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.
Showing posts with label blacks killed by police. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blacks killed by police. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
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.
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Tip of the iceberg: An average life
This is how I feel right now. I am in 9th grade reading Huckleberry Finn with my class and each time they call Jim a nigger, I cringe. And it's said over and over. Many look at me sympathetically, shrug their shoulders, some even touch me on the arm if they are close enough because we all know, no matter how we all long for the adventure, that poor, ol' Jim and I have more in common than Huck and me. I don't deny that most feel uncomfortable with the language that is explained away with a "that's how people spoke of black folks at that time" but when we move on to "A Farewell to Arms" everyone else can drop their shame, their melancholy, longing for the expectation that I have forgiven this past and that "we've come a long way, baby" and get back to modern living.
But I see Jim and I know him because, though you may be looking at me and seeing an upper middle class, well-educated, articulate, funny, put together (at times) African-American (I prefer Black) woman with a handsome, French husband and two beautiful mixed kids, I come from a long line where Jim and folks like him are roots on my tree. I am, as the expression goes, the tip of the iceberg, but under the surface is a lineage of survivors and thrivers, former slaves and slavers. We are mixed by choice and very often not. I spent my early years and my summers on the front porch of my grandparents' home at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Though I lived in a white neighborhood in New Jersey and believed myself assimilated, I sat at the feet of my grands and great-grands and heard about racism firsthand. Not just being called "nigger" or "blackie" or "brown sugar" by white kids testing their power and position in the wide streets of the suburbs, but pervasive, oppressive, strangulating cruelty that only served to threaten and stunt the mental, emotional, spiritual, and social growth of black people. These were not stories or headlines. These tales were the lives of my family and my ancestors. No matter where I am in the world, this is the ground beneath me.
I did not grow up the way many envision black people growing up. Not because it is so rare but because you don't know us. And if you do, really do, then I am not talking to you, but I would venture to guess that you don't really. I dream of a life that is banal, no more exciting or charged than that of anyone else, maybe even the default. The life you think of when you think of every day life. And then I wake up and remember that I am black. That I am a black, sensitive, creative woman who, by nature of being black in America, cannot live an average life. That my life is meant to define, describe, explain, assuage, and calm the feelings of other citizens allowed to live their mundane lives while mine is fraught with symbolism and metaphor and hyperbole.
My grandmother told me often that she wanted better for me, for all of us, was grateful for what she'd seen us achieve in such a short amount of time, hoped that "white people were fair and good" to us. There was palpable fear and doubt, but also hope. I wanted to tell her, to show her that all her suffering and her efforts had not been in vain, that we were advancing. That the rapes, assaults, laws, white supremacy, and pervasive and accepted racism were seen as the horrors they were, were being put firmly in the past, and that WE were being seen for the "content of our character." And the advancement of our family specifically was tied to our advancement as black people in America collectively. Many black families will tell you the same. For us to be able to just be average, regular, unspectacular, under the radar, just living our lives gave her hope. It was the tip of the iceberg. She was sure we'd overcome. I carried that hope for her.
There were small things that reminded me we hadn't come as far as I'd hoped. My father getting followed home by the police on a morning run. People assuming he was a ball player because he drove a nice car. Having a very hard time finding an apartment even with full time employment, good credit, and a clean record. Having to consider that I had a clean record. Listening to people tell me, when hearing my experience as a black woman in America that racism wasn't the problem but poverty and elitism. Um, AND those too. Having to qualify that though, yes, micro-aggressions were not the same as being beaten or killed in the street, dealing with them was still incredibly damaging to the psyche. Having someone, a "friend" write something about "hey, blacks, I've suffered too and look at me" on my Facebook wall in response to more proof of the systemic racism that prevails in our country. Imagine trying to be part of a group or society or country but when the conch shell gets passed to you, everyone talks over you. Tells you it's not your turn.
If we meet you with rage, if we meet you with anger, you call us animals and beat us or pepper spray us or shoot us. If we ask for a fair shake, an opportunity, a chance, you say we are angling for special privilege. If we write stories or articles or blogs about our experiences on the outside, you say we, WE are the ones being divisive. If we tell you we are hurting, we are tired, we are traumatized by the rhetoric, by the hatred, by the violence, the unrelenting insensitivity and ignorance, you say buck up. When innocent black men, women, and children are murdered, people who look like us, in epic abuses of power, and no justice comes on their behalf. When we cry for them, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, cousins, friends, we are asked to consider why they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing. We are told that if they'd just listened, behaved, respected the law and the policies that were not designed with them in mind, they might have lived another day to face it all again.
This racist system is real and it's killing all of us. Not just Black people, but our country. It's not that we are a nation divided by black and white because that isn't true. It wasn't then and it isn't now. But racism, complacency, white privilege and its hideous cousin, white supremacy do threaten to tear us apart. And everything that anyone finds great about this nation will crumble into the seas like the icebergs of white and blue and purple crumbling under the heat of global warming. We are dying ever so slowly from a disease that feels impossible to stop. We are sure it is going to overtake us, consume us. It just might. Like people suffering from illness, we can resign or we can fight it with all we have. There is prayer, meditation, and there is love. And love...
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Corinthians 13
I don't deny it, I am sinking, melting into the sea, afraid I will never be solid again. Each week, as I try to do what everyone else is doing, raising their children, trying to give them values and truths to uphold them, I am crying into the back of my hand, afraid to let them see what lies beneath the surface of their gleaming pyramid called life. I held the hope for my grandmother and now I hold it for my daughters. This conversation is just the start. It's the tip of the iceberg but if we don't tend to it, we are bound to hit the parts below the surface and dash all our dreams of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for an average life made special by our content, by our character, by our cooperation, and by our love.
RIP to the victims of the cowardly act of terrorism in at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
But I see Jim and I know him because, though you may be looking at me and seeing an upper middle class, well-educated, articulate, funny, put together (at times) African-American (I prefer Black) woman with a handsome, French husband and two beautiful mixed kids, I come from a long line where Jim and folks like him are roots on my tree. I am, as the expression goes, the tip of the iceberg, but under the surface is a lineage of survivors and thrivers, former slaves and slavers. We are mixed by choice and very often not. I spent my early years and my summers on the front porch of my grandparents' home at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Though I lived in a white neighborhood in New Jersey and believed myself assimilated, I sat at the feet of my grands and great-grands and heard about racism firsthand. Not just being called "nigger" or "blackie" or "brown sugar" by white kids testing their power and position in the wide streets of the suburbs, but pervasive, oppressive, strangulating cruelty that only served to threaten and stunt the mental, emotional, spiritual, and social growth of black people. These were not stories or headlines. These tales were the lives of my family and my ancestors. No matter where I am in the world, this is the ground beneath me.
I did not grow up the way many envision black people growing up. Not because it is so rare but because you don't know us. And if you do, really do, then I am not talking to you, but I would venture to guess that you don't really. I dream of a life that is banal, no more exciting or charged than that of anyone else, maybe even the default. The life you think of when you think of every day life. And then I wake up and remember that I am black. That I am a black, sensitive, creative woman who, by nature of being black in America, cannot live an average life. That my life is meant to define, describe, explain, assuage, and calm the feelings of other citizens allowed to live their mundane lives while mine is fraught with symbolism and metaphor and hyperbole.
There were small things that reminded me we hadn't come as far as I'd hoped. My father getting followed home by the police on a morning run. People assuming he was a ball player because he drove a nice car. Having a very hard time finding an apartment even with full time employment, good credit, and a clean record. Having to consider that I had a clean record. Listening to people tell me, when hearing my experience as a black woman in America that racism wasn't the problem but poverty and elitism. Um, AND those too. Having to qualify that though, yes, micro-aggressions were not the same as being beaten or killed in the street, dealing with them was still incredibly damaging to the psyche. Having someone, a "friend" write something about "hey, blacks, I've suffered too and look at me" on my Facebook wall in response to more proof of the systemic racism that prevails in our country. Imagine trying to be part of a group or society or country but when the conch shell gets passed to you, everyone talks over you. Tells you it's not your turn.
If we meet you with rage, if we meet you with anger, you call us animals and beat us or pepper spray us or shoot us. If we ask for a fair shake, an opportunity, a chance, you say we are angling for special privilege. If we write stories or articles or blogs about our experiences on the outside, you say we, WE are the ones being divisive. If we tell you we are hurting, we are tired, we are traumatized by the rhetoric, by the hatred, by the violence, the unrelenting insensitivity and ignorance, you say buck up. When innocent black men, women, and children are murdered, people who look like us, in epic abuses of power, and no justice comes on their behalf. When we cry for them, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, cousins, friends, we are asked to consider why they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing. We are told that if they'd just listened, behaved, respected the law and the policies that were not designed with them in mind, they might have lived another day to face it all again.
This racist system is real and it's killing all of us. Not just Black people, but our country. It's not that we are a nation divided by black and white because that isn't true. It wasn't then and it isn't now. But racism, complacency, white privilege and its hideous cousin, white supremacy do threaten to tear us apart. And everything that anyone finds great about this nation will crumble into the seas like the icebergs of white and blue and purple crumbling under the heat of global warming. We are dying ever so slowly from a disease that feels impossible to stop. We are sure it is going to overtake us, consume us. It just might. Like people suffering from illness, we can resign or we can fight it with all we have. There is prayer, meditation, and there is love. And love...
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Corinthians 13
I don't deny it, I am sinking, melting into the sea, afraid I will never be solid again. Each week, as I try to do what everyone else is doing, raising their children, trying to give them values and truths to uphold them, I am crying into the back of my hand, afraid to let them see what lies beneath the surface of their gleaming pyramid called life. I held the hope for my grandmother and now I hold it for my daughters. This conversation is just the start. It's the tip of the iceberg but if we don't tend to it, we are bound to hit the parts below the surface and dash all our dreams of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for an average life made special by our content, by our character, by our cooperation, and by our love.
RIP to the victims of the cowardly act of terrorism in at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
(c) Copyright 2015. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
Struggling not to fall
When I was a little girl, my family went on a trip to an ice skating rink. I'd never been before, but as I was a young dancer and pretty proficient on the roller skates, I took to it pretty quickly. I remember the cold and the sound of the blades on the ice and the whoosh-whoosh of the wind as I picked up speed. It should have been such a freeing experience. Here was something that felt a little like flying, where I could feel the air in my lungs clear and crisp, where I could whiz around the rink passing people, turning, and where feeling that special magic of being encapsulated in my own energy bubble should have brought me joy... and I was riddled with anxiety.
My parents, who'd both come from humble beginnings, had not had the opportunities or privilege to participate in frivolous activities like skating and skiing and tennis or any of the extracurriculars my brother and sister and I were afforded. Their after school activities were often connected to their schools or churches and they still had to make time for work and help around the home or farm. That day at the rink, my dad was up on skates for the first time too but was thrown off balance, resting on the thin blades did not come naturally. My father was and is a very solid guy. He stands firmly on the ground and gives the appearance of such physical strength that I was well into adulthood when I realized that he was not as enormous as John Henry the steel driving man. For him, skating was a challenge, but one he did not give up on. I watched him make his way slowly around the rink, staying close to the side, shuffling along trying to get the hang of it. I have always been sensitive and empathetic to others' struggles and have always beamed with pride at anyone's attempt at something new, something dangerous, something just beyond their reach. But this was too much for my tiny, little heart. To see my dad, probably the person I loved the most at that time, certainly looked up to (despite our incredible differences), working so hard, struggling, broke me and I cried and cried at his humanness. My world turned upside down when I discovered that he was just a man.
I have not posted for a very long time because again I have been crying and crying. Seriously. I am in a state of absolute pain at my core. The very real humanness of this struggle has poked and prodded at my heart and at my gut so that I just can't get much of a handle on what I believe anymore. I feel the same sensation that I felt watching my father, my hero, struggle around that rink. We are wobbling and tumbling and falling flat trying to get around this fucking rink.
I am hurt and angered and saddened by the outcomes of every case involving a black person--man, woman, or child--being killed by the police. I am insulted by the imagery being used to describe black boys and men--animals, monsters, overpowering, aggressive. I cannot believe that the victims and their communities are being told that it is their lack of respect that has brought the pox on their houses. I am hurt that the trigger is pulled so quickly and that the victim is then blamed for his past or the figure he cut on surveillance video as though those were reasons enough to kill an unarmed person. But I have been destroyed, truly cut deep, by the efforts of friends and neighbors quick to explain to me either the absolute necessity of handling black people this way or in deflection about the tough, brave, good folks in law enforcement out there. Of course there are good cops and good public servants. We are not talking about that and you know it. I never said, "Fuck the police," but I hear in the tone, in the explanation, and in the crazy, blue-cold silence, "Fuck that. Their lives got nothing to do with me."
I can see how easy it is for people, white people, to look at these all black communities, see their upset, their anger, their feelings and disassociate. I know you don't know any of those people. Truth be told, I don't either. Not personally nor tangentially. It's easy to imagine that somehow they don't want the same as you want for yours, that they are willing to destroy themselves and their communities because they "just don't care about themselves or their families or their communities" the same way you do. It is easy to say if they'd done nothing wrong, they'd have nothing to feel guilty about. It is easy to look at someone in a moment of terror or pain or frustration and read them all the way wrong. It is easy to apply your experience to the actions of people you don't know, to expect that they had every opportunity that you did and assume they are just making bad choices or are somehow deserving of the incredibly strict, harsh punishment (death) handed down for being #alivewhileblack. But the most infuriating thing is how easy it is for you to just look away.
I grew up in your community. There were a handful of brown and black faces and all the rest were white and your right to be there no matter your efforts, your intelligence, how clean, good, big your family was, your lawn, your car, your station, you knew the place was yours. That you were free to skate. There was judgment, there were microaggressions every day against my family and me. There were assaults on my psyche if not on my physical self. The same folks I saw in church would not even acknowledge me in the Pathmark. A good friend's mother would rather he put himself in harm's way than possibly end up in my arms (He was gay, but there'd be a little time for her to discover that.). A teacher at school told me that my white boyfriend and I were disgusting. A popular student told me I was pretty but that his mother would kill him if he came home with someone black. Going below the speed limit, friends and I were pulled over and though I was not driving, the officer told me to watch myself. We were held up as the proof of diversity in your community, shown as a symbol to how open and available and post-racial we were despite all that.
And you know what? I did try. I danced and shimmied at the parties, deflected when way off color jokes were told, kindly shot down hideous come-ons conjured by images of hot black chicks who can't get enough. I put the rage and anger and fear in my art, moved to spiritualism and meditation and the quest for a higher power, for the sacred because being just human, a black, female human navigating life in this country that believed itself to be post-racial, post-Civil Rights movement was exhausting and lonely and frustrating. I struggled to get my footing when, even though I was full of promise, I truly just could not find my way. Even now, I still listen to people who want to tell me how they see my experience. How they feel about what I am talking about. How they think I am getting it all wrong, that I did not even grow up in "those communities." How I am a different kind of black person. I'm not.
I never feared for my life but was raised to be prepared for it. Though my father did not know we knew, we'd seen the rifle given him by his father before we moved "up north." The weapon that was to protect us in case "those white people got crazy." We knew the stories of the South, knew that my dad and his brothers and cousins and uncles and all the men before them knew to cross the street if a white woman was walking on the same side of the sidewalk lest folks get the wrong idea and come after the. Knew that they would not look white folks directly in the eye, that they would try to keep their tone down so as not to rile or rifle or scare white folks into craziness. It wasn't my story but I knew it well enough. It's in my DNA. I knew that they endured all that and moved to this neighborhood, this town for a good job, good schools, greater opportunity, and a chance to skate around the fucking rink.
And when I say this hurts and it's bad and we have to change it, I am called to task for rushing to judgment about the police, about the policies in this country that have tied the arms and bound the legs of black people and black communities. Yes, this is a class issue, the impossible gap between the very wealthy and the working poor is staggering, but there is no denying, no matter how hard one tries, that this is a racial issue. That black people, whether they grew up in their own communities or interspersed with yours, whether they grew up poor, rich, middle class, went to college or did not, whether they sell cigarettes on the street corner or are ivy league professors or lawyers or ball players or scientists or students are viewed with fear and prejudice. And even when you ask the people around you, more than likely also white and as inexperienced as you are, if it is at all possible that what "they" say is true, you are going to get back the answer you want, the one you expect, the one that let's you go to sleep at night while some of us are still awake and in tears watching vigilantly.
I went to school with you, to dance class, to church. I trick or treated with you and sang carols. I took the SATS next to you and lent you a pencil. If you don't believe people you don't know, trust me. Slow your judgment of black people and black communities. Sure there are bad apples. But since you've never really exposed yourself to those communities, you cannot see the people who are working their tails off to succeed in a system that is set up to fail them. Even those of us who grew up in your affluent communities don't have your advantages. And before you try to hold a mirror up to our successes, our achievements, let me tell you that nothing, nothing at all came easy and the road was paved not only with obstacles and sacrifices but hellishly racist shit that would spin your head.
When we are frustrated, all of us, all human beings, and we need to let off steam, to vent, we do the same things. Scream, yell, vent, kick stuff. I know it. Now imagine in your frustration, in your pain, in your rage at injustice and disproportionately unfair treatment, there is little to no release. You are locked in. No one will feel your pain, no one will comfort you, no one will even acknowledge you. No one will cradle your head, no one will even address how much you hurt but rather that you kicked the door in. Imagine that your outrage, that your expression is met with judgment and lectures and invalidation. Imagine that what you know is true is argued about and disputed and negated to your face by someone who has no idea about what you are speaking.
All of us, all human beings want the same things. We want to give all we can to our families, to see them do better than we have, to give them more, to leave the earth, to leave society, the world better than we found it. There are little girls and boys all around the country watching their fathers skate around the rink, stumble, struggle. They are beaming with pride, falling in love with their heroes, cluelessly believing that if their fathers could just make it around the rink that all will be right with the world, completely blissful in their ignorance, as open and trusting and hopeful as every one of you. They are willing their fathers and mothers and families and communities to succeed, to make it around, to get better at it, to progress.
I was a little black girl with big dreams. I believed my dad could do anything. To see him struggle, to see him fall, to see him in fear, to witness injustice, unfair treatment, judgment reserved for him only because he was black, hindrances and obstacles placed in his way, when I knew he'd worked so hard, climbed such heights, done so much, threatened to halt my conviction. I could glide and spin and soar only when I knew he was safe. That he could get to a place where he trusted himself too. That he could falter and get up again. We must find a way to talk about race, privilege, injustice or our only future is dystopian. There must be fundamental changes in policy, better training of police and civil servants. But most importantly, we must see each other.
What frightened me most going around that rink was not that my father was so inexperienced. It was that the really good skaters, the fast ones who'd been skating all their lives might knock him down and that he wouldn't get up. That they'd zoom by so quickly they might rush over his fingers on the ice as he tried to right himself. I was afraid for him, as I am afraid for us now, that he would just give up and never try again. And he did. And I hope we can too.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
My parents, who'd both come from humble beginnings, had not had the opportunities or privilege to participate in frivolous activities like skating and skiing and tennis or any of the extracurriculars my brother and sister and I were afforded. Their after school activities were often connected to their schools or churches and they still had to make time for work and help around the home or farm. That day at the rink, my dad was up on skates for the first time too but was thrown off balance, resting on the thin blades did not come naturally. My father was and is a very solid guy. He stands firmly on the ground and gives the appearance of such physical strength that I was well into adulthood when I realized that he was not as enormous as John Henry the steel driving man. For him, skating was a challenge, but one he did not give up on. I watched him make his way slowly around the rink, staying close to the side, shuffling along trying to get the hang of it. I have always been sensitive and empathetic to others' struggles and have always beamed with pride at anyone's attempt at something new, something dangerous, something just beyond their reach. But this was too much for my tiny, little heart. To see my dad, probably the person I loved the most at that time, certainly looked up to (despite our incredible differences), working so hard, struggling, broke me and I cried and cried at his humanness. My world turned upside down when I discovered that he was just a man.
I have not posted for a very long time because again I have been crying and crying. Seriously. I am in a state of absolute pain at my core. The very real humanness of this struggle has poked and prodded at my heart and at my gut so that I just can't get much of a handle on what I believe anymore. I feel the same sensation that I felt watching my father, my hero, struggle around that rink. We are wobbling and tumbling and falling flat trying to get around this fucking rink.
I am hurt and angered and saddened by the outcomes of every case involving a black person--man, woman, or child--being killed by the police. I am insulted by the imagery being used to describe black boys and men--animals, monsters, overpowering, aggressive. I cannot believe that the victims and their communities are being told that it is their lack of respect that has brought the pox on their houses. I am hurt that the trigger is pulled so quickly and that the victim is then blamed for his past or the figure he cut on surveillance video as though those were reasons enough to kill an unarmed person. But I have been destroyed, truly cut deep, by the efforts of friends and neighbors quick to explain to me either the absolute necessity of handling black people this way or in deflection about the tough, brave, good folks in law enforcement out there. Of course there are good cops and good public servants. We are not talking about that and you know it. I never said, "Fuck the police," but I hear in the tone, in the explanation, and in the crazy, blue-cold silence, "Fuck that. Their lives got nothing to do with me."
I can see how easy it is for people, white people, to look at these all black communities, see their upset, their anger, their feelings and disassociate. I know you don't know any of those people. Truth be told, I don't either. Not personally nor tangentially. It's easy to imagine that somehow they don't want the same as you want for yours, that they are willing to destroy themselves and their communities because they "just don't care about themselves or their families or their communities" the same way you do. It is easy to say if they'd done nothing wrong, they'd have nothing to feel guilty about. It is easy to look at someone in a moment of terror or pain or frustration and read them all the way wrong. It is easy to apply your experience to the actions of people you don't know, to expect that they had every opportunity that you did and assume they are just making bad choices or are somehow deserving of the incredibly strict, harsh punishment (death) handed down for being #alivewhileblack. But the most infuriating thing is how easy it is for you to just look away.
I grew up in your community. There were a handful of brown and black faces and all the rest were white and your right to be there no matter your efforts, your intelligence, how clean, good, big your family was, your lawn, your car, your station, you knew the place was yours. That you were free to skate. There was judgment, there were microaggressions every day against my family and me. There were assaults on my psyche if not on my physical self. The same folks I saw in church would not even acknowledge me in the Pathmark. A good friend's mother would rather he put himself in harm's way than possibly end up in my arms (He was gay, but there'd be a little time for her to discover that.). A teacher at school told me that my white boyfriend and I were disgusting. A popular student told me I was pretty but that his mother would kill him if he came home with someone black. Going below the speed limit, friends and I were pulled over and though I was not driving, the officer told me to watch myself. We were held up as the proof of diversity in your community, shown as a symbol to how open and available and post-racial we were despite all that.
And you know what? I did try. I danced and shimmied at the parties, deflected when way off color jokes were told, kindly shot down hideous come-ons conjured by images of hot black chicks who can't get enough. I put the rage and anger and fear in my art, moved to spiritualism and meditation and the quest for a higher power, for the sacred because being just human, a black, female human navigating life in this country that believed itself to be post-racial, post-Civil Rights movement was exhausting and lonely and frustrating. I struggled to get my footing when, even though I was full of promise, I truly just could not find my way. Even now, I still listen to people who want to tell me how they see my experience. How they feel about what I am talking about. How they think I am getting it all wrong, that I did not even grow up in "those communities." How I am a different kind of black person. I'm not.
I never feared for my life but was raised to be prepared for it. Though my father did not know we knew, we'd seen the rifle given him by his father before we moved "up north." The weapon that was to protect us in case "those white people got crazy." We knew the stories of the South, knew that my dad and his brothers and cousins and uncles and all the men before them knew to cross the street if a white woman was walking on the same side of the sidewalk lest folks get the wrong idea and come after the. Knew that they would not look white folks directly in the eye, that they would try to keep their tone down so as not to rile or rifle or scare white folks into craziness. It wasn't my story but I knew it well enough. It's in my DNA. I knew that they endured all that and moved to this neighborhood, this town for a good job, good schools, greater opportunity, and a chance to skate around the fucking rink.
And when I say this hurts and it's bad and we have to change it, I am called to task for rushing to judgment about the police, about the policies in this country that have tied the arms and bound the legs of black people and black communities. Yes, this is a class issue, the impossible gap between the very wealthy and the working poor is staggering, but there is no denying, no matter how hard one tries, that this is a racial issue. That black people, whether they grew up in their own communities or interspersed with yours, whether they grew up poor, rich, middle class, went to college or did not, whether they sell cigarettes on the street corner or are ivy league professors or lawyers or ball players or scientists or students are viewed with fear and prejudice. And even when you ask the people around you, more than likely also white and as inexperienced as you are, if it is at all possible that what "they" say is true, you are going to get back the answer you want, the one you expect, the one that let's you go to sleep at night while some of us are still awake and in tears watching vigilantly.
I went to school with you, to dance class, to church. I trick or treated with you and sang carols. I took the SATS next to you and lent you a pencil. If you don't believe people you don't know, trust me. Slow your judgment of black people and black communities. Sure there are bad apples. But since you've never really exposed yourself to those communities, you cannot see the people who are working their tails off to succeed in a system that is set up to fail them. Even those of us who grew up in your affluent communities don't have your advantages. And before you try to hold a mirror up to our successes, our achievements, let me tell you that nothing, nothing at all came easy and the road was paved not only with obstacles and sacrifices but hellishly racist shit that would spin your head.
When we are frustrated, all of us, all human beings, and we need to let off steam, to vent, we do the same things. Scream, yell, vent, kick stuff. I know it. Now imagine in your frustration, in your pain, in your rage at injustice and disproportionately unfair treatment, there is little to no release. You are locked in. No one will feel your pain, no one will comfort you, no one will even acknowledge you. No one will cradle your head, no one will even address how much you hurt but rather that you kicked the door in. Imagine that your outrage, that your expression is met with judgment and lectures and invalidation. Imagine that what you know is true is argued about and disputed and negated to your face by someone who has no idea about what you are speaking.
All of us, all human beings want the same things. We want to give all we can to our families, to see them do better than we have, to give them more, to leave the earth, to leave society, the world better than we found it. There are little girls and boys all around the country watching their fathers skate around the rink, stumble, struggle. They are beaming with pride, falling in love with their heroes, cluelessly believing that if their fathers could just make it around the rink that all will be right with the world, completely blissful in their ignorance, as open and trusting and hopeful as every one of you. They are willing their fathers and mothers and families and communities to succeed, to make it around, to get better at it, to progress.
I was a little black girl with big dreams. I believed my dad could do anything. To see him struggle, to see him fall, to see him in fear, to witness injustice, unfair treatment, judgment reserved for him only because he was black, hindrances and obstacles placed in his way, when I knew he'd worked so hard, climbed such heights, done so much, threatened to halt my conviction. I could glide and spin and soar only when I knew he was safe. That he could get to a place where he trusted himself too. That he could falter and get up again. We must find a way to talk about race, privilege, injustice or our only future is dystopian. There must be fundamental changes in policy, better training of police and civil servants. But most importantly, we must see each other.
What frightened me most going around that rink was not that my father was so inexperienced. It was that the really good skaters, the fast ones who'd been skating all their lives might knock him down and that he wouldn't get up. That they'd zoom by so quickly they might rush over his fingers on the ice as he tried to right himself. I was afraid for him, as I am afraid for us now, that he would just give up and never try again. And he did. And I hope we can too.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
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