“An Imagination Party”: How My Toddler Fuels My Vision for Liberation

Part of the Series

The Road to Abolition

The following piece is an excerpt from the forthcoming anthology, We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, which I edited in collaboration with Kim Wilson. Our book explores the ways in which parenting, caregiving and struggles for liberation intertwine. In this cataclysmic moment of looming fascism, we have much to learn from people who are putting a politics of care into practice. We hope We Grow the World Together will be a useful tool in building communities where we take care of all our people, and leave no one behind. The book’s contributors include Dorothy Roberts, Mariame Kaba, Erika Ray, Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Dylan Rodriguez, Harsha Walia, Nadine Naber, adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown, and many others. You can buy the book here!

“So,” says the cashier at 7-Eleven, squinting at my three-year-old child K.’s “A Is for Abolition” shirt as they wait patiently in their stroller for a small carton of Goldfish crackers. “What is abolition?”

Gripping my hand, K. pauses, thinks. They’ve overheard me expound on this theme. I wonder nervously which aspects of it might be graspable by a three-year-old. Now that they have the floor, will they reveal something humiliating about my personal life in the middle of 7-Eleven?

Finally, K. draws a deep breath, and their eyes smile above their lime-green mask. “It’s a PARTY!” they say.

“Well, actually…,” I say.

“It’s an imagination party! It’s about imaginationing things,” K. explains. “And it’s a party. With ice cream cake that you have to keep in its cold home.”

K. calls the freezer a “cold home.” They are convinced that it’s filled with invisible dancing snowpeople and magical penguins and a freezing but happy horse. Also, in a way, they are right.

Those of us who want to abolish prisons and policing recognize the power of imagination. We know that we must conjure new ways of being, acting, talking, daring and growing in order to build toward future liberation — and practice it in the present tense, too. Abolitionist author and organizer Mariame Kaba invites us to “begin our abolitionist journey not with the question, ‘What do we have now and how can we make it better?’” but instead with, “‘What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?’ If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a more just world await us.”

Yet sometimes it feels impossible to call forth the imagination. Capitalism squashes it. The pressure of our lives bludgeons it. Norms and supremacies smash it. As Kaba notes, “oppression puts a ceiling on our imagination.” And as Critical Resistance cofounder Rachel Herzing puts it, a lack of creativity is a “primary stumbling block” in moving beyond prisons.

In these moments of seeming impossibility, it can help to remember that there is a vast group of people in our society who regularly live in their imaginations, unabashedly and vocally: toddlers.

What if we adults could open ourselves to a bit of the imaginative power of young children to strive for creative ways of building a fundamentally different world?

Young kids create the worlds they want to live in (even as they whimper and throw tantrums), imagining wild and wacky scenarios into existence in a matter of seconds. (Just yesterday, K. explained: “I can’t go to bed, Mama! There’s a shooting star in the bedroom.”)

My 3-year-old (white, middle-class) child certainly does not have all the answers to abolishing the prison industrial complex and creating a just world. They don’t even know what the prison industrial complex is. But their merry explanation of abolition does point toward a core truth: The wide-open imagination most vividly displayed by young children is key to societal transformation.

Psychologists Alison Gopnik and Tom Griffiths have studied why youth lean more heavily on creativity than adults do, writing of “a tension between two kinds of thinking: what computer scientists call exploration and exploitation.” They note, “When we face a new problem, we adults usually exploit the knowledge about the world we have acquired so far. We try to quickly find a pretty good solution that is close to the solutions we already have. On the other hand, exploration — trying something new — may lead us to a more unusual idea, a less obvious solution, a new piece of knowledge.”

In other words, young children — people who aren’t quite as acquainted with the status quo — are less likely to come up with status quo answers. Gopnik and Griffiths say that exploration may mean sometimes veering into “solutions” that utterly fail, as toddlers’ (and teenagers’) strategies often do. But at what cost are we adults avoiding such failures?

Prison abolitionist and liberatory harm reductionist Shira Hassan (whose interview is featured in this book) says her “favorite thing is to talk about mistakes,” because in order to develop new transformative practices that disrupt the status quo while creating liberatory ways of confronting harm, we are going to have to make a lot of mistakes along the way — and use their lessons as we search for better paths forward.

Childhood and adolescence, Gopnik and Griffiths write, “give us time to explore before we have to face the stern and earnest realities of grown-up life. . . . And that may help each new generation change the world.”

But those of us committed to radically changing the world might push ourselves to ask a further question: Why does that “time to explore” have to end? Mightn’t the “stern and earnest realities of grown-up life” be a little less stern and earnest if we didn’t assume that, as adults, we must relinquish our magical penguins and shooting stars? What would it look like for us to take toddlers’ imaginations seriously, and resist the pull of the “exploitation” framework of living life as a grown-up, in a society rife with exploitative, death-dealing systems?

Our “earnest realities” are oppressive, racist, classist, cisheteropatriarchal, sexist and ableist, and are quickly destroying the Earth. And so the work of trying something new — of exploration, toddler style — is a skill we all must work to re-access.

What if we adults could open ourselves to a bit of the imaginative power of young children — delve into the wonder of a time when, for many, possibilities really do seem boundless — to strive for creative ways of building a fundamentally different world?

We know this creativity is possible in adulthood, because many adults are already engaging it. Abolitionist organizers actively reject the “let’s be realistic” dream-dulling that’s so prevalent among the grown-ups of the world. As abolitionist activist-scholar Angela Davis describes in Are Prisons Obsolete?, the ancestors of many of today’s liberals could not have imagined the end of the status quo systems of slavery, segregation and lynching, but radical liberation organizers of those eras proved them wrong. And as far as “changing the world” goes, abolitionist activist-scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore exhorts us: “Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything.”

Abolition is a multigenerational movement of people who have embraced exploration over exploitation, imagination over the already known.

“No change for the good ever happens without it being imagined first, even if that change seems hopeless or impossible in the present,” the poet Martín Espada noted in an interview in Policing the Planet.

But even as we cultivate imaginative sparks, we must recognize the gravity of the circumstances that make those sparks so necessary. Espada’s words of hope follow his lamentation that “police violence is . . . always with us.”

We must imagine outside the bounds of the “possible” because the current reality is, quite literally, lethal.

K.’s 7-Eleven incident was not the first time I’d thought about young children in relation to prison abolition. My abolitionist evolution was shaped by the stark horror of what incarceration does to kids.

Back in 2013, my younger sister Keeley gave birth to her first baby while incarcerated, alone except for the watchful eyes of prison guards. She was shackled to the bedposts seconds after the birth. Keeley and her daughter were torn apart twenty-four hours after my niece entered this world.

Days later, I watched my infant niece writhe in her hospital bassinet, her wet face red, her tiny mouth opening and closing as if yearning to nurse, unsoothable. Hours after, I heard Keeley’s raw voice through the prison phone, nearly deadened with sobs. And I came face to face with the reality that incarcerating any child’s parent is an act of violence. Incarcerating any parent’s child is, too, a torturous act. Those realities, taken together, deliver a stark truth: Incarceration is inherently an act of violence.

While K. has helped me recognize that there are a million possibilities for abolition if we open our imaginations, my sister’s experience of birth and separation taught me that we have no choice but abolition.

Although my sister was released from prison a few months after she gave birth, her reunion with my niece was not a permanent one. They were wrenched apart many times, as Keeley was pulled back into jails, prisons, and other institutions. And when my niece was two years old, the family police (otherwise known as the “child welfare” system) forcibly removed her from my sister, citing Keeley’s unrelated drug use. The removal happened shortly after the tragic SIDS death of Keeley’s second daughter.

Being severed from both her children was, in my sister’s words, “a hundred times worse than the prison cell itself.” The trauma plunged her deeper into her addiction to heroin, which grew worse with every incarceration.

The many tentacles of the punitive state — jail, prison, probation, family policing, coercive mandated drug “treatment” — had wrapped themselves around Keeley, and they were squeezing. Meanwhile, I was straining my imagination as hard as I could, trying, in my writing and editing and activism and direct support for Keeley, to dream beyond the walls that kept her from us.

If a 3-year-old can dream of cats building skyscrapers, dancing snowpeople, and melodies in the silence of aching grief, then surely, if we put our minds together, we can imagine — and build — a world without cages.

But I often felt stuck, and at these times, baby K. — born during Keeley’s seventh incarceration, having heard her sing to them in utero through the phone — helped. She got a prison tattoo of their name on her forearm before they were even born. They repeated “Aunt Keeley” among their first words, adorning it with hopeful babbles.

In late 2019, when we found out Keeley was pregnant again, I told 18-month-old K., “You’re getting a cousin.” They responded dreamily, “A cousin, a giraffe?” and began to sing a long thread of nonsense syllables, punctuated by “Aunt Keeley” and “cousin” — a sunny melody, a ballad of their future together.

Three months later, on an icy February morning, my mother called to tell me my sister was dead. My partner distracted K., who was nearly 2 years old, with Legos in the living room while I huddled in bed with the phone. (“The cat building a tall tower!” I heard them exclaim as I hid under my comforter to muffle my sobs.)

Keeley had died in a freezing tent under a viaduct, of a heroin and fentanyl overdose. At the time, her drug tolerance was drastically lower than usual, since she’d been forced into a court-mandated abstinence-based treatment program. This mandate greatly increased her risk of overdose death. And Keeley had been determined to avoid calling 911 in an emergency, because she was terrified of rearrest. She didn’t want to lose another baby.

My sister was nearly twenty weeks pregnant when she died. Her daughter was 6 years old.

Once, in a letter from prison, Keeley had written, “I have to get better because I need to see all my babies grow old. ALL my five babies! They’re coming. I see them in my mind.”

After Keeley’s autopsy, the medical examiner’s office told us of the fetus, “It’s a girl.”

There’s no space between the shock of unjust death and the planning of funerals. So, that afternoon, I fled to my parked car to sit alone, blasting music to drown out my weeping. I emailed my rabbi, googled “funeral for an overdose,” and sent morbid “save the date” texts to friends.

But what would it even be, this funeral that should not be happening? I refused to think it should simply “celebrate her life” — a life marred by the criminalization system since she was 14, a life in which many dreams were left unfulfilled, a life whose loss would leave a young child severed from her mother one final time. We could not just chant the Mourner’s Kaddish and read some poems that people read at funerals, and let Keeley be dead.

What was the action, if we couldn’t bring her back?

That evening, when my partner took the garbage out, I sat alone for a couple of minutes with K. I stared at my hands, tensing my eyes to hold back tears that would scare them.

Then K. started singing, loud and high-pitched and hoarse, toddler-scatting in a minor key. I closed my eyes and let the melody seep in, wistful but urgent, unmistakable. It was over quickly — “a silly song!” K. was exclaiming — but it struck a match in my mind. As soon as my partner reentered the apartment, I ran to my computer. The notes poured out, plans for a funeral that would be an abolitionist action.

“I reject a world in which Keeley dies at 29,” I said in my eulogy four days later, in a chapel that doubled as a community space where Keeley had once spoken out about her incarceration. “We need to imagine what it would look like to live in a society that supports people and holds people, in care and love, no matter what they are doing, or what drugs they are using; no matter what kind of pain they are dealing with and how they choose to deal with it. We need to build that world.”

A harm-reductionist friend, who’d also gone through addiction and incarceration, spoke at the funeral about her work. She emphasized that police won’t keep us safe — instead, we need to learn how to keep each other safe.

Our synagogue’s cantorial soloist Leah Shoshanah sang her original song, “Kaddish for Those Unjustly Taken,” which lifts up those killed — indirectly and directly — by state violence.

I asked the harm-reductionist group Chicago Recovery Alliance to set up a table in back to provide funeral guests with free overdose prevention supplies, including the lifesaving overdose antidote naloxone and fentanyl test strips.

Perhaps 150 people attended Keeley’s funeral and shiva (scant weeks before COVID hit Chicago), and they came away with tools to prevent deaths like Keeley’s, with the knowledge that we have the power to protect each other, and with the message and melodies of abolition in their minds.

The night after the funeral, K. crashed around our living room, alternately singing and wailing, resisting bedtime. My head throbbing, I watched them and whispered, “Thank you.”

A few months after Keeley’s death, my mom suggested we plant a tree in my sister’s memory in the park across from Cook County Jail. I loved the idea but was scared of it — the finality of putting something in the ground, and the fear that it would die, too. But in those early months of the pandemic, I was spending almost every day inside the apartment with K., often watching them build block towers — sometimes teeth-grittingly precarious ones — without fear that they’d eventually fall. “I’m gonna build a city!” they’d say, just before the turrets toppled. Sometimes, of course, they shrieked or cried afterward (and once, horrifyingly, upended an entire pot of macaroni and cheese), but then it was right back to building, muttering new plans. I thought of Shira Hassan’s enthusiasm for mistake-making, how risk and vulnerability are part of imaginative creation. I wrote in my journal: The blocks keep falling over, but K. still has that city in their head, and they keep going.

And so we planted the tree, and a friend gave me flower seeds to scatter at its base, and we buried Keeley’s ashes in that grassy dirt, hoping the tree, surrounded by bright blooms, would grow tall, outlive the jail — a kind of miniature abolitionist garden. I shared the story of the tree on social media, sent around pictures, gave away the extra seeds. People told me the tree moved them to plant their own trees and scatter their own flowers near prisons. A friend and co-organizer began working to create a public art piece, a seed quilt outside a prison, inspired by the tree.

Thinking, “What would Keeley do?” I got my first tattoo — an image of her tree — on my arm. And thinking, “What would K. do?” I pushed myself to imagine further.

When Black Lives Matter uprisings swept the country in the summer of 2020, I co-initiated the creation of a different kind of garden: a journalistic feature and archive called The Road to Abolition at Truthout, the publication where I work. The collection depicted visions, dreams, experiments — stories of neighbors coming together to confront violence without police, chronicles of unlikely coalitions joining to rid campuses of cops and develop healing formations instead, exciting imaginings of what “community care” and “reinvesting in communities” could mean. The Road to Abolition series eventually included the winners of the Keeley Schenwar Memorial Essay Prize, a contest honoring narrative work by formerly incarcerated writers.

As I spoke and wrote about prisons and prison “alternatives,” I tried to ask wild questions — “What can we imagine? What can we create?” — instead of reverting to adult mode, pretending to have all the answers. (Admittedly, I often forgot to ask the wild questions. But hey, mistake-making is part of the process.)

After Keeley died, I didn’t know how I’d ever return to a meeting of my beloved abolitionist feminist collective, Love & Protect, which supports women and trans and nonbinary people of color who are survivors of interpersonal and state violence. Many of the people we support are suffering beyond bars, separated from their babies, living with heartbreaking trauma that parallels what Keeley endured. But as the pandemic mounted, our Love & Protect meetings unfolded over Zoom, and toddler K. popped in for the first few minutes of each meeting to say hi. We joked that they were our facilitator. Of course, they weren’t, but they did facilitate something in me, even after they left the room, ran to my partner, and closed the door. In order to stay in that meeting, to help plan our little corner of abolitionist world-building, I had to breathe in a little of that toddler dream energy, to remind myself that it survived in me, too.

Nearly two years after Keeley’s death, I still run to my car to cry and rage. None of my attempts to imagine a life-affirming society have erased the horror of her death. They never will. But I owe it to Keeley’s memory — we all owe it to the memory of those lost to carceral systems — to keep attempting these imperfect imaginings, to reject the earnest grown-up “realities” that tell us we can’t radically transform the world.

And so, as K. imagines shooting stars in the bedroom, I strive to imagine an orchard lush with wildflowers in the place where the jail now stands.

As K. conjures melodies out of thin air, I try to reach for new and surprising ways to communicate the urgency of abolition.

As K. dreams of ice cream cake and magical freezer-horses and giraffe cousins, I dream of a time when no one dies hiding from the police, a time when people like my sister live to birth their babies, to laugh and sing and get tattoos, to dream their own dreams.

At the 7-Eleven, the cashier smiles at K., clearly pondering their “imagination party” definition. “Well, I like parties!” he says.

“Me too,” says K. “At a party, you eat ice cream cake.”

Sometimes, though, abolition isn’t a party. Abolition is steeped in grief. It’s about confronting death-making systems. It can never be just fun.

But, to badly paraphrase Emma Goldman, if I can’t eat ice cream cake, it’s not my revolution — and wise organizers remind us that we all need some ice cream cake now and then. As Dean Spade notes in his book, Mutual Aid, activist groups that are “fun, celebratory, appreciative of each other” tend to be the ones that thrive. And as Marcus Carter of Critical Resistance has affirmed, “Abolition is joy.”

After all, in the world we’re working to build, won’t there be more joy, more fun, more delicious treats for everyone?

A line has formed behind us at 7-Eleven. I place the promised Goldfish crackers on the counter, but K. shakes their head.

“Nooooo,” they say. “Ice cream.”

“People are waiting,” I say. “Can you pretend your crackers are ice cream?”

“NOOOOOO!” they cry, aghast.

I guess there are limits to each of our imaginations. That’s why “abolition is a collective struggle.” Toddlers don’t have all the answers! Nobody does, individually.

But if a 3-year-old can dream of cats building skyscrapers, dancing snowpeople, and melodies in the silence of aching grief, then surely, if we put our minds together, we can imagine — and build — a world without cages.