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?”
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.
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?”
Teach your children to respect the law and law enforcment officers.
-PJ
“”If her 3 year old wakes up and asks who won the presidential election, you are not a good parent.””
Soooo true! WOW - she really thought people would believe that? When does the stupidity end?
Teller her not to try to kill ICE agents. It’s a bad look.
Photo....
The new Taylor Swift album won’t drop next month after all. To be delayed well into the Fall. Have to, have to...just hang on.
No. Your emotional whiplash is a sign of narcissistic personality disorder. Your kids will end up either hating and staying as far away as possible from you or will end up in therapy for the rest of their lives.
“thence” not “hence”
Sorry.
I checked - hint - she’s not white!
Yes. Not a good thing to hear “Drive, baby, drive” from a woman dressed like a chubby lumberjack as your last words.
WELFARE FRAUD, POLITICAL CORRUPTION were the narrative and headline.
Renee Good was the lead driver, lead car in the line because she knew the mission she had been trained for. Her mission was to change the narrative. Mission Accomplished.
MOM 37 SHOT BY ICE is now the narrative and headline.
Icing on the cake:
She demonstrated how valuable Lesbians are to the Movement.
She now ranks with George Floyd and will live in far more people’s heads than she previously did.
Someone beat some sense in the stupid author.
Here’s a thought. Don’t try to murder law enforcement officers with your vehicle and you won’t get dead.
“When my daughter turned 1, we gave her a stuffed-lamb toy to try to coax her away from her pacifier.” I got a really weird one, when she was three she wanted to look at
Gray’s Anatomy
Book by Henry Gray
Gray’s Anatomy, written by Henry Gray and first published in 1858, is a foundational and highly influential textbook on human anatomy, known for its detailed text and illustrations by Henry Vandyke Carter.
“I’ll take things that never happened for $500, Alex”
Don't underestimate the drive liberals have to instill leftist politics into kids at a young age.
Kids chanting mm mm mm Barack Hussein Obama (as Rush pointed out to us on his radio show years ago)
Politically violent moms are GOOD “for the children”.
Danielle “Space” Cadet’s articles... the summaries tell you everything you need to know about her!
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/author/danielle-cadet
Good point.
The TV news panels have plenty of time to criticize Trump, the American system, ICE and law enforcement in cities.
But pressed for time to mention the children who crime victims of the illegals and dead or will live with a lost childhood, never being able to trust or get close to someone again in many cases.
All to keep the Dem midterm takeover plan going.
How to parent? Tell your kids stay away from the Commie death cult.
(why do I think her daughter is 18 and still wants lambchop in the car?)
why do I think her “daughter” IS ACTUALLY A GUY, 27
and still wants Lambchop in the car?
😁😄😆🤣🤣🤣
I taught my kids and grandkids to shoot straight, obey laws, respect, work hard and responsibility. They seem to be doing quite well.
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