TL;DR: Sign up for one of our events about using storytelling to help bring widespread pressure. There’s a widespread pressure general call this Thursday, one on using stories to bring pressure on Wednesday July 5, and another one of those same calls on storytelling on Tuesday July 11.
One of my favorite memes came up today in my Facebook memories. It's a cartoon of a 1950s-styled blonde woman with her head upturned and her hand over her face, going "OMG!!! I forgot to have children!"
I would wonder about the wisdom of sharing something like this publicly even nowadays; because there's so much pressure on people to reproduce. But now it's worse than just that social pressure and its corresponding taboo.
Now sooooooo many women in this country have so much less of a choice. Where they even still have choices.
Now women in something like half of this country can be forced to give birth if they end up pregnant. With the Republican religious right trying to even make contraception illegal... as they've had so much success with outlawing abortion.
The thing is that I didn't forget to have children.
I made a deliberate choice in my teen years not to bring kids into the world… but to be open to adopting, fostering, or step-parenting if and when I was in a position to do so. I have been able to legally honor that choice.
At the time when I made that choice, I was quite the environmentalist; and very worried about the pressures of ever-expanding human life on this finite planet.
Plus, I was dealing with a bunch of not very nice people in my high school that made things very difficult for me.
🚧 Actually, some of the not-very-nice kids were downright dangerous to me and to other girls I was in school with. In hindsight — the dangerous ones were dangerous to more kids than just the girls, but the girls were the ones who had to endure a lot of the physical danger because that’s what growing up involves in these United States for millions of girls.
Nobody likes to talk about that, but it’s a hard truth. Women know. Girls know. Statistics show it. Our society tries to hide it. Even after a man bragging about sexual assault won the US presidency and we had the whole Women’s March in reaction and the whole #MeToo storytelling phenomena… somehow the damage American men and boys do to American women and girls never stays at the front of the national narrative for long. Probably because there’s too much, and it’s too widespread. It’s too uncomfortable. Toxic masculinity has a very, very wide damage path.
Anyway… back to my high school.
No, it wasn't all the kids (#NotAllMen) who were dangerous. But the existence of nice humans doesn't mitigate the risks that the dangerous ones bring. That's still highly relevant today.
I knew when I was 17 that I couldn't in good conscience bring new kids into a world where they would have to deal with the level of danger that I’d had to deal with as a teenaged girl in this country. I just couldn't do it.
I didn’t see where that danger would change significantly in my lifetime. Geez… was I right about that. I did think it might get a bit better. I certainly didn’t imagine that we’d go backwards; danger-wise. Yet we have.
You cannot tell me that women and girls aren’t in more danger with the increase in the hyperactivated toxic masculinity that’s come with Trumpism, the rise in far-right extremism, and the empowerment of Christian nationalism.
Women and girls are in more danger than we’ve been in in decades… and we’re not even talking about it as a society. For those on the far right, that danger is a feature not a bug. That danger is a political reality in communities everywhere in these United States — and it is a factor in local action, local engagement, and local voting.
I get why lots of women and girls don’t want to talk about it… because I don’t. I rarely talk about any of that horror in my daily life. It’s hardly something I want to focus on. Trauma sucks. It’s mortifying, too. It’s haunting. It’s debilitating. It can come right out of left field after years of being dormant and absolutely freeze you terrified in your tracks. Stop your heart in a moment. Turn your blood to ice in a flash.
I don't talk about the trauma that I had to deal with at that young age; in high school. I still don't. My decision not to have kids speaks for it. How about that?
My read on the danger of some of the kids I was in school with though was right on.
The kinds of not-very-nice kids that were dangerous to me and to many other kids in high school are now the kinds of people in the Republican base that the whole Republican party is kowtowing to. The entire Republican political establishment has bent its knee in loyalty, deference, and servitude to America’s school bullies.
One of the most famous insurrectionists from the January 6th coup attempt is from near where I grew up near Des Moines in central Iowa — Doug Jensen. Jensen was the guy who led the riotous crowd up stairs headed right for US Capitol Police 0fficer Eugene Goodman. Officer Goodman faced down that pale, angry, thuggish yahoo even while walking backward and being taunted from the mob with the vilest things he’d heard in his life… and diverted those insurrectionists away from where key legislators were making a getaway.
Which person in that scenario showed shining courage, character, and morality? Officer Goodman showed us how healthy “masculinity” can be done — put to use through a life of service; saving lives and facing down danger even while faking out a menacing horde.
A university in Chicago did a study on where the insurrectionists came from. They're from areas exactly like where I grew up... from counties that are seeing increasing diversification within them in recent years. From the report:
“Question: Where do the insurrectionists come from within the United States?
“Answer: They come from 45 states plus the District of Columbia, with more coming from counties won by Joe Biden than Donald Trump. The key county characteristic is that the counties with insurrectionists lost the most non-Hispanic White population.”
But it isn't just the danger of the extremists themselves that's tied to all of this; this moment that we’re in as women and girls.
It's the choices women and girls can make — or not — about their own lives and futures.
My life would have been totally different had I not had the choice not to have kids. Or if I had been forced to give birth.
I wouldn't have been able to take the kinds of jobs that I took that did a lot of good for people when I was in those jobs.
I took jobs in public service. I made places safer for a spell when I was a park ranger. It's true that someone else could have done some of that; but some of what I did was unique and touched individual lives. The impacts that my park ranger partner and I had on one park location over a summer lasted for years.
I fought wildland fires... and there too someone else would have been there had I not been. But I was.
Because I got that firefighting experience plus some grad school, I managed to get into a management position in big wildland firefighting in southern California as a Fire Intelligence Coordinator. Is there a cooler job title?
It would have been hard to get that job, to take that job, and to stay at that job had I been raising kids.
I did a hell of a lot of good in that place. I actually did a lot of good for the whole country there in some of what I did... although it would take forever to explain how. The short, short version is that I worked with a small team to push changing some key things in national fire decision-making processes… which required coordination and approval from all kinds of huge coalitions in the wildfire world on top of actually making the changes and building a new online platform to handle the new stuff. The changes made decision-making better across the board in wildfire management. It still does. We led a change that you see when you see most any official US wildfire summary ever — but that’s just the surface stuff. The real impact is buried deep in a hugely complex system that responds to most of the country’s largest disasters every year… whether or not they’re wildfires.
I did a lot of good for the Southern California region while I was in that cool job, too. I impacted people's lives everyday. I impacted the decisions everyday that firefighters and that people in the public made about fire and fire risk.
I went from there into national policy and programs work in Washington, DC to help first responders and everyday Americans after 9/11.
Had I not gone, some of the things in this country in homeland security, disaster management, infrastructure restoration, and incident management would be somewhat different. I did some good. I brought a few very unique specific things to homeland security; had I not gone those things wouldn't have happened (quick summary on the LinkedIn “About” section).
We can't know the impacts of the path of our lives, but we can make informed guesses.
My path so far would have been completely different had I had kids at home. Because I did not, I was able to dive deeply into public service work because of the path I was able to choose.
Of course if I had brought new people into the world my path would have been different; as would the lives of those hypothetical children. The things that I've done for real in the world that have done some good may not have happened had I been focused more on being a mother instead.
Instead I have been able to laser-focus my time, my energy, my intelligence, and my problem-solving on the good of the country. It's helped. I’ve brought worthwhile things to the table.
Now, less women have the kinds of choices I’ve had.
How much different will thousands of lives be for women who no longer have so many choices? How will their paths shorten and veer away from the lives they had hoped for and planned?
What will be the cascading effects of their more restrictive life paths?
How many things in this country will happen differently or less well because women are not able to be in the workplace in the same ways that they’ve been able to be for the last many decades? How will that affect our lives?
How much harder will it be for women who are forced to bear children to find and keep jobs?
How many companies that don't offer benefits already just won't hire someone who is pregnant, or who has too many "complications" (kids) and not enough leave as a single parent?
The questions and the lists go on and on. There are too many to even give more examples.
Our country is already not set up to take care of humans.
Now we're forcing more humans to come into the world.
How is that going to go?
Now… how many women won't be able to post a meme like this… that says casually that I “forgot” to have kids? Now that you can't "forget" to have children? Now that there are less options for opting out of that path?
Part of how we can fight for women and girls everywhere to have that choice is to tell our stories. Just like this. Or better. Or longer. Or shorter. Or more uncomfortably. Or maybe with more trauma details. Or maybe with less. Or maybe on video. Or on some other social media. Definitely in thousands of other ways, in thousands of places, and in all kinds of online and real-world platforms and mediums.
We. Need. To. Tell. Our. Stories.
We need videos. We need writing. We need storytelling events where we live and online. We need media coverage.
We need to drive the damn narrative.
We need all that stuff. We can do it, too.
That's the kind of thing we're fixing to help with at our growing teeny tiny nascent nonprofit here. Stories are a huge, huge piece of how we Shift the Country.
Join us and help us do more of this.
Because it should be up to each one of us individually whether we have the wherewithal and the resources and the moral choice to bring people into the world.
It shouldn't be up to pale, male, religious legislators who want to control the entire society.
Let's push back.
Let's drive them out of office.
A freaking enormous, ongoing flood of stories in all the places will help. We can get them going anytime, and anywhere.
Let's go.
Storytelling events online:
The Power of Stories to Bring Widespread Pressure — July 5, Wednesday, evening.
The Power of Stories to Bring Widespread Pressure — July 11, Tuesday, evening.
Other Shift the Country Zoom events online:
Ramping Up Business Pressure to Make Shift Happen — June 27, Tuesday, evening. Brainstorming & ideas to start identifying & pulling together efforts to pressure/partner with business in preparation for pressure during the 2024 election season. There is time to build a plan & to implement it if we get going on it.
Team Call for Volunteers — June 29, afternoon. All are welcome. Working call to get into ongoing projects, to brainstorm, & to work through new ideas.
Choice, Vanessa. It really does boil down to choice. You don't need to justify why you chose not to have children--even if society expects you to do that. The fact is that some of us--maybe not a lot--chose not to have children because we knew that we were NOT meant to be parents. I often joke that all the children I never had are very thankful! So yes, I had the ability to choose not to be a parent; I wish that choice were respected by more people, but I know that it was the right choice for ME. And that's why I fight so hard to ensure that everyone, all women, have the choice to HAVE or NOT to have a child or children. Whenever they need to make that choice. Wherever they are on their journey. It is their choice, and not one they need to defend.