06/04/2026
āThe World is What we Make It,ā by Mike
I took one of my boys' first ducks to the vet when it started having seizures. This was peak COVID, so I dropped it off and waited for the call. When the vet called, she told me what it would cost to try and save it. Thousands of dollars I didn't have. So they put it down after we hung up. A few hundred dollars to not save a duck, when it would have cost thousands to save it. Either way, money decided it.
Before she hung up, the vet said, "That's just how the world is." I didn't say anything back. But I've thought about it ever since, and I know now what I wish I'd said: I've always been told the world is what we make it.
Then I went and told my two youngest boys their duck was gone, and I sat with them while they bawled their eyes out. Not because of what was best for the duck, or for them. Because we didn't have enough money to save an animal we'd taken in and promised to take care of.
That's tangled up with something Ally and I keep coming back to, and a lot of people around us lately too. We can't understand how humans can be so cruel to each other. Not the small stuff. The big stuff. The greed. Whole groups of people treated as worth less than land and money and power. People hated for nothing more than the color of their skin. Senseless killing because somebody wants what's underneath somebody else's feet. A few dozen people with more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes, who just have to have more, while people who can't afford a vet bill get told that's just how the world is. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I've figured that out. I haven't. It still eats at me, pretty much every day.
But I have come to understand a smaller, closer version of cruelty all the way down to the bone, because I used to be the one doing it. Fifteen years ago I slapped my son's hand for something. I don't even remember what. Probably something stupid. What I remember is the look in his eyes after. I had a lot of trauma growing up, and without ever deciding to, I was handing it straight to my kids. The way I was parented was just coming back out of me. That day I decided to change. I've worked at it every single day since. I haven't been perfect. But I try my ass off.
It wasn't until I started digging into psychology and trauma, listening to a lot of podcasts (a heavy dose of Dr. Gabor MatƩ in there) while I worked on my own healing, that I began to understand my mom. She was adopted, and there's a whole world of hurt buried in that. Her dad died when she was sixteen. Her mom became an alcoholic. She grew up feeling like her mom loved her sister, the biological one, more than her. Once I understood all of that, I was able to more easily let go of the anger I'd carried toward her since childhood. She eventually told me she felt bad about how she'd been toward me. That meant a lot.
My dad's in this too, though I remember less about how he was before things came apart. The clearest thing I've got is the day CPS got brought into our lives, because of how I showed up to school the morning after I called my mom a bitch. I was six or seven. My dad carried his own load. His father walked out on the family. His stepfather was abusive. I know now that he came home from the Navy in the Korean War with PTSD, even if nobody had a name for it back then. He used to tell some pretty traumatic stories about his own childhood. Both of them were just handing me what had been handed to them.
So when Ally and I had Skye, I figured I'd done the work. She's the best mom I know. This one would be easy. The universe decided it was time to level up again. Skye was born in March 2024, and he woke us up through the night for most of his first year and a half. And for the past year and then some, he's been rage-screaming at us. Every single day.
Kindness is not the thing that wants to come out of me in those moments. The parenting I was parented with wants to come out. It rises right up and it is soooo hard to not snap. I know he's not doing it to torment us. He doesn't have many words yet, and he struggles to make himself understood, and that has to be miserable for him. He deserves love. And I catch myself wondering if this is what I was like as a toddler. If this is why my mom was mean to me.
So when he's screaming and I feel myself getting close to the edge, I go in the bathroom and shut the door. I sit down. I breathe. I turn the music up. Sometimes I yell, just to myself. A lot of times Ally comes in and helps me get calm. I stay in there until I'm steady again, and then I come back out. Nobody claps for that. There's nobody behind that door but me, and sometimes Ally. But that's where the work actually happens.
Here's what all of that taught me. There are two kinds of cruelty. There's the hot kind. The kind that comes out of a person who's hurting, who got hurt themselves and never had anybody stop it, until one day it's their hands and they're too far gone in the moment to catch it. That kind I understand now, because I've lived on both ends of it. It can be interrupted. I'm proof. My mom's proof. So are the friends I've watched get handed the same thing and decide to put it down instead of passing it on.
But there's another kind, and nothing I've learned touches it. The cold kind. My mom being mean to me does not explain wiping out entire civilizations. It doesn't explain a person sitting in a comfortable chair, doing the math on other human beings, and deciding the profit is worth more than the lives. That's not somebody at the end of their rope. They're not even upset. It's calm. It's chosen, on purpose. I have never been able to understand it, and I'm not going to pretend I've made peace with it. It bothers me every single day.
I watch a version of it up close, too. I watch a close friend's dad be cruel to her, his own daughter, while he stands there preaching community and social permaculture. All the right words coming out of his mouth, and he treats the person who should be the easiest in the world to love like she's nothing. Everything that healed me and brought me back to my mom just bounces right off him. Understanding doesn't reach him. Love doesn't reach him.
But I know what love does reach. I've watched my closest friends get torn down by the people around them, the ones who are supposed to love them, partners, parents, while they were working their asses off trying to stand back up. Told they couldn't. Told it was pointless. And I've watched those same people pull out of it because somebody believed in them anyway, no matter what anyone else said. I've been that somebody, and I've watched it work with my own two eyes. That's not a theory. That's real people I love, getting better.
My boys were the biggest reason I started changing in the first place.
The duck still died. And the kindness I choose isn't going to change the mind of a man with more money than he could spend in a thousand lifetimes, or stop a war on its own. I know that. But maybe it stops one if it spreads to enough of us. š
The vet told me that's just how the world is. She said it like it was settled, like a door already shut. I don't believe that, and I never have. The world isn't something you get handed finished. It's something we make, in the parts of it we can reach.
I can't make the whole world kind. I can only make my part of it. Our kids. Skye, behind the bathroom door. The mom friends parenting alone. The friend who's down and just needs somebody to believe in them. The person right in front of me.
So that's what I'm going to do. Make my part of it kind. The whole world is just everybody's part put together, and I hope I'm not the only one working on mine.
