My 7 1/2 year old told me last night, after I'd begged her to stop Rainbow Looming and do her 30 minutes of reading and put in two cents on her project about Helen Keller, that I was unfair. Her exact words were shouted, "You are unfair, Mommy! Other moms are more fair than you!" To which I responded, without raising my voice, "Then go and check them out. See if you want to live with one of them. Because I can assure you that when you are over at their place for a play date they are giving you the fun, cool mommy. But I bet their own kids will tell you that they are just as unfair and uncool as Mommy. Now get to reading." She stormed out of the room and kicked around a bit in her own bedroom before coming back to her senses and picked up her book to read. She came to me and asked that I sit with her while she read to which I immediately obliged.
After we'd read and I was braiding her hair for bedtime, I told her that I'd been very hurt by her comments earlier and that while I did not like having to be a nag, it was my job to make sure that everyone in the family, little kids and Papa, were taking care of their responsibilities. I told her to imagine just how exhausting it was when no one listened to me but everyone yelled at me. I didn't have to say much else as she started crying and apologizing. While reassuring her that it was not my intention to have her cry but to consider how it must feel to have someone say cruel things, I also wanted her to understand that we would not communicate with each other in the house with outbursts and hurtful statements. The three of us, Lily and Virginie and myself, reviewed better ways to tell someone how you feel. Ways that did not involve shouting, pouting, and throwing tantrums.
I know this scenario plays out in so many households daily, maybe even hourly. And I have to think that the person who can change this kind of communication at my house is yours truly. When I was growing up, there wouldn't be much conversation about it, and when I say wouldn't be much, I mean ANY. My parents, like most others at that time, told us what to do and we did it. Often, "because I said so," was answer enough. I do go to that one from time to time, but I prefer to explain my actions; it's a personal choice. If I don't offer the answer "just because" when they ask a question about nature or math or art, I don't want to give that answer in regards to social situations and personal behavior.
"It's not fair!" means that I am asking them to do something that they not only don't want to do but are actually put out being asked. Or told to do it. We can argue, and we do, or I can tell them why I have asked, in this case, for Lily to do her homework. I can tell her about responsibility and expectations and her role and mine. She is welcome to tell me that she is tired or frustrated or disinterested or angry or sad, but she cannot just tell me that I am being unfair. My parents used to say, "Life is unfair." That's true. I have thrown that in there too and for good measure have even given examples. Rarely do those examples involve a first-world child with everything in front of her, coming home from a play date, eating her favorite foods, and snuggling in a blanket while she Rainbow looms. I guess this is my "kids in China/Africa/somewhere would love to eat your broccoli" argument.
When mine tell me, "that's not fair," I want to show them as delicately as I can when I am "Cool Mommy" and as snarky as I might when I am "Overworked/Put upon Mommy" that "that's not fair" often comes out of sounding like they believe themselves to be the most important persons in the whole wide world. From believing not that the sun rises and sets in them but that they are, in fact, the sun. I can imagine that letting them believe they are not the most important people in the world might go over badly with some parents. I imagine this because I see adults asking permission of their children for just about any decision they need to make. Mine ARE the most important people to ME and to my husband. But they are not the center of the universe. It would be awfully painful for them to discover this fact outside of the house when they were too old to still believe so. My grandma, Jessie Mae used to tell hers, "I'm always going to love you. It is my job to get others to like you." In other words, she taught her children, my father included, how to be good, kind, decent human beings, and not to think of themselves before everyone else.
Of course I do not want my children to be put upon or feel less than in anyone's eyes, and they have been fortified with feelings of adequacy and sprinklings of how special and important they are, have been celebrated for jobs well done, and tickled under their chins with giggles about how lovely they are. But learning about how to be part of a community, a family, a group is just as important to me as their developing self-love and pride in the things that make them special. What's not fair is allowing them, while they are cute and sweet and under my roof, to believe that the world will start and stop for them, revolve around them, that they have no responsibility to anyone but themselves, and that they will be accountable to nothing but their own desires. When they say, "that's not fair!" responding with the truth and my expectations and a little guidance, I am hoping to ensure that they are not unfair, unkind, and selfish towards others. Feeling like the bad guy? That's not fair. But I'll take it for the team.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Back to the Suburban Grind: Sugar, Spice, and everything fierce
Back to the Suburban Grind: Sugar, Spice, and everything fierce: Little girls. The hard part is raising them. The crazy part is having to search and scour and work through all the messages that are being...
Sugar, Spice, and everything fierce
Little girls. The hard part is raising them. The crazy part is having to search and scour and work through all the messages that are being sent at their little hearts and minds. The wicked part is trying to work through my own politics, my own feelings, my own shortcomings, fears, desires and lead them to their own paths.
I want to raise my girls stronger, more self-aware, and centered than I ever was. I want them to know their strengths--emotional, physical, and spiritual, their beauty, their wisdom, their intuition, intelligence, and their magic. But I also want them to use their powers for good and not evil. I, like so many parents of girls my age, love the fierce, young things out there, images of girl power that are not as obviously sexist, racist, misogynistic as images from the past. My girls believe they can do anything though they often need some coaxing to see the application of this mantra. All things new are met with a little apprehension and fear and some embarrassment about being made a fool of by their peers real and imagined. I sit with that part as it runs in me too, but as a woman, I am able to throw myself into the new, knowing the rewards often outweigh the risks.
I love almost anything that lets little girls and women high five themselves at the show of strength, power, and confidence, that shows the second sex flexing all its muscle--physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. I like girls in real life and fiction that challenge the status quo, that bring it, find themselves alienated because they are so misunderstood in their desire to march to the beat of their own damned beatbox. I believe that leadership comes with strength and compassion and I teach my girls how to lead themselves. I have told them to lead by example and others will follow but I do not know that that is true. Sometimes it seems like the sassy wheel gets the grease.
There are so many other reinforcements for an aggressive show of strength--girl bullying, the "I don't care," the blasé response to a life lived with just 6 or 7 years under the belt and parents' oblivious acceptance or ignorance of them. Mine see wonder in everything, Believe that every image seen will enhance the dreams in their minds, every experience had will feed the possibilities. They are open to the idea of everyone's joy and believe there is enough to go around for everyone. Sure, they fight like heck when they get locked in the house on a cold day or a boring morning where Mommy does not jump up and show them the fireworks, but they cut their teeth at home where the sparing is playful at best, chock full of Mommy-shouting, teachable moments at worst. Like two little lion cubs they spar and jab and resist and pounce and I call from the other room, "That's too much. Not like that. Don't say words just to be cruel, just to hurt. Say them to make your point."
Mine know the first of the Four Agreements because I say it so often. "Be impeccable with your word." It's kind of like "use your words" but with intention and conviction behind them. Know that what you say or do definitely has a reaction in the world and who the heck wants a reaction that hurts someone else. When little girls are cruel, abusive, short-tempered with others, I often wonder if their parents have goaded them on, cheered them, encouraged them by telling them that they are strong, singular, fierce. I wonder if the girls long for a tribe of like-minded chicas or if they believe that to be a strong girl or woman one must do it alone. I wonder why compassion gets taken out of the equation when one is being prepped for greatness.
Yesterday, after a dance class, I spent a good hour talking with some mommy-friends about raising children and girls in particular. My parents involved themselves very little in my social development and I navigated using clues from television, playground politics, and bearing witness to schoolyard hierarchies. I was nervous, but found that humor and revealing very little about my real feelings was helpful. Only I knew how trying it was to find my way through this maze and I grew a thick skin. I shored up and developed a hard shell to protect my gooey insides. But what for the girls who appear quiet, but really have a silent roar? Those that are nurturing a strong character, who are watching and mindful and intelligent and sharp? Who don't know how or won't fight for the top of the pyramid but could surely get there on their own strength.
The narcissistic side of me hopes that my girls are tiny avatars of all my good qualities with daring, commitment, and perseverance in extra measure. I hope that when they are doing something that makes them stand out, either because they are great or not so, that they keep doing it anyway because they love it. I hope that the voices--inside their heads and from other littles who have already taken in the sad, scary, tiny messages delivered on a pink tray to little girls--can be ignored and they can blaze hot, fiery paths of their own making. Or even lay tiny little stones, like Gretel and her brother Hansel, on their path to find their way. I don't care how they do it, just want it to be their very own.
My girls are sweet, easy playmates, sugary and gooey and lovey with enough character and drive to spice up all interaction with them. The fierceness will come as their confidence strengthens and they feel safer navigating knowing that I have their backs and support every effort they make towards self-discovery and self-improvement and self-love. I'm in it with them.
Those sassy, precocious, sophisticated, modern kids who call adults by their first names and treat children and adults alike with the same snarky attitude, who are already bored, unmoved by the real miracles of life, the joys, the highs, who hide the miserable, scary lows, who have even us fooled that "they got this" when they are way too young to GET this and just need to be parented, to be given limits, to have consequences to face, need guidance. They need us to help them find their way to their best selves, to their potential, and to do it without having to break others down to the quick. They run this town and they know it. We let them tell us what to do, talk back, assault us, call us names and then wonder why they just can't seem to connect with others.
Fierce is not mean or biting or cruel. It's not manipulative or controlling. It doesn't make others feel less than so that one can feel whole. We know this, but they may not. May not be able to read through the pages of confusing messages directed at them or lives lived vicariously through them. I don't want my children to be too heavy on the sugar, so sweet and kind and easy-going that they give up their strength. But the healthy snack to that meal is not snark or sassiness. It's the true power--self-reliance, self-love, intelligence, empathy, and compassion. Sugar and spice and everything nice? I don't know about that. But crystallizing that inner awesome, seeing it in others too, and letting everyone be led by their own star? I can get with that.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
I want to raise my girls stronger, more self-aware, and centered than I ever was. I want them to know their strengths--emotional, physical, and spiritual, their beauty, their wisdom, their intuition, intelligence, and their magic. But I also want them to use their powers for good and not evil. I, like so many parents of girls my age, love the fierce, young things out there, images of girl power that are not as obviously sexist, racist, misogynistic as images from the past. My girls believe they can do anything though they often need some coaxing to see the application of this mantra. All things new are met with a little apprehension and fear and some embarrassment about being made a fool of by their peers real and imagined. I sit with that part as it runs in me too, but as a woman, I am able to throw myself into the new, knowing the rewards often outweigh the risks.
I love almost anything that lets little girls and women high five themselves at the show of strength, power, and confidence, that shows the second sex flexing all its muscle--physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. I like girls in real life and fiction that challenge the status quo, that bring it, find themselves alienated because they are so misunderstood in their desire to march to the beat of their own damned beatbox. I believe that leadership comes with strength and compassion and I teach my girls how to lead themselves. I have told them to lead by example and others will follow but I do not know that that is true. Sometimes it seems like the sassy wheel gets the grease.
There are so many other reinforcements for an aggressive show of strength--girl bullying, the "I don't care," the blasé response to a life lived with just 6 or 7 years under the belt and parents' oblivious acceptance or ignorance of them. Mine see wonder in everything, Believe that every image seen will enhance the dreams in their minds, every experience had will feed the possibilities. They are open to the idea of everyone's joy and believe there is enough to go around for everyone. Sure, they fight like heck when they get locked in the house on a cold day or a boring morning where Mommy does not jump up and show them the fireworks, but they cut their teeth at home where the sparing is playful at best, chock full of Mommy-shouting, teachable moments at worst. Like two little lion cubs they spar and jab and resist and pounce and I call from the other room, "That's too much. Not like that. Don't say words just to be cruel, just to hurt. Say them to make your point."
Mine know the first of the Four Agreements because I say it so often. "Be impeccable with your word." It's kind of like "use your words" but with intention and conviction behind them. Know that what you say or do definitely has a reaction in the world and who the heck wants a reaction that hurts someone else. When little girls are cruel, abusive, short-tempered with others, I often wonder if their parents have goaded them on, cheered them, encouraged them by telling them that they are strong, singular, fierce. I wonder if the girls long for a tribe of like-minded chicas or if they believe that to be a strong girl or woman one must do it alone. I wonder why compassion gets taken out of the equation when one is being prepped for greatness.
Yesterday, after a dance class, I spent a good hour talking with some mommy-friends about raising children and girls in particular. My parents involved themselves very little in my social development and I navigated using clues from television, playground politics, and bearing witness to schoolyard hierarchies. I was nervous, but found that humor and revealing very little about my real feelings was helpful. Only I knew how trying it was to find my way through this maze and I grew a thick skin. I shored up and developed a hard shell to protect my gooey insides. But what for the girls who appear quiet, but really have a silent roar? Those that are nurturing a strong character, who are watching and mindful and intelligent and sharp? Who don't know how or won't fight for the top of the pyramid but could surely get there on their own strength.
The narcissistic side of me hopes that my girls are tiny avatars of all my good qualities with daring, commitment, and perseverance in extra measure. I hope that when they are doing something that makes them stand out, either because they are great or not so, that they keep doing it anyway because they love it. I hope that the voices--inside their heads and from other littles who have already taken in the sad, scary, tiny messages delivered on a pink tray to little girls--can be ignored and they can blaze hot, fiery paths of their own making. Or even lay tiny little stones, like Gretel and her brother Hansel, on their path to find their way. I don't care how they do it, just want it to be their very own.
My girls are sweet, easy playmates, sugary and gooey and lovey with enough character and drive to spice up all interaction with them. The fierceness will come as their confidence strengthens and they feel safer navigating knowing that I have their backs and support every effort they make towards self-discovery and self-improvement and self-love. I'm in it with them.
Those sassy, precocious, sophisticated, modern kids who call adults by their first names and treat children and adults alike with the same snarky attitude, who are already bored, unmoved by the real miracles of life, the joys, the highs, who hide the miserable, scary lows, who have even us fooled that "they got this" when they are way too young to GET this and just need to be parented, to be given limits, to have consequences to face, need guidance. They need us to help them find their way to their best selves, to their potential, and to do it without having to break others down to the quick. They run this town and they know it. We let them tell us what to do, talk back, assault us, call us names and then wonder why they just can't seem to connect with others.
Fierce is not mean or biting or cruel. It's not manipulative or controlling. It doesn't make others feel less than so that one can feel whole. We know this, but they may not. May not be able to read through the pages of confusing messages directed at them or lives lived vicariously through them. I don't want my children to be too heavy on the sugar, so sweet and kind and easy-going that they give up their strength. But the healthy snack to that meal is not snark or sassiness. It's the true power--self-reliance, self-love, intelligence, empathy, and compassion. Sugar and spice and everything nice? I don't know about that. But crystallizing that inner awesome, seeing it in others too, and letting everyone be led by their own star? I can get with that.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Back to the Suburban Grind: Learning MLK
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,...
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Back to the Suburban Grind: Winter birthday wishes
Back to the Suburban Grind: Winter birthday wishes: January 2nd usually marked the return to normalcy or a soft landing like the movie stuntmen made onto that huge pillow at the end of the ho...
Winter birthday wishes
January 2nd usually marked the return to normalcy or a soft landing like the movie stuntmen made onto that huge pillow at the end of the holiday circus. Rather the celebration of the Christ child and the baby new year than me. While I didn't want to be forgotten completely, I was happy to get back to life as we knew it with a tiny secret tucked behind my ear, kissed there by the aliens who, in the dead of night, have always given me promises of a good future, not just resolutions but truths to which I was completely committed. I still believe in the probability of great achievement even in the face of total chaos and seemingly impossible obstacles. Though I have never been good at the holidays, what with all the celebrating and wide opened hearts on display, the arrival of the girls brought a chance for me to live them with different eyes, a more gracious heart, and a sense of wonder and hope.
Every year since I can remember, the arrival of the "winter holidays" has brought a little bit of tension, a little bit of the blues, and an eerie calm like the dead quiet of the first inches of a massive Nor'easter falling heavily on whichever sleeping town or block I was living. It feels somewhere between a whisper and the ringing in the air after a scream. I can hear my breathing. Sometimes I can see my breath. Always I am aware that I am alive even if I can't move from the cold or the fear, and am fully aware of my surroundings even if I want to run. Always I feel awkwardly alone even when surrounded by crowds of family and friends. Alone but not quite lonely. Here, but not quite here. I can't be lonely with the two people standing on my neck, whispering in my ear, chatterbugging to my face. Maybe that's why they came to me. To connect me to place, pry open my wintered heart.
2013 was hardly different from previous years--family ups and downs, community involvement, extracurriculars, doctors' visits, health checks and scares and reassurances, travel, work, parenting, craziness. I don't think I have counted my "best or worst" years since I was a child when the best or the worst was defined by gifts I received or didn't, skills I acquired or didn't, loves found or lost. Now, every year starts off full of promise, more than 1/2 full with the days firmly on one side, ahead of me. Every year I know that I will peel back the onion to find some other truth about myself, my soul's journey, my desire, and my fulfillment. I make no promises other than to try to remain open to whatever comes, to avoid (or try not to bring it all the way to insane clown posse meltdown) the panicked shut down when the world delivers what I expected but for which I had somehow been poorly prepared. At the beginning of every year I have promised myself, "This is the year for me. This is the year I will find the path, stay on it, actualize." I say this every year. I believe it every time. I don't write the directions, don't set the map in stone and quickly wander from the path...or perhaps discover the one worn in the ground, not paved.
I followed the breadcrumbs back to a language I'd almost forgotten I spoke. Many speak it more eloquently, some with grace and agility, others flexibility, but when I speak to them too, they understand. In 2013 I returned to dance. When I was a girl who hated her voice and was sure no one cared what I might have to say, there was dance. When I needed to free myself from the torment of the bad years and celebrate the joys of the good, there was dance. When I had a secret to keep, something that I needed to protect, I could dance around it, seal it in. And then I stopped, quit moving altogether, froze, and then allowed myself to believe that another form of exercise, maybe the machines at the gym, maybe an abs class, could suffice. They couldn't. Not yoga, even with all the breath and meditating and connection to the divine, warmed my soul. It was dance that first connected me to my own life force. Reclaiming it was so helpful to everything in my life.
When I was a little girl, my mother asked for the same things for her birthday, Christmas, and Mother's Day. Peace and quiet and for everyone to get along. We thought that was the craziest request on earth. "That's all she wanted?" I'd wonder. What a waste of a rub of the lamp. You can have anything three little cherubs and a workaholic husband can offer! I get it now. As I reanimate the creative back into my life, each day becomes mine to do with it what I will. I can ease myself out of the tepid pool of suburban monotony and feel passion burning me up again. I want that more than I want anything else.
I have, and have admitted, struggling with the daily expectations of raising children and running a household. I want to do them both well. Hell, I want to do everything well, but I believe that I bring more to everything in my life with the creative spirit and energy weaving throughout. At the start of every year, I remind myself of this. Somewhere along the way the priorities shift and I find myself making excuses, putting off making art, writing, dancing, and allow the minutiae of parenting and being married to be more important. I'm going to do better this year. At least I am going to try.
My husband was gone for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years and my birthday. He has been for nearly every one of these holidays since we've been together. I have stopped allowing myself to suffer this and surely cannot let his absence during these days define the entire year. Or me. Or my life. I don't want to be defined by absence or by a "lack of." But when he returns and asks what I want for all the holidays I missed, it's not a necklace, a scarf, socks, or new boots that I am after. It is some of that quiet, some of that peace, some of the space where I can create or believe myself able again. It is solitude and my own communion with the end of the year and the start of my new one.
My birthday starts up the music, begins the lightly playing song that guides me through the year. It is wintry and quiet and moody and grey and cloudy followed by bursts of sun in a cerulean blue sky, cold as hell frozen over, that thaws into a promising spring. I've bundled up into it and survived the shortest day of the year and the longest parade of holiday celebrations. And on this day, I danced and wrote and drew a little sketch. Running head first, out the window, to the stunt man's pillow down below. To the new year. Mine.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
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