Back to the Suburban Grind: 5th: The throwback

Back to the Suburban Grind: 5th: The throwback: And just like that, the summer is over and the girls are back in school.  Sure, we will have a few more weeks of warm weather that will make...

5th: The throwback

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she did.


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

Back to the Suburban Grind: Miscarriage of Justice

Back to the Suburban Grind: Miscarriage of Justice: WARNING:  Some graphic imagery of the experience of a miscarriage.   Miscarriage:   failure   to   attain   the   just,   right,   or   de...

Miscarriage of Justice

WARNING:  Some graphic imagery of the experience of a miscarriage.  

Miscarriage:  failure to attain the just, right, or desired result/end; he expulsion of a fetus before it is viable, especially between the third and seventh months of pregnancy

Miscarriage of justice:  
primarily is the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. "Miscarriage of justice" is sometimes synonymous with wrongful conviction, referring to a conviction reached in an unfair or disputed trial.

Before I was pregnant with my second child, I'd suffered two miscarriages.  Just weeks into each pregnancy (the first at five weeks, the second at ten) seemingly no different than the one that had delivered its promise of a baby, my body, ripe and pumping with hormones and an increased blood supply, began to tear the walls down.  My heart skipped a beat and then a small cramp.  I felt nervous and my palms began to sweat.  I believe I was holding my breath.  I didn't want to look, to check.  A small cramp was not entirely uncommon or unexpected.  My body was trying to tell me something I did not want to know.  I knew it and still didn't want to listen.

The cramping began to increase and I was hot.  My skin, plump and swollen, got cold and clammy.  My breasts and nipples already longing to nurture that baby were so sensitive to the touch that it seemed just my clothes were too much.  I felt the longing, the begging, and the pleading.  "Please don't let this be." And then the resolve.  There was blood.  Blood everywhere and I was alone and even when people came to my call, I was alone.  The first time in France in my in-laws' upstairs bathroom on New Year's Eve.  The second time in the apartment I shared with my soon-to-be husband and our first child just weeks shy of the end of the first trimester.  I was at a loss for words.  Everything everyone said to comfort me sounded muffled.  I didn't want them to talk to me.  I wanted them to listen.  To listen to the sound of the moment and it was deafeningly quiet.  It was so real that try as I might to escape in my mind, I was pulled back into the present with each tiny contraction.  A friend of mine, one of my very best, who is also a healer had once said to me, 'we cannot expand and grow all the time.  Sometimes we have to contract.'  That thought kept coming to mind.  I can't say why, but it somehow gave me comfort and the space to accept what was to be.

We wanted another child, a partner and friend for our first, and after meeting with my doctor and receiving the appropriate shots (I have Rh negative (Rhesus negative) blood which means that my blood is most likely not compatible with the blood of the baby and certain precautions have to be taken), we decided to try again.  My husband was hopeful and to some degree disconnected from the emotional and spiritual effort it was going to take to get back out there.  Encouraged by the all clear from my doctor, he was eager to start the baby-making!  I was more apprehensive.  The losses had been traumatic, terrifying, and exhaustively lonely.  I did indeed want to have another baby but was so scared to lose another.  The sense memories, smells, tingles, ringing in my ears, the muscle memory of loss pulled tightly at my core.  My heart and gut wrenched, my palms became sweaty, I was nervous and easily agitated and very short tempered.

I didn't watch either of the videos.  We came home from the day-late Independence Day fireworks to our cable, phone, and internet service not working.  It turned out to be a blessing.  As I did a quick review of the latest on social media on my phone I saw the first hashtag:  #ripaltonsterling.  It wasn't difficult to put the pieces together to see what had happened.  I knew better than to even try to watch the video on my phone.  Already I was shaking.  My heart and gut wrenched and my palms were sweaty.  I looked to posts from my 'woke' friends.  I was in a panic.  Piecing together small details--selling CDs, concealed carry state, gun in his pocket, point blank range, black, black, black, black, black.  I knew guys who sold CDs on the street.  Hell, I'd bought some back in the day when I didn't know better and could scarcely afford a good meal let alone my favorite music.

Like with the first cramp suffered in the upstairs bathroom, I stood alone.  I didn't even want to say the words out loud.  I looked down.  Blood.  Real, thick, dark.  Pulled into the present.  This is happening.  From the bathroom, "Honey, something is wrong."  And now from the bedroom, barely whispered, "They killed another black man on the street."  The depth of our disconnect even more expanded, there was no answer.  "A man.  Selling CDs.  Pinned down and shot at point blank range."  My husband looked up. "No.  Can't be.  How they can do that?"  Nervous, easily agitated, short tempered.  I had to move, walk around.  I knew not to try to watch the video, the video!  I knew that I was suddenly very alone.

Retreating to my bed, to sleep, seemed the best option and I took some melatonin to disappear and went in.  When I woke up to the news of the murder of Philando Castile, a young, black man who'd been shot and killed in the driver seat of his car as he'd reached for his permit to show the officer who'd demanded it, I blanched.  That his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and his child had also been in the car and that his girlfriend had live streamed his death, dropped me to the floor.  Again, I did not watch the video but saw a still.  The blood.  The thick, dark blood on a white t-shirt on a man sitting in the driver's seat of his car.  The scene was haunting, surreal.

I looked down and took stock of my surroundings.  That hyper-awareness that trauma brings.  I see the floor, the walls, my feet.  There is so much blood.  I smell the food cooking downstairs.  I see the whites of my eyes gleaming with tears and fear.  I see blood.  A miscarriage.  A failure to achieve a desired end.  I'm still standing.  I sit and try to breathe deeper breaths than the shallow, panicked wisps that are leaking out of me like cold winter smoke rings.  All the moments I've ever looked at my feet, my hands, my face, the floor, the wall come rushing to me.  I am pulled back to the present.

They have killed another black man in the street.  There was no trial, no accusation (none formal at least).  This was not justice.  It is not just.  There has been a rush to find fault in these two men as has been done countless times before.  I have taken stock of my surroundings.  I stare down at my hands and at my feet.  I see the walls, the floor.  This has all happened before and before me and before them and before all of us.  That in a public court of opinion these men cannot be found innocent of a crime they did not commit because by being black they are guilty.  There is a lot of talk about it.  Too much for me right now because I need the sound of the moment in its deafening quiet.  I need there to be listening.

When we'd passed fifteen weeks during my pregnancy with the little one I felt safe enough to tell people that we were pregnant, but the panic never stopped. I checked between my legs daily.  I responded to gas, fullness, fatigue with worry and panic.  I prayed and chanted and mantra-d from point to point.  I was afraid and I was hopeful.  We can do this, I thought.  We have before.  She wants to stay with us.  She wants to be our baby.  The gods are shining on us.  They want her to be ours too.  But until she was in my arms, peering up at me with those shiny, black eyes, I was prepared for the worst. Prepared to lose her, prepared to suffer and hurt and feel anguish in silence.  Silence because looking at me in my hurt was too much for most to bear.

It is hard to watch someone in excruciating pain.  It is hard to watch them writhe and twist and ache so deeply internally that their body contorts, the way they appear on the outside is hideous to behold, their faces change, their destinies are missed, their paths misdirected.  We fear pain like the dark hand of misfortune.  We don't want it to touch us too so we turn from it, intellectualize it, talk and talk and talk about it, analyze it, describe it, try to work around it but it can only be confronted deep inside.  It is bloody and dark and thick.  It is slow and gruesome and sudden.  It throbs and burns and pulls.  And then gives release.  

The tiny space within me that I keep my deepest fears and secrets burst at the seams and I cried for days, endlessly.  I'd heard that the little four year in the car, in the back seat, where I now strapped my two children, tried to comfort her mother as her father lay dying in the driver's seat.  I'd heard that Diamond Reynolds was taken into custody and I wondered where her tiny girl was taken.  I wept at the thought of the rushing, the fast moving, the approach with with Alton Sterling was met in those last moments.  Wondered if he said to himself, 'this is just like that guy...' before someone put a gun to his chest.  I could not stop crying as I thought about all the blood and its metallic smell, its dankness, its thick, tacky swell as it flowed from the body.  I would wipe my eyes and more tears would come thinking of the moments in stillness when even though there was sound and screaming and fury, for a split second the dead silence of that present moment froze the world.  *gasp* And then it was done.

I remember the heaviness of the blood, the weight on my shoulders, the pulling in my heart, believing I could never recover from a loss like this.  One that had been a secret, one that was private, one that was mine to mull and cultivate.  And I came to see, I have to tell you.  I have to tell you that these are not just stories on white paper.  They are not clean or neat or easily filed.  They are real life.  The just, right, desired end was that I would bear another child and bring her into this world and love her and have every right to share with her and show her and celebrate with her the beauty of this human experience.  I hope I can.  The just, right, desired end would be that two men, black men, who had every right, so it is said, to share and celebrate the beauty of our shared human experience would not be dead because they'd been unfairly tried and convicted because they were black.

It's incredible this life.  And heartbreaking.  Black lives matter. Too.  



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

Back to the Suburban Grind: Sempervivum: On Father's Day

Back to the Suburban Grind: Sempervivum: On Father's Day: As the story goes, when my father was born, his grandmother wanted him to be named Stephen after her father.  Though he'd already been n...

Sempervivum: On Father's Day

As the story goes, when my father was born, his grandmother wanted him to be named Stephen after her father.  Though he'd already been named Jesse, he was called Steve or Stevie by everyone growing up.  I know a childhood friend by whether they call him Steve or Jesse.  I am called Stephanie after his secret name, a tiny, little seed planted at his roots in an alternative, dream landscape.  He is a hearty and strong succulent perennial, only an occasional flower, low growing, sometimes called the liveforever or sempervivum.  I am the flower.

We are so alike, my father and I.  There is depth, order, control.  We are protective, strong, and quick to anger.  I love him.  I always have.  I respect the man he became and all that he has accomplished in this life.  I know that if I am in danger he will come.  If I am hurt he will come.  If I need he will give.  But in order to protect himself from the slings and arrows, knives in the back and punches to the gut, he has had to encase his heart in thorns and booby traps.

I woke up this morning at 5:30.  That's too early for me.  Though I tried to go back to sleep, as soon as my eyes are opened I find that nearly impossible.  My racing mind started tracing lines to all the people I know who were probably awake.  Many living abroad where the day was already in full swing, friends on the West Coast who may be having a bout of insomnia or a late night of excess, and my dad.  Now that he is in his seventies, 5:30 is pretty early for him too, but the early mornings are a space where I always see my father.  Walking the house in quiet, breathing in life in a space where no people means no mask, rising with the sun as he did as a boy when he had work to do.  You can take the boy out of the country, but not the country out of the boy.  My dad is still a country boy.

A country boy whose parents told him and his four siblings how to survive, and gave them everything they had, which was not much materially but was full to bursting with love, guidance, and support.  They told those beautiful, black children how to get out of the poverty they'd been born into and to keep marching forward despite the expectation of the America that they were born into, that they were 'less than.'  Education, character, drive, ambition, and familial love and support would help each lift the others.  Racism and segregation shaped my father's sense of himself and no matter his successes, he has remained haunted.  I can only imagine how he endured the assaults on his character, his intelligence, and his basic rights.  Like me, he is sensitive, easily wounded, and anxious.  Like me, he hides and protects his heart.  Unlike me, he has not found too many to share it with.  And that includes me.

The love was tough, survivalist.  It wasn't precious or adorable.  It wasn't indulgent or demonstrative.  There were few hugs and smothers of kisses and compliments and praise.  There were high expectations.  When one fears failure, when failure in a system set up for you to fail means life or death, there is little time for pleasantries.  The hurt of his youth nourished ours and our blooms were sprinkled with his pain.  But mine is a fragile bloom.  My roots are strong, but the flower is so desperate for the light, desperate for the watering and the nutrients, seeking warmth from real and artificial light sources.  I cannot always tell the difference.  

My father is the first man for whom I was ever too much.  I could tell by the way he looked at me since the beginning of time and shook his head.  I wasn't easy because I'm not.  I'm all of the things one has to work on, work towards.  Work.  I was compared to other girls who achieved better and far more than I.  Girls who were poised and demure and knew the code and followed it.  They were good girls.  They weren't wild and didn't talk back or fight or question or practice magic.  They were practical and organized and good.  There is a part of me that is like that too.  Remnants of my attempts to please.

My father is the first man whose love I could feel dangling in front of me but could never reach.  My father loves me, but it sparks like an electrical short and cannot sustain itself long enough to provide light.  I chase the falling embers, hope it will help me find my way through the tunnel but I I do a lot of feeling around in the dark.

My father is the first man I tried to impress by dancing all around him, literally dancing all around him, who was distracted and saw only a flash and felt a slight breeze from all my efforts, and wondered to himself, 'What was that?' as I whirled past.  I still don't think he has ever seen me.

But I am not done with him.  I am nothing if not persistent.  I am the flower.  And I continue to bloom in his face.  I remind him that without our roots neither of us would thrive.  That it does no good for the succulent to resist its flower.  The plants are so gorgeous, have always been some of my favorites, whether they have a bloom or not.  But the blossom is such a sweet surprise sometimes taking years to finally bloom.  It is more.  It is the hand to God, the reaching, the longing, the magic expressed.  It is working through the fear and the shame of wanting and needing to be loved.  It just is.  And we both need it, the light and the love.

As the story goes, I was born so prematurely that I was so tiny you could hold me in one hand.  There was a fear that I might not survive, that the cold winter and early arrival might be too much for my tiny body.  But my roots dug in deep and I called on everything I knew.  The sempervivum, I was going to live and he knew it.  So he gave me his name, the one he should have had.  I fulfilled the promise of this family name and we are tied.  Liveforever.

Happy Father's Day to my dad.


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

Back to the Suburban Grind: This moment: RIP, Prince

Back to the Suburban Grind: This moment: RIP, Prince: I stand outside myself when I remember the moment.  I see myself, just out of the shower, hair wet, towel draped loosely around me, when my ...