The hardest part of postpartum hasn’t been the sleepless nights or the endless cycle of feeding, burping, and diaper changes. It’s been scrolling through the news while nap-trapped under a newborn and realizing that the world my son has just entered feels increasingly hostile and uncertain.
Nothing could have prepared me for navigating the throes of new motherhood while watching fascism unfold in real time.
Life with a newborn is already disorienting. Days blur into nights. Your body is recovering, your brain is foggy from sleep deprivation, and your life revolves around a tiny person who needs you for everything. Through it all, I’ve found myself putting on a smiling face for a baby who knows nothing of the outside world while inwardly grieving the state of that world.
In the span of my son’s first months of life, I’ve seen fascism in the suppression of dissent, where ICE murdered two American citizens, militarism escalating, and immigrants once again scapegoated for problems in the United States, from housing to healthcare and everything in between.
It’s been hard sitting on the sidelines while friends put themselves on the line for their undocumented neighbors and protesting ICE and its abuses of power.
For me, these fears aren’t abstract. Both of my parents left their homelands, their families, and their friends to start over in the United States, hoping to give me a better life. Their migration shaped my own sense of possibility.
Now, as a parent myself, I find myself wondering what I would do to give my son the same chance.
What if my family is targeted simply because we are Latino? At what point would I consider leaving the country to give my child a better future?
Even in the haze of postpartum life, I find myself contingency planning—applying for a passport for my infant son, just in case. At the same time, I’m coming to terms with a painful truth: I cannot shield him from the racism and xenophobia that exist in this world.
While postpartum life can be isolating, I’m reminded that I’m not alone. At a new parent group in the San Francisco Bay Area, several of us admitted that the news has been weighing heavily on us. We are a generation of parents with unprecedented access to information at all hours of the day and night—and very little control over the events shaping our children’s future.
Like many parents, I find myself asking: how do we raise children in times like these?
Those questions keep me up at night just as much as my crying son.
Recently, I came across a post offering guidance to parents on how to talk to young children about violence. It was a small but meaningful reminder that even in frightening times, there are people thinking carefully about how to help children grow up with empathy rather than fear.
My activism looks different these days. Instead of marching in the streets, I spend hours rocking a baby to sleep. Instead of organizing meetings, my nights are filled with lullabies and whispered “I love yous” to a child who has no idea what is happening beyond our home.
Some nights, I sit in the dim light of the nursery while my son drifts off against my chest. His tiny hand holds onto me, his breathing slow and steady in a way that makes the rest of the world feel far away. For a moment, the headlines fade and there is only us.
But even in those moments of peace, the questions remain.
Parenting right now looks like applying for a passport for a baby who can’t sit up yet—just in case. It looks like rocking him to sleep while headlines flash across my phone. It looks like kissing his soft cheeks and praying for a world that is kinder and more just than the one we are living in now.
I may not be able to control the forces shaping my son’s future. But I can raise him to meet that future with compassion instead of cruelty.
In dark times, raising compassionate children is an act of resistance.
Elisabet Avalos is a leader in housing justice, developing programs for survivors of violence experiencing homelessness, and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project on Domestic Violence and Economic Security.
