Afraid of the rain

my son is afraid of the rain. he asks me ten, eleven times a day if he can check the weather forecast on my phone. he wants, always, to know what’s coming, and when it’s rain, even a fifty percent chance or when there’s a little lightning icon instead of just a cloud or a sun, he turns instantly serious, concerned.

my son is afraid of the rain. last night it drizzled here, light drops we’d have missed if i hadn’t turned on the outdoor lights, and he rushed to the window to stand and furrow his brow and ask me without turning away from the glass how long it was going to last. he told me, as he has before, that whenever it rains he gets butterflies in his stomach and his body shakes a little.

my son is afraid of the rain. he takes every piece of weather prediction as gospel, every radar color coding and wind speed, despite my having told and continuing to tell him that meteorologists only know what lies ahead very slightly more than anyone else does, that their guesses with computers aren’t much better than our looking up and to the west. but i haven’t convinced him. maybe if i typed it on my phone.

my son is afraid of the rain.

the rain.

my son is not afraid of being shot. he is not afraid of being bullied, or harassed, or called unrepeatable names. he is not afraid that when there are school buses again he will be sitting on one minding his own business and be verbally or physically attacked just for existing. he is not afraid of being groped or assaulted in any setting. he is not afraid of playing in his own yard. he is not afraid of interacting with police officers, and he is not afraid that his mom or i won’t make it home at the end of the day because WE did. he is not afraid for my safety when I go out for a run alone. he is not afraid of police bursting into our home while we’re sleeping and killing us because they’ve got the wrong address. he is not afraid of anyone in uniform stopping us in public, or arresting us without cause, or violating our basic rights in any way under any circumstances. he is not afraid of dying before he can drive, and he is not afraid that his final moments will be caught only by a neighbor’s cellphone because a cop had his body camera switched off.

he is not afraid of these things now, and he will not be afraid of them as he grows up.

he WILL be afraid, i hope, of living in a country where his fellow citizens DO hold these fears, where they know these fears like the backs of their hands because they are worn into their families’ skin. he will be afraid, i hope, of inaction, indifference, inadequacy, and inertia from elected leaders.

he will be afraid, i fear, of the idea that nothing might change at all, that progress has all his life been a ghost, a rumor. he will be afraid, i fear, of how closely 2040 resembles 2020.

i hope he will be afraid of doing nothing himself, and i fear that he will be afraid that his parents were little more than talk.

but for now.

he’s afraid of the rain.