What I Learned On The Way To My Life

This happened on the way to my life.

My eleven year old daughter is quirky, bubbly, math genius, and champion fighter of all things chronic illness. She plays the cello, guitar, is a chess whiz, sings, can out-build anyone with Legos, and is my last child. She is the reason why I took a ten-year detour through my product and brand marketing career to discover so much more in the world. She has allowed my world to expand and grow by her presence and her courage.

Her sister, my thirteen year old, is equally as remarkable, focused, quietly intent, socially conscious, writer, budding fashion maven, expert texter with her friends, and lover of animals. She is a student leader, honor student, violinist, someone who will need a personal assistant to hang up all her clothes, and the greatest conversationalist on world issues. She welcomed my parent challenges and strict codes, while also challenging me to trust her judgment. She is my twin.

These little girls, after a houseful of boys, have changed my world in more ways than my morning latte flavors. It is through them and in sacrificing to be one-hundred-percent available to them, that my advocacy, activism, and voice took shape.

When I had my sons, I thought I was conquering the world as a working mother, one who took the sons, lock-stop-and-barrel, off to graduate school with me. I put my graduation cap on the middle son and dubbed him the future scholar. He is now a married man with a son on the way, head of security for a major downtown hotel, former Navy man, and still a scholar. He and his brothers, the artist and lyricist and the opera major, were both part of my growing up. I wanted them to see me as strong and capable, despite my divorce and lack of child support, I wanted them to know that nothing was impossible with a determined heart and thoughtful budget. In them now, as men, I see a lot of the same dedication and discipline that I had to use as a young divorced mom.

My girls have changed my life in so many ways. I was on my way to my life when I first became pregnant with child #5. It had been years since I had been in that state, I was remarried, in my dream home, in a great position, and breathing after years of disciplined order. We were not spend thrifts  by any means, we just could breathe, had it to give, travel, and give the boys things I always wanted them to have.

The girls, however,challenged that perspective when their existence and my corporate exit were also met with a child with chronic illness and a couple job changes for my husband. I began to examine my assumptions of what it all meant to have it and what would it take to keep it.

My husband and I intentionally avoided the housing lust for more square footage and dressing rooms than we needed. Both of us knew that it could be fleeting and something could change, we wanted to be able to live on just one salary. We chose our newly built home on one side instead of the other, an up-and-coming suburb with land enough for acreage and affordability in a  great school district. We got the square footage we needed with a large and growing family. The five bedrooms were all used and still more felt like it was needed. Yet, we wanted to make sure we could eat more than noodles if one of us stopped working.

Our children laughed and joked in that house we called home. The girls were born there, the boys had friends over, learned to cook in my big kitchen, and simply be in one spot for several years. They mowed the lawn, raked the leaves, shoveled the snow, and knew the home would be there.

When my husband took at job across state and the middle son graduated from high school, we had to make a decision. Do we continue being a highway family, like so many are doing now, and keep a strain on defining what it meant to be family? Or do we walk away from our beloved 3500 square feet and re-establish ourselves somewhere else?

The move to the new city was traumatic and opportune. It was ideal for my youngest son, now a junior in college preparing for his opera recital, all on scholarship, at a university he loves.  The girls found friends and have now been here for as long as the boys were there. Each set of my children has different memories of what their childhood was like and where they place home.  My middle son returned to the country to move about fifteen minutes away from the home he left as a new recruit. My oldest son lives about thirty minutes away from there. Home carries memories and it is so different with each one how they determine place for themselves.

My girls and I are preparing to visit the youngest son for his big recital and are anticipating a week of spring rest. In our packing and selecting, we invaded the son's room for space to spread out. We now live in a 1900 square foot townhouse that my New York visitors thought was huge and my St. Louis friends think is small. The girls, husband, and I strike a delicate balance of space, with my fussing about their junk. It was in that fussing that the girls wanted to find out if their brother was coming home or not.  When he said he wasn't going to be home for spring break or the summer, the girls lit up like it was Christmas and started pulling out the design books so they could redo the space.

The news shocked me and reminded me. I raised my sons to be independent of me and to go out into the world and be all they were intended to be. When I was younger and harried, I couldn't wait for them to be "eighteen and out." Now, at the middle stages in my life, I sometimes wish we homesteaded and lived close by. I miss the sound of noise in my home and secretly entertain my middle son's request that I move back closer to him.

Life is a cycle and the ebbs and flow are what makes it worth it. In the middle of devastating news and challenging assumptions, sometimes it is family that reminds us of what it is all about.  I may never live to see the changes I advocate for, may never see the day when my future grandchild, a mix of cultures, won't be otherized because he may end up with his great-grandmother's walnut coloring instead of his grandmother's café au lait or his other grandmother's olive native skin. Genetics like life is random and a gift of wonder. I wonder about this little person, that I am alive to see my son's son is a thought I cherish as he is being developed in his mother's womb. The thought makes me smile and makes me hope.

The thing I've learned is that mistakes will happen, children don't come with instruction manuals, everyone is different, life is still worth living, the adventure is worth it, and lattes are amazing.

All Together Random, Yet Connected, Thoughts on Ferguson, Selma's 50, Race, Equity, and Lattes

This has definitely been the week that race made.

The weekend before this was the children's march for black lives, in memory of those murdered under age 18, and led by those under age 18.

That was followed by the report of the Department of Justice confirming what the activists and protesters had been saying all along - the City of Ferguson was using the police to enforce a race-based policy of extortion on black people because the white people who lived there didn't want to pay the proper taxes to run their city.  Since this report came out just before the weekend, there was a release of some racist email exchanged by city employees - they have been fired. The body count has been increasing with more and more demands for true accountability so two judges have resigned and just today, the city manager has been terminated. Progress.

This past weekend, the same weekend that thousands descended upon Selma, Alabama to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that 50 mile march, a few white people and a sprinkling of black, met in a church in Kirkwood, Missouri to talk about race. A white theologian, a woman preacher activist, made some of them squirm in their seat when she challenged their idolatry and clinging to racism. She named statistics of cop stops in Kirkwood, Webster, LaDue, and Clayton, all tony, quiet, and mostly white upper income suburbs untouched by the ravages of Ferguson, or so they think.

Sunday, International Women's Day, found three women and a man, all active in the movement, sitting in the front of a cathedral, facing a mostly white audience, discussing why they protest. The four, two of them Ferguson Commission Members, openly answered questions from the moderator and a few from the audience. One of the biggest points was made when one of the same-gender-loving protesters said that when she wakes up, she is in a protest, the simple fact of being married to a woman, making good grades on her college exams, coming home to make dinner for her wife, and  hang out with their daughter, is an act of protest.

The afternoon ended with some of the audience members, mostly young and white, carrying signs that said "black lives matter" along with signs about women, down the sunlit streets of downtown St. Louis. It was an interesting sight, a moment to just be in sabbath while someone else picked up the mantle.

Rest was not long, though, because this conversation is longer than my jubilee years. As long as there is fear of the other and continued otherizing anyone who is not white, male, protestant, and middle class. There was a MOnday morning and while the television news hasn't beat through the walls of this townhouse, twitter, facebook, and online news is tripping over itself to run every story they sat on about race.

There was a story about the forced confessions of black children.

Another one about the disparate treatment in education.

One about the Afro-Latinas, in celebration of International Women's Day. I share this heritage and joked that I should change applications to check all the boxes except white, since my heritage is black and Latina and Caribbean and Creole.

There was a moment of brief joy with the snow melting and the sun being welcomed back with short sleeves and tossed coats. There was a moment when Al Jazeera stopped by to have a pre-Selma interview when we just talked about New York pizza and my daughters and I just wanted to dial back three years.

Yet pain continued to invade the living spaces.

A black man, barely nineteen, was gunned down by police, in his home in Madison, Wisconsin.

A black man, naked as a jay bird, mentally ill, probably suffering from PTSD, a veteran, was gunned down by police in Atlanta, Georgia.

A white fraternity was videotaped singing the most racist song, they have now been removed from the university and the president expelled some of the members. The wait continues for strong action from the SAE national office, however, like the KAs, another white fraternity known for their fervent racism, the wait continues.

My daughter, budding activist, said she didn't want to have to deal with all this when she is may age and was trying to figure out how she could nip this in the bud now. She pondered the reasons behind it and what could be done. We chatted, I listened, She already made history, there is more for her to do and in my secret heart, I hope she is not dealing with this at my age.

It seems impossible that the simple dignity of living as human beings, fully actualized in the divinely appointed gifts, is so much of a threat to someone that they go out of their way to destroy. This is the existence of Ferguson residents and of so many black people who are in protest just by breathing, by achieving, like the Oakland senior with a 2100 SAT and 5.0 GPA, and is dark with long locs. The people who wake up every day, in the face of so much opposition to their presence, that they square their shoulders and walk sternly over the bridges that try to separate them from their purpose.

The white flag waving and peace offerings seem to be a little too convenient, a little too late. Peace is meant to calm down the masses, meant to quiet things, meant to put it back to "normal." Without justice, there can be no peace.