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    ‘Our political situation is such a fragile thing’: Robert De Niro on fatherhood, family – and Trump

    For a very long time, the actor Robert De Niro was reticent in interviews. He was solitary or shy or inarticulate – biographers couldn’t decide which. Then Donald Trump was made president, and public De Niro – the De Niro we read in magazines, who appeared at Hollywood events – became openly, angrily, exasperatedly chatty, at least on politics. Trump was a New Yorker, like De Niro, but not a good New Yorker, it turns out. He was a “fool”, a “bozo”, a “national disaster”. How could he have become president? Why weren’t more Americans embarrassed, or terrified? “Fuck Trump!” he shouted while appearing at an awards ceremony in 2018. It was an offhand remark that earned him an ovation. During an interview later that year he added, “I feel that more people should speak out against him, not be genteel about it.”This is the De Niro I meet on Zoom, one afternoon a few months ago. Outspoken De Niro. Politically frustrated De Niro. He is bethroned in a hotel suite in Cannes, grey-haired and lined of face, present as an irked but not unpleasant grandpa. (He recently turned 80.) It is shortly before the actors’ strike and long before Trump’s appearance at a New York courthouse on charges of fraud. “I’m going to go into this,” De Niro says. “The political situation we’re in in my country, it is crazy and absurd – we lost control. I see the phenomenon of Trump, the phenomenon of people not standing up to him, people who ought to know better… They’re causing great concern in the country and a lot of anxiety. I feel like since he’s come on the scene – even after being president – it’s like when an abusive parent rules a household, only it’s not just one household it’s the whole country. We’re like, ‘What’s this guy going to do next? What’s he going to aggravate us about?’” The actor shrugs. “Is he just doing this to aggravate people? To make people unhappy? Maybe he is.”De Niro and I are meant to be discussing his latest picture, Killers of the Flower Moon, which recalls a dark period in 1920s Oklahoma during which members of the Osage Nation were murdered for their oil rights, and in which De Niro plays William Hale, a benign-seeming ranch-owner who is in fact at the root of much of the period’s evil. (The film is based on David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller of the same name.) But Trump keeps getting in the way. At a press conference earlier in the day, De Niro had suggested that Hale’s kind of immorality – his entitlement and greed, his racism, his disregard for anyone outside his own bloodline, all of it wrapped up in a kindly aspect – is easy to spot in contemporary politics, in what was a not-so-veiled swing at Trump and a broader swipe at members of the Republican party, accessories to the chaos.When I mention his allusions to Trump, De Niro says, “Of course. He allowed more of it to come out” – the racism, the disregard. “One of the main tasks of being a leader, the responsibility, is to lead. Even when the masses are turning in a certain the direction, you have to show them the right way. And that comes down to personal integrity, what you know is right and what you know to be wrong, what you stand for.” Trump is “doing whatever he can to be the boss,” he goes on. “He just wants to be in charge. He has no moral centre.”In Killers of the Flower Moon, Hale is similarly unprincipled, bigoted, and vengeful. Many if not all of his actions are propelled by avarice. Asked what appealed to him about playing the character, De Niro replies, “I don’t know if he appealed to me. He’s… I don’t know.” Then he adds, “The older I get, people do things that I just don’t understand. I have no pretence to know.”“What sort of things?” I ask.He gives a brief answer that he boils down to: “The state of the country.”A few years ago, a suspect package was mailed to one of several New York restaurants De Niro owns. Similar packages were delivered to other outspoken Trump critics, including Joe Biden, then a former vice president. The event proved De Niro’s concern that things were not OK. “It was sent by somebody crazy,” he recalls now. “But I don’t want to make it simple. All you can do is keep an eye on them. Suppress or repress it. Because it’s always going to be there. People have their reasons.”Killers of the Flower Moon is De Niro’s 10th collaboration with the director Martin Scorsese. (Their first, Mean Streets, was released 50 years ago.) Of De Niro, Scorsese said recently, “Bob doesn’t talk a lot.” (In a typically halted style, De Niro has said of the director, “There’s a connection, but it’s hard for me to define.”) I ask now why Trump has made De Niro, a man so diffident even his close friend and collaborator has described him as taciturn, suddenly so forthcoming.“It upsets me so much that somebody like him could get so far in our political system,” he says. “Many New Yorkers were on to what a fool he is, a joke. But when the country started buying it? I mean, he didn’t win by much. He didn’t win the popular vote. She won. But look what happened. What’s scary is it’s such a fragile thing, to swing like that. And the odd thing about Trump is that if he had any brains he could have become president again. But he doesn’t care. He did stupid things. He’s not somebody who should ever be allowed close to leadership in this country again.” (Remarkably, or perhaps not, Trump is currently polling highly as a 2024 presidential candidate.)I ask, “The fragility he created, do you think it’s still there?”“Yeah,” he says. “Don’t you?”I nod.“I mean, I wish the media would not give him much attention, would ignore him. But it’s like watching a train wreck. You’re fascinated by it. What will eventually happen is he will die away. He’ll become not even an afterthought. It’s like the pandemic. We had it. Now people are forgetting. And it was only three years ago.”De Niro was born in New York during the Democratic presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. His father, the painter Robert De Niro Sr, studied under the German émigrés Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, briefly waited tables with the playwright Tennessee Williams, and worked as a night watchman at the Guggenheim Museum alongside Jackson Pollock, who De Niro Sr considered both peer and friend. De Niro’s mother, the artist Virginia Admiral, briefly counted the writer Anaïs Nin as a mentor, and transcribed several volumes of her diaries. (For a time, both Admiral and De Niro Sr wrote erotica for Nin, who paid a dollar a page.) De Niro’s early life was bohemian. An only child, he grew up quietly in the company of adults and books, loved but not coddled. His parents, who called him Bobby, separated when he was two – they divorced a decade later – and he lived with his mother, who stopped painting despite a promising career and began a successful typing business.Still, it is De Niro Sr who has loomed large over De Niro’s life. At auditions early in his career, De Niro would mention his father’s name in case the casting director had heard of him. He would later hang his paintings on the walls of his business ventures, including his restaurants, to generate interest in his father’s career. When I ask if legacy is something De Niro considers, he replies, “Yeah, I think about legacy,” but goes on to discuss his father’s work rather than his own. “I think about his legacy,” he says. “I’ve tried to keep it going. To me he was a great artist, he was a genuine artist. And it’s not like I want to revive whatever he did. I just want my kids, my grandkids, to know who he was, what he stood for.”De Niro Sr died in 1993, on his 71st birthday; Admiral died in 2000, aged 85. De Niro has described his father as witty and affectionate but prone to loneliness and severe self-criticism. (De Niro Sr was gay, though not publicly, and his sexuality was never discussed between father and son.) That the senior artist’s star never exploded led slowly to bitterness, and he fell into poverty. De Niro has talked before of how he considers it his responsibility to maintain awareness of his father’s work – to “see him get his due”.I ask De Niro now what he thinks his father thought of his fame.“I think he was proud of me,” he says. “At the same time, a little jealous, or envious, and so on. But he always… He was proud of me. And what I remember is I was proud of him when I was a kid – he was an artist. But that’s normal. People in families have certain feelings. It doesn’t mean they don’t love the family member, that they’re not loyal to them.”I ask about their relationship.“We had an OK relationship,” he says. “ He was not with me, we didn’t live together. But I would see him, spend time. I would always go to his shows, take the kids to his openings.” Sometimes father and son would run into each other in the street and talk, or De Niro would visit his father while he worked. “We had what I suppose people would call an understanding,” De Niro has said. “We were close in some ways but not in others.” The painter regularly requested his son sit for a portrait, but the son demurred. (“I wouldn’t sit still,” he has said.) A couple of years ago, De Niro, while showing a journalist around his father’s SoHo studio, which De Niro has preserved faithfully, said, “I wish I had listened more to my father so I could speak more carefully about his work.”I ask now, “Why is this important to you?”“It just is,” he says. “It’s family. Tradition.”“It’s for your children,” I say.“It’s for the family, yes.”Not long before De Niro and I meet, it is announced that he has had another child – his seventh, and his first with his current girlfriend, the actor Tiffany Chen. When I offer congratulations he nods plainly. And when I ask how things are going, he says, “It’s going OK,” shrugs, and screws up his features into a kind of parent-face that suggests he might be muddling through.We both laugh.De Niro has said of child-rearing, “It’s always good and mysterious and you don’t know what the hell is going to happen.” I ask if he agrees with that statement now.“You never know,” he says.“That’s still true?” I ask.“Of course it’s true!” he says. “It’s true for everybody.”“It’s still mysterious?” I ask.“You never know what’s going to happen,” he says. “They surprise you.”I ask if things get easier.“It doesn’t get easier,” he says, becoming pleasantly private. “It is what it is. It’s OK. I mean, I don’t do the heavy lifting. I’m there, I support my girlfriend. But she does the work. And we have help, which is so important.”I ask if he enjoys fatherhood.“Of course I do.”“What about it do you enjoy?” I ask.“All of it! With a baby it’s different to with my 11-year-old. My adult children. My grandchildren. It’s all different.”“In what way?” I ask.“Well, I don’t talk to the adult children the way I talk to my baby,” he says, in a way I think suggests exasperation, “or the way I speak to my 11-year-old, though she’s pretty smart. But… I don’t know if you have kids.”“I have two,” I say, adding, “I think that’s enough for me.”Smiling, De Niro says, “Well, that’s understandable.”Talk turns to his upcoming plans. When I ask De Niro his intentions for the next couple of years, he mentions a Netflix series I was unaware he had scheduled, what might be another piece of make-work for which the actor has been regularly, often unfairly criticised. (A student of the acting coach Stella Adler, a two-time Oscar winner, the force behind Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and The Deer Hunter, one of our greatest actors, he is also responsible for Dirty Grandpa.) But soon another, more plain ambition is revealed. “And to stay alive,” he says.“You think about that?” I ask.“Of course I think about it, at my age,” he says. “You think about it at your age, why wouldn’t I think about it at my age?”He looks briefly off camera to his publicist, then goes on, “It’s not going to stop me, but you think about it.”“What do you think about?” I ask.“I’m aware of it,” he says. “You think more about time. Every summer, every new season, everything, you say, ‘Well, I’m going to use these few months of the summer to be with my kids, my family.’ I can’t wait until the next – I don’t know what’s going to happen. So each thing becomes more important. Everything I do, time-wise, is important. Whatever I’m thinking about doing in two years, I’d better think about doing it now.”I ask, “Do you enjoy being older?”“I don’t mind,” he says. “I have no control over it. What am I going to do? I might as well give in and go with it.”And with that his publicist rises, and De Niro gives in and goes with it.Killers of The Flower Moon is in cinemas nationwide from 20 October. This interview was completed before the SAG-AFTRA strike commenced More

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    ‘Parents’ rights’: Republicans wage education culture war as 2024 looms

    Speaking recently at a theater in Davenport, Iowa, Donald Trump marveled at the crowd’s reaction when he vowed to “bring back parental rights into our schools”. The line elicited thunderous applause – one of the loudest ovations of his nearly two-hour address.“Can you imagine what I’m doing? I’m saying, ‘Parents, you have rights’ … and the place goes crazy,” remarked the former president, who is again seeking the Republican nomination.With the 2024 election cycle looming, Republicans are leaning into the education culture wars, championing policies that they say will give parents more of a say in their children’s education, from the subjects they are taught to the books they read, with hopes of appealing to suburban voters who recoiled from the party during the Trump years. In their telling, Republicans are the defenders of America’s schoolchildren whose education is threatened by a leftwing ideology that promotes activism, racial history and gender fluidity over academic outcomes.But critics and many educators say conservatives are using the term “parents’ rights” as a guise to advance a rightwing education agenda that undermines public schools, whitewashes American history and marginalizes LGBTQ+ students.The debate took center stage in the House this week, where Republicans broke into cheers after narrowly advancing their “Parents Bill of Rights”. Friday’s vote followed a contentious 16-hour committee hearing and a bitter floor debate over the legislation, whose sponsor argued would “bring more transparency and accountability to education” and whose opponents derisively rebranded the “politics over parents act”.Democrats argued that the bill would only serve to embolden a far-right movement that has pushed book bans, restrictions on the instruction of American history and turned classrooms into “ground zero” for conservative culture wars.“This legislation has nothing to do with parental involvement,” said Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader. “It has everything to do with jamming the extreme Maga Republican ideology down the throats of the children and the parents of the United States of America.”Though the legislation has little chance of advancing in the Democratic-controlled Senate, it will serve as a rallying cry for Republicans on the campaign trail.‘A line in the sand’The origins of the “parents’ rights” movement, experts say, can be traced back to the 1925 “trial of the century” in which a Tennessee biology teacher was fined for teaching evolution in violation of state law. The term has been invoked repeatedly in the decades since, notably in clashes related to desegregation, the red scare, sex education and homeschooling.“The idea of parents’ rights is really nothing new in American politics,” said Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute who has written extensively about culture war battles in education.The present-day movement emerged in response to the upheaval sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, when extended school lockdowns led to a burst of political activism by parents who felt overwhelmed and abandoned, and by the racial justice protests that erupted in the summer of 2020, with the murder of George Floyd. Conservative politicians were quick to seize on any backlash, channeling voter frustration into a sophisticated national campaign aimed at restricting instruction on race and gender.As the presidential primary begins to take shape, the notional field of Republican hopefuls are using the education battles to distinguish themselves on an issue they believe has the potential to motivate their base.By far the most aggressive education culture warrior has been Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is widely seen as Trump’s strongest rival for the Republican nomination, though he has not formally entered the contest.“I think we have really done a great job of drawing a line in the sand to say the purpose of our schools is to educate kids not to indoctrinate kids,” DeSantis said at a recent event in Des Moines, Iowa.He has pointed to his successes in Florida, where he notably signed into law the Parental Rights in Education Act, branded by critics as “don’t say gay”, which forbids the instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity in early elementary grades. He also approved the “Stop Woke Act” that restricts conversations around race in schools, colleges and even private workplaces; banned transgender athletes from competing on women’s sports teams at public schools and colleges; and blocked high schools in the state from offering an Advanced Placement course on African American studies.Emboldened by his re-election victory, DeSantis is now pushing a raft of education-related proposals that would go even further ahead of an anticipated White House run.Not to be outflanked, Trump and the budding field of GOP candidates and potential contenders have also sharpened their attacks on the education system.In Iowa this month, Trump vowed to prohibit the teaching of “critical race theory”, “transgender insanity” and “any other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content” in public classrooms while calling for universal school choice, the direct election of school principals by parents and breaking up the Department of Education.Former vice-president Mike Pence, who built a reputation as a staunch social conservative and is weighing a run for president, has also staked out territory in the education wars, pushing what he calls a “parents’ rights” agenda. In Iowa last month, he stood with conservative parents as a federal appeals court considered a case involving a local school district’s policy to support transgender students.Nikki Haley, Trump’s former UN ambassador who is now challenging him for the nomination, has denounced critical race theory as “un-American” and blamed leftwing ideology for fueling a culture of “woke self-loathing” she has called a “virus more dangerous than any pandemic”. And in a likely preview of the education fights to come, Haley suggested Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” law “didn’t go far enough”.‘A front-row seat’In 2021, Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the race for Virginia’s governor under the banner of “Parents matter” in a state that had been steadily trending blue offered a model for Republicans candidates across the country.“During Covid, parents for the first time weren’t just going to PTA conferences; they were literally turning their living rooms into classrooms and so they got a front-row seat to curriculum, standards, grading, teaching practices,” said Kristin Davison, a top strategist for Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign. “That awoke a number of parents across the political spectrum to demand more out of their schools.”As governor, Youngkin issued a day one executive order prohibiting the teaching of “inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory” from Virginia classrooms and overhauled policies related to transgender students in public schools. He also set up a tip line for parents to report teachers who raise “divisive” topics in the classroom, thought it has since been shut down.With parents and teachers continuing to grapple with the repercussions of the pandemic on students – the learning loss and mental health challenges – Davison believes the education agenda championed by Republican politicians like Youngkin, who has also been raised as a potential presidential candidate in 2024, will only become more resonant with voters.Since Youngkin’s election, the conservative campaign to expand parental control over public education has moved from contentious school board meetings to state capitols and now Congress. Over the last two years, Republican-controlled legislatures have enacted or are considering a dizzying array of new proposals limiting the instruction of what proponents deem “divisive concepts” in public schools.And this week House Republicans pressed ahead with their “Parents Bill of Rights”, a centerpiece of their midterm election campaign and a top priority for the speaker, Kevin McCarthy.The measure outlines five pillars that Republicans say will guarantee a parent’s right to scrutinize library books and classroom curricula and review school budgets, among other aspects. It would also require parents’ consent before a student is allowed to change their gender designation, pronouns or name, a provision that Democrats warned would force schools to out LGBTQ+ students to their families that may not be accepting of their identity.“Parents across this country have overwhelmingly spoken out that they have had enough,” said Julia Letlow, the Republican congresswoman of Louisiana who sponsored the bill. “They want a seat at the table because at the end of the day, these are our children, not the government’s.”‘It’s just terrible what they’re doing’Democrats say the focus on divisive cultural issues distracts from the real challenges facing American students and public education – and suspect voters will punish Republicans for it.They point to the midterms results and polling as evidence that voters are more concerned about school funding, teacher shortages, student mental health and campus safety than they are about the instruction of critical race theory, an academic framework for examining systemic racism in American institutions.A pre-election memo by the Republican National Committee last year seemed to recognize that risk and last year advised candidates to center their general election pitch on “parental rights and quality education”, as opposed to cultural attacks.And though DeSantis soared to re-election last year in Florida, several other GOP candidates for governor who pushed a socially conservative agenda lost, including in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. House Republicans failed to secure the dominating majority they predicted, while many of the “parents’ rights” activists who ran for seats on their local school board came up short, even though conservative groups poured millions of dollars into winning the once-sleepy contests.“Unless we say stupid things,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said, a reference to the debate-stage blunder by the party’s nominee for Virginia governor that many believe contributed to Youngkin’s victory, “our proactive agenda of quality education, well-paid teachers, mental health and job skills beats their agenda of transgender, CRT every single time.”Democrats believe they can offer a strong contrast. They are promoting an education agenda focused on boosting federal funding for public schools and raising teachers’ pay while expanding pre-K programs and increasing college affordability, plans that face strong Republican resistance.In the president’s State of the Union address, Joe Biden, who is expected to run for re-election, proposed two years of tuition-free community college as a way to expand access to “the best career training in America”. He also used his executive authority to forgive more than $400bn in student-loan debt, an action that enraged Republicans and some Democrats and which the supreme court appears poised to invalidate.In a recent interview, Biden criticized the flurry of legislation targeting transgender students and athletes and singled out new laws in Florida as particularly problematic.“What’s going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, close to sinful,” he said. “It’s just terrible what they’re doing.”‘Peddling hysteria’For many of the teachers, parents and students caught up in the political battle of so-called parents’ rights, the impact has been disorienting and demoralizing.Public school teachers, already grappling with the impacts of the pandemic on their students’ mental health and academic achievement, are now trying to navigate a thicket of new restrictions that critics say are having a chilling effect on what they can discuss in the classroom.Educators and librarians have come under attack, inundated with conspiracy-fueled accusations that they are “grooming” students by offering books that address LGBTQ+ issues. Some have quit or retired early, exacerbating, some say, the nation’s teacher shortage.A survey by the Pew Research Center found that parents divided sharply along partisan lines when asked how their school-age children should be taught about gender identity, the legacy of slavery and whether they had enough influence over school curriculum. But some polls have found broader support for laws restricting certain instruction on gender and sexuality in elementary grades.There are areas of consensus. In general, Americans strongly oppose book bans and believe students should be taught both “the good and bad” aspects of American history. And though public attitudes on transgender rights are complex and still being shaped, especially on issues involving trans youth, Americans remain widely supportive of laws that protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination.But as the debate over parental rights in education rages, LGBTQ+ students, and especially trans youth, say the efforts to place aggressive controls on their identities is harming their mental health, while LGBTQ+ parents in states like Florida reporting that they have considered moving away to protect their families.“The politicians and rightwing zealots behind this anti-LGBTQ+ movement are peddling hysteria,” said Brandon Wolf of the LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Florida, adding: “While it’s a marketing ploy for those folks, it has had real impacts on people across the state.”Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, denounced Republicans’ attacks on public education as a “divisive” political strategy. While it may serve Republicans on the campaign trail, she said, it was doing a “disservice” in the classroom, where teachers must prepare students for a world that is socially, culturally and technologically different than the one into which their parents graduated.“I don’t think it has anything to do with parental rights or education,” she said. “I think it’s a fear of the future.” More

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    ‘Is everyone doing this perfectly but me?’ Michelle Obama on the guilt and anxiety of being a mother – and her golden parenting rules

    ‘Is everyone doing this perfectly but me?’ Michelle Obama on the guilt and anxiety of being a mother – and her golden parenting rules In an exclusive extract from her new book, the former first lady shares what she learned about raising a family while living in the White HouseAfter Barack was elected president, word got out that Marian Robinson, my 71-year-old mother, was planning to move to the White House with us. The idea was that she’d help look after Sasha and Malia, who were seven and 10 at the time, at least until they were settled. She’d make sure that everyone adjusted OK and then move back to Chicago. The media seemed instantly charmed by this notion, requesting interviews with my mother and producing a slew of stories, dubbing her “First Granny” and “Grandmother-in Chief”. It was as if a new and potentially exciting character had been added to the cast of a network drama. Suddenly, my mother was in the news. She was news.If you’ve ever met my mother, however, you’ll know that the last thing she wants is to be well known. She agreed to do a handful of interviews, figuring it was just part of the larger transition process, though she said, again and again, that she was surprised that anyone would care.By her own measure, my mom is nothing special. She also likes to say that while she loves us dearly, my brother and I are not special, either. We’re just two kids who had enough love and a good amount of luck and happened to do well as a result. She tries to remind people that neighbourhoods like the South Side of Chicago are packed full of “little Michelles and little Craigs”. They’re in every school, on every block. It’s just that too many of them get overlooked and underestimated. This would probably count as the foundational point of my mom’s larger philosophy: “All children are great children.”My mother is now 85. She operates with a quiet and mirthful grace. Glamour and gravitas mean nothing to her. She sees right through it, believing that all people should be treated the same. I’ve seen her talk to the pope and to the postman, approaching them both with the same mild-mannered, unflappable demeanour. If someone asks her a question, she responds in plain and direct terms, never catering her answers to suit a particular audience. This is another thing about my mother: she doesn’t believe in fudging the truth.What this meant as we transitioned into the White House was that any time a reporter posed a question to my mom, she would answer it candidly rather than soft-pedalling her thoughts or hewing to any set of talking points generated by nervous communications staffers. Which is how she surfaced in the national news, describing how she’d been dragged kicking and screaming from her quiet little bungalow on Euclid Avenue and more or less forced to live at the nation’s most famous address. She was not being ungracious; she was just being real. How my mom expressed herself to the reporters on this matter was no different than how she’d expressed herself to me. She had not wanted to come to Washington, but I had flat-out begged her. My mother was the rock of our family. Since the time our daughters were babies, she’d helped us out around the edges of our regular childcare arrangements, filling the gaps as Barack and I often improvised and occasionally flailed our way through different career transitions, heavy workload cycles, and the ever-burgeoning after-school lives of our two young girls.So, yes, I did kind of force her to come.The problem was that she was content at home. She had recently retired. She liked her own life in her own space and was uninterested in change more generally. The house on Euclid had all her trinkets. It had the bed she’d slept in for more than 30 years. Her feeling was that the White House felt too much like a museum and too little like a home. (And yes, of course, she voiced this observation directly to a reporter.) But even as she made it known that her move to Washington was largely involuntary and intended to be temporary, she affirmed that her love for Sasha and Malia in the end eclipsed everything else. “If somebody’s going to be with these kids other than their parents,” she told a reporter, giving a shrug, “it better be me.”After that, she decided she was pretty much done giving interviews.Once she’d moved in, my mother became very popular in the White House, even if she wasn’t looking to be. Everyone referred to her simply as “Mrs R”. People on staff enjoyed her precisely because she was so low-key. The butlers, who were mostly Black, liked having a Black grandma in the house. They showed her photos of their own grandkids and occasionally tapped her for life advice. Secret Service agents kept tabs on her on days when she wandered out the gates and headed to the CVS [pharmacy] on 14th Street or when she dropped by Betty Currie’s house – Betty being Bill Clinton’s former secretary – to play cards. The staff housekeepers were often trying to get my mother to let them do more for her, though Mom made it clear that nobody should wait on or clean up after her when she knew perfectly well how to do all that herself.“Just show me how to work the washing machine and I’m good,” she said.Aware of the favour she was doing us, we tried to keep her duties light. She rode with Sasha and Malia to and from school, helping them adjust to the new routine. On days I was busy with Flotus duties, she made sure the girls had snacks and whatever else they needed for after-school activities. Just as she had when I was an elementary-school student, she listened with interest to their tales about what had unfolded over the course of the day. When she and I had time alone, she’d fill me in on anything I’d missed in the kids’ day and then she’d do the same sort of listening for me, acting as my sponge and sounding board.When she wasn’t looking after the girls, my mom made herself deliberately scarce. Her feeling was that we should have our own family life, independent of her. And she felt that she, too, should have a life independent of us. She liked her freedom. She liked her space. She had come to DC with only one intention, and that was to be a reliable support to Barack and me and a caring grandmother to our two kids. Everything else, as far as she saw it, was just fuss and noise.Sometimes we would host VIP guests for a dinner party in the White House residence. They’d look around and ask where my mother was, wondering whether she’d be joining us for the meal.I’d usually just laugh and point up towards the third floor, where she had a bedroom and liked to hang out in a nearby sitting room, which had big windows that looked out at the Washington Monument. “Nope,” I’d say, “Grandma’s upstairs in her happy place.”This essentially was code for: “Sorry, Bono, Mom’s got a glass of wine, some pork ribs on her TV tray, and Jeopardy! is on. Don’t for one second think you could ever compete … ”My mom ended up staying with us in the White House for the whole eight years. Our girls morphed from wide-eyed elementary-schoolers into teenagers in full bloom, intent on achieving independence and the privileges of adult life. As teenagers do, they tested a few limits and did some dumb things. Someone got grounded for missing curfew. Someone posted an eyebrow-raising bikini selfie on Instagram and was promptly instructed by the East Wing communications team to remove it. Someone once had to be dragged by Secret Service agents from an out-of-hand, unsupervised high-school party just as local law enforcement was arriving. Someone talked back to the president of the United States when he had the audacity to ask how she could possibly study Spanish while listening to rap.An episode of even mild disobedience or misbehaviour from our adolescent daughters would set off a ripple of unsettling worry in me. It preyed upon my greatest fear, which was that life in the White House was messing our kids up. One tiny thing would go wrong, and my mother-guilt would kick in. I’d start second-guessing every choice Barack and I had ever made. Self-scrutiny is something women are programmed to excel at, having been thrust into systems of inequality and fed fully unrealistic images of female “perfection” from the time we were kids ourselves. None of us – truly none – ever live up. For mothers, the feelings of not-enoughness can be especially acute. The images of maternal perfection we encounter in advertisements and across social media are often no less fake than what we see on the enhanced and Photoshopped female bodies that are so often upheld as the societal gold standard for beauty. But still, we are conditioned to buy into it, questing after not just the perfect body, but also perfect children, perfect work-life balances, perfect family experiences, and perfect levels of patience. It’s hard not to look around as a mother and think, Is everyone doing this perfectly but me?I am as prone to this type of self-laceration as the next person. At any sign of conflict or challenge with our kids, I would instantly and ferociously start scanning for my own mistakes. Had I been too tough on them or too indulging? Had I been too present or too absent? Was there some parenting book I’d forgotten to study 15 years earlier? Was this a bona fide crisis, a sign of bigger problems? Which critical life lessons had I failed to impart? And was it too late now?As a parent, you are always fighting your own desperation not to fail at the job you’ve been given. There are whole industries built to feed and capitalise on this very desperation, from baby brain gyms and ergonomic strollers to Sat coaches. It’s like a hole that can’t ever be filled. I’m sorry to say that this doesn’t end with any one milestone, either. The desperation doesn’t go away when your kid learns to sleep or walk, or graduates from high school, or even moves into their first apartment and buys a set of steak knives. You will still worry! You will still be afraid for them! Even now, my husband, the former commander-in-chief, can’t help but to text cautionary news stories to our daughters – about the dangers of highway driving or walking alone at night. When they moved to California, he emailed them a lengthy article about earthquake preparedness and offered to have Secret Service give them a natural-disaster-response briefing. (This was met with a polite “No thanks”.)Caring for your kids and watching them grow is one of the most rewarding endeavours on Earth, and at the same time it can drive you nuts.Over the years, I’ve had one secret weapon to help stem the tide of parental anxiety, though – and that’s my own mother. If you’re around her enough, you will start to notice that she is prone to dropping little pearls of wisdom into everyday conversation. Usually, they’re connected to her belief that it’s possible to raise decent children without drama or fuss. These are never blustery proclamations delivered with fury or passion. They tend to be wry thoughts that just slip out quietly, almost like stray pennies falling from her pocket.For years now, I’ve been collecting these pennies, stuffing my own pockets full of them, using them for guidance and as a tool to offset my own doubts and worries as a parent. For a while, I was thinking that maybe my mother should write her own book, that she could tell her life story and share some of the insights that I personally have found to be so valuable. But when I suggested it, she just waved me off, saying: “Now, why on earth would I do that?”She has given me permission, however, to share a few of her more tried-and-true maxims here, some of the points she’s made that have helped me to become a slightly calmer, slightly less guilt-ridden, slightly more decent parent to my own kids. But only if I attach the following disclaimer, which comes direct from my mom herself: “Just make sure they know I’m not in the business of telling anybody how to live.”1. Teach your kids to wake themselves upWhen I was five and starting kindergarten, my parents gifted me with a small electric alarm clock. It had a square face, with little green glow-in-the-dark hands that pointed toward the hour and the minute. My mom showed me how to set my wake-up time and how to turn the alarm off when it buzzed. She then helped me work backwards through all the things I’d need to do in the morning – eat my breakfast, brush my hair and teeth, pick out my clothes, and so on – in order to calculate how many minutes it would take to get myself up and out the door to school. She was there to provide instruction, she’d furnished me with the tool, but the challenge of using it effectively became mine to figure out.And I freaking loved that alarm clock. I loved what it gave me – which was power and agency over my own little life. My mom, I realise now, had passed on this particular tool at a deliberately chosen window early enough in my development, before I was old enough to be cynical about having to get up for school in the morning, before she’d ever have to start shaking me awake herself. It spared her the hassle in some ways, but the real gift was to me: I could wake myself up.If I ever did sleep through my alarm, or otherwise get lazy and drag my feet about going to school, my mother was not interested in doing any nagging or cajoling. She remained hands-off, making clear that my life was largely my own. “Listen, I got my education,” she’d say. “I’ve already been to school. This isn’t about me.”2. It isn’t about you. Good parents are always working to put themselves out of businessThe alarm-clock approach was representative of an even more deliberate undertaking on my parents’ part, and that was to help us kids learn to get on our feet and stay on our feet, not just physically but emotionally. From the day she birthed each of her children, my mother was striving toward a singular goal, and that was to render herself more or less obsolete in our lives. My mom made no bones about the fact that especially when it came to day-to-day practical tasks, her plan was to become as unnecessary in our lives as possible, as quickly as possible. The sooner that time arrived, the more successful she’d deem herself to be as a parent. “I’m not raising babies,” she used to say. “I am raising adults.”It may sound scandalous to say, especially in an era when helicopter-parenting has become de rigueur, but I’m pretty sure that most of my mom’s decision-making was guided by one basic question: What’s the minimum I can do for them right now?This was not a cavalier or self-serving question, but rather a deeply thoughtful one. In our home, self-sufficiency mattered above all else. My mom believed that her hands only got in the way of our hands. If there was something new we needed to learn, she’d show us a way to do it and then quickly step aside. This meant that with the aid of a step stool, Craig and I learned how to wash and dry the dishes long before we were tall enough to reach the sink. We were required to make our beds and do our own laundry as a matter of habit.We did a fair amount of this stuff imperfectly, but the point was we were doing it. My mother wasn’t stepping in. She didn’t correct our errors or squelch our way of doing things, even if our way was slightly different from hers. This, I believe, was my first taste of power. I liked being trusted to get something done. “It’s easier for kids to make mistakes when they’re little,” my mom told me recently when I asked her about this. “Let them make them. And then you can’t make too big a deal out of it, either. Because if you do, they’ll stop trying.”She sat by and allowed us to struggle and make mistakes – with our chores, our homework, and our relationships with various teachers, coaches and friends. None of it was tied to her own self-worth or ego, or done for bragging rights. It was not about her at all, she would say. She was busy trying to wash her hands of us, after all. This meant that her mood didn’t rise or fall on our victories. Her happiness wasn’t dictated by whether we came home with As on our report cards, whether Craig scored a lot of points at his basketball game, or I got elected to student council. When good things happened, she was happy for us. When bad things happened, she’d help us process it before returning to her own chores and challenges. The important thing was that she loved us regardless of whether we succeeded or failed. She lit up with gladness any time we walked through the door.On days when I came home stewing about something a teacher had done (and, I’ll admit, this happened with some regularity), my mom would stand in the kitchen and listen to whatever tirade I had to unleash about the unfairness of some teacher’s remark, or the stupidity of an assignment, or how Mrs So-and-So clearly didn’t know what she was doing. And when I was finished, when the steam of my anger had dissipated to the point that I could think clearly, she’d ask a simple question – one that was fully sincere and also, at the same time, just a tiny bit leading. “Do you need me to go in there for you?”There were a couple of instances over the years when I did genuinely need my mom’s help, and I got it. But 99% of the time, I did not need her to go in on my behalf. Just by asking that question, and by giving me a chance to respond, she was subtly pushing me to continue reasoning out the situation in my head. How bad was it actually? What were the solutions? What could I do?This is how, in the end, I usually knew I could trust my own answer, which was: “I think I can handle it.”My mother helped me to learn how to puzzle out my own feelings and strategies for dealing with them, in large part by just giving them room and taking care not to smother them with her own feelings or opinions. If I got overly sulky about something, she’d tell me to go do one of my chores, not as punishment, exactly, but rather as a means of right-sizing the problem. “Get up and clean that bathroom,” she’d say. “It’ll put your mind on things other than yourself.”Inside of our small home, she created a kind of emotional sandbox where Craig and I could safely rehearse our feelings and sort through our responses to whatever was going on in our young lives. Once, when I was in high school and unhappy about having to deal with a math teacher who struck me as arrogant, my mom heard my complaint, nodded understandingly, and then shrugged. “You don’t have to like your teacher, and she doesn’t have to like you,” she said. “But she’s got math in her head that you need in yours, so maybe you should just go to school and get the math.”She looked at me then and smiled, as if this should be the simplest thing in the world to grasp. “You can come home to be liked,” she said. “We will always like you here.”3. Know what’s truly preciousMy mom remembers that the house she grew up in on the South Side had a big coffee table at the centre of the living room, made of smooth, delicate glass. It was breakable, and so everyone in the family was forced to navigate around it, almost on tiptoe.She was a studious observer of her own family, my mother. She sat squarely in the middle of seven children, which gave her a lot to watch. She had three older siblings and three younger ones, plus two parents who appeared to be polar opposites and didn’t much get along. She saw how her father – my grandfather Southside – tended to baby his kids. He drove them around in his car so that they wouldn’t need to take the bus, afraid of what lay beyond his control. He woke them up in the mornings so they wouldn’t need to set an alarm. He seemed to enjoy their dependence on him.My grandmother Rebecca – my mom’s mom – meanwhile, was stiff and proper, patently unhappy and possibly (my mother believes now) clinically depressed. When she was young, she dreamed of being a nurse, but apparently her mother, a washerwoman who’d raised seven kids, had told her that going to nursing school cost a lot of money and Black nurses rarely got good jobs. So Rebecca married my grandfather and had seven children instead, never seeming terribly content with what her life had yielded. The governing edict in Grandmother Rebecca’s house was that children should be seen and not heard. At the dinner table, my mom and her siblings were instructed to stay silent, to listen mutely and respectfully to the adult conversation around them. When her mother’s friends came to visit their home, my mom and her siblings were required to join the adults in the living room. All of them – from toddlers to teens – were expected to sit politely at the edges, permitted to say nothing more than hello.My mother describes long evenings spent in that room with her mouth clamped shut in agony, hearing plenty of adult-speak she wanted to engage with, plenty of ideas she’d want to quibble with or at least better understand. It must have been during these hours that my mother arrived at the idea, even unconsciously, that her own kids some day would be not just allowed but encouraged to speak. No earnest question would ever be disallowed. Laughter and tears were permitted. Nobody would need to tiptoe.One night, when someone new stopped in for a visit, my mom remembers the woman surveying all the young faces and restless bodies packed into the living room and finally posing a logical question: “How possibly could you have a glass table like this and all of these kids?” She doesn’t recall how my grandmother responded, but my mom knew what the real answer was: her own mother had missed a fundamental lesson about what was precious and what was not. What was the point of seeing children without hearing them?One evening, finally, when my mom was about 12, some grown-up friends came over to their house to visit and, for some foolish reason, one of them happened to sit down on the table. To my grandmother’s horror, and as her children watched silently, it shattered into pieces on the floor. For Mom, it was a bit of cosmic justice. Even today, this story still cracks her up.4. Parent the child you’ve gotThe apartment my parents raised us in had nothing resembling a glass table. We had very little in our lives that was delicate or breakable at all. It’s true that we couldn’t afford anything too fancy, but it’s also true that in the wake of her own upbringing, my mother had no interest in owning showpieces of any sort. At home, Craig and I were permitted to be ourselves. We were respectful of our elders and abided by some general rules, but we also spoke our minds at the dinner table, threw balls indoors, cranked music on the stereo and horsed around on the couch. When something did break – a water glass or a coffee mug or, every once in a while, a window – it was not a big deal.I tried to carry this same approach into my parenting of Sasha and Malia. I wanted them to feel both seen and heard – to always voice their thoughts and to never feel like they had to tiptoe in their own home. Barack and I established basic rules and governing principles for our household: like my mom, I had our kids making their beds as soon as they were old enough to sleep in beds. Like his mom, Barack was all about getting the girls interested early in the pleasure provided by books.What we learned quickly, however, was that raising little kids followed the same basic trajectory we’d experienced with both pregnancy and childbirth: you can spend a lot of time dreaming, preparing and planning for family life to go perfectly, but, in the end, you’re pretty much just left to deal with whatever happens. You can establish systems and routines, anoint your various sleep, feeding and disciplinary gurus from the staggering variety that exist. You can write your family bylaws and declare your religion and your philosophy out loud, but, at some point, sooner rather than later, you will almost surely be brought to your knees, realising that despite your best and most earnest efforts, you are only marginally – and sometimes very marginally – in control. Here’s a story I’m not necessarily proud of. It happened one evening when we still lived in Chicago, when Malia was about seven and Sasha was just four. I was home after a long day of work. As was often the case in those days, Barack was across the country in Washington DC, in the middle of a Senate session that I was probably feeling resentful of. I had served the kids dinner, asked how their days had gone, supervised bath time, and was now cleaning up the last of the dishes, sagging a little on my feet, desperate to be off duty and find even just a half hour to sit quietly by myself.The girls were supposed to be brushing their teeth for bed, but I could hear them running up and down the stairs to our third-floor playroom, giggling wildly as they went.“Hey, Malia, Sasha, it’s time to wind down!” I called from the foot of the stairs.“Now!”There was a brief pause – three whole seconds, maybe – and then more thundering footsteps, another shriek of laughter.“It’s time to settle down!” I yelled again.Yet it was clear I was shouting into the void, fully disregarded by my own kids. I could feel the heat starting to rise in my cheeks, my patience disintegrating, my steam building up, my stack preparing to blow. All I wanted, in the whole wide world, was for those children to go to bed.Since the time I was a kid myself, my mom had always advised me to try to count to 10 in moments like these, to pause just long enough that you might grab on to some reason – to respond rather than react. I think I got as far as counting to eight before I couldn’t stand it another second. I was angry. I ran up the stairs and shouted for the girls to come down from the playroom and join me on the landing. I then took a breath and counted the last two seconds, trying to quell my rage.When the girls appeared, the two of them in their pyjamas, flushed and a little sweaty from the fun they’d been having, I told them I quit. I was resigning from the job of being their mother.I summoned what little calm I could find in myself and said: “Look, you don’t listen to me. You seem to think you don’t need a mother. You seem perfectly happy to be in charge of yourselves, so go right ahead … You can feed and dress yourselves from now on. And you can get yourselves to bed. I am handing you your own little lives and you can manage them yourselves. I don’t care.” I threw my hands in the air, showing them how helpless and hurt I felt. “I am done,” I said. It was in this moment that I got one of my life’s clearest looks at who I was dealing with.Malia’s eyes grew wide, her lower lip starting to tremble. “Oh, Mommy,” she said, “I don’t want that to happen.” And she promptly hustled off to the bathroom to brush her teeth.Something in me relaxed. Wow, I thought, that sure worked fast.Four-year-old Sasha, meanwhile, stood clutching the little blue blankie she liked to carry around, taking a second to process the news of my resignation before landing on her own emotional response, which was pure and unfettered relief.No sooner had her sister shuffled obediently off, Sasha turned without a word and scampered back upstairs to the playroom, as if to say, Finally! This lady is out of my business! Within seconds, I heard her flip on the TV.In a moment of deep fatigue and frustration, I’d handed that child the keys to her own life, and it turned out she was plenty happy to take them, long before she was actually ready to. Much as I liked my mom’s idea about eventually becoming obsolete in my kids’ lives, it was far too early to quit. (I promptly called Sasha back down from the playroom, marched her through the tooth-brushing, and put her to bed.)This one episode provided me with an important lesson about how to proceed with my children. I had one who wanted more guardrails from her parents and one who wanted fewer, one who would respond first to my emotions and another who would take my words at face value.Each kid had her own temperament, her own sensitivities, her own needs, strengths and ways of interpreting the world around her. Barack and I would see these same dynamics manifest over and over again in our children as they grew. On the ski slopes, Malia would make measured, precise turns while Sasha preferred to bomb straight downhill. If you asked how Sasha’s day at school had been, she’d answer with five words before bouncing off to her bedroom, whereas Malia would offer a detailed breakdown of every hour she’d spent away. Malia often sought our advice – like her dad, she likes to make decisions with input – whereas Sasha thrived, just as I once had as a kid, when we trusted her to do her own thing. Neither was right or wrong, good or bad. They were – and are – simply different.In the end, the child you have will grow into the person they’re meant to be. They will learn life their own way. You will control some but definitely not all of how it goes for them. You can’t remove unhappiness from their lives. You won’t remove struggle. What you can give your kids is the opportunity to be heard and seen, the practice they need to make rational decisions based on meaningful values, and the consistency of your gladness that they are there.5. Come home. We will always like you hereMy mother said this to me and Craig not just once, but often. It’s the one message that stood out above all else. You came home to be liked. Home was where you would always find gladness.I recognise that, for many folks, “home” can be a more complicated, less comfortable idea. It may represent a place, or set of people, or type of emotional experience that you are trying to move past. Home could well be a painful spot to which you never want to return. And that is OK. There’s power in knowing where you don’t want to go. You may need to courageously remake your idea of home, fostering the parts of your flame that may have gone unrecognised when you yourself were a child. You may need to cultivate a chosen family rather than a biological one, protecting the boundaries that keep you safe. My mom moved (yes, kicking and screaming) to Washington with us, in part to help with our kids, but also in part because I needed her gladness. I am nothing but a grown-up child myself, someone who at the end of a long day comes through the door feeling worn out and a little needy, looking for solace and acceptance and maybe a snack.In her wise and plain-spoken way, my mother built us all up. She lit up for us every day, so that we could in turn light up for others. She helped make the White House feel less like a museum and more like a home. During those eight years, Barack and I tried to throw open the doors of that home to more people, of more races and backgrounds, and particularly to more children, inviting them in to touch the furniture and explore what was there. We wanted it to feel like a palace of gladness, telegraphing one simple, powerful message: We will always like you here.Mom will take no credit for any of it, of course. She’ll be the first to tell you – still – that she’s nothing special, and it’s never been about her, anyway.Late in 2016, about a month before a new president was sworn in, my mother happily packed her bags. There was little fanfare and, at her insistence, no farewell party. She just moved out of the White House and went back to Chicago, returning to her place on Euclid Avenue, to her old bed and old belongings, pleased that she’d gotten the job done. TopicsMichelle ObamaBarack ObamaUS politicsParents and parentingFamilyWomenGrandparents and grandparentingextractsReuse this content More

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    After the long wait, US parents seeking under-5s’ vaccine face yet more hurdles

    After the long wait, US parents seeking under-5s’ vaccine face yet more hurdlesSome local officials are unsure of how to order Covid vaccines or when they will arrive, while others are aiming to ignore federal guidelines completely Ashley Comegys, a parent of two young children in Florida, was ecstatic when the Covid vaccines were authorized for children above the age of six months in the US. “We’ve been waiting for this for so long,” she said. “We can finally start to spread our wings again.”But then she learned that Florida had missed two deadlines to preorder vaccines and would not make them available through state and local health departments, delaying the rollout by several weeks and significantly limiting access.“Rage does not adequately describe how I felt that they were basically inhibiting me from being able to make a choice to protect my children,” Comegys said.Families with young kids encountered months of delays after the pediatric trials were expanded and regulators pushed back meetings in order to evaluate the data closely. Vaccines for adults were rolled out a year and a half ago.Now new challenges to vaccinating some of America’s youngest are cropping up.“I called probably 20 pharmacies and pediatricians in our area” – including across the state line, said Sheryl Peters, a parent of an 18-month-old and a four-year-old in Tennessee.Even after the vaccines were authorized for this age group, her local health officials didn’t know when they would arrive, and they directed her to the state health department, who told her it would be a few weeks, she said. She was crying on the phone, begging for help, but “nobody knew anything,” she said. “It was so, so disorganized.”-While Tennessee did pre-order vaccines, the rollout has been slow and complicated. And the confusion could deepen.Four Republican lawmakers in Tennessee are petitioning the governor, Bill Lee, to ignore the federal recommendations on vaccinating children under five and to ban state health departments from “distributing, promoting or recommending” the vaccines, creating uncertainty in the state’s approach to vaccinating some of its youngest residents.Tennessee stopped all vaccination outreach to teens – not just around the Covid vaccines – in 2021.The actions by leaders in states like Florida and Tennessee may contribute to existing hesitancy some families feel toward the vaccines, as well as hampering efforts to vaccinate children across the states – particularly those who have been marginalized in the health system, who are also at higher risk of getting sick.“Departments of health, by and large, assist people who don’t have insurance or are on Medicaid or don’t have access to healthcare or live in rural areas where there are no providers,” said Michelle Fiscus, a pediatrician and Tennessee’s former top vaccines official who was fired in July 2021 after promoting vaccines. She was “absolutely furious” to read the lawmakers’ request for a ban.“For an elected body and a governor in a state who has continued to beat the drum of everybody can make their own choice, whether it’s about wearing a mask or gathering in a church or getting a vaccine, to decide for these parents that they are no longer going to have access to these vaccines is really antithetical to everything that they have been preaching,” Fiscus said.“Everything has always been, ‘It’s your choice. You don’t have to quarantine or isolate – it’s your choice. You don’t have to wear a mask – it’s your choice. You don’t have to stay away – it’s your choice.’ But when it comes to getting a vaccine that can actually save lives and prevent hospitalization, then they’re going to make the decision to take that choice away from you.”That’s been one of the hardest parts about this process for Comegys.“If you don’t want to get vaccinated, if you don’t want to mask, OK,” she said. “You can choose that. But why do you then get to make that choice for my family and the way that we want to protect our kids? It doesn’t feel fair.”Some officials continue to spread the narrative that kids aren’t affected by Covid, Fiscus said, even after more than 440 deaths and thousands of hospitalizations among children under five.In March, Florida’s department of health recommended against Covid vaccines for all healthy children. Florida is “affirmatively against the Covid vaccine for young kids”, DeSantis said at a press conference on 16 June, despite ample evidence of the vaccines’ safety and efficacy.The Biden administration soon announced that Florida “reversed course” and would allow doctors to order vaccines directly. State officials disputed the idea of a pivot, saying doctors were already allowed to order the vaccines on their own, but doctors pointed out that the portal to do so was not in place until after the initial shipments had already gone out to every other state.“The state of Florida intentionally missed multiple deadlines to order vaccines to protect its youngest kids,” said Dr Ashish K Jha, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator.With the delays and the confusion, many doctors and health systems haven’t received doses yet.Only federally qualified health centers and pharmacies participating in the national pharmacy program could order vaccines directly in Florida. But most pharmacies can only vaccinate kids three and older, leaving significant access gaps for younger children. (CVS can administer the vaccine to kids as young as 18 months through its Minute Clinic.) And some opted out entirely, with the grocery chain Publix announcing it will not offer the vaccine to children under five through its pharmacies.In Tennessee, Lee has not yet signaled whether he is considering limiting the vaccines. And even if vaccinations and information isn’t limited in Tennessee, the lawmakers’ request could add to hesitancy around the vaccines.“That seems to be their goal, to continue to spread vaccine misinformation and disinformation and to continue to erode confidence around these vaccines,” Fiscus said.In Florida, vaccinations will probably stall amid the message that Covid vaccines for kids aren’t recommended and the confusion around how to find them, especially because Florida isn’t offering the pediatric vaccines at state and local health departments and because pharmacies usually only vaccinate kids above the age of three.“I genuinely don’t know, if you have a child under three, where you will go for that here if your pediatrician’s not getting it,” Comegys said. “Unless you’re on top of it, it’s going to be really hard to find.”Many pediatricians in her area are short-staffed and aren’t able to reach out to families to let them know the vaccines have been authorized and how to get them.Her pediatrician was able to place an order for the under-five vaccines a week ago, but it’s going to take several weeks before they arrive. Her two children were placed on the waitlist.It’s been difficult to know the vaccines are rolling out in other states while her family still can’t access them, Comegys said. “The fact that it is available, and I can’t access it – that’s where I get really angry and really upset.”Families that want to vaccinate their kids are eager to get the shots as soon as possible, as the US faces another potential wave from the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, and with the return to school rapidly approaching.But many families feel like they put their lives on hold while much of the rest of the world moved on. Peters had a family cruise planned for May that they canceled because the shots weren’t available yet, while Comegys is canceling a vacation planned for July.“The finish line has been so close,” Comegys said. “And then to hear, ‘Oh no, it’s going to be another couple of weeks or a couple of months.’ I’m so angry. We’re so close, and now you’re not going to let me get there.”TopicsCoronavirusVaccines and immunisationFloridaParents and parentingUS politicsHealthFamilynewsReuse this content More

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    ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it

    ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it For Black women in Congress, maternal mortality hits close to home. The Black Maternal Health Caucus seeks changeWhen Alma Adams’s daughter complained of abdominal pain during a difficult pregnancy, her doctor overlooked her cries for help. The North Carolina congresswoman’s daughter had to undergo a last-minute caesarean section. She and her baby daughter, now 16, survived. “It could have gone another way. I could have been a mother who was grieving her daughter and granddaughter,” Adams told the Guardian, following a week in which the White House highlighted the crisis of pregnancy-related deaths among Black women. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Black women die at three times the rate of white women.For Adams and other Black women in Congress, who formed the Black Maternal Health Caucus, the issue hits close to home. Last week, during Black Maternal Health Week, they talked about how their experiences and the work of advocates had propelled legislation, known as the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021, to fight a healthcare crisis that disproportionately affects Black women regardless of income.The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among industrialized countries. Since 2000, the maternal mortality rate has risen nearly 60%, making it worse now than it was decades earlier. More than half of these deaths are preventable.Health experts point to the fact that other industrialized countries have significantly different approaches to motherhood than the US, including paid maternity leave, access to comprehensive postpartum care and enough maternity care providers, especially midwives, to meet the needs of their populations. Policy advocates add that the crisis among Black women is a symptom of racism in the nation’s healthcare system – from who has access to care to attitudes toward Black people and their bodies.“It doesn’t matter what your socioeconomic status is. It doesn’t matter how much insurance you have, or how much education you have,” Adams said, adding that her daughter, Jeanelle Lindsay, had a master’s degree and health insurance. “Those things don’t matter. This could happen to anyone. Look at women like Beyoncé and Serena Williams, who had these near misses because the doctors really didn’t pay the kind of attention that they should have.”Black women in the House used the week of recognition to bring attention to several bills that are part of a sweeping Momnibus package to address the dangers of birthing while Black. Their efforts to elevate the longtime work of organizations such as the Black Mamas Matter Alliance showed the power of representation in putting issues affecting Black women on the congressional agenda, said Lauren Underwood, an Illinois congresswoman and registered nurse.“It takes women in these spaces to call out problems, set an agenda, and bring together a coalition of legislators, advocates, and community members to work toward comprehensive, evidence-based solutions that will save moms’ lives,” Underwood said in an email.In January 2019, after Underwood received her committee assignments, Adams met with her to see if she wanted to launch a caucus focused on Black maternal health. One of Underwood’s friends, an epidemiologist at the CDC, had died three weeks after she gave birth. “I was still grappling with her death when I came to Congress,” Underwood said.Three months later, they launched the caucus with 53 founding members, including Ayanna Pressley, Lucy McBath and Barbara Lee. Today, it has 115 members from both parties.After consulting with maternal health advocacy groups, Underwood and Adams introduced the Momnibus Act in March 2020, nine bills aimed at combating maternal health disparities through investment in community-based programs and other efforts to rectify social determinants of health – the conditions in which people live, work and grow up – that affect who lives and who dies in childbirth.Their legislative pursuit was timely, coming before a pandemic that would bring racial health disparities to the public’s attention. Between 2019 and 2020, the mortality rate for Black and Latina women and birthing people rose during the first year of the pandemic.Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black and South Asian female vice-president, amplified the issue last week during a speech at the Century Foundation, a progressive thinktank based in Washington DC. Harris called for “building a future in which being Black and pregnant is a time filled with joy and hope rather than fear”.As a US senator from California, Harris was lead sponsor for the Senate version of the Momnibus Act in 2020, which stalled in committee. Underwood and Adams, along with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, reintroduced the Momnibus bill in February 2021.Most of the proposals in the package are included in the Build Back Better Act, a social spending bill that is stuck in gridlock.“Were it not for Black women in the Congressional Black Caucus, there would not be a Black Maternal Health Caucus,” said the Massachusetts representative Ayanna Pressley. “When we say that we are the voice of Congress, we mean that.”Pressley lost her paternal grandmother, whom she never knew, when she died giving birth to Pressley’s uncle in the 1950s. “Decades later, the Black maternal mortality crisis continues to rob us of our loved ones and to destabilize families,” she said during the Century Foundation event.What explains the disparities in outcomes between Black and white mothers boils down to what Pressley called “policy violence”. It’s not just the discrimination that Black women and birthing people experience, but also the lack of access to quality healthcare and medical coverage.“These are the result of centuries of laws in a systematic, systematically racist health care system that too often discounts our pay, ignores our voices, disregards our lives,” Pressley said. “Birthing while Black should not be a death sentence.”In November 2021, Joe Biden signed into law one of the bills in the Momnibus package that invests $15m in maternity care for veterans. But other legislative efforts remain stalled in Congress. Eight bills that were part of the original Momnibus package are part of the Build Back Better Act, according to a tracker by The Century Foundation. They include awarding grants to community organizations to help pregnant people find affordable housing, documenting transportation barriers for pregnant and postpartum people, expanding food stamp eligibility and permanently expanding Medicaid coverage for mothers in every state for a year after childbirth.And on Friday, Booker and seven other lawmakers introduced Mamas First Act, which would expand Medicaid to cover services from doulas and midwives.“We’ve made historic progress, from the enactment of the first bill in my Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act to the recent cabinet meeting Vice-President Harris led, the first-ever White House cabinet meeting convened to address maternal health disparities as a national priority,” Underwood said.Adams pointed to another piece of the legislation that feels very close to home: the Kira Johnson Act, named after a 39-year-old Black mother who, after complaining of abdominal pain, died in 2016 from a hemorrhage following a routine caesarean section. The bill would direct the health and human services department to send grants to community groups focused on improving the maternal health outcomes for Black, Latino and other marginalized communities and for training to reduce racial bias and discrimination among healthcare providers.The connection between Johnson’s and her daughter’s situations resonated with Adams. The pain they experienced was dismissed – a familiar form of racial bias that the Momnibus package attempts to address.“Either you have a mother, you are a mother, or you know women who are moms,” Adams said. “When we raise the tide for Black women, who are among the most marginalized and the most vulnerable, we ultimately raise the tide for all women.”TopicsUS CongressParents and parentingFamilyKamala HarrisAyanna PressleyHouse of RepresentativesUS SenatefeaturesReuse this content More

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    I’m a gig worker with zero parental leave. Even four weeks off would make a huge difference

    Parents and parentingI’m a gig worker with zero parental leave. Even four weeks off would make a huge differenceAs US politicians argue over paid time off for parents, workers like me are forced to keep working while caring for children Andrew Lawrence@by_drewMon 8 Nov 2021 06.00 ESTLast modified on Mon 8 Nov 2021 12.21 ESTNine months ago I was not yet a bleary-eyed dad juggling work and two baby boys, but I did know a second baby was imminent. What should’ve been a happy milestone was quickly blunted by a boomeranging lament – that there would be no taking any paid parental leave for me, a gig worker.When my first was born, just before the pandemic, I was a freelance writer in the throes of an MFA program. My wife decided it was more cost-effective to stay home with our son than return to work; soon after Covid forced everyone inside, local daycare options vanished.And even though our son was thriving in preschool and my work wasn’t drastically affected by stay-at-home precautions, a second child – blessing and all – was still a nervous endeavor that was going to demand so much more of me. Still, for all of my agita about the challenge ahead, I was still well equipped. I write from anywhere (the kid’s room, the car), keep odd hours and that flexibility meshes well with diaper changes, school runs and bedtime stories. I can stay on the grind and contribute at home. I’m fortunate, sure, but I’m still killing myself to live. And it’s not just me.Working American parents are stretched thinner than ever. In the past half-century the share of working moms has jumped from 51% to 72%, according to Pew Research; almost half of two-parent families include two full-time working parents. And yet despite this trend toward balanced parenting the US remains the glaring exception among 41 resourceful countries that offer a national paid parental leave mandate. A 2019 congressional survey estimated 16% of private-sector workers qualified for family leave, and even then a recent Ball State University study found that only 5% of new dads take two or more weeks of leave. The figures are even more discouraging when you zero in on race. And yet there’s no question that part-time workers – 11% of whom have access to family leave, according to the Department of Labor – have it hardest. In a country that is increasingly pivoting toward a gig economy, this patchy social safety net should be an acute concern.Only nine states and Washington DC mandate paternity leave – and even then it isn’t paid. The Family and Medical Leave Act gives parents unpaid leave for public agency workers and employees who have worked at least one year at private companies with at least 50 employees. That’s even as the benefits of paid leave have been well established for decades – most obviously in kids who grow up to be happy and self-assured. But paid family leave is good for the economy too, as workers with access are much more likely to return to their jobs and strengthen the overall labor force.You’d think a president whose origin story derives from his being there for his kids after his wife and infant daughter were tragically killed in a car accident would have an easier time making a case for paid family leave. But it had been a sticking point in Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill, with the terms going from 12 weeks to four weeks to out entirely (for Dino Senator Joe Manchin) to back in the fold when the bill narrowly survived a House vote last Friday. The haggling persisted even as Ball State researchers also found that 86% Americans supported some form of paid family leave, with participants on average pushing for 13 months off. When the Atlanta Braves utility player Ehire Adrianza took paternity leave before game six of the World Series, Braves fans mostly cheered – probably because it didn’t cost them the championship.Of course some will find demands for paid family leave laughable, especially coming from a parent who didn’t push. Last month Joe Lonsdale, a smirking tech venture capitalist and father of three, gaslit the Twitterverse after pronouncing any prominent man who takes six months off with his newborn was “a loser”. It was a not-so-subtle jab at the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, who continues to draw harsh criticism for exploiting the 12 weeks of paid parental leave he receives from the federal government after he and his partner, Chasten, welcomed twins in September. “This idea that both parents should get maternity and paternity leave at the same time is a little weird,” quipped Joe Rogan, also a father of three, on a recent podcast episode.Allow Instagram content?This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click ‘Allow and continue’.Allow and continueBut then again that figures. Rogan just scored a $100m deal from Spotify – which, incidentally, offers its employees six months of paid parental leave regardless of gender. (“And we strongly urge you to take it,” the company tells prospective workers.) Lonsdale and Rogan’s considerable fortunes don’t just buy home help on demand. (Tellingly, Ball State researchers found high-income-earning fathers were most likely to take leave.) It assumes not just that moms must bear the majority of infant caregiving, but also that they don’t need or aren’t deserving of undivided physical or emotional postpartum support. It assumes that same-sex parents can’t be overwhelmed, too. And it assumes childbirth to be a fairly straightforward affair.It dismisses the mounting challenges for women who choose to start their families after 35 (the start line for “geriatric” pregnancies), and altogether overlooks the childbirthing risks for black women – who are four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Beyoncé, Serena Williams and Allyson Felix have been candid about their struggles. Meghan Markle, who has been just as open about her own pregnancy trials, made personal appeals to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Given the broad, bipartisan public support for paid family leave, it’s especially galling that pro-choice championing, family values-espousing conservatives and progressive Democrats were so obstinate about this. Even four paid weeks off makes a massive difference for workers like me. My wife and I committed to a home delivery. As we inched closer to the due date I promised to begin winding down my workload, but as a creative contractor running a small business, that’s easier said than done – and then not done at all when work got really nuts. The further we sailed past our due date, the more the frustration built. Ten days later I was finally forced to hit the pause button when the baby arrived and was immediately rushed to the hospital. While he lay in a NICU bed, there was still a toddler back home who’d be waking up any minute expecting a wardrobe change and a hot breakfast. If it weren’t for family rushing in from out of state and the profound generosity of so many friends and neighbors, I don’t know how we’d have made it through. Finally, just before Halloween, we brought the baby home to a hero’s welcome; his brother, dressed as Iron Man with hands outstretched, shouting “Gimme!” A baby in the hospital, Tony Stark back home, pets to feed, dishes to wash – this is a heaping plate in the best of times, let alone with the extra pressure of urgent work deadlines. But for the moment gig workers and small business owners who survive by eating what they kill have no choice but to press ahead with their jobs and react to the new additions to the family as they come. Now comes the hard part: reconfiguring routines, redrawing responsibilities, reckoning with the increased diaper flow, setting up the rest of the nursery – when all I’d rather do is take a nap. In a world where paid family leave is the norm it’s past the time the US did better by its working parents. TopicsParents and parentingFamilyUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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    Joe Manchin single-handedly denied US families paid leave. That’s just cruel | Jill Filipovic

    OpinionJoe ManchinJoe Manchin single-handedly denied US families paid leave. That’s just cruelJill FilipovicAll of America’s economic peers have a paid family leave policy. Why would a Democrat oppose such a basic measure? Fri 29 Oct 2021 06.30 EDTLast modified on Fri 29 Oct 2021 16.40 EDTAmericans will remain some of the last people on the planet to have no right to paid leave when they have children, and for that, you can thank Joe Manchin.Biden pitches $1.75tn scaled-down policy agenda to House DemocratsRead moreManchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, tanked the paid leave portion of an increasingly narrow domestic policy package. Manchin had already gotten Democrats to make what was once a sweeping and ambitious bill smaller and less effectual. Even though the Democrats control the House, the Senate and the White House, and are not expected to maintain control of Congress after this year’s midterm elections, they still can’t get it together to deliver what the American people put them in office to do. And that’s because of Manchin, as well as his fellow centrist holdout, Kyrsten Sinema.To be fair, 50 Republicans are to blame for this as well. All 50 of them oppose Biden’s paid family leave plan, and none were expected to vote for this bill. If even a few of them had been willing to cross the aisle to support parents and new babies – to be, one might say, “pro-life” and “pro-family” – then Manchin would not have the power he does to deny paid family leave to millions of American parents. So let’s not forget this reality, too: most Democrats want to create a paid family leave program. Republicans do not.But Manchin’s actions are particularly insulting and egregious because he is a Democrat. He enjoys party support and funding. He benefits when Democrats do popular things. And now, he’s standing in the way of a policy that the overwhelming majority of Democrats want, and that is resoundingly popular with the American public, including conservatives and Republicans.Paid family leave brings a long list of benefits to families, from healthier children to stronger marriages. And it benefits the country by keeping more working-age people in the workforce – when families don’t have paid leave, mothers drop out, a dynamic we’ve seen exacerbated by the pandemic. By some estimates, paid family leave could increase US GDP by billions of dollars.This is good policy. But it’s also a policy that is, in large part, about gender equality. While paid leave is (or would have been) available to any new parent, the reality is that it’s overwhelmingly women who are the primary caregivers for children, it’s overwhelmingly women who birth children, and it’s overwhelmingly women who are pushed out of the paid workforce when they have kids.As it stands, many well-paid white-collar employees do get some paid leave. It’s working-class parents who often don’t – and who can’t afford to take several weeks off of an hourly-wage job, even to recover from childbirth or to care for a brand-new infant who needs 24/7 attention. These workers, and particularly the women among them, are put in an impossible bind: money but no ability to care for a child, or caring for a child and no money. A paid family leave program would put an end to that particularly American cruelty.We are one of the most prosperous societies in the history of the world, and yet our lack of paid leave policies means that new mothers are back working at fast-food restaurants days after having major abdominal surgery, leaving their infants home with whoever is free to watch them. Or, our lack of paid leave policies mean that new mothers simply quit their jobs, pitching themselves into financial precarity at the exact moment they need greater stability, more money and less stress.It’s astoundingly cruel. And it’s entirely unnecessary – all of America’s economic peers have a paid family leave policy, and most of them have policies that are far more generous and far more sensible than even the plan Democrats were debating. This is not a mysterious or unsolved problem; every other wealthy and developed country on Earth has largely solved it. We are an outlier because we are simply choosing to make life unnecessarily brutal for families, and for women in particular.And this week, it’s Joe Manchin in particular who is choosing, single-handedly, to continue making life unnecessarily brutal for families, and for women in particular. He’s not the only bad actor, but right now, he’s the most powerful one.And he’s using his political power not to advocate for what his constituents want and need, but simply to demonstrate that he has it – to show that he is more influential than the American president, that American social and economic policy lies in his hands.It’s a pathetic, petty little narcissistic display. And it’s American families, and particularly American mothers, who suffer so that Joe Manchin can feel like a big man.
    Jill Filipovic is the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind
    TopicsJoe ManchinOpinionParents and parentingDemocratsUS politicsFamilycommentReuse this content More

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    The Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. Can their sons reveal the truth?

    “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs…… ” So goes the opening sentence of Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar, referring to the Jewish American couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and sent to the electric chair exactly 68 years ago today. Their execution casts a morbid shadow over Plath’s book, just as it did over the United States, and it is seen by many as the nadir of America’s engagement with the cold war. The Rosenbergs are still the only Americans ever put to death in peacetime for espionage, and Ethel is the only American woman killed by the US government for a crime other than murder.During their trial, Ethel in particular was vilified for prioritising communism over her children, and the prosecution insisted she had been the dominant half of the couple, purely because she was three years older. “She was the mastermind of this whole conspiracy,” assistant prosecutor Roy Cohn told the judge. But questions about whether she was guilty at all have been growing louder in recent years, and a new biography presents her in a different light. “Ethel was killed for being a wife. She was guilty of supporting her husband,” Anne Sebba, author of Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy, tells me. And for that, the 37-year-old mother of two young children had five massive jolts of electricity pumped through her body. Her death was so brutal that eyewitnesses reported that smoke rose out of her head.The killing of the Rosenbergs was so shocking at the time and is so resonant of a specific period in American history that it has become part of popular culture. In Tony Kushner’s play Angels In America, Ethel haunts Cohn. In Woody Allen’s Crimes And Misdemeanours, Clifford (played by Allen) says sarcastically that he loves another character “like a brother – David Greenglass”, referencing Ethel’s brother, who testified against her and Julius to save himself and his wife. The most moving cultural response to the Rosenbergs’ deaths was EL Doctorow’s 1971 novel, The Book Of Daniel, which imagines the painful life afterwards of the Rosenbergs’ oldest child, whom he renames Daniel. In reality, the older Rosenberg child is called Michael, and his younger brother is Robert. It is a bitter, rainy spring day when I interview the Rosenbergs’ sons. Only three and seven when their parents were arrested, six and 10 when they were killed, they are now grandfathers with grey beards and known as Michael and Robert Meeropol, having long ago taken the surname of the couple who adopted them after the US government orphaned them. When their parents were arrested, Michael, always a challenging child (“That’s putting it kindly,” he says), acted out even more, whereas Robert withdrew into himself. This dynamic still holds true: “Robert is more reserved and I tend to fly off the handle,” says Michael, 78, a retired economics professor, whose eyes spark with fire when he recalls old battles. Patient, methodical Robert, 74, a former lawyer, considers every word carefully. We are all talking by video chat, and when I ask where Robert is, he replies that he’s at home in Massachusetts, in a town “90 miles west of Boston and 150 miles north-east of New York City. To be more specific… ” Michael is in his home in New York state, in a town he describes as “just south of Pete Seeger’s home”, referring to the folksinger and leftwing hero.The differences between the brothers are obvious, but so is their closeness: Michael calls Robert “Chando”, a childhood nickname, and since Michael’s wife, Ann, died two years ago, his younger brother has called him every day.“Rob and I are unusual siblings in so many ways. We have dealt with so many struggles, so we are very enmeshed,” says Michael. I ask how it would have been if he had gone through it all on his own. He recoils, poleaxed by the thought. “I think it would have been very, very hard,” he says eventually. Perhaps just as importantly, they have been there for one another as adults, as more evidence about their parents’ case has trickled out, and they’ve had to keep reframing their own past. “Throughout the 70s and 80s, we believed our parents were just communists who were framed. Do you want to add anything, Chando?” says Michael. “Yes, I would add: you can frame guilty people,” says Robert.The brothers’ struggles began on 17 July 1950 when their father, Julius, was arrested in the family’s home on New York’s Lower East Side on suspicion of espionage. Michael had been listening to The Lone Ranger on the radio, an episode in which the Lone Ranger was framed, and now the show seemed to be happening in front of him. The previous month, Ethel’s younger brother, David Greenglass, had been arrested for the same crime. Equally significantly, the Korean war had just begun, which was seen by the US as a fight to stop communism destroying the American way of life. Senator Joseph McCarthy was warning Americans about “homegrown commies”. By the time Julius was arrested, America was in a red panic. A month later, Ethel was seized by the FBI and charged. She called Michael at home and told him that she, like his father, had been arrested.“So you can’t come home?” he asked.“No,” she replied.The seven-year-old screamed.Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, like David Greenglass and his wife, Ruth, were communists. Like a lot of Jews, they became interested in the movement in the 1930s when it seemed like a means to fight against fascism. Unlike many others, they stuck with it after the Soviet Union and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, ostensibly, if not officially, allying the countries. “It’s easy today to criticise them, but these were people who grew up in poverty during the Depression and saw the rise of fascism. They thought they were making the world a better place,” says Sebba. As a historian, Sebba has built up a reputation for writing in particular about women, such as Wallis Simpson. “I do like writing about a woman who has been misunderstood,” she says, and few, according to her, have been more misunderstood than Ethel Rosenberg.The Rosenbergs are almost invariably discussed as a duo, but as her sons have slowly realised, and as Sebba shows in her book, their stories were very different. While Julius had a close relationship with his mother, Sophie, Ethel and her mother, Tessie, had a difficult one. Tessie favoured David, the baby of the family, and for Ethel, communism was a means of educating herself and separating herself from her mother.David briefly worked as a machinist at an atomic power laboratory called Los Alamos Laboratory. He was arrested when he was identified as part of a chain that passed on secrets about the technology to the Soviets. David quickly admitted his guilt, and his lawyer advised him that the best thing he could do for himself, and to give his wife immunity, would be to turn in someone else. Then the Rosenbergs were arrested. The FBI believed that Julius was a kingpin who recruited Americans to spy against their own country, and that he had used David to pass on secrets of the atomic bomb to the Russians. The initial allegations against Ethel were that she “had a discussion with Julius Rosenberg and others in November 1944”, and “had a discussion with Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass and others in January 1945” – in other words, that she talked to her husband and brother. It was feeble stuff, as the FBI knew, yet Myles Lane, the chief assistant attorney for the Southern District of New York, told the press: “If the crime with which she, Ethel, is charged had not occurred perhaps we would not have the present situation in Korea.”Michael played hangman with his father on prison visits, although he didn’t realise the irony until he was an adultInitially, David testified that his sister had not been involved in any espionage. However, his wife, Ruth, said that Ethel had typed up the information David had given Julius to pass on to the Soviets. David quickly changed his story the week before the trial to corroborate his wife’s version, probably under pressure from Roy Cohn, the ambitious chief assistant prosecutor. This was the key evidence against Ethel, and the chief prosecutor, Irving Saypol, conjured up an image for the jury of Ethel at the typewriter, pounding the keys, striking “blow by blow, against her own country in the interest of the Soviets”. But even with that, Myles Lane, who had publicly laid the blame for the Korean war at Ethel’s feet, admitted privately in a closed-door meeting of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy: “The case is not strong against Mrs Rosenberg. But for the purpose of acting as a deterrent, I think it is very important that she be convicted, too, and given a stiff sentence.” FBI director J Edgar Hoover agreed, writing “proceeding against the wife will serve as a lever” to make her husband talk.At the trial, under Cohn’s questioning, David testified that in September 1945 he gave Julius a sketch and description of the atomic bomb, and that Ethel was deeply involved in the discussions between them. Because he had given names, David was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and ended up serving nine. Ruth was free to stay home and look after their children. The Rosenbergs, who insisted they were innocent, were found guilty. Judge Irving Kaufman carefully considered their sentence. Hoover, aware of the tenuousness of the case against Ethel, and how it would look if America executed a young mother, urged against the death sentence for her, but Cohn argued for it and won.Michael and Robert never saw the Greenglasses again after the trial, and all Michael remembers of them is: “David looked like a nondescript schlub and Ruth was a cold fish. But is that true, or just a nephew who wants to expose the people who lied about my parents?” he asks. They constantly question their own memories of the past. Robert says that when he thinks of his family before his parents were arrested he has, “this feeling of a golden age, of a wonderful loving family before it was ripped apart. But is that just fantasy?”Ethel has long been portrayed as a cold woman, one who, as Kaufman said in his sentencing, loved communism more than her children. In reality, as Sebba reveals in her book, she was a particularly devoted mother, with a progressive interest in child psychology. Before her arrest, she regularly saw a child therapist, Elizabeth Phillips, for help with Michael and to learn how to be a better mother. During her three years in prison, she faithfully kept up her subscription to Parents magazine. But when she was arrested, all the aspirations she had harboured for giving her boys the kind of happy childhood that had been denied to her imploded spectacularly. At first the boys lived with her mother, Tessie, who made no secret of her resentment of the situation. Things got even worse when they were put in a children’s home. Eventually, Julius’s mother, Sophie, took them in, but two little boys were too much for their frail grandmother to handle. None of their many aunts or uncles would take them, either because they sided with David and Ruth, or they were scared. So they were shipped around to various families. All Ethel could do was write letters to her lawyer, Manny Bloch, desperately laying out her parenting theories in the hope they would somehow be followed (“One cannot behave inconsistently with children… ”) For the sake of the boys, she always maintained a happy front when they visited.“We always had a good time on the prison visits: singing, talking, enjoying ourselves,” says Michael. He even used to play hangman with his father, although he didn’t realise the irony until he was an adult.The US government said that if Julius gave them names of other spies, and he and Ethel admitted their guilt, their lives would be spared. The Rosenbergs issued a public statement: “By asking us to repudiate the truth of our innocence, the government admits its own doubts concerning our guilt… we will not be coerced, even under pain of death, to bear false witness.” On 16 June 1953, the children were brought to Sing Sing prison in New York State to say goodbye to their parents. Ethel kept up her usual brave appearance, but on this occasion Michael – who was 10 and understood what was happening – was upset by her outward calm. Afterwards, Ethel wrote a letter to her children: “Maybe you thought that I didn’t feel like crying when we were hugging and kissing goodbye huh… Darlings, that would have been so easy, far too easy on myself… because I love you more than I love myself and because I knew you needed that love far more than I needed the relief of crying.” On 19 June, Ethel and Julius wrote their last letter to their children: “We wish we might have had the tremendous joy and gratification of living our lives out with you… Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. We press you close and kiss you with all our strength. Lovingly, Daddy and Mommy.” Just after 8pm that day, the Rosenbergs were executed. They were buried on Long Island, in one of the few Jewish cemeteries that would accept their bodies.With their extended family still unwilling to look after them (“People later said to me, ‘A Jewish family and no family members took in the kids?!’” says Michael wryly), the boys were eventually adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, an older leftwing couple. They could finally grow up in anonymity among loving people who told them their parents had been brave and admirable. Abel Meeropol was a songwriter whose biggest hit was Strange Fruit, so the boys were raised on the royalties from the most famous song of the civil rights era. “I never thought about our aunts and uncles not taking us in, because living with Abel and Anne, it felt like we won the lottery,” says Michael. But memories of their parents were always there. Robert developed a strong physical resemblance to Ethel. “It made me want to hug and kiss him all the time,” says Michael.The boys enjoyed a happy, academic, leftwing upbringing as Meeropols. They told almost no one their real surname, and Robert, who was a toddler when his parents were imprisoned, never considered reverting to it. It was more complicated for Michael, who could remember playing ball games with his father in their apartment (“If it went in Robby’s playpen, it was a home run.”) Eventually, he decided as an adult that reverting to Rosenberg would be “artificial”. It soon didn’t matter, because in 1973 the local media unmasked them, ignoring their pleas to retain their anonymity. They decided to put the exposure to good use by campaigning for their parents. They wrote a memoir, We Are Your Sons, and sued the FBI and CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, obtaining more than 300,000 once secret documents which they believed proved their parents’ innocence. But the story had only started to unfold.In 1995, the Venona papers were declassified. These were messages sent between Soviet intelligence agencies that had been intercepted and decrypted by US counterintelligence from 1943 to 1980. The Rosenbergs were named in them. Julius, it was now clear, had definitely been spying for the Soviets, so much so that he was given the codename “Antenna” and later “Liberal”. David and Ruth Greenglass were also sufficiently productive as spies to be given codenames – “Calibre” and “Wasp”. But there was little about Ethel. She didn’t have a codename. She was, one cable noted, “a devoted person” – ie a communist – but, the cables also stressed, “[she] does not work”, ie she was not a spy. But when describing the recruitment of Ruth, the cable said, “Liberal and his wife recommend her as an intelligent and clever girl.”“At first, I hated that transcript, because it made Julius look guilty of something,” says Robert. “But then I realised this was as close to a smoking gun we would ever get, because it said that Julius and Ethel didn’t do the thing they were killed for. Ethel didn’t work and Julius wasn’t an atomic spy, he was a military-industrial spy,” he says, meaning that although Julius passed on details of weapons, he wasn’t passing on details about the atomic bomb.When our father got involved with the Soviets, our mother stayed out of it so that if he got arrested, she could take care of usMichael was more sceptical of the Venona papers and wondered if they were “CIA disinformation”. But in 2008 he finally accepted them when Morton Sobell – who had been convicted for espionage along with the Rosenbergs and served 18 years in Alcatraz – gave an interview to the New York Times. He said that he and Julius had been spies together, and confirmed that Julius had not helped the Russians build the bomb. “What he gave them was junk,” Sobell said of Julius, probably because he didn’t know anything about the bomb. Of Ethel, Sobell said, “She knew what he was doing, but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.” This corroborated what Aleksandr Feklisov, a retired KGB agent, said in 1997 when he admitted that he had been Julius’s handler. Feklisov agreed that Julius had passed on military secrets but, “he didn’t understand anything about the atomic bomb, and he couldn’t help us”. Ethel, he said, “had nothing to do with this, she was completely innocent. I think she knew [what her husband was doing], but for that you don’t kill people.”Michael has made peace with the revelation that his father was a spy. “As Robby’s daughter Jenny said to me, there is a positive to not thinking of our family as hapless victims. We want to be people who take charge of our lives,” he says. But he and Robert repeatedly emphasise that their uncle David’s claim that he gave Julius atomic information in September 1945 is extremely dubious. Recent research corroborates their argument: Soviet sources state that Julius stopped working for them in February 1945. “[The government] took a small-fry spy and framed him to be an atomic spy,” is Michael’s take on his father. Ethel, however, was a very different story.In 1996, David Greenglass gave an interview in which he finally admitted he lied about his sister: “I told them the story and left her out of it, right? But my wife put her in it. So what am I gonna do, call my wife a liar? My wife is my wife. I mean, I don’t sleep with my sister, you know.” He added, “I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember.” It is possible that Ethel helped to recruit Ruth and David, but they needed little encouragement. Many Jews of their milieu were communists and the Greenglasses’ letters show they were even more enthusiastic about communism than the Rosenbergs. Ruth died in 2008, David in 2014.Robert launched the campaign for Ethel’s exoneration in 2015 – not for a pardon, because that would suggest she had done something wrong, but a full exoneration. He is, he says, “more focused” on his mother than his father. “Perhaps my willingness to separate Ethel from Julius is a sign I don’t feel the same way about my parents,” he says.I ask what he means.“I wonder if there’s a little voice in the back of my head that’s saying, ‘You know, Julius, you really shouldn’t have done it, because you had kids,’” he says with some effort. I ask how he feels when he looks back at his father’s letters from prison, in which he insisted he was innocent. “I think he was spinning: he wasn’t an atomic spy, like they said, but he was a spy, so it wasn’t the whole truth. And I think he thought if he confessed to anything they would kill him, so denying everything was the best option. But yes, I have some ambivalences.”Michael, who has clearer memories of his parents, sees his father’s behaviour differently: “Should a man not have children if he goes off to war? In those days, that wasn’t the thought process. For a Jew and a communist, this was about survival.”Ethel’s innocence raises more questions than it settles. First, given that she was a true believer in communism, why didn’t she join her husband, brother and sister-in-law in spying?“Robby and I think that when our father got involved in helping the Soviets, our mother stayed out of it so that if he got arrested, she could take care of us,” says Michael.This sounds to me like a son hoping that their parents at least tried to protect their sons. But Julius and Ethel seemed to have little understanding of the danger they were putting the family in. After all, Greenglass was arrested a month before Julius, so they had plenty of time to flee the country, but didn’t. Sebba’s theory strikes me as more likely: “I think she just had other concerns: she was looking after her children and trying to be present for them. She gave up activism when her children were born. Her main identity was as a wife and a mother, and that’s what mattered to her,” she says.So why didn’t Julius save Ethel? The FBI was right: he had recruited spies, so he could easily have given names and probably saved her life, and very possibly his own, too.“Dad’s unwillingness to rat out his fellows wasn’t about him wanting to be a soldier of Stalin,” says Michael. “It was more personal. These were his friends! My father was not going to cooperate with the government, and that’s why they arrested my mother. So now he’s going to turn around and say, ‘OK, I’m going to save my wife by ratting out my friends?’ No! He had a naive belief that the American justice system was going to work because half the case against him was a pack of lies, so he thought he could deny everything and save them both.” Almost until the end, Julius believed that they wouldn’t go to the chair. The government and FBI hoped that, too. They never wanted to kill this young mother and father – they wanted names. After Ethel was killed, the then deputy attorney general William Rogers said, “She called our bluff.”Then there’s the question that baffled officials at the time, and has become the defining mystery about her: why did Ethel choose to stay silent and die with Julius, over staying with her children? We know she was deeply in love with her husband, and her letters to him during their imprisonment are filled with her longing to “lift my willing lips to yours”. But they are also full of her anxiety about the boys. Yet she said nothing.“Ethel absolutely did not want to be separated from Julius, and her letters show that she thought she was the one who had done him wrong by introducing him to her ghastly family,” says Sebba. “I believe that Ethel thought her life without Julius would have been valueless because her sons would never have respected her, because she would have had to make some kind of confession and name names.”If Ethel did think this, she might have been right.“As a child, it might have been easier if Julius had cooperated” says Robert. “He’d have been in prison and Ethel would have been released to take care of us – that’s the deal the government made with the Greenglasses. But as an adult I would much rather be the child of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg than the child of David and Ruth Greenglass.”Michael and Robert’s campaign for their mother’s exoneration was struck a major blow with the election of Donald Trump, whose original mentor was none other than Roy Cohn. Like many on the left, the Meeropols were shocked by Trump’s victory. “We just didn’t believe people could be so conned [into voting for Trump], but of course they can: the Salem witch trials, the antisemitic blood libel, communists under the bed, all the crap people have believed through the ages,” says Michael. It felt, Robert says, as if Cohn had won again, and they knew there was no point in asking Trump, of all presidents, to exonerate their mother. But the Meeropols got their revenge: in 2019, Michael’s daughter, Ivy, made a documentary about Cohn, in which Michael features, called Bully Coward Victim, in which she made the connection between her grandparents’ execution and Trump. “I’m a very revenge-oriented person, but it’s never about beating people to a pulp. I like exposure,” grins Michael.The campaign to exonerate Ethel is starting again, and the Meeropols are “optimistic” that President Biden will look at it favourably. They know their argument defies the confines of bite-size headlines, and so is a difficult one to sell to the public: Julius was guilty, although the extent of his guilt was exaggerated in an attempt to scare him into naming names; Ethel was possibly complicit, but not culpable. “There’s a very binary idea of the political world, in which people are guilty or innocent, right or wrong. But understanding nuance is essential to understanding how politics work and how society works,” says Robert.I ask why it matters so much to them what people understand. Their parents’ lives were destroyed by this case; instead of spending so much of their lives reliving it, why not leave it in the past? “It’s personal as well as political,” says Robert, emphasising both words. “That the US government invented evidence to obtain a conviction and an execution is a threat to every person in this country, and to not expose that is to become complicit in it. The personal stuff is obvious, but the political stuff is equally powerful.”The biggest question about Ethel for me relates to her sons. After our initial interview, I end up speaking to them, together and separately, several times over the course of a month, mainly because I have so many questions, but also because they are so delightful to talk to: wildly intelligent, always interesting, completely admirable. How on earth did they triumph over such a traumatic childhood? Sebba tells me that she asked the same thing of Elizabeth Phillips, the child therapist Ethel used to consult, whom she interviewed before her death.“She told me it was down to three things,” Sebba says. “She said, ‘One, they have an extraordinarily high level of intelligence. Second, they had amazing adoptive parents. But we now know how important those early years of life are, and Ethel must have given those two boys so much in those years that it lasted all their lives. Ethel must have been an extremely good mother.’” More