The permanence of now: What's changed since I've become a mother

This isn't about how I go to bed much earlier these days, or how I wish I could sleep in until 9 or 10 am (although some days, I do wish I could sleep past 7 am). This isn't even about how I don't go out drinking very much, if at all, or how people don't ask me to hang out anymore. These are all changes I'm okay with- I get out enough (now that the weather permits) and I know my social life will pick back up if we move closer to home at the end of the year.

Instead, as we bathed Katie the other night, I finally realized why my dad is still surprised when I wear a dress, or how he seems to think I take care of my thyroid problems like I did when I was 14. Much like the way the elderly seem to just stop changing, like how 75 year-olds can still be racist as shit even though the world has somewhat moved on, I realized that as Katie splashed and laughed in her bath the other night, that that was how I would always see her. My mom wasn't kidding when she says that I'll always be her baby; when Katie goes to kindergarten for the first time, graduates from high school, goes on her first date, leaves for college, all those things- she'll still be my little baby, splashing in her tub and pleased to pieces over the strangest things. She'll still be the stubborn nine-month old who freezes up and lays on the kitchen floor, or starts licking the sliding glass doors up and down (that's her latest antic). She'll still be my sweet, rambunctious booger-nose who slaps the floor as she crawls across our little house here in Iowa.

These, my memories of her as an infant that I will store always in the back of my mind, are what will always stay the same. I have made an effort to cherish every moment with her since not many parents do or get the chance to. But what has changed now that I am a parent, and is the true subject of this post, is my reaction to news and stories involving children and families.

It happened almost immediately after Katie was born. It seemed there as a proliferation of horrid things happening to small children: baby Grace in Texas, things as awful as that. Whereas once, I would've reacted something along the lines of, "geez, that's awful," now, it hits me straight in the gut. It's an honestly visceral reaction to news of neglected or brutalized children. When a father facing charges of embezzlement bludgeoned his wife and four children to death in Iowa City in April, my professors' children were in school with the man's oldest son. My professor and I talked about how having children just changes your feelings about things like this. As he said, a lot of kids in IC were getting away with things they normally wouldn't have, just because their parents were glad to have them around.

So tonight, I pulled into the HyVee (the local ubiquitous grocery store) and finished listening to back-to-back stories on NPR that brought tears to my eyes. The first was about parents in the earthquake-stricken area of China, waiting around their children's schools to find out if they had survived or not. The end of the story really got me; the reporter mentioned that for most of these parents, these were their only children, and she finished with the line, "as they said goodbye to their babies." That was it; your child is always your baby...

But the next story hits home for multiple reasons. As a mother and a graduate student, my research interests involve representations of gender in the mass media. For my dissertation, I want to look at Latino immigrant communities and some interaction with the media. Needless to say, I do not have the same ideas about certain issues as the numerous people back home in Oklahoma who support immigration reform and the mistreatment of immigrants, legal or not.

This second story involved a panic in a California town after an undocumented woman was arrested in a store by ICE. Rumors had gone around that government officials were watching the local schools, and so the principals had to hold meetings with scared parents to assure them that NO ONE had been watching the school, and NO ONE would be arrested on the school campus. The mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles were both speaking out against immigration raids and the inhumane treatment of those apprehended as a result; the San Francisco mayor declared the town a sanctuary for all people and that all city services would be available, regardless of immigration status.

What seems to be forgotten in all the alarmist propaganda that gets circulated regarding immigration post-9/11 is that regardless of status, legal or undocumented, these people are humans like the rest of us. They are fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters; they only happen to have the wrong shade of skin color.

Make no mistake; the current fear of an immigrant invasion is aimed at the waves of brown-skinned folks seeking better lives here than what's available in their home countries. But the moment they cross that border, U.S. citizens lump them into the same category as murderers and rapists. The xenophobes out there, like those idiot Minute Men posting themselves along the border, aren't concerned with undocumented immigrants from Europe or Central Asia. If you're white, there's apparently no reason to be scared of you.

If you're brown, though- watch out. Then, it's perfectly okay to separate fathers and mothers from their families, place them in detention centers, and deny access or information to their family members who have no idea about the status of their mothers and fathers or if they're even still in the U.S. We sure do like to crow about family values in this country- evidently, that doesn't apply in this situation. So-called "compassionate conservatism" appears to only apply to white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants- certainly not to impoverished workers from Third World countries.

Moreover, the human rights violations are only one part of immigration in the U.S. that's poorly, poorly misunderstood. First, since the U.S. began regulating immigration in the 1800s, the "fears" and "threats" have always been the same: an alleged invasion by people of allegedly poorer character and moral standing who are taking the jobs of white folks (re: white men), draining social services, and introducing all sorts of social ills into society. And God forbid someone speak a language other than English. But the fact of the matter is, the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Germans, Eastern and Southern Europeans, and any one from any Latin American country except Cuba has been the target of immigration exclusion for every reason imaginable- and for every single reason we seek to reform immigration today.

These "security threats," seemingly waiting to cross our Southern border this time, illegally and via coyote rather than legally, from Saudi Arabia, and on a plane, have all been conjured and imagined in the past: the Chinese were a threat to Labor in the 1800s, so we had the Exclusion Acts in 1882. The Japanese were excluded next under the Gentlemen's Agreement (talk about shady diplomacy). Mexicans and Mexican Americans, first easily exploited labor in the booming agribusiness of the early 20th Century American Southwest, were suddenly taking the jobs of returning GIs. As a result, all stripes of Mexican Americans were deported. Throughout the Cold War, we used the same excuses for exclusionary and draconian immigration policy; the worst came when the U.S. denied asylum to Latin Americans from countries ravaged by civil wars funded and supported by the U.S. government. Anyone who praises Ronald Reagan should know better, or has little understanding of the Iran/Contra Affair. Nevertheless, hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of Gautemalan, Salvadoran, and Nicaraguan refugees were denied asylum by the U.S. government, who could not admit that the governments they backed in Central America had done anything wrong, much less murder droves of their own citizens. To admit these refugees would be to admit the U.S.'s collusion with murderous regimes in the effort to secure our imperial legacy.

And now, for the Bush administration to admit that undocumented workers do not themselves pose a security threat, but serve to keep fresh the idea that we are threatened as nation, would be to confront the hypocrisy of neoconservatism in this country.

If only it were about securing our country and saving our social services and infrastructure from plunder; but look no further than the White House for the epicenter of moral erosion. If only immigration reform could be enacted fairly, justly, and humanely; instead, families are ripped apart, robbed of their basic human right to live with a sense of security. Instead, we criminalize families based on anecdotal and inaccurate tales of over-bred Mexican women, uninsured drunk drivers killing American citizens, all of whom supposedly reap the benefits of the same social services necons would take away if given the chance.

This, as a parent, I find outrageous, repulsive, and apprehensible. To think that my child and I might live in fear from simply crossing a border- that, I might add, was drawn as an act of empire and in effect, crossed them- breaks my heart. That our country can be so cold and depraved to the livelihood of other humans, anywhere in the world, is deplorable. And that we live in a country that seizes upon a factory, detains workers, separates families, and shows no concern for the welfare of the most vulnerable sectors of society is reason for outrage. They stole social security numbers? What this means is, they're paying into a system from which they will not benefit. Who really loses there? It's certainly not me, especially given that our government's current spending will ensure that there will be no social security benefits for me to draw upon when and if I retire.

Scholarly studies overwhelmingly refute and contradict every common epithet regarding undocumented workers: they are less likely to use public services, although they pay taxes into the system; they are less likely to be jailed or commit crimes warranting prosecution; they do NOT take jobs from other workers. And let's not forget, those weren't Mexicans using legally-obtained visas driving planes into the Twin Towers.

It may seem circuitous, how I go from musings about Katie to ravings about the inhumanity of American immigration policies. The point is, just like I will always see Katie as my infant, and I will always remember the big-toothed silly baby girl, even when she's thirty and starting her own adventures, we tend to see the moment we occupy as permanent. We sometime can't see past our own faces. And right now, this country fails to understand that history is literally repeating itself: we are falling prey to a government using our fear of compromised national security to target a largely beneficial community for expulsion. We can't understand the fear with which these immigrants live, fears of being separated from their families- of mothers being riven from their children. How can we stand for that? How can we let that happen? Finally, as a nation of parents, how can we change the seeming permanence of the moment?