Taking care: the big whoop

I wake everyone in the house with my coughing except my husband.  The fits can be hysterical and leave me spent.  If she's around, my littlest continuously says "God bless you" and "I hope you feel better" until the coughing stops.  My eldest asks if I need a glass of water.  I always take it but it doesn't really help.  Then I try to get up and continue the day as though I do not have whooping cough, but a mild summer cold.  My husband is doing the same.

Sickness is weakness.  It is vulnerability and it is getting left behind whilst the pack proceeds.  It is side eyes and hands thrust on my warm head angry that I came down with whatever it is.  It is fear and loathing.  It is the frightening sense that I won't or can't be productive, that someone will find out I am not as strong as projected or promised.  That I am not invincible.  That I am not superhuman.  That I am human.  It is the stories of drowned Africans thrown overboard because they might infect the entire cargo.  It is sick slaves killed or left to die lest they not infect the tiny quarters of the others.  It is the infirm in a tribe left at the edge of camp to fend for himself or to find a place to slowly die in private or be attacked by ferocious animals.  It is the prisoner in an internment camp ravaged by disease and giving up his food for someone else to survive.  It is a Darwinian belief that I am not at the top of the human evolutionary chain and that I will die.  I will.

I used to joke that I didn't want to tell my father when I was sick because I was afraid that he'd be mad at me.  I knew he was hurt for my hurt and afraid but I couldn't do much to get better any faster and his pacing made me feel guilty and scared.  He couldn't talk to me.  I would try to will myself to good health as I drifted off in fevered dreams or try not to let it out when I felt my insides twist and threaten to force me to vomit or worse.  My mother would look in periodically but would stay at her usual distance.  She didn't talk to me.  It was when I was able to care for my own sick children, nurse them through colds and fevers and sore gums and teeth breaking through, and lay cold compresses on their heads and stroke their arms, snuggle them close as I wished their pain away, that I accepted that illness is just part of the human experience and that I surely didn't want them to feel a burden or a failure as I had.

Whooping cough is called the 100 days cough and though I can't tell exactly where I am on that timeline, it does feel like I have been coughing forever.  It came on like allergies or a summer cold and hit my oldest daughter first.  She coughed for weeks and at night she'd sometimes vomit from its force.  I'd get cross with her, certain she just wasn't trying hard enough to clear her throat, and would then spend the night by her side.  I asked her if she was sure it was as bad as all that and then rub her down with Vapor Rub.  She woke up in the morning OK and then it would start up again in the night.  That was as school was ending.  In June. 

I took her to the doctor as soon as school was out for summer.  After careful review of her body, her lungs, her eyes, ears, and nose, the doctor concluded that she had just a run of the mill upper respiratory infection.  He couldn't see anything and advised me to give her a cough medicine at night to ease the cough and encouraged me to continue with her daily Claritin.  Of course this didn't feel right to me but I left her to herself and followed the protocol.  And she didn't get better at all.  In fact, she got worse.  She coughed and gagged all night.  She fought to breathe.  She'd inhale and seem to stop breathing for a moment and I'd run to her rescue, always finding her in the middle of a massive inhale that stilled the room.  A week before we left for Barbados, I sent her back to the doctor and demanded antibiotics.

She never developed the whoop, the curlicued bark at the end of that desperate choke of a cough and though her symptoms matched the basic description of pertussis or whooping cough, this diagnosis never crossed the minds of either doctor.  Children are vaccinated for pertussis as part of the DTaP and then Tdap booster.  There are five doses of the DTaP that are given from 2 months until some time between the ages of 4 and 6 and the Tdap is recommended for people between the ages of 11 and 64 and what comes next will alert you to why.

The DTaP decreases in effectiveness as children get close to the age of 11 when the Tdap is administered.  But because whooping cough has been out of the general health conversation for so long due to these vaccines, very few have memory of it or expectation of seeing it which allows it to spread quickly and silently.  One week before my daughter returned to the doctor for a course of antibiotics, one of her best friends developed a cough so severe and violent that she too nearly threw up each time she coughed.  And then the big whoop.  The big whoop is a big deal because with the whoop there is no denying.  With the whoop there is concern and there is testing.  Her friend was tested first with a swab that was negative.  After meeting with a pulmonologist, her mother decided to follow up with the more precise blood test.  The blood test confirmed that it was pertussis.

Immediately I began trying to solve the puzzle to which, until moments earlier, I'd not realized I'd held so many pieces.  My daughter had been coughing for months.  So many around us described a cough that could not go away, bruised ribs, vomiting, and tears.  There were the endless nights of kids getting up coughing and having difficulty breathing.  It seemed like just a terrible allergy season.  So many diagnoses of bronchitis and other respiratory illnesses that seemed not to go away with multiple rounds of antibiotics.  Without a rash or telltale sign to certify its presence (not everyone develops the whoop), whooping cough was weaving through the community without a batted eyelash.

Fortunately, my daughter was treated with the antibiotic prescribed to render pertussis no longer communicable and her symptoms lessened.  We went on vacation.  Our friends were treated and, as is necessary when a positive diagnosis is made, were contacted by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to whom they'd reported their symptoms, contacts, and treatment.  

My cough came and went so I felt confident that it was caused by my allergies.  I got back on my allergy medication even though it made me drowsy when it wasn't supposed to.  I continued to cough.  While on vacation I'd cough and occasionally find myself short of breath but I was sure it was my excess "vacationing" and thought nothing of it.  I was tired, I figured, and my body was letting me know that I was too old for these shenanigans.  When I was back home and taking a dance class, I noted that I felt short of breath again but assumed it was due to my sluggish, sunbed-and-cocktail lifestyle over the past week and change.  And then the cough that dropped me to the floor.  I couldn't breathe at all.  Heaved and then vomited and then continued coughing.  I was crying on the floor in the bathroom and couldn't catch a breath.  I just kept coughing and coughing and coughing and coughing.  My children were terrified and I could not reassure them because whenever I opened my mouth to speak I'd immediately start another fit.  My husband stood in the doorway and felt terribly sorry for me and very afraid and did not come any closer.

I was not comforted by his presence and he made no attempt to comfort me.  He wanted to know what 'pertussis' was called in French so he could better understand what was wrong with me.  I told him I felt terrible that I had doubted our girl when she couldn't stop coughing.  I cried on the floor next to the toilet because I'd asked my girl to stop coughing so much and I knew in this moment that she couldn't have.  He looked up the word 'pertussis' on Wikipedia and changed the language to French to find 'coqueluche.'  He read and cross-checked references.  He understood, he said.  He gave me details and statistics.  He told me it was what he thought it was.  He said, "poor Honeybee" as I coughed and coughed on the floor.  I held up my hands and asked him to pull me up so I could get in the bed and he walked me there and went to his office.  I called the doctor in the morning and was given a morning appointment.

Without a nasal swab or a blood test, it is not easy to determine pertussis in an adult.  I didn't whoop.  But I did have a consistent dry cough, no mucus or phlegm in the lungs like bronchitis.  That was ruled out.  I had no fever and no ear infection.  My throat was raw but there was very little drip.  When the doctor listened to my chest and my lungs she didn't hear much.  I told her I'd been exposed to whooping cough and that I suspected that my daughter had had it because she'd had all the symptoms before her friend developed the disease.  Whooping cough.  WHOOPING cough.  She listened for the whoop. 

"You don't have the telltale sound at the end of your cough," she'd said.  "I know you've had some exposure."

"Yes, I know. Look, I don't want to have whooping cough.  I spent last night on the floor in the bathroom coughing so hard I had to throw up.  I can't sleep from coughing."

"What did you throw up?"

"It's not a gastro issue.  I threw up because my cough was so hysterical."

"It doesn't seem like bronchitis."

"It's not.  I've had bronchitis.  This is not it."

"I can give you a cough suppressant with codeine and let's see if we can get you some sleep and if it doesn't do better for you then please call and I'll get you the antibiotic.   I'm just not sure of your exposure time and if it's bronchitis you'll definitely get some comfort and some rest."

"I've taken two different cough suppressants that have done nothing but I know that codeine will knock me out.  Let's see." 

And I coughed for hours until I finally passed out around 2:30 in the morning.  I called her the next morning and left a message with a receptionist that I wanted to be treated for pertussis, needed the correct antibiotic, and asked that she consider a blood test so that I could be sure that I would not infect anyone else.  She gave me the prescription and accepted that I could have pertussis but since my children had been recently vaccinated, she did not think there was reason enough to have me tested.  I'd be treated and if need be would revisit with her when the antibiotic course had run if I didn't feel better.  I sensed her dismissal but didn't push.  I knew that no one wanted to summon the CDC on their watch.

I hate being sick.  Sickness is being in my bed upstairs listening to the sounds my family one flight below and wondering if they've already forgotten me.  It is a profoundly lonely feeling of being left behind.  It is the last person out the door forgetting to shout goodbye and then hearing the silence of the house and my imagining what everyone is doing at school.  It is Love American Style before having to drift off, afraid to fall asleep alone in the house but too exhausted to watch any more programs.  It is needing to prove that I feel badly, that my body needs healing, that I need this rest, this sleep, this healing.  It is saying that I am broken, that I am hurt, and that I need fixing.  It is asking for help and feeling like a burden.  It is needing and it is terrifying.

My course of antibiotics is finished and though I continue to have wicked coughing spells, there are fewer than when it started.  My body is tired and my throat and rib cage are sore.  I have held myself up during this week so that I can be a support to my children who are dealing with transitions in their lives--the start of school, a fractured elbow for the little one, encroaching puberty for the eldest, but I have also claimed my space when it is needed.  There were many afternoons in the bed when the previous night's coughing jags kept me up wandering the house.  There were cuddles and forehead kisses so that possibly contagious mommy would not infect anyone else.  

Once when I was a teenager my mother and father both fell ill within days of one another.  Scar tissue from an earlier surgery in his intestines had caused some kind of blockage and dropped my father to the ground.  I remember visiting with him in the hospital and finding him so small.  I cannot remember if I am confusing this visit with another time, but I recall that he had a tube that passed through his nose and down his throat and that he and everyone who saw me watching it assured me that it caused him no pain.  He'd been sedated, so he was very drowsy and kind of sweetly childlike, like I'd never seen him before.  His voice was a whisper as though he were telling me the secret about how human he was while also hypnotizing me to forget.

My mother suffered from an ulcer and had been driven to the hospital by a neighbor.  I don't think we'd been able to see her so immediately and there were some warnings about not overreacting or agitating her more than she'd been.  She was also very small and so quiet.  I knew they had to let me in to see them but that they were not prepared for me to see them like that.  I was their child.  Sickness was weakness.  It was a threat to our shared mythology.  It was startlingly human and smelled like body, sweat and tears, mucus and saliva.  It drained from your nose to your stomach.  It was a dry mouth filled with cotton.  It was coughing fits and jags that shattered the silence and the pristine walls of our modern life.  It was dry hands, days unwashed, sweaty foreheads, and unkempt hair.  It was untidy and it was wild and it was needy and it was human.

When I close my eyes each night and try to relax into my pillow, I cough.  I am bolted upright, heaving and seizing from fits of coughs that empty my lungs of all the air until I gasp.  Then I try again to lie back.  Next to me, my husband snores himself to sleep having drawn the invisible line around me where the heaving, sighing, coughing, sweaty, teary sickness cannot touch him.  The girls are asleep in their beds.  Sickness is lying in the bed listening to the sounds of my family wondering if they know how hard it has been to carry this physical burden alone.  It is being physically tired and emotionally spent but pulling out one last trick for my children because I am the parent who will do that.  It is the profoundly lonely feeling of being important in how you are able to hold up the world for everyone else and watching them let you drop it when you just can't anymore.  It is lying in bed next to someone snoring while you cough so much you are afraid you might die and they don't move.  It is shame and fear and loneliness, and as a healer friend once said to me, it is a change of consciousness.

Pertussis or something like it is leaving my body though the cough may linger for months.  I'll probably get the booster when I am well so that I don't meet its symptoms again.  It has been a big deal, a big whoop, and extremely revelatory.  When I am sick, I need to be loved and cared for, to have my wounds salved, my soul rested.  It cannot be that at my most vulnerable I should be denied this kindness.  I have, myself, done this.  I have punished myself for being the most human being, for succumbing to nature's traps and pitfalls, pranks and sinister jokes.  Instead of kissing my own knees and suturing my own torn heart, I have punished myself before another would be able.  I have allowed a circle to be drawn around me to keep me out.  It has been incredibly hard being this sick and loving with all my breath when I could not breathe but I have learned again.  

My ribs no longer ache and my jags come mostly in the morning, last gasps of this crazy disease.  I'd rather it be me than the girls, rather I'd endure this pain that allow them preventable suffering.  That curlicued gasp at the end is when I realized that I haven't been well cared for.  That will change.





(c) Copyright 2017.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Barbados reveals

Part I.

I lay in the water face up, floating on my back, letting the viscous, salt water of the Caribbean Sea buoy me.  I could hear the sounds of my children and others around me as I drifted between the present and some other time.  The sea had never been this delicious, this wonderful.  I let myself be on my own.  Closed my eyes even though I feared the waves might crash over me and go up my nose.  I resisted the urge to raise my head and closed my eyes.  The sun was hot on my face.  I could feel the heat in my lips and inhaled the sea's aura all around me.  I started to time travel.  My ancestors who passed through Barbados on their way to the Carolinas stood closer to shore.  I sensed the bleed of their garments swirling around me.  In my mind's eye I saw their head wraps and skirts, watched them wipe their hands on their clothes, peeped them sneaking bits of mango into the mouths of their own children.  I recalled a time when visiting Jamaica as a young girl sucking the juice from a sugar cane stalk and wishing we could take this sweetness with us forever.  I remembered that the cane was the cotton of the Caribbean.  I remembered the gnarled hands of my great-grandfather, Jesse Ben, and his clean, well-shaped fingernails.  He was old when I was a girl and lived long into my adulthood.

I closed my eyes as waves rocked me and saw stars when I opened them to the turquoise and azure hues of the sky and sea.  I thought, as I often do when I find myself alone in nature, how did the people of long ago experience this?  I thought of Africans coming ashore in what looks like paradise, only to become slaves to someone else's heaven.  I thought of poor black people washing themselves in the sea, rubbing the fine sand on their faces and knees and elbows and feet as I'd seen many locals do when we lived here.  I recalled the old man who passed me going down the aisle on the airplane to find his way to the bathroom who looked like an older version of my father and wondered if my family tree, were I able to trace it, would find some of our people in Barbados.  I concluded that it was possible.  Maybe that was why we'd relocated there to begin with.  That I might find my way to myself somehow.

The sun was high and bright and the water's undulation hypnotic and the number of rum punches consumed had me outside of my control and into a space more nebulous and open.  Breathing in the air, feeling the water lap against my ears, I opened my eyes to consider how this place suddenly felt like home after all of the promises broken and kept, after the punishing loneliness, after I'd called her my heart of darkness.  But my heart of darkness still pumps life blood through me, shows me connection, and gives me direction.  She has been patient with me and has allowed me to love and be loved, no matter my fear of it.

Part II.

I was as afraid of Barbados as I was of myself.  She was dark and hot and humid and fecund and feral, shiny, damp, throbbing, and deep.  She wore her colonialism like a necklace or a yoke depending on what circle you traveled and she was beautiful.  She was in your face heavenly at times, then seedy and broken.  I'd come to Barbados like a white American tourist.  I don't say that with pride.  But I'd prepared, as did my Euro-centered, patriarchy-card carrying, rigidly gendered French husband, for a life in paradise.  A two year break from the grind.  We'd dreamt of sun and sea and sand and tropical drinks and "maybe even someone to help you care for the children; it's really cheap there, you know?"  I was still pregnant when we began the conversation about the move that would take us from New York City, my home, what I'd thought was my true north, to the Caribbean.

I'd only marginally considered how I'd relate or connect to the people of Barbados and was reassured that I'd meet the "wives of other employees" and would be part of an expatriate community which I presumed correctly would be mostly white.  In Barbados I was black but a different black.  I'd no Caribbean roots (that I knew of) and moved through space like a New Yorker.  I was efficient, abrupt, focused.  I acted with precision and purpose.  I was frustrated by the slower gaits, imprecise schedules, and indirect responses.  Expats marveled at the locals' disinterest in their companies' priorities, called them incapable, demonized their behavior and infantilized them in their minds.  My husband regaled me and anyone who would listen about the unsophisticated ways in which they worked, how uncouth, how unprofessional, how inelegant, and I was struck by the overtones. 

I'd spent my life, as instructed, proving these beliefs untrue.  I knew that whites' impressions of me could determine my opportunities.  That being likeable, malleable, complacent, unchallenging would allow me access to spaces forbidden to other black people.  Before I could be called lazy, I worked harder and more efficiently than anyone else.  Before I could be called messy or sloppy, I was well turned out and presented.  Before I could be called unintelligent, uneducated, unprepared for the tasks at hand, I'd worked and considered every angle.  There were rewards for this good behavior and the rewards quieted my restlessness for a time.  I believed they were what I wanted, gifts, treats.  I'd been a dear pet, a cultivated, curated, well-edited example of how to do it right, only revealed to be the sham that it was when the developing nation of Barbados showed me myself.

I know how I looked and I know what I sounded like and it fills me with shame.  In trying to right myself when postpartum depression and anxiety turned me upside down, I lashed out.  Self-loathing and internalized racism made me angry that Barbados hadn't easily opened herself to me.  Wasn't I her kin?  I had no friends.  Locals looked at me suspiciously, tried to suss me out, make heads or tails of this black American girl and her French husband and multicultural babies.  I was indignant for my husband, wished the cooks in his kitchen could make his life easier for him so that he could, in turn, make my life easier.  I willed them to be better, to act better, to give a damn about the shitty hotel company that couldn't have given a damn about them, to show up for their low wage in the hot kitchen to work tirelessly and thanklessly for spoiled tourists so my husband could be praised and exalted.  I hated what I believed they were doing to my family. The cultural divide between my husband and I broadened and I saw for the first time the weight of his self-importance and privilege and my deference to it.

I said silent prayers to Barbados to get her shit together. (Wasn't I trying to muffle my cries each night as I found my thoughts turn more and more psychotic?  Why couldn't she?  Why did she always have to show her contempt?  Her wounds?  Her pain?)  I asked her not to be as she was.  (I'd been stuffing myself down my throat my entire life!  My parents had hung up on my while I wailed in fear at the monkeys coming to the screen-less windows and I tried to act casual about it.)  I asked her to make it easier for the tourists visiting our landscape.  (Let them feel special and important.  Let them focus on your blue waters and have their hair braided and tell you that now they looked just like you.  Let them tell you how much they love you and your food and your dress and your style and then return to the air-conditioned luxury hotels and villas whilst you tell them they are pretty and return to your modest dwelling.)  I asked her to keep her skeletons in her closet.  (It can't be colonialism, racism, class structure, and history preventing your rise and your success.  Barbados is not ready for prime time, can't get it right.) 

In a class about the Barbadian character, my husband and other white expats were taught to expect a passive-aggressive position from the Bajans/Barbadians.  It was explained that because, unlike slave masters and traders on other islands of the Caribbean and in the United States, the slavers of Barbados had allowed families to stay together, had not separated them through sale, and had therefore made its black population more complacent, docile.  The terrain, unlike other islands, did not provide much place to escape.  There were no mountain ranges or protected landmasses in which to hide.  That this modified history was meant to explain to expat workers the resistance they might meet when dealing with locals making pennies to their dollars infuriated me.  That they believed it made it worse.  When my parents came to visit the island, my father said that Barbados "wasn't ready for prime time" and I knew that she still had more to prove.  We both did.

In New York City, I could disappear into the melting pot.  I could ride the subway, walk down the sidewalks, go to work, restaurants, parks with people from all walks of life.  Sure, there were pockets of complete WASPy whiteness and areas where black and brown communities set up "Little" versions of their homeland, but for the most part I was amongst the world's population every day.  The blackness of Barbados hit me like the wall of humidity that sweated my hair, all coiffed and presented for my reunion with my husband, when I walked down the stairs at the back of the plane the evening of our arrival to the island.  It curled my hair, glossed my cheekbones, and parted my lips.  She gave my swinging hips and the jiggle my ass made when I walked permission.  She showed me all the black ladies and men doing all the things.  She gave me eye contact and I was at first afraid to meet her gaze.

I got lost in Barbados.  Walking through the mansion's ruins deep in the forest of mahogany trees at Farley Hill overlooking the island's Atlantic Coast, I discovered her lush, soft heart, and mine for her.  I fell in love with this place and then the east coast.  My first foray into the island, going deeper to her core, no longer flitting on her edges where tourists and expats teased her and hedonistically played with her, I discovered another type of paradise.  It was morose and melancholy.  There was a Victorian sadness to this place.  Ghosts, secrets, and whispers.  It was here that I made my first friends on a class trip with my oldest girl. They resuscitated me.  They shared their secrets and let me tell mine.  This included my shame and my pride and my confusion.  I was able to admit that the paradise promised had not been what I'd expected.  That the sun was too bright and too hot for this exhausted mother, that our house was uncomfortable, that I'd been so lonely, that my husband didn't and couldn't meet my needs, that being a black, African-American expatriate in a country of black Caribbean people was more challenging than I'd expected. 

I didn't recognize the New Yorker who'd just begun making a career for herself, who'd finally found a real place to call home, who'd confronted assaults and deep old wounds only to see the post traumatic stress pull any sense of safety out from under her.  I couldn't believe how bad I was at living abroad.  I'd dreamed since I was a girl of being a "woman of the world" and then couldn't hack it.  I thought, I can't even hang on this little island with black people and I thought I was going to be a world traveler?  I'd been fed and made complacent on the spoils of the first world.  I wanted my rules, my food, temperature control, my media, fast internet, VOGUE magazine, sidewalks and clean streets.  I wanted businesses and companies that thought I was always right.  I wanted antiseptic correctness.  I feared real connection and contact and Barbados wanted to touch me.  Touch me with her warm fingers, take me into her beating heart, get mango juice and soursop, sugarcane, coconut, lime, breadfruit and flying fish fry in my hands and my hair.  I thought I could move there, live there, raise my children there and remain untouched, unchanged but she revealed herself to me and me to myself.



Part III.

Though I was angry with Barbados and my time spent there, I kept coming back. I kept up with dear friends and the weekly news.  I followed different organizations on the island and got excited about the island's successes.  I met people living in the United States from Barbados with pride and told them of my time spent there.  I tattooed a flying fish, the nation's symbol, on my right forearm underneath the Eye of Horus.  I still regaled people with my tales of monkeys and cultural confusion, long days spent at the immigration office, and word for word play by play of conversations I'd had with customer service at varying businesses, but I kept going back.  When I told white people I'd met about my years in Barbados they'd say, "See!  I knew you were from the islands!"  To which I'd always reply, "I'm actually an American born black person.  My parents and their parents are from here too.  We've no Caribbean roots that I know of."  They'd always meet my response with suspicious eyes.  They understood why they visit the Caribbean, for the sun and the sea, but couldn't imagine that I'd somehow have been there for the same reasons, suspected that I was keeping my roots a secret.  There is no secret.

My father and mother both went in search of their roots using ancestry.com and found what they'd pretty much suspected.  Many US narratives begin in West Africa, and theirs was no exception.  There are various European attributes that can more than likely be traced to the rape of my slave ancestors.  That's no secret.  They've also worked diligently with their siblings on their family trees to see how far back they can trace our family.  We are at the mercy of the slave masters' records.  What I know is that Barbados and the Carolinas have a very deep connection for both white slavers/forefathers and the slaves they transported with them for trade.  My people are from the Carolinas and the surrounding areas. 

As the daughter of black Southerners, I have made the connection to my slave ancestors, seen the soil where they toiled, been inside the modest homes where they lived.  I have been inside the churches and listened at my grandparents' and my great-grandparents' knees of stories that brought dimension and depth and value to the lives of the people who came before me.  I loved their character, their strength, and their dignity.  I despised that they were made to bend to the whims of white people, that their lives were not fully realized because of what racism and poverty inflicted upon them, and that the crosses they were made to bear were never acknowledged by the good, white people who'd unloaded them onto their backs.  These warm brown, beautiful people never believed how glorious they were.  That their lush, dark, soft hearts, sweated brows, and sinewed arms, strong hands, and wooly hair deserved to be loved.

It is with that love that I return to Barbados.  To tell her that I love her, and myself, in her imperfection.  That is she a baby, a young one, and that I am sorry for having been unforgiving.  I have been that way for myself.  Because I didn't learn that my blackness, my heat, my desire, my need, my gifts, my treasures, my heart, my humanity was enough.  That I could allow myself a moment to float aimlessly or rest.  That I didn't have to prove that I was other than I was.  Than I am.  When I next visit Barbados, I am going to spend Foreday Morning with my friends native and adopted.  I am going to follow the steps of the man who looks like my father and let myself be painted in mud and colors.  I am going to wash myself off in the sea and trace the color stained sweat down my face.  I am going to rise and fall with other black people into the night and let Barbados finally, actually fill up the cracks in my story.  I may jump at the Grand Kadooment or find other Cropover events in which to participate and I will come to the sea and float on my back, careful not to let the water go up my nose.  I will let the water come to my ears and listen for my heartbeat.  I will catch the heartbeat of those who came before me and I will let the sun brown my body to a deep mahogany.  

Barbados nearly broke me.  She did crack me open.  And is now filling those cracks with moon dust.  What I'd wanted was a picture, a two dimensional postcard of my life.  Instead I found that I must put my hands in, dig in deep, pull from myself the lies and deceits embedded in me to make me easier, less than I am.  I have learned to love being this black woman.  I have loved having a deep, wounded, melancholy heart because she has shown me how to be compassionate.  I know the chemtrails of slavery weave themselves across my soul's starry sky and that I have carried that dark secret as it were my own.   It isn't only mine to bear.  What is my own is the light.  What is mine is my heartbeat in my ears as I float in the water.  What is mine is the undulating rhythm of the waves.  What is mine are the things revealed to me living in Barbados.



(c) Copyright 2017.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Fallen: Dead Baby Birds

Spring: such beautiful things and dead baby birds.  I have spent hours each day walking the puppy child, our new baby, and listening to podcasts.  That he has to go out, HAS to, has been a blessing.  I'd been slowly descending into a muted-colored and muffled depression, the kind that for me comes in cycles related to the moon and the mood of the last phrase read, music absorbed through the skin, line in a drawing or slight from a family member who either doesn't care or doesn't recognize their callousness when I discovered the podcast, "The Hilarious World of Depression."*  While listening to PLACEBO: A Conversation with Ana Maria Cox (5/5) , walking through an open field full of clover patches, dandelions and "wishes" I nearly tripped over one, then two dead babies.  They were featherless, with bulging closed eyes that were black and blue.  Their skin was 70s-band-aid flesh and their tiny beaks and claws looked like baby finger nails.  They were so plastic and so still and so hopeless.  The sight of them caused me to gasp and dart in another direction.  I didn't want to stand by too long, to stare too long, to come so close that their lost hope might touch me.  It was drizzling, preparing for rain, so I put up my hood and stared across the field.  And then I walked back.

The day before I'd seen a bird and a squirrel quarreling above my head in my own yard.  I'd never seen an interspecies battle like this so was drawn to all the desperate, violent chatter between the two of them.  I understood, even from my vantage point, that something wasn't right.  The blackbird was beside herself and the squirrel seemed so caustically aloof and reckless.  I found myself getting annoyed with that damned squirrel. But the puppy found something more curious and interesting across the yard and I walked with him to find someone else's shit to roll in (yeah, I pulled him up before that could happen.). 

Early the next morning, I'd raced behind Ivan as he bolted down the stairs and out the door to relieve himself after a long night of "holding it in."  He was playful and fluffy and so early-morning baby sweet so, even though I was in my nightgown with a sweatshirt over it, pulled on haphazardly as I tried to protect myself from the morning's cold, I let him tour me through the open yards that sprawled behind ours and our neighbors' houses.  As we left the wall that holds the creek that runs through town, he discovered what all the fuss had been about just the day before. Two babies had taken a long, miserable fall to the ground.  Below the nest now lay lifeless a developing bird and the head of its sibling.  Ivan licked the head and I pulled him more aggressively than I'd meant to get him away from it.  I couldn't bear to look.  And then I couldn't stop.

I studied the lifeless body, saw the articulation in its exposed wing, considered its fall, looked up to see the nests that dotted that tree and wondered from which it had fallen.  I thought of the hysteria in the mother's cawing and flapping as the squirrel had teased and taunted.  I wondered for how long an animal mourns or if it does at all.  These two babies were dead but were there others?  Could she love the others more fiercely because they'd survived or was she just meeting the task at hand, the imperative, keeping them alive?  I remembered the first time I'd seen little baby birds, they'd been tiny chicks in an incubator, I and thought of their smell and the warmth that surrounded them and the peep-peep-peep of all of them hovering close to one another.  I wished for that for this dead bird.  Warmth.

Against my better judgment, I took my family to my parents' home in sunny Florida for spring break, the Florida weather promising a break from the bleak, rainy April we'd been having.  We'd had to leave Ivan who'd not been with us so long and I considered for a moment staying behind.  I have been torn to shreds by how much of a relationship I should allow between my parents and my children.  On the one hand, I'd rather just suck it up and not have to explain the intricacies of dysfunctional family dynamics to two little girls who have felt the fullness of my love and protection from the moment we'd promised ourselves to one another, and on the other I am shattered to endure the aggressive, palpable disdain and contempt in which my parents hold me.  It's only warm outside in sunny Florida.  I'd fallen out of the tree.

While searching through old photo albums, I found my baby book where I learned that I'd not left the hospital until 18 days after I was born. Eighteen days in Vassar Hospital in the cold of a Poughkeepsie winter in January.  I knew I'd been born prematurely and that I'd been placed in an incubator for care and protection in my early days but was told very little else. When I first learned as a child that I'd been in an incubator, I thought immediately of myself on a tiny tray, cuddled up trying to get warm and become strong enough to face this thing called life.  I also thought about "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" (a movie starring John Travolta as "the boy" that I'd watched as a girl) because I imagined in my frailty and sickness, I could not and should not have been much handled.  I sat in isolation with visits from my mother when she was dropped off at the hospital by my father each morning.  And how did I miss her touch?  How did I feel in that silence?  Those first eighteen days have marked me, imprinted me as a fallen bird.

Nature is not sentimental.  The fittest survive and the others perish.  Animals and plants and we humans have to adapt and evolve or lose our one shot.  The grass beneath the birds was so lush and green after weeks of rain, and pollen from all the beautiful flowers in bloom coated the world chartreuse and yellow.  The green of the whole scene swallowed up those tiny bodies until I was right upon them.  I felt a responsibility to them, a need to bury and protect their brief moment here.  To honor their attempt to live their tiny lives.  Perhaps they'd stuck their necks out too long to reach for their food or been knocked over by a squirrel or the wind.  Maybe they'd arrived too early, when the spring thaw had not quite happened and it was too cold for them to survive and their mother had long abandoned the nest.  Maybe their mother felt the environment too unsafe to risk caring for them where she'd built her nest or knew they were too weak to survive and had flown away.

When humans touch baby animals that have been lost or fallen or hurt they doom them to never be lovable or acceptable to their mothers.  It had always terrified me, the thought of the baby animal picked up and returned to its nest or burrow or clearing, saved, only to be rejected by its mother and left in the world to defend itself and surely die.  It seemed so cold, so callous, so heartless, and so unfair that a chance moment could change the course of a new life. 

As the drizzling developed into a steady rain, I turned away from the birds along the path.  The green of the spring dotted with the vibrant colors of the flowering trees and well planted tulips and other blooms gave my walk back an other-worldly haze.  I stopped abruptly as the hosts of the podcast quietly uttered the pain around the suicide of one's brother and the failed attempts of one of the hosts.  There was silence and grief and palpable pain.  The silvered light of this grey day sharpened and I caught my breath.  The sound of my gasp in my ears as my headphones shielded me from the noises outside of my personal space echoed and stilled me.  I felt so suddenly alone.  The emptiness of navigating the world alone shook me.  I was vulnerable, unguarded, stealing oxygen for my tiny lungs.  Motherless.  I'd fallen from the nest.

And once you are out of the nest and find yourself alive you have to make a choice.  I took a little longer at first to meet the milestones that are the bullets on any mother's checklist.  I was small but met the developmental challenges easily.  I don't remember much contact.  I suppose one wouldn't but the continued lack of it throughout my life hints that there wasn't very much.  It is as crushing to write this as it is to know.  I have never had much emotional, psychic, or physical connection with my parents, often feeling indifference or active disdain.  I have always believed it was because I arrived as imperfectly as I did, premature, small, fragile, and sensitive, because I fell.  It has made me profoundly sad and secretive.  I have hurt so deeply and so silently, have faded into life's lushness, felt small and frail and alone.  I have listened to countless explanations and excuses from others as though what I feel and experience in my heart could not be truth enough.  My heart that beats and mourns the tiny, dead baby birds along my dog walking route couldn't possibly know.

Now the rain was coming at a steady clip and even Ivan was ready to go home.  It's warm inside.  Our house has pillows and blankets, delicious smells, soft light, private spaces and nooks, communal tables and couches.  It is plush like the swelling comfort of spring's garden and every place is safe.  I finished out the podcast with my headphones over my ears, sitting on the floor of the kitchen with Ivan and his toys.  I stroked his soft white fur and kissed him on his pink nose and let him lick me.  The licks to my face and mouth that I swore I'd never allow now covered me.  My puppy licked my salty tears and fell over on his back for me to rub and pet the fur on his belly.  We'd found him in the shelter, in a viewing room with his sister.  Though my husband had seen pictures, we'd never known his parents.  They weren't with him anymore.  We are his new family and I am his mother.



(c)Copyright 2017.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.



*"The Hilarious World of Depression" is a podcast hosted by John Moe that offers frank, funny, smart conversations with well-known comedians and humorists about their battles with depression and other mental health issues. 

Ivan: Promise kept

I didn't let myself fall for him right away but the girls did.  I watched him from across the room and saw how much everyone wanted to be near him, how many people wanted to touch him, embrace him, love him.  He was indeed lovable.  The loveliest thing I'd seen in a long time and I didn't want to get my hopes up.  Or theirs.  I started looking for the less popular, the wounded, the flawed.  I showed these options to them too and they, bless their hearts, gave them as much love as they could give, but they wanted him. 

We'd taken so long to fulfill this promise, had stalled, stuttered, and deflected for so long that I could see they were beginning to doubt that we'd ever intended to honor it.  And that finally broke me.  Because I don't make promises lightly, certainly not to my children, and I knew that if they loved him, really loved him, then I had to give them the chance to take him home.

Ivan is mostly white with one brown ear.  He is a poodle/Stafford terrier mix and his eyes are the color of deep water and sea glass. He has a long tail that curls into a circle and he is as soft as a bunny.  I always thought, if I were ever to have a dog, he'd be black and strong, representative of my projected strength and power.  I thought he'd be sleek and sexy, shiny-coated and muscular, deep dark-eyed with wisdom and calm.  My imaginary dog was my image self, the fuck you to a world that didn't want me to express my strength at all.  But this dog is not only mine.  He's OURS and we all wanted him and we want him to be part of US.

When I was around ten years old, the same age as my oldest daughter now, I saw a puppy in a pet shop window that seemed to love me as instantly as I loved him.  I'd gone in with my father and my sister and possibly my brother, I can't quite recall, and asked if I could hold him.  When he was put in my arms, he snuggled and squirmed and licked me and loved me just as I'd suspected.  I asked for him.  Begged and pleaded.  I made promises not only about how well I'd look after him but about how I'd do better as a young human being, be a better person, more giving, more loving, would keep my room clean (though it was usually extremely tidy), fight less with my siblings, be amenable to any and all suggestions for my betterment.  I'd psychically prostrated myself on the ground before my father and offered my life in exchange for this love.  I knew my dad couldn't just give it to me for no reason, this was 1980 and only Richie Rich from the cartoon got what he asked for just like that, so I waited for Christmas. 

In the dream sequence, my father recognized my desperate need for love and contact.  He saw that I needed to be important to something or someone, that I needed a place to express my love and devotion.  Both he and my mother had grown up with pets and I appealed to their memories, mercilessly begged for this thing.  He was a tiny Chihuahua and he trembled with fear at the world much the way I did inside though you'd never know that from my outside.  I wanted to make him strong, to give him courage, to let him see that with me he'd be safe, and I'd have a friend when none was available.  I wanted to be as strong as I'd hoped to make him.

He was on the top of my Christmas list.  My parents hadn't said no, but they'd also not said yes.  They'd said nothing, so my ten year old self, still believing in dreams coming true, in great surprises, and in their noticing that something was missing in my life, truly expected to see him sitting next to the Christmas tree surrounded by all the colorfully wrapped boxes and candy filled stockings. 

I was lonely.  I had plenty of friends but no one particularly close and I was sensitive, often living an alternate life completely in my imagination.  Our family is funny in that we spend and spent time close together but not together.  We don't and didn't share intimacies, hopes, desires, dreams.  It was easy to feel alone surrounded by company, so my longing, my burning love for this puppy exposed me in a way that was terrifying.  But I was so blinded by love, by my own hunger for affection, I couldn't help it. 

He wasn't there on Christmas morning.  I never saw him again.  I'd even gone back to the store to see if someone else had had the chance to give him the life I'd wanted so desperately to share with him.  I have loved like that all my life.  Desperately, afraid of losing it, nearly obsessively.  I don't claim that it's healthy.  It isn't at all but it's what I have known.  I struggle with my sense of love and giving my girls another way to see and feel and be loved.

Two years ago, the girls started asking for a dog and as I'd never had a pet before being their mother when goldfish, hamsters, and newts came into my life, I was actually afraid to say yes.  Every cell in my body felt that yearning for my pet store Chihuahua and then whispered, "You can't do this.  You've never had a pet.  You are not supposed to.  You'll probably do it wrong."  As I've believed all the other bullshit spoon-fed me about who and what I am, I believed that I was not a dog owner, that I couldn't, that it would just never be.  And has happened each time I am about to tell my daughters the same no's that I was told, I change the narrative.  To be sure, I promised. 

We first started looking for a purebred, a Havanese, because they don't shed and I am a neat freak and clean like a maniac even without a dog in the house.  But almost immediately that plan was fraught with obstacles--timing, the right season, location, expense.  They were surely cute but I didn't quite see myself well-represented in a Havanese.  The girls loved the idea of them but not the time it would take us to procure one.  A rescue, we all agreed, would suit us fine and a mix even more so. 

That Saturday morning at the shelter, Ivan was the most popular little thing going.  Everyone wanted to hold him, meet him, touch him, kiss his soft head.  In a room with his sister Savannah, Ivan, then Ethan, held court.  The two of them rolled all over each other and jumped on our legs, licked the girls in their eager faces, and I watched my ten year old girl's little dimple press hard into her cheek.  I saw that look on her face.  She had fallen in love for the first time with someone not in our family, something outside of us.  I saw her want him and want him so desperately that she giggled and whispered to him silently.  As I suggested other dogs for us to meet and greet she said with assurance, "But I want him."  And we met three others and she said that they were nice and sweet and good and would be happy with any one that we were able to take home, but that she wanted him.  And I was already afraid for her.  Didn't want her to love him too much just in case.  Just in case I would fail her by not writing the right thing on the form, by not charming the pants off the staff, by not convincing them that we were worthy, by revealing the flaws that I was bringing to the table.

When they called that Tuesday afternoon, they called the house first.  I saw the number come up on the Caller ID and did not answer it.  Lily was home sick with me that day and I could not bear having to tell her while she lay in bed that we did not get the puppy we wanted.  I let it go to voicemail.  I waited for the message icon to appear on the phone.  My breath was a little shallower than seconds before.  And then my cellphone rang.  It was my husband.  They'd called him next.  We could pick him up that week and had the night to discuss it before deciding if and when.  It had been decided all those years ago when I saw my hoped for Christmas gift sitting behind the glass at the pet store.

Ivan is our dog.  He is white with one brown year.  His mother was the color brown of his ear and his father was a white poodle.  My youngest daughter says that he is white and brown just like us.  He is going to grow up with them and he has made me a dog owner and the mother of a fur baby for the first time. To say that he is loved and cared for beyond measure would be to understate it.  How do you not love someone you have been waiting for nearly all your life? 

(c) Copyright 2017.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

The box

I'd carried the box with me for almost thirty years because I'd never found the right moment to go to the post office and send it.  As organized and efficient as I have always been, I'd just never found the time or the inclination to address it and send it.  It came with me from Freehold to Boston, Boston to Atlanta, Atlanta to New York, New York to Barbados, and Barbados back to New Jersey. 

I'd texted my mother two weeks ago  and asked for his parents' address.  She'd given it to me once before, another time I'd meant to send it and then didn't after getting heated about her having their new address and telephone number after all of these years.  They'd moved again and she had the new address now.  I've made my peace with their continued contact.

He'd been my first boyfriend, my very first at a time I was sure I'd never, ever have one.  When we broke up, years later, after I'd followed him to university, his father had said some truly awful things about me.  We were sixteen when we met.  I'd long pined for him, a beautiful, shy, athletic boy.  He was pretty, so, so pretty, with delicate features, long limbs, a kind heart, like the shy hero in the '80s teen romantic comedies.  He was too sweet and lovely for me.  His own father had said so once we broke up.  I think he said something about "that kind of girl" and not being able to trust me.

I've held onto that comment as long as I'd had the box.  Wondered just what kind of girl this man thought I was.  Wondered how he'd found me to be untrustworthy after I'd dated his son for four years.  Wondered how he could still be friendly with my parents and deem me "that kind of girl."  I'd programmed myself to be a girlfriend, learned the tricks from television and movies.  So desperate for any love and affection, I'd clung to this boy with all my strength and desire and need.  I am sure I'd made promises I'd never be able to keep and promises for a future I could not quite visualize.  I was sixteen and then seventeen and finally nineteen when we broke up.  He'd been my first boyfriend and everything I was, I'd assigned to him.

The box contained a bracelet with his name on it, given to him by his parents when he was a small boy, some Cub Scout badges and pins, collectible pins and patches from various Olympics and soccer camps and teams.  They'd been the most important things in his young teenage life and he'd gifted them to me.  I believe in the magic of objects, the energy bestowed upon them by whomever possessed them.  Always loved that psychics and mediums could make a greater connection with departed loved ones if they could hold something that was either symbolic or important to them.  Even when I knew that this boy, now a man, could not forgive me my transgressions, had not yet found a way to incorporate our young love into his narrative, I could not bring myself to get rid of these special things.

When I stumbled upon the box looking for something else, I felt the immediate need to send it.  I opened it to make sure that everything was secure and wrapped each item in tissue paper.  Then I wrote a note on carefully chosen stationery to his parents explaining what was in the box.  Inside the box, I placed a card, written to him, with an apology and a wish for him and his family.  I told him I hoped that the box and its contents would be a welcomed surprise, something he could share with his children.  I'd treated the items with the utmost respect and care and was happy to return them with love and gratitude.  I walked to the post office and mailed the package and wandered back home through the park.  I felt that I'd finally made peace, after all these years, with how I'd hurt someone that I loved.

First loves unleash this incredible energy and power.  I never knew I could love or be loved as I'd loved him.  It wasn't mature, I know, but my love for my parents felt unrequited, they very seldom reciprocated, and he was the first person to return my affections and my need.  I loved in the most desperate way.  We were so entangled, knotted, that the thought of losing him left me panicked.  He'd been everything.  He answered for me the nagging questions, Was I deserving of love?  Was I lovable?  Was I beautiful?  Was I desirable?  For the first time the answer to these questions was yes.

It was so heady as so much of the teenage experience was.  I'd felt alone and then he was there.  It cannot be understated what those first kisses, long, crazy make out sessions were like for this girl.  I'd practiced on my pillow, certain it would NEVER happen for me in real life, completely unprepared for just how many people one might be able to kiss in a lifetime.  With each barrier broken, greater intimacy and connection created, I began to hook into him.  Could not bear to be without my well spring of love and affection.

When he went away to college the year before I did, I prided myself on my loyalty to our great love.  I was stoic and steadfast.  We wrote letters and made lots of expensive phone calls.  I visited him at school and pined for the day we could be reunited.  I followed him to the same university the next year.  He was the only love I'd ever known.  And then came life.  And I became "that kind of girl," for which I'd apologized profusely to him.  To his family.  To my family.  The shame, the betrayal was mine.  I'd fucked up or I'd grown up and I'd hurt everyone.  He'd returned a beautiful gold necklace I'd given him, swore he could not bear any reminders of me.  He said he regretted our time together, that he'd made a horrible mistake, that he should never have trusted me, that I was a terrible person.  And I could not disagree.  What had I done with love?

When we stopped seeing each other on campus, stopped trying to be friends as it was just too painful, stopped allowing ourselves to acknowledge that we'd gotten each other to the next phase of our lives, stopped showing love, I found the box.  He didn't want it, he'd said.  Didn't want anything from me.  So I put it away for safe keeping and promised myself I'd send it in time.

Yesterday I received a letter from his mother.  I'd sent the box to her to forward to him, sure he still wanted nothing to do with me.  I recognized her handwriting immediately.  She'd always been so good and so kind to me, was one of the things I loved in his life, his amazing family.  She assured me that the package was on its way to him.  She too thought it would be a welcome surprise for his children and thanked me for taking such good care of it.  I read and re-read the note.  Nearly thirty years ago I'd been completely in love with her son and had made promises I couldn't keep.  But I did still love.  For all those years, through all that BS, I'd been so grateful that he loved me and had loved him no matter that he believed me to be cruel and heartless. 

I don't expect to hear from him.  I didn't even address the note to him, but I am relieved and thankful that he can have these mementos and whether he can deal with it or not, the energy of the person who touched him is still on those objects and I loved him so.


(c) Copyright 2017.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

The very best words

I've had nothing and everything to say.  In the movies when the aliens or the mermaids or angels arrive and meet human beings they often can't speak.  They don't know the language spoken where they've arrived on earth so they communicate with emotions, with touch, long gazes, and love. 

I haven't known how to write or speak this feeling in which I have been wading.  My vision blurry, I feel my way towards my allies and steel myself for our survival.  I don't want to use too much energy so that I don't spend my reserves.  It must look like depression or anxiety.  It must look like panic.  It feels noisy and chaotic and wordy though I've not spoken much at all.  I've shared on social media, I've advocated for the rights of everyone, and I wear my heart so open and unbuttoned that is screams out, you can see its beating outline on my chest.  I'm no mermaid, no angel, sometimes alien, but I don't know the words to speak here. 

I see messages from friend to other friends who don't believe this mess involves them.  White women who text other white women in the hopes that they have the same disdain for the disruption of their regularly scheduled privileged lives, only to find that the receiver of the message is active and hurt and organizing, and I am speechless.  It figures, I've thought.  And then gratitude washes over me for the friend who did respond in kind.  I read posts from people in my life from way back, way, way back, who say, "Stephanie, it's only been a week.  Give him a chance."  And I remember giving the bullies in my high school whose torment of me crushed moment to moment and being advised to either ignore them or ask them, sincerely ask them, why they've chosen me.  And I am stunned.

Sometimes people listen, really sit with you and listen, hold you in a space that they've generously given.  Sometimes when you aren't even there they are praying for you, hoping for you, holding you dear, sending you strength.  Sometimes, when you can hardly speak, they read between the lines and hear you.  Sometimes the very best words are expressed, barely spoken.


I have before felt lonely, afraid, ashamed.  I have before felt disconnected, excluded, outside.  This was something else.  In my spirit's journey for meaning, I'd assumed that deep down everyone was on a similar path, only to hear/see/read the most violent, hateful, racist, sexist, misogynistic, uninformed, terrified and terrifying rhetoric spewing like bile about almost everything and everyone I love and hold dear.  I have felt that all-consuming fear that makes people do the craziest things.  I have watched in shock, horror, and disbelief at what my black people would call the devil, take his place on a thrown right next to the people's god.  They look at the throne and can't tell the difference.  Angels, devils, mermaids, and aliens. 

I was sitting on a bench outside the bank on the corner of an intersection in my town.  I'd walked there to get out of the house where my husband was on day two and a half of man-flu and because I needed to take some fresh air into my lungs.  It was 33 degrees and windy.  It was perfect and it was quiet.  I talked to myself and to my angels.  These existential dialogues have been occurring with greater frequency, as soon as I've a free moment from the needs, desires, and demands of everything in the world.  It sounds like hysteria or panic, which it truly is not, but a real consideration of purpose, mine and everyone's, that I've not really had with this much intensity in my life.  This moment in history feels fraught. 

The wind hit my face and my hands as I tried to type on my phone to a friend.  It was so cold that I thought to just put the phone down for a while so I could just stop the sizzling in my brain that happens when I'm plugged in.  I put the phone in my pocket and turned my face to the sun trying to work her magic on that cold day.  When I opened my eyes, I made contact for a fleeting moment with a new friend, a woman I knew just briefly through shared friends and in our attendance at school functions, who was passing with a friend at just the moment I'd opened my eyes.  She doubled back and said, "Can I just give you a hug?  I want to hug you." 

I said, "Oh, yes.  Yes, please."  And we stood on the corner of at the crazy intersection in our little town and held each other.  When we let go I thanked her and we both wished each other a good day.  She walked on and I sat back on my bench and took in the air deeply, tears immediately coming.  Oh, my heart. 

Nothing and everything to say.  SHE had the very best words.

(c) Copyrighted 2017.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Drawing, work in progress.  Grace, 2017.  Stephanie Penn-Virot

5th: The throwback

And just like that, the summer is over and the girls are back in school.  Sure, we will have a few more weeks of warm weather that will make getting up and spending the day at school complete torture, but the arrival of September means a new start and a season change to fall.  As I got the girls ready for bed last night and for 5th and 2nd grades, the talk inevitably turned to my time in school, and specifically 5th grade as my rising ten year old expressed a little apprehension about it.  Last year had been pure hell for her, and for me, as we tried to work our way through a difficult teacher and the anxiety being in her classroom produced.  I'd stopped pretending 1/2 way through the year and told her that I agreed with her feelings about her teacher but that shit happens, for real, and that you can't stop striving because someone is trying to bring you down.  I meant it.  It is hard to learn that and as hard to teach.

What I remember about my fifth grade class are small fleeting moments.  Memory is like that.  I am not even sure that what I am remembering actually happened in fifth grade and is not an amalgamation of that heady late elementary-middle school block.  My teacher, Mrs. S, was an old school, Southern, pinch-lipped, white biddy who wore skirt suits nearly every day.  Drab colored skirt suits with skirts well below the knee and a mid-sized heel with pantyhose to make her legs look a beigy-tan.  Her hair was coiffed like a cotton candy puff and sprayed so that not a hair moved.  She spoke in that breathy, southern school marm tone that told you she had little time for your shenanigans, even if the shenanigans just meant asking to be excused to use the bathroom.  

This woman brought little to no joy to my life (and I was still of the goody two shoes variety at that time).  She seemed to revel in giving bad grades, marking papers in red, and sucking the life out of the room.  I remember people getting in trouble, especially a boy named Derek who'd surely be diagnosed with ADHD today, and the creaky spot in the floor that I tried to avoid when I walked across the room to sharpen my pencil.  My feet had grown so quickly that year that the only shoes that fit me were women's shoes and styles and I had this pair of wooden clogs with a heel that I wish to God I still had but don't.  I remember that one girl in my class had reached puberty years ahead of the rest of us and that we all, boys and girls alike, obsessively watched her boobs doing what they do.  I remember there were some fast booty girls that were rumored to have been caught kissing sixth and seventh grade boys and that I was both appalled and intrigued.  There were combs in back pockets but I wore my hair in braids.  And I remember for the first time that the school day seemed to go on forever.  Mrs. S was no fun.  In fact, she was as rigid and dry as her old pruney lips announced.  I hated being in her class.  And I hated her.  After that year, thanks to puberty and beauty standards I couldn't meet and a sense of loneliness and isolation, I started to hate myself a little.

I watch my ten year old running up the hill to her elementary school with the other 3rd through 5th graders looking for signs of her sense of worth and value.  I wonder if she pays attention to all the details that now seem my only memory of that time.  All the kids look enthusiastic and eager and too young to think about any of the things I recall about fifth grade.  My ten year old is all curiosity, rainbows, cute animal videos, and pop culture memes that seem to sometimes go over her head.  She is still wearing ponytails and a tank top, no bra-lette.  She is all legs and thanks to the crowning of the kids as king, she has age appropriate footwear and clothing even though her paws are getting big like a growing puppy.  But she is also musical.ly and snapchat photos and silly little texts to her girlfriends on the phone we got her to stay in touch with us on her walk home.  When I ask her if kids talk about love interests or care about their hair and clothing more than they used to, she rolls her eyes at me to tell me that my line of questioning is embarrassing and ridiculous because 'no' or more likely because she cannot imagine that I know how it goes.

Sometimes she tells me about something funny she has seen on line or an app her friends have shared with her.  Other times she brings to me the most adorable, well-crafted stuffed animals that she knitted or sewed with no pattern or guide and I think about how amazing she is, about the talent she has that has absolutely nothing to do with me.  At night, when her most anxious thoughts and fears creep in, she whimpers and whispers her self-doubt into my ear, tells me that she just doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up and asks if she really has to know right now.  She wonders aloud why a girl in her class is wearing and wants to wear make up and stylish clothes "like an adult" and talks to everyone like she is grown.  She tells me she feels woefully alone and is afraid not of the small details of her life but of the big picture.  How we all got here.  How do we discover what our role is to play on this planet?  What if she just can't find her way?

And I answer.  All of the questions to the best of my ability.  And we talk about the anxiety and self-doubt that she is predisposed to thanks to me, and how she can best navigate it.  I tell her that kids of her generation do things much sooner that we did and we laugh together and agree that yes, she got the teacher that nearly broke her spirit one year before I did.  I tell her about Derek and the girl who developed early, about Mrs. S's sullen way of presenting almost everything.  About how still and quiet and lonely that room felt to me. I tell her about the clicking of my adult sized clogs on the floor and the dreams I had staring out the window.  I told her that I started to believe I couldn't be anything I dreamt of that year, that I started to believe I was not enough.  That the way this teacher spoke of me to my parents and that they did not tell her to 'fuck off' made me wonder if I really needed to work that much harder or if they were just not "getting me."  (At the time I went with work that much harder but now I am not so sure that was the right answer.)

This morning, though I'd offered to let her wear her mane of hair, now blond and brown from the sun, down, my 5th grader still chose ponytails.  She wore high tops and a blouse-y purple top that has a built in tank top so she didn't have to sport an undergarment.  Despite feeling a little under the weather, she decided not to miss the second day of school.  Though she is a little shell-shocked from last year, she is willing to go forward feeling hopeful, accepting this new path and direction.  She knows what she is ready for and what she is not quite yet.  As I pulled up to our drop off spot, I wished her insight and guidance and goodness on this second day.  I told her I'd tell her how I loved her from inside the car so she would not have to be mortified by my beaming pride once out in the real world.  She grabbed her backpack and tightened her safety patrol belt and said, "I want everyone to know that you love me."   She closed the door and got on her path.  I watched as long as I could see her, hoping she would turn to look just one more time.

And she did.


(c) Copyright 2016.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.