Finding Hope in Hopelessness

My mom was over on Election Day, teaching me how to cook some of the dishes I grew up with — chicken biryani, seek kabob, aloo tikki, all flavors that feel part of my DNA. It’s something we’ve talked about doing for so long but never before found the time. Or more honestly, I hadn’t made the time.

While she moved around my kitchen, stopping every few minutes to coo at the baby and offer him some little nibbles of what she was preparing, I started to tidy the living room. I ended up just watching her from my perch on the dining table.

Until very recently, my parents have seemed, not ageless, but stuck in time, exactly the age they were when they were making my sandwiches and shuffling me off to school, admonishing me for being late. Now, watching her in the kitchen, my mom suddenly seemed old. I abandoned my half-hearted attempt to clean and puttered around her instead, offering water, making her a snack because I know she always forgets to feed herself when she’s feeding everyone else.

Normally, on a day like Tuesday, I’d be checking my phone like crazy, frantically refreshing social media and news sites to see exactly what’s happening seconds after it happens. That day, my phone stayed somewhere on the coffee table untouched. She kept cooking while I picked up the kids from school and then as they crawled all over her, covering her in tiny kisses and smudgy, dirty hands.

That evening, my sister popped in and we all ate dinner together and talked about the coyote that’s been hanging around the neighborhood and my son’s upcoming birthday and what presents he wants. On a night where fear and chaos and disruption would normally occupy my mind, I found myself fully grounded in the safety of the moment in front of me. It had been a long time since my mom and I spent a day like that, since we’d been able to sit so peacefully for a meal together. I didn’t — wouldn’t — dare look at my phone to destroy that feeling. Whatever else was happening in the world in that moment, this was all I could focus on.

When I did finally look at the results coming in, it was on the TV in the basement. My 6-year-old son, avoiding bedtime, asked about what I was watching. I tried to explain it in a straightforward way, but I couldn’t help throwing in my bitter two cents about what could happen if one side won. Without sounding like some kind of corny Ruthkanda Forever meme, he took it like 6-year-olds take a story where there’s a bad guy and a … slightly less bad guy, offering to “kick Trump in the nuts.” I told him to be mindful of his language.

The next day, I parented in a fog, trying to figure out what this all meant, for the world, for me and my children. I didn’t have the heart to write or think about this column, which was supposed to be about the constant discourse around “birth rates,” wanting to pick away at some of the false panic over people having, or rather, not having a kid or more kids.

I’m curious as someone who writes about parenting and is also a mom of three — a number that for American parents, according to 2023 data, is above average — why more people are choosing to have fewer or no kids. I figured that question sort of answered itself on Tuesday night in some ways.

I had put the question out on X last week and expected the usual handful of responses these kinds of prompts often get. Nearly 4 million views later, I ended up with over 500 responses and a thousand quote tweets, where a lot of people shared incredibly vulnerable, personal stories about a lack of money, stability, and career prospects. The grocery bills that elicit tears yet still somehow leave you short of food a few days later. The lack of community and support. The internal struggle with the idea of bringing kids into a burning world, where the climate crisis has fundamentally shifted a lot of people’s perspectives on the “future.”

There were angry replies about how little this world is built for kids or families, and plenty of “I just don’t want any, fuck off.”

Before Tuesday I’d been eager to talk about all of those reasons, especially the ones feeling grim about the future, while also plucking at another thread that came up often on my X post: the idea that having kids seemed awful, that the narrative for so long has been that it’s unbelievably hard and so often bad, that it hardly seems worth it.

It’s not that bad, I was ready to offer. In fact, it’s incredible. I was planning to write about optimism and leaps of faith and the hope kids inspire in me.

By Wednesday morning, I was feeling a lot less optimistic.

Then a day later, my mom came over again. This time it was to help me make a chicken karahi. She told me there was something in her body that shouldn’t be there, a disease that I can’t even allow myself to speak aloud let alone put into words. I felt the breath leave my body and wondered how the universe always knows exactly when the pain of something will affect me the most, how it knows exactly when to strike to really make it hurt.

The last few days have made the future feel bleak, uncertain, scary, and chaotic. I’m really not sure how to move forward or how to do anything really.

But I have these three kids and despite all of my hurt, this mountain of pain that seems to be sitting on my chest, I still have to go on. There are bums and noses to wipe, fruit to cut in tiny pieces, and sandwiches to make that will never get eaten. No matter how badly I want to give up or lie down, I am their shelter, I am their weather vane, I am the levee and I have to keep the storm at bay for them, for me, for us.

It may seem like the world is out of control, like hope is a diminishing resource that’s getting harder and harder to grasp, but when I look down at my daughter’s hand, reaching for me as we cross the street home from school, I know that hope is the thing propelling me forward. It keeps me putting one foot in front of the other, signing permission forms, volunteering for field trips at my kids’ school, planning birthday parties and learning to cook my mom’s old recipes.

Hope is the currency of parenthood. That’s exactly what I would have said if I were still talking about birth rates, about why one might still want to bring a child or two into this world. It’s how we survive the inevitable heartaches, it’s why many of us made this choice in the first place, the sometimes joyful, sometimes solemn belief in the possibility of tomorrow.

So yes, I’m feeling angry, scared, sad, and anxious about what’s next, but I’m using this hope to make it to the next day and the day after that and the day after that. I’m playing Barbies with my daughter and making castles out of old toilet paper rolls with my son and I’m holding my mom’s hand while she walks me through another one of my childhood meals, as we both hold tight to our hope for what comes next.

For now, that’s all I can do.