Momma's Gonna Buy You a Mockingbird

South Addison, October 25

They were once just my neighbors.  People whose names I didn’t know but whose presence on the milelong road I drive to reach the dirt driveway to our house made me feel well-disposed to them, related in a way — like fourth cousins once removed.  I noticed and cheerfully approved of their carved pumpkins and bedsheet ghosts strung from the branches of almost leafless maples.  I noticed if the lights in their house were out for a long time or if their driveway was plowed in winter and, if it wasn’t, I’d have a dollop of worry about them. 

But this Fall, when cardboard signs went up on lawns declaring one’s choice for President, all that changed.  The neighbors who live in the house I’d felt so kindly towards, the one with the six pumpkins on the stoop, all in descending order of size, had, I felt, betrayed me. There, on the lawn, feet from my car was that name.  Viscerally, before I have a chance to engage my higher cortical brain functions: I recoil, feel angry, disgusted, threatened.  This is who lives here! In the amount of time it takes for the phoebe on my lawn to fly up and flick her black and white tail into the air, I position these neighbors on the other side of the great divide in our country.   This vast dark space between us, between the red and the blue, has been growing since the last election, but since Covid tiptoed into the world on little pangolin feet last January the divide has grown so vast I wonder if we will ever come together again as a country.  I wonder if the time will ever come when I will drive by that house with the pumpkins and the sign and feel kindly towards those neighbors.

Yesterday, on the drive with my husband to canvass in East Machias for my side of the divide, we passed the Burma Shave Pledge of Allegiance signs on Rt.1 in Columbia Falls, the ones I wrote about back when I first saw them in early October.  Just before we reached the signs, I said to Bob, I am going to close my eyes and breathe, try to stay calm. At that moment we were tuned to an MPBN show about the over 500 children taken from their parents at the border in Mexico.  The reporter told us how impossible it is to reunite these children with their parents because no records were kept.  For some reason I opened my eyes at that moment.  The word INDIVISIBLE was printed on the sign right in front of me.  The dichotomy between the word INDIVISIBLE, put up there by a right wing wreath making family hiding behind a non-profit that lays wreaths on veterans graves at Christmas, and the plight of these children divided from their parents, instantly made me so angry that my pulse leapt  from 70 to at least 120, my hands formed into fists.  I felt as if a bomb had gone off in my head.  I cursed the family. I cursed the man whose name is on the sign on my neighbor’s lawn.  My husband reached over and patted my leg.  “I know this is infuriating,” he said, “but you need to to calm down.  Just breathe.”

Hush little baby don’t say a word. 

I turned off the news, it was too much for me.  My sympathetic nervous system is in a state of constant arousal.  My neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for judgement and clear thinking is often hijacked, “emotionally flooded,” as my profession calls it.  I was born rigged to be a fighter.  But even those of us born with a calmer nature are overstimulated and in a constant state of vigilance because of the level of distrust and anger and fear billowing through the air like smoke.   There is plenty of research about the hypervigilance, anger and fear children experience when their parent is a bully, blames and threatens others with violence or abandonment as a consequence for doing anything that makes that parent look bad.  We are all his children now, whether we are on the red side of the divide or the blue. 

And we are the children of a parent who isn’t taking care of us.  Yesterday, there were 82,600 new cases of coronavirus, our highest daily level of cases in a single day since the pandemic started. Winter is coming and we are all living in fear.  Even here in Maine, where the state government has done an outstanding job containing the virus, numbers are climbing.

Hush little baby don’t say a word.  Momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.  And if that mockingbird don’t sing, momma’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.  And if that diamond ring turns brass, momma’s gonna buy you a looking glass. 

Momma, in this song, knows it’s hard to sleep, hard to calm down, but she keeps trying, she keeps singing, making up more rhymes.   Momma can teach us what we need to do for each other: we can sing each other lullabies.   You can sing to me and I can sing to you. We can persist in trying to find ways to bring peace to ourselves or our neighbors.   We can be gentle with our friends and partners if they suddenly start yelling at signs.  Or at us. 

We can hush our flooded brains. And if we do, if I do, I hope that that someday the word INDIVISIBLE will not feel so impossibly far off, will not be so hard for me to feel when I drive by my neighbor’s house, see their signs. I hope they will again feel like fourth cousins, once removed.