We are in a season of despair. I don’t have to tell you this—you are as plugged in as I am, you scroll endlessly the way I do. You see the world breaking apart. Rather, being broken apart by broken men. You hurt. You rage. You fear. (You organize; you rebel.)
And it was while sitting in this pit of despair we were offered a (qualified) moment of relief—on June 20, news came in that, after 104 days of imprisonment, Mahmoud Khalil (the Palestinian-American activist and Columbia graduate student who was the first among pro-Palestinian student activists to be abducted and detained, in what has become an all too familiar scene involving plain clothes ICE agents without warrants) was released from detention in Jena, Louisiana on bail.
I offer the parenthetical qualified there because, as heartwarming as it was to see Mahmoud Khalil free, able embrace his wife and child, it comes with knowing what had been taken from him, what he had been denied.
“In the early hours of 21 April, I waited on the other end of a phone as your mother labored to bring you into this world,” Khalil wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian, “I listened to her pained breaths and tried to speak comforting words into her ear over the crackling line. During your first moments, I buried my face in my arms and kept my voice low so that the 70 other men sleeping in this concrete room would not see my cloudy eyes or hear my voice catch.
“I feel suffocated by my rage and the cruelty of a system that deprived your mother and me of sharing this experience,” he wrote.
I know you felt it, too. If you’re a parent, you perhaps felt it more acutely. I know I did. His son was in the world almost two months before Mahmoud Khalil was able to spend a night at home with him. They are long nights of worry and anxiety and frantic action that you learn to cherish as memories of much simpler time—memories Mahmoud Khalil will not have. They are days of convincing yourself you have seen a smile, though you know they won’t give you a real smile for a few more weeks, but talking yourself into it being true nonetheless. Had he been imprisoned any longer, Khalil may have missed that actual first smile, the one that melts away so much of the stress and makes a parent fall in love.
It is good that Mahmoud Khalil is home, but what I am bothered by is not only what he missed, locked away for having the audacity to believe his people have a right to life and committing to fight for them, but by who denied it to him—men who seem like they wouldn’t understand why a father would want to be there the moment their child enters the world.
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I have joked alongside friends that bad fathers are the load-bearing structure keeping creative nonfiction standing—eliminate them and most of us would have nothing to write about. A joke, mostly. It had felt in the past few years that more of my students were drawing on their relationships to fathers who were less than ideal; it has certainly been a source of grim inspiration in my own work. From the emotionally unavailable to outright abusive, and every gradation between, fathers, on the whole, have been fucking us up for a good long while.
And some of us have still chosen to become fathers ourselves. Call it a profound act of optimism. We firmly believe we can do it better. The bar is certainly low enough. None of us will be perfect—those old scripts are still rattling around in our heads, and in the toughest moments of parenting, I’ve noticed, there is a great temptation to give in to what they say. And we are still far from any sense of gender parity in parenting; in heterosexual relationships, mothers still take on a greater part of the caretaking responsibilities. I’m not here to pretend I’m part of generation of fathers who have mastered this, but there is a wave of fathers wanting to do it differently.
I don’t know Mahmoud Khalil. I can’t say who he is. I have seen the pictures and videos. I have read his words to his newborn. I see in him someone who wants to be part of that wave.
But the levers of power are controlled by men who have chosen to emulate the fathers of the past. I don’t need to have been there in every intimate moment of his children’s lives to know Donald Trump has been an awful father. I can see the fruits of his (non) labor. I worry for Pete Hegseth’s children, still young enough to view their father as a heroic figure. Some of Marco Rubio’s four children are approaching the age where he might conceivably be a grandfather in the years to come; I wonder if they will question who he has been to the world.
The thing I think about often is a moment from the last presidential campaign, which passed by without much fanfare in the middle of a contentious and world altering contest—J.D. Vance went on a podcast and told the story of the moment in which he got the call where he would be asked to become the Republican’s vice presidential nominee. His seven year-old son wanted to talk to him about Pokémon, and Vance recalls this:
So he’s trying to talk to me about Pikachu, and I’m on the phone with Donald Trump, and I’m like, ‘Son, shut the hell up for 30 seconds about Pikachu… This is the most important phone call of my life. Please just let me take this phone call.”
It’s the kind of thing you might find in a creative nonfiction workshop. Because in that moment Vance told his son how much he and his interests matter; in repeating it to an audience, he found some valor in it. Vance may think it a funny anecdote, but I guarantee his son will hold on to that moment in a way that will impact how he shows up in the world, how he may later show up as a father to his own children.
It was a reminder that I live in a bubble of my own making, knowing that none of the fathers I socialize with would speak to their children in such a way—there are still fathers out there who think it is their duty to be harsh.
And these are the fathers who stole time from Mahmoud Khalil and his son. That makes me more angry than I know how to put words to. I’m under no illusion that the old order still exists. It reminds us every day, indeed, the day after Khalil was finally released, Trump ordered an attack on Iran, entering the U.S. into a new, illegal, immoral war that has echoes of the last illegal, immoral war. The old guard still holds the power. My hope has always been that those who pose a challenge to the destructive ways of being will find their way to instill into the generations coming behind us that they do not have to accept the old ways—the can resist, rebel, in ways that make headlines and those that manifest over time. Like raising children.
I am happy Mahmoud Khalil is home. I know this is not the end. These broken men will come after him with everything they have, because for them it is better to inflict new pain on others than to ever face their own. It will hurt. It will enrage us. It will make us scared.
But if we carry with us this fact—they will never be as good as Mahmoud Khalil is, never been as caring a father in presence as Khalil has been in absentia—I hope it serves a beacon of the future we have the ability to create.