I know Linda doesn’t always think before she speaks, but I need you to be the adult here and deescalate the situation. This is the sixth time she’s clutched me during this dinner, and I don’t even think she got to eat lunch because I was wrapped around her fingers the whole fucking time.
Why did you decide to come home this weekend? Don’t you know Linda well enough to see that she would rather cry and storm off than sit there and listen to you call her a “white woman?” Can’t you see that the burning house analogy you used to explain why “All Lives Matter” is racist made so much sense to her that she’s now starting to panic that she may be racist?
This year has been rough on us. I knew she had a strong proclivity to stroke me whenever they said “Iran” on the nightly news, but what kind of a year packs an impeachment trial, pandemic, and worldwide protests for racial justice into the same six months? Don’t get me wrong – I knew you humans had more than earned a year from hell, but I thought both oysters and white ladies who walked around the house wearing pearls would be extinct before it finally arrived.
And, as though you’re trying to make my situation even worse, you come into this house and challenge your family’s ingrained white supremacy while your mother is wearing me? Couldn’t you have waited until she got ready to take a shower or was about to turn in for the night? Don’t you see that this weekend is literally the first time in her life that she and your father have felt uncomfortable? (As she pushes me into her chest with the full weight of both of her spread palms, I am also wondering why she feels comfortable having me draped around her for eighteen hours a day.)
Did you just respond to her “not all cops” tomfoolery with a carefully reasoned argument about why the police in every city need to be abolished? You might as well have come after me with scissors after dropping that bombshell on her. Her palms are no longer spread; she’s fashioned her right index and middle fingers into a pair of hooks and started stretching me out above her shoulder.
Of course Linda and your father have stopped watching the news and only check their Facebook feeds for information filtered by their like-minded friends! Why would you even ask them if they’ve seen any of the footage of police brutality at peaceful demonstrations? Why would their friends want to post about anything other than “rioting,” “looting,” or Dr. King’s non-violent legacy minus the part where he got assassinated? Those videos you just pulled up – of the cops in Buffalo shoving Martin Gugino, of the NYPD driving into protesters in Brooklyn, of a Philadelphia police inspector beating an unarmed Temple student, of dozens of similar incidents documented on an ever-growing Twitter thread while your mother yanked me in ways I never thought possible – have sealed my fate.
My final request to you, the offspring who put Linda in this state, is that you find a way to fashion my broken pieces into several pairs of earrings. And maybe also consider giving me to someone who can behave like they are aware we’re already a fifth of the way into the twenty-first century.