It’s OK; we’re all in this mess together

I am a 38-year-old stay home mom of two … over here on the Eastern Shore/MD … OK, between the war, the terrorist warnings, the refugees in Darfur, the tsunami and the fact that my daughter still can’t stay dry overnight … how do you … not get exhausted by it all?

For a long time I have tried to just avoid watching the news because there is so much sadness … but then I feel selfish. Like on Oprah today Lisa Ling did a piece on the brutal raping of the women … in the Congo and I am worked up about my 1-year-old not napping? … I just want to be a good mom and raise my kids in a happy world but I just don’t see how that is ultimately possible … so much is out of control … What do you do to deal with it all?

Thanks for your time, Michelle O’Brien

I‘m sure I have an answer to this. Ever since I got this e-mail a few weeks ago, I’ve been trying to formulate one. Um. Shouldn’t this be easier? It is hardly a new question: How do you keep up with the news of this big, bad world and still sleep at night?

I keep up with the news. And I sleep at night. Well, no, I don’t. But my bouts of insomnia are always about stupid stuff, little nonsense stressors compared with, say, a tsunami. This is a hideous realization. Just last week I was reading about the horrific human rights violations against women in Gujarat, India, and that night I did not spend much of my insomniac energy worrying about them; no, my stress was over some deadline pressure, and whether or not I could get a better deal on car insurance.

Ugh! See, now I’m starting to hate myself. I wonder now if my way of coping is to simply shut down, become numb. What good is that? I should … fret more. I should run away to a monastery and spend my life in prayer. I should rob a bank and start a foundation to feed the world, and then turn myself in and rot in prison.

I submit the latter plan to my friend Wendy. She has no idea what I am talking about. We’re at a kid’s birthday party, this one at McDonald’s. Wouldn’t that put anyone in a prison state of mind? I eat a french fry, tell her about Michelle O’Brien’s e-mail, ask her how she would answer it. Wendy says she shares the frustration, and that ever since motherhood she’s felt she’s had no choice but to stick her head in the sand. “The world is a crazy place, and I think the only thing I can do about it is raise a good and compassionate child,” she says.

Well, that’s definitely better than my bank-robbing plan. I wonder how others might answer the question, and so I take the e-mail around and do an informal survey. Right away my friends fall into two camps. Well, three if you count B.K., who still hasn’t gotten over the 2004 presidential election, and who blames our president for everything bad, everywhere. But she’s working through her grief. My other friends either have stopped watching the news, or are news junkies.

Beth and I meet for lattes, and she’s all dressed up after one of her historic preservation board meetings. I show her the e-mail. She gives me one of those “Aha!” looks, says this is exactly why she goes to board meetings. She limits her national and international news to radio and gets busy locally, volunteering for causes that matter to her. “I accept that I can’t impact the big picture,” she tells me. “I can, however, impact my little world.”

By contrast, there is Nancy, who never turns the news off. I call her and ask her about this, what it does for her. She says learning helps her cope: “When terrible things happen, I always feel a need to feel connected to the rest of the world, even if it’s just through the TV.”

My friend Kit sends an e-mail offering “the egghead’s approach.” The key for her is historical perspective. “For me, literature and church are the main windows. Poems written 300 years ago show the same torment I feel; psalms written 3,000 years ago show the same despair. This is the human condition, to be `exhausted by it all,’ and yet we keep going. We keep singing, even!”

Well, that was a good one. And why do I feel that my friends all have much better answers than I do? I’ve been walking around thinking about those answers, and, the thing is, they make me feel a lot less like skipping town and entering a monastery.

They give me a quiet hope.

The one thing the answerers have in common is reaching out to people beyond themselves — Wendy to her daughter, Beth to her community, Nancy to the world through her TV, Kit to centuries of sufferers who came before.

There’s something in this. Some kind of healing happens when you know you aren’t alone in this mess.

So maybe my reaching out to my friends with an informal survey, and finding safety in numbers, isn’t so completely off base. It’s definitely better than robbing a bank, even if I did plan to turn myself in.