This week I was going to post about a lovely and outrageous trip my husband’s work sent us on recently. It was a reward for him selling many things and not choosing a job in public education, and so the whole thing was capital-F fancy.
I wanted to wax poetic about how the pampering that week was rivaled only by my near-constant motion sickness. As our butler (yes, AN ACTUAL BUTLER) replaced the tiny fresh flowers on our bathroom linens each morning, I snorted Dramamine up my nostrils and wished for death. But that was good, because after a week of being treated like royalty, perpetual nausea was likely all that stood between me and a full transformation into an entitled, champagne-flavored monster.
So I wrote about how this was making me come around to Richard Rohr’s prayer for one good humiliation a day. It’s good to get the rug yanked out from under you on the regular, I said. Our egos don’t need an excuse to believe we’re special, and so humiliations are just favors from the universe.
Then Roe got overturned and I lost my appetite for that idea.
It may still be spiritually sound, but now that the country regards my reproductive system as something like the involuntary luge, a daily humiliation seems a bit… superfluous. Who needs humbling when thirty-seven percent of your fellow citizens wish you full personhood only under extenuating circumstances?
After the court’s decision, I carried on, as many of us did, with a whopping dose of cognitive dissonance. I listened to the news and I scrolled the socials and I knew my personal liberties were being stripped away, and yet I also made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—easy on the jelly.
I went about the mundanities of my life with the enormity of an overturned Roe playing in the background. Not so much like music, but like I’d left the radio in between stations. A constant, garbled static. A reminder, as I pumped gas and watered flowers, that at any time I might be consumed with the raging feminine wound our legal system had given me shelter from my entire life.
I’m still not completely out of it. But I will tell you that, weirdly and somewhat offensively, something helped after a few days. And that something was another humiliation.
I was not courting humble-opportunities at this point—again, the Supreme Court seemed to be taking care of that, thank you very much—but during a trip to the pool, my son got overconfident in the 4’6” section and found himself on the wrong side of an angry lifeguard. Admonitions were given, noodles were confiscated, and she ended with the grand finale. “Where is your mom?” she scolded, turning back to her chair. “She needs to be watching you.”
Hello parenting shame, my old friend.
I had been watching, from close enough to witness this interaction but maybe not close enough to have jumped in and rescued him myself. Girl wasn’t wrong. In a rational world, in a rational state of mind, I would have nodded, made a note to do better, and shuffled us along to our afternoon eye doctor appointment.
In the real world, yeah, no.
Of all the shames, parenting shame burns the hottest. And lasts the longest. You can arc weld with parenting shame. All other thoughts will melt in its presence, subsumed by the firey knowledge that everyone else is doing this right and you, you hapless parenting imbecile? You. Are. Not.
So then it was time for another type of cognitive dissonance: parenting while in shame. My son was embarrassed and a little scared and he needed me. While my brain was shriveling like it had sipped from the wrong Holy Grail, I was leading a small, anxious person through belly breaths.
I lost a good part of the afternoon to it. Including the trip to the eye doctor. Just as Roe had in the days before, mom shame now blared in my ear, keeping half of me in agony while the rest paid for scratch-resistant lenses. Functioning and not functioning. Fine and not fine. The way we’re all zombie-ing through life right now, I suppose.
The thing that brought me back around was a voice. You might remember this voice from such hits as my mid-life career crisis. It shows up when it wants to, often when I’m not asking for it, but I do find that it tends to be correct. As I tried to drown my sorrows in Diet Coke that day, wishing for the thousandth time that I’d been born without shame receptors, I heard it a little more assertively than usual. “Come on,” it said. “Why should you be the only one that doesn’t feel shame?”
Ah.
That’s a good note, inner voice. Everyone has felt shame at some point, haven’t they? When I’m not neck-deep in it, I can remember that although it sucks as hard as anything has ever sucked, it is also a thread that connects my humanity to yours.
We evolved to live in groups, and shame was the thing that kept us from get booted from them. Or so the story goes. Whatever the reason it exists, shame is a through-line among Democrats and Republicans, Christians and pagans, people who like Neil Diamond and people who don’t. Despite our best efforts to the contrary lately, our deepest selves want to live with others. The fact that we can’t get rid of shame is proof of it. A reminder that we want to be accepted, to live in community.
We’re just bad at it.
So I’m back to where I started, with Richard Rohr. With one humiliation a day. Not because I’m riding high on a wave of ego (or, you know, bodily freedom), but because without it, I’m tempted to believe thirty-seven percent of Americans have come from another planet. They haven’t. They feel shame just like I do, plus fear and anger, joy and grief. We’re all one species, flawed and misguided and stuck in the nineteenth century though we may be.
And right now, that little thread of empathy is all I’ve got.
So, if this helps you, take it. I hope you won’t need the humiliation, but if you’d like to sit next to me, I’m here, in a small space where I can hold my rage and empathy together, and there’s room for everyone.
