Love under scrutiny

     If you want to see yourself in the harshest possible light, have a three year old and a four year old stare at your face from four inches out. “Your hair is kind of two different colors” (thank you Loreal), “what is that red dot?” (thank you, Irish ancestry), and my favorite, “I think some of your hair is silver too” (thank you to all 36 of my birthdays.)

     The thing that always fills me with wonder in this process is that all that scrutiny doesn’t matter to them. Because in the end, they stick their wet thumbs in their mouths and lay those little faces on my chest contentedly. They make it ever so clear that none of the features that make us different, the ones we sometimes try to hide, matter in the slightest. Kids love because they love. Why? Because that’s what love is. As is so popularly repeated, love is blind. But, love is blind not because differences, peculiarities and irregularities aren’t noticed, but because they are overlooked; kids inherently know that surfaces don’t matter.

     A few weeks ago, when the wonderful news story about the record clearing of nine civil rights protesters (the Friendship Nine) came out, I read it to my kids. At the time, my oldest daughter’s class was discussing Ruby Bridges and Rosa Parks and my older son was learning about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. I thought the modern day news story would connect them to the fallout from slavery and the process our slow redemption has taken us on since the Civil War.  When I got done with the article, one of my daughters asked why, for so long, we thought black people and white people were different. Being born in 1978, and to parents who  raised me to be color blind,  when I am faced with this question, I always have a hard time answering. I talked about the European worldview at the time of colonization as well as differences in culture and economy in a long and meandering way.

     After my diatribe, I was met with blank stares. I realized that no matter how I tried to phrase my answer, it wouldn’t matter. These children were born in the 21^st century and have absolutely no idea how it is possible to hate someone because of anything they can see, nor what it feels like to feel better than someone else by virtue of ancestry. What a blessing this is; what a debt of gratitude we, as a nation, owe to the many people along the way who have made it possible for our children to be open to the world, to be oblivious to any thinking that implies differences on the surface mean anything more underneath. To children, love is blind, and in the end, isn't that the only true kind?