Hello friend, Liz here.
A few weekends ago, early on a Saturday morning, my husband and I were sleeping late. We could hear the kids chattering above us in the kitchen, happy and presumably full of cereal.
And then we heard a splintering noise and piercing screams.
My husband made it up the stairs before I did, and he’d already scooped my son into his arms and was running to the bathroom, even as he demanded of my daughter, “I need to know exactly what happened.”
She began to weep, peeled off her shirt, and there, a large welt had already begun to form.
The next few moments were spent in dressing wounds, jogging between kids to deliver children's ibuprofen and band aids and Neosporin and ice packs and water bottles.
Eventually, on the drive to urgent care, we reconstructed the events: the kids had decided to make tea. They’d boiled water in the electric kettle. They’d selected a glass carafe—a vintage filagreed cocktail carafe—from the bar cabinet, they’d placed a handful of tea bags in the bottom, and they’d tipped the boiling water into the carafe.
It shattered immediately.
In the aftermath, my son was skewered by glass shrapnel and needed four stitches. My daughter ended up with a second-degree burn across her belly, which she needed us to cool down and bandage on-and-off for two weeks. (In the first hours, we iced and cold-showered and every few seconds blowing on her belly, like we were blowing up a balloon, in order to help her manage the pain.)
This is every parent’s worst nightmare.
That weekend was traumatic for us parents, sure, and I’m devastated that my kids experienced it. I hope we never have to go through such a thing EVER AGAIN.
But as I’ve thought backward on that Saturday morning, the standout moments were the utterances from both kids, each expressing to me that they wished this had never happened. If only we had avoided this altogether.
As my daughter stretched on the couch with an ice pack on her stomach, she wailed, “I just wish I’d never decided to make tea in the first place.”
Boy, do I understand the feeling. Haven’t we all had those moments? My kids’ expressions of regret seem to me highly applicable to our cultural moment, in fact.
Us adults need to do some reflection of our own. Over the past handful of years, we’ve learned many lessons the hard way: that power corrupts, that violence doesn’t pay, that the internet is a dirty liar, that our planet is fragile, that our bodies are fragile.
Are we listening? Are we paying attention?
I believe that my own kids have a lot to teach me about the humility required to take an experience to heart.
Though my kids are young—seven and nine—neither needed a lecture to understand what had gone wrong on that fateful Saturday. Neither needed to be nudged toward an apology. Neither needed their parents to spell out the fact that they should NEVER EVER DO THAT AGAIN, PERIOD.
They were doomed to learn the hard way. And it was terrible, and as their parents who adore them, we hated that they had to find out that glass is fragile at such a high cost.
But I hope that their spirit—a spirit humble enough to listen when truth screams in their direction—is catching.
Thanks for reading. Warmly, Liz Charlotte Grant
A brief PSA: this newsletter has been sent out weekly up ‘til now, but I’m finding that’s too taxing to get this out every week—it can take me 5-10 hours to get this email together for ya! So I’m switching to an every other week schedule... ;-)
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#1
The fractures within the American Evangelical church—often due to politics—are killing off our congregations, including in David Platt’s megachurch, where misinformation and white supremacy disrupted a recent elder election.
“Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque.”
This is the best overview in a while of the current state of the American white evangelical church.
The Atlantic | Read
#2
Remember when we all called carpal tunnel a “first world problem”? The newest first world problem is called smartphone pinkie.
Turns out, a pinkie is not made to hold up a smartphone all on its lonesome… it’s bad for your health.
Slate | Read
#3
Ben Affleck’s best acting role is as a tabloid star.
“There are at least a half-dozen pictures in circulation of Affleck flipping off cameras. Photographers wait outside his house in hopes of taking pictures — like the immortally on-brand one in which he gives the lens a direct deer-in-the-headlights stare while wearing a BELIEVE IN BOSTON shirt and fumbling a Dunkin’ haul. They have followed his family; they have captured some of his most agonizingly unguarded moments and sold them for public consumption. To view these pics of Affleck is to be complicit in this machinery, but it also means getting a more eloquent look at their subject than he tends to offer himself. The best of these images, with their untrammeled dirtbag energy and their middle-aged melancholy, are expressive in a way that borders on the absurd. When they’re funny, it’s because they feel unmediated, lending them an unexpected purity.”
A deep dive into celebrity culture and the intimacy portrayed by Affleck in paparazzi photos.
Vulture | Read
#4
Mothers don’t have to be martyrs. (And neither do dads, btw.)
Here’s how to find that middle ground between guilt, responsibility, and self-care, according to a psychiatrist:
“I teach my patients to think of guilt as ambient noise. When you identify as a martyr, consciously or unconsciously, you’re sacrificing your capacity to feel a full range of emotions. Guilt is not about the choice in front of you. It’s simply a familiar place for your brain to go. Guilt does not need to be your compass. It can just be a feeling that’s there.”
Repeat after me: I am not my feelings. I am not my feelings. I am not my feelings.
NYT | Read
#5
An old man, white and baffled and alone, estimated at age 60, was wandering the streets of Jackson, Mississippi when police picked him up on charges of vagrancy. It’s 1931, the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929, when the homeless and unemployed hopped trains to find opportunity. Likely, that’s how this man arrived in Mississippi, too.
But he seemed dazed, could not remember his own name, could not remember his address or his relatives or even his own age. And so, after a brief arrest, police moved him into the local hospital, where a psychiatrist entered his name in a ledger as “Mr. X.”
This is the mystery of Mr. X, a mystery that captivated the U.S. in the 1930s as the country asked, who is Mr. X?
But no one had learned the whole truth—until now.
The Atavist Magazine | Read
Just for Fun
Everybody’s favorite soccer coach as… (drum roll, please), you guessed it, the devil.
By the way, Instagram for kids? Bitcoin? All the works of the devil, duh.