My three year old is quite precocious and wise beyond her years. I love talking to her and her big sister about whatever interests them, though we don't talk about murders or attacks or death of any kind which terrifies Lily and leaves her reeling for days. But we do tell them honestly how we feel about certain things, in an age appropriate way. No questions are off limits. Complex subjects are broken down but not dumbed down. We talk about God, religion, sex roles and gender stereotypes, marriage, politics, money, meditation, spirituality. I trust that my people can find the center, the core concepts. Tonight as we were going to bed, her big sister long ago fast asleep due to the cold that is kicking her little behind, Virginie said to me, "Do you remember that boy (Virginie still refers to all males as boys.)who was lying in the street when we went to New York City?" I did remember the man but was rather surprised that she did, as we'd been there together more than six months prior for a birthday party.
"Yes," I answered. I do remember that man. He was homeless. Remember that I told you that he had no home?"
"The street was his home. He lived there," she announced. She wasn't proud, just stating matter of factly that he must live somewhere, so the place where he lay must be it. She sat quietly for a moment, which for anyone who knows my dear girl knows is no small feat. Then she said, "Can he drive his car to his house somewhere else?" To which I replied, "I don't think he has a car either, baby, or a house somewhere else."
Her little brow furrowed and she stared into the darkness for a minute before she said, "We have to help him, Mama. Papa gets jobs. Maybe he can show him how to get one too."
"Maybe," I said while brushing her hair from her face and trying to gently lull her to sleep. I lay there in the darkness, missing my husband who is working through this holiday season, and thought, This baby is right. We have to help this man. We have to help people. We have to help each other.
I, too, have been guilty of turning in, working on my own issues, my own problems, my own story. I have gotten used to letting go of my community, not asking of it, and being slow to offer my assistance or service, assuming either that someone else will do it or fearing calling unwanted attention to me or my action. I have figured that the connections were too personal, too scary, left me too vulnerable to attack or to love. Whenever I have had the chance to participate, I've felt so incredible, so alive, so connected, so tangibly, vibrantly, extraordinarily human. I have been reminded by this small girl who somehow saw the connection between us all and asked not if we would help, but demanded we should. I say this so much when it relates to real tragedy, to the furthest reaches of human suffering and need, but it is also true in our every day. We are our brother's keeper. We need to see each other, consider each other, support each other. Want to.
Strangely, I too, could not get that particular homeless man's face out of my mind. Maybe it was because I could see him in the distance as the girls and I were about to pass and I mulled just what I would tell them when the question was inevitably asked. But for days after, when I thought of the conversation between us, I wondered how I'd found it so easy to explain that there was a man, red-faced and cold, clinging to a box, sleeping on the sidewalk in the city of their birth, and that I was able to say it so matter-of-factly.
I remember as a child, seeing my first homeless person. It was the early eighties and we'd gone into the city to do something, probably see a show or go to a museum as was usually the case. I was older than my girls are now and homeless people we not commonplace. As more and more people found themselves unable to keep up with the excess and striving of the 80s, coupled with the closing of mental health facilities that saw many with mental disabilities actually released to the street to fend for themselves, an invisible, underground (so to speak) population grew alongside those of us living above ground. I was terrified of the man and woman I saw. They seemed out of a movie. Which is, frankly, why it was probably so easy for so many adults to consider them unreal. It was hard to look at them and see their faces, to look them in the eye, let alone consider their stories. Their real life, human stories. Stories the same as those I or others I knew might tell. I never forgot them and my feeling that as a society, as a community, we were choosing to allow these people to live out of our sight, rather than bringing them back into the fold. I was just a kid but I knew that this just didn't seem right.
I'm not sure when and where we let go of each others' hands. Maybe we were never holding them in the first place, and it is a fantasy of my youth that we were meant to care for one another, to look out for one another, to try to lift each and every one of us from our place on the sidewalk, physically and metaphorically, to allow even those living in parallel universes to be seen and acknowledged from time to time. Some people think when we are young we can still see ghosts and spirits and as we age, we lose our connection to that world, overwhelmed are we by the material world. We cannot see what children see right in front of their faces. "We have to help him." We have to help each other because we need each other.
Inherent in all the struggle we have meeting the demands of the modern world, striving for a level of success equal to that of our parents, raising our children to be decent citizens while giving them everything we can without making them completely spoiled, must be the sense, if not the realization, that we cannot leave all those people behind. That there has already been too much of that, too much "going for mine," and that it has not brought comfort or peace. The "otherness" of homeless people, black people, white people, foreigners and expats, gay people, straight people, people with disabilities of any kind, people who think differently than we, rich people, poor people, anything that doesn't look, on the surface, just as we envision ourselves, has allowed us to ignore each other, to step over each other, walk around each other, justify killing each other, justify fearing each other, set up communities where we don't have to look at each other or be with each other. But that does not negate the fact that this man was lying down on the ground, living, breathing, sleeping and that many others actually and metaphorically are doing the same. And we should help them.
My baby wants to help him. It's my job to keep it that way.
(c) Copyright 2012. Repatriated Mama: Back the Suburban Grind.
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