What do you tell your kids?

2020 was bananas. Ba.Na.Nas.

A global pandemic, economic crisis, political meltdown, coups, race riots in the streets, mayhem and death.

It also gave me my daughter, made me a mother, put me in the kind of lockdown that actually manifested in this blog, which was something I'd wanted to start for a long time but finally came to fruition in the silence of quarantine.

And here we are in 2021, about to go into 2022, and I for one am still grappling. Still trying to figure it all out. Still trying to make sense of it all, the salty and the sweet. And as my kiddo starts walking and talking, I'm also trying to figure out how to tell her about it all.

We want to protect our kids. We want them to say, "see, it all works out, no matter what". And while that may be true in the long run for some of us, for some of us, it's just not.

Some of us still get shot in our beds deep in slumber even though we did nothing wrong.

Some of us live a healthy life dedicated to the good of everyone and still get cancer.

Some of us live in countries where famine, war, and poverty are the norm.

Some of us are living in a body that doesn't properly communicate who we are to the world around us and we have to come up against social scripts that result in bullying, violence, and harm.

I know. It was. But you don't come here for candy and unicorns. (at least I don't think you do).

I sing to my daughter a lot. Most of it is spontaneous stuff that comes up out of the struggles of toddlerhood (one of our favorites is titled, "all the things that you can't touch"). But I watched an instagram post by Jeffery Marsh the other day and was inspired to write a song. One I can sing to her as she grows that tells a more complete story. Normally I agonize for days over these blog posts just doing my best to be as witty as possible, but this time, I just kinda wanna share it with you all. If any of you out there are looking for ways to sing to your kids, ways to teach them about the ways that life is a little more complex than all the fairy tale stories we grew up hoping were true but learning all to soon that (for some) just aren't, feel free to add this to your repertoire.

Cheers,

Tiziana