Kirsten Greenidge is a playwright. Her work includes The Luck of the Irish, Baltimore, and the Village Voice/Obie Award-winning Milk Like Sugar.

Picking up my children after school one afternoon earlier this year, a teacher rushes briskly toward me. He is not my son’s first-grade teacher, nor my daughter’s third-grade teacher, but I do know him. He’s an exceptional teacher, and my sister has been a guest speaker in his class, giving talks to second graders about the Underground Railroad and the history of black people in Boston. He pulls me aside. “So you know,” he begins. Even if you are the type of parent who unfreezes quickly in these moments, there is still that initial 'what has my kid done now?' spark of dread that customarily accompanies those types of words.

“Your son has been talking about Trump.”


“Oh?” I say. I wait. I have no idea what my son might have said about Donald Trump. As a family, we had not, at that point, said very much about Trump. We had relayed large news items to both children and discussed them the way any socially liberal Cambridgey/Somervilley, Massachusetts family might.

“Today, he kept saying to other kids, ‘Make America Great Again,’” the teacher recalls. “Until some other boys told him what they thought it meant.” “I don’t think he knows what it means,” I reply. The teacher continues: “He said ‘Trump just wants to make America great again.’”

“What? No, he’s confused,” I insist. The teacher offers: “I just wanted you to know.”

I first “met” Trump as a child in the ’80s, when he appeared on Oprah. I knew him then as being very, very rich and having stepped out on his first wife, Ivana, to have an affair with Marla Maples. I knew his kids were my age.

When my parents separated and divorced, my mother told my sisters and me that we would all need to move to my grandparents’ house because we would not have enough money to live on our own. In the days I boxed up my room—the posters, my stuffed animals, my gymnastics trophies—knowing there was no room for my childhood things where we were going, I would talk to God, but I would pray to Donald Trump. Please let us stay, please let us stay, please let us stay. Even as a kid, I knew it was silly, but somehow, I thought, hoped, maybe one of the richest men in America might be able to help if only I wrote him a letter. I was sure he would if I got the wording right.

I’ve never read The Art of the Deal. I’ve never watched The Apprentice as more than a sound bite. But now I look back at those weeks when my family’s life imploded with sadness and chagrin because by the time I learned that my son had been touting Trump’s campaign slogan, I had come to view The Donald as a man with very little empathy—someone who would’ve seen our formally middle-class family as “losers.” That my youngest kid seemed moony-eyed over him was startling.

On the car ride home after school, I handed out snacks, looked in the rear-view mirror a few times, and took a deep breath. I usually lead up to big questions with more precise calculation, but it’s only a 20-minute drive to chess practice.

“Do you have any questions about Trump? About the election?” “No,” he said. His sister gave him the side eye. Two years older, she can tell by my voice that something’s about to go down, even if she isn’t sure just what.

“I kind of have a question,” I prompted. Now neither moved. Here we go: “You know that phrase? ‘Make America Great Again?’”

My son opened up. “That’s what Trump wants! That’s what’s going to be GREAT.”

“What’s going to be great about it?,” I asked.

“It’s just going to be really great.”

At this point in the election, it was in the thick of primary season. Every week was like a mini Super Tuesday. The Republicans were awash with candidates. Trump was the loudest and stood out the most. For the Democrats, it was Hillary and Bernie, both of whom seemed unexciting to my first-grade son. By contrast, Trump, I think, felt dynamic to him. Linguistically, Trump is easy to understand. Even if you do not agree with him, you “get” him, so one is able to feel a sense of inclusion—you’re part of the conversation even if your reaction to him is a knee-jerk “NO! NO! NO!” Trump is bombastic and overtly traditionally masculine, which I also think my son is drawn to, especially being raised in a culture where the masculine in little boys is often asked to “be still” “be nice.” Here is a figure who is not still or nice, and is being rewarded for it over and over and over again with more attention and more space to say and do what he wants. It’s not just my 6-year-old little boy; adults have been transfixed by him for months.

How do you discuss 2016 with a six-year-old when the conversation could easily veer towards Megyn Kelly having “blood coming out of her wherever” or a group of people being singled out as rapists?

And I think this is what has made discussing this election particularly difficult as a parent: How do you discuss the electoral process with a 6- and 8-year-old when the conversation is able to veer toward Megyn Kelly having “blood coming out of her wherever” or a group of people being singled out as rapists? How do you streamline discussions about democracy for the very young when the sound bites are about throwing chairs and adults behaving badly? One could say that side conversations are the stuff of life, that they are where the real learning lies. As a teacher, I know this is often true. But as a parent of young children, I also know the side conversation is a sticky, unruly place. I envisioned a conversation much like this: “Blood? What? Where? Why? What’s ‘rape’ again? What? Blood from where? Well, does he have kids? Does he have a little girl? Fat pig? Fat pig??? Whut? Why would someone say that to someone in front of people like that?” I envisioned how it would end: “Honey, I know I usually say no, but, do you want some screen time? How about some Minecraft?”

I am a playwright. I write plays that question how we live in a post-modern, decidedly not post-racial society that still has some issues with lots of -isms, so I fully recognize the irony of my ambivalence about difficult questions flying about my household.

And yet. Here I was.

“Do you know what Trump believes in?,” I asked. “Uhhhhh nope,” my son replied. His sister snort-laughed.

“Well,” I began. “Let’s talk about some of the things Donald Trump—”

“Who’s Donald Trump?” my son demanded. His sister snort-laughed again. So did he, but only to show he was in on the joke. He was beginning to look nervous, like, the joke was maybe changing.

“That’s Trump’s whole name. His first name is Donald. Let’s talk about what he has said. All the people running say things to get people to vote for them. The Democrats and the Republicans, and that is how we decide who we want to be president. Obama can’t run again. He has to stop being president.” “Ohhh, OK.”

And so we began. We talked about a lot: walls and Mexico and Spanish and Muslims and brown people.

“Wait. I am brown.” “Yes.” “OK. Keep going.”

We talked about women and health care and gay and lesbian people and trans people and marriage equality and Bernie and Hillary and Rubio and Cruz and Carson and pyramids and being a surgeon and being a black surgeon when there weren’t many other black surgeons. “I don’t want to do that,” my son says. “Shhh!,” his sister demands. “This is not about surgeons.”

And as I talked and they asked questions, my son got angry. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” “Daddy and I want you to make up your own mind.” “You should have told me about this before I went to school,” he said. “Are you embarrassed?”

In the rear-view mirror, I could see him nod his head sadly. His legs were tucked up to his chest. His chin rested on his knees. “Yes. I am.”

“Don’t be embarrassed. We’re just talking. When Trump says certain things, some people do wonder what kind of America he is talking about. That is why the phrase is confusing to many of the people we have been talking about. It means a different thing to the groups of people we were talking about than to some of the people who want Trump to win.”

“It’s your job to tell me these things,” my son said. “From now on, tell me everything: Show me all the news, tell me all the news, every day, all of it.”

“I don’t know if I can do that. Sometimes the news is harsh. And also we want you two to think for yourselves.”

“No, Mommy. Do it.”

And I know he is not wrong. I had shied away from giving him enough information to make up his own mind, and allowed him to create an ideology fashioned out of sound bites. I have prepared my child better for a rainy day than to have an informed discussion about our world, worried he is not ready—he’s only in first grade, after all.

But I was wrong. This particular small person is perhaps not ready to appear on Meet the Press, but he is indeed interested and eager to know more about the political workings of our world.

***

The next months are difficult. My son is sad. And angry. At home, he picks fights with his sister and with me. We discuss more news. When police shootings occur, I mention those. When we pass by officers, I make a point to vocalize greetings and smile. We are walking a line. I know both of my children know this. I know I walked this line growing up, too, but I am now raising a black son post-Trayvon, post-Ferguson, and I know it is different.

Trump is everywhere. And many of his words and actions are difficult to rationalize to a first grader, especially a first grader who is both black and white but whose skin is dark. In June, I checked out Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as one of our nighttime books. The week of the Republican National Convention, we got to a section about the March family and scarlet fever. My son piped up: “What is that?” “It’s strep throat—like what you had in February, only not treated with medicine, and it gets worse and it was very dangerous, but in the 1930s penicillin was discovered, and now people don’t die from it anymore.“

“And what time period is this book taking place?” “During the Civil War. The 1860s.” His sister asks: “When were the World wars?” I answer. “And the Second World War had Hitler,” my son announces. “I hate that guy,” says my daughter. “Yeah, I know,” I say. “How’d he die?” asks my son. I explain about bunkers and bombs and suicide and the Holocaust and 6 million Jews, and 5 million others. “You know who I think might read a lot of what he wrote? “ says my son. “Trump.”

I am not sure what to say, but my son and I have been here before in the last few months. “You think so?”

“You know, sending people away.” My heart sinks. It was the association that stopped me, made me catch my breath. If a 6-year-old boy can connect our cultural moment to Germany in the 1930s, then surely my keeping him from watching the evening news is a little absurd. And I know my son is most certainly shaped by the experiences he’s had in a particular home in a particular part of the country, and that another child exposed to other types of views would make other conclusions about Trump or Cruz or Hillary.

It was more than my feeling silly that I had entertained the idea that he was too young for the news; I was sad that my 6-year-older was that perceptive to realize the magnitude of executive power should it be chosen to be exercised in a way that could have real consequences not for someone who is nameless or faceless, but for himself. To be 6 years old and understand that must be terrifying. As a child, I would watch both parties’ conventions and feel like part of the process, ironically, just as I felt removed from it. My son, I realized, felt implicated in the process in a way that was heartbreaking.

“READ THE BOOK,” yells my daughter. I tell my son that he is safe. That his dad and I love him. “MOMMY. READ.” My son has taken his cue to be quiet from his sister, and both assume silence.

But it is temporary. What I have discovered is that it is my job as a parent to appreciate the silence while I cultivate the next discussion, rather than worry about what the next opinion will be.