In a timely episode (hey, I planned it that way!) I'm sharing my conversation with Frida Berrigan, a peace activist and author, who shares her experiences growing up with activist parents, navigating tensions between parenting and activism, and raising her own children. We discuss the importance of engaging in activism while maintaining joy, the struggle of balancing multiple responsibilities, and the impact of ordinary acts in making a difference. Frida also emphasizes the significance of moral cheerfulness and acting within our capacity to contribute to positive change.

As you'll hear in the podcast, Frida grew up in a family of famous peace activists and she wrote about her experience and how it inspired her own parenting decisions in the book It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood. You can also read her essays at WagingNonViolence.org and I recommend you start with her wonderful essay, Nuclear Weapons Ruined My Life (And I Wouldn't Have It Any Other Way).

00:00 Welcome to the Tell Me It Will Be OK Podcast

00:52 Introducing Frida Berrigan: Peace Activist and Author

01:20 Frida's Family and Activism Background

01:59 Parenting Through Activism

02:46 Interview with Frida Berrigan Begins

03:09 Frida's Children and Parenting Journey

05:51 Balancing Caregiving and Activism

07:27 Frida's Unique Upbringing and Education

18:30 Navigating Tensions and Choices in Activism

27:22 Parenting Decisions and Sharing Information

29:47 Taking Action with Kids

31:11 Impact of School Shootings

32:11 Helping Refugee Families

36:26 Balancing Effort and Outcome

41:54 The Role of Ordinary Acts

49:02 Moral Cheerfulness and Joy

53:38 Accepting Imperfection

Thanks for listening! And, of course, it helps if you will share, rate, and subscribe so more people can learn about and from Frida Berrigan and the other wonderful guest I have coming up! 🧡

Takeaways:

1. In our increasingly complex world, parenting anxious children requires a multifaceted approach that embraces both awareness and empathy.
2. Frida Berrigan's life experiences illustrate the challenges of balancing activism with parenthood in a meaningful and impactful manner.
3. The significance of moral cheerfulness amidst adversity is a recurring theme, emphasizing the importance of joy in the face of life's difficulties.
4. Engaging with community and activism can provide children with invaluable lessons on compassion, empathy, and the importance of standing up for justice.
5. Understanding that our efforts, no matter how small, contribute to a larger movement is essential for both parents and children alike.
6. The podcast stresses that navigating the imperfections of life and parenting is a shared journey that requires patience and understanding.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. wagingnonviolence.org

Hi, and welcome to the Tell Me It Will Be okay podcast podcast for parents who are raising anxious kids in a worried world.

It's all about contending with general anxiety, clinical levels of anxiety, everyday anxiety, and how it is to parent children in a world that is increasingly complicated, challenging, and sometimes overwhelming.

While I will continue to answer listener questions on the podcast when it feels appropriate or when those things are coming up and seem aligned with whatever else we're talking about, I am also shifting to interviewing folks who can give us some insight, not just about parenting, not just about anxiety, not just about a worried world, but everything else that relates to that.

I'm going to be curating a list of fascinating people.

My very first guest on the podcast is Frida Berrigan.

Frida is a peace activist since she was a very young child.

She's an author.

She writes a regular column for wagingnonviolence.org and she is also author of the book It Runs in the Family on being raised by radicals and growing into rebellious motherhood.

That book is about being raised by her father, Philip Berrigan, and her mother, Elizabeth McAllister, who were peace activists who created the Plowshares movement.

When her parents met, her dad was a priest of the Josephite order.

Her mother was a nun.

They were already working as activists.

They ended up marrying, being excommunicated from the church, and went on to have three children.

Frida is the eldest.

I reached out to her because she has lived a life doing activism.

She was born into it.

She continues to do it.

She is raising children through it.

Her eldest is now an adult, and she has two children who are just heading into the teen years.

She is walking her talk, but she understands the tremendous challenge of this and the difficulties in balancing the work that we need to do for the world, the work we need to do for ourselves, and the work we need to do for our children.

This is what we talk about.

In the interview, I found her perspective incredibly helpful and inspirational and not in a oh, my gosh, you need to reach even higher kind of inspirational way, but in an inspirational of, oh, I can do this.

I can be a help.

I can access activism from wherever I am.

So thank you for tuning in.

Let's get into it, folks.

This is Frida Barrigan.

Hi, Frida.

I love the color behind you.

How did you pick that?

Thank you.

I was going for Marigold and it worked.

Yeah.

So, so bright and lovely.

And you are calling from Vermont.

I'm from New London, Connecticut.

Connecticut.

You're about three hours from me.

Okay.

And where are you?

I'm in northeast Pennsylvania.

Oh, okay.

Great.

Okay.

Before this, we were talking about how old your kids are.

Can you fill people in and how old your kids are and who they are and what people, what you are open to sharing about them?

Sure.

I have three kids, Don.

I have a 12 year old named Madeline who's in sixth grade.

She'll be 12 later this month.

And Seamus is 13.

He'll be 14 this summer and he's in eighth grade.

And then my step kid, the Wonderful Ro, is 19 and in their first year of college at Johnson and Wales.

Oh, wow.

I had a big deal.

Yeah.

My husband's kid and we've been co parenting with Rosina's mom since we fell in love when Rosina was about 3 or 4 years old.

So you are really in it with parenting.

You've been through it and you are deep in it.

These are big ages for kids.

These are big ages.

And I think all the time back to when I had two kids in diapers and a small child, Rosina was maybe in second or third grade.

And how full on parenting was.

I realized that it is no less full on now that they all can make themselves ramen and get themselves dressed in the morning.

That the.

That their emotional lives are just as complicated and just as in need of my attention as taking care of their physical bodies when they were so much littler.

And it's a surprise every day, but a good surprise.

I found that parenting little ones was physically exhausting.

And then as they got older, it shifted to more emotionally intense.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah.

But a joy all through it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you've written extensively about being a parent, not just in your book, but in columns that you write, right?

Yep.

When they were little, I wrote a column called Little Insurrections for waging nonviolence dot org.

2016.

2015, called It Runs in the Family Raising Children.

Oh, man.

It has a long subtitle.

I'm sorry.

And.

And then I continue to write about parenting for.

Well, it just, it comes up in, in my writing about politics and nuclear weapons and trying to be a good person in this world.

It keeps.

It keeps coming up.

Yeah.

And.

And I love that because it's not segregated.

You don't act like parenting is this thing that you put on a shelf.

And you've even written about that.

How important it is to bring caregiving into these discussions and create access for parents.

Yeah.

Yes.

And like, like Many of your listeners, you know, I'm.

I'm care taking for three kids and I'm also caretaking for my mother, who's 86 and living with dementia and quite, quite advanced dementia.

She is now living in a facility about three miles from me.

I spend a lot of time with her and I still do a lot of very active caregiving for her.

And so I guess they call us the sandwich generation of young kids and an aging needy parents.

And then somebody called it.

We're actually the Panini generation.

We're stressed and hot between these, you know, between these two sets of intense needs that shapes my daily life a lot too.

I'm sorry to hear that about your mom.

I was wondering how she was doing.

Yeah, she doesn't have any shame or awareness of her disease, and I'm grateful for that.

Physically, she's still pretty strong, so that's good.

She has a lot of pleasure in her life, which is nice.

And you have younger siblings, but they don't live very near, is that right?

Well, I have an Irish twin, my brother Jerry, who lives in Michigan.

And then My sister is seven years younger than I am.

I'll be 52 this year.

She actually moved to Connecticut when caretaking our mom got to be too much for me.

And so we, we live about four blocks away and she's a physical therapist at our mom's.

And so we, we share caretaking responsibilities.

Oh, that.

I'm glad to hear that.

Yeah.

I wake up every day grateful to have my little sister as my neighbor.

You come from an.

A famous activist in your family, as does your husband, right?

Yeah, yeah.

We joke that the weaving of our communities together, there's more overlap than there is, than there is separation.

His parents were active.

They're younger than my parents, but they were active in Catholic Peace Fellowship and were some of the young upstarts within what could be called the Catholic left during the Vietnam War.

So, you know, we're older generations but very recognizable names.

Philip Berrigan was my father and Elizabeth McAllister is my mother and sort of synonymous with a particular type of, you know, kind of principled spectacle, public energy resistance to first the Vietnam War and.

And in service of the civil rights movement and then more recently against nuclear weapons and US Imperialism, war making projects abroad.

One of the things I found really interesting in your book is you said that your parents originally did not want to have children because they knew they were choosing to live in A way that would make parenting more difficult.

Yes.

My father had been a Josephite priest and my mother was a religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary nun.

And so they had made the decision decades earlier to not be parents and to commit themselves to a broader kind of parenting or mentoring.

They're both educators within their orders.

Having children was, you know, they kind of thought that it would be antithetical to this austere kind of.

Once they were excommunicated and no longer, you know, kind of shielded by the kind of enveloped in the church, they sought to kind of make a lay, basically a lay monastery of resistance community of, you know, like minded individuals kind of coming together to sustain the kind of resistance that they thought would be necessary after the Vietnam War was over.

And they, they didn't see kids as, as really fitting neatly into that, into that very austere kind of rigorous life that they envisioned for themselves.

And so, so when we came along as, as we do, and you know, not to get too, you know, graphic about it, but, you know, Catholics don't know a lot, or didn't back then know a lot about how, how these things worked.

We were all surprises in different ways.

You know, my, myself and then my brother was born basically a year later.

And then my sister was born, you know, after my mom had already hit menopause, right.

So we were all like, whoa.

They realized that we could fit in and we did.

And other kids were part of our community, which was called Jonah House in Baltimore, Maryland.

Other kids fit in, but it was not a typical childhood by any means.

Not that anybody really lives a typical life.

But we were, you know, we lived in active community with mostly single adults.

But as I said, there were other couples and children who were part of that.

People moved through.

Lots of people stayed for a year or three years.

You know, some people were part of our daily lives for decades.

And, you know, we were very poor.

It was all very rigorous, very regimented.

They kind of replicated the best of monastic life in a lay kind of situation.

So, you know, meals were at particular times.

We all eat together.

We shared responsibility for making meals.

Childcare was a task like all of the other tasks that were shared amongst the adults.

And then they painted houses to make a kind of make a living.

They didn't want to be dependent on donations, but there was only one bank account, so all the money just went into that one bank account.

And so we did a lot of dumpster diving and a lot of gleaning, shared food with our neighbors.

Baltimore is a city of neighborhoods.

And we were sort of between two neighborhoods, kind of a.

Always on the edge of gentrifying kind of white middle class neighborhood and beautiful old historic Baltimore row houses with lots of beautiful stained glass.

And then, you know, kind of you cross the street and you're in an African American poor neighborhood.

Lots of people kind of squeezed into, you know, these row houses that were broken up into many apartments.

And so, you know, we were white like the gentrifiers, but we were squeezed together like the African Americans.

And, you know, we had none of the hallmarks of white interlopers.

We didn't call the police.

We didn't hold our parking spaces with chairs in the wintertime.

We weren't afraid of our black neighbors, so we didn't lock our doors.

That was kind of our upbringing.

My brother, sister and I all went through public school, which was a surprise to lots of people who associate both of my parents with Catholicism.

But they had had enough of the church with a capital C at that point and really didn't want to impose that on us.

And it's one of the many things I'm grateful for.

You know, I've been able to go to public school.

I think it would have been.

Well, I don't know what it would have been like to go to Catholic school with the last name of Berrigan, But I'm glad I didn't have to find that.

I think that you went to Hampshire, which people may not know is a very expensive, very sort of crunchy liberal arts college.

I just wonder what kind of culture shock that was for you, especially with your peers, because you're sort of dancing in these two worlds.

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was, it was wild, Dawn.

It was so right.

I went to Hampshire College.

I applied to three other schools.

I was waitlisted at Vassar, got into the Great Books Program at St. John's in Annapolis and Bard College up the Hudson River.

I visited all those other schools, but I never visited Hampshire.

I just didn't get up to western Massachusetts and I was in the driver's seat of this, this whole going to college project.

My parents were distracted by the first Gulf War and life in the community.

If I was going to go to college, it was sort of.

I was going to figure it out.

I had some other adults who were really helping me kind of figure it out, but my parents were pretty not engaged with all of that.

And.

And so Hampshire came onto my radar screen because Ekbal Ahmed taught there and he was friend of, of my parents and my uncle Dan Barrigan.

And, and this, you know, kind of Pakistani freedom fighter critical of nonviolence and pacifism.

He had been an advisor to the Algerian revolutionaries.

I was ready to be challenged in that way on pacifism and maybe Christianity.

Hampshire attracted me for all of that.

And it was certainly a hippie school, but it was also very rigorous and self directed.

You know, I don't quite know what it's like now, but there are no grades and no required classes.

You kind of move at your own pace and do quite a bit of self directed work.

And I was, you know, pretty.

That was fine for me, but.

But yes, I got there.

You know, I had gone to a college preparatory high school where pretty much everybody went to college and it was academically rigorous and you know, I thought of myself as pretty smart.

But I got there and I was completely unprepared for lots of things.

I was unprepared for the wealth of my peers.

I was unprepared for the kind of fish, Grateful Dead culture.

There I was, the marker of wealth and poverty were completely different than they had been at my high school.

You could tell who was rich and who was poor, who was privileged and who was not.

But the like, the cues were all off there and I had a lot to navigate and it was almost all white.

In my entire school experience up until that point, I had been a minority and often a minority of just like, yeah, me and my brother were the white kids.

And so.

And you know, in high school it was a little bit more.

But my friend group was not white.

I was kind of used to standing out, being conspicuous both for my race and because of my parents.

All of a sudden I, I didn't stand out, at least physically in any way.

And, and that was also like something new to have to navigate, how to kind of like represent myself when I was just one more white girl with a nose ring, you know, so.

So it took me some time to find my footing there, but I was really, really glad to study there.

And then it was also rural and I had never been in a rural place before at all.

So stars and sheep and a farm and, you know, space and quiet, those were not part of my reality.

But I was really happy there.

And it was such a privilege to be able to study with Ekbal Ahmed.

And because it was Hampshire, I would also see him in the, in the, in the co ed sauna.

Oh, hello, Professor.

Anyway, so he was such a marvelous human being.

So I went to Hampshire, then moved back to Baltimore for a little while and then moved to New York City and had an internship at the Nation magazine and then spent a long time in New York City writing on military industrial complex issues at various think tanks with my mentor, William Hartung, working for him before moving to the Catholic Worker briefly in New York City, and then, you know, falling in love with Patrick and moving to Connecticut and becoming a parent at the age of 38.

So, yeah, that's a nutshell, Dawn.

It's got to be a really big nutshell.

One of the things you said in the book is that.

And this is about your parents creating that church space, that monastery space, is that it looked like belief and life integrated and yet in constant tension.

And that's what I keep coming back to in, is that you seem to be comfortable navigating tension.

Like, when I read your columns, you are willing to engage with tension, not turn away and ignore it.

And I think think that is really valuable in times like this.

And I wondered if you could speak to the willingness to be uncomfortable in considering the tension of our values, of things we say yes to, of things we say no to, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think.

Yeah.

I thank you for that question and that observation.

And it rings true.

My therapist.

What did he say?

He said something funny not too long ago.

He said, frida, you have a high tolerance for the suck.

Yeah, Yeah, I sure do.

Right?

And, like, you know, from an early.

Yeah, yes.

Like, I have a high tolerance for it.

And.

And I think it is.

You know, Rebecca Solnit wrote this amazing book called A Paradise Built in Hell, where she writes about how contrary to the way we think about disaster.

Right.

And, like.

And maybe this is getting to, like, you know, like, oh, my gosh, it's going to be so, like, terrible.

Like, terrible things are going to happen.

It's going to bring out the worst of everybody.

You know, when the proverbial shit hits the fan, we're all going to devolve to our base selves.

Her research on disasters shows that we are at our best, right?

When we are under pressure.

We come together.

We don't separate.

We give out of not just our excess, but our.

Our.

We give, you know, to the point of not having enough.

And she said, that institutions and structures tend to make things worse.

The police come in, and in San Francisco, they set fire to things.

They profiled Chinese people and young people, but that.

That people, for the most part, were.

Were their best and really, like, took care of one another.

In oral histories of terrible disasters, people say it was the worst of times, but, like, it was also when I felt the most alive.

And.

With the news of the day and the injustices of the moment.

Every single adult that I was relating to was kind of in this open, growing space.

It was so fertile and dynamic, and that was wild to be a part of.

And sort of like they kind of left, and then a new one would come, and I would see somebody else go through that process.

And as an adult, I guess the other thing that was pretty significant is that I got to see all these people give things up to come live at Jonah House.

And the holy squalor of intentional community.

I'd be like, their parents are rich.

You know, like, they.

They, like, they gave up a job, like, a real job to come live here.

Gosh, there really must be something here, right?

It's not like we're just taking people off the street who have nothing, right?

Like, people are shedding mainstream America to enter our community.

That had a profound impact on me.

But the tensions were always there.

Like, this is a choice my parents had made to live here, to not ride their fame in a particular way or direction for their notoriety, to not cash in on it in any way.

And they made the choice to go to prison.

And I think they would say.

And, like, kind of the.

The way they talked about it was not quite in the language of choice, right?

Their conscience required them to.

Their faith required them to.

Like, they were called to do this.

But, you know, I watched them step off the curb or go through the fence.

There was an active.

You know, like, we were.

Nobody was coming to our house in the middle of the night to take my parents off to prison.

They stepped, you know, over the line into the military facility, up the steps of the Pentagon to throw blood on the pillars.

So there was a lot of choice.

And as I grew older, I saw that choice, right?

And.

And so, you know, and then I was aware that I was not the only kid in seventh grade with a parent in prison.

But there was not the same agency, and there Certainly wasn't the same support for the parents of my peers in prison.

So I was sort of aware of that tension, right?

And mindful of the nobility of going off to prison was maybe only noble for particular reasons, but that.

That was sort of complicated because this question of choice hung me up.

One of the reasons I, you know, would really have to really, really not want to go to jail or prison for a long period of time and leave my kids is because, unlike my parents, I have a visceral sort of in my body understanding of how hard that is on other people and something my parents weren't aware of.

I hope they weren't aware of.

It was really hard on us when our mom or dad went off to jail.

It was not that it was easy for them.

Right.

Jail is uncomfortable.

Prison is uncomfortable.

But, you know, both of them treated it like a vacation from the responsibilities of community.

They studied the Bible.

They, you know, related intensely to the people directly around them.

They did a lot of correspondence and writing.

They tried to be present to us, but they were used to discomfort.

It was not all that different from the early days of their time and their religious orders, in many ways, institutional strictures were not something they found an affront to their humanity.

Right.

Although those places try and strip people of their humanity, right?

So they managed to maintain their humanity quite robustly and extend that to other people in ways that totally admirable and beautiful.

But meanwhile, we're out suffering.

We totally suffered.

I think about that a lot, and I think about the burden that kind of witness puts on the people closest to me.

If it had to happen, we would all get through it.

Right?

But in terms of that sense of choice, I am not stepping into actions that I am judging have serious consequences.

Right?

I got arrested last, you know, Ash Wednesday in New York City, spent a couple hours in lockup, was released with a parking ticket, right?

Like that.

Got caught up in the moment for nuclear disarmament.

But that's real different than trespassing into a military installation, receiving felony federal charges.

The kind of things that my parents did, not routinely and not without discernment.

But, you know, it was part of.

It was part of their.

Their culture.

It was part of their witness.

In your book, you're talking about your eldest, you're talking about Roe.

You say, I want her to know all of this someday.

You're referencing school shootings.

I want her to grow up compassionate and empathetic.

But right now, I just want her to be a kid.

And that's another kind of tension.

So I know that at the time you were writing the book, you were making some decisions as a mother to young children and now you're making other decisions as a parent of older children.

So I'm curious about how you ended up navigating, sharing information with them in ways that you felt was going to be most healthy and hopeful for them.

Yeah, yeah.

I, yeah.

I was aware immediately of how unconcerned my own parents were with shielding me in any way.

Like there's no filter.

There was no, there was no sanitized, kind of bite sized version of nuclear weapons dangers or US Imperial adventures for me, my brother and my sister.

I, yeah.

Made a conscious decision not to show them documentaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the age of five.

Right.

Firm break for my own upbringing.

And, and I, you know, one of, one of the reasons.

Well, okay, I'm aware that it's my analysis that many people reject the politics of their parents because there is, there's too much shielding, too much protection.

Kids are given a lie.

Everything's fine, honey.

Oh, sweetie, everything's good, you know.

Oh, that man lying on the ground on cardboard.

He's just napping like there's nothing wrong there.

Let's come on, let's keep moving.

You know, a kid comes of age and is like, parents lied to me.

Things are not okay.

This world is screwed up and my parents don't have any capacity to contend with everything I'm seeing here.

Right.

And that makes a rupture.

Right.

My parents didn't give me the tools I need to be a human being in this, in human system.

Right.

So I didn't want to do that.

I remember Patrick, my husband and I talking about that kind of thing and us both seeing like that as we developed and came of age.

And so what I came up with was anything that I share with my little kids as problems, things that make me sad, things that, that, that move me.

We're going to do something about.

Right?

We're going to do something.

We're going to go to the, go to the protest after the Newtown shootings and after the school shootings in Florida.

We're all going to go and we don't need to be in the middle, right?

And we don't need to be at the front.

We don't even need to march if we, you guys don't want to, but we're going to be here.

And you can see all the people who also care about this.

You can see people who are angry and you can see people who are sad and you can See people who are kind of stepping out of the norm and, like, maybe being too sad or too angry.

And you can see how people respond to that.

You can see people holding each other.

You know, like, just look, look.

Let's just watch.

And then when you're ready, let's enter.

And so that was, you know, and it was.

It was this series of school shootings that were sort of the same age, right?

Rosina was a kindergartner when the Candy Hook Newtown shooting happened, right.

And it was just like, oh, and security changed and the, the kind of this language change.

And I was like, oh, I don't like the way the school is talking about this.

This is a lie, and these drills aren't going to help.

Right?

And so, like, we do need to talk about this.

And, and we would talk to Rasinish friends, parents about, oh, do you have guns in your house?

Where are those guns?

How do you talk about guns?

Patrick mostly had those conversations.

I was grateful for that.

We were real deliberate about that.

When Rossino was quite small, and since the little kids have been growing up, it's been a lot of Trump.

And so I was like, okay, well, we're going to.

There are these brand new.

The last refugees before the Muslim ban came to Connecticut, came to New London because they actually landed in Indiana.

But Mike Pence was, you know, made the plane go.

So they came here.

And we, I, our, our church did a lot with these families, and I kind of set myself up as a conduit for clothes and shoes and stuff for these kids.

These kids were all the same ages as Seamus and Madeline, and we were over at their houses all the time.

I was bringing them to the supermarket and doing all this kind of, you know, direct work with them.

My kids learned how to, like, you know, you take your shoes off and you say hello in this way, and you, you know, and girls do this and boys do this.

And we were just, like, in the homes of Syrian and, and Afghan and Sudanese refugees all the time.

So that, I think, helped a lot, as it certainly helped me contend with my sort of sadness and sense of, like, hopelessness about how big that first Trump administration, how hard that landed on.

On so many people.

I think it helped our kids, too, right?

Like that.

It wasn't, it wasn't this big thing out there.

It was, it was, you know, it was Amna and Zainab and their families a lot of sugary soda, which they.

Can'T get at home.

That connection between having my reaction to current events World events, the injustice of the day, allowing them to see that move me to action and to connection and to like kind of going out, right?

We would leave our house and we would wash all these clothes and pick through what would be appropriate and what would not be appropriate.

So somebody donated all these short shorts to all these Muslim girls.

And I was just like, you know, I'm just gonna not.

Yeah, these are not going right anyway.

And so through working with those families, I got to talk to my kids a lot about the importance of making them feel welcome and how they settle in and work to retain some parts of home as they become Americans and, and back to tension.

Some of that bothered me so much.

So the oldest girl in this Sudanese family, you know, she joins ROTC as a freshman in high school.

And I'm, and I like had to let it go.

You know, I just kind of, I'm not going to.

Lecture this young woman about, well, I, you know, I said what I needed to say, but I'm not gonna, what, call her names or you know, have less of a relationship because she's, this is the path she's chosen to give back to the country that took her in or assimilate fully.

And you know, and, and then I can also appreciate that there's something very beautiful about this young dark skinned Muslim woman wearing her hijab and then like her little like ROTC hat, like cracked just so on top of her hijab.

And I'm like, yeah, that all looks pretty cute.

You know, to get back to your question, to link what's happening out there with our ability to go out and do something, change everything, right?

But for this year and a half that these families were settling and figuring things out, we were a really big part of their lives.

And that was meaningful to us and that was meaningful to them.

We helped them feel welcome and you know, like a part of this community.

Shame and Madeline were a huge, huge part of that work.

When I'm talking to parents, sometimes they'll say, but I don't think doing X is really going to make a difference.

What difference does it make?

Because they're shaming themselves for not doing more.

And you say something about, I really like this line, so I want to make sure I find it a joy.

Constantly under assault, not by lefter than thou, grumpy activist.

And I tell them, you're right, you'll never be able to do enough.

There's always more you can do.

And you live that as a child.

Your parents did everything and so you're Very aware.

You could do even more.

You could make another Jonah house at your house.

But because it's endless.

Just do what you can.

Yeah.

I think there's something so kind of like, first world and white about this idea that if I really tried, I could do it all.

Like, we can't, you know, and the people who do try the hardest maybe are the hardest to be around some sort of sense of balance, perspective, modesty or humility with all of that.

That the effort is almost more important.

No, the effort is more important than the outcome.

Right.

Like, it is.

It is.

It's just.

I am trying.

In this white, cis.

Relatively privileged body of mine, I am trying.

And.

And that's all we're really meant to do, to try and to give a shit or to give a shit and then try.

And I think we get, you know, the more privilege and more kind of like, in our head we are, the more we're like, well, I tried it that one time.

Or, you know, like, calling my congressman.

They don't listen.

Whatever, you know?

Or if I can't be Rosa Parks or like, somebody else of that stature, if I can't be Phil Berrigan, why.

Why should I try without recognizing that, you know, Martin Luther King was wracked by insecurity, right?

He never felt like he did enough.

He was anxious.

He was, you know, worried.

He was.

He was not.

He was just trying, right?

And he had a machine and a whole kind of enterprise around him, this whole movement kind of pulling him this way and that way and pushing him and prodding him.

The man worked so hard.

He lived, like, four lives in his, what, 39 years?

But, you know, there wasn't a minute where he was like, man, get kicked ass today.

I'm the man.

You know, And I think that's the piece that we never.

We don't really allow ourselves.

We don't allow one another.

We don't allow the people we look up to that.

That grace in that room.

Right.

Yeah.

None of us are, like, amazing job today.

Well done.

You know, but we sort of.

We.

We think that's how everybody else is.

My dad died at the age of 79.

He was sick with cancer for.

Actually, between diagnosis and death, not very long, couple months, and.

And he.

He really did.

He wanted his tombstone to say, I tried.

Right?

And he had this sense that he was leaving all this work unfinished, like, of course.

Of course.

And my mom didn't.

She thought that the I tried was kind of too glib for a tombstone.

So she told him that she Wanted it to say, love one another instead.

And he was like, yeah, okay.

Tried to love one another.

Right?

Yeah.

That's actually harder.

And.

And so.

So anyway, there's a modesty there.

I tried and I'm trying.

Right.

It's really kind of a countercultural mantra.

You know, I try, and so I definitely feel like I'm trying.

And that can be trying.

I love this, though, because we can ask ourselves, how would I like to try today?

Because one of the griefs that I see among the people that I am working with and talking to is.

And I never.

I never had this belief about myself.

I grew up half Jewish, and the only part of myself that was Jewish, a father who was obsessed with the Holocaust.

So my Judaism was only in the context of the Holocaust.

I never got any of the joy of Judaism until I grew up and looked for it.

And I knew very young, oh, I am a coward.

I am going to hide.

My mother said.

I said, what would.

And she said, we would stand tall.

And I was like, stand tall.

I'm hiding.

I was so disappointed to hear that she was not going to protect me.

And so I was not surprised to find out that I was not a hero.

When these times call for heroes, I'm not the hero.

I'm a hero supporter, but I'm not a hero.

Many of my clients grew up believing that they were gonna be heroes.

And I think that's part of what you were talking about, that parents overprotect.

And so they only get these stories of heroic people.

And they get told, you can be a hero, too.

Like Rosa Parks.

You can be a hero, too.

Most of us are not going to be Rosa Parks.

That's why she's her.

That's why we hear about her, is she is not ordinary, but she was held up by ordinary people and ordinary organizers.

And I feel like we need to talk more about.

You gotta call your congressman, and sometimes that's gonna be all you're capable of doing that day.

Not just because you're too busy with laundry and you've got a nursing toddler, but also because sometimes that is your emotional capacity.

Mm.

So just don't do nothing.

Just do something.

Yeah, right.

There's this huge gulf between being the hero and, you know, kind of sticking your thumb up your nose and doing nothing with a sense of, like, kind of self hate or self discipline.

Right.

And I think the hero stories that were told are also.

They support the do nothing kind of thing.

Right.

And Jean Theo Harris, I think her name is, has kind of done A has retold the story of Rosa Parks as a story of preparation and practice and community.

And so that, you know, Rosa Parks, you know, was trained by the Highlander Institute.

She was the secretary of the NAACP already.

She was.

She came from this family of, you know, militants and, you know, black nationalists.

There was nothing meek or diminutive about her, even though she was small in stature.

Claudette Colvin had.

Was an African American young woman who had been arrested maybe a year or two earlier in Montgomery for refusing to rise when ordered to by the bus man to make room for a white person.

And there was already a movement that was kind of waiting for the right moment to launch this boycot caught.

It was decided by, you know, the kind of the.

The men in charge that Claudette Colvin wasn't the right poster child or sort of person to rally around because she was pregnant and not married.

And so she also happened to be a lot darker complexioned.

And so, you know, Rosa Parks decided herself, you know, to say no that day and carry her personal dignity and.

And all of that.

But she was also chosen, right, and prepared and sort of placed there to.

To do that, to be the right person at that moment to rally around.

And then it was, you know, tens of thousands of Montgomery black, you know, people who lived there, who walked to, to and from work, mostly physical jobs, for more than a year in order to win that small battle, right, within the larger civil rights movement of desegregated buses and at the beginning of desegregation within the business district downtown Montgomery.

And that movement needed people to drive cars, ride bicycles, make food, and, you know, turn off the lights in the church at the end of the long church meeting and countless, like, right, write press releases and call people and do these phone trees and, you know, like, there was all these tasks that were not front page news kind of tasks, but every single one of them contributed to the success of that movement and the ability of so many people to stay within that movement and hold the boycott for such a long time.

That's a much more empowering and inviting kind of story of the Montgomery bus boycott, even with the sexism and colorism of the choice of Rosa Parks over Claudette Colvin.

Like, it, it invites you in.

It says, well, like, all right, Don, like what.

What can you do?

Where can you start?

Right?

And instead of being like, well, if you can't, like, if you can't say no to this white bus driver, then, then we don't need you.

Those ordinary acts, yes, is what allows the heroics and so we should not demean because when we demean ourselves for doing ordinary things, we stop doing them.

That's right.

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

And we are all holding up, we're all holding up the sky.

Right?

Yep.

And, and you know, and now we're in this kind of attentional marketplace that serves us up these little snippets of heroics all the time.

Right.

And, and that the heroics though come from these confrontations between people that are contentious.

Most of them are sort of made up or just there to keep us watching.

Right.

Like they're just there to keep our attention here instead of connecting us.

Right.

Like we feel connected because we're consuming these images and these little bites, but we're not really, we're not connected.

And one of the struggles I have printing my Madeline and Seamus is that they're expected to have these little attention machines in their own pockets and they're, they're real outliers as 6th graders and 8th graders for not having them.

And you run into all sorts of logistical.

Yeah, right.

Problem with that decision.

But we're holding fast, you know, and all the research sort of supports that these machines are not really all that great for any of us.

And they're certainly not great for the developing preteen and teenage mind.

But even, you know, like I have one and I have a hard time putting it down or using it judiciously.

I just want to model to them connection and relationship.

And there's nothing sadder to me as I watch young people move through the world like a part time crossing guard.

I just watch these middle schoolers trudge off to the salt mine of the middle school.

But they're already at work.

They've given their attention over to this machine and they're employed by it.

They think they're kind of just passing the time or whatever, but they're, but they're, they're at work.

They are handing over their attention and their information to this machine.

And the consequences of that are.

We don't really understand even like what the long term consequences of that is.

Well, it does make me think about that.

Is one way to introduce kids to activism is by talking to them about our choices around phone use.

Because so often we frame it as it's bad for your brain, which is true.

And we need to tell them that, but also to let them know that this is one way to stand up to the way corporations are profiting off of us.

And I like that you used the word employment because they are making money off of their eyes.

While we're winding up here, is there.

Can you really quickly talk to me about moral cheerfulness?

You use that a lot in your book.

Can you explain what that means and what you're talking about there?

Yeah.

I'll start by saying that I am like somewhere in my body I am just a happy person.

I wake up kind of like good morning.

And that is kind of always how I've been.

And the line that really buoys me is from Wendell Berry.

And it's be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

And it comes from a brilliant poem.

The title is something like the, the manifesto of the Mad Farmer Liberation Front.

And it is this kind of, this roadmap for how to be unpredictable and unplottable and uncommodifiable and untouched by kind of consumerism and capitalism.

But to be joyful, though you have considered all the facts, this moral cheerfulness is sort of distillation of be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Because it is not like, la, la, la, everything's fine.

Do, do, do.

You know, I, I live in this kind of world of my own creation.

It's not that it, it is contending with climate catastrophe and you know, being 85 seconds to nuclear midnight and you know, in the kind capitalism like Trumpian kleptocracy, where in the racism and the sexism and the kind of abuse of children, it's all of it, right.

Like, I am not unaware of any of that, but I am not going to seed my joy and my belief that life is a gift and that it is beautiful and that there's so much that's worth fighting for and preserving and protecting.

We do that by, by bringing everybody in and holding everybody close and, and, and kind of making, making meaning of our own lives and making ritual, making art and, and making, making beauty.

Right, and seeing beauty.

And it's also my belief that everybody deserves that, like, not like everybody desert the pursuit of happiness in that kind of way that I think is meant to signify that we're, you know, all meant to pursue material comfort is sort of how I best understand it from the founders, but that, that we're, we're meant to know and trust our neighbors and, and we're meant to walk in this world without fear of bodily harm and, and like we're meant to protect one another and live in solidarity with one another.

And so I'm often sad and I'm often brought to tears.

I was reading the newspaper a couple Weekends ago.

And then.

And I was crying, and I could hear the kids in the other room, and they were like, mom's crying in there.

What's she crying about?

What's going on?

And they come in and they're like, mom, are you okay?

And I'm just sobbing about some article on the front page of the New York Times.

And I'm like, you guys, look.

And they're like, oh, okay.

Okay, Mommy.

So it's not being sad, but it is this assertion that there's.

Yeah.

That we.

That.

That there's work to do and that we have to do it, and we might as well do it in a way that invites more people to do it with us and builds community as we do it.

I like that.

I think that's really helpful.

I have a lot of clients who feel guilty every time they're allowing themselves to experience joy, because why should they be happy?

And I tell them, well, you should be happy because everybody should be happy.

And your happiness is not taking from anyone.

It's what's going to keep you going.

Right on.

Right.

This has been such a pleasure.

I so appreciate your time and your writing and your work, and I wish I had discovered it earlier.

I so appreciate your voice in the world, and I hope that some more people find it who need it.

Really good to talk to you, Dawn.

I hope that interview helped you as much as it helped me.

And because this is a podcast all about raising anxious kids in a worried world, I wanted to talk specifically about the way anxious thinking creeps into all the areas of our lives.

And one of those areas is the all or nothing thinking that keeps us frozen in space.

In times like these, either we're out there doing every single thing we can do, or we're doing nothing or denigrating what we can do.

Because it is not all, so it must be nothing.

Which means the efforts that we make, we can't even allow ourselves to acknowledge, to allow ourselves to see that as fighting on the side of goodness and rightness, and instead say, but it's not enough.

The truth is, it is never enough.

If by enough we mean brings us all into perfection, where life is just and good and kind.

We don't live in a perfect world, and so we have to learn how to navigate imperfection.

The world's imperfection, our own imperfection.

And every day we can ask ourselves, how will I try today?

This is also a message we can offer our children.

They may never do enough, but that doesn't mean that their trying doesn't matter.

And they are going to have to learn to live with that, too.

They may yearn to hear that the efforts will guarantee their own or someone else's safety.

And we can't guarantee that.

But we can take pleasure in the fact that we are alive, that we are here and doing the work, the work that we can do, the work that we can access, and we can be grateful that we get to do that.

I'm not saying any of this is easy.

I'm not saying that there is a way to do this where we will not feel pain, because that is also a perfectionist tendency.

But how can we do this in a way that we won't feel pain?

We should be feeling some pain right now, because what we are witnessing is painful.

But we can also practice the moral cheerfulness that Frida shared with us, despite all the facts.

We can look for the beauty and the joy and the kindness and the connection.

That takes effort.

This does not mean ignoring what's in front of us.

It means not ignoring the good that is in front of us because we are focused on what's not good.

That balance is very, very tricky.

And teaching our children that balance is also very, very tricky.

We will tip one way too far and the other way too far.

But we need to just be balancing, to be negotiating, to be trying to figure it out.

I hope you'll look into Frida's other readings.

I've included links to her column at Waging Nonviolence in the show notes.

It's terrific.

I find her work so encouraging.

And her interview is even better than I thought it was going to be because there is something about her that lends a real confidence and calm to the world, even as she is fighting so hard to make it better.

And aren't we lucky to share the world with her, to share this space with her, to get to hear her voice and the voices of other people who are doing the work, and to get to share this world with each other.

I welcome your thoughts about this podcast.

I'd love to hear from you.

If there was something especially that you found helpful, I'm happy to pass that on to Frida.

Or you can look her up and contact her at Waging Nonviolence.

I really appreciate you listening to this podcast.

I hope if this interview gave you something that you needed, that you will share it with someone else who might need it as well.

Well, I hope you're having a good week and I'll see you next time.