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Posted on 01/13/2026 1:17:49 PM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
When my daughter turned 1, we gave her a stuffed-lamb toy to try to coax her away from her pacifier. Fortunately, it worked like a charm and Lambchop became a member of the family. Lambchop now joins us during family meals, family vacations, and even family photo shoots. As my daughter has grown, I’ve had to convince her that sometimes Lambchop has to stay in the car while she’s at school or on a playdate so it won’t go missing. While she’s gone and I’m running errands, Lambchop rides shotgun. And when my daughter gets back in the car, she promptly requests Lambchop’s return, often when I’m in the middle of turning the steering wheel.
Seeing Renee Nicole Good’s glove compartment, overflowing with her 6-year-old’s stuffies, shattered me. I imagined her son requesting stuffies from the back seat while she was driving, just like my daughter does. I thought of all three of her children, ages 6, 12, and 15 — how they would get picked up early from school and receive the worst news of their lives. How the hot tears would stream down their faces like lava. And how their mother wouldn’t be there to wipe them away.
Good’s children aren’t the only ones who have had a parent ripped away from them. The reason ICE officer Jonathan Ross was on that street in Minneapolis in the first place: the thousands of parents torn from their children, detained, and deported to countries where they may face the unthinkable.
For anyone with the slightest semblance of a conscience, life feels especially heavy these days. Every morning, I dread the idea of looking at my phone, knowing I’ll be inundated with something terrible — news of the latest air strike, invasion, wildfire, government-sanctioned kidnapping, or all-around incoherent utterance from an elected official. Doomscrolling doesn’t begin to cover it.
As a journalist, I’ve always been entrenched in current events. I’ve watched every horrific video, debate, and press conference you can think of. Because it was my job. But five years ago, I got a new job that made processing the news especially hard for me: I became a parent. Something about motherhood rewired my brain. I read the news differently. Suddenly, every person was someone’s baby. Every child’s cry was familiar. Every attack felt personal and urgent. This was no longer the world I was living in; it became the world I am somehow supposed to raise my children in.
Consuming the news, not simply as a person with a conscience but particularly as a parent, is harrowing. I know I can’t be the only one pouring cereal and playing on the floor with my kids, telling them everything will be all right while simultaneously asking myself if that’s actually true. Mothers are pulling dinner out of the oven, navigating after-school schedules, helping with homework, signing up for summer camp (yes, in January), and smiling through it all while a war rages inside our own brains. We read a horrifying headline one minute and a fairy tale the next.
The day after the 2024 election, I woke my then-3-year-old daughter up for school and searched for the right words when she looked up at me through groggy eyes and asked, “Did Kah-mama win, Mommy?”
Last month, I couldn’t help but cry while wrapping Christmas presents and listening to Nat King Cole’s “A Cradle in Bethlehem.”
A mother tonight is rocking a cradle in Bethlehem.
Is she?
Why is it that my kids get to have a holiday when Palestinian children don’t even get to have a home? And how much longer will my children even have that privilege?
Parenthood is an eternal loop of generations experiencing what so many parents before them went through. And we often make the mistake of discussing our trials as if we’re the first mothers to ever lose sleep or cry over spilled breast milk. Let me be clear: I’m not the first parent to feel this way, and I certainly won’t be the last. As a Black woman, I know my ancestors worried their sons and daughters might be lynched on their walks home from school, that their babies would be ripped from their arms on the auction block. I’m not arrogant enough to believe my experience is unique.
But as a member of a generation that once learned that fierce hope could yield real results, a group of voters that went from “Yes, we can” to “Yes, we did,” a community that believed the good guys eventually prevail, I find myself wondering how to bestow that hope on my children. And while those years weren’t without their own version of cruelties, I’m desperate to live in “precedented times” and growing more aware by the day that my children don’t even know what those days feel like.
I don’t have a solution. I don’t know how to raise a generation of children who feel motivated to build despite the fact that the world is burning around them. But perhaps the best thing for these kids is that they’re being raised by a group of parents who have had to hold heartbreak in one hand and hope in the other. Maybe our emotional whiplash has made us more equipped to raise empathetic humans who are bold and, more important, who are just. What I know for sure is I can’t look away. I used to keep up with current events because it was my job. Today, it still is — but the stakes are much higher. Rather than writing a breaking-news story, I have to stay informed so I can be honest, in age-appropriate ways, with my children about the state of their world and their place in it. And I have to hold on to hope the same way I hold on to Lambchop, protecting it so I can turn it over to my daughter’s reaching hands. Some days I find the balance; many days I do not. But I won’t stop trying.
Becoming a mother made the pain of the world’s suffering feel so much more acute. But maybe that’s the point. Parents are helping to shape the people who will shape the future, and perhaps our efforts to maintain normalcy for our own children will become motivation for our children to create a more normal world.
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Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
4 phony statements.
4 rejoinders.
Lie, lie, lie, lie.
Whoever put up those posters should be ashamed of themselves.
That’s all the demonrats have left is lying.
Easy, teach the child not to be an ignorant, lying, obnoxious and often fugly POS. Especially to folks who are trying to carry out the law.
why do I think her daughter is 18 and still wants lambchop in the car?
Have seen several clips of trembling, tearful woke women saying they can’t go out without fearing they and their children will be murdered by Trump’s agents.
Sheesh.
At least that means they’re staying inside. Beautifies the country.
‘Tis for homely women to keep home.
They had their names hence.”
—William Wordsworth.
little jonny, when a police officer tells you to do something, you do it, and be nice and keep your hands where they can see them.
if you find yourself surrounded by liberal moonbats, GTFO of the area to a sane area.
class dismissed.
How do you parent through this? Let’s begin here with this one: Don’t try to run over cops with your vehicle.
If her 3 year old wakes up and asks who won the presidential election,
you are not a good parent.
Well, DANIELLE - you COULD start with telling your kids the TRUTH for once in their brainwashed lives.
THREE YEARS OLD? REALLY?
“The day after the 2024 election, I woke my then-3-year-old daughter up for school and searched for the right words when she looked up at me through groggy eyes and asked, ‘Did Kah-mama win, Mommy?’”
PUH-LEASE!
Liberal women are b@tshiite crazy! They should not be allowed to drive, vote or reproduce! And yet, here we are...
That's impossible for a leftist to do.
At this rate, they'd be better off teaching the children how to drive. With today's systems, the kid can drive from a tablet if they can't reach the pedals.
The kids already have to be the adults in the house anyway.
BUMP
Maybe stay home and bake some cookies with your kids?
Always worked for me.
Wrong poster
Right Poster Suicide By Stupidity
First of all, “to parent” implies they are taking it upon themselves in rejection of Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village.” Hillary meant it as the public schools, public government day care and the socialist system dominating as the surrogate parents of children. Lenin said if he had the kids for 4 years they would come out lifelong Communists.
The African saying meant the opposite. The parents would raise the children but with all of the extended family relatives, neighbors and village residents lovingly helping the new generation to flourish.
Another African saying: “ Never trust a naked man who offers to sell you his shirt.” Could apply to Mamdani, today.
Was used for the advice book Beware the Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt by Harvey Mackay. 1990.
“”Every child’s cry was familiar.””
How ironic!! She doesn’t hear the cries of the children who are raped and murdered by illegals???
Cry me a river, lady! Nothing like a one sided argument!
Photo....
I should have bought gold and silver ten years ago. What in the world was I thinking?
Her youngest child's dad, Renee's second husband, is dead. Now Renee is also dead, that makes him an orphan. Might be for the best.
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