Interdependence Day by Rachel Wagner
When my first child was a baby, I was making a little over $1000 per month. This was in the mid 1990s, so believe me—it was still not enough to live on. I was in graduate school. I had health insurance that wasn’t very good, and my kid was on a version of Medicaid. I already owed about $30,000 in student loans. I was on my own.
I couldn’t afford disposable diapers. So I bought a batch of cloth diapers from the local diaper service—the ones they were about to throw out. They had holes, but they still worked. I found some plastic covers at the thrift store. I managed to buy a used washing machine, but I couldn’t afford a dryer, or the electricity required to run it. So I strung ropes around my cinderblock apartment and hung them there to dry, or outside on the line. I did this no matter the season.
I remember one winter my kid went through the two dozen diapers I had more quickly than I’d like. So I needed an actual dryer. As a single mother, I had to take the baby with me everywhere.
I loaded him up in my ramshackle car and drove to the convenience store to get a roll of quarters. Then I drove the mile back to another apartment complex, where I carried the baby and my laundry bag down the steps to the basement to the dryer. I carried the baby back up the steps, drove around to keep warm, and came back in half an hour to carry the baby down again and add more quarters.
This is independence. And it’s toxic. Imagine if someone had offered for me to come to their home and do my laundry. Imagine if I had made enough money as a teaching assistant to actually clean my clothes. Imagine if my child’s father had sent any money at all to support his own child. Imagine if my own family of origin had the means and the desire to help me.
Imagine.
I was so lonely and so very tired.
Imagine a world in which instead of “Independence Day,” we have “Interdependence Day.” It was always a lie to pretend that we are “independent.” We are part of a shared world, with shared benefits and shared risks. We depend on each other whether we like to admit it or not.
When I was eighteen, I asked my mother about how hard it was to grow up without support for my desire to go to college, with an abusive father who beat me with a belt whether I did anything wrong or not—as if this were a thing any parent should ever do. I remember she responded, “You’re an adult. It’s your problem now.”
As if we aren’t tangled in each other’s lives forever. As if we aren’t part of our world community, each of us. As if we have no responsibility for each other. As if we are all Cain.
I, for one, would like more interdependence. I’d like family gatherings (found family will do!). Last month we had too many bills and not enough food, so a friend sent me $100. As if we are family. And so we are. This month, we have a little extra money to spend, and so in honor of Interdependence Day, I’m going to go buy a dozen or so packages of diapers. Yes, they will be disposable because the people who need diapers most don’t have the resources to stock up on cloth diapers. I was unusually savvy in figuring out how to make cloth diapers work, and it wasn’t easy. I’m going to deliver the diapers to families in my area, identifying those in need by our mutual aid group. Caring for each other doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t even have to be time consuming. You just have to feel our reliance upon one another. We are not independent, nor it that the best way to be.
Happy Interdependence Day.
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