From Subtraction to Expansion
Making Sense of Our Betrayal Stories and How to Move Forward
We used to have ferns in the backyard.
A small, marshy garden in the corner of our city lot filled with green, leafy stalks that came up to my hip by midsummer.
Every April, I’d stoop down to touch the tiny fronds—still furled tightly shut, small and armored and waiting.
The ferns are long gone now, replaced by a necessary drainage system covered in river rock.
But every so often in the spring, I find one tiny green fiddlehead poking out from between the rocks, and I remember. When I close my eyes, it is still vivid—green and green and green. Every day a little larger, every morning a little more reaching towards the sun.
The truth is, my body knows something about this.
It has learned, over the years, what it is to uncurl the tiny spiral of itself and become full and open and capacious.
My first-grader sits at the table, chin resting on her knees, ready to practice subtraction.
In the stilted, cautious voice of a child still learning to form words from letters and sounds, my daughter reads aloud from her math book.
Emma and Liz bake twelve cookies. Emma eats three. Liz eats two more. How many cookies do Emma and Liz have left?
Her brow furrows, and she twists the hem of her shirt into a rope as she ponders.
I scatter blocks and a number line across the table, and we get to work.
Look, I am saying, making the block pile smaller and smaller. This is what it means to take something away.
Look, I am saying, moving my finger along the number line. This is what it means to move backwards.
She grabs the number line and scoots back the red dial, quietly mouthing the numbers in reverse under her breath.
“Seven,” she beams up at me. “They have seven cookies left.”
“Good!” I reflect a smile back to her and gesture to the blank space in her workbook.
“Now, show your work,” I tell her.
“Number your steps.”
I am in second grade, sitting on my knees at the dining room table in front of my mother’s work laptop—an old black Dell, thick as a novel.
I have just reached a new level in Math Blaster, and I cannot wrap my mind around what I must do to beat it.
Something about negative numbers. Something about subtracting.
My big brother watches me falter from across the room and seizes the opportunity to explain something to me I do not yet understand.
Full of eager energy, he pulls out a sheet of printer paper and draws a horizontal line. He writes zero in the middle, then numbers on both sides.
See? he is saying. There are numbers less than zero, too.
I feel shocked that this kind of math exists—one that requires me to go beneath what I even knew existed.
All these years and I thought zero was the bottom, but it turns out, the foundation of what you think you know can shift under your feet in an instant.
I feel disoriented as I listen to his words run together, as I watch his finger move back and back and back.
We used to have ferns in the backyard.
Every November, I’d pull on my muck boots and trudge out to the overgrown patch of leafy green, garden shears in hand.
I’d slice each fern down evenly, clean cut after clean cut at the soil line. A brief and thorough leveling.
It broke my heart a little, every year—after everything, the limp leaves, the snip of the shears, the dark and pungent soil.
The truth is, my body knows something about this, too.
A soft green frond beaten back by the world, cut down at the roots.
My brother and I hunch over his number line at the dining room table.
His finger is still moving backwards. He still does not understand why this is difficult for me.
By now, I am crying hot tears of frustration.
“No, no, it’s easy!” he says, frantically. “Watch!”
I wipe my nose on my sleeve and watch. I watch him make a large number so small it becomes less than zero—which is to say, less than nothing.
Even now, in so many ways, I am watching the number move back, and back, and back. Even now I feel disoriented.
My brother was not wrong about many things, but he was wrong about this:
It was not easy. I did not understand.
It still is not easy.
I still do not understand.
The day after America shows its people, again, who it really is, I wake up physically ill.
All morning, I run to the toilet. All morning, I lie in bed with limbs heavy as lead, a familiar pit forming in my belly—crushed, again, from the hope hangover.
My body’s reaction is visceral and familiar. This is merely an updated version of the same, old betrayal story.
It is betrayal by country, and while this particular story is relatively new to me1, I have felt some version of it before—with family, with friends, with religion.
Every betrayal story is compounded by the ones before it. Each one attempts to pawn off shame by refusing to acknowledge the fullness of my existence, or the existence of someone I love.
This attempted erasure is a quiet kind of violence against the very thing we’re born seeking.
Curt Thompson writes, “We all are born into the world looking for someone looking for us…”. This is what we long for—in our marriages, our friendships, our families, our faith, and our political leaders.
And here is the part that kicks me in the gut:
The people on the other side of the political aisle have their own betrayal stories.
They, too, are looking for someone who is looking for them.
Somehow, I have to swallow this complicated truth:
That the person who attempts to make me and the ones I love smaller and less visible is the same person who makes my neighbor feel seen.2
Solve the following story problem.
A woman is born with her eyes wide open to the world. The world lays bear all it has to offer—joy, horror, the full scope of the human experience.
Over time, because this is how the world works, the multitude of all she is becomes smaller, then smaller still.
The world takes things from her—her ability to listen to her anger, the full scope of the human language, her desire, her want, her voice, the assumption that her body is good, the assumption that her body is hers.
She begins reaching for the light switch after she steps out of the shower so she does not have to look at her belly in the mirror.
She begins apologizing for the size of her emotion, the heft of it, the way it vibrates through a room.
She begins editing her language depending on the company she keeps. She will say, “Interesting” when she means, “Offensive.” She will say, “That’s okay” when she means, “Please do not speak to me that way.”
After everything, how much of the woman’s own self is left?
Show your work.
Number your steps.
When my neighbor and I lock eyes across the street one rainy afternoon after the election, we lurch towards each other into a sloppy hug.
We talk about our children’s futures—her little boy’s, my little girls’—and as I walk back into the house, I think about the vows we make with ourselves.
I think about how, for better or for worse, these are the moments we say: I will never get my hopes up again, or I will never trust anyone again or I will never open my heart up again.
We swear off hope, trust, love. We armor up. We curl into ourselves and become small.
It is November, after all. Perhaps we all need a clean cut down to the roots. Perhaps this temporary, necessary reduction will help us gather the courage to begin again.
But here is the truth—the tender pain we carry with us, a thin pink scar of opening, again and again:
Love hurts, but we must keep loving. Hope hurts, but we must keep hoping.
When I can’t remember how, I remember the ferns—how they unfurl so slowly, at first, it seems as though nothing is happening at all.
And then one day, the startling discovery: how expansive and bold these plants have become.
Solve the following story problem.
A woman is tired of living in subtraction.
See how she reaches for the number line, and breaks it in half.
See how she pays no mind to the hands moving back and back and back, to those insistent on her unbecoming.
See how she takes a new kind of vow—a vow of reaching, of expanding, of turning the soft and tender parts of herself toward the world, again and again.
See how she closes her eyes. How she remembers the ferns—green and green and green.
After everything, how open, how capacious, how unfurled has the woman become?
Show your work.
Number your steps.
Photo by hannah grace on Unsplash
White women are scraping the tip of the iceberg, here. While we do have a long history of fighting for our rights, it is brief in comparison with our neighbors who are people of color, LGBTQ+, or in other groups overlooked and villainized by the leaders and ideals of our country. White women like me are feeling a small fraction of the betrayal and disorientation other people groups have known for centuries, and it is by no means our job to ask them to explain to us how they carry themselves forward with dignity. As
says, this is the time for white women to stand up and do the work for ourselves.(Saeed Jones’ book Alive at the End of the World is a piercing, beautiful, honest read—a great place to start).
A brief reminder that it is possible to recognize the humanity in those we tend to “other” AND still call out misogyny, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. As Dr. Becky says, “Two things are true,” and that applies to politics, too.
Thank you for writing what so many of us haven’t been able to find words for yet ❤️
Grateful for your work and the way you show it.