Untamed

by Glennon Doyle

  It’s not terrible, and it makes perfect sense. Since women are equally poisoned by our culture’s standards of manhood, we panic when men venture out of their cages. Our panic shames them right back in. So we must decide whether we want our partners, our brothers, our sons to be strong and alone or free and held.

  Perhaps part of a woman’s freeing herself is freeing her partner, her father, her brother, and her son. When our men and boys cry, let’s not say to them with our words or energy, “Don’t cry, honey.” Let’s get comfortable allowing our men to gently and consistently express the pain of being human, so that violent release isn’t their go-to option. Let’s embrace our strength so our men can take their turn being soft. Let us—men, women, and all those in between or beyond—reclaim our full humanity.

  When Tish was nine, she and I went to our favorite bookstore together. As we walked inside, Tish stopped and stared at a magazine rack—a wall of cover models, each blonder, thinner, and more vacant than the last. All ghosts and dolls. Tish stared.

  As usual, I was tempted to distract her, hurry her along, put it all behind us. But these messages cannot be put behind us, because they are everywhere. Either we leave our kids alone to make sense of them, or we wade in with them.

  I put my arm around Tish, and we quietly looked at the covers together for a moment.

  ME: Interesting, isn’t it? What story are they telling you about what it means to be a woman?

  TISH: I guess that women are very skinny. And blond. And have white pale skin. And wear a lot of makeup and tall shoes and barely any clothes.

  ME: What do you think about that story? Look around this store. Do the women in this store match the idea about women these magazines are selling?

  Tish looked around. A gray-haired employee was straightening books near us. A Latina woman was flipping through a paperback on the memoir table. A very pregnant woman with blue punky hair was wrangling with a cookie-eating toddler.

  TISH: No. Not at all.

  We drove home, and Tish disappeared into her room. Fifteen minutes later, she opened her door and yelled down the stairs, “MOM! HOW DO YOU SPELL PETITION?”

  I googled it. Hard word.

  A little while later, she came downstairs to the kitchen holding a handmade poster. She cleared her throat and began to read:

  HELP SAVE HUMANITY

  Dear world, this is a petition to show that I, Tish Melton, strongly feel that magazines should not show beauty is most important on the outside. It is not. I think magazines should show girls who are strong, kind, brave, thoughtful, unique, and show women of all different types of hair and bodies. ALL women should be treated EQUALLY.

  I liked her idea so much. It wasn’t enough for women to have equality with men; they needed equality with each other.

  I cannot rid my children’s air of all the lies they’ll be told about what it means to become a real woman or man. But I can teach them how to be critics of the culture instead of blind consumers of it. I can train my children to detect those lies and get angry instead of swallowing them and getting sick.

  TWELVE-YEAR-OLD ME: That’s the truth about women. I will match it.

  TWELVE-YEAR-OLD TISH: That’s a lie about women. I will challenge it.

  TISH: Chase wants me to join the same club he joined in middle school. I don’t want to.

  ME: So don’t.

  TISH: But I don’t want to disappoint him.

  ME: Listen. Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.

  TISH: Even you?

  ME: Especially me.

  EIGHT-YEAR-OLD TISH: Keri doesn’t like me.

  THIRTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD ME: Why not? What happened? What can we do to make it better?

  TWELVE-YEAR-OLD TISH: Sara doesn’t like me.

  FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD ME: Okay. Just a fact, not a problem.

  TWELVE-YEAR-OLD TISH: Totally.

  My friend Mimi told me that she was concerned because her middle school son was spending hours on his phone behind his locked bedroom door.

  “Do you think he’s watching porn?” I asked her.

  “No!” Mimi said. “He can’t be. He’s so young!”

  “I just read that the average age kids discover porn is eleven.”

  “Jesus.” Mimi shook her head. “I just feel bad spying on him. I mean, it’s his phone.”

  “Nah. You pay the bill. It’s your phone, he’s borrowing it.”

  “I’m afraid of what I’ll find,” Mimi said.

  “I know. Me too, every time,” I admitted. “But what if he’s already found porn? What if he’s lost in that world by now? Don’t you want to go in and find him?”

  “I just have no idea what I’d say.”

  “Listen, I know plenty of adults who find certain kinds of porn to be liberating, but the porn kids come across on the internet is misogynistic poison. We have to explain that to them so they don’t learn that sex is about violence. I just think that saying anything at all—even if we say it awkward and stumbling and afraid while our kids roll their eyes—is better than saying nothing at all.

  “What if you said:

  “Sex is an exciting and wonderful thing about being human. It is natural to be curious about sex, and when we are curious about things, we turn to the internet for information.

  “But here’s the problem with using the internet to learn about sex: You cannot know who is doing the teaching. There are people who have taken sex and sucked all the life out of it to package it and sell it on the internet. What they’re selling is not real sex. It lacks connection, respect, and vulnerability, which is what makes sex sexy.

  “This kind of porn is sold by people who are like drug dealers. They sell a product that fills people with a rush that feels like joy for a short while but then becomes a killer of real joy. Over time people prefer the rush of drugs to the real joy of life. Many who start watching porn very young will get hooked on the rush. Eventually they will find it hard to enjoy real sex with real human beings.

  “Trying to learn about sex from porn is like trying to learn about the mountains by sniffing one of those air fresheners they sell at the gas station. When you finally get to the real mountains and breathe in that pure, wild air—you might be confused. You might wish it smelled like that fake, manufactured air-freshener version.

  “We don’t want you to stay away from porn while you’re young because sex is bad. We want you to stay away from porn because real sex—with humanity and vulnerability and love—is indescribably good. We don’t want fake sex ruining real sex for you.

  “What if you said something like that?” I asked Mimi. “Do not leave that sweet boy alone in the woods because you are too afraid to go get him.”

  We don’t have to have answers for our children; we just have to be brave enough to trek into the woods and ask tough questions with them.

  We can do hard things.

  One afternoon I opened my inbox and saw an email with the subject line “Mom, You’re Up!”

  The email was meant to inform me that it was my turn to provide breakfast for my kid’s school athletic team after their early-morning practice. Each morning, a parent delivers a full spread of bagels, cream cheese, juices, and bananas to school. She sets up the buffet while the children practice so that after they finish, they can dine.

  The night before I was to deliver the goods, I received another email from the mother of one of the athletes. She had a concern she wanted to share with me. She was worried that the other parents had not been providing sufficient cream cheese choices for the children. For example, last Friday there had been only two options, and several of the children
hadn’t liked either one of them and had been forced to eat their bagels cream cheese–less. She had a solution: “There’s a bagel store close to the school that makes five different flavors of cream cheese. Might you be able to provide all of them?”

  All of them. Five flavors of cream cheese.

  Five flavors of cream cheese is not how to make a child feel loved.

  Five flavors of cream cheese is how to make a child an asshole.

  And yet I am a cream cheese parent. All of my friends are cream cheese parents. Cream cheese parenting is the result of following our memo: Successful parenting is giving your children the best of everything. We are cream cheese parents because we haven’t stopped to ask: Does having the best of everything make the best people?

  What if we revised our memo? What if we decided that successful parenting includes working to make sure that all kids have enough, not just that the particular kids assigned to us have everything? What if we used our mothering love less like a laser, burning holes into the children assigned to us, and more like the sun, making sure all kids are warm?

  One morning I woke up and read a story unfolding at our southern border. Children as young as four months old were being stripped away from their asylum-seeking parents’ arms, loaded into vans, and sent without explanation to detention centers. I searched the web for Americans’ reaction to this, certain that all would be as heartbroken and outraged as I was. Some were. Others were hardened. Again and again, I read: “It’s unfortunate, but they shouldn’t have come here if they didn’t want this to happen.”

  Privilege is being born on third base. Ignorant privilege is thinking you’re there because you hit a triple. Malicious privilege is complaining that those starving outside the ballpark aren’t waiting patiently enough.

  Despair is physical for me. With each new heartbreaking image and heartless response, I felt hope drain from my body. Hope is energy. That morning, I ran out of both. I shut down my computer and climbed into bed at 3:00 P.M. Abby tucked me in, kissed my forehead. Out in the hallway, I heard my daughter ask, “Is Mommy okay?” Abby said, “She will be. She’s feeling it all now. She has to feel it all so she can use it. Just wait. Let Mom sleep. When she gets up, something amazing will happen.”

  What if we let ourselves feel it all? What if we decided that it is strength—not weakness—to let other people’s pain pierce us? What if we stopped our lives and the world for things that are worth stopping for? What if we raised our hands and asked, “Can we stay here for a minute? I’m not ready to run out to recess yet.”

  I slept for twelve hours and then woke up at 3:00 A.M. on fire. By the time Abby walked out of our bedroom, I’d set up a command center in the dining room. As soon as she saw my face, the piles of papers, and the easel covered with phone numbers and ideas, she understood. She looked at me and said, “Okay, babe. Let’s do this. First, though: coffee.”

  As soon as the sun rose, we called the Together Rising team: my sister, Allison, and Liz. One was on vacation, one in the middle of a big project at work, one caring for a sick relative. They stopped their worlds and set up their own command centers in the beach rental, in the office, in the hospital room. We began the way we always begin our responses to large humanitarian crises: We contacted the people on the ground who understood the crisis firsthand and knew which organizations were responding with wisdom, efficiency, and integrity.

  Together Rising exists to turn our collective heartbreak into effective action. We do this by serving as a bridge between two sets of warriors: the everyday warriors across the globe who—in their kitchens and cars and offices—refuse to go numb to crises in distant countries and their own communities; and the boots-on-the-ground warriors who devote their lives to world-healing, life-saving work. With a most frequent donation of just $25, Together Rising has ushered more than $20 million over that bridge from heartbreak to action.

  At Together Rising, we are not the warriors—we find the warriors. This is crucial work because the most effective teams are often not the large well-known organizations people tend to give to. The fiercest groups we’ve worked with have been smaller, scrappy, women-led teams—those already trusted by the affected communities and nimble enough to respond in real time. Our job is to find them, ask what they need to continue their fight, and listen deeply. Then we introduce them to our heartbroken people. Our people give in order to get these warriors the help they need to carry on with their work.

  So we wrote up the story of the administration’s lawless cruelty at the border and the warriors working to end it. We posted it for our community, and other brave, compassionate artists helped share it widely. Within nine hours, we raised $1 million to reunify families. Within a few weeks, we raised $4.6 million. We spent the next year funding and working alongside other organizations to hold the government accountable and return those children to their parents’ arms.

  * * *

  One morning, I posted a video of my sister escorting a six-year-old boy named Ariel back to his family after having been separated from them for ten months. Ariel’s father had brought him to the southern border to lawfully seek asylum. When they arrived, American border patrol took Ariel from his father’s arms. He begged authorities to just deport them both—all he wanted was his son back. The officials refused. They deported him and sent Ariel into government custody alone. This father had to return to his community—plagued by extreme poverty and gang violence—and tell his wife that he had lost their son. He and Ariel’s mother were losing hope that they would ever see their son again when a team funded by Together Rising found them in Honduras. A month later, the Together Rising team stood on the U.S.-Mexico border for nine hours with Ariel’s father, mother, and sister until the authorities agreed to follow the law, allow the family to present for asylum, and move to reclaim Ariel. One week after she crossed the border with his parents, my sister picked Ariel up in Washington, D.C., and drove him to the airport to reunite with his family. Ariel told her that he was afraid because he didn’t remember what his mom and dad looked like. When my sister pulled out her phone and showed him a picture, he beamed with joy, recognition, and relief. Minutes later, Ariel sprinted into his parents’ arms—ending ten months of excruciating separation. The video I posted of the airport reunion was haunting: both beautiful and utterly brutal. Reactions of gratitude and rage flooded in.

  * * *

  That afternoon, I stood in the hallway of my daughter’s school. Another mother approached me and said, “Can we talk?” Her tone made my stomach drop. “Sure,” I said. We stepped outside.

  She began, “I’ve been following you for a long while, but I unfollowed you today.”

  I said, “Okay. Sounds like you made the right choice for you.” I began to step away.

  Nevertheless, she persisted: “With all due respect, I have to ask: Why don’t you care about protecting America as much as you care about protecting illegals? We follow the law; so should they. You know, I read that many of these parents know their kids could be taken from them. They know it, and they come anyway. I’m sorry, but I look at my daughter and I just think: I cannot IMAGINE doing that. I cannot IMAGINE.”

  I looked at her and thought: Really? You can’t imagine risking it all—doing whatever it takes—to give your child a chance at safety, hope, and a future? Perhaps you’re not as brave as these parents are.

  * * *

  People use one of two tones when they say the words I cannot imagine.

  The first tone is one of humility, awe, softness, gratitude. There is a quietness about it. A There but for the grace of God go I quality.

  The second tone—the tone this woman used—is different. It is one of dismissal and judgment. There is a definitiveness about it. A Well, I would never quality. We invoke that tone like a spell, like a clove of garlic around our neck worn to distance ourselves from a particular horror in case it’s contagious. We look for a reason,
for someone to blame, so that we can reassure ourselves that this horror could never, will never happen to us. Our judgment is self-protection; it’s a cage we put around ourselves. We hope it will keep danger out, but it only keeps tenderness and empathy from coming in.

  What I realized, right there in the hallway, is that when people use the first tone, it is because they already are imagining. They are using their imagination as a bridge between their known experience and the unknown experience. They are imagining themselves into the other human being’s shoes, and that is making them tender because they can somehow—through the magical leap of imagination—see and feel what the other might see and feel. That’s when I realized that imagination is not just the catalyst of art, it’s also the catalyst of compassion. Imagination is the shortest distance between two people, two cultures, two ideologies, two experiences.

  * * *

  There is a little boy in my daughter Amma’s fifth-grade class named Tommy. Tommy never brings in his homework, so the kids never earn the class reward promised to them if they all comply. Tommy falls asleep in class repeatedly, and the teacher has to stop to wake him, which interrupts her lessons and makes her cranky. Amma is baffled by Tommy.

  Amma walked in the door after school the other day, threw her book bag down on the floor, and said, “Again! He forgot his homework again! We are never going to earn our pizza party, never! Why can’t he just do what he’s supposed to do?”