Just text me if something happens

If you’re like me you had sense of familiar disbelief after the 2024 election.

I decided that if there was anything I could learn from my own engagements with the first Trump administration, it was that I was going to be more strategic and empowered about surrendering my attention and energy.

No more Twitter. No more refreshing the Times/Post home pages. No more declaring “Well this is a new low, I can’t believe it!”

This was an essay I wrote shortly after about my personal media blackout after the election results. I admit I haven’t stayed as strong in the months that followed but I’ve done a lot better.

I hope you are drawing your own good boundaries and recognizing when your foray into “catching up” has descended into the gutter and you can pull yourself out before you’re like Artax in the Swamp of Sadness (RIP.)

I haven’t engaged with the news or social media since a brief moment last Wednesday morning.

Neither has my husband. We got the New York Times delivered on Sunday, and I pulled out the crossword and books section and recycled the rest without looking at it.

Life at home has been strangely content. It helps that the punitive middle school football season is over. But the kids are getting a better version of their parents than they have in a long time. We’ve been playing more board games. Sorry! takes forever in a good way; Poetry for Neanderthals goes quickly. My older son created a real-life version of Pokemon Go where he created characters, assigned them values, drew them, cut them out, and hid them around the house for people to find. It’s been such a hit that I’ve been able to use it as collateral with his younger brother (“If you get out of bed and wake us up tonight, you can’t play the game tomorrow”). Also, it just made my heart feel full to see how my younger son will go all in on anything his older brother does for him and to appreciate that the older one, despite being a world-weary seventh grader, still has it in him to play like that sometimes.

The kids and I did some volunteer work together. We’ve been watching a lot of stuff; Abbott Elementary, Music and Lyrics, the Franchise, Antiques Roadshow, and for me, Conclave, Drag Race UK, and Breath of Fire. I’m slightly less angry about how dinner is every night. I’m reading more. I’m listening to more audiobooks and podcasts about movies and TV shows: not at all to NPR.

We are lighter mentally without carrying around the weight of a hundred headlines and thousands of comments below them, making parenting feel much easier. On Sunday I proposed it was a good day for us to eat the king-sized Reese’s the kids had gotten for Halloween, and my older son asked me if I wanted one. I thought he meant one Reese’s cup, but no, he meant an entire king-sized package of Reese’s, and I felt like, finally, this parenting thing was paying off. I felt that way about COVID as well. At least I have a project to keep me busy. This kid and everything it touches/needs/discards will be a good distraction.

There are other ways it feels a bit like early pandemic. Checking in with friends with a renewed kind of care. Going outside like it’s my job. Trying to be useful. Taking a moment to finally purge the single socks I never wear because what the hell, I have the time. 

But I can’t keep this up forever. Right? Even though I am grateful I have a community of people who will text me if something major is happening, I just learned, for instance, that a friend’s dad died on Election Day, and I would have learned about that if I was on social media. Much less crucially, I also missed how Nicole Scherzinger apparently liked a MAGA-inspired Jesus hat that Russell Brand is selling, and it became a meme already just in the last week? I don’t know if I can keep up with staying out of the loop for many years. I need to know what the kids are talking about the next time one of them says whatever the latest incarnation of “hawk tuah” is in the car.

This all feels incredibly obvious. Of course, we feel better without the internet/social media in general, not to mention avoiding the awful details about something I very much wanted not to happen. Of course, my husband and I have more to talk about with each other now that we have the time and patience to recommend things to each other, check out each other’s recommendations, and talk about them.

I am not going to dare call this situation a bright side. It’s not—but I would like to find a way to keep this spirit going, to try to go and do something when I’m bored or simply take a minute to luxuriously stare into space instead of checking the Reddit gossip site and inevitably getting pulled into other Reddits. We do get some newspapers/local newsletters/magazines, and I ordered “The Week Jr.” (thanks to recommendations from many witches!), so I don’t plan on full ostrich-ing, which I don’t think is realistic or responsible. But if the next several years are going to be shitty, and if I have learned how to exercise some control over how unproductively shitty I’ll let myself feel, I want to put that to use.

I guess I had a sort of plan to finally open Pandora’s box this week and load [whatever news site] and let it all wash over me, and pull up [whatever social media site] and let the grief and the takes unfurl, but I had a good talk with my therapist who had similarly been offline and off the news. “You don’t need an action plan,” she said, when it comes to ending the vacation from doomscrolling. We talked about how she’s talking to her patients about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, prioritizing engaging on a more local level for a while, and that raising good kids is a public service.

I decided to put off reading the news for another day.

End credits

Thanks for reading Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Our Instagram, curated by Carly O., lives here. You can find the Evil Witches archives here. I just found an old issue from COVID times that feels relevant today: Who am I mad at right this minute?

I do want to give you one bright side to the past week: the fundraising we did for the States Project to support Democrats in Pennsylvania paid off. So there’s that. That is a win. Full stop.

PS: Anyone else out there gets a random menstrual interruption of late, as if your uterine lining decided to walk off the job in disgust?