Collapsing into connection

My boys are home for Reading Week and the house feels louder in the best way. Towels are slung over doors. Someone is in the shower. Someone else is looking for socks that pass inspection. We’re tidying before friends come over for dinner, weaving around each other in that familiar choreography that resumes the minute they walk back through the door and reclaim home as their own.

One of them leans against the counter and starts telling me about a girl in South Africa who was kidnapped and trafficked through Epstein’s network. He talks about flight logs and jurisdictions, about how ordinary it all looked on paper. Daylight departures. Filed documents. Men who shook hands, quoted Mandela from memory, and boarded their very own planes.

I feel the recoil first. Then a strange alertness, like my nervous system could act just fast enough to stop the ooze of information that’s about to break. I watch his face as he speaks and he’s calm, telling the news as it reaches him. No sensationalizing, but something seems to glitch. He’s trying to understand scale. How something so grotesque could operate in plain sight for so long and whether it has anything to do with him, with us in the kitchen, right now, with the rest of “all this” that remains in the wake of a story like this.

Behind my disgust is a protectiveness that has nothing to do with his physical safety. His six-foot frame no longer needs my arms to shield him. It’s the moral atmosphere he is inhaling that unsettles me. When they were babies, I fed the boys organic purées as if I could build immunity from the inside out, as if careful ingredients could function as a perimeter. Labels could be read. Inputs could be controlled. But I can’t make the newsfeed organic. I can’t make any sense of these ingredients, for any of us.

What does it do to young adults to come of age inside revelations like this—revelations so constant they no longer even register as scandal? Who can they trust when the adults in the room reveal themselves to be less guardians and more gargoyles?

His brother interrupts from the stairs: “Are we doing the smoked salmon rolls?”

The shift is seamless. Cream cheese. Capers. Lemons. Someone starts a list. I slice dill while they debate quantities (doesn’t matter, just no stems). The dishwasher hums. The conversation keeps looping back to the girl, to power, to complicity, and then the music changes and an exaggerated groan erupts in protest of his brother’s playlist.

How quickly we move between registers! Sex trafficking networks and grocery lists. Institutional rot and lemon zest. The careening between contexts feels natural and practiced.

I wonder how we’re all doing with these conversations. I have a few options:

I can harden. I can let these stories accumulate into a private dossier about the state of the world. I can start narrating decline and pulling their examples into a coherent dumpster of declining expectations.

Or I can pull back, sit in wonder at our completely undeserved luck, make another salmon roll. I can tell myself this is how news cycles work, that outrage is performative, that none of it touches us directly. I can retreat into logistics and let the larger implications dissolve into the electric drum and bass that’s pumping into our kitchen vignette.

Neither response feels quite right.

So I stayed in the mess for longer. I asked one son what detail bothered him most. I told him what made my stomach turn. We disagreed about whether anything meaningful would change. I kept chopping. He kept talking. His brother filled in a disturbing number of legal details from the last headlines he read and asked again about the dill. I held my breath at the astonishing intelligence, care, and goofiness of these boys.

The larger context presses in, but I tense against naming any of it. Ecological collapse. Moral confusion. Institutional betrayals. The grown ups are mean kids in fancy clothes with no clue what they’re doing beyond “winning”. To me, the Epstein story doesn’t feel like scrolling headlines in the same way that others have. It feels like part of a longer reckoning that is still unfolding, across borders and sectors and generations and myths we once could name.

And yet, in this house, we are setting a table and inviting friends to share a meal and lots of laughs and storytelling. It was a great night made all the more brilliant because one of our guests declared it “no news” night and we all obliged in delicious relief.

So which is it? No news night or diligent excavation of the atrocities?

It won’t be a surprise to any reader of previous posts that my answer will be neither. And both. I wonder how do we stay aware together without either calcifying or checking out? Awareness, right now, seems less like a position to take and more like a collective practice to which we need to return. Over and over again. Us. And them. Over and over again.

It happens in kitchens and on road trips. Anywhere it happens, we can allow the horror of what is possible in the world to be spoken without rushing to sanitize it. And then resume the planning of more dinners and showing up to chop together.

I suspect the most consequential work for parents of adult children right now may be to learn how to inhabit uncertainty alongside them. To build muscles of intuition that help us move between what we were handed and what we’re having to invent. To resist sealing over the cracks with borrowed confidence. Because we do need to pay attention to what is growing in those cracks. That is, after all, how the light gets in.

The larger point is that we don’t have to digest these realities in isolation. We can let our adult children see our disgust, our confusion, our not-knowing, without rushing to perform steadiness for their sake. Concretely, that meant my boys and I lingered in the hallway a little longer than usual at the end of that night. We let the earlier conversation about the news resurface and braid itself into the rest of the evening’s banter.

We held our joint attention with no solutions. No grand synthesis. Just the shift from vigilance to care before the soft click of our separate bedroom doors closed the cracks for the night.