A Tale of Two Inaugurations

Tariku and I attended the Women’s March Los Angeles, on January 21, 2017.We could barely move, gridlocked in a sea of bodies. We were all there to be counted. To say we did not consent to this new world order of fear and scapegoating and hate and rabid nationalism. I held Tariku’s hand, now practically the size of a catcher’s mitt. He rarely lets me anymore, but even my bold, brazen boy was unsettled by the sheer number of souls crowding the downtown streets.

Our experience of the Women’s March was moving, inspiring, and also totally annoying, as a day of inconveniences will often be when you're with your kid. Tariku bitched and whined for roughly 7 straight hours that we never got to meet up with his friends, and that we had to walk for so long. It was blustery and overwhelmingly crowded. The Metro was impossibly backed up and there was no cell reception, so we almost had to walk the 6 miles home. We made it about 2 miles up Sunset Blvd (which was NOT FAIR), before we finally got reception and a friend came to pick us up. And we had to wait in a long line for tacos, which was also NOT FAIR. Lots of things are not fair right now.

Nearly-nine-years-old is the age of realizing how very #$%! unfair the world is. Exactly eight years and a day prior, on January 20, 2009, I sat on a beat-up, brown, velour couch in a guest house in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, while a tiny Tariku slept on my chest. After a few days of transitioning him slowly out of the care center in which he’d been living for nine months, he was finally in my arms for good. I never again had to leave him in that crib covered in chipped, sky-blue paint, with a picture of Scott and me taped to its rails.

He was eleven months old, and it was his first night with us. We had zero idea of how it was going to go. Do babies sleep when you watch TV (Yes! Sometimes they do!)? Why won’t he eat the baby cereal I brought for him (Because it’s gross, and anyway he’s already eating spicy sausage stew.)? Will he die if he doesn’t poop for two days (Nope. But you will be very, very sad when he finally does.)? I held his tiny, perfect hands. Smelled his sweet head- that baby scent that resembles a magical combination of soap and angel cake and fairy dust. Our new friends sat beside us, also holding their babies. Tears of awe and joy and relief streamed down all our faces as on the satellite TV we watched Obama’s inauguration. Aretha Franklin sang “My Country Tis of Thee,” and in doing so, we hoped, we thought, we knew, ushered in a whole new era.

I was sure I was bringing my son, my black son, home to a world that was immeasurably better, safer, more humane, than any that had come before it. A lot happens in eight years.

I now have two sons. I now feel as if I have to apologize for the world in which I’m raising them. I feel compelled to ask forgiveness for my own culpability and privilege. For having done what I thought was my best, and it not being enough. Some of my changing perspective has to do with this wild political pendulum swing we’re experiencing. Some of it has to do with my own re-education about race in America. One thing that has not changed is my hope-- a thumbprint on my heart, small right now but still very much alive.

My son- my tall, brave, bright, whiny, impossible, beautiful, surprising son- held my hand as we marched with 750k people through downtown LA, along with millions of people marching around the world. Together we chanted, “This is what democracy looks like!” I will never forget it. Any more than I will ever forget holding his small, fragile body that first night and imagining the sparkling future that has not, in fact, come to pass. Yet.