Friday, April 7, 2017
Back to the Suburban Grind: The skin I'm in
Back to the Suburban Grind: The skin I'm in: It's been a tough few weeks in our two towns. A number of extraordinary curricular missteps regarding slavery (a mock slave auction and...
The skin I'm in
It's been a tough few weeks in our two towns. A number of extraordinary curricular missteps regarding slavery (a mock slave auction and runaway slave posters presented in two separate schools' 5th grades) and pathetic racist and anti-Semitic scrawls and scratches on the walls of some of the elementary, middle, and high schools in the area have risen from the ground like a septic spill and gotten everyone all up in their feelings. Myself included. As the black mother of two black girls of mixed heritage, I have become both the sounding board and the rubber wall off of which white friends and acquaintances can bounce their feelings, their fears, and their embarrassment. I have read posts on a town Facebook page and gone down the dangerous, thorny hole of defensiveness, divisiveness made more infuriating by a focus on semantics and description rather than on empathy, connection, and apology.
In navigating my anger and my hurt and the confusion and fear of my girls, I have struggled with what has always been my belief, my truth, and with the hope I have wanted to instill in the hearts of my children. We have paid lip service to the idea of community in these two towns. We have congratulated ourselves for our openness and inclusion, and with a bit of side eye and tongue planted firmly in cheek, I have allowed it, but the truth is, no matter that I am married to a white, French man, I have not ever believed that the collective "white people" are my community. I have always felt that my otherness would never allow me space in "their" communities. That sucks and I hate to admit it. But I have always been prepared to be disappointed by even my allies. I have been prepared to lose them, to let go, to be assaulted, humiliated, abandoned by my white friends and colleagues. I have steeled myself for their indifference, their insensitivity, and their ignorance. The events of these past weeks have triggered that sense.
My otherness, my black, my skin/culture/race has placed me outside for much of my life because I grew up in the mostly white township of a mixed town in which most of the people of color lived in the borough circling the town. Defining and defending my otherness within this community became my job, and one that I was not particularly good at because I was a child and because my parents had grown up with only black people and really had no idea what these white people were getting into. They may have known in theory but had no practical application of growing up and living amongst the very people they'd always expected would not include them. We'd been given no tools other than "do unto others" and watching and studying their white moves on TV and in real life.
Though surrounded for much of my young life by pink and tan little girls and boys, I always marveled at my brown skin. It was coppery and gold when the sun hit it and shiny with oils and lotions after a bath. It amazed me that my mother all butter cream and café au lait could blend with my father's coffee bean and chocolate to make the different browns that covered my siblings and me. My grandparents, save my dad's father, were all fair-complexioned black folks. My mom's mother was often mistaken for white for those not in the know (white people). The skin we were in made us black people, all of us because one drop made it so*, but there was not shame in that, not instinctually. Only one thing could make it immediately so to young me, could blush the brownest cheeks mauve and purple. And that was the dreaded slavery section of American history in social studies.
All the lessons and stories told by our families, the reunions, the family trees, old photos, black church, roof-raising hallelujahs could not inoculate me from the burning eyes of my peers and my teachers who needed me to feel some kind of way, show some kind of reaction to their gaze when they told me that it all began here. With someone with the same coppery skin as mine or dark coffee bean of my father or buttercream meringue of my mother or white coconut of my grandmother sold into or born into slave to toil and suffer abuses named but not discussed, certainly not felt. We'd move past fast enough to keep the pain and the anguish at bay. I'd burn and blush, feeling my cells vibrate with that truth in my body and my classmates would consider it for as long as it took, usually the slowest reader, to get through those two paragraphs.
That the enslavement of my ancestors is abhorrent is not and was not questioned. That my family tree and the stories of my past are filled with tales of horror, rape, assault, abuse, beatings, degrading humiliation, division and separation of families and names never to be traced again (and further receding as each older member of my family, those who kept the stories and the secrets alive, pass on) isn't either. But it is not quite understood either. So hideous is this reality to all of us in these United States, the modern world really, that we refuse to sit longer than a few paragraphs with it. Refuse to share the reality of our foundation, of the roots of this nation with our future. Allow our children to interpret what we as parents can barely discuss with one another.
I asked my girls last night to consider this. We are sitting together in a room, spending time after a long day when we are brought outside to the yard and told by our master, the person who owns us and uses us for his will, who keeps us in this cold house in these horribly tattered clothes, that tomorrow, he will send my oldest daughter to another family where she will work and toil for the rest of her life, and that we will more than likely, never see one another again. I tell the youngest that years later, the same will be done to her. I tell them that we suffer and that we cannot read or write, have no comforts, and cannot escape this truth as our lives, as what we will live and endure as long as we are on the earth. I tell them that the same would have been true for those who came before us and those who came after.
As I talked, we were all in tears. I was choking them back as I described to them this horrific scene. This one horrible moment that does not include epic cruelty, rape, maiming, whipping, torture, starvation, actual breeding of human beings like chattel. I cried into their hair as I hugged them and said, "This is not the story of where black people began. We are and have been so much more. This is how the story of us begins for so many white people. This is slavery and it's not all that we are."
When I heard about the mock slave auction that was to be included in the presentation of a child in my 5th grader's switch class, I at first tried to logically connect the dots that would lead a child to this place. How in the teaching of slavery did going on the auction block seem like a schoolyard game or play? How did kids end up dancing and dabbing while singing Negro spirituals learned during Black History Month while pretending to be slaves? How did children feel compelled to participate in this charade? What had they missed? My daughter was doing a report on the Southern colonies and while she mentioned slavery as it is not possible not to, she and her partner met the topic with the gravity one would expect. To be honest, I could feel their fear around talking about it together. And that's the problem.
It's fear. It is always fear. Looking at one's self directly in the mirror, facing the truth about one's nature, one's motivations, one's soul is incredibly hard work. When it doesn't look pretty, we don't want to be who we are. When I look in the mirror, I cannot deny my brown skin and the history it tells. I can no much cover the blemish of the world's slave trade with concealer and powders as I can the truth of our history that predates that scarring and the advances and re-centering of ourselves in our own narrative rather than in peripheral characters in a white story. I'm looking and I see myself. I see our brown and black and meringue and cocoa and peach and tan skin. I see our tales told on my body, feel them run through my veins, taste their breath in my soul. I stare into my tired, knowing eyes and I refuse to meet this moment with shame. The shame is not mine to claim.
My purple blush at my family's history, my people's story relegated to a 1/2 centimeter on the world's timeline. The story of the soul-crushing, body-breaking, psyche-wounding, intentionally cruel, inhumane centuries of torture on the people of the diaspora told as a Disney tale with singing and dancing and runaway slave posters drawn by 5th graders and then defended as childhood innocence, has knocked the wind from me. That forty years after I was taught this hideous tale as my truth, my children and their white counterparts are learning it as though history lives outside of our bodies, outside of the bodies and lives of real people is a travesty.
Perhaps my anger is getting the better of me. Perhaps it is about time. I have sat idly, quietly, cautiously, listening to mostly white people, but also other minorities, with a different story to tell. I have seen various groups "become" white, claim white, be deemed "model minorities" and turn their heads from the mirror, no longer seeing their otherness in the reflection but a clear, unblemished patina of respectability one foundation shade lighter and rouged lips telling the same stories about black people and the lies of our brown skin. I hear them all describe and define and explain anything and everything but the privilege their white skin, their acceptable otherness has allowed them. I hear them demand that I, that we, promise that we are greater than the story of us that starts with slavery, that their othering of me/us is not my/our fault, that their othering of me/us is not THEIR fault, that we can discuss the man in the mirror but that they cannot be made uncomfortable and even more, that THEIR children cannot be made uncomfortable. So my children look in the mirror and have to ask and I have to tell them every time and yours, only when they get in trouble and we can hope they "learn from it."
And so we sit again discussing slavery, the very root of the systemic racism in the United States of America that has and does threaten our role on the world stage with the rise of Donald Trump and his white throngs terrified of looking in the mirror and seeing themselves clearly. To see that there are many shades of foundation to cover their pain, their blemishes, their scars, their hate, their privilege, their lies, their denial but that we know they are wearing makeup and that the emperor has no clothes. You are too scared to look deeply past your white cheeks, your furrowed brows, your clenched fists, your pursed lips to see that you cannot blur the reflections of the people standing next to you, that no matter how you try to fade us from view, we are still standing next to you.
There were meetings of a coalition on race and there was a town hall meeting. There were "teachable" moments and recordings of bias attacks and petty crimes that were dissected on the towns' Facebook page. There were cries of "not me" and pleas not to "see us as just white people" and reminders that "no one living now was/is a slave owner." And I begin to burn in my own skin, to itch, and to fidget. I am hot, heated, but not from my own shame. It is because I must ask again that you look at your folded hands, bite your tongue ready to lash out with explanation, stare into your eyes in the mirror or those of your children and tell me, again, that we can all learn from standing on the auction block, that white children participated too, that the runaway slave posters really had a purpose, that you have more to say and still no time to listen because your discomfort of confronting our hideous past is worth more than our sustained and repeatedly opened wound. It is because I blush purple with hurt while you do all you can to avoid seeing your cheeks flushed by your complicity in this racist system. It is because we are teaching our children what we learned and what we learned was not good enough. It cannot be that I know this just because of the skin I'm in.
*The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States asserting that any person with even one ancestor of sub-Saharan-African ancestry ("one drop" of black blood)[1][2] is considered black (Negro in historical terms). This concept evolved over the course of the 19th century and became codified into law in the 20th century. It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness" and is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status. (Wikipedia, One-drop rule).
(c) Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
In navigating my anger and my hurt and the confusion and fear of my girls, I have struggled with what has always been my belief, my truth, and with the hope I have wanted to instill in the hearts of my children. We have paid lip service to the idea of community in these two towns. We have congratulated ourselves for our openness and inclusion, and with a bit of side eye and tongue planted firmly in cheek, I have allowed it, but the truth is, no matter that I am married to a white, French man, I have not ever believed that the collective "white people" are my community. I have always felt that my otherness would never allow me space in "their" communities. That sucks and I hate to admit it. But I have always been prepared to be disappointed by even my allies. I have been prepared to lose them, to let go, to be assaulted, humiliated, abandoned by my white friends and colleagues. I have steeled myself for their indifference, their insensitivity, and their ignorance. The events of these past weeks have triggered that sense.
My otherness, my black, my skin/culture/race has placed me outside for much of my life because I grew up in the mostly white township of a mixed town in which most of the people of color lived in the borough circling the town. Defining and defending my otherness within this community became my job, and one that I was not particularly good at because I was a child and because my parents had grown up with only black people and really had no idea what these white people were getting into. They may have known in theory but had no practical application of growing up and living amongst the very people they'd always expected would not include them. We'd been given no tools other than "do unto others" and watching and studying their white moves on TV and in real life.
Though surrounded for much of my young life by pink and tan little girls and boys, I always marveled at my brown skin. It was coppery and gold when the sun hit it and shiny with oils and lotions after a bath. It amazed me that my mother all butter cream and café au lait could blend with my father's coffee bean and chocolate to make the different browns that covered my siblings and me. My grandparents, save my dad's father, were all fair-complexioned black folks. My mom's mother was often mistaken for white for those not in the know (white people). The skin we were in made us black people, all of us because one drop made it so*, but there was not shame in that, not instinctually. Only one thing could make it immediately so to young me, could blush the brownest cheeks mauve and purple. And that was the dreaded slavery section of American history in social studies.
All the lessons and stories told by our families, the reunions, the family trees, old photos, black church, roof-raising hallelujahs could not inoculate me from the burning eyes of my peers and my teachers who needed me to feel some kind of way, show some kind of reaction to their gaze when they told me that it all began here. With someone with the same coppery skin as mine or dark coffee bean of my father or buttercream meringue of my mother or white coconut of my grandmother sold into or born into slave to toil and suffer abuses named but not discussed, certainly not felt. We'd move past fast enough to keep the pain and the anguish at bay. I'd burn and blush, feeling my cells vibrate with that truth in my body and my classmates would consider it for as long as it took, usually the slowest reader, to get through those two paragraphs.
That the enslavement of my ancestors is abhorrent is not and was not questioned. That my family tree and the stories of my past are filled with tales of horror, rape, assault, abuse, beatings, degrading humiliation, division and separation of families and names never to be traced again (and further receding as each older member of my family, those who kept the stories and the secrets alive, pass on) isn't either. But it is not quite understood either. So hideous is this reality to all of us in these United States, the modern world really, that we refuse to sit longer than a few paragraphs with it. Refuse to share the reality of our foundation, of the roots of this nation with our future. Allow our children to interpret what we as parents can barely discuss with one another.
I asked my girls last night to consider this. We are sitting together in a room, spending time after a long day when we are brought outside to the yard and told by our master, the person who owns us and uses us for his will, who keeps us in this cold house in these horribly tattered clothes, that tomorrow, he will send my oldest daughter to another family where she will work and toil for the rest of her life, and that we will more than likely, never see one another again. I tell the youngest that years later, the same will be done to her. I tell them that we suffer and that we cannot read or write, have no comforts, and cannot escape this truth as our lives, as what we will live and endure as long as we are on the earth. I tell them that the same would have been true for those who came before us and those who came after.
As I talked, we were all in tears. I was choking them back as I described to them this horrific scene. This one horrible moment that does not include epic cruelty, rape, maiming, whipping, torture, starvation, actual breeding of human beings like chattel. I cried into their hair as I hugged them and said, "This is not the story of where black people began. We are and have been so much more. This is how the story of us begins for so many white people. This is slavery and it's not all that we are."
When I heard about the mock slave auction that was to be included in the presentation of a child in my 5th grader's switch class, I at first tried to logically connect the dots that would lead a child to this place. How in the teaching of slavery did going on the auction block seem like a schoolyard game or play? How did kids end up dancing and dabbing while singing Negro spirituals learned during Black History Month while pretending to be slaves? How did children feel compelled to participate in this charade? What had they missed? My daughter was doing a report on the Southern colonies and while she mentioned slavery as it is not possible not to, she and her partner met the topic with the gravity one would expect. To be honest, I could feel their fear around talking about it together. And that's the problem.
It's fear. It is always fear. Looking at one's self directly in the mirror, facing the truth about one's nature, one's motivations, one's soul is incredibly hard work. When it doesn't look pretty, we don't want to be who we are. When I look in the mirror, I cannot deny my brown skin and the history it tells. I can no much cover the blemish of the world's slave trade with concealer and powders as I can the truth of our history that predates that scarring and the advances and re-centering of ourselves in our own narrative rather than in peripheral characters in a white story. I'm looking and I see myself. I see our brown and black and meringue and cocoa and peach and tan skin. I see our tales told on my body, feel them run through my veins, taste their breath in my soul. I stare into my tired, knowing eyes and I refuse to meet this moment with shame. The shame is not mine to claim.
My purple blush at my family's history, my people's story relegated to a 1/2 centimeter on the world's timeline. The story of the soul-crushing, body-breaking, psyche-wounding, intentionally cruel, inhumane centuries of torture on the people of the diaspora told as a Disney tale with singing and dancing and runaway slave posters drawn by 5th graders and then defended as childhood innocence, has knocked the wind from me. That forty years after I was taught this hideous tale as my truth, my children and their white counterparts are learning it as though history lives outside of our bodies, outside of the bodies and lives of real people is a travesty.
Perhaps my anger is getting the better of me. Perhaps it is about time. I have sat idly, quietly, cautiously, listening to mostly white people, but also other minorities, with a different story to tell. I have seen various groups "become" white, claim white, be deemed "model minorities" and turn their heads from the mirror, no longer seeing their otherness in the reflection but a clear, unblemished patina of respectability one foundation shade lighter and rouged lips telling the same stories about black people and the lies of our brown skin. I hear them all describe and define and explain anything and everything but the privilege their white skin, their acceptable otherness has allowed them. I hear them demand that I, that we, promise that we are greater than the story of us that starts with slavery, that their othering of me/us is not my/our fault, that their othering of me/us is not THEIR fault, that we can discuss the man in the mirror but that they cannot be made uncomfortable and even more, that THEIR children cannot be made uncomfortable. So my children look in the mirror and have to ask and I have to tell them every time and yours, only when they get in trouble and we can hope they "learn from it."
And so we sit again discussing slavery, the very root of the systemic racism in the United States of America that has and does threaten our role on the world stage with the rise of Donald Trump and his white throngs terrified of looking in the mirror and seeing themselves clearly. To see that there are many shades of foundation to cover their pain, their blemishes, their scars, their hate, their privilege, their lies, their denial but that we know they are wearing makeup and that the emperor has no clothes. You are too scared to look deeply past your white cheeks, your furrowed brows, your clenched fists, your pursed lips to see that you cannot blur the reflections of the people standing next to you, that no matter how you try to fade us from view, we are still standing next to you.
There were meetings of a coalition on race and there was a town hall meeting. There were "teachable" moments and recordings of bias attacks and petty crimes that were dissected on the towns' Facebook page. There were cries of "not me" and pleas not to "see us as just white people" and reminders that "no one living now was/is a slave owner." And I begin to burn in my own skin, to itch, and to fidget. I am hot, heated, but not from my own shame. It is because I must ask again that you look at your folded hands, bite your tongue ready to lash out with explanation, stare into your eyes in the mirror or those of your children and tell me, again, that we can all learn from standing on the auction block, that white children participated too, that the runaway slave posters really had a purpose, that you have more to say and still no time to listen because your discomfort of confronting our hideous past is worth more than our sustained and repeatedly opened wound. It is because I blush purple with hurt while you do all you can to avoid seeing your cheeks flushed by your complicity in this racist system. It is because we are teaching our children what we learned and what we learned was not good enough. It cannot be that I know this just because of the skin I'm in.
*The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States asserting that any person with even one ancestor of sub-Saharan-African ancestry ("one drop" of black blood)[1][2] is considered black (Negro in historical terms). This concept evolved over the course of the 19th century and became codified into law in the 20th century. It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness" and is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status. (Wikipedia, One-drop rule).
(c) Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Monday, March 6, 2017
Back to the Suburban Grind: Ivan: Promise kept
Back to the Suburban Grind: 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 b...
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Back to the Suburban Grind: The box
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. ...
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.
Monday, January 30, 2017
Back to the Suburban Grind: The very best words
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 oft...
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