a different kind of mom

Am I a different kind of black folk? Am I a different kind of mom?

Every day I go to pick up Ahmir at preschool, I ask him what he did and who he did it with. I’m interested in building his group of friends beyond those he sees every day to especially those he sees at preschool only twice a week. For several weeks now he has spoken about a little boy named Peter, so on Thursday as we were leaving, I asked Ahmir to point Peter out to me.

“Mommy, there he his!”

I spotted Peter, and fortunately, he was there with a woman, someone I presumed to be Peter’s mother. I encouraged Ahmir to say goodbye to Peter, thinking it was a good opportunity for me to introduce myself to Peter’s mother and set the stage for sometime after the winter break to possibly have Peter over for a playdate.

Some background before I continue – a few months back I wrote this note about the racial self-segregation at this preschool and my concerns about it. Since then I’ve learned, from both parents and teachers and also some great books, that this is entirely normal behavior. What parents can and should do, however, is have explicit conversations, starting at 3 or 4, about race and difference and equality or else children will come to their own conclusions, including inferences about in-group superiority or inferiority.

So, as I am walking up to this woman, who is dressed very nicely with a fancy silk scarf around her neck, black boots, pretty jewelry and makeup, I become aware of what I must look like. I’m actually aware of this each time I walk into the school because I know I look very much unlike most of the middle-class white women who come to pick their children up in the middle of the afternoon. First, which I actually think might be more indicative of my difference than my race, is the fact that I look so young. Most people, be they black, white, or whatever, cannot believe that I have two children. I am often mistaken for an undergrad that is volunteering at the school, or possibly a grad student, but never as a parent. Not only do I have a young face, but I’m sure I dress the part as well. I’m usually on my bike, in yoga pants or jeans and sneakers. In the winter I have on a winter hat, and maybe a bookbag. So I’m sure that as I approached this woman yesterday, my sneakers, jeans, and leather jacket indicated to her a difference in age of at least 10 years.

But the next part is about race, and then class. There are two things about the school worth mentioning here. First, the school, which is affiliated with the university and is on campus, offers a scholarship for families who can’t pay full tuition. We are one of those families. However, if you are a family that lives in Palo Alto (the neighboring city), where the median family income is $117,000, you probably don’t need the scholarship. On the contrary, if you live in East Palo Alto, where the majority of the brown people in the area live, and the median family income is $44,300, you might need the scholarship. Anecdotally, there is a perception in the area that if you are black, you live in EPA. I believe the same applies at the school.

So while I cannot say for sure, of course, as I approach this woman, not only do I think she is ascertaining my age, she is also taking account of my race and my class. And it shows. She has absolutely no interest in making conversation, talking about our children’s friendship, or anything. She wants to get away from me and Ahmir as fast as she can. She is polite, not rude, but any fantasy that I had establishing a relationship is gone before I had any chance to dream one up. And for a brief second I wanted to shout out – but I’m different, don’t you see! Can’t you tell by the way I talk that I’m just like you! Actually I’m probably smarter than you – I have a BS from Wharton, and an MA from Penn, and I’m working on a JD and a PhD from Stanford, and everyone thinks I’m, brilliant – hey wait!

But I didn’t. She walked away, and I’m glad she did. ‘Cause I don’t want to play that game. I hate the “I’m different” game that so many of us play in order to gain favor in white folks eyes. I shouldn’t have to prove that I’m somehow “worthy” of your attention by distancing myself from people who look like me to show that there’s another “kind” of black folk out there that white people can feel comfortable around. By trying to solidify our class differences, they are playing a very simple conquer and divide tactic. Of this, I want no part. If you think I’m from EPA, whatever, so be it. Where one lives is nothing to be ashamed of. How much money one makes it nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, on the real – I make LESS than the median EPA income. How dare I be ashamed of being associated with hard working people who go to work every day?

But back to the story – I can’t deny that her snub doesn’t hurt. And Peter’s mother was not the first and she won’t be the last. While this is the first parent I’ve had the nerve to approach, I’ve watched other pairs of parents strike up conversations, swap numbers, and arrange playdates this quarter. But it’s never happened with us, at least not yet, I guess I should say. Even when you are used to it, something in you hopes for the best, hopes that it will be different this time. And for me, each time it’s not, instead of the hurt becoming less painful, it is like the knife just becomes sharper. But I thank God that my son is too young (I hope) to understand the snub that woman dealt us, even though I am sure that the loss is hers and not ours.

Do we need to prove our difference to make white people feel more comfortable? I remember once Will and I were having a conversation at a bar on Germantown Avenue with this white guy, and at the end of it he said, “Now if more black people were like you guys…” and my response was, “Then what?” I can’t even remember what we were “like” that night, but I remember thinking to myself, “Something just went terribly wrong…”

I have a habit of making white people uncomfortable. How, I’m not quite sure – I look them in the eyes when I speak, I dunno. But I have to admit, I like it. Discomfort is important. Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up middle class and now I’m chasing this high prestige occupation so I have perspective on both and find that I have a foot in both worlds and that makes them uncomfortable. I talk a lot of shit, even in class I challenge professors and I use slang and references to pop culture. I avoid academic language and legalese and try to talk so that my mommy and daddy could understand (who are both smart people, just not academics.)

Maybe it’s because I defy stereotypes of what a black female young-looking, dreadloc-wearing, yoga-doing, joint-degree pursuing, fibromyalgia and bipolar-having mothering academic is supposed to look like, which is weird because I don’t know nobody besides myself doing it so I don’t know what the stereotype would be.

black child’s burden

So a few days ago, I went to pick up Big Boy from preschool. He’s one of four black children of 36 in the classroom. As I was leaving, one of the teachers told me that he and the other black children (she referred to them by name, not as “the other black kids”) had fun all day playing “duck, duck. goose” and other games and told me that they had become great friends since the summer began. I smiled and said something like, oh, that’s nice, and went on my way. Something about it bothered me right then, but I couldn’t really put my finger on it, and besides, I had to go.

After I thought about it that night, I decided I was going to ask her more about it the next day. So the next day, I asked her, “You know, you mentioned yesterday that Big Boy and [the other kids, I also referred to them by name] had become good friends, and it occurred to me that they are all the black kids in the room, and I wondered what you thought of that.” She seemed a bit put off, caught off guard, and then just began nodding her head vigorously, and said, “Yeah, I know, I know. It’s not uncommon for children at this age [ages 3-5] to gravitate towards those who look like them. We often notice that, you know, a Koren child will find out that another Korean child speaks Korean and then they become friends.” I thought it best not to point out that Black people speak English just like everyone else so I wasn’t quite sure how her example provided any elucidation on the situation, but then she paused and said, “But it’s not like they are self-segregating themselves, I mean, they play with the other children too.”

That caused me to pause. Really? The first thing you think to say to reassure me is to make sure I know that the black kids aren’t self-segregating? What about the white children who are also playing in same-race groups? Would it be a question as to whether they are self-segregating? So of course I had to say something to that effect. “Oh, that wasn’t my concern. It was really whether the other children weren’t playing with them so that they felt compelled to play together.” Then she got really flustered. “Well, no, I mean, while they can see that they are different colors, they don’t really ascribe any values to that. I mean, we might, cause we know what that means, color and all, but they don’t.”

I know it’s the sociologist in me, but I know this is a bullshit answer. And I was dissapointed that she gave this answer. This is a research-based preschool, run by Stanford’s psychology department, where people are doing work on race and race relations. Therefore they should know what Van Ausdale and Feagin noted in their 2001 book “The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism,” a book that does an ethnographic study of preschoolers:

The children we observed in the day care center are actually doing life. They are not going through some waiting period during which their main goals are to mirror quietly or aggressively the ways of adults, delaying actual socialization, understanding, and performance until they are older. The children we observed take various bits of racial and ethnic information from the surrounding world and then experiment with and use that information in their everyday interactions with other children and with adults. …Most of the young white children in our study are helping to build, or rebuild, a racialized society with their own hands with the materials learned from the racial order of the adult world surrounding them.

This is crucial to understand. If she understood the adult world that most of these children come from, she would be much less likely to assume that the black children were segregating themselves from the white children, rather than the other way around. Big Boy and Baby Girl are the only black children in our “courtyard,” the area of student housing where we live. His friends here are of all colors – his “best” friend is a white/Asian child whose white mother is a friend of mine. Now some of the white children, on the other hand, I would bet see only white people for the majority of their day as they go along with their parents. They learn, unlike Big Boy, that having exclusively white friends, or friends that look just like you, is the norm. Ahmir learns that mommy and daddy have black friends that look like them, but also Asian friends and white friends and Latino friends – there is really no majority that they are surrounded with every day. So to suggest that my black child is the one that may be self-segregating, instead of looking at the actions of the white children simply flies in the face of the well-established racial research.

But where I am struggling in this is balancing being a parent with being a social scientist. Sometimes I think that being immersed in issues of race and justice all the time may make me too sensitive (ohh, i hate that word) in that I will never find this racial utopia that I so want for my kids and that choosing my battles on the racial front is going to be very important if I want my kids to have a normal life. Doing research on the black middle class has shown me that the racial utopia that perhaps black folk thought they would find with increased education and money does not exist and perhaps the racial issues become even more complex and difficult to identify and manage. I desperately want to recommend that the teachers at this school read The First R, but as a parent, I also do not want to alienate them out of concern for my child. If it was just about me, I would do it – I’ve already had to tell one professor that his lack of showing women and people of color photographers was sexist and racist – but when it comes to my kids, I’m on uncharted territory and I don’t know what to do.

Any thoughts?

i am not…

I wrote this July 11, 2009 on my facebook page:

Today has been a painful day. The aches in my body have hit what I hope is a peak, where the act of standing and sitting is sometimes too much. I have fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition where aches and pain come about for apparently no reason at all. I think it’s just one manifestation of something deeper within me, something that causes everything to be in overload all the time – like my emotions in the form of depression/bipolar II, my intestines in the form of IBS, in my sinuses in the form of year-round allergies.

For the first half of the day, I felt pretty sorry for myself. I’d gone about 3 months without a flare, and I thought they were done, like all the hard work I’ve put in in the last three months since my hospitalization was starting to manifest in good health. I mean, I’ve been eating well, exercising regularly, have even gotten to within 5 pounds of my pre-pregnancy (before Ahmir!) weight. I’ve been trying so hard to get better, and this setback threatened to be more than I could handle.

But as I walked through the bookstore this afternoon, trying to distract my mind from the pain, it came to me that I AM NOT MY PAIN. I need to say it again: I AM NOT MY PAIN. I am not the stiffness in my neck, the electric shocks in my arms, the soreness in my legs. I am not the suffering attached to the pain, the feeling of self-pity, guilt, and shame.

I had to remind myself of who I really am, beneath, because, and in spite of, the pain. Beneath my pain I am a child of God, made in the image of the Truth, perfect in my imperfection. I have a purpose in this life that is there with or without pain. I am rooted and established in Love. Because of my pain I am (learning) patience, compassion, empathy, and insight. I know some things that others do not because I have experienced this pain and lived to tell about it. I know what It means to feel pain and am able to comfort those who also feel pain. In spite of the pain I am a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, and a friend. I strive very hard to be good in all those roles, and know that most times I am giving all that I can to those relationships. I am multi-talented – I write, I sing, I draw, I paint, I photograph. And I do them well. I am an excellent student who will be an excellent scholar, an academic who can cross disciplinary boundaries with grace and ease. Pain can’t take any of those things away from me.

But I get angry sometimes too. I love God, I fear God, and sometimes I am so angry with God because I can’t understand. I can’t understand why I am in this pain, when I see people out there doing dirt but living happy, pain-free lives. And then I remember that in ALL things, God works for my good. ALL things. So while this pain is, well, painful, the lessons and blessings from it will be greater than I can ever imagine. Without this pain, maybe I wouldn’t have the compassion that I admire in myself. Without this pain, maybe I wouldn’t be learning the lesson of the importance of self-care, and not giving all of me away without first taking some of me for myself. Without this pain, I wouldn’t be cultivating this relationship with God that I didn’t have before.

And if I am not my pain, who am I? I’m a friend that likes to get Fraiche frozen yogurt on a daily basis (even though it’s $5 a pop). I’m a mother that enjoys taking pictures of her kids and going to the beach. I’m a wife that enjoys laughing with (and at) her husband. I love me a glass of Chardonnay, but even more a Gin and Tonic. I’m a vegetarian who sometimes has a taste for some In-and-Out Burger and some achee and saltfish. I like reality TV, and am especially amused at Wipeout. I’m a bit vain and paint my toenails weekly, keep my nails femininely long, am obsessed with my hair and just bought an eyebrow pencil and brush. I thought Twilight was okay (I just finished New Moon and think I’ma take a weeks-long break before starting book 3). I don’t always like to shower but do it because it’s considered good hygiene (and my husband badgers me about it). I like candy.

And all of that is much more important to me than this pain.

P.S. I tagged you not for any particular reason except that I thought maybe you’d like to know me a little better. If not, sorry. And I’d like to say that I won’t be obsessively checking to see if anyone comments, but that would be a lie. But please don’t let that compel you to respond. That’s my issue, not yours.

MIA

I feel like I’ve been MIA lately, in that so much is going on in the news and in my life and I haavent been my opiniontes self, at least not in uber-public forums such as this. But things are getting nutty and I feel drawn back in. From Iran to MJ to BET to Honduras to hip-hop to disability and bipolarity to parenting and religion, I’m in all these places trying to make sense of it all.

A few thoughts to get me started: BET might just be the worse thing out there for black people today. I’m in favor of renaming it Bamboozled Exploitation Television. Just downright shameful. Micheal Jackson is the greatest entertainer ever. No qualifications neccessary. He never wanted not to be black, but rather be accepted by all. We need to be watching the reaction to what’s happening in Iran. There was a coup in Honduras, reminiscint of Haiti. Again, watch. Hip-hop makes me sick. From now on, I’m caring about me, as both black and woman. If you are not for me, you are against me. That’s a warning to everyone. Mental illness is as much a disability as physical illness. I’m glad my university gets it. Do diagnoses really matter at the end of the day? I just want to be better, but Much of my recovery will depend on me. Makes life a little less fun, but a whole lot more worth living. In church yesterday, pastor preached a out understanding your true self on God’s eyes. I am coming to know that I am rooted and established in love that surpasses knowledge, and that gem of truth is what takes me through each day.

Have a wonderfully blessed day!

gloom and doom

Sunday night I experienced the worst mental and physical symptoms I have ever felt in my life, and I thought I was going to die. It’s no surprise that I suffer from mental illness, exactly what I’m still not sure. Major Depressive Disorder is the old standby, but I’m starting to think it may be a bit more. But I digress.

I was started on a new medication exactly one week ago. I was in such a bad place that I just took it without reading about it, and without throroughly discussing the possible side effects. Boy, I wish I would have. Never, ever, ever take  something that you don’t know what it’s going to do to you.

I spent Sunday feeling like I was going to jump out of my skin. I couldn’t take the noise of being in the car with my kids – it felt like their sounds were actually entering my body. I’ve always said it’s one thing to not feel safe in your external environments. But when you are not safe in your own body, you have a serious problem. And that problem took me to the ER.

Sparing all the details, they diagnosed me with akathisia, which according to Wikipedia:

is a syndrome characterized by unpleasant sensations of “inner” restlessness that manifests itself with an inability to sit still or remain motionless…Akathisia may range in intensity from a mild sense of disquiet or anxiety (which may be easily overlooked) to a total inability to sit still, accompanied by overwhelming anxiety, malaise, and severe dysphoria (manifesting as an almost indescribable sense of terror and doom)…High-functioning patients have described the feeling as a sense of inner tension and torment or chemical torture.

It was AWFUL. I really thought I was going to die. Thank God the psychiatrist knew what do to, based on the new drug I had recently started taking, which had nasty side effects all week (I’ve lost 7 pounds due to the naseau, sleepiness and restlessness…) Wandering through the maze and puzzle of mental illness SUCKS. I would not wish any of this on my worst enemy.

critique

I don’t know if I can survive in this business. As an update to a previous post, my ASA submission was actually accepted, so I’ll be presenting in a regular session. But while this is good news, the feedback I received has my heart racing and my stomach all upset and I don’t know if I can deal with this for the rest of my career as a sociologist. The first review was not so bad, suggesting that I add something to the paper to further contextualize it. Fine. But the second review, while stating that the paper is well done, boils down to saying that I’m not saying anything new. Which, in a way, I agree with. I don’t think much of anything in sociology is saying anything new. But what I think I’m doing is conceptualizing something that we already know to 1) broaden the concept as it’s been used in the past and 2) give us a new way of understanding not just the phenomenon I use as an empirical example, but also other parallel phenomena.

Ok, now that I’ve written that out I feel a little better in that I have a response to the critique. Breathe, breathe, breathe. Oh man, this is going to be the death of me. Please tell me this gets easier (even if it doesn’t, I need to be talked off of the ledge.)

Time to blog

I’ve been thinking a lot about priorities lately, and I’m sure you’ve noticed my lack of posting lately. As I haven’t been writing (or reading in the blogoshere for that matter) I’ve found, much to my surprise, that I really don’t have all this free time left over. Blogging takes time, but I used to think it was time I had. But I was wrong. I really don’t have time to blog, if I also want to do things like eat and sleep, and not multitask while I’m doing them (well of course not while sleeping, blogging actually took sleeping time.) I don’t want to delete the blog, as I’d like to share some things, but I’m coming to the realization that it must be sporadic, at times like now where I’m just waiting for a child to fall asleep. On mothers day. *sigh* I’m a bit of an exhibitionist, if I’m brave enough to admit it – I like to put myself out there, it keeps me honest and in the present- so I will be twittering. Follow me if you like

what about the rest?

When I think of The Rest, the first thought that comes to mind is “what remains,” “leftover,” as in “…and all the rest.” It was only today, as I talked to my doctor, that I realized the fallacy in my thinking. I was talking about how my energy shifted from last week’s hype-ness to this week’s lethargy. She replied that with all I’d been through lately, she wasn’t surprised that my body needed a lot of rest.

Rest for me has always come once everything was done, which meant that I often don’t get a lot of it. But of course the body is a bit more intelligent than the mind, and inevitably my body knocks me on my behind to the point where The Rest is no longer what remains or what is leftover after more important things are done, but primary, what gets done before all else. The Rest becomes as important as Doing, Thinking, and Planning, if not more so.

I’ve learned (or better yet, am *hopefully* learning) that The Rest does not take kindly to being an afterthought. The Rest for me is like gas in my car – it *can* run on fumes, but it’s not very happy doing so. It shakes a bit, sputters, and everything is just working so hard just to get up that hill that would be child’s play on a full tank. I know people who never let their tank get to less than a 1/4 full. They never run out of gas.

I’m trying to commit being done with relegating My Rest to The Rest, i.e. what’s leftover. Rather than taking The Rest only when I have nothing left, My Rest needs to come before the sputter, before the “doing too much” feeling creeps up, before the gas is gone. The thrill of seeing how low the tank can go, how long I can drive with the light on, how much further past ‘E’ the gauge can go, that thrill no longer excites me. I used to feel proud that my car could go another 70 miles once the light came on. No more.

I have to Rest what I’ve got before I don’t have it anymore.

mama’s salon

I’ve been MIA for the past few weeks, both literally and figuratively.* And I’m not really back. But while I was thinking about it, I wanted to post some pics of the beauty/barber shop we got goin’ on arounds here:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

I think he’s a lot more handsome with the short cut. The curls were cute, but I like this look better. f course, that’s just me. Y’all might feel differently… But the great thing about this is that now that we know we can do this at home, no more worrying about barbers and inadvertent loc-ing…

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Baby Girl’s new ‘do isn’t as dramatic as Big Boy’s, but please note the extra fluff. I think it’s just long enough for some pretty barrettes…

*…for reasons I’m not quite ready to divulge here. I’m sure I will one day, but I am still in the midst of it, and don’t have the proper perspective. And people who really know me in real life, but not intimately so, read this blog and it’s so personal that I need to be able to handle them and I can’t do that right now.

favorite words

I was listening to NPR this evening, and I heard a word that I like a lot: cacophony. Webster (well, okay, not Webster, but dictionary.com) defines cacophony as:

ca⋅coph⋅o⋅ny/kəˈkɒfəni/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [kuh-kof-uh-nee]

1.	harsh discordance of sound; dissonance: a cacophony of hoots, cackles, and wails.

2.	a discordant and meaningless mixture of sounds: the cacophony produced by city traffic at midday.

3.           Music. frequent use of discords of a harshness and relationship difficult to understand.

I don’t like cacophony, but I like the sound of the word.

Speaking of which, I do have a favorite word whose meaning I really like: serendipity.

ser⋅en⋅dip⋅i⋅ty /ˌsɛrənˈdɪpɪti/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [ser-uhn-dip-i-tee]

1.	an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.

2.           good fortune; luck: the serendipity of getting the first job she applied for.

Who wouldn’t like that? Do you have a favorite word?