The Boy Who Cried Hitler

I stand here before you in my mother's hand-me-downs, in this world where mothers must work like they don't have children and parent like they don't have jobs, keeping households running and bills paid while their hearts run around outside their bodies on tiny little legs that don't yet know where the wolves are, but don't you dare over-mother them, or under-mother them, or get anything wrong while treading laundry and kung fuing the kitchen and, oh yeah, if you could save the world from nuclear armageddon and environmental collapse when you get a minute that'd be great. I stand here before you in my mother's hand-me-downs, with my mother's strangled voice, and my mother's Pinesol hands, and my mother's weeping back, and my mother's feral chores, and my mother's loving patience, and my mother's gritted teeth, and my mother's inner beauty that you never get to see — her inner world of unheard symphonies and unpainted art and oceans of sleeping babies, neatly stuffed into a housecoat drowned out by a Helen Reddy song. I stand here before you in my mother's hand-me-downs, glaring with crosshair eyes at eelfaced manipulators who blacken the children's sky, who poison my children's water, who microplastic my children's blood, who scorch my children's Earth to turn billionaires into trillionaires, vowing "I see you, I'll stop you, right after this dentist appointment, right after this assignment, right after these taxes, right after this to-do list, I'll be ready to stop you in, like, two more weeks, maybe, or maybe two weeks after that." I stand here before you in my mother's hand-me-downs, with my mother's intuition (two eyes in the back of her head — "I can see what you are doing!"), but my many eyes can only glance before more dishes pile up before the to-do list unfurls — I'll get to it, I'll get to you, I'll stop you, I will, I see what you are doing, I just need to take the kids to daycare but make the sandwiches first and stop off on the way to work for a part to fix the air con before the summer comes before the heat you stoked with dinosaur bones and Canary Island loopholes and the infantile ambitions of impotent men hits our little rental (that I'm so grateful to have so grateful I am on-my-hands-and-knees grateful your-cock-in-my-throat grateful please don't kick us out we love you we do) like a solar wind storm barbecuing my children in this tent made of weatherboards like a tiny funeral pyre for bad women, naughty witches, ladies flying solo who need to be put in their place. Just two weeks. Just two weeks. Just two weeks more. Just two weeks and I'll sit in silence for while. Just two weeks and I'll write this all down. Just two weeks I need to get this stuff done. Just two weeks. Just two weeks. Just two weeks, and I'll stop you. ____________________ Reading by Caitlin Johnstone.