How Baby

May this comic one day become completely incapable of being understood. May one day tragedies never befall children. May we live in a world where a parent searching anxiously through a pile for their child’s belongings only happens within minutes of that child also returning home from camp – not because they’ve been salvaged from a tragedy.

The tragedy at Camp Mystic – the tragedy of Palestinian children being bombed seeking aid – the tragedy of regular school shootings – and many more that don’t make the cut of media attention – trigger a helpless grief in me that’s bigger than my body. I think of the juxtaposition of the enormity of love and the enormity of the death that consumes it, and I think I can hold it in my body until I think of piles of carefully labelled backpacks. Waterlogged stuffed animals coming home. Piles of shoes. Items of love and care.

You become closer to death when you create life, more familiar with its forms and its inevitability. I’m constantly reminded and humbled that it’s only through privilege and sheer luck that it hasn’t noticed me or mine yet. There but for the grace of God go I – and though I don’t believe in said deity, the sentiment keeps coming back to me, a reminder to be thoughtful, and grateful, and to help when I can, because, goddamnit, we are all someone’s children, we all love and are loved with this same ferocity, and the same submission to forces outside our control.

Momo’s away at five (non-consecutive) weeks of camp this summer, the most she’s ever been. She loves it, and every year she dreams of going back the moment she’s home. I don’t understand parents who tell me, I could never send them away. She must go away. She must leave me, and struggle and triumph on her own, and have her own casual brushes with death that terrify me and I hope I never, ever have to learn about. When she comes back with skinned knees, I kiss every bug bite. I hold her tight. I thank the uncaring universe for sparing her.

And, this year, I add another gratitude: that when I’m looking for her in the piles of gear, when my eyes pass over masking-taped McKennas and Katelyns and Mayas, all the sacred names of someone’s child as enormously beloved as mine, I am grateful that she is coming home along with it.