In this house

We wash. We water. We spray. We scrub. We arrange and rearrange and re-rearrange all of our things. 

There are piles of papers for keeping, and a paper bag of paper for recycling. There is something sitting in the kitchen sink, while notes of coffee, eggshell, and citrus skin sing from the compost bin. This house hugs our clutter, holds it all within its walls: worn out/outgrown clothing, books, soaking oatmeal pots, notebooks, pencils, pillows, and plants. This house holds an old refrigerator, a handbuilt bread box, a long table, paintings, photographs, mirrors, latching doors, and steep stairs. Its walls of plaster and paint are scarred from hammers and nails, tacks, tape, and second-hand furniture. Oh, if these walls could talk, how they would laugh! Through the windows, winter sun washes in, mid-morning floods that pour slanted shadows across our breakfast crumbs. And so we sweep. We vacuum. We wash. 

In this house, there is silence and stillness and sweetness. There is sleep and there is sleeplessness. There is utter boisterousness - a whole wilderness of silliness. There is electronic pop music for dancing and princess soundtracks for twirling. Often, a folk music soundscape plays. There is the sound of highway, wind, stove, and storm. There is brilliant witty banter and there are bathroom jokes. There is deep discussion, celebration, and storytelling. There are fits and wailing, warm snuggling, tickling, and improvised singing. 

In this house, magic happens. There is a baby with sharp pearls pushing up through his gums, urging him to bite everything - the coffee table, the rugs, our wooden blocks, my breasts, and his father's chest. He comes at us with his mouth long. 

"Here! Bite this!" I plead, pressing something soft and safe into his sore mouth. 

This baby belly laughs, trills his lips, sings, yells, and crawls one hundred miles an hour. He reaches and stands up like a mountain climber - chairs, tables, and couches, his cliffs. 

In this house, magic happens. There is a child with immense creative intelligence. A story builder, a performer, a dancer, she is entirely herself and yet still, a stunning mystery. 

The other night, she told me she would love me forever. All because I lied beside her. My body is something she loves. "Cuddle me, Mama!" She begged, and I did. 

Is not that magic? 

Talker's Remorse

You have it again. That sudden shame. Those words spinning like a rusty roundabout inside the playground of your skull. 

This brain activity beats your heart until you consider the life of a mother monk, remaining in your home and in the woods until you are a very old woman. It is probably the coffee, or the pandemic, or perhaps you are simply deficient in both conversation and friendship. You get so excited now to be with a friend that you tend to talk and talk until your talk is like a train tumbling off a track, off a cliff toward silence, toward uncomfortable alterations in energy, toward your mind trying desperately to drag back those cars until they are back inside your body so that you may slow them to a stop at the tunnel of your teeth. 

Why must you say everything?

Now, in your remorse, you make your apologies. Then you inform your meaningless memories to hold steady. You tell your silly little ideas that they are, indeed, silly little ideas. 

And that silence is wise and worthy. 

Say your somethings slowly. Watch the words as they begin their climb out of your belly. Look at them. Don't just spit them out. For the ears that drink your splatter of syllables do not hold shields. What is said is taken and stored in the cellars of their souls and if it is not worth their keeping, then keep it inside. 

And shit it out later.  

POLITICS

Your grandfather sends an editorial in the mail.

You unfold it, read it, disagree with it, leave it. 

You wait, then write him a handwritten letter.

Weeks pass. 

He emails you another.  

You open it, read it, disagree with it, leave it. 

You wait, then whittle a reply, a collection of words that splint-

er more than they probably should.  

He waits, then writes.

You wait, then write. 

You love your grandfather but loathe this contest. 

It has been weeks now. 

He is 90 and in chemotherapy.

He still owes you an email, but you're not sure 

if you don't first owe him an apology. 

What if we tell our children about America?

What if tell our children about the violent displacement, slaughter, kidnapping, and killing of Indigenous people? What if we tell them about the plunder of the land, the land blessed and borrowed but never called "country" by these ancient native tribes? What if we tell our children about assimilation as it simmered in a melting pot of forced European colonization?

What if we tell our children about the abduction and enslavement of Africans? Tell them how they were torn from familiar land, chained, and tossed onto wooden ships, which then tossed on the wide-open stormy sea. Of unimaginable unfamiliarity followed by generation upon generation upon generation of brutal slavery. Of king cotton capitalism, of excessive greed, of building our cities for free, of violence (so much violence), and century upon century upon century of made-up skin-deep social hierarchies. Of whips and horses and dogs, of nooses and nightsticks and knees, of fire hoses, handcuffs, jail cells, and guns. 

What if we ask our children how it would make them feel to be sold? To stand upon a wooden stage and bear witness to strangers as they bid on their bare bodies. How it would feel to be trapped in bondage - in all that hopelessness, and in all that rage. 

What if we tell our children about lynchings by mobs of wildly ignorant white people? What if we tell them about the humiliation of Jim Crow? What if we tell them about the humiliation of minstrel shows? What if we play for them Nina Simone's haunting version of Strange Fruit and show them films like Selma? What if we tell them about the buses and the beatings and the church bombings and the burning crosses and the white-cloaked KKK? What if we tell them about Rosewood and Tulsa and Ruby Bridges? What if we tell them about Emmett Till and Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McCane, and Ahmaud Arbery? What if we tell them the list is too long for anyone to learn. What if we tell them that they are citizens in a violent racist nation? 

[It is important to mention that I am suggesting that the truth be revealed, but carefully, with scaffolding. Imagine a mural painted with rollers and wide brushes for years before dipping slender brushes into wet paint and sharpening our country's story with details.] 

What if we remove our American glory and replace it with the raw reality? What if we stopped reading only the History books of our forefathers, our white oppressive ancestors, and instead gathered the defiant stories of our past's diverse oppressed persons? 

I wish we could suppress our undeserved patriotism and instead invest in humility, humanity, and authenticity. I want us to be ordinary and kind for awhile. I want us to be humble. Meek even. Let us, white people, apologize for the barbarity of this country's contradictory creators. Our revolutionary war was fought for freedom. The freedom to torture, enslave, kill, and take from others. This "great country" was founded on hypocrisy. 

"Yes, but", you say, "slavery was a long time ago."

"Slavery was a long time ago."

"Slavery was a long time ago."

"Slavery was a long time ago."

If you say it over and over and over again, it will become like truth. 

Wait. 

Who said that? 

Ah yes, Hitler. 

"Yes, but," you say, "America is a young country."

"America is a young country."

"America is a young country."

"America is a young country."

Your excuses are contradictory. Your excuses are embarrassing me. 

Let us lay our nation's sins upon the table and stare at them for a while. Hold the papers of our past, ALL the papers of our past, and simply accept them, and then vow to do better, vow to be better.

What if we tell our children how to make amends? How to avoid war. How to allow peace. It isn't enough to mumble "sorry" and expect everyone to forgive and forget.

"We were wrong. We are wrong. There is still so much inequality. I am sorry. I am learning, and I am paying your reparations through careful donations. "  

If we were honest. If we did vow to acknowledge the truth of America. If we were humble and devoted ourselves to making amends, then I would be a proud American. If the Earth (the land, air, water, animals, people, and plants) were placed above the profits of a few deep pockets, then I would fly the biggest and brightest, and most beautiful American flag I could find.

But until that day, I will work.

Come, children, come see. You will not be like me, seeing at 36 that my empathy has been shallow and narrow, my understanding incomplete. Instead, you will learn the complexities of this place so that one day you may help to mend it.

It is a reckoning.

A revolution.

It is a maturation in societal evolution. 

I am a White person / a White American citizen. 

This moment in the Black Lives Matter movement 

is a reckoning. Of what I am. And who we are. 

What we do and how we live. 

I have been an oppressor with ignorance and silence as my weapons. For silence is violence and so here is my voice: READ the books of brilliant Black people. Close your pale pink lips and swallow the sounds of their cries, their philosophies, and their robust histories. WATCH them. Watch them drum. Watch them dance. Watch them live. Watch them suffer and rise, as Maya wrote, for still, they rise. Now LISTEN to them sing. Listen to these caged birds sing and sing. 

I have been complicit because I have allowed the world to tend to me and my tenderness, while it leaves so many others without essentials like freedom and air, health care, food, and clean water. I am a garden of fragile flowers. When I am not weeded, I weep. When I am not watered, I wilt. Love is my sun. I am no different from anyone, but I have been cared for by my country community. My tenderness has been tended to and so now I am so alive I thrive.

This sleeve of skin I am in, the one lacking melanin, should not be the reason I am tended to while others are not. We are all gardens of fragile flowers and we all deserve tending. 

I am a white person.

It's a lot. 

A pandemic, 

a potential civil war, 

a fascist American monarchy, 

and white supremacy seeped so deeply into this society 

and consequently scattered inside of me. 

Let me write this plainly. I am a white person. 

Because of this light skin, I have privilege. 

What does privilege mean? 

Immunity. 

I am not looking for pity. I promise I won't use my white woman's tears to save me. I am not the victim here. I am part perpetrator, partially to blame for my own miseducation and partially to blame for my own inaction. It is on me now to do the work. So I am seeking and finding more author educators. Brilliant Black people to read and learn from. That's what I should be doing right now actually, starting chapter three of the book, Me and White Supremacy. I thought I understood what was happening, but I have been skimming the surface. It is not enough to empathize with victims of incredible inequality and unwavering brutality. It is not enough to imagine the same thing happening to me and my family. It is not enough to weep. It is not enough to not be blatantly racist. This is what I've learned so far. I must learn how to be anti-racist. I also must seek and act and change. 

I know the weight of my civil rights reality check is feather-light compared to the heavy load a Black mother must be currently holding, sending her babies out into this deeply racist country during a pandemic and a potential civil war where a fascist American monarch is screaming support for police brutality and white supremacy. Let's all remember what he said about the white people wearing automatic weapons on the steps of a statehouse. Let's all remember how he had tear gas blown at protesters so that he could pose with a bible before a church. Let's all remember that he's an old white man in power doing what old white men in power have done for eons, which is attempting to control individuals with fear and violence. 

It's a lot. 

A pandemic, 

a potential civil war, 

a fascist American monarchy, 

and white supremacy seeped so deeply into this society 

and consequently scattered inside of me. 

Again, I'm not looking for pity.  I will practice recognizing my white fragility (learn what this is if you don't know already) and the privileges I reap from centuries, or rather a whole history of savage white supremacy.  I will seek. I will act. I will change. I will be changed.  

 

being there to say "I love you"

I can't keep from singing There are many ways to say I love you by Mr. Fred Rogers.

there are many ways to say
i love you
there are many ways to say 

i care about you
many ways
many ways

many ways to say
i love you

there are many ways to say
i love you
just by being there when things are sad and scary
just by being there
being there
being there to say
I love you

cleaning up a room can say 

i love you
hanging up a coat before you're asked to do it
making special pictures for the holidays
and making plays

you'll find many ways to say
i love you
you'll find many ways to understand what love is
many ways
many ways
many ways to say
i love you

I glanced at a news headline tonight. So now on and on my mind sings.

We cannot always be there to say "I love you." Not even now when things are truly sad and scary.

At this new time of social isolation, we are together in spirit and through screen, in phone call, text message, email, social media, and mailed letter. We are there not in skin, but we are together, proving our love by word, and by not being there in body.

"I love you," we say by staying away.

We can be strong. We can feel through these sad and scary feelings. We can weep at loneliness. We can feel the creeping insanity of uncertainty. We can sing. We can scream. We can grow from this. We can love harder during this time and then forever after this time. We can dance. We can remain in the solitary confinement of our separate homes, sending out love in every other way imaginable.

And that just needs to be enough for right now.

We can holler I love you from across the street, or from driveway to doorstep, or from between our parked cars. We can sit in awkwardness together as yet another video call freezes or an elder can't find their camera or the children can't keep from performing for each other and missing one another. We can call because we all feel better when we do. Even though we can't be there in body, we can be in our separate heres and still say, "I love you." Mr. Rogers was right. There are many ways to say it.

If you are reading this, I love you. Whether you are my 90-year-old grandmother, or we have never met. For that is the beauty of human empathy. I love you.