Baby's First Protest?

Or how I let my paranoia get the best of me

On Friday, I got a text from a friend. “Baby’s first protest?” it read.

The friend was planning to head downtown the next day for one of several gatherings meant to demonstrate displeasure at recent Supreme Court, let’s say, fuckery. A lot of women I knew were. Some were mothers. At least one was pregnant. Some never wanted children. All of them were– and still are– pissed. It hadn't occurred to me to bring my baby with me, but now that the thought was out there, I had to entertain it.

I was never a big protester. That’s no judgment toward people who are into protests; it’s just that the only way I can usually handle large crowds is if it’s at a concert or sporting event and all of the participants have assigned seats and something to look at that is not each other. Some people demonstrate their support for a cause by physically showing up; the best way for me to make a difference, for most of my adult life, was to write and speak publicly about the things I care about and donate as much money as I could to established organizations devoted to causes I supported (What good would one additional nervous person do at a gathering of thousands, anyway?). To each their own!

However, this felt like the right time to protest. My friend's half-joking idea was actually good. I decided I'd go. This would be baby's first protest.

First I would need a sign. I figured my local CVS would be out of poster board, because this is a Show Up To Protest kind of a neighborhood– lots of Bernie bumper stickers on Subarus, prefab “In this coffee shop, WE BELIEVE in SCIENCE” stickers, a dark blue dot in a dark blue city in a blue state– so I found a cardboard box we were going to recycle and cut it up so I had a few decent-sized slabs. Big enough for signs.

I thought about what I would write on my repurposed box, if I would try to fashion some kind of mini-sign for the baby. I couldn’t come up with anything clever; my brain could not be anything but attendant to its own rage-fatigue that day. My creative capacities were that viral .gif of an impotently angry little girl threateningly shaking a hairbrush. Hairbrush Girl does not spark creativity. All the good signs are made by brains channeling the cool smirk of Disaster Girl.

I didn’t have a good night of sleep the night after the Supreme Court overturned Roe. During one of my middle-of-the-night wakings, I opened TikTok and started scrolling with the sound turned all the way down. (This literally never helps me get back to sleep, and yet...) Somehow, I found myself in Paranoid Post-Roe Digital Surveillance TikTok, a corner of the app that seemed to have sprung up in hours.

Delete your period tracking apps! said one user with a lot of followers and likes. I’d never even downloaded any period tracking apps. I find apps that track bodily functions to be creepy. I don’t even like knowing how many steps I’ve taken. Regardless, that wasn’t something I had to worry about.

Get a burner phone! said another TikTok user. I had a couple burner phones lying around from a brief period of panic a few years ago. When it came to post-Roe disaster prepping, I was doing great. Two for two.

But as my insomnia wore on and TikTok’s algorithm worked its fucked up magic, I found myself deeper and deeper into a tech dystopia where the government might be about to breach my cervix at all times.

Be careful what you Google, said another post. Download Tor and use that browser to get sneaky said another. Don’t tell anybody anything about your reproductive health. Leave your phone at home AND TURNED ON if you leave to have an abortion. Use a magic marker to write the Legal Aid number on your arm in case you get arrested while protesting. Better safe than sorry! Other posts advised me to bring face covering in case there was tear gas, to forego contact lenses, and to remember the phrases “Am I being detained?” and “I want a lawyer.”

By the time Saturday morning rolled around, I was low key convinced that my attendance at any protest of any kind would result in both me and my baby getting sent to Guantanamo. I went back and forth for awhile and then went on a brain-clearing hike, and on the ride home, Juniper fell asleep in her carseat, thus nap-trapping me and making the decision on my behalf: this wouldn’t be Baby’s First Protest.

And so, until the next one, I will protest in other ways. I will write. I will goad elected officials I’ve connected with over the course of my work. I will talk to my friends whose political awakenings have happened in the last few years– or even the last few days. I will donate money.

I’ll bring my daughter to a protest one day. I want her to grow up knowing that her mother did everything she could to unfuck that which is fucked, and I want my daughter growing up knowing that there are people out there who care about her and other little girls' ability to make decisions about their own bodies, and some of those people have devoted their entire lives to fighting for it. I want their presence to be physical to her. I want her to see them. But she’s so little now, and I still haven’t learned to just put the phone down when I wake up in the middle of the night with anxiety about the state of the world. After she's learned how to use Baby's First Burner Phone.

Image via Shutterstock