You were raised by fascism. That's why you can't see it.

I have long been the kind of woman who supports (no, celebrates) those who choose to exercise their god damn right to be child-free (and, in the case of women, a generally happier segment of the population, while doing it).

That said, it isn’t my story. Not only do I love being a mom and find it to be the most singularly fulfilling thing I could ever have done with my brief time on this spec of dirt – but it delivered to me a truth I am almost certain I couldn’t have woken up to without it.

For whatever reason, the contradictions of motherhood don’t really bother me. Yes, yes. While I find it to be the most fulfilling life’s work I could endeavour toward, it is also, of course, the dullest and most frustrating shit sometimes.

Tonight I made, like, seven different variations of dinner for a mostly whining and unimpressed audience. Ah, well.

Almost eight years into the gig it doesn’t bother me to know that I could never even remotely be who or what I understand myself to be, while in any way pretending to be divorced from my role as Mamá.

I’m a mom with every fibre of my being and I have access to a whole ass separate sense of myself that has nothing to do with kids – or even my husband.

Because, if I’m being honest, I never really had access to that part of me before having children. Before these sweet angels entered my life, I was raised by a cruel and vengeful God who told me I was inherently less than.

I had parents who echoed those sentiments, whether in the fundamentalist terms of people who take that kind of childish teaching as literal, or by way of emotional abuse that grew with me, seeming intent on stunting my appropriate developmental growth at every passage.

That rearing turned me into the kind of person who believed in my own unworthiness. All through high school, yes, but even beyond. I became the kind of person who befriended and made a life with people who also (clearly) believed in their own unworthiness.

Only in the act of having children did I begin to part with a version of reality that placed me firmly at fault for, well, anything and everything that an external other needed me to be the cause of.

Looking at my own sweet babies, seeing their innocence and worthiness, inherent in their simply being here, well, it cracked the first veneer in what I had taken as unimpeachable truth.

It set me on my path toward liberation.

When we begin to knock down the authoritarian, patriarchal and white supremacist boundaries within which our limited colonized minds can imagine…

When we liberate ourselves from the personal (yet little and possibly, if we’re being honest, gilded) cages many of us are imprisoned within…

We can finally begin to imagine a freedom beyond ourselves.

When we stop serving our absent fathers, our resentful mothers, and the community upon whose malevolent discretion they taught us to rely on, we begin to see the way it is all connected.

At least that’s how it went for me. Pulling the thread unraveled a painful – painful – world where I realized that what I endured had made me a perfect little cog in a machine designed to perpetrate pain on others.

Suddenly it all made sense. Why those who I embraced as my closest and most intimate friends suddenly loathed me when I couldn’t be what they relied upon me to be. Why corporate bosses (an entirely synthetic microcosm of this phenomenon, btw) loved and saw in me themselves – until they didn’t.

I no longer wanted to be part of that system of perpetual pain. Of authoritarian Daddies who kill all the polar bears and then tell us who else to blame in the wake of their destruction.

The ones who tell us to look at genocide – the slaughtering of children – straight in the face and call it, well, anything the fuck else.

They tell us to look at the world’s richest man making a nazi salute (plain as day) on the inauguration of another billionaire’s second (nefarious) presidency, which, by the way, is far from a statement on the purity or goodness of anyone else’s presidency, and call it an “awkward gesture.”

This, folks, is the logical conclusion of people being raised unable to understand when they’re being abused, gaslit, or quite frankly, mocked.

That confusion is how fascism thrives. It tells you that your daddy’s whoopin’ made you a “man.” That your mama’s coldness taught you how to weather a brutal world.

It lurks in the psyche of every unhealed, emotionally immature person who wants to believe that blind adherence to authority makes them the kind of adult that their own parent, emotionally stunted themselves, would have respected.

And that person, boy oh boy do they want a demagogue. I mean, a daddy.