How do we talk about Ukraine? Also we moved to Brooklyn, got COVID...

...and how is it already March??

Friends!

It’s been a minute. One minute we were hanging in Texas, watching omicron and Abbott-style authoritarianism surge, and the next minute Jim was accepting a job in Brooklyn and we were trying to figure out how to move ourselves across the country in two weeks. So we decided to place a giant TBD sign on figuring out how to move most of our stuff, packed our minivan to the gills, and set our sights north.

We arrived in Brooklyn and…got COVID. I’m 90% sure I know how (I suspect it was a hotel lobby, and Maisie was of course not wearing a mask). But, it also doesn’t matter how or why. After spending two years rearranging our lives to avoid it like the plague (haha), it found us anyway. Luckily, it was mild, we all seem fine, and it has provided us with a sense of relief in a lot of surprising ways. Which is welcome, given the complexities of starting our lives over, again…but this time, we’re hopeful it’ll be long term. As of March 1, we have a gorgeous apartment, we’re sending the kids to school (Alma: “I LOVE SCHOOL! And it’s INSIDE school! I LOVE being inside!” these pandemic kids, man), and our lives are feeling like they are getting back to normal.

It feels right to be here in a way that things haven’t felt in a long time. Part is being back on the east coast. Part of it is how many friends and family we have living here (even though we haven’t reached out to most of y’all yet). And part of it is, at long last, living in a blue state. It was very hard to imagine raising kids in Texas after the onslaught of fascist legislation. So, if I owe you an email or a phone call or a birthday card…you’re somewhere on the 500 notes I’ve started on my phone in the past month. I’ll get there. And, now that things are beginning to get into a rhythm, I’m going to be writing again.

So, for now… Ukraine.

Jim and I both have professional and personal ties to central and eastern Europe, and have both spent time in Ukraine. Watching the invasion unfold has been horrifying for us. I wake up in the middle of the nights most nights checking my phone to see if Zelenskyy has been assassinated. I have complicated thoughts about what this means for the global order and my frustrations with the critiques of NATO coming from the left, but I’ll save those for another newsletter. For now, how have we been talking to the kids about the war?

With Alma, we’ve talked about being helpers. She knows that we’ve sent money different places (one of Jim’s friends was in a bomb shelter and ran out of food for her dog, so we were trying to figure out how to get dog food to her).

Cyrus has a much more sophisticated understanding - he remembers when his dad spent the summer in Ukraine, and he knows where Russia is on a map, and so we’ve been talking about it from two angles.

First, we’ve been using Hamilton to draw connections. The analogy isn’t perfect, but there are some parallels: Ukraine broke off from the Soviet Union, and now the war is for Putin (aka King George) to try to force Ukraine back (the line “I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love…” particularly resonates). In all of the driving we’ve been doing lately, we have had the opportunity to do some deep dives into Lin Manuel Miranda soundtracks (we’ve been talking about Bruno quite a bit), and so the parallels between the war songs at the beginning of Hamilton and what he’s heard in the news have helped him make sense of Ukraine. We talk about how brave the Ukrainian revolutionaries are for standing up for their country’s right to exist, and how brave the Russian protestors are for trying to hold their country accountable.

We’ve also been talking a lot about (you guessed it) how people aren’t their governments. Jim’s new role supports a lot of international students, and he’s been outraged at calls to ban Russian students from studying here. We’ve also been upset at people attacking Russian restaurant owners in New York. Putin is a fascist, he was never elected, and he is not accountable to his citizens or his diaspora. Blaming Russian citizens is unfair, but it also just serves to isolate people from the broader global community.

We’ve been trying to shield him from the more graphic reports of the war (the bombing of maternity hospitals, the dead kids), but he’s seen before and after pictures. The square in Kharkiv where Jim had coffee has been shelled beyond recognition. We think pictures like that make the cost of war concrete.

That’s all for now friends. If you’re in the area, let’s hang out! If I haven’t told you we’re here yet, this is my official announcement! I’ll be back in your inboxes more regularly now, trying to make sense of the state of things.

What we’re reading:

I am reading Annie Dillard for the first time, and really blown away by The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It’s made me realize what an impatient reader I am, because the prose forces you to linger over ever sentence, and you still can’t absorb the complexity and beauty of the writing. It reminds me of reading Nabokov in some ways.

The kids got Brooklyn library cards this week, and it’s like Christmas. They gave Cyrus his own card, and he’s checked out the entire geography section, and several Minecraft volumes. Alma found a bunch of books in Italian she took a liking to, so we’ll be practicing our accents this week.

Thanks for reading friends! I missed you, and am excited to be back writing about how to talk about politics with kids.