It is difficult for any family nucleus to want to meet a child's need to live in the world. I would say it's impossible. But this is the challenge that is being posed to us, mothers, in this pandemic. And, like every maternal challenge, there's nowhere to run. It's solving the way you can and dealing with the consequences of our decisions.
We complete a year and a month of the pandemic when I write this. One year and one month living an unprecedented historical moment in the whole world. An especially unprecedented moment in Brazil, which has never experienced major wars or deaths on the scale we are experiencing, as well as never having these general restrictions on everyday life.
Apparently, due to a mishap of fate, this historical moment coincides with another: the coming to power of fascist, authoritarian forces with no interest in safeguarding the rights of the population, especially the economically and socially most vulnerable layers.
Today, Brazil is one of the worst countries to be in the world for all people, without a doubt. But it's even worse if you're a mother.
I, despite being extremely privileged, am part of some of the groups most impacted by the pandemic. Woman, entrepreneur in the gastronomic and cultural sector, and mother of a school-age child.
At the beginning of this journey, I was sure it would be difficult. I knew that the debt of my company and family would be inevitable. I knew that my son's schooling would be precarious and that my attention would have to be on him 24 hours a day again (I miss those 4 hours of school where I could solve 200 things without being interrupted).
But I couldn't measure the psychological effects that hopeless social distancing from an optimistic future would bring.
Looking at the past, and the beginning of my motherhood, in 2014, we lived in a troubled but apparently safe political environment. I was a big believer in “there will be no coup”. He believed in institutions and that they would protect our democracy regardless of the anti-democratic movements that emerged.
When my desire to become a mother came, I embraced it with all my might. I was kind of shocked, I confess, with prolonged lactation, a thousand hours reading about child development, food introduction, pedagogical games. The first two years were good, focusing almost entirely on my son. And inevitably keeping an eye on what was happening in the country.
I, who had always been linked to social movements, reproached myself for doing militancy on the couch while dealing with a baby, a thousand hormones, a house and a professional life in ruins that I was trying to rescue.
In 2016, I cried hugging my one-year-old son, and apologized to him for the blow to President Dilma. There, I understood that the Brazil in which I conceived my child no longer existed, as well as the future I had envisioned for her. But life has no other way but to move forward. And I, like Brazil, followed, while the political environment that was taking shape was getting worse.
I opened my first business. I focused my energies on what I could do in each of those post-coup moments. In 2018, I had lapses of hope in a better future, as in the “Ele Não” movement.
But the Brazilian people clamored for a crooked change, moved by hatred and not by hope. The population wanted to “change everything that is there”, in a reasoning that I believe (from the height of my experience as a simple person interested in politics) that combined a lack of political awareness, an irrational fear of the left, sown by the media since forever, and an unconscious confidence that the institutions would prevent some crazy person from jeopardizing the rights won in this country since the end of the military regime. We are left with Bolsonaro, and his entourage of incompetents, to manage us at the moment we are.
Since 2019, we have watched, as if anesthetized, the dismantling of several conquered rights. End of the Ministry of Labor and Culture, labor reform, social security reform. All done in a hurry and with the flagrant aim of precariousing the rights of the population. We reached 2020 with an already fragile society. And then came the pandemic. And we are all bald to know what Bolsonaro does to manage this crisis.
Poverty, hunger, hopelessness, all while experiencing what it's like to live in social isolation. And the main victims, no matter which economic strata of the population they come from, are children.
It is clear that children in poverty are suffering from far more dire ailments. I cannot think of a more overwhelming reality than a peripheral single mother having to watch her children starve in a country without a job and without an informal market. Or, in a slightly less worse reality, having to put yourself at risk in the middle of a pandemic to put food on the table while leaving your children to take care of each other. This is Bolsonaro's pandemic Brazil for the most vulnerable mothers.
And for us, privileged ones, there is the comfort of knowing that we will not go hungry, that if we are no longer able to pay our rent, we will have a support network to welcome us. But there is no relief in dealing with the depression of our children who suddenly don't know what it's like to have friends anymore. They don't know what it's like to be in a school anymore. They no longer know what it is to live in community. They are trapped, safely, in their apartments, surrounded by screens and being deprived of such basic things in life as we have always known it.
I don't know a mother who isn't panicking about online classes, face-to-face work or home office (when there is work), and still having to meet the need that every child has to live in a community.
It is difficult for any family nucleus to want to meet a child's need to live in the world. I would say it's impossible. But this is the challenge that is being posed to us, mothers, in this pandemic. And, like every maternal challenge, there's nowhere to run. It's solving the way you can and dealing with the consequences of our decisions.
Speaking only here from my small privileged world, in one year I had to leave the house where I lived (rented) to return to my mother's house, I took my son out of private school, accumulated functions in my company (in addition to debts) and I started to have to cook more, clean more, play more, comfort more. And, worst of all, I started to deal with the nightmares of a 6-year-old who started to dream that I caught Covid and “became a star”.
I wasn't prepared for this. I believe no mother is. I get emotional just remembering that conversation, in which I promised my son that I wouldn't die like that and that I would never leave him alone, even without knowing if that's really true.
We are all exhausted. But for us moms, there's no option to cry in the fetal position on the couch. We have to work and work and work to make the reality of our children a little less worse, while we wait for the vaccine and, who knows, better days.
I feel that I need to believe in a better future for my son. And even though I often find myself yelling at him when stress gets high, I am passionate about making him a better person. He is my future project. Just as I see the women around me doing the same for their children, despite the limitations imposed on us.
Within a society that at this moment (and for a long time now) has been valuing competition, money and maintaining oppressive systems such as machismo, racism and structural lgbtphobia, my hope lies in my own values and in creating my own boy to be an amplifier of ideas for a more equal, more cooperative society, focused on being better as a community and not needing to cling to values like those I was raised with.
He doesn't need to be better than his peers. He doesn't need to explore to be a winner. He doesn't have to protect the rights of the rich because one day he might be the rich one. It's funny to write this, but these were the values inculcated in our minds by past generations. And this is the reasoning that seems to me to permeate those who still call for neoliberalism.
I'm here doing a sink political awareness exercise. I know. Academics may even come and crucify me. But isn't that what societies need? That people understand their roles and that each one, from their microcosms, form the macro that needs so many improvements?
Anyway, I do this exercise in hope so as not to go crazy in an increasingly hopeless reality. And I invite everyone to do the same.
After all, the Bolsonaro government is fleeting. Not us and our children.
( • ) 
Lívia Farah is a woman who fights, cares and cries, who learns every day to face the world with a thousand demands on her mind and a child in tow.
( • )
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