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. 

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.  

The Lost Black Girls

I always have something to say. Even when I am not saying anything I still have something to say.  But there are times, like now, when the thought of opening my mouth threatens to release the hiccuping, sniveling, water running in the mouth torrent of tears and screams that I hear only in my dream state because I don't dare care or feel as much as all that in my real life. Not if I can help it.  Not if I want to survive.

I am a woman of color (WOC) until I am black, really black.  A little black girl does not often find herself with a voice, with the protection of everything and everyone.  A little black girl is scared and only sometimes believes that anyone gives a damn.  At least this little black girl.  We know that very early on.  Even when the people who love us tell us we are important and special and valuable (and that does not always happen), we can see.  We can hear.  We listen.  We sense.  We're low on the totem pole.  A woman of color gets to talk about her perspective, share the stories of her time as a little black or brown or yellow girl, as she developed into a woman who took control of her destiny or found herself crushed by the weight of its reality.  When I am a woman of color, people who want to, who dare to, listen to my perspective, want to know what I think or believe, hope they want to know my story, what I have lived, what I experience.  As a woman of color I feel expert in my experience, strong, protective, prepared.  But deep down, I am still a little black girl.  Scared, tired, fragile, strong, endlessly hopeful, and both shamelessly fearful and fearless.  

I have been unable to write or speak or even utter a gasp about the girls, kidnapped, stolen in Nigeria by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram.  I knew, even as a young girl, that if I went missing, no one would come looking for me.  And every time I tried to disappear, ran away, hid in the closet or the attic, even my parents did not stop what they were doing to find me.  Everything I have ever known about my status did nothing to reinforce my sense of worth or value. Little black girls were not searched for, missed when they were gone. Yes, this was a child's perspective, and yes, they, we are valuable to many, but consider that the stories that really got the public moved to action were those of pretty little white girls stolen in the night.  Rarely did I see a story about a small black child that raised everyone's consciousness, concern, pulled the community together to talk about the sanctity of childhood or innocence.  I knew inside, just knew that the general population was not concerned for my virtue, my safety, or my innocence.  No one who looked like me starred in the rescue story.

So when I learned they were gone, my heart sank.  I felt as if I'd been kicked in the gut.  And then my thoughts turned to them.  Taken in the dark, scared to death, wondering what would become of them, how would the people who loved them find them, where were they going.  I imagined them looking for clues on the path, a way to remember to find their way back, probably knowing they would not go back.  At least not the way they came.  I thought of the fucking cowardice it took to punish people, communities by raging assaults on young girls and women.  I thought of the absolutely sickness of that kind of power play and how the eyes of those girls and their minds and their hearts and their bodies will be changed forever.  And then I learned that I was late to the Intel.  They'd been gone days when I first heard about the abduction.  Many tuned in later to find that the girls had been missing for weeks.

I could not conjure up in the recesses of my mind, the most horrible fear, most alienating, soul crushing, dream stealing terror that is happening right now. They were gone for days before the world got enraged, got upset, was called to action.  Taken in the night at their school by a group that rejects Westernization and education of girls and women.  Their response to this affront was to kidnap the girls and, depending on who you are asking, sell them into marriage, lead them through the brutal terrain of the forest, or torment and repeatedly rape them, traumatizing and terrorizing them and leaving their families in complete anguish. Each possibility more horrifying than the next.  That the possibilities are more than likely probabilities has left me supremely enraged.

Their mothers and families left to imagine the unimaginable, crying in the night, feeling the psychic pull of their children and having no idea how or where to find them.  There is talk of international aid, perhaps a trade with Boko Haram for militants being held as prisoners. There are rallies and writing campaigns, and calls for action.  I support those.  But what I cannot get out of my mind, even when I close my eyes, are the faces I have conjured of those girls, their eyes staring at me, making our connection real.  It is so easy, especially in the modern world, when the threats are not immediate or put one in imminent danger, to turn one's head.  But I feel their presence and their fear and their life force.

There but by the grace of God go I.  I see myself in their faces.  Read my own name next to theirs.  The horror lies in the absolute randomness of being unfortunate to be chosen for such violence and assault.  A girl in the world learns these things.  That upon her body and to her mind will be done great damage and violence in the name of anything and nothing.  How I wish I could make them feel safe, secure, complete after this.  Some have escaped and I have read that some may have died on the journey but many will have an "after this."  What that is, where that is, how that is, we don't yet know.  What serves as a metaphor for so many of us, girls in the world, lost in the dark, stolen innocence, is the reality for many more. 

Hiding in the closet or in the attic, I remember my pounding heart.  Its steady thunder keeping me tethered to the present, kept me from fleeing to my mind, my dreams, my outer space, disappearing place.  I feel their hearts beat.  All of ours.  And I hope these girls are reunited with their families and brought home soon.  Say their names out loud so you believe that they are as real as you are.  Call out to them so they feel your hope and your rage and their strength and your love.  The little black girl inside of me is screaming out, clawing at the walls, begging to be heard, to be rescued, to be healed.  The WOC is prepared to be steely and strong enough to support others, to hold them up in body and spirit, to live in a place where being a girl in the world, a black girl in the world can again be wondrous and awesome, not dangerous and threatening. 

(c) Copyright 2014.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.

Learning MLK

Black National Anthem

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou Who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.

Written by James Weldon Johnson (1899), music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson (1900)


When I was a little girl, though I suspect younger than my two ladybugs, to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday and legacy, my family would spend the afternoon at a black church listening to people who'd lived the Civil Rights era, talking about about our history and the life of this man, and singing and clapping and dancing to some incredible church music and old Negro spirituals.  We were meant to reflect, consider, uplift, and rise, rise, rise above what our people, African-American people had endured in our own country.  A suffering that weighed heavily in the story of my immediate family.  This was not the story of just my ancestors, but of my people, my family, my father and mother and uncles and grands and greats.  It was not the past.  It was the ever-fluid present.

The emotion was so visceral, so intense in those moments that I was often embarrassed and humiliated by the heaviness.  I was "one of the only's," "the Cosby" at my school (calling it largely white would understate it).  That my father and mother were well-educated and had good jobs and provided for us well above even the national average allowed others to define us as "past all that."  But we weren't.  We aren't.  That our experience as middle class, educated, law abiding, good neighbors seemed beyond the norm was just the start of the misunderstanding.  That Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday was still being debated as a national holiday confused the young me.  That I celebrated in a church full of African-Americans and very few others hit it home.  This was my cross to bear.  Everyone else got to have the day off.

I supposed that my white friends were spending the day shopping or watching TV, hanging out, while the weight of my people and really the future of our nation, felt like it rested on my shoulders, or ours, as we endured to keep the memory, the truth, and the history alive.  I wanted everyone to be considering Martin Luther King, Jr. in the same way I was.  As a man, a true person, not just an idea, who lived and breathed among us, the same air I was breathing now, and who saw severe racism and institutional injustice and wanted it changed.  I felt burdened in a way different than my parents and their parents had because, according to so many who "don't see color" I was not living the outright barbaric terrorism of the times before the Civil Rights era and was living in a nearly all white community, proof to so many that things had changed.  But I still felt racism's sting in the subtlest of ways and much of it was internalized.  I still felt that it was mine to prove that we were equal, alike, multidimensional and multifaceted. 

It has been an interesting lesson for my husband and me as we teach our children who are biracial and bicultural  about this very particular man from this very particular moment and then open up the discussion to the greater topics of racism and equality, tolerance and acceptance.  They are so young and still at an age where they see the differences but do not have cultural references as to what those differences mean to some people.  Because I experienced that sense of other, I have been both protective of their feelings as such and have also opened the dialogue before their questions about otherness have even arisen.  Since they were very small, they have seen both of our families either in person or via Skype.  My husband speaks French with them and they see him speaking with his friends and family only in French.  We have looked at the map and the globe to discover just "how close and how far" we are to where Papa grew up.  We have visited with my parents and family full of aunts, uncles, and cousins down South in Virginia, Washington, DC, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas.  When we lived in Barbados, they saw what looked to them like a thriving nation where black and white people worked along side one another, where they saw many more people of color in positions of power, where racism was, of course,  in play, as it is everywhere, but where they were not isolated because of their racial make up, where they were, in fact, part of the majority.  They learned there about the East Indians and Chinese in the Caribbean through the friendships they made, and though they certainly asked questions about where folks came from, it was more a curiosity of geography than fear or confusion about race.

We have made it clear through our friendships and relations and the way we speak about all people that intolerance based on color, creed, religion, or sexual orientation will not be accepted in our home.  They have never said they wished they were not black.  Have never said they don't believe themselves to be beautiful.  Have never said that boys are smarter than girls, that white is better than black, that something is a girl game or a boy color or only for one group or another.  We talk about other peoples' customs and religions, even practicing some of the holiday customs and going to services when we can to demonstrate how all people are just striving for the same goals for their families.  And yet, when the specifics of the pre-Civil Rights era come up, I am taken back to that pain. 

As they have begun to learn the very cursory history and stories they are shocked.  If the separate water fountains and segregated schools are enough to burn their cheeks and hurt their hearts, imagine how they were brought to silence, sucking the insides of their cheeks, when I told them that Grandma and Grandpa had grown up, been little kids, just as they were now, and had lived this abject racism and in the case of my parents, poverty.  That Grandma and Grandpa and their brothers and sisters and so many other families and children just like them could not look away from it, rather had to live it and breathe it every day of their lives.  That their lives, in the minds of many, institutionalized in the country they called home, were not as valuable as the lives of others.  They see the absolute injustice right away and struggle and fumble for words.  It is not an abstraction talked about as if a bygone era, but a tangible truth for people they love and hold dear.  Because they still see us all as equal, they are just unable to comprehend.  This is how it hurts.  As the true terror and violence of that time comes to light for them, they will need the strength to endure and to forgive and to continue the legacy of a real, live man who gave his life in that struggle.  For them, a real, live man who looks like Grandpa, for whom their eyes sparkle and who is loved infinitely.

Both girls are extremely empathic and feel for others so deeply and compassionately.  I feel so lucky that we are the same in that way.  But they, as I long ago, cannot define how it hurts, just feel the lumps in their throats, the flush of their cheeks, the knot in their hearts and they weep.  They have cried for friends that "would not be our friends if the brown and the white could not be together."  The oldest has a dear girlfriend who said she'd just have to be in jail because she loved her friend so and would not put up with that nonsense.  I loved this comment more than I realized because it keeps returning to me, to my heart.  I love it because during those MLK celebrations of my youth, I would have loved a professing of love and commitment such as that from someone who "didn't have to," was able to choose her commitment to the rights of others when the privilege was hers.

I was a young person and am now a grown woman.  What I shared is not shame but the real visceral pain of that history, of what separation, exclusion, divisiveness of any kind does not only to us on a global scale, but what it does just to our own individual selves. We miss the true evolution of ourselves--physically, emotionally, spiritually, nationally, internationally, globally.  We miss transcendence if we cannot "lift every voice and sing."  I am working hard to keep that love in mine.  I hope as we celebrate the man and his actions, we each make a commitment to ourselves and our actions. 


(c)  Copyright 2014.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Bleeding Heart

My children are small.  Very small.  Small enough that outside of rules about recycling and energy conservation, stories about the holidays that cover just the basic "facts" and themes, news about the weather, and public interest stories about animals and the pool opening for summer, they are blissfully ignorant and detached from news of the world.  I am thankful for that today.  Though we talk casually about children in the world who are not as fortunate as they, who do not have the freedoms, rights, and more specifically (and frequently), toys and birthday parties that they have, their minds are not burdened with the state of the world.  They will learn soon enough.  I will lead them to a place of understanding, of compassion, and as important, what I think is often missing in the lessons that we parents offer our children, that none of us is more important or more valuable or more special than anyone else.  Truly.

But this lesson is easily taught by me to my children.  It was taught to me by my parents in as much what they did as what they said.  And it was surely taught to them by their parents.  When you are black in America, that message comes in loud and clear.  We were taught that we had to be twice as good, told to mind our p's and q's, to watch and wait before entering a group, take the temperature, find out if the members of that group were amenable to our presence.  Even if we knew that what we would bring to that group--talent, intelligence, humor, compassion, kindness--would greatly benefit, we entered with caution.  We were, clichéd as it sounds, outsiders.  Without being told this directly, I took it also to mean that I was never enough, didn't quite measure up, and probably never would.

My children know their gifts and know they are special to me.  I try to instill it in them every day,  but they surely do not believe that they deserve more in this world than anyone else.  They are learning that we must lift each other up to rise, that we must all rise together, not climb on others' backs or blindly soar while others are pedaling or flapping their wings underfoot.  The wind beneath their wings is my love and support, not a system that propels them to the top while others languish in the decks below.  They know this because I am teaching this to them. 

My parents, I can see it now, are insanely intelligent and exceptional people.  They are both smart and funny and witty and caring and giving, having been raised by fierce, God-loving, trusting, good people.  They are exceptional, but are not the exception.  We knew so many other black families like ours.  Saw success and drive, intelligence and creativity, humor and wit.  When we were all together, everyone could breathe a little easier, relax into our true selves, let our spirits soar, because the defining character of ourselves outside that group, our race, could be ignored.  We could be real, three-dimensional people with hopes and dreams and desires that could be acknowledged and considered.  But outside of that group, of that safety net, we just weren't sure where we stood with people.  We had so many wonderful friends from different backgrounds, people who shared themselves with us and allowed us to do the same.  Who truly judged us and all minorities by the content of our character.  But there were also others with whom we spent time at church or school or on sports teams or dance classes who wouldn't acknowledge us outside of our activities or used derogatory language about blacks and other minorities in our presence with the disclaimer, "but I don't mean you."

Oh, but you do.  And they did even if they'd convinced themselves that there was a different place for this black face, this black person.  They had a space for other and it was outside of their circle.  Sure there are criminals flaunted on the local news daily.  Those are people to be feared no matter their background (though a disproportionate number of those shown on local news are people of color as it helps to continue that narrative) but the rest of us are just normal citizens going about our daily lives.  We want what's best for our children, want to shape them to be the kind of people we want to be, want to see them have greater opportunity and success than we've had.  Verdicts like this one just handed down in the Trayvon Martin case remind us that we are still outside the circle.

My bleeding heart.  My "excessive" sympathy can, at times, leave me speechless, immobile, frozen in an emotional coma where the feelings rage inside the cocoon but on the outside I stand in fear.  I cannot do this and still take care of my children.  I have to get up and prepare breakfast and make beds and plan the day.  I still weep this morning for that young man being followed by a stranger in a neighborhood where he should have, like everyone else there, felt safe.  There was, after all, a neighborhood watch.  But the neighborhood watchman was watching him, checking for him, had written him outside the circle and pursued him, against police suggestion, and all of his hopes and dreams and desires died with him.  We won't even know them. 

None of us is more special, more important, more valuable than any other.  And none of us is less so.  In our spiritual core, in our hearts, in the part of us that is within our human selves but is not constrained by it, we know this.  But in the part where we are but mere human beings, in the part where we jockey for self-importance and relevancy, we don't believe it.  Can't.  In our keeping-up-with-the-Joneses/Kardashians/1% culture, where racism and discrimination burden the pursuit of happiness, where the "going for mine" and "doin' me" mentality reigns, teaching compassion and love and empathy is a serious endeavor but one we must all attempt or risk an epic failure. 

There is room enough for us all in the circle.  God I hope so.  And any loss suffered by any one of us should be felt by all.  The girls woke me this morning with kicks to the knees and ribs as they jockeyed for prime snuggling position.  They kissed my face even before I'd opened my eyes and whispered good morning before they knew whether I was asleep or awake.  They didn't know I'd cried all night and wouldn't.  It's not theirs to bear right now.  It is mine.  Though I stood up and was not able to clear the fog of the news of last night's verdict from my mind, my heart still fluttered for them.  It raged.  Their warm, little bodies jolted me back to my real life.  The life where I care for them and raise them and teach them how we must love one another.  My heart also bleeds for the mother who cannot hold her son, the mothers who cannot hold their children, cannot feel their warm bodies, be jolted out of bed by their promise, be comforted by the hope that their dreams and desires provide.  It bleeds because if we are all part of the same circle, what's mine is yours and we are one and the same.  And today I feel, again, that mother's emptiness.


RIP Trayvon Martin.


(c)  Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

It Takes a Village

Lily woke up in the middle of the night with a fever boiling through her bloodstream.  I knew because she was snuggled up next to me and I felt my own blood start to simmer until I realized that she was tucked in the crook of my arm.  I touched her head, put my hand on her rising belly and she was on fire.  I reached for her little sister on the other side of me and she, thankfully, did not feel the same.  She turned over to avoid my handling of her little body and I tended to her big sister.  That was the first night.

The next evening, antibiotics in hand for the raging ear infection that was plaguing my girl, we tried again.  Lily on my right and Virginie on my left.  Everyone tucked in and medicated or whatever was needed to allow a comfortable night's sleep and healing.  We made it to 3 AM.  At 3 AM, Virginie started wheezing as if she'd swallowed a balloon.  She could not seem to take a full breath without this full, croupy cough taking over her tiny body.  She would cough and tremble and cry, all while trying to fall back to sleep.  I offered her inhaler every fifteen minutes until she could breath easier.  Unfortunately, her coughing woke Lily who began pulling at one of her ears, coughing herself, and complaining of pain. For her there were pain killers and a back rub.  In fact, with each one sandwiching me into the middle of the bed, I rubbed and patted them, arms outstretched, until 5 AM when I heard the last labored breath subside to soft, even whistles.  Then I slept.

I've spent countless nights alone with the girls and most nights they are well, though often chatty and wake in the night.  When they are sick or scared or in need, I am available for them too, will take care of what needs caring for until it is right.  The good days greatly surpass the bad, but the bad ones fuel the fuzzy-brained, rain-clouded, barbed-wire pressured, and angst-filled stories of parenthood.  Those nights leave me feeling so low and lonely, mostly because I am sleep deprived and insane (JEG, you know who you are), like I don't have a prayer or a hand or a friend.

This morning, my neighbor offered to take the girls for a while to play with her children.  She and her husband had run their errands and handled their business and knew that I was alone for the long, holiday weekend with the girls.  I tried to bow out, excuse myself, convince her that it wasn't necessary, that the girls were fine with crazy me.  Though I have longed for a community, a tribe, a village to help me raise my children, I don't think I ever considered what I was really asking for.  It wasn't something mythic, epic, poetic, romantic.  It wasn't only a dream or an expression used in speeches when children had again been marginalized or ignored.  For me, it was having someone that I trusted and that I knew cared for me and my children, take them for a bit.  Nurture them.  Feed them.  Play with them.  Entertain them.  So that I might have a moment to regenerate, take a shower without a guest lecturer present, hell use the bathroom without having a conversation about only God knows what with a person sitting one foot in front of me.  On the floor.

I let the girls go for a bit when a friend called requesting Virginie, the four year old.  My friend's four year old was down for a full afternoon of play that involved multiple costume changes, a bath, coloring, a trip to the pool, all the cool stuff the pre-K set is into.  She went.  She stayed.  I saw her at 6 pm.  Lily, too, stayed out and I did things.  Fun things, housework things, banking things, lying down things, standing up things, alone things.  I later sat in the yard having an afternoon drink with my neighbor while we watched our children ride bikes and scooters up and down the drive.  A family of friends who were walking by on their way to the train station, continuing on to the airport and a European vacation, stopped for a quick beer.  I promised to check in on their house and their visitors. (They were doing a house trade with a family in France.)

I felt the village forming around me.  I always see in my mind a Native American or African tribe of my imagining with huts configured in a circle, women working and tending to their children, men hunting and gathering, doing what they do.  It is an image that comforts me, though it lives in my fantasy and is not drawn from any particular group or tribe.  It's just what I want.  The houses in my neighborhood are close enough for my children, young as they are, to walk from our home to a friend's without my being nervous.  In the nearly two years we have lived here, we have amassed a small tribe of families to whom I would entrust my children, my home, our pet (Baby Dragon, the newt).  There is a wonderful exchange of childcare, babysitting, dinners, evening cocktails, and conversations that gives me peace.  The girls have learned to respect and consider other adults (and children too) and other ways in which families live and households are run.  But as important, I have learned to trust, to fall into the arms of people who want to love and support me, who would allow me to love and support them, who have helped me give and receive in equal measure despite myself.

The village that we have chosen to call home has given me a place in the circle.  The people we have added to our circle have given me no corners to be pushed into and no walls to hide behind.  I am grateful for the connections and the community.  When the nights are insufferable and days or weeks alone threaten my sanity, my village comes to my aid.  It takes a village to raise a child.  This one has raised up my family too.


(c)  Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.

Brother Man

I am almost six years older than my brother which was just enough distance to see him as a cute and cuddly threat when he was born and a strange, little brainiac as he grew into a viciously smart kid and I into a miserable, brooding teenager.  I was always so curious about him, intrigued and fascinated.  He was a boy and did boy things and was sensitive, inquisitive, and obviously bright.  It was understood that he was bright.  He "got" things easily, skipped second grade, had a memory for all kinds of information, facts, dates, concepts, and loved exploring them, sometimes talking, talking, talking about them out loud in order to process them.  His role in the family was son and heir and "the smart one."  Nevermind that he was also a talented musician, it seemed a "shame" for him to go in the direction of the arts when he was clearly gifted with this brain for "something more."

I can only imagine how being my little brother must have traumatized the poor soul.  I was all arts and smarts--dance, visual arts, music, then acting later in life-- though the smarts did not reveal itself until years later when intelligence was no longer measured in test taking ability, memorization, and advanced algebra and trigonometry.  I foolishly committed the rules to memory and existed only to serve them.  Until I became that tortured teen, I ignored my own thoughts and cries and pleas for expression and did what I was told.  My bro watched in the shadows of the Speak N-Spell, adding numbers on the calculator to turn it upside down and make funny words, spinning the globe and pouring through maps and Encyclopedia Britannica volumes while I went from people pleaser to sad, angry worm.  My sister, two years younger than I am, buffered him from my angst and anxiety, teaching him about hip hop and teenage partying, relationships, and navigating the grey landscape that was our childhood home. 

And then I was gone.  As I watched from the dorm rooms I inhabited in Boston, my brother became a very cool, super hip, politically passionate dude.  I wanted to know him but was long gone and fast disconnecting from the mothership.  We'd move in and out of the circle, a little do-see-do, but never quite got to know each other or find ourselves completely comfy in each others' presence.  I blamed myself for this.  My brooding, emotional, artistic self saw ribbons of energy pushing and pulling and twisting around each other and I could never get my bearings.  I recalled bad times where he'd existed only on the periphery, moments that did not sit with the same thud for him as they did for me.  I was melancholy, mourning, dark and he was still searching, reaching, seeking.  Though we were both artistic, creative, thinkers, though we were both inquisitive, longing,questing, I couldn't see in his success, his hopefulness, how it was that we'd come out of the same house, that he remembered too.

As soon as I saw the trotting horses in the park, I collected myself and got my bearings.  I looked down and saw that I was pushing Virginie in our Peg Perego stroller that has survived international travel, beach dunes, and took comfort in seeing my hands gripping the carriage handles.  I searched for Lily, looking for her red jacket through the trees and other colored parkas in the park and saw that she was close. Close to me and to the trotting horses.  I didn't have to say anything because before I could figure out just what I would shout out about now, my brother rounded up the girls (his and mine) and got them well out of "harm's" way.  I looked over at my sister-in-law and said, "He has it too, huh?  The Penn panic.  The horses aren't bothering you at all, are they?"  They weren't.  At all.  Nor were they bothering my husband.

A smile came to my face and I took comfort in this commonality.  My brother is all those wonderful things and he was freaked by the possibility of the "charging," yes, now charging (in my mind) horses.  He was prepared for danger, ready.  He believed in love and life, had found the most incredible place with his gorgeous wife and girls, successful career, nice home, spoils of a well-lived, well-guided life, and still flashed panicked eyes at obstacles on the road.  As I watched him, looked at his face, I saw my baby brother, the little one, and I wanted to reassure him, even though I was pretty on guard myself.  Even though, when we were younger, I had no tools to guide or protect or reassure.

Even if this guy wasn't my brother, I would think he was pretty awesome.  In the second act, I get to know him for whom he probably always was, but I had no idea, and for the person he continues to develop into.  The man, the dad, the husband, and the friend.  The artist, the lawyer, the thinker.  I can only hope that he recognizes that the broody, moody, emotional girl he witnessed has transformed into a still emotional, spiritual, hopeful, still a bit fearful, caring, creative woman with partially exorcised demons and a map with room for more experiences and destinations.  We've been through some of the same places and I now hope we can show each other something new.




(c)  Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Our brother's keeper

My three year old is quite precocious and wise beyond her years.  I love talking to her and her big sister about whatever interests them, though we don't talk about murders or attacks or death of any kind which terrifies Lily and leaves her reeling for days.  But we do tell them honestly how we feel about certain things, in an age appropriate way.  No questions are off limits.  Complex subjects are broken down but not dumbed down.  We talk about God, religion, sex roles and gender stereotypes, marriage, politics, money, meditation, spirituality.  I trust that my people can find the center, the core concepts.  Tonight as we were going to bed, her big sister long ago fast asleep due to the cold that is kicking her little behind, Virginie said to me, "Do you remember that boy (Virginie still refers to all males as boys.)who was lying in the street when we went to New York City?"  I did remember the man but was rather surprised that she did, as we'd been there together more than six months prior for a birthday party. 

"Yes," I answered.  I do remember that man.  He was homeless.  Remember that I told you that he had no home?"

"The street was his home.  He lived there," she announced.  She wasn't proud, just stating matter of factly that he must live somewhere, so the place where he lay must be it.  She sat quietly for a moment, which for anyone who knows my dear girl knows is no small feat.  Then she said, "Can he drive his car to his house somewhere else?"  To which I replied, "I don't think he has a car either, baby, or a house somewhere else."

Her little brow furrowed and she stared into the darkness for a minute before she said, "We have to help him, Mama.  Papa gets jobs.  Maybe he can show him how to get one too."

"Maybe," I said while brushing her hair from her face and trying to gently lull her to sleep.  I lay there in the darkness, missing my husband who is working through this holiday season, and thought, This baby is right.  We have to help this man.  We have to help people.  We have to help each other.

I, too, have been guilty of turning in, working on my own issues, my own problems, my own story.  I have gotten used to letting go of my community, not asking of it, and being slow to offer my assistance or service, assuming either that someone else will do it or fearing calling unwanted attention to me or my action.  I have figured that the connections were too personal, too scary, left me too vulnerable to attack or to love.  Whenever I have had the chance to participate, I've felt so incredible, so alive, so connected, so tangibly, vibrantly, extraordinarily human.  I have been reminded by this small girl who somehow saw the connection between us all and asked not if we would help, but demanded we should.  I say this so much when it relates to real tragedy, to the furthest reaches of human suffering and need, but it is also true in our every day.  We are our brother's keeper.  We need to see each other, consider each other, support each other.  Want to.

Strangely, I too, could not get that particular homeless man's face out of my mind.  Maybe it was because I could see him in the distance as the girls and I were about to pass and I mulled just what I would tell them when the question was inevitably asked.  But for days after, when I thought of the conversation between us, I wondered how I'd found it so easy to explain that there was a man, red-faced and cold, clinging to a box, sleeping on the sidewalk in the city of their birth, and that I was able to say it so matter-of-factly. 

I remember as a child, seeing my first homeless person.  It was the early eighties and we'd gone into the city to do something, probably see a show or go to a museum as was usually the case.  I was older than my girls are now and homeless people we not commonplace. As more and more people found themselves unable to keep up with the excess and striving of the 80s, coupled with the closing of mental health facilities that saw many with mental disabilities actually released to the street to fend for themselves, an invisible, underground (so to speak) population grew alongside those of us living above ground.  I was terrified of the man and woman I saw.  They seemed out of a movie.  Which is, frankly, why it was probably so easy for so many adults to consider them unreal.  It was hard to look at them and see their faces, to look them in the eye, let alone consider their stories.  Their real life, human stories.  Stories the same as those I or others I knew might tell.  I never forgot them and my feeling that as a society, as a community, we were choosing to allow these people to live out of our sight, rather than bringing them back into the fold.  I was just a kid but I knew that this just didn't seem right.

I'm not sure when and where we let go of each others' hands.  Maybe we were never holding them in the first place, and it is a fantasy of my youth that we were meant to care for one another, to look out for one another, to try to lift each and every one of us from our place on the sidewalk, physically and metaphorically, to allow even those living in parallel universes to be seen and acknowledged from time to time.  Some people think when we are young we can still see ghosts and spirits and as we age, we lose our connection to that world, overwhelmed are we by the material world.  We cannot see what children see right in front of their faces.  "We have to help him."  We have to help each other because we need each other.

Inherent in all the struggle we have meeting the demands of the modern world, striving for a level of success equal to that of our parents, raising our children to be decent citizens while giving them everything we can without making them completely spoiled, must be the sense, if not the realization, that we cannot leave all those people behind.  That there has already been too much of that, too much "going for mine," and that it has not brought comfort or peace.  The "otherness" of homeless people, black people, white people, foreigners and expats, gay people, straight people, people with disabilities of any kind, people who think differently than we, rich people, poor people, anything that doesn't look, on the surface, just as we envision ourselves, has allowed us to ignore each other, to step over each other, walk around each other, justify killing each other, justify fearing each other, set up communities where we don't have to look at each other or be with each other.  But that does not negate the fact that this man was lying down on the ground, living, breathing, sleeping and that many others actually and metaphorically are doing the same.  And we should help them.

My baby wants to help him.  It's my job to keep it that way. 


(c)  Copyright 2012.  Repatriated Mama: Back the Suburban Grind.