Hard Questions

     As I look at the many titles strewn across the coffee table about slavery and civil rights, I wonder how far we have come. I try to explain to my children what it meant to be owned, to be told where to sit, where to eat, to be told you were not, by nature, good enough. I tell them Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was preaching and marching and changing our world while their grandmothers were in high school. This is an impossibility to them, that this part of our history could be so recent. They ask questions, not understanding the word “black” as it is used in some of the books, ask why there is only “black” and “white” when they see so many different colors. Some of their questions I can answer, some I can’t. The hardest question: “do people still feel that way?” “Some, unfortunately,” is the truth I tell them with longing that I could give them a different answer. I know the answer they want would be a lie, and I cannot tell it.

     My favorite question, though, and the one that gives me the most hope for the future on this eve of celebrating a man who changed the world, “how did people know whether someone was black or white?”  I love that I have no answer.

Hard Questions

     As I look at the many titles strewn across the coffee table about slavery and civil rights, I wonder how far we have come. I try to explain to my children what it meant to be owned, to be told where to sit, where to eat, to be told you were not, by nature, good enough. I tell them Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was preaching and marching and changing our world while their grandmothers were in high school. This is an impossibility to them, that this part of our history could be so recent. They ask questions, not understanding the word “black” as it is used in some of the books, ask why there is only “black” and “white” when they see so many different colors. Some of their questions I can answer, some I can’t. The hardest question: “do people still feel that way?” “Some, unfortunately,” is the truth I tell them with longing that I could give them a different answer. I know the answer they want would be a lie, and I cannot tell it.

     My favorite question, though, and the one that gives me the most hope for the future on this eve of celebrating a man who changed the world, “how did people know whether someone was black or white?”  I love that I have no answer.

The Waiting Place

     Anybody who has read, Oh the Places You’ll Go which, I know for sure, is everyone my mom has ever given a graduation present to, has probably come to fear The Waiting Place. That anomalous page of the book shows what looks like people from Soviet-era Moscow waiting in a breadline, depressingly aware that they will not get any again today. I have seen that place in my nightmares; me sitting around, projectlessly twiddling my thumbs. I have fought long and hard against the Waiting place, preferring always to push on, push through even when I know it might not be the smartest or safest idea. Alternately closing eyes on a road trip to push on for a few more miles, check. Not stopping to put the paint lid back on so I can finish painting a bureau, check. As Dr. Seuss made clear, the waiting place was not for me.

     I am starting down the road to a realization, though, that maybe the waiting place is for me, at least sometimes. Maybe ripping up the carpet a week before Christmas is a bad plan, and maybe pushing that denim through the sewing machine despite the smoke coming out was also a bad plan. Maybe, just maybe, waiting would have been a better choice for both of those projects. Maybe waiting isn’t quite as bad as the fantastical Seuss has made it out to be. Maybe waiting gives us time to think, to reflect, to figure out what it is we really want, who it is we are. Maybe we’re waiting because the universe has not devised a plan yet, or maybe we’re waiting because our own plan is lacking. Either way, I think, on my way to 40, it might be time to accept that sometimes the waiting place is not a dreadful departure from forging on, but a necessary part of life. Everything cannot be now; paths cannot be laid out unceasingly. So, here I wait, at the crossroads, hoping to accept that the crossroads, too, are part of the endless journey. Happy waiting…

Gift horses

     Today, I have been given three beaded bracelets, one picture of a rainbow, help with moving heavy furniture from small hands and a copy of a New Year’s poem written by an eight year old where “future” is spelled “fucher,” (go ahead and try; it defies any non-expletive pronunciation.) I count these gifts and wonder how, at the end of the day, I could feel so tired, push so hard for bedtime to happen quickly, read one less book than requested and feel myself being spread so thin, stretched to the point of breaking.  How could I feel so relieved at being able to get on pinterest for a few minutes without someone needing a snack, needing to get wiped; needing, really, a small piece of me.

     Today, I have not been given more hours in a day than yesterday, more mental and physical energy or less on my to-do list. In this wonderful thing I like to call semi-large family living, I don’t think those things will be given to me any time soon. However, where I put that energy and how I spend those hours is up to me, every day. I can choose to listen to a seemingly endless but clearly important diatribe on eleven year old relationships, I can choose to sit in wonder at our poet-in-resident and her capacity for expressing emotions, I can choose to throw snowballs at their fort walls, and sometimes, I can and do choose to organize that shelf that has been irritating me forever, or read the new National Geographic for ten minutes with the door closed.

     In the last few days, my oldest has been watching home videos. In one of them, my now five year old was not quite 3. She was sitting on the floor of her room playing with a toy cell phone and putting her baby in a basket. Her hair was almost non-existent and she was lost in her imaginary world. I’m so glad I took the time to capture that moment, because that little girl has changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable in two years. I had almost forgotten those quiet times on the floor and the sound of her voice, so soft and malleable. I have read heartwrenching quotes about how quickly children grow since my oldest was a newborn, but there is nothing like the passage of time in your childrens' faces that will make you feel it in every inch of your being.  In addition to my much more practical and mundane resolutions at the start of this year, I have made another, more important one. I will not look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when those horses come bearing gifts they have made with their hands and hearts, because I am still, to them, their favorite person. I will still organize shelves and I will still have to clean the living room, but I will make sure I look in their eyes and accept what they give with love, because that is the spirit in which they were given.