Thursday, December 29, 2016
Back to the Suburban Grind: Star dust and grief
Back to the Suburban Grind: Star dust and grief: I am crying for someone I've never met, that I have never known truly, someone known by everyone, and still feel crushed and lost and hu...
Star dust and grief
I am crying for someone I've never met, that I have never known truly, someone known by everyone, and still feel crushed and lost and hurt and angry like I knew them. It doesn't mean I've lost touch with reality or that I do not care in general for the suffering of the unnamed or that I love in a way that is unrealistic and fantastic. Sometimes we are just forced to confront our feelings of fear and loss in an immediate and direct way. Sometimes watching a supernova burn out reminds us that we are just hurtling through space on a rock warmed by the sun. Sometimes the comet that we tied our hearts to is disintegrating into the blackness and it stops our breath.
My house is eerily quiet, missing someone who was never there. The girls are asleep, snuggled up together across the hall from me. The night light plugged in for the seven year old, is slowly changing colors and throwing candy shadows against the wall. She'll be in my bed soon. I hear myself breathing. Not a good strong breath. I can't fill my lungs and exhale through my nose because only these shallow, choppy breaths keep me from bursting into tears again. I can feel my heart beating deeply in my chest. I cannot stop that. I listen to it and begin to count. The counting takes my mind away from the loss. It gives me something to do so that my idle mind does not visit what's missing. I've cried for every one of them, have been struck to the core.
News of the passing of someone that inspired me or showed me myself before I'd even considered myself sucked the air from my lungs and stilled everything. It seemed to never stop. My heart would go deep into my chest and my chest to my knees. Before I could stop them, there would be tears. I'd feel the planet's atmospheric pressure change. I'd know it to be true that they were gone and I'd sit. Sit with the silence and the truth of the inevitable. I'd go to the tape or the film or the music or the words or the pictures and will their presence on this earth just a little longer. I'd recall a time, a place, a moment, a gesture. I'd hear the first note and feel my teenaged, awkward self rise from the couch in awe and disbelief.
I'd remember the first time. I'd remember myself from that moment, from that time. I'd feel the layers of myself, the ones at the bottom, the ones that built me, and I'd remember the voice or the music or the sound or the image. I'd sit in the darkness. I'd trace my racing thoughts through my brain. I'd feel loss. I'd mourn. I'd grieve. I'd miss them, desperately miss them, their presence, their shared place on this earth and I'd reach out to others who shared the same sense of loss and longing. We'd ask why. We'd wonder if anything could have been done. Could anything have saved them? Can anything save us?
I'm in my bed with just one light on. There is a saved side but I know that only my littlest will share the bed with me tonight. Eventually. The rest of the room is dark and still and I am alone. I cannot bear to watch TV or videos. Cannot bear to listen to the news. With each retelling of a life in past tense, I shrink smaller in my own in the present. We are living apart essentially no matter that I have saved a place for him here at his insistence. It hurts. This loss. This missing what I never had, what I never knew because he remained aloof and untouchable all this time. All my promises to live fuller, to follow my own path, to walk through darkness, to trailblaze are whispers in the face of this overwhelming malaise. I am in shock, scared, and startlingly aware of my own presence. I feel myself watching me and wondering what I intend to do with my life. I listen to my shallow breathing and wonder if I intend to pour the fullness of me into my children because I don't dare live the life I promised myself I'd try to seek, but insist they try to reach. I wonder if I even have it in me to dream anymore. I rub my eyes. Stardust. In my eyes.
This last time the girls catch me, see my face in the rear view mirror as I adjust it to back out. "Are you crying, Mommy?" And I am. I'd let myself believe that the fates would spare these people. Might spare us this grief. That they would not all be taken. I joked with others about the Rapture and end days and then in the silence asked aloud if there was something I was missing. It's like standing in the middle of the storm, at its eye where it seems calm, yet all around there is madness. And I am both the calm and the madness. There are so many tears that I tell the girls that the stardust swirling in the air has gotten into my eyes. I am aching to my core because everything I thought I knew is no more. With each passing, a part of my foundation crumbles. As my girls witness me crack and glue myself together. They attend my Spotify listening parties and watch YouTube videos. They hold hands with me while I read to them thinking of my youthful heroes fading. It is the three of us. They have no choice but to allow me my space to heal.
As a girl, I'd fixed myself to the stars even though I knew that if I could see them, they'd probably already burned out. I saw them in the sky twinkling, sparkling, showing me infinite possibility and waited for them, longed for them in that weightless forever. I was transported. So many who have passed this year were those stars for me. They gave me voice, spoke my pain and heartache, longing and desire, wit and humor. They were everywhere, some so much that I assumed I'd have them longer than they'd been promised to the world. After first denying that they were gone, my heart settled on the realization, on the truth, and the tears could not stop. A short, shallow breath can hold in the despair only so long and then you are whimpering on your knees.
And I am here again. Another loss. They came so fast this year that I could hardly catch my breath before the heartache came again. And yet, I almost welcomed the distraction. I am already grieving. Each day a new assault on my heart. Each day a crack to be reglued. I keep holding up the stars for my girls, offering them magic to believe in. I have tried to show them the very best of these people, the very best they've given. They are already supernovas, hardly seen as human in our eyes. Beyond. Magic. Heroic but also human. We all need our heroes. Theirs is their father. And when I met him, he was sprinkled in stardust. By the time I was looking directly at him, he was already gone. I knew it. But I couldn't believe it. The giant universe that shared with us all these wonderful people now seems oppressive and scary and cold. But I keep holding up the stars for my children though I mourn the loss of the magic and the stardust.
I cannot name them all, but they each left this world and exploded like supernovas into another without warning. The sense of being left behind by their meteor trail of magic, unable to catch the tail of that comet, triggered me in so many ways. Before I could get my bearings, it would happen again. And when he finally comes home, I'll have no choice but to look into that trail of stardust and confront the sadness.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
My house is eerily quiet, missing someone who was never there. The girls are asleep, snuggled up together across the hall from me. The night light plugged in for the seven year old, is slowly changing colors and throwing candy shadows against the wall. She'll be in my bed soon. I hear myself breathing. Not a good strong breath. I can't fill my lungs and exhale through my nose because only these shallow, choppy breaths keep me from bursting into tears again. I can feel my heart beating deeply in my chest. I cannot stop that. I listen to it and begin to count. The counting takes my mind away from the loss. It gives me something to do so that my idle mind does not visit what's missing. I've cried for every one of them, have been struck to the core.
News of the passing of someone that inspired me or showed me myself before I'd even considered myself sucked the air from my lungs and stilled everything. It seemed to never stop. My heart would go deep into my chest and my chest to my knees. Before I could stop them, there would be tears. I'd feel the planet's atmospheric pressure change. I'd know it to be true that they were gone and I'd sit. Sit with the silence and the truth of the inevitable. I'd go to the tape or the film or the music or the words or the pictures and will their presence on this earth just a little longer. I'd recall a time, a place, a moment, a gesture. I'd hear the first note and feel my teenaged, awkward self rise from the couch in awe and disbelief.
I'd remember the first time. I'd remember myself from that moment, from that time. I'd feel the layers of myself, the ones at the bottom, the ones that built me, and I'd remember the voice or the music or the sound or the image. I'd sit in the darkness. I'd trace my racing thoughts through my brain. I'd feel loss. I'd mourn. I'd grieve. I'd miss them, desperately miss them, their presence, their shared place on this earth and I'd reach out to others who shared the same sense of loss and longing. We'd ask why. We'd wonder if anything could have been done. Could anything have saved them? Can anything save us?
I'm in my bed with just one light on. There is a saved side but I know that only my littlest will share the bed with me tonight. Eventually. The rest of the room is dark and still and I am alone. I cannot bear to watch TV or videos. Cannot bear to listen to the news. With each retelling of a life in past tense, I shrink smaller in my own in the present. We are living apart essentially no matter that I have saved a place for him here at his insistence. It hurts. This loss. This missing what I never had, what I never knew because he remained aloof and untouchable all this time. All my promises to live fuller, to follow my own path, to walk through darkness, to trailblaze are whispers in the face of this overwhelming malaise. I am in shock, scared, and startlingly aware of my own presence. I feel myself watching me and wondering what I intend to do with my life. I listen to my shallow breathing and wonder if I intend to pour the fullness of me into my children because I don't dare live the life I promised myself I'd try to seek, but insist they try to reach. I wonder if I even have it in me to dream anymore. I rub my eyes. Stardust. In my eyes.
This last time the girls catch me, see my face in the rear view mirror as I adjust it to back out. "Are you crying, Mommy?" And I am. I'd let myself believe that the fates would spare these people. Might spare us this grief. That they would not all be taken. I joked with others about the Rapture and end days and then in the silence asked aloud if there was something I was missing. It's like standing in the middle of the storm, at its eye where it seems calm, yet all around there is madness. And I am both the calm and the madness. There are so many tears that I tell the girls that the stardust swirling in the air has gotten into my eyes. I am aching to my core because everything I thought I knew is no more. With each passing, a part of my foundation crumbles. As my girls witness me crack and glue myself together. They attend my Spotify listening parties and watch YouTube videos. They hold hands with me while I read to them thinking of my youthful heroes fading. It is the three of us. They have no choice but to allow me my space to heal.
As a girl, I'd fixed myself to the stars even though I knew that if I could see them, they'd probably already burned out. I saw them in the sky twinkling, sparkling, showing me infinite possibility and waited for them, longed for them in that weightless forever. I was transported. So many who have passed this year were those stars for me. They gave me voice, spoke my pain and heartache, longing and desire, wit and humor. They were everywhere, some so much that I assumed I'd have them longer than they'd been promised to the world. After first denying that they were gone, my heart settled on the realization, on the truth, and the tears could not stop. A short, shallow breath can hold in the despair only so long and then you are whimpering on your knees.
And I am here again. Another loss. They came so fast this year that I could hardly catch my breath before the heartache came again. And yet, I almost welcomed the distraction. I am already grieving. Each day a new assault on my heart. Each day a crack to be reglued. I keep holding up the stars for my girls, offering them magic to believe in. I have tried to show them the very best of these people, the very best they've given. They are already supernovas, hardly seen as human in our eyes. Beyond. Magic. Heroic but also human. We all need our heroes. Theirs is their father. And when I met him, he was sprinkled in stardust. By the time I was looking directly at him, he was already gone. I knew it. But I couldn't believe it. The giant universe that shared with us all these wonderful people now seems oppressive and scary and cold. But I keep holding up the stars for my children though I mourn the loss of the magic and the stardust.
I cannot name them all, but they each left this world and exploded like supernovas into another without warning. The sense of being left behind by their meteor trail of magic, unable to catch the tail of that comet, triggered me in so many ways. Before I could get my bearings, it would happen again. And when he finally comes home, I'll have no choice but to look into that trail of stardust and confront the sadness.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Monday, December 5, 2016
Back to the Suburban Grind: Hothouse flowers in bloom
Back to the Suburban Grind: Hothouse flowers in bloom: This is me talking from the wound. I know all about holding hands across the aisles and all the way we've come. I know that we want to...
Hothouse flowers in bloom
This is me talking from the wound. I know all about holding hands across the aisles and all the way we've come. I know that we want to be color-blind and cast the world open and diverse and accepting of all of our unique qualities. But I am often a bit player, the confided in best friend, the fringe, the exotic, the unreal. When I tell you that I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders, that I am tired of carrying this load and you ask, "Why do you feel like you are carrying the load? Don't you feel that all women do this?" then I know that you don't know.
I know y'all love Soul Train and Beyonce and Jay-Z, Oprah, Barack Obama, and Michelle. I know you would kill for Oprah's giveaways, love Neil Degrasse Tyson, Van Jones, and every and any ball player who does not take a knee. I know you had a cool, wicked best friend/roommate/co-worker who gave you fist bumps, maybe even hugs, and held your hair back when you went all the way in and hurt yourself with the alcohol or the weed that you smoked up and she did only in secret when she was around your other white friends. I know that you know that Naomi Campbell is beautiful and the fiercest walker we've ever known, and that Vanessa Williams was the best Miss America, probably the only one you remember, and that Misty Copeland inspires the hell out of you and all the little dancers who have to "overcome something." Black.
We are the Titubas to your flying around the room foolishness. Listening to your cries, your stories and tall tales, moving the earth to heal your wounds. Standing by you because we've had no other option. When you go to trial, we are there with you. We might even hang first before you get released on appeal. When we go to trial you might bring things to the jailhouse before the lynch mob shows up. You wonder if we might survive it, rise up, come out the other side stronger, more knowledgeable, and still compassionate, softened, kinder, more enlightened.
You've watched the film next to us, in the seventh grade, heads bent low, when you see them hosing down the black people. The black people. Marching peacefully and fighting for their basic rights. I'm struck dumb, maybe you were too, of the older, black church ladies in their pillbox hats and their short strap purses carried delicately on their arms, moving forward with dignity, self-respect, desire, trembling pride, hosed down with water meant to quell a raging fire. Raging. Hell yeah. Inside. Magic. Students, girls and boys, holding on to one another, twisting like vines, never letting go of each others' hands until the torrent is just more than a human body can bear.
You've watched the film next to us, in the seventh grade, heads bent low, when you see them hosing down the black people. The black people. Marching peacefully and fighting for their basic rights. I'm struck dumb, maybe you were too, of the older, black church ladies in their pillbox hats and their short strap purses carried delicately on their arms, moving forward with dignity, self-respect, desire, trembling pride, hosed down with water meant to quell a raging fire. Raging. Hell yeah. Inside. Magic. Students, girls and boys, holding on to one another, twisting like vines, never letting go of each others' hands until the torrent is just more than a human body can bear.
The shit has to seem like witchcraft because the tropes and assaults were meant to take us down and still we rise. I read on a site, in the comments where I should not have trudged, a young white woman demanding of the black hostess, "How are you so strong? Black women are so strong! I wish I could bottle some of your strength and face the world." Now God bless her heart, I know she hit the trip wire with that BS backhanded compliment, but no one on there was up for her tomfoolery or her games. To paraphrase, "Bitch, you kidding me? We been carrying this shit forever. You can't even see us we holding it down so hard. We went in and voted to save the world and y'all still undecided. Take a seat. Ask us how we are so strong....what choice did we have when everyone turned their backs and tried to ride ours, the niggers of the world." We've toiled. Our backs are splitting.
Heads high even when we have nothing or little or a lot, but someone just had to tell us they think we didn't deserve it or got it because of Affirmative Action or a quota system that would surely have seen the mediocre (white) pass but not the exceptional (black). Your mediocre calls out our great with no shame. Maybe you don't know the difference. Go low and we go high and say what you will but still we slay. Calling us ugly and monkeys, animals and devils, heathens, idiots, sexpots and studs. Before the power structure threatened to take the one tool that poor blacks and whites had to find their way to any chance at that American dream, there was education. My grandparents told all of their charges it was all they could give them. They could work the farm or the factory, or they could learn. And there were tests put before them each time they succeeded and excelled. They'd just take the test again. And again. And again until there was no denying their excellence.
The rebirth of cool and slick and funk and style with roots so deep they reach to the core of the earth and out the other sides. We recall that deep, dark, black soil from which we were conjured, all of us, where the seeds of our souls are planted, where we have grown in sealed cages, like hothouses. Outside you see the foggy windows but inside there is a rich world, to which you have little access until you know how to cultivate and grown the most delicate of plants. You may touch the surface, clear the glass outside and peak in and see a world of lush greenery, steamy and hot, ripe with hope and expectation, creativity, drive, a microcosm into which you have never been invited because we are afraid. We have been protective of that space. You must remember that pesticides have been sprayed all over our blooms.
Colorism breaks people in many countries of the diaspora (thank you, colonialism) and in the good old United States of America, just one drop of black blood made you black, a taint you could only hide if you were fair and could "pass" yourself off as white, giving up everything. My aunties recall walking with my great-grandmother and having white people see her with them and think they were her "girls," what might be delicately called, housemaids, were they white, something that burned her up. She held them up, gave them their place, and their names. She tended to their delicate souls.
Whether the hair in a natural, long or short, wig, weave, pressed, relaxed, braided, colored, shaved today and down the back tomorrow, don't touch it or any part of me if it is just to dissect, tear apart, explore and navigate like some unfamiliar planet. We are from here. Of this soil. Right here. And our feet touch the ground, wiggle deep. We can put our ear down to it and hear what's coming, taste the air and feel the storm, rub the soil between our palms and know that there will be harvest or famine. We are more than just our bodies, place holders, stand ins for your desires, your whims, your hopes, your gardens. You can't imagine how deep the roots go to the center of the earth. We are in front of you and we are deep down and we are in the air.
Everyone is down when the gettin's good and the get down is low and funky and directed by Baz Luhrmann, but when we're being called out in numbers for the televised firing squads or tell our own stories in our own words, the spoken word hits the white window panes and the anguish gets distorted in the patter of rainfall against the glass. You mouth the words, "I can't hear you," and don't dare open the window to get in as you turn back to familiar pastures. There is a deep patch of forest where everything grows wild and resilient. We are made of that stuff. It is beautiful and awe-inspiring, tenacious, dignified, regal, magical. It is from these roots that we have found our strength, healed ourselves when no doctor was present. Salved our own wounds when you hurt us. Made our own crutches when we were too tired to bear weight.
I'm weary. I've grown so hot and ripe in that hothouse. Angry and violent with vibrant color and personality, wit, humor, and pain. You must come to know this garden. You must come to know what lies in there, to have a curiosity, to learn, to walk silently, to listen. If you come into this garden, you will know why I feel like I have carried so much and want to lie down. In bloom. And for even just a few seconds know a moment of existing just because I am beautiful in my own world before being plucked and studied in yours.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Heads high even when we have nothing or little or a lot, but someone just had to tell us they think we didn't deserve it or got it because of Affirmative Action or a quota system that would surely have seen the mediocre (white) pass but not the exceptional (black). Your mediocre calls out our great with no shame. Maybe you don't know the difference. Go low and we go high and say what you will but still we slay. Calling us ugly and monkeys, animals and devils, heathens, idiots, sexpots and studs. Before the power structure threatened to take the one tool that poor blacks and whites had to find their way to any chance at that American dream, there was education. My grandparents told all of their charges it was all they could give them. They could work the farm or the factory, or they could learn. And there were tests put before them each time they succeeded and excelled. They'd just take the test again. And again. And again until there was no denying their excellence.
The rebirth of cool and slick and funk and style with roots so deep they reach to the core of the earth and out the other sides. We recall that deep, dark, black soil from which we were conjured, all of us, where the seeds of our souls are planted, where we have grown in sealed cages, like hothouses. Outside you see the foggy windows but inside there is a rich world, to which you have little access until you know how to cultivate and grown the most delicate of plants. You may touch the surface, clear the glass outside and peak in and see a world of lush greenery, steamy and hot, ripe with hope and expectation, creativity, drive, a microcosm into which you have never been invited because we are afraid. We have been protective of that space. You must remember that pesticides have been sprayed all over our blooms.
Colorism breaks people in many countries of the diaspora (thank you, colonialism) and in the good old United States of America, just one drop of black blood made you black, a taint you could only hide if you were fair and could "pass" yourself off as white, giving up everything. My aunties recall walking with my great-grandmother and having white people see her with them and think they were her "girls," what might be delicately called, housemaids, were they white, something that burned her up. She held them up, gave them their place, and their names. She tended to their delicate souls.
Whether the hair in a natural, long or short, wig, weave, pressed, relaxed, braided, colored, shaved today and down the back tomorrow, don't touch it or any part of me if it is just to dissect, tear apart, explore and navigate like some unfamiliar planet. We are from here. Of this soil. Right here. And our feet touch the ground, wiggle deep. We can put our ear down to it and hear what's coming, taste the air and feel the storm, rub the soil between our palms and know that there will be harvest or famine. We are more than just our bodies, place holders, stand ins for your desires, your whims, your hopes, your gardens. You can't imagine how deep the roots go to the center of the earth. We are in front of you and we are deep down and we are in the air.
Everyone is down when the gettin's good and the get down is low and funky and directed by Baz Luhrmann, but when we're being called out in numbers for the televised firing squads or tell our own stories in our own words, the spoken word hits the white window panes and the anguish gets distorted in the patter of rainfall against the glass. You mouth the words, "I can't hear you," and don't dare open the window to get in as you turn back to familiar pastures. There is a deep patch of forest where everything grows wild and resilient. We are made of that stuff. It is beautiful and awe-inspiring, tenacious, dignified, regal, magical. It is from these roots that we have found our strength, healed ourselves when no doctor was present. Salved our own wounds when you hurt us. Made our own crutches when we were too tired to bear weight.
I'm weary. I've grown so hot and ripe in that hothouse. Angry and violent with vibrant color and personality, wit, humor, and pain. You must come to know this garden. You must come to know what lies in there, to have a curiosity, to learn, to walk silently, to listen. If you come into this garden, you will know why I feel like I have carried so much and want to lie down. In bloom. And for even just a few seconds know a moment of existing just because I am beautiful in my own world before being plucked and studied in yours.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Back to the Suburban Grind: Moving in Quick sand
Back to the Suburban Grind: Moving in Quick sand: I've voted for candidates who've not won before. I have accepted defeat with a few tears and resolve. I have felt ready to face it...
Moving in Quick sand
I've voted for candidates who've not won before. I have accepted defeat with a few tears and resolve. I have felt ready to face it all again four years later because I have believed that even if everyone did not think as I did (and I have never been myopic enough to think they did so) that we, Americans, THAT WE, had agreed upon everyone's right to at least live in their own space in their own peace even if we (or I) longed for us to reach a greater love and understanding of one another. I'd taken comfort that though I suspected/knew that behind closed doors there was a good deal of racist and sexist banter going on in the White House and cabinet of presidents in which I held little faith, I expected they'd at least try to hide their shameful behavior and policies with rhetoric and not come right out and assault us with hate. And I wasn't afraid of them.
I can't lie. I have always anticipated some level of racism from my fellow Americans, white Americans, and am always pleasantly surprised when someone shows me otherwise. I listen to the stories they choose to tell, choose to share with me and the rest of the world and cull tiny messages, read the pinpoints on their maps to know if deep down or perhaps on the surface, they don't or can't fully respect me and my experience. Somehow the shame was mine, that I suspected that I should do more, be more or less, convince them by contorting myself, my beliefs, my strong voice, my thick legs, my alarming sexuality, my very blackness, that I should be smaller in the world so that they might be able to live in a world that had me in it. Even I allowed that the world, that America, did not belong to me and was thankful for every small mercy that showed me differently.
For every friend who told me of their racist auntie, of their schools where no people of color attended, of their churches, towns, teams, and other organizations in which they participated without ever seeing a black person, I winced and then offered some level of comfort to them. Well, you are here now. You are part of this diverse community. That counts. And sure. It does. It does.
When I was a girl, I saw the world through the low-res footage of the Polaroid camera and loved looking at the world in the black and white of my parents' and grandparents' "olden days." Their pictures fascinated me because everyone looked so young and beautiful but the tales they told of the time, the parts of the tales that had to do with white people, were violent and bleak and terrifying. The Civil Rights Era was not just part of history, tales made flat and two-dimensional by the textbook, but the stories told by my family, the young, beautiful family of a time that the United States of America was truly black and white and all shadows. I lived among white people in a nearly completely white community and lived my life every day with a pinch of fear. I knew that even in the face of good, kind, supportive white people, I'd better be sure that someone of color, someone who "knew" would have my back up front.
I was ashamed of this, ashamed that I distrusted, that I was not letting love in my heart, that I was not turning the other cheek. I'd always felt that the burden was on me to prove myself open, easy-going, and cool. I tried to let microaggressions and judgments roll off me, not let the blood rush to my cheeks. Defused offenses with laughter, assault with excuses, ignorance with forgiveness -- "they know not what they do."
But I still held my breath. I held my breath because I knew that it was just a matter of time before someone revealed that they weren't as down for my cause as they'd hoped. Held my breath because I knew I might meet their mother/father/grandmother/auntie/cousin/friend/neighbor who said shit like, "that neighborhood is full of n****s not good black people like you," and I wouldn't know how to respond. Because I was twelve. Held my breath because someone would tell me that they didn't understand why all the other black kids were in different classes and not in the advanced classes with me. Held my breath because someone wanted me to know that they just didn't find black girls attractive or black people attentive or able to swim or couldn't get lice or whatever it was they'd heard. Held my breath when, though in the top ten percent of my class, lesser students dared tell me that I'd surely get into the college of my choice because of affirmative action and wanted me to agree to as much. Held my breath because the cute boy told me that he really liked me but that his grandmother would roll over if he came home with a black girl and I felt badly for HIM. Held my breath because sometimes it was all too much and the short breaths were all I could take in without letting my emotions seep out.
First there are tears and then there is rage! And I learned that it was the rage, the rage that scared everyone off. Even your allies couldn't stand for your rage. Your family, your friends, the people who were trying to love you in their own way, to study you, understand you, who longed for whatever it was that being a black girl meant to them, turned from your rage. It revealed too much. Too much of the pain behind your forgiveness, behind your memories, behind your hope. So you channeled it. Made the world. Held it up. Shone the lights. Held your breath. Sucked it in with your head high, eyes focused, became a pillar, face tight with smiles but the heart pumping blood, veins and vessels pounding, eyes blinking, lashes fluttering, cool breaths sucked in and out through your lips.
Simmering, a slow boil and each assault or insult, each death called us from against the wall and whispered, "you'd better let it out or it'll blow." Heat flushed our ears and our cheeks and we were at first embarrassed, humiliated, scared, and then the rage. The rage came and poured like lava melting the glossy papered image of what we were expected to be into something harder to identify. Our beautiful black friends staring past us, the invitation standing to join but no more asking or pleading. Get on or get off. And we wanted everyone on board. We all did. WE did--the blacks, non-whites, immigrant, Muslim, LGBTQ, disabled, the intersected of all these groups--we want you on board. Without you, your racist/sexist/bigoted/homophobic/cruel/apathetic mother/father/auntie/uncle/friend/cousin/neighbor will never hear another side to their fear-mongering, hateful rhetoric or their privileged denials and apathy. They have already chosen not to believe me, not to believe us. While I "may not be like the others," I still can't shake my otherness. You must go in for me.
Listening at the foot of my grandmother in her front sitting room to the tales of a defiant great-granddad and seeing him in his black and white, youthful glory, seeing the uncles in their overalls who stood across the street from the little soda shop/cafeteria that was segregated while their nephews and sons attempted a sit in in white, short-sleeved button downs, and slacks. Pouring over photos of our parents in large Afros and sideburns, wide collars, and short skirts. Seeing our photos become clean and Kodakchromed and colored as our friendship barrettes and hoop earrings, lightening bolted enamel pins and designer jeans came into fashion. Seeing the events of our nation unfold in real time in moving pictures in social media. We are here. You must go for us.
When I was a girl I was afraid of stray dogs because I didn't believe they'd listen to my command to stop. I was afraid of quicksand because it looked like regular ground until you were deep in it and then it just might be too late. I was afraid of someone disrespecting or challenging my family because I believed they'd already been through enough and didn't want to see them wounded or have them face me having been. And I was terrified of someone calling me "nigger," "blackie," "brown sugar" in mixed company not only because it would burn my heart and rise up in my cheeks and my ears and force my tears, but because I was afraid to know just who would and would not stand for me.
Those Kodak pictures from that time show me in my youth already navigating the world's mines and expecting that I might blow up first. That little girl had hope but low expectations for others for whom supporting and loving her might be a burden, might even put them in harm's way. That little girl learned to accept defeats that were altogether unfair, more than likely biased, and influenced by a society that valued her less than all the white children that surrounded her. It is with shock but not complete surprise that a raging, narcissistic, racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynistic blowhard has been elected president. It is the culmination of all my fears. It is the ground made quick sand. It is a stray dog jumping up and putting its paws on my shoulders looking like he might bite my face. It is embarrassing the legacy of my hard-working, well-educated, dedicated, God-fearing, loving family and all the sacrifices they made to get me to my basic rights. It is being called "nigger" or watching my friends cursed and assaulted because they are gay or Muslim or Hindi or Sikh (because please don't know the difference) or in a mixed relationship or disabled or a woman, strong or meek, or poor or uneducated or not quite what America had in mind when they narrowed their definition of "American."
When Al Gore and John Kerry conceded I felt deflated. I'd had faith in their abilities to lead, to govern, to be fair and inclusive. I felt that even if they could not ever meet or even understand the needs of my community and the communities of those I love, but I thought they might try. I thought they wanted to understand, that they wanted to unify. I was afraid of the machine that Ronald Reagan and the Bushes drove over communities I loved. But what I feel now is terror. Absolute fear. I stare at my old class pictures, run my fingers over the old faces of friends, classmates, people who have said how much they love me, care for me, enjoyed our friendships who have voted against my very right to live as they'd like to live. We are sinking. That quicksand catches you and takes down slowly. What happens is that we suffocate and drown and don't even know we've gone down. And we all go down.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
I can't lie. I have always anticipated some level of racism from my fellow Americans, white Americans, and am always pleasantly surprised when someone shows me otherwise. I listen to the stories they choose to tell, choose to share with me and the rest of the world and cull tiny messages, read the pinpoints on their maps to know if deep down or perhaps on the surface, they don't or can't fully respect me and my experience. Somehow the shame was mine, that I suspected that I should do more, be more or less, convince them by contorting myself, my beliefs, my strong voice, my thick legs, my alarming sexuality, my very blackness, that I should be smaller in the world so that they might be able to live in a world that had me in it. Even I allowed that the world, that America, did not belong to me and was thankful for every small mercy that showed me differently.
For every friend who told me of their racist auntie, of their schools where no people of color attended, of their churches, towns, teams, and other organizations in which they participated without ever seeing a black person, I winced and then offered some level of comfort to them. Well, you are here now. You are part of this diverse community. That counts. And sure. It does. It does.
When I was a girl, I saw the world through the low-res footage of the Polaroid camera and loved looking at the world in the black and white of my parents' and grandparents' "olden days." Their pictures fascinated me because everyone looked so young and beautiful but the tales they told of the time, the parts of the tales that had to do with white people, were violent and bleak and terrifying. The Civil Rights Era was not just part of history, tales made flat and two-dimensional by the textbook, but the stories told by my family, the young, beautiful family of a time that the United States of America was truly black and white and all shadows. I lived among white people in a nearly completely white community and lived my life every day with a pinch of fear. I knew that even in the face of good, kind, supportive white people, I'd better be sure that someone of color, someone who "knew" would have my back up front.
I was ashamed of this, ashamed that I distrusted, that I was not letting love in my heart, that I was not turning the other cheek. I'd always felt that the burden was on me to prove myself open, easy-going, and cool. I tried to let microaggressions and judgments roll off me, not let the blood rush to my cheeks. Defused offenses with laughter, assault with excuses, ignorance with forgiveness -- "they know not what they do."
But I still held my breath. I held my breath because I knew that it was just a matter of time before someone revealed that they weren't as down for my cause as they'd hoped. Held my breath because I knew I might meet their mother/father/grandmother/auntie/cousin/friend/neighbor who said shit like, "that neighborhood is full of n****s not good black people like you," and I wouldn't know how to respond. Because I was twelve. Held my breath because someone would tell me that they didn't understand why all the other black kids were in different classes and not in the advanced classes with me. Held my breath because someone wanted me to know that they just didn't find black girls attractive or black people attentive or able to swim or couldn't get lice or whatever it was they'd heard. Held my breath when, though in the top ten percent of my class, lesser students dared tell me that I'd surely get into the college of my choice because of affirmative action and wanted me to agree to as much. Held my breath because the cute boy told me that he really liked me but that his grandmother would roll over if he came home with a black girl and I felt badly for HIM. Held my breath because sometimes it was all too much and the short breaths were all I could take in without letting my emotions seep out.
First there are tears and then there is rage! And I learned that it was the rage, the rage that scared everyone off. Even your allies couldn't stand for your rage. Your family, your friends, the people who were trying to love you in their own way, to study you, understand you, who longed for whatever it was that being a black girl meant to them, turned from your rage. It revealed too much. Too much of the pain behind your forgiveness, behind your memories, behind your hope. So you channeled it. Made the world. Held it up. Shone the lights. Held your breath. Sucked it in with your head high, eyes focused, became a pillar, face tight with smiles but the heart pumping blood, veins and vessels pounding, eyes blinking, lashes fluttering, cool breaths sucked in and out through your lips.
Simmering, a slow boil and each assault or insult, each death called us from against the wall and whispered, "you'd better let it out or it'll blow." Heat flushed our ears and our cheeks and we were at first embarrassed, humiliated, scared, and then the rage. The rage came and poured like lava melting the glossy papered image of what we were expected to be into something harder to identify. Our beautiful black friends staring past us, the invitation standing to join but no more asking or pleading. Get on or get off. And we wanted everyone on board. We all did. WE did--the blacks, non-whites, immigrant, Muslim, LGBTQ, disabled, the intersected of all these groups--we want you on board. Without you, your racist/sexist/bigoted/homophobic/cruel/apathetic mother/father/auntie/uncle/friend/cousin/neighbor will never hear another side to their fear-mongering, hateful rhetoric or their privileged denials and apathy. They have already chosen not to believe me, not to believe us. While I "may not be like the others," I still can't shake my otherness. You must go in for me.
Listening at the foot of my grandmother in her front sitting room to the tales of a defiant great-granddad and seeing him in his black and white, youthful glory, seeing the uncles in their overalls who stood across the street from the little soda shop/cafeteria that was segregated while their nephews and sons attempted a sit in in white, short-sleeved button downs, and slacks. Pouring over photos of our parents in large Afros and sideburns, wide collars, and short skirts. Seeing our photos become clean and Kodakchromed and colored as our friendship barrettes and hoop earrings, lightening bolted enamel pins and designer jeans came into fashion. Seeing the events of our nation unfold in real time in moving pictures in social media. We are here. You must go for us.
When I was a girl I was afraid of stray dogs because I didn't believe they'd listen to my command to stop. I was afraid of quicksand because it looked like regular ground until you were deep in it and then it just might be too late. I was afraid of someone disrespecting or challenging my family because I believed they'd already been through enough and didn't want to see them wounded or have them face me having been. And I was terrified of someone calling me "nigger," "blackie," "brown sugar" in mixed company not only because it would burn my heart and rise up in my cheeks and my ears and force my tears, but because I was afraid to know just who would and would not stand for me.
Those Kodak pictures from that time show me in my youth already navigating the world's mines and expecting that I might blow up first. That little girl had hope but low expectations for others for whom supporting and loving her might be a burden, might even put them in harm's way. That little girl learned to accept defeats that were altogether unfair, more than likely biased, and influenced by a society that valued her less than all the white children that surrounded her. It is with shock but not complete surprise that a raging, narcissistic, racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynistic blowhard has been elected president. It is the culmination of all my fears. It is the ground made quick sand. It is a stray dog jumping up and putting its paws on my shoulders looking like he might bite my face. It is embarrassing the legacy of my hard-working, well-educated, dedicated, God-fearing, loving family and all the sacrifices they made to get me to my basic rights. It is being called "nigger" or watching my friends cursed and assaulted because they are gay or Muslim or Hindi or Sikh (because please don't know the difference) or in a mixed relationship or disabled or a woman, strong or meek, or poor or uneducated or not quite what America had in mind when they narrowed their definition of "American."
When Al Gore and John Kerry conceded I felt deflated. I'd had faith in their abilities to lead, to govern, to be fair and inclusive. I felt that even if they could not ever meet or even understand the needs of my community and the communities of those I love, but I thought they might try. I thought they wanted to understand, that they wanted to unify. I was afraid of the machine that Ronald Reagan and the Bushes drove over communities I loved. But what I feel now is terror. Absolute fear. I stare at my old class pictures, run my fingers over the old faces of friends, classmates, people who have said how much they love me, care for me, enjoyed our friendships who have voted against my very right to live as they'd like to live. We are sinking. That quicksand catches you and takes down slowly. What happens is that we suffocate and drown and don't even know we've gone down. And we all go down.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Sunday, October 2, 2016
Back to the Suburban Grind: Choose Life
Back to the Suburban Grind: Choose Life: TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of suicide, death, and loss. Two weekends ago, I sat between two very dear friends, behind the parents of...
Choose Life
TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of suicide, death, and loss.
Two weekends ago, I sat between two very dear friends, behind the parents of a friend who could be better described as an acquaintance, a well-loved acquaintance but a woman to whom I'd never gotten very close, at a memorial service. I was sad, I was angry, and I was very hurt and didn't know how to communicate these emotions. I was sending X-ray beams to the back of her mother's head, pleading with her to see her, understand her, care about her. And was then angry with myself for feeling that way. For blaming her. For wishing she'd cared more, tried harder, had given her daughter a break, just let her be. That wasn't fair. I know that.
I'd run into this woman just a month before at Trader Joe's. I was walking out as she was coming in and just starting her shopping and the exchange was brief, head nods and smiles, a wink. I was in a rush and she seemed lost in thought or her list. I'm really not sure. I didn't think much of that exchange until a few weeks later when I learned that she'd taken her life. She was dead. I kept seeing her face looking down at that list. I replayed every moment we'd been together, her asking me about something or other, talking about the wine at a party. She was dead. And then she was standing over me doing my make up as she'd just started selling Mary Kay cosmetics and needed someone to practice her technique and her sales pitch. I'd said, "I didn't think you wore make up." To which she replied, "I'm trying something new. My mother always said I'd do better to wear some make up." And I resented her mother for putting the idea into her head that she was not enough and reassured her she was. At least that's what I think I did. Maybe she thought I should just shut up because she was trying something new.
She'd been a lawyer and was incredibly intelligent, more cerebral and intellectual than I (or so it seemed). I'd met her through other friends and saw her most often in the company of the others, except for the afternoon that she did my make up and we talked about trying new things and make up and raising children, daughters in particular, (She has a daughter and a son.) and how beautiful my own mother is and how incredible my mother's skin is and that maybe she'd try Mary Kay. This was nervous chatter. Having her there doing my make up, so up close, trying to convince me to buy the lipstick, the shadow, and the face creams when I rarely wore make up and if I did I sought products that would look good on my brown skin, which to my mind Mark Kay was not such a product, made me uncomfortable. I told her as much in a series of emails after our meeting. I did not want to let her down, didn't want her to waste her product on someone who was not going to buy anything. I wanted her to win. I felt her need for approval, for acceptance. And I was upset with her mother for saying she'd do better to wear make up because she clearly did not feel comfortable in it.
And she now was dead. I hurt her hurt and retraced the steps I'd imagined she'd taken before that last, sudden, violent moment. And as sublime as the moment seems in poetry, in story, in song, the truth of it, the starkness, the finality, and the violence broke me. I thought I should have spoken to her at Trader Joe's. Should have looked into her eyes and said something to her, whatever it might be, that might make her choose life one more day. I thought of the acting exercise, "the private moment' where the actor lives a moment where he'd not expect anyone to see him, lets down his guard, experiences the moment unapologetically, unself-consciously, and I hurt all over again imagining those last moments.
Her family and friends were in tears, completely shattered and stunned. There were photographs of her at various stages of her life and I racked my brain trying to recall if we'd ever taken photos at the dinners and parties we'd attended together. I closed my eyes searching for her ghost in photos of us that were never taken. I felt her loss in the world, in my world, but didn't have the proof. Couldn't find a photo in my mind's files. Looking across the aisle at her children, I thought of my own and those years ago in Barbados when the daily routine seemed impossible. I remember the despair of postpartum depression and the loneliness of my marriage and the daunting prospect of attempting to live each day. And I felt that cold breath, that sigh between here and somewhere else and the pull in my chest and the ache in my core as I struggled to choose life. I don't feel at all close to that edge now but that feeling has never left me.
In a bedroom community outside of New York City, the sound of the passing trains is a common occurrence and every time I hear it now, it gives me pause. I think of the photo of her as a young girl in a brimmed hat, looking so like a character from a novel, a kind-hearted innocent, a girl from another time and place. Her eyes in that photo were so gentle and soft and sweet. She, full of promise. There is yellow light around her, framing her in a memory of a perfect moment in a perfect day. I didn't know her then. I also didn't know the young girl in the short hair that flipped at the sides, snuggling a bunny to her chin. But I recognized the woman that she became in her gesture. She was warm. She was kind. She was sweet and loving and good and she seemed, in that moment of love, so truthful, so vulnerable, and so present.
And now she is dead. I say dead because gone doesn't do the loss the justice it commands. Gone could mean that when ready she could return and she won't. I sat behind her mother who did not, could not speak at the service and searched her father's face as he spoke of her, his voice cracking and faltering as he tried to hold her in this world with a sweet memory, for some answer that would explain why this happened. I looked at her ex-husband and her children and all of her friends and colleagues. I did not look in the faces of my dear friends who sat next to me but I did squeeze their hands.
It is so lonely being a human being sometimes. Even when you are sitting next to someone and holding their hands, when you are in a crowd, when you are being feted and loved and surrounded, when you are on a beautiful Caribbean island living the fantasy of so many, there can be illness, depression, pain, and despair that those around you cannot know unless you share, tell them, trust them. It is truly a risk to take. I get it more than I care to admit. But it's a gift this life. I believe it and I continue to choose it. I hate considering making a decision that ends with this choice. I hate that there is no one to blame no matter that I was clearly searching for someone. That no one knew how deeply despaired she was, how she'd tired of it all, how what haunted her began to share this earthly plane with her and that her dreams were no longer a safe place to escape. I hate it so much that I replay every breathing moment I know of her life and imagine the moment she took her last. I want to be there for her, be her witness, acknowledge her just as she was and in my magical thinking, will her back to this plane. But she is more than gone and she won't be back.
If you have suicidal thoughts, please seek help. You can call 1-800-273-8255 twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Back to the Suburban Grind: Offline
Back to the Suburban Grind: Offline: It wasn't when people in my feed started explaining what Trayvon Martin did wrong (yeah, Trayvon). It wasn't when a former babysitt...
Offline
It wasn't when people in my feed started explaining what Trayvon Martin did wrong (yeah, Trayvon). It wasn't when a former babysitter typed, "Hey, black people" I suppose to get my attention and the attention of my black people friends as she explained our experience to us. It wasn't when one after another, black men, women, and children were shot and killed by police or sketchy white neighbors or strangers and were shown no justice, but I saw only posts about home renos and favorite cupcakes. It wasn't Colin Kaepernick and all he inspired on one knee getting character slandered and pummeled. It wasn't the endless reaction and outrage to every post begging the larger community to recognize that Black Lives Matter did not take anything away from them but that All Lives Matter spit in the faces of folks they called "friends." It wasn't that.
It wasn't when Brock Turner got away with a rape that everyone knew he'd committed or my revisited trauma when listening to the comments made about "the kinds of girls and women who are sexually assaulted" and the acknowledgment that a black girl or woman in such a predicament may as well keep that shit to herself since no one even gives a fuck about the white girl behind the dumpster. It wasn't one more post about the "gay agenda" and how proud some families feel about "kicking that no good kid out on his ass" because he was somehow born this way but-not-in-my-house-dammit.
It wasn't even watching the unfathomable rise of a straight up racist, misogynist, rotten to the core blowhard in the run up to a presidential election, or seeing friends with friends who support this horse's ass telling me there was nothing they could do about their friend's or family member's opinion and go on about their lives. The build up of racism, misogyny, rape culture, misogynoir, misguided, uneducated and under-educated thoughts and theories that were breaking my spirit. As one childhood friend or acquaintance after another showed themselves to be completely ignorant and unable to use any amount of reason, compassion, or empathy to the plight of peoples other than those that occupied their tiny American, suburban lives, I became discouraged, heartbroken, and wrecked.
I was keeping up with and reading too many articles that painted a bleak picture of our immediate future and I was internalizing the anguish of our collective souls. I was seeing my friends in pain, confusion, despair. Every single day. I'd always come here to find connection I didn't have off line and now on line was threatening my sense of peace, already tenuous, and sending me to the panicked dystopian hell where everyone who looked like me, loved like me, and felt like me would be on the run. Not even the hedgehogs and kitties and other cute things could save me.
When we got to Barbados my offline life was so unbearable that the retreat into the internets saved my life. I didn't want to admit that I was startlingly unhappy, suffering from postpartum depression, and realizing I actually knew very little about how to love and be loved and wasn't going to get it from my husband or distant family. My husband who'd seemed like a charm in New York was distant, unavailable, and overwhelmed in Barbados. He left me to the care and handling of the home and the children and retreated deeper into his own pathos. I did not know how to ask for care and comfort in all the ways it might have taken to get it, but I did know how to surround myself in a virtual world with people who would empathize with me, would root for me, pray for me, and wait for me to arrive every day to share. I needed that love and fought like hell for it no matter its imperfection and its empty promise.
Life off line is messy and beautiful, hysterical, passionate, and tormented. There are hours, days, weeks of high energy, high impact, live on stage business that exhaust, rip apart, and tear at the seams of everything. Whether I am dealing with my daily grind, my midlife struggles, or empathically feeling the torment of human existence, off line I often find myself gasping for air and trying to catch my breath as I see compassion and empathy exit the building. I've tried to share that on line--my hurts, my hopes, my fears, my anger even, but it often feels too tempered. I don't fight. I choose my words carefully. I listen and acquiesce. I am imploring, conveying, hoping, and posting about things I love. My children, fashion, decor, music, art, and all people and especially black people because I love us in our struggles, in our hopes, in our relentless pursuit in the face of unending trauma. I swear I hope I am convincing, showing, revealing who I am, who we are in every mundane, daily moment, but I don't know. I don't know anymore if I am succeeding in either space.
My life on line is beautiful, I'm not fronting. We are a photogenic family who take lots of photos of the major and minor adventures in our lives. There is witty banter and dry, in-the-know wit and humor. I have always been good with a comeback and can put together good images. In the face of the funk I can plant flowers and hope. I love a cute animal doing an insanely cute thing and am extremely passionate about the people, places, and things that I love. I am a well edited and curated catalog of incidents, moments, and images. But it is all edited. An artist edits her work, her writing, her paintings, her collection, her life to tell a more cohesive story. An unedited showing would be all over the place, full of contradictions, promises and lies and love and fear and darkness and light.
I hopped off line because I wanted to be in a private space to mourn and I didn't know what to say. I was hardly able to speak in real life and didn't want to flinch and wince and lie or rant and scream and plead in the place I'd come to seek like minds of the ether, people I know, I've met, and still have to meet. I ducked out when I wondered what more I had to give or contribute. When I thought I'd nothing else to share or say and that, as I have since I was a young girl begging my parents to see me, shouted myself to hoarseness to no avail. I bowed out and eventually watched from the sidelines. I am lonely sometimes. So lonely. I am scared and hurt and frustrated that we are not seeing or hearing each other. That people who have not lived outside of a world of privilege are still leading the conversation about whether or not our lives are even relevant, let alone how to heal all that separates and divides us. On line or off, I had to admit that I am still watching so much happen on the outside, feeling all of it, and screaming, screaming, screaming my head off in the most polite way. And I am not sure who can even hear me or gives a damn.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
It wasn't when Brock Turner got away with a rape that everyone knew he'd committed or my revisited trauma when listening to the comments made about "the kinds of girls and women who are sexually assaulted" and the acknowledgment that a black girl or woman in such a predicament may as well keep that shit to herself since no one even gives a fuck about the white girl behind the dumpster. It wasn't one more post about the "gay agenda" and how proud some families feel about "kicking that no good kid out on his ass" because he was somehow born this way but-not-in-my-house-dammit.
It wasn't even watching the unfathomable rise of a straight up racist, misogynist, rotten to the core blowhard in the run up to a presidential election, or seeing friends with friends who support this horse's ass telling me there was nothing they could do about their friend's or family member's opinion and go on about their lives. The build up of racism, misogyny, rape culture, misogynoir, misguided, uneducated and under-educated thoughts and theories that were breaking my spirit. As one childhood friend or acquaintance after another showed themselves to be completely ignorant and unable to use any amount of reason, compassion, or empathy to the plight of peoples other than those that occupied their tiny American, suburban lives, I became discouraged, heartbroken, and wrecked.
I was keeping up with and reading too many articles that painted a bleak picture of our immediate future and I was internalizing the anguish of our collective souls. I was seeing my friends in pain, confusion, despair. Every single day. I'd always come here to find connection I didn't have off line and now on line was threatening my sense of peace, already tenuous, and sending me to the panicked dystopian hell where everyone who looked like me, loved like me, and felt like me would be on the run. Not even the hedgehogs and kitties and other cute things could save me.
When we got to Barbados my offline life was so unbearable that the retreat into the internets saved my life. I didn't want to admit that I was startlingly unhappy, suffering from postpartum depression, and realizing I actually knew very little about how to love and be loved and wasn't going to get it from my husband or distant family. My husband who'd seemed like a charm in New York was distant, unavailable, and overwhelmed in Barbados. He left me to the care and handling of the home and the children and retreated deeper into his own pathos. I did not know how to ask for care and comfort in all the ways it might have taken to get it, but I did know how to surround myself in a virtual world with people who would empathize with me, would root for me, pray for me, and wait for me to arrive every day to share. I needed that love and fought like hell for it no matter its imperfection and its empty promise.
Life off line is messy and beautiful, hysterical, passionate, and tormented. There are hours, days, weeks of high energy, high impact, live on stage business that exhaust, rip apart, and tear at the seams of everything. Whether I am dealing with my daily grind, my midlife struggles, or empathically feeling the torment of human existence, off line I often find myself gasping for air and trying to catch my breath as I see compassion and empathy exit the building. I've tried to share that on line--my hurts, my hopes, my fears, my anger even, but it often feels too tempered. I don't fight. I choose my words carefully. I listen and acquiesce. I am imploring, conveying, hoping, and posting about things I love. My children, fashion, decor, music, art, and all people and especially black people because I love us in our struggles, in our hopes, in our relentless pursuit in the face of unending trauma. I swear I hope I am convincing, showing, revealing who I am, who we are in every mundane, daily moment, but I don't know. I don't know anymore if I am succeeding in either space.
My life on line is beautiful, I'm not fronting. We are a photogenic family who take lots of photos of the major and minor adventures in our lives. There is witty banter and dry, in-the-know wit and humor. I have always been good with a comeback and can put together good images. In the face of the funk I can plant flowers and hope. I love a cute animal doing an insanely cute thing and am extremely passionate about the people, places, and things that I love. I am a well edited and curated catalog of incidents, moments, and images. But it is all edited. An artist edits her work, her writing, her paintings, her collection, her life to tell a more cohesive story. An unedited showing would be all over the place, full of contradictions, promises and lies and love and fear and darkness and light.
I hopped off line because I wanted to be in a private space to mourn and I didn't know what to say. I was hardly able to speak in real life and didn't want to flinch and wince and lie or rant and scream and plead in the place I'd come to seek like minds of the ether, people I know, I've met, and still have to meet. I ducked out when I wondered what more I had to give or contribute. When I thought I'd nothing else to share or say and that, as I have since I was a young girl begging my parents to see me, shouted myself to hoarseness to no avail. I bowed out and eventually watched from the sidelines. I am lonely sometimes. So lonely. I am scared and hurt and frustrated that we are not seeing or hearing each other. That people who have not lived outside of a world of privilege are still leading the conversation about whether or not our lives are even relevant, let alone how to heal all that separates and divides us. On line or off, I had to admit that I am still watching so much happen on the outside, feeling all of it, and screaming, screaming, screaming my head off in the most polite way. And I am not sure who can even hear me or gives a damn.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Wednesday, September 7, 2016
Back to the Suburban Grind: 5th: The throwback
Back to the Suburban Grind: 5th: The throwback: And just like that, the summer is over and the girls are back in school. Sure, we will have a few more weeks of warm weather that will make...
5th: The throwback
And just like that, the summer is over and the girls are back in school. Sure, we will have a few more weeks of warm weather that will make getting up and spending the day at school complete torture, but the arrival of September means a new start and a season change to fall. As I got the girls ready for bed last night and for 5th and 2nd grades, the talk inevitably turned to my time in school, and specifically 5th grade as my rising ten year old expressed a little apprehension about it. Last year had been pure hell for her, and for me, as we tried to work our way through a difficult teacher and the anxiety being in her classroom produced. I'd stopped pretending 1/2 way through the year and told her that I agreed with her feelings about her teacher but that shit happens, for real, and that you can't stop striving because someone is trying to bring you down. I meant it. It is hard to learn that and as hard to teach.
What I remember about my fifth grade class are small fleeting moments. Memory is like that. I am not even sure that what I am remembering actually happened in fifth grade and is not an amalgamation of that heady late elementary-middle school block. My teacher, Mrs. S, was an old school, Southern, pinch-lipped, white biddy who wore skirt suits nearly every day. Drab colored skirt suits with skirts well below the knee and a mid-sized heel with pantyhose to make her legs look a beigy-tan. Her hair was coiffed like a cotton candy puff and sprayed so that not a hair moved. She spoke in that breathy, southern school marm tone that told you she had little time for your shenanigans, even if the shenanigans just meant asking to be excused to use the bathroom.
This woman brought little to no joy to my life (and I was still of the goody two shoes variety at that time). She seemed to revel in giving bad grades, marking papers in red, and sucking the life out of the room. I remember people getting in trouble, especially a boy named Derek who'd surely be diagnosed with ADHD today, and the creaky spot in the floor that I tried to avoid when I walked across the room to sharpen my pencil. My feet had grown so quickly that year that the only shoes that fit me were women's shoes and styles and I had this pair of wooden clogs with a heel that I wish to God I still had but don't. I remember that one girl in my class had reached puberty years ahead of the rest of us and that we all, boys and girls alike, obsessively watched her boobs doing what they do. I remember there were some fast booty girls that were rumored to have been caught kissing sixth and seventh grade boys and that I was both appalled and intrigued. There were combs in back pockets but I wore my hair in braids. And I remember for the first time that the school day seemed to go on forever. Mrs. S was no fun. In fact, she was as rigid and dry as her old pruney lips announced. I hated being in her class. And I hated her. After that year, thanks to puberty and beauty standards I couldn't meet and a sense of loneliness and isolation, I started to hate myself a little.
I watch my ten year old running up the hill to her elementary school with the other 3rd through 5th graders looking for signs of her sense of worth and value. I wonder if she pays attention to all the details that now seem my only memory of that time. All the kids look enthusiastic and eager and too young to think about any of the things I recall about fifth grade. My ten year old is all curiosity, rainbows, cute animal videos, and pop culture memes that seem to sometimes go over her head. She is still wearing ponytails and a tank top, no bra-lette. She is all legs and thanks to the crowning of the kids as king, she has age appropriate footwear and clothing even though her paws are getting big like a growing puppy. But she is also musical.ly and snapchat photos and silly little texts to her girlfriends on the phone we got her to stay in touch with us on her walk home. When I ask her if kids talk about love interests or care about their hair and clothing more than they used to, she rolls her eyes at me to tell me that my line of questioning is embarrassing and ridiculous because 'no' or more likely because she cannot imagine that I know how it goes.
Sometimes she tells me about something funny she has seen on line or an app her friends have shared with her. Other times she brings to me the most adorable, well-crafted stuffed animals that she knitted or sewed with no pattern or guide and I think about how amazing she is, about the talent she has that has absolutely nothing to do with me. At night, when her most anxious thoughts and fears creep in, she whimpers and whispers her self-doubt into my ear, tells me that she just doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up and asks if she really has to know right now. She wonders aloud why a girl in her class is wearing and wants to wear make up and stylish clothes "like an adult" and talks to everyone like she is grown. She tells me she feels woefully alone and is afraid not of the small details of her life but of the big picture. How we all got here. How do we discover what our role is to play on this planet? What if she just can't find her way?
And I answer. All of the questions to the best of my ability. And we talk about the anxiety and self-doubt that she is predisposed to thanks to me, and how she can best navigate it. I tell her that kids of her generation do things much sooner that we did and we laugh together and agree that yes, she got the teacher that nearly broke her spirit one year before I did. I tell her about Derek and the girl who developed early, about Mrs. S's sullen way of presenting almost everything. About how still and quiet and lonely that room felt to me. I tell her about the clicking of my adult sized clogs on the floor and the dreams I had staring out the window. I told her that I started to believe I couldn't be anything I dreamt of that year, that I started to believe I was not enough. That the way this teacher spoke of me to my parents and that they did not tell her to 'fuck off' made me wonder if I really needed to work that much harder or if they were just not "getting me." (At the time I went with work that much harder but now I am not so sure that was the right answer.)
This morning, though I'd offered to let her wear her mane of hair, now blond and brown from the sun, down, my 5th grader still chose ponytails. She wore high tops and a blouse-y purple top that has a built in tank top so she didn't have to sport an undergarment. Despite feeling a little under the weather, she decided not to miss the second day of school. Though she is a little shell-shocked from last year, she is willing to go forward feeling hopeful, accepting this new path and direction. She knows what she is ready for and what she is not quite yet. As I pulled up to our drop off spot, I wished her insight and guidance and goodness on this second day. I told her I'd tell her how I loved her from inside the car so she would not have to be mortified by my beaming pride once out in the real world. She grabbed her backpack and tightened her safety patrol belt and said, "I want everyone to know that you love me." She closed the door and got on her path. I watched as long as I could see her, hoping she would turn to look just one more time.
And she did.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
What I remember about my fifth grade class are small fleeting moments. Memory is like that. I am not even sure that what I am remembering actually happened in fifth grade and is not an amalgamation of that heady late elementary-middle school block. My teacher, Mrs. S, was an old school, Southern, pinch-lipped, white biddy who wore skirt suits nearly every day. Drab colored skirt suits with skirts well below the knee and a mid-sized heel with pantyhose to make her legs look a beigy-tan. Her hair was coiffed like a cotton candy puff and sprayed so that not a hair moved. She spoke in that breathy, southern school marm tone that told you she had little time for your shenanigans, even if the shenanigans just meant asking to be excused to use the bathroom.
This woman brought little to no joy to my life (and I was still of the goody two shoes variety at that time). She seemed to revel in giving bad grades, marking papers in red, and sucking the life out of the room. I remember people getting in trouble, especially a boy named Derek who'd surely be diagnosed with ADHD today, and the creaky spot in the floor that I tried to avoid when I walked across the room to sharpen my pencil. My feet had grown so quickly that year that the only shoes that fit me were women's shoes and styles and I had this pair of wooden clogs with a heel that I wish to God I still had but don't. I remember that one girl in my class had reached puberty years ahead of the rest of us and that we all, boys and girls alike, obsessively watched her boobs doing what they do. I remember there were some fast booty girls that were rumored to have been caught kissing sixth and seventh grade boys and that I was both appalled and intrigued. There were combs in back pockets but I wore my hair in braids. And I remember for the first time that the school day seemed to go on forever. Mrs. S was no fun. In fact, she was as rigid and dry as her old pruney lips announced. I hated being in her class. And I hated her. After that year, thanks to puberty and beauty standards I couldn't meet and a sense of loneliness and isolation, I started to hate myself a little.
I watch my ten year old running up the hill to her elementary school with the other 3rd through 5th graders looking for signs of her sense of worth and value. I wonder if she pays attention to all the details that now seem my only memory of that time. All the kids look enthusiastic and eager and too young to think about any of the things I recall about fifth grade. My ten year old is all curiosity, rainbows, cute animal videos, and pop culture memes that seem to sometimes go over her head. She is still wearing ponytails and a tank top, no bra-lette. She is all legs and thanks to the crowning of the kids as king, she has age appropriate footwear and clothing even though her paws are getting big like a growing puppy. But she is also musical.ly and snapchat photos and silly little texts to her girlfriends on the phone we got her to stay in touch with us on her walk home. When I ask her if kids talk about love interests or care about their hair and clothing more than they used to, she rolls her eyes at me to tell me that my line of questioning is embarrassing and ridiculous because 'no' or more likely because she cannot imagine that I know how it goes.
Sometimes she tells me about something funny she has seen on line or an app her friends have shared with her. Other times she brings to me the most adorable, well-crafted stuffed animals that she knitted or sewed with no pattern or guide and I think about how amazing she is, about the talent she has that has absolutely nothing to do with me. At night, when her most anxious thoughts and fears creep in, she whimpers and whispers her self-doubt into my ear, tells me that she just doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up and asks if she really has to know right now. She wonders aloud why a girl in her class is wearing and wants to wear make up and stylish clothes "like an adult" and talks to everyone like she is grown. She tells me she feels woefully alone and is afraid not of the small details of her life but of the big picture. How we all got here. How do we discover what our role is to play on this planet? What if she just can't find her way?
And I answer. All of the questions to the best of my ability. And we talk about the anxiety and self-doubt that she is predisposed to thanks to me, and how she can best navigate it. I tell her that kids of her generation do things much sooner that we did and we laugh together and agree that yes, she got the teacher that nearly broke her spirit one year before I did. I tell her about Derek and the girl who developed early, about Mrs. S's sullen way of presenting almost everything. About how still and quiet and lonely that room felt to me. I tell her about the clicking of my adult sized clogs on the floor and the dreams I had staring out the window. I told her that I started to believe I couldn't be anything I dreamt of that year, that I started to believe I was not enough. That the way this teacher spoke of me to my parents and that they did not tell her to 'fuck off' made me wonder if I really needed to work that much harder or if they were just not "getting me." (At the time I went with work that much harder but now I am not so sure that was the right answer.)
This morning, though I'd offered to let her wear her mane of hair, now blond and brown from the sun, down, my 5th grader still chose ponytails. She wore high tops and a blouse-y purple top that has a built in tank top so she didn't have to sport an undergarment. Despite feeling a little under the weather, she decided not to miss the second day of school. Though she is a little shell-shocked from last year, she is willing to go forward feeling hopeful, accepting this new path and direction. She knows what she is ready for and what she is not quite yet. As I pulled up to our drop off spot, I wished her insight and guidance and goodness on this second day. I told her I'd tell her how I loved her from inside the car so she would not have to be mortified by my beaming pride once out in the real world. She grabbed her backpack and tightened her safety patrol belt and said, "I want everyone to know that you love me." She closed the door and got on her path. I watched as long as I could see her, hoping she would turn to look just one more time.
And she did.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Back to the Suburban Grind: Miscarriage of Justice
Back to the Suburban Grind: Miscarriage of Justice: WARNING: Some graphic imagery of the experience of a miscarriage. Miscarriage: failure to attain the just, right, or de...
Miscarriage of Justice
WARNING: Some graphic imagery of the experience of a miscarriage.
Miscarriage: failure to attain the just, right, or desired result/end; he expulsion of a fetus before it is viable, especially between the third and seventh months of pregnancy
Miscarriage of justice:
primarily is the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. "Miscarriage of justice" is sometimes synonymous with wrongful conviction, referring to a conviction reached in an unfair or disputed trial.
Before I was pregnant with my second child, I'd suffered two miscarriages. Just weeks into each pregnancy (the first at five weeks, the second at ten) seemingly no different than the one that had delivered its promise of a baby, my body, ripe and pumping with hormones and an increased blood supply, began to tear the walls down. My heart skipped a beat and then a small cramp. I felt nervous and my palms began to sweat. I believe I was holding my breath. I didn't want to look, to check. A small cramp was not entirely uncommon or unexpected. My body was trying to tell me something I did not want to know. I knew it and still didn't want to listen.
The cramping began to increase and I was hot. My skin, plump and swollen, got cold and clammy. My breasts and nipples already longing to nurture that baby were so sensitive to the touch that it seemed just my clothes were too much. I felt the longing, the begging, and the pleading. "Please don't let this be." And then the resolve. There was blood. Blood everywhere and I was alone and even when people came to my call, I was alone. The first time in France in my in-laws' upstairs bathroom on New Year's Eve. The second time in the apartment I shared with my soon-to-be husband and our first child just weeks shy of the end of the first trimester. I was at a loss for words. Everything everyone said to comfort me sounded muffled. I didn't want them to talk to me. I wanted them to listen. To listen to the sound of the moment and it was deafeningly quiet. It was so real that try as I might to escape in my mind, I was pulled back into the present with each tiny contraction. A friend of mine, one of my very best, who is also a healer had once said to me, 'we cannot expand and grow all the time. Sometimes we have to contract.' That thought kept coming to mind. I can't say why, but it somehow gave me comfort and the space to accept what was to be.
We wanted another child, a partner and friend for our first, and after meeting with my doctor and receiving the appropriate shots (I have Rh negative (Rhesus negative) blood which means that my blood is most likely not compatible with the blood of the baby and certain precautions have to be taken), we decided to try again. My husband was hopeful and to some degree disconnected from the emotional and spiritual effort it was going to take to get back out there. Encouraged by the all clear from my doctor, he was eager to start the baby-making! I was more apprehensive. The losses had been traumatic, terrifying, and exhaustively lonely. I did indeed want to have another baby but was so scared to lose another. The sense memories, smells, tingles, ringing in my ears, the muscle memory of loss pulled tightly at my core. My heart and gut wrenched, my palms became sweaty, I was nervous and easily agitated and very short tempered.
I didn't watch either of the videos. We came home from the day-late Independence Day fireworks to our cable, phone, and internet service not working. It turned out to be a blessing. As I did a quick review of the latest on social media on my phone I saw the first hashtag: #ripaltonsterling. It wasn't difficult to put the pieces together to see what had happened. I knew better than to even try to watch the video on my phone. Already I was shaking. My heart and gut wrenched and my palms were sweaty. I looked to posts from my 'woke' friends. I was in a panic. Piecing together small details--selling CDs, concealed carry state, gun in his pocket, point blank range, black, black, black, black, black. I knew guys who sold CDs on the street. Hell, I'd bought some back in the day when I didn't know better and could scarcely afford a good meal let alone my favorite music.
Like with the first cramp suffered in the upstairs bathroom, I stood alone. I didn't even want to say the words out loud. I looked down. Blood. Real, thick, dark. Pulled into the present. This is happening. From the bathroom, "Honey, something is wrong." And now from the bedroom, barely whispered, "They killed another black man on the street." The depth of our disconnect even more expanded, there was no answer. "A man. Selling CDs. Pinned down and shot at point blank range." My husband looked up. "No. Can't be. How they can do that?" Nervous, easily agitated, short tempered. I had to move, walk around. I knew not to try to watch the video, the video! I knew that I was suddenly very alone.
Retreating to my bed, to sleep, seemed the best option and I took some melatonin to disappear and went in. When I woke up to the news of the murder of Philando Castile, a young, black man who'd been shot and killed in the driver seat of his car as he'd reached for his permit to show the officer who'd demanded it, I blanched. That his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and his child had also been in the car and that his girlfriend had live streamed his death, dropped me to the floor. Again, I did not watch the video but saw a still. The blood. The thick, dark blood on a white t-shirt on a man sitting in the driver's seat of his car. The scene was haunting, surreal.
I looked down and took stock of my surroundings. That hyper-awareness that trauma brings. I see the floor, the walls, my feet. There is so much blood. I smell the food cooking downstairs. I see the whites of my eyes gleaming with tears and fear. I see blood. A miscarriage. A failure to achieve a desired end. I'm still standing. I sit and try to breathe deeper breaths than the shallow, panicked wisps that are leaking out of me like cold winter smoke rings. All the moments I've ever looked at my feet, my hands, my face, the floor, the wall come rushing to me. I am pulled back to the present.
They have killed another black man in the street. There was no trial, no accusation (none formal at least). This was not justice. It is not just. There has been a rush to find fault in these two men as has been done countless times before. I have taken stock of my surroundings. I stare down at my hands and at my feet. I see the walls, the floor. This has all happened before and before me and before them and before all of us. That in a public court of opinion these men cannot be found innocent of a crime they did not commit because by being black they are guilty. There is a lot of talk about it. Too much for me right now because I need the sound of the moment in its deafening quiet. I need there to be listening.
When we'd passed fifteen weeks during my pregnancy with the little one I felt safe enough to tell people that we were pregnant, but the panic never stopped. I checked between my legs daily. I responded to gas, fullness, fatigue with worry and panic. I prayed and chanted and mantra-d from point to point. I was afraid and I was hopeful. We can do this, I thought. We have before. She wants to stay with us. She wants to be our baby. The gods are shining on us. They want her to be ours too. But until she was in my arms, peering up at me with those shiny, black eyes, I was prepared for the worst. Prepared to lose her, prepared to suffer and hurt and feel anguish in silence. Silence because looking at me in my hurt was too much for most to bear.
It is hard to watch someone in excruciating pain. It is hard to watch them writhe and twist and ache so deeply internally that their body contorts, the way they appear on the outside is hideous to behold, their faces change, their destinies are missed, their paths misdirected. We fear pain like the dark hand of misfortune. We don't want it to touch us too so we turn from it, intellectualize it, talk and talk and talk about it, analyze it, describe it, try to work around it but it can only be confronted deep inside. It is bloody and dark and thick. It is slow and gruesome and sudden. It throbs and burns and pulls. And then gives release.
The tiny space within me that I keep my deepest fears and secrets burst at the seams and I cried for days, endlessly. I'd heard that the little four year in the car, in the back seat, where I now strapped my two children, tried to comfort her mother as her father lay dying in the driver's seat. I'd heard that Diamond Reynolds was taken into custody and I wondered where her tiny girl was taken. I wept at the thought of the rushing, the fast moving, the approach with with Alton Sterling was met in those last moments. Wondered if he said to himself, 'this is just like that guy...' before someone put a gun to his chest. I could not stop crying as I thought about all the blood and its metallic smell, its dankness, its thick, tacky swell as it flowed from the body. I would wipe my eyes and more tears would come thinking of the moments in stillness when even though there was sound and screaming and fury, for a split second the dead silence of that present moment froze the world. *gasp* And then it was done.
I remember the heaviness of the blood, the weight on my shoulders, the pulling in my heart, believing I could never recover from a loss like this. One that had been a secret, one that was private, one that was mine to mull and cultivate. And I came to see, I have to tell you. I have to tell you that these are not just stories on white paper. They are not clean or neat or easily filed. They are real life. The just, right, desired end was that I would bear another child and bring her into this world and love her and have every right to share with her and show her and celebrate with her the beauty of this human experience. I hope I can. The just, right, desired end would be that two men, black men, who had every right, so it is said, to share and celebrate the beauty of our shared human experience would not be dead because they'd been unfairly tried and convicted because they were black.
It's incredible this life. And heartbreaking. Black lives matter. Too.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama in the Jungle: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Miscarriage: failure to attain the just, right, or desired result/end; he expulsion of a fetus before it is viable, especially between the third and seventh months of pregnancy
Miscarriage of justice:
primarily is the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. "Miscarriage of justice" is sometimes synonymous with wrongful conviction, referring to a conviction reached in an unfair or disputed trial.
Before I was pregnant with my second child, I'd suffered two miscarriages. Just weeks into each pregnancy (the first at five weeks, the second at ten) seemingly no different than the one that had delivered its promise of a baby, my body, ripe and pumping with hormones and an increased blood supply, began to tear the walls down. My heart skipped a beat and then a small cramp. I felt nervous and my palms began to sweat. I believe I was holding my breath. I didn't want to look, to check. A small cramp was not entirely uncommon or unexpected. My body was trying to tell me something I did not want to know. I knew it and still didn't want to listen.
The cramping began to increase and I was hot. My skin, plump and swollen, got cold and clammy. My breasts and nipples already longing to nurture that baby were so sensitive to the touch that it seemed just my clothes were too much. I felt the longing, the begging, and the pleading. "Please don't let this be." And then the resolve. There was blood. Blood everywhere and I was alone and even when people came to my call, I was alone. The first time in France in my in-laws' upstairs bathroom on New Year's Eve. The second time in the apartment I shared with my soon-to-be husband and our first child just weeks shy of the end of the first trimester. I was at a loss for words. Everything everyone said to comfort me sounded muffled. I didn't want them to talk to me. I wanted them to listen. To listen to the sound of the moment and it was deafeningly quiet. It was so real that try as I might to escape in my mind, I was pulled back into the present with each tiny contraction. A friend of mine, one of my very best, who is also a healer had once said to me, 'we cannot expand and grow all the time. Sometimes we have to contract.' That thought kept coming to mind. I can't say why, but it somehow gave me comfort and the space to accept what was to be.
We wanted another child, a partner and friend for our first, and after meeting with my doctor and receiving the appropriate shots (I have Rh negative (Rhesus negative) blood which means that my blood is most likely not compatible with the blood of the baby and certain precautions have to be taken), we decided to try again. My husband was hopeful and to some degree disconnected from the emotional and spiritual effort it was going to take to get back out there. Encouraged by the all clear from my doctor, he was eager to start the baby-making! I was more apprehensive. The losses had been traumatic, terrifying, and exhaustively lonely. I did indeed want to have another baby but was so scared to lose another. The sense memories, smells, tingles, ringing in my ears, the muscle memory of loss pulled tightly at my core. My heart and gut wrenched, my palms became sweaty, I was nervous and easily agitated and very short tempered.
I didn't watch either of the videos. We came home from the day-late Independence Day fireworks to our cable, phone, and internet service not working. It turned out to be a blessing. As I did a quick review of the latest on social media on my phone I saw the first hashtag: #ripaltonsterling. It wasn't difficult to put the pieces together to see what had happened. I knew better than to even try to watch the video on my phone. Already I was shaking. My heart and gut wrenched and my palms were sweaty. I looked to posts from my 'woke' friends. I was in a panic. Piecing together small details--selling CDs, concealed carry state, gun in his pocket, point blank range, black, black, black, black, black. I knew guys who sold CDs on the street. Hell, I'd bought some back in the day when I didn't know better and could scarcely afford a good meal let alone my favorite music.
Like with the first cramp suffered in the upstairs bathroom, I stood alone. I didn't even want to say the words out loud. I looked down. Blood. Real, thick, dark. Pulled into the present. This is happening. From the bathroom, "Honey, something is wrong." And now from the bedroom, barely whispered, "They killed another black man on the street." The depth of our disconnect even more expanded, there was no answer. "A man. Selling CDs. Pinned down and shot at point blank range." My husband looked up. "No. Can't be. How they can do that?" Nervous, easily agitated, short tempered. I had to move, walk around. I knew not to try to watch the video, the video! I knew that I was suddenly very alone.
Retreating to my bed, to sleep, seemed the best option and I took some melatonin to disappear and went in. When I woke up to the news of the murder of Philando Castile, a young, black man who'd been shot and killed in the driver seat of his car as he'd reached for his permit to show the officer who'd demanded it, I blanched. That his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and his child had also been in the car and that his girlfriend had live streamed his death, dropped me to the floor. Again, I did not watch the video but saw a still. The blood. The thick, dark blood on a white t-shirt on a man sitting in the driver's seat of his car. The scene was haunting, surreal.
I looked down and took stock of my surroundings. That hyper-awareness that trauma brings. I see the floor, the walls, my feet. There is so much blood. I smell the food cooking downstairs. I see the whites of my eyes gleaming with tears and fear. I see blood. A miscarriage. A failure to achieve a desired end. I'm still standing. I sit and try to breathe deeper breaths than the shallow, panicked wisps that are leaking out of me like cold winter smoke rings. All the moments I've ever looked at my feet, my hands, my face, the floor, the wall come rushing to me. I am pulled back to the present.
They have killed another black man in the street. There was no trial, no accusation (none formal at least). This was not justice. It is not just. There has been a rush to find fault in these two men as has been done countless times before. I have taken stock of my surroundings. I stare down at my hands and at my feet. I see the walls, the floor. This has all happened before and before me and before them and before all of us. That in a public court of opinion these men cannot be found innocent of a crime they did not commit because by being black they are guilty. There is a lot of talk about it. Too much for me right now because I need the sound of the moment in its deafening quiet. I need there to be listening.
When we'd passed fifteen weeks during my pregnancy with the little one I felt safe enough to tell people that we were pregnant, but the panic never stopped. I checked between my legs daily. I responded to gas, fullness, fatigue with worry and panic. I prayed and chanted and mantra-d from point to point. I was afraid and I was hopeful. We can do this, I thought. We have before. She wants to stay with us. She wants to be our baby. The gods are shining on us. They want her to be ours too. But until she was in my arms, peering up at me with those shiny, black eyes, I was prepared for the worst. Prepared to lose her, prepared to suffer and hurt and feel anguish in silence. Silence because looking at me in my hurt was too much for most to bear.
It is hard to watch someone in excruciating pain. It is hard to watch them writhe and twist and ache so deeply internally that their body contorts, the way they appear on the outside is hideous to behold, their faces change, their destinies are missed, their paths misdirected. We fear pain like the dark hand of misfortune. We don't want it to touch us too so we turn from it, intellectualize it, talk and talk and talk about it, analyze it, describe it, try to work around it but it can only be confronted deep inside. It is bloody and dark and thick. It is slow and gruesome and sudden. It throbs and burns and pulls. And then gives release.
The tiny space within me that I keep my deepest fears and secrets burst at the seams and I cried for days, endlessly. I'd heard that the little four year in the car, in the back seat, where I now strapped my two children, tried to comfort her mother as her father lay dying in the driver's seat. I'd heard that Diamond Reynolds was taken into custody and I wondered where her tiny girl was taken. I wept at the thought of the rushing, the fast moving, the approach with with Alton Sterling was met in those last moments. Wondered if he said to himself, 'this is just like that guy...' before someone put a gun to his chest. I could not stop crying as I thought about all the blood and its metallic smell, its dankness, its thick, tacky swell as it flowed from the body. I would wipe my eyes and more tears would come thinking of the moments in stillness when even though there was sound and screaming and fury, for a split second the dead silence of that present moment froze the world. *gasp* And then it was done.
I remember the heaviness of the blood, the weight on my shoulders, the pulling in my heart, believing I could never recover from a loss like this. One that had been a secret, one that was private, one that was mine to mull and cultivate. And I came to see, I have to tell you. I have to tell you that these are not just stories on white paper. They are not clean or neat or easily filed. They are real life. The just, right, desired end was that I would bear another child and bring her into this world and love her and have every right to share with her and show her and celebrate with her the beauty of this human experience. I hope I can. The just, right, desired end would be that two men, black men, who had every right, so it is said, to share and celebrate the beauty of our shared human experience would not be dead because they'd been unfairly tried and convicted because they were black.
It's incredible this life. And heartbreaking. Black lives matter. Too.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama in the Jungle: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Back to the Suburban Grind: Sempervivum: On Father's Day
Back to the Suburban Grind: Sempervivum: On Father's Day: As the story goes, when my father was born, his grandmother wanted him to be named Stephen after her father. Though he'd already been n...
Sempervivum: On Father's Day
As the story goes, when my father was born, his grandmother wanted him to be named Stephen after her father. Though he'd already been named Jesse, he was called Steve or Stevie by everyone growing up. I know a childhood friend by whether they call him Steve or Jesse. I am called Stephanie after his secret name, a tiny, little seed planted at his roots in an alternative, dream landscape. He is a hearty and strong succulent perennial, only an occasional flower, low growing, sometimes called the liveforever or sempervivum. I am the flower.
We are so alike, my father and I. There is depth, order, control. We are protective, strong, and quick to anger. I love him. I always have. I respect the man he became and all that he has accomplished in this life. I know that if I am in danger he will come. If I am hurt he will come. If I need he will give. But in order to protect himself from the slings and arrows, knives in the back and punches to the gut, he has had to encase his heart in thorns and booby traps.
I woke up this morning at 5:30. That's too early for me. Though I tried to go back to sleep, as soon as my eyes are opened I find that nearly impossible. My racing mind started tracing lines to all the people I know who were probably awake. Many living abroad where the day was already in full swing, friends on the West Coast who may be having a bout of insomnia or a late night of excess, and my dad. Now that he is in his seventies, 5:30 is pretty early for him too, but the early mornings are a space where I always see my father. Walking the house in quiet, breathing in life in a space where no people means no mask, rising with the sun as he did as a boy when he had work to do. You can take the boy out of the country, but not the country out of the boy. My dad is still a country boy.
A country boy whose parents told him and his four siblings how to survive, and gave them everything they had, which was not much materially but was full to bursting with love, guidance, and support. They told those beautiful, black children how to get out of the poverty they'd been born into and to keep marching forward despite the expectation of the America that they were born into, that they were 'less than.' Education, character, drive, ambition, and familial love and support would help each lift the others. Racism and segregation shaped my father's sense of himself and no matter his successes, he has remained haunted. I can only imagine how he endured the assaults on his character, his intelligence, and his basic rights. Like me, he is sensitive, easily wounded, and anxious. Like me, he hides and protects his heart. Unlike me, he has not found too many to share it with. And that includes me.
The love was tough, survivalist. It wasn't precious or adorable. It wasn't indulgent or demonstrative. There were few hugs and smothers of kisses and compliments and praise. There were high expectations. When one fears failure, when failure in a system set up for you to fail means life or death, there is little time for pleasantries. The hurt of his youth nourished ours and our blooms were sprinkled with his pain. But mine is a fragile bloom. My roots are strong, but the flower is so desperate for the light, desperate for the watering and the nutrients, seeking warmth from real and artificial light sources. I cannot always tell the difference.
My father is the first man for whom I was ever too much. I could tell by the way he looked at me since the beginning of time and shook his head. I wasn't easy because I'm not. I'm all of the things one has to work on, work towards. Work. I was compared to other girls who achieved better and far more than I. Girls who were poised and demure and knew the code and followed it. They were good girls. They weren't wild and didn't talk back or fight or question or practice magic. They were practical and organized and good. There is a part of me that is like that too. Remnants of my attempts to please.
My father is the first man whose love I could feel dangling in front of me but could never reach. My father loves me, but it sparks like an electrical short and cannot sustain itself long enough to provide light. I chase the falling embers, hope it will help me find my way through the tunnel but I I do a lot of feeling around in the dark.
My father is the first man I tried to impress by dancing all around him, literally dancing all around him, who was distracted and saw only a flash and felt a slight breeze from all my efforts, and wondered to himself, 'What was that?' as I whirled past. I still don't think he has ever seen me.
But I am not done with him. I am nothing if not persistent. I am the flower. And I continue to bloom in his face. I remind him that without our roots neither of us would thrive. That it does no good for the succulent to resist its flower. The plants are so gorgeous, have always been some of my favorites, whether they have a bloom or not. But the blossom is such a sweet surprise sometimes taking years to finally bloom. It is more. It is the hand to God, the reaching, the longing, the magic expressed. It is working through the fear and the shame of wanting and needing to be loved. It just is. And we both need it, the light and the love.
As the story goes, I was born so prematurely that I was so tiny you could hold me in one hand. There was a fear that I might not survive, that the cold winter and early arrival might be too much for my tiny body. But my roots dug in deep and I called on everything I knew. The sempervivum, I was going to live and he knew it. So he gave me his name, the one he should have had. I fulfilled the promise of this family name and we are tied. Liveforever.
Happy Father's Day to my dad.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Back to the Suburban Grind: This moment: RIP, Prince
Back to the Suburban Grind: This moment: RIP, Prince: I stand outside myself when I remember the moment. I see myself, just out of the shower, hair wet, towel draped loosely around me, when my ...
This moment: RIP, Prince
I stand outside myself when I remember the moment. I see myself, just out of the shower, hair wet, towel draped loosely around me, when my phone pings the "illuminate" ringtone which tells me my sister needs me or wants to make me laugh. I don't rush to it, know it will be there until I check it, and put on some underwear first. The rest of my clothes are on the bed but I don't grab them just yet, instead I pick up the phone to read the message.
Prince is dead. Devastated. Mess.
And I am naked except for the underwear I just put on and need more clothes because I feel so naked but also need to call her. I want to be dressed. Because I will remember this moment and want to be dressed. I don't want to be crying in my room, which I am now doing near hysterically, as I fumble for the TV remote and the phone. I reach my sister and the news channel at the same time and she is saying yes but I don't see it on TV so maybe it is not true. Because why would it be true. Because it can't be. And I keep putting on my clothes but also a blanket over my still wet head to wait for the news on TV.
It's there. A still of Prince from Purple Rain and that 1958-2016 at the end. The marker of time. I think, "I'll die in your arms under the cherry moon." I think, "Until the end of time, I'll be there for you. You own my heart and mind, I truly adore you." I think, "Baby, baby, baby...what's it gonna be tonight...." The first songs that coming from my subconscious to my head. He's gone.
The moments, hours, days, and now weeks that follow I move in a slow jam of molasses. I am going through life's motions but the pull at my throat and the corner of my eyes and my solar plexus and my chest don't let me forget that I feel profound loss for someone I don't know but who helped me discover myself. The journey he led me on at various stages of my life by sharing his cannot be overstated. I've heard it said that when one is, say, tripping on psychedelic mushrooms or acid, a good guide, someone who has already experienced the effects and visuals, can help navigate the emotional roller coaster, the drama of the alternate universes, and the mind-blowing imagery of that sojourn. My life with Prince's music has been such a trip.
Some nights I react to his passing in the lower chakras. I actually drop to my knees with ache and longing. I feel untethered and disconnected, empty and ungrounded. Prince gave me license to be in possession of myself and to connect to the energies, physical and psychic around me. I felt the hair stand up on my arm, my heart beat faster, my head spin, my legs go weak in the landscape he created. I dared not be ashamed of my otherness, my sexuality, the magnetic pull and attraction between souls.
"They feel the heat, the heat between me and you."
There are no words for what the 15 year old me felt when she first heard those lyrics. I felt like I'd been told a secret, that something lurking inside would be impossible to hide when I discovered my soul's mate. I don't think I'd ever stood face to face with a boy at that time, let alone felt his heat, but I knew something wicked and delicious and terrifying would happen when I did. Songs of love and longing had not been so visceral for me until that moment. So much of Prince's music took me through the full range of emotions, love, sex, heartbreak, pleasure and pain. The sacred and the profane. The spiritual longing, the seeking, and the command he took on stage, in the studio, on the screen made him both pilgrim and guide.
I loved that Prince did not apologize for his blood, sugar, sex, magic (to quote the Red Hot Chili Peppers). He was all those wicked things and a vulnerable man cub. He was music's Mowgli walking through the jungle of the human psyche in all its dank, dark, delicious earthiness. He was sexy and naked and sweating and sweet and looked at us all with those wet eyes and everyone fell. He was so real as to be surreal. So truly enigmatic that no matter how often he was asked to define himself, he believed in not doing so, he was. That he is gone in a blink takes away a pocket of that magic.
I'm haunted by his passing as much because I loved him and his music at a time when I was flowering into my own being as that I, and so many others, had no idea how he was suffering. I am haunted by the man alone, by the tunnels I imagine him passing through to get from studio to studio, the corridors and chambers of his secret spaces. I feel stunned by all the work amassed, the work never heard, the work, the work, the art, the music that he kept making even when his fans still connected to the tried and true, the music that we knew. I imagine him alone, in the quiet, with his god and his muse, creating and hurting, and being distinctly human on a quest for the divine. I consider my own pain, my own loneliness, my own torment and compare it though I know I shouldn't. I think of an artist in physical pain and addiction and imagine the sorrow. And then the lyrics flood me and everyone in my life really for infinity because we have to listen to his music until I say stop and I have not yet.
And in this moment in my life, waiting at a stop light, mindlessly folding laundry, sending a message, reading, or dreaming, the songs come back, pop into my head like mile markers. You've come by here before, they say. Remember when you ached, longed for that boy, fought your own demons, wanted, needed. Do you remember when you were alone? When it was another time? Another place? And it was quiet and you were naked and out of the shower and had no idea which way the day would go?
I feel guilty for taking so long to let go. My mood is revealed by what's playing. One is warned whether or not to ask the question, show me the Beanie Boo, or ask for another something by my dancing or my silence. After the call, I slowly, silently finished getting dressed. I'd turned off the TV at some point probably to hear my sister better as we talked. The house was still.
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Prince is dead. Devastated. Mess.
And I am naked except for the underwear I just put on and need more clothes because I feel so naked but also need to call her. I want to be dressed. Because I will remember this moment and want to be dressed. I don't want to be crying in my room, which I am now doing near hysterically, as I fumble for the TV remote and the phone. I reach my sister and the news channel at the same time and she is saying yes but I don't see it on TV so maybe it is not true. Because why would it be true. Because it can't be. And I keep putting on my clothes but also a blanket over my still wet head to wait for the news on TV.
It's there. A still of Prince from Purple Rain and that 1958-2016 at the end. The marker of time. I think, "I'll die in your arms under the cherry moon." I think, "Until the end of time, I'll be there for you. You own my heart and mind, I truly adore you." I think, "Baby, baby, baby...what's it gonna be tonight...." The first songs that coming from my subconscious to my head. He's gone.
The moments, hours, days, and now weeks that follow I move in a slow jam of molasses. I am going through life's motions but the pull at my throat and the corner of my eyes and my solar plexus and my chest don't let me forget that I feel profound loss for someone I don't know but who helped me discover myself. The journey he led me on at various stages of my life by sharing his cannot be overstated. I've heard it said that when one is, say, tripping on psychedelic mushrooms or acid, a good guide, someone who has already experienced the effects and visuals, can help navigate the emotional roller coaster, the drama of the alternate universes, and the mind-blowing imagery of that sojourn. My life with Prince's music has been such a trip.
Some nights I react to his passing in the lower chakras. I actually drop to my knees with ache and longing. I feel untethered and disconnected, empty and ungrounded. Prince gave me license to be in possession of myself and to connect to the energies, physical and psychic around me. I felt the hair stand up on my arm, my heart beat faster, my head spin, my legs go weak in the landscape he created. I dared not be ashamed of my otherness, my sexuality, the magnetic pull and attraction between souls.
"They feel the heat, the heat between me and you."
There are no words for what the 15 year old me felt when she first heard those lyrics. I felt like I'd been told a secret, that something lurking inside would be impossible to hide when I discovered my soul's mate. I don't think I'd ever stood face to face with a boy at that time, let alone felt his heat, but I knew something wicked and delicious and terrifying would happen when I did. Songs of love and longing had not been so visceral for me until that moment. So much of Prince's music took me through the full range of emotions, love, sex, heartbreak, pleasure and pain. The sacred and the profane. The spiritual longing, the seeking, and the command he took on stage, in the studio, on the screen made him both pilgrim and guide.
I loved that Prince did not apologize for his blood, sugar, sex, magic (to quote the Red Hot Chili Peppers). He was all those wicked things and a vulnerable man cub. He was music's Mowgli walking through the jungle of the human psyche in all its dank, dark, delicious earthiness. He was sexy and naked and sweating and sweet and looked at us all with those wet eyes and everyone fell. He was so real as to be surreal. So truly enigmatic that no matter how often he was asked to define himself, he believed in not doing so, he was. That he is gone in a blink takes away a pocket of that magic.
I'm haunted by his passing as much because I loved him and his music at a time when I was flowering into my own being as that I, and so many others, had no idea how he was suffering. I am haunted by the man alone, by the tunnels I imagine him passing through to get from studio to studio, the corridors and chambers of his secret spaces. I feel stunned by all the work amassed, the work never heard, the work, the work, the art, the music that he kept making even when his fans still connected to the tried and true, the music that we knew. I imagine him alone, in the quiet, with his god and his muse, creating and hurting, and being distinctly human on a quest for the divine. I consider my own pain, my own loneliness, my own torment and compare it though I know I shouldn't. I think of an artist in physical pain and addiction and imagine the sorrow. And then the lyrics flood me and everyone in my life really for infinity because we have to listen to his music until I say stop and I have not yet.
And in this moment in my life, waiting at a stop light, mindlessly folding laundry, sending a message, reading, or dreaming, the songs come back, pop into my head like mile markers. You've come by here before, they say. Remember when you ached, longed for that boy, fought your own demons, wanted, needed. Do you remember when you were alone? When it was another time? Another place? And it was quiet and you were naked and out of the shower and had no idea which way the day would go?
I feel guilty for taking so long to let go. My mood is revealed by what's playing. One is warned whether or not to ask the question, show me the Beanie Boo, or ask for another something by my dancing or my silence. After the call, I slowly, silently finished getting dressed. I'd turned off the TV at some point probably to hear my sister better as we talked. The house was still.
If I gave you diamonds and pearls
Would you be a happy boy or a girl
If I could I would give you the world
But all I can do is just offer you my love*
Would you be a happy boy or a girl
If I could I would give you the world
But all I can do is just offer you my love*
(Prince and the New Power Generation, Diamonds and Pearls)
It hadn't been one of my favorites but there it was. And I sang it out loud to break the silence. And as I'd felt so many times before listening to his music, I wanted someone to offer their love.
RIP, Prince Rogers Nelson
(c) Copyright 2016. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
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