Sometimes I Wish

Sometimes I wish

we could fit in

because the systems tell us this is what one must do to deserve resources & care

an economy of lengths and widths and depths

ignores aberrant lines of flight

but this story veils the homemade research dream puzzling

low hums of thoughts

always whirring over you

daily eyes and ears and

guts pour out

surrounding your speech-acts in wonder

unknowing certainties privilege folds into my skin

I try with what I am

I do with what I have

always imagining

infinite

you

Beauty, Middle Fingers and Parental Pause

Middle Finger Graffiti in Berlin Elevator in Wedding Photo Credit: Iwan Gabovitch

The sun was setting.

Dinner was done.

Nina (my 6 year old daughter) rocked in the back porch hammock with quiet confidence slathered all over her smugly smiling lips as her 3 year old brother Jurian bathed in devastation.

Jurian (through buckets of tears): Nina told me I am not beautiful.

Me: Nina, how would you feel if Jurian told you you were not beautiful?

Nina: I would put my middle finger up at him if he said anything about how I looked.

Me: Nina?

<<Pause>>

<<Pause>>

Me: What I meant to say is please don’t try to hurt your brother’s heart on purpose. I think his heart is hurt. And yes, if someone says something about how you look, I do think you should tell them that’s wack. That’s right.

It’s moments like these when I hear the record screech to a halt. It’s all quiet and I can hear myself repeating a 100 year old script I likely heard from adults my whole life who heard from adults their whole lives and so on – that “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” aka golden rule logic. In many situations, it doesn’t actually work out that mathematically, nor should it. And there are probably so many moments like these when I don’t hear myself being heard by someone else, but tonight…tonight…I did. And it gave me (thank god) a little pause.

30 seconds like these make me feel like I’m raising another generation. My mother probably had these too. They were probably about things I’d consider small now in my 40s, but I truly believe it’s events like these that bear weight as we move forward in the world. Here she is. At the age of 6 she has used her words to bring her brother to tears; words she knows and has heard should hurt feelings. Perhaps they’ve hurt her feelings before as well. I can recall many a tearful recounting of “someone said I wasn’t a pretty girl because I wasn’t wearing a dress” or “they said I was ugly because I didn’t have long enough hair.”

Today, after a couple of years of tears, she is building up that steely armor. That woman who won’t take shit for her looks or hear people telling you how you should and shouldn’t dress, sit, stand, talk, think, feel, and basically exist as a powerful person in the world.

I don’t get it right 100% of the time, but I’m proud to endorse my daughter putting her middle finger up at anyone who has something to say about how she looks.

It’s not traditional research, but it’s worth a read…Reasons Moms Who Swear are the Best F*#$ing Moms and gave me the fire to post about this tonight. #goodcompany

Tweets, Teacher Talk & Winnie the Pooh

 

 

Image Credit: Thoth God of Knowledge

 

Last night I wasn’t feeling so well. It had been a long week and it was only Wednesday. I had been working late every night, getting up early, and couldn’t see an end in sight. I still don’t, but Iwoke up to a loving colleague tweeting about a remarkable student post about classroom work in my course. It’s not often that you get tangible, detailed, positive feedback at 6 in the morning. Let’s just say it was well-timed and the day continued to surprise as I had a rousing conversation about Minds Online with SEU faculty, several students came and engaged in the English Eddies Teacher Circle (along with venerable AISD 2013 Teacher of the Year Sarah Dille and her colleagues Ginger Gannaway and Janie Lewicki) and I arrived home to a swarm of smiling children who wanted to read Winnie the Pooh and go to sleep. Kind of a dream.  Feeling grateful. Going to bed.

Theatre of the Absurd

She expected me to be devastated.

“Ms. Johnson, come over here and look at this.”

“What?”

“Come over here and take a look at my screen; at Sadie’s growth chart.”

I come over in time to see her hitting zoom in 25 times. I can see the almost flat line barreling down the one yard highway between my chair on the wall and her laptop hanging on the washbasin counter.

“Ok. Tell me what you’d like me to observe.”

It was like she was doing a see think wonder with a growth chart I’ve been scrutinizing at the will of doctors since June 5, 2007 (Sadie’s birth).

“The line is flat. We are at the standard deviation of 3 since you can’t be less than zero. There are no numbers less than zero on growth charts.”

“Ok.”

I am nodding my head with full knowledge that there are no zeros, but apparently, there are people who are “abnormal” or who “deviate” from the norms these charts work to maintain.

“Tell me what you want me to infer from this chart and these numbers.”

It’s like she’s afraid to say what’s on her mind and what she’s thinking, but has a plan for how this visit should go, for the observations I should make and the conclusions I should draw. I am playing dumb because my kid has always been outside the norm. I have never thought she would meet preconceived expectations. I work everyday to see her with an open heart and mind because she deserves to NOT always have the norm foisted upon her by the world that will inevitably foist it, even if it does in the name of kindness and care.

“She has been taking growth hormone for a year and patients with pseudohypo don’t usually respond to it.”

I bite my tongue and work to shrink in, but have a hard time not saying it, so it spills out.

“Based on the chart it does look like she’s losing weight, so I would gather that the response she is having is weight related and based on early results in clinical trials run by Dr. Emily Germaine Lee at Kennedy Krieger center in Baltimore, PHP1a patients lose weight on growth hormone. I’d also imagine that her internal organs might be growing. That seems important”

“But we can’t measure that,” she blasts. “We can only measure height and visible bone growth.”

“Ok. Are you telling me you want her to stop taking growth hormone?”

“No. I’m trying to set expectations.”

“Mine? Hers? Yours? About?”

All this time Sadie’s eyes are pingponging between my head and the endocrinologist’s. Tears are welling in my eyes. Sadie comes over to place her hand on my knee.

“My daughter is small. She has always been small. Are you trying to tell me she will always be small? I am ok with that. I was ok with that before we started taking growth hormone.”

It was why I, for a long time didn’t want her to take growth hormone. I didn’t want her to ever think that we needed her to grow to achieve some imagined expectations norms produced for her prior to her conception, in utero, and everyday since her birthday. I didn’t want her to live with the bodily-not-enoughness so many have to bear.

Not the doctor, but similar smile

The doctor stares at me with a weird smirky smile that seems to have an affected care about it or grandmotherly reassurance. The smile is unnerving because it’s packed full of how she thinks I should or would respond and the role she and this doctor’s visit might play in my expectations for my child. What she doesn’t know is how I think and feel about norms and bodies and my role as a parent for NOT setting expectations for my child and teaching her to ignore AND put the middle finger up to those who do. What the doctor doesn’t know is what makes this whole event feel so weird to me. It’s as though we are playing roles in a play that the doctor authored with a script she is holding onto and has read many times; rehearsed with other families, possibly in medical school or during her residency. It feels stilted and played out like an SNL skit; two two dimensional cardboard characters reading tele-prompters while simultaneously going through the motions.

And there is Sadie, looking around, distracting herself, wondering, studying, worrying about me…I’m pissed that she worries about me. I’m pissed that the doctor is putting me in a position where I am supposed to play the parent with expectations she is going to work on in front of my child. If Sadie invites me to a therapy session with her when she is 27 and we have to work through this doctor’s office visit, I won’t be surprised. The position this produces for her makes me sick to my stomach…makes me have to write this.

“If she follows at this standard deviation. If… She may be four foot eight.”

“That seems pretty tall,” I remark. “I’m 5’7. That’s less than a foot shorter. That puts her around my shoulder. That surprises me.”

I’m playing along, but this still feels weird. What are we doing? What is she doing? The doctor leads me out to the hallway, so we can look at the freaky measuring device they bounce on Sadie’s head at every appointment.

We stare at the empty space while the doctor calculates inches to centimeters and lowers the bouncy measuring board to display my daughter’s imagined future full grown height. The empty space below the bouncy board on the measuring device fills with my silence. The doctor’s stare at me is pregnant with expectation. I stand there. I don’t know what to say. I scream for my line. It doesn’t come. The doctor beckons to me with open arms. I think she wants me to hug her. She wants to console me. I do not want to mourn over my daughter’s height differential. I do not want to feel pity or sadness or anger or loss over her not meeting some imagined potential produced by norms that rank and classify. Like a rag doll, I hug her. That seems to be the key that unlocks the moment. We move back into the office. She tells me an inspirational story about a nurse who worked for her who was 4’8″ and could do anything. She had to drive a special car, but… This is a nice story. It is a planned story. The doctor seems done with the script.

Now she is relaying changed dosing information and setting up future blood draws to monitor hormone levels. Now we are back to business as usual. Mother cries. Doctor embraces mother. Doctor tells mother inspirational story. Doctor hands mother lab orders. Mother leaves reassured, listened to, empathized with. Mother completes patient survey and gives high ratings for visit.

I don’t want to be a part of this play. I want to write a different one where Sadie and I are the authors, not the doctor and the growth charts. Sure people will assume she is less capable, younger, etc. But it’s not my job to be that person or to mourn because Sadie isn’t somebody she isn’t. Sadie can, but I cannot. I don’t even want to. I fear people will hurt her feelings, that people will take advantage of her, that she will be dismissed more than the next kid. But many parents raising kids beyond the White middle class heteronormative (the list could go on) regime live with those fears and worse. The only power I have is power to live with her beyond those normative scripts people want us to embody daily, so she grows up knowing she IS all I want her to be.

Getting Ready, Getting Excited…Getting Scared?!

I’ve been working feverishly on syllabi and thinking about all the interesting ideas, activities, and projects I want to engage students in over the coming semester. All that being said, I look at my notes and my documents and my designs and feel overwhelmed with all the new I’m going to be learning along with all the new faces and places I’m going to be meeting and exploring. It is all I can do to keep myself from sitting on the couch and staring into space at all the new.

I suppose this is the month out/night before school jitters that I’ve learned to expect and almost appreciate. Once I get in the swing of things, kinks will work out, surprises will emerge, and there will be a new beginning again. If only I could keep all that perspective at the forefront of my thoughts enough to quiet them and capture a worker-bee-like buzz.

Things I do to chill myself out in these moments of pre-semester jitters:

1. Log in to Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp.

2. Check texts, email & write friends about totally unrelated writing, research, and life projects.

3. Blog.

4. Review a new book I’d like to use.

5. Make todo lists of tiny things I can do to move forward when I’m overwhelmed or brain dead.

6. Search for chocolate.

7. Calendar things.

8. Go to bed.

9. Take a shower.

10. Go for a run.

Facebook Empty

Facebook on my iPhone was my cigarette. Maybe it was the way my life had been diced into tiny bits for work, family, and self-care, but it had taken over all the in-betweens. At red lights I found myself checking. Walking to school pick up, I found myself checking. Moving around I found myself thinking about what people would think if I snapped a shot of my kid’s creepy drawing all over her belly and her nipples with a red marker or a Grandma Rambo Grambo poster in a neglected Staten Island pizzeria. I imagined Facebook friends’ comments before they’d even happened, carrying their cyber voices around in my life, living in a real-virtuality that gave me periodic twitches and more opportunities to slip away from writing, grading, cleaning, driving, sleeping, hanging out.

Toward the end of May, I noticed some friends posting a lot, maybe too much? It gave me that sad feeling. The same sad empty feeling I’d get after checking my account 5 times in 2 hours. It was the beginning of the summer. Time was opening up. I could see it and I could see it gone.

The fear of the Facebook vacuum sucking my soul and my summer up slipped into my dreams and into my shower the next morning as I hatched a plan. I turned off the water, quickly dried off and hunted for my phone. My finger weighed on the tiny app icon and I watched it jiggle. The x popped up. One tiny tap and poof! I felt the fear rise, the summer open up, and the warm blanket of time and possibility seep into my shoulders.

Facebook was still there and it was still a cigarette, but I’d flushed my pack down the toilet and exchanged it for those moments when you bum one from a friend or snag one quiet moment away from the storm.