Undeterred

Thinking Outside of the Cage

I feel like I’m making some progress on certain things. How my four-day-a-week gym routine seemed wholly out of reach a few months ago and suddenly it’s turning into five. I’ve never done that in my life. Never saw myself as the type. I have a good endocrinologist, someone who looks at my confusing test results and goes “hmmm” in a thoughtful way. Both of us are trying to take care of my health.

I got out in the garden with my kids on the first sunny day, planting two front yard concrete planters with some pink creeping thyme, delicious-smelling creeping rosemary, and assorted pansies my daughter picked out from this seasonal pop-up garden center that gets set up in the parking lot outside our local thrift store. (I also found some lovely vintage wool yarn and a mustard-colored vintage Tupperware strainer, because I can’t pass by a thrift store without peeking in.)

As I dig into the planter pots with my kids, I explain how roots work, and we see little green shoots from last year’s oregano plants that I had thought were dead, so we happily keep them in the pots.

This year I decided to keep it simple in the native plant hellstrip garden. I didn’t remove any fall leaves and only chopped down the stems of last years plants bit by bit so they can function sort of like wood chips and be left there along with the leaves. I kept a foot of the woody stems standing for the benefit of the solitary bees (which nest inside the holes) and to serve as stability, a natural plant stake of sorts, for this years’ vegetation.

It’s sort of a wild look for now, while the brand new plants are tiny, but not as wild as I thought it might be. And it took me only half an hour and a pair of garden shears to do this for a 300 square foot area.

It had been chilly and rained much of the week before this, so in the absence of wanting to be outside digging weeds in a raincoat (which I admit I considered), I found myself reading more. I started with a garden design book by Pete Oudolf, but then gravitates towards current events, falling into a bit of doomscrolling.

I found myself thinking a lot about the use of intentionally cultivated fear as a power tactic. I want to say I’ll just reject the fear entirely, because I have experience and know the purpose, but enough scary things are happening that it can sometimes be hard to take my own advice.

After all, it’s not just some logistical exercise when my own husband is a former child refugee and an immigrant and a brown man in America.

I don’t discuss my fears with my in-laws, as they’ve got enough going on. I attend a family death day celebration dinner (think of it like an annual memorial of sorts) for my husband’s grandmother, a meal of crispy pork and steamed chicken in lettuce wraps with a side of udon noodle stir fry. They talk in Vietnamese around me about houses people are remodeling, and cucumbers they’re about to plant, and the dishes on the table. Simple daily life things that suddenly seem even more precious to me.

I plan to attend an oncology appointment with my father in law on Wednesday, because his cancer is no longer in remission.

I find that when I get fearful, the first sign is I double down on my checklists, prone to seeing everything I need to do as remedial, a should-have-been-done-already task, and when I’m not in the garden or the gym, that’s how I’ve felt for much of this week.

I need to sort all the kids clothes and get rid of some toys. Then all I need is to find paid work. After that, a nanny and housecleaner, of course.

But meantime, as I live the life I have, not the one I’m trying to get, I sweep the Cheerios off the floor and apply to jobs that at least 150 other people are in the running for (many with better qualifications than me, newly laid off from their formerly respectable federal roles and state grants). I’d like to think I’m responding to our country’s expanded political nightmare in fairly responsible ways. Disconnecting from social media. Supporting local voting and civic engagement. Showing up for my loved ones. Writing about real life.

But I admit that this week’s political news shook me to my core in a way that people not as well acquainted with federal policy norms, or recently ramped up discrimination against immigrants, or the way a system of checks and balances stands or falls might miss.

I know that if even one person who lives here can be randomly sent off to be forgotten about and likely suffer and die in some random for-profit prison (being illegally paid with our tax dollars) in a foreign country we don’t respect, and it is not corrected after the Supreme Court has ordered it corrected, then there is a cage ostensibly waiting for us all. Even if we don’t make it into that cage, we will still know it’s there. It’s possible. It could happen. And that’s the point.

It is not just immigrants and brown people. We have all been threatened with violence.

So as I wait to see if the Supreme Court will be listened to, if they will put a stop to sending any people to extra-judicial foreign and moneymaking prisons that can rightly be called concentration camps, I try to hold it together.

It brings up a lot.

Part of me feels a strange intimacy with people who are afraid now, like they get something that was formative to my upbringing, and part of me feels like that’s who I used to be.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am very concerned about what this administration is doing, both for my own self and the rest of y’all. It will be life and death and something much deeper than bullying for far too many people. It will be bad bad news in a lot of other ways, even more so than it already is.

But I escaped a patrimonial cage myself once already, when I left the Quiverfull movement and my violent father’s house at the tender age of 17, and again, out of a different and equally hard-to-leave one when I divorced my passive-aggressive faux-feminist first husband at age 29. I now know that while my story might seem extreme, it isn’t as unusual as it might seem. To be a woman is to have people constantly trying to put you in a domestic cage of some kind while swearing it’s for your own good, or the benefit of your family, or full of conviction that you brought this particular situation on yourself by not following some set of rules.

I reassure myself that if need to escape from a cage again I know I have the strength in my heart and mind to do so, if not nearly as much of the resources and energy I’d like on hand for such an endeavor.

But rest assured that the will and the past experience are there, and that counts for more than half of it.

I know not to wait for a rescuer. That I am here to rescue myself.

But it sucks to wonder if this administration’s denaturalization plan (part of their overall anti-immigrant agenda) will soon come ever closer to me, if someone could reach out to grab my own husband (it’d clearly be easy to mistake him for somebody else and/or say his childhood paperwork wasn’t done right, if they’re already doing this to others in such a climate), dragging him to some CECOT-type gulag rather than back to Vietnam, where it would be hard, but at least possible, for our family to be reunited.

Still, I know that part of the abuser’s handbook is issuing threats and making people believe things. They want people like me so scared we don’t marry or stay with people like my husband. They want people like my husband to feel cowed enough to reduce his footprint and maybe even voluntarily leave. They want racists to feel like they’ve got a man in the White House, and his alignment with their goals is worth whatever dropping 401k or rising interest rates or billionaire identity theft they must endure.

But the truth is that unless it comes down to an emergency where you must pack a suitcase and leave, my family isn’t going anywhere. This is our home.

So in the meantime while I wait and see what direction our country takes this (and I fangirl over the excellent advocacy work of Senator Van Holland), I resolve not let a devil I know so well take away what joy and beauty I have in front of me.

On a sunny Easter Sunday the fear that life as we know it may collapse, create ghost towns where we can’t have anything nice, doesn’t seem like a logical concern, even if on some level it may be. But it’s hard to tell sometimes. After all, I live in a place with good dirt and kind neighbors. My children are prepared for little more today than to dye eggs and discuss their favorite flavors of jellybeans.

So while some are obsessed with natalism and fertility rates and purchasing power, or water and air temperature, or telling everyone that everything is fine while having no way to back it up, I watch our existing lives and kids grow in a way that seems marvelous. I plant things that may be there for them to pick as teens and young adults, if nobody decides to chop it all down.

I also firmly believe that our so-called leaders do not know the outcome of our current moment anymore than I do, and they have no more of a stranglehold on how it will be built and unfold than I do.

The future is a great unknown.

But I bet I could plant one plum tree next to the street and do more good for the world than a dozen of these suits in their daily Teams meetings seem able to accomplish in a presidential term.

That’s the bankruptcy of power-seeking for the sake of power. They aren’t trying to do good for the world. So if they get power, they have no idea what to do with it except leverage it for more until they fall apart, weighed down, their legacy an embarrassment of missed opportunities to do better.

I think of other times I’ve seen and faced such things, fascism on a domestic scale.

I’m sure my dad, in his moments of dragging me out of the shower or down the stairs by my hair (and yes, this is not hyperbole) or holding my chin up and forcing me to look into his angry ice-blue eyes, imagined he’d always have the ownership, the patriarchy, the control he asserted to be his right.

Once divorced, after 20 years of doing whatever he wanted to and despite our family, he then used the family court system to harass my mother and his remaining eight minor children for years, and the Louisiana courts were only too happy to oblige his every petty request until the last one was grown. He remarried to a career woman who covered his bills and inexplicably was able to look the other way on all of his toxic behavior and red flags, and even have another baby with him. He got a job teaching in a prison.

For a while it seemed there was no justice, no karma, nothing but another entitled white man failing upwards or sideways or at least not falling down to the depths their own actions should bring them to. And while spouting Bible verses, no less.

But even with our society set up to promote and maintain these men as authority figures, keep them out of their own way, he slowly sunk. There was no true foundation under him, a bedrock keeping him from the morass his decisions led to.

He’s old now, a face and voice somewhere that I don’t recognize and would not seek out. An estranged grandfather who doesn’t know his children or grandchildren. The last time I saw or spoke to him was at a family wedding on Easter weekend eleven years ago, and he hasn’t been invited to another one in over a decade. He’s so deeply in debt that his legacy likely will not be his offspring lovingly writing an obituary about him, but the silence of credit card companies no longer hounding him. He will die bankrupt in every sense of the word, not visited or respected by any of the people that someone who has ten kids should have there.

And that’s the thing these abusive types don’t seem to realize, in politics or in domestic life. They eventually do reap what they sow. They eventually have death staring at them from the foot of their bed, their life flashing before their eyes, and none of the money or power or influence they once wielded will be worth the sense of waste and devastation apparent in their lack of a highlight reel, their missed opportunity for a meaningful life that they stole from themselves time and again.

It’s pathetic, really.

Meantime, every person who saw them put another person in a cage will view them differently, and not for the better. Every person they put in a cage who has a chance to escape and oppose them will take it. Every leadership space and role that they are hollowing out, tunneling through like a mole or a worm, will become more and more brittle for their brazenly craven activity.

Eventually it will cave in on them, even if it seems like they are amassing power now.

If you’d have told me growing up that I’d one day have a life where I had no idea what my dad was up to or where (and if) he lived, because my whole family has no idea - that he’s long since been ejected from the role he presided over with obsession and cruelty - I would have been shocked. He once took up all the space, sucked up all the air, and now the only reminders of him are our genetics and our emotional scars. He’s still out there somewhere, but gone from us, unmissed and unasked for. We have moved on and he cannot return.

I believe that most of us will be able to stay out of the cages being readied for us now, just by strategically resisting in this numbers game. Unfortunately some will not. Some are far more vulnerable than others. My own little family, as a mixed partially-immigrant one, might be more at risk than yours.

But we need to start off knowing that the cages they have prepared and paid for for us are already unsustainable, with the newly amplified story of even one young man wrongfully disappeared (and clearly hundreds more that could be told). They are starting down this path but they do not have the money or the power or the will to keep up what it takes to maintain this abuse. Only enough to do it right now, although clearly that is bad enough. History unfortunately shows us it could get much worse before it gets better.

But the fact is that in time they will be dethroned. And we will be in charge of the true leadership, the cleanup, the healing, the responsibilities to one another and ourselves that we all had all along.

We already are, even in the midst of it.

Although this element is hard to face too. Something I’m still working on from the last time it happened in my life. The time and effort required for repair from years of tight control and unnecessary viciousness.

But I know we all have a starting point to reject fascism and cruelty from. Mine is my own garden. I live in a place with cute kids and good dirt and kind neighbors.

We have children to raise into better adults here. We have our freedoms to rebuild, and call our own and our neighbors’.

I see the work ahead, and I am undeterred.