Week 8: Living Room, Janna Ireland, May 24, 2020 Posting early because this day is so heavy, and this is a picture about love and closeness. The feeling of watching Minneapolis burn last night was indescribable. My heart was full and empty and broken all at once, and today I am so tired.
I have been trying and failing to organize my thoughts about this week, and George Floyd, and the wounds his death has prodded. The thought that keeps circling is that all of the pictures I share of my children are a form of propaganda, and that the idea they are trying to sell is that my people are people, and that we have a right to our lives. This world is absurd, but there is nowhere else to go.
It is an awful kind of relief to have my longstanding fears--those of a mother of black children living in the United States--to distract me from my new fears about parenting during a pandemic. I know these old fears intimately, at least.