The raw heart of motherhood

I know I'm not alone in seeing the world differently after becoming a parent. Watching the news becomes a heartache in a new way as you know every person suffering is someone's child. Even fiction becomes different. For the longest time, I couldn't watch what were previously my favorite crime shows. Violence in any form was hard to stomach, even pretend violence.

Recently, I read The Hunger Games trilogy and it occurred to me about a third of the way through the first book that I would have already put it down a few years ago. I won't give you any spoilers, but the book is full of unthinkable situations that require great sacrifice and bravery. Mental anguish and grisly violence are to be expected throughout. It's also one of those terrifying dystopian novels that imagines a world much worse than ours yet so like ours that it's impossible to ignore not only the possibility that we could end up there but also the ways in which our world, our government, our culture are already cruelly inhumane and dishearteningly difficult to change. Orwell's Oceania and Huxley's The World State pale in comparison both to the horrors of Panem and, more subtly, to the similarities between Panem and 21st century America. I found the book utterly chilling, compelling, and rushed right from the first to the next to the last, loving the humanity juxtaposed with the inhumanity, the universals present in the differences, and joltingly disturbed by the brutality.

It opened up that raw heart of motherhood. By the time I finished the third, I was mired in thoughts of how I can protect my children from living the horrors present in our own world. Of how I and they can help improve the world so that other people - other people's children - don't have to live these horrors either, and barring that, of how we can stop hatred and violence from escalating. Of how no matter how peaceful we can make this world, there is no protecting them. Death, loss, and successful ordeals are themes threading through even the most charmed life.

Today, I took my kids to a playground with trees and bushes surrounding half the park, making for a nice pretend wood. They played "Woodland Children." I found myself proud of their inventiveness. I was surprised by Eliana's knowledge of what it might take to survive in the forest. And then, their plots and comments were enough to make me place them in Panem, to imagine Eliana in the Hunger Games, to grate at the rawness that the books had opened up inside of me and personalize it. I tried to ignore them for a while and turn away from this discomfort, but as I began to listen again, I was simultaneously relieved and disturbed to discover that Eliana has a ruthless streak that would give her top-tier odds for survival in any circumstance. I'm not surprised by this, but it was a new perspective on it, and a welcome one given the concerns brought to a head by reading these books.

What painful and lovely gifts The Hunger Games has given me, then: to recognize even more greatly the need for Tikkun Olam, repairing our world; to appreciate again how good our life is; to recognize the strengths of my children; to face fully the inability to keep them from harm or pain. I am glad I did not open the first book when it was published but waited until my mama heart had healed enough to be able to be opened again so that I could feel that rawness in new places, and learn.