Tale of Two Mothers: Donald Trump's Treachery

“Because we’re fighting wars, the United States cannot take care of daycare, Medicare, or Medicaid.”  Donald J. Trump

Photo: https://pixabay.com by Pezibear is licensed under Free

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The words drifted from the small kitchen radio just as the coffee finished its thin, watery drip. She stood there a moment, one hand on the counter, the other wrapped around a chipped mug, as if the sentence itself had weight and had to settle somewhere inside her before she could move again.

Outside, the bus would be coming soon.

Her name could have been anything. There are thousands like her. She had two children still asleep in the next room, curled into each other under a blanket their grandmother had once mended at the seams. It was her mother who had made everything possible. Mornings like this used to begin with the quiet comfort of knowing someone older and steadier would be there when the children woke.

But her mother was gone now. The apartment felt larger because of it, and colder, as though something essential had slipped out through the walls.

She moved quickly then, because she had to. Toast. A banana split in two. Backpacks checked. Shoes found. The small choreography of survival. She would walk them to a neighbor who could watch them for an hour, maybe two, before the neighbor’s own obligations pressed in. After that, she did not know. Each day was a patchwork, and lately the seams were giving way.

A friend had mentioned vouchers. There was a place downtown, she said, where you could apply. It might take time. It might not be enough. But it was something, a narrow plank laid across a widening gap.

On the bus, she held the pole with one hand and her thoughts with the other, steadying both as the city passed in gray and hurried fragments. She tried to imagine a future that held together. Rent paid. Children safe. A small margin for breath.  She did not know Donald Trump wanted to take those vouchers away.

Far away, in a place she would never see, another mother was waking her children.

The morning there carried a different weight. The air itself seemed to listen. She moved through her own quiet rituals, straightening a collar, brushing hair back from a small forehead, pressing a kiss that lingered a moment longer than usual. There were no buses to catch, no vouchers to apply for, only the long stretch of a day shaped by uncertainty.

She had learned to read the sky. To measure silence. To listen for what might come, praying her home would not be bombed, her children dead under rubble.  

Her children did not fully understand, though they sensed enough. They stayed close. They watched her face the way children do, searching it for signs of what the world might do next.  They did not know Donald Trump had said he wanted to bomb them back into the Stone Age.  

In another life, the two mothers might have recognized each other instantly. Not by language or country, but by the way they carried everything at once, love, fear, endurance, balanced so carefully it almost looked like grace.

One stood in a crowded bus, calculating hours and dollars, hoping for help that might or might not come.

The other stood beneath an open sky, calculating distances and sounds, hoping the day would pass without breaking.

Between them stretched a world that insisted these were separate stories.

But if you looked closely, past the borders and the politics, past the reasons and the justifications, you could see the thread that bound them.

Two mothers, each holding her children as close as she could, each asking for the same small mercy.

Let them be safe.

And, Donald Trump willing to destroy both of them.  
 

Nancy O'Brien Simpson