Don't Make It Worse

Beginning as I mean to go on

When our daughter was small, Marido and I attended parenting classes at her hippie-adjacent preschool. Both of us grew up in high-control religious communities and most of what we knew about parenting was what we wanted to avoid: guilt, shame, fear, punishment, repression, children-should-be-seen-and-not-heard, stop-crying-right-now, you-need-to-learn-to-behave, don’t-make-God-sad, because-I-said-so, etcetera.

The preschool ran a parenting course that used materials from experts in the attachment parenting field: Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté, Dr. Laura Markham, Patty Wipfler from Hand in Hand Parenting. We learned a great deal about parenting through deep connection and emotional understanding. We learned too, about healing from our own childhood hurts so we could be better parents and partners.

At the time Filha was only two, so the class spent a fair amount of time talking about how to deal with tantrums. My own experience as a child who felt all things intensely was that those feelings were embarrassing. Inappropriate. Weeds that needed to be pulled; uprisings that needed to be quelled. To rage, to weep — these were things I could only do safely within the privacy of my room or the pages of my journal.

It was astonishing, then, to hear these educators and psychologists likening a tantrum to a storm. Something you could sit through with your child, calmly, until it passed. Like no big deal.

“When a tantrum hits,” the teacher said, “you have a choice. You can make it worse by scolding or shaming or denying your child’s feelings. By doing so, you might just whip that thunderstorm up into a category 5 hurricane. Or you can be a shelter—a safe place for your child to go where they know they will be heard and accepted, no matter what.

I’ve never stopped thinking about this analogy, even though Filha has matured beyond toddler-sized tantrums. I’ve never stopped thinking about how that choice—of making the storm worse or being a safe harbor—applies to so many things in life.

I feel compelled to tell you, and this is relevant to the topic, I swear, that New Year’s Eve is my least favorite holiday. It’s like once upon a time a Pope decided the Gregorian calendar was cool and now we measure a year with 365 days. Each time the days tick down to zero, we flip a page, rack up the count again and call it reinvention. It’s always this big build up to what is technically just another day.

Look, I understand the need for changing seasons and turns of the wheel and starting over and trying again but pinning so many hopes upon a single eve has never worked for me. Not the parties, not the resolutions, not the inevitable despair come February when we stop going to the gym or start eating carbs again or otherwise fall short of who we said we wanted to be and then call ourselves a failure.

Change is work and habits take time and the pressure we exert on ourselves every new January is intense.

At the end of 2021 as my first year in Portugal wound down, I had a conversation with one of my best friends about beginnings and endings and the looming trap of all the New Year, New Me nonsense. I was banging on about how much I hated the holiday and everything that goes with it and Kathy listened like a champ, as always. Then she shared that she doesn’t make resolutions anymore, she sets intentions.

I wrote about this last January when I said: A resolution is a specific destination or a quantifiable achievement. Lose the 20 pounds. Run the 5k. Finish the degree. Write the book. Move to Portugal. A resolution is an external goal that can live in a spreadsheet. …An intention is internal. It’s about your relationship—to yourself, to others, to the world.

I could mark a new planetary orbit anytime—my birthday or the March equinox. But my little One Line a Day journal runs out on December 31st, so I have to flip back to the beginning and start again. Might as well take a look at the ways in which I’ve changed and what has changed around me and recalibrate how I want to exist in the world now. Might as well do this new year thing in a way that works for me.

Ever since my talk about intentions with Kathy four years ago, I’ve been using the month of December to think about how I want to be in the world. I come up with a phrase—a short one. Motto-length. And then I write it on the front page of my little journal to help me begin as I mean to go on.

In the beginning of 2024, I wanted to Stay open. I still want to stay open, to be soft. But now I am adding a layer for 2025: I am setting the intention to be part of the solution. To not make things worse.

Because it’s going to get worse, isn’t it? Of course we will hoard our individual collections of small gladnesses; we will cling to the moments of warmth and bursts of light, but we all know the waters are rough and they’re only going to get rougher.

I’m talking about all of it: The late-stage capitalism and the blind eyes turned to the harm caused in pursuit of more and better and now. The greed and the violence and the isolation and the despair and the apathy and the overwhelm. The me-first and not-my-problem and nothing-we-can-do and they-had-it-coming and waste-of-time and bad-news-burnout and that’s-just-how-those-people-are and it’s-just-a-dusty-shithole-anyway, what-does-it-have-to-do-with-me I’m-not-political mentality. The phobias and isms. The never-ending need to Other. The chasm between unthinkably wealthy and can-barely-afford-groceries. The billionaires and their stans. The supremacists and their justifications. The fragility and toxicity. The obstinate ignorance. The belligerent entitlement. The empathy-as-performance. The virtue-as-concealment. The exhaustion, the exhaustion, the weight of the whole world.

I can’t change it. I can’t staunch the storm. I can’t hold up the levees.

But I can refuse to make it worse, whatever it may be—bombs falling in Gaza or Filha’s panic attack on the way to school because she forgot her chemistry notebook.

I can be part of the solution, however small, however local.
I can be a safe place.

I can call out my own complacency. I can get even more comfortable with being uncomfortable. I can get soft in the face of hard news. I can stay open to ridiculous possibilities. I can soak up the stories of strangers and let them tear up my heart.

I can give fewer fucks about playing it polite. Fewer shits about whether people do or don’t like me. (Fewer shits by the truckload with every aging year!) Fewer rats’ asses about following these rules that never served me or anyone like me anyway.

I can, as my favorite Irish witch Hannah Graves says, get “even more feral and ungovernable.” (Seriously, please give yourself the gift of watching this.)

I don’t have to be an obliviously optimistic person to believe that a better world is possible, and that by not throwing in the towel or up my hands, I can find ways to make it more real. To be part of the solution, or a speck in the sea of countless solutions because let’s not kid ourselves, there is no One Grand Solution to any of these colossal disasters.

Nameless Deity knows that I don’t always get it right—life or my opinions. I fuck up in a thousand and three new ways all the time. But I’ll be gods-damned if I ever stop trying to get it right, to do better, to be more human and also at the very same time a terrifying bog witch. (I feel like being a bog witch would get me through all manner of hard times. Life goal right there.)

No matter what comes for us this next trip around the sun, we all get a choice. Sometimes that choice is infinitesimally small, to be sure. But still, it’s there.

Ready or not, the New Year is upon us. I shall ride out to meet it (probably in my pajamas and probably also not really, like, riding because that sounds like drama) with every intention to at the very least not make it worse and at the very best, make it better.

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