Anticipation

I'm really excited about leading my Song of Myself workshop at the FGC Gathering next week. This will be the fourth time I've done it; twice previously at Gathering and once for a group in my monthly meeting. I love reading the poem again--it's like a favorite old movie, I find myself all excited thinking about when we get that that part--and that other part--and then the one part that....

It's also a mystery, doing this. My system is to simply read the poem together; we read it aloud, stopping at the ends of the 52 numbered sections, and then discussing what we've read, asking and answering questions. It's a big poem and the whole world is in there (dinosaurs, even!), and what rises to the top for any group depends on who's there. One year, I had someone very versed in scripture, for instance, and from him we got a lot of insight into scriptural echoes. Or there might be someone who knows a lot of 19th-century or Civil War history, or who is familiar with other poetry written during the same era, or who knows more about Whitman's biography than I do, or who knows very well the Eastern religious texts that had recently been translated for the first time and were lighting Western thinkers on fire.

Much also depends on what happens in the room as we read, which is always unpredictable. One year, my group got to the end of section 45 and was so moved to be at that place that we stopped and re-read the section chorally, in unison, and then just sat there in stunned, emotional, worshipful silence together. Here's some of it:

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,
And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems.

Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.

My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside them.

There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,
If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces,
were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail the long run,
We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther.

A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not hazard the span or make it impatient,
They are but parts, any thing is but a part.

See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that,
Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that.

My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,
The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,
The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

My rendezvous is appointed, it is certain,

The Lord will be there and wait till I come on perfect terms,

The great Camerado, the lover true for whom I pine will be there.

Gives me shivers.

So the next time I led the workshop, I couldn't wait until we got to this piece! And people would be amazed and moved! I quivered with anticipation.

And the group blew right past it. It just didn't particularly speak to their condition.

That group, on the other hand, went nutso for the sex parts (this was also the group that really went deep into the scriptural references--what a great week that was. My ignorance of scripture is vast, so I learned a lot). They thought section 28, in which the poet's "other senses" abandon their sentry posts and leave him at the mercy of "villain touch" was absolutely the best description of sexual abandon and orgasm they'd ever heard, and they really wanted to talk about it:

The sentries desert every other part of me,
They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

I am given up by traitors,
I talk wildly, I have lost my wits, I and nobody else am the greatest traitor,
I went myself first to the headland, my own hands carried me there.

You villain touch! what are you doing? my breath is tight in its throat,
Unclench your floodgates, you are too much for me.

"Unclench your floodgates," indeed. Walt, you sexy old guy.

There's always a day when we end in the darkest part of the poem, where the poet has let himself get caught up in the contemplation of evil, and feels lost, degraded, hopeless. He sees himself imprisoned, impoverished, ill to the verge of death; he feels himself united in every sufferer:

For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
It is I let out in the morning and barr'd at night.

Not a mutineer walks handcuff'd to jail but I am handcuff'd to him and walk by his side,

(I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)

Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.

Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp,

My face is ash-color'd, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.

Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them,
I project my hat, sit shame-faced, and beg.

I don't plan for us to end a day's session at that point, but somehow we always do. And as the group shuffles out, discouraged, cloud-covered, hag-ridden, I call out after them desperately, "It gets better! We're not stuck here! Trust me!" The next morning, they are impatient to get started, to hear the poet's next words:

Enough! Enough! Enough!

I think it's good to break there; it's only 10 lines from the poet as degraded beggar to the resurrection ("the grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it, or to any graves/ corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me."), and it's possible to come up for air too quickly, to dash past the dark place the poet has led us to. It's good to carry it for an afternoon and evening.

I could go on and on--about 85% of the poem falls into "OMG I love this part!" territory for me. And that's really why I lead the workshop, because it's a chance to inveigle 20 or so people into listening to the poem, to all the parts I love so much, and I get to see them fall in love with it, too (and get angry at it and frustrated at Walt and suffer from bafflement and all the other things that always happen alongside the loving it part), and sometimes--always, at some point during the week--the thing they fall in the love with and the ways they love it illuminate the poem in a new way for me, and it becomes a new poem and I love it even more.

Stop this day and night with me [says our Walt] and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love

I wasn't sure about reading Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in US Adoption Practices by Christine Ward Gailey. I've read a lot of books about adoption, and as has happened to me with some other topics, although I remain interested in the subject, I've reached the point where I've heard the information and arguments so many times that a new book is not likely to yield a lot that's new.

I'm so glad I decided to give this book a try. For one thing, it's an academic book, and Gailey is more interested in reporting her findings than supporting an argument, and that's refreshing--it doesn't feel like I have to try to read through her biases as I have had to do in other books.

More importantly, though, Gailey addresses some adoption scenarios that no other book I've read has touched on (this may be a function of my own interests; there could well be a whole adoption literature out there that I'm not familiar with). One is public (from foster care) adoptions by working-class families, especially single mothers. Gailey talks about the forces that bring the least-adoptable children--those who have been traumatized and may be displaying behavioral problems--with the least-desirable adoptive parents--those who have few resources and no partner to share the work. She describes the bitter irony that leaves parents of the most challenging children, who need the most support, with the least. These parents often experience significant downward mobility after an adoption, in some cases losing jobs because of the demands of caring for their children, or flirting with bankruptcy, or losing homes.

I'm only 40 pages in, and I'm in a section right now where Gailey discusses the adoption of black children by black families. You wouldn't know it from the kinds of adoptions stories that get media play, but most black children available for adoption are in fact adopted into black families, and Gailey is (uniquely, in my experience) interested in the experiences of those children and families, both in their own right and in contrast with transracial adoption.

After a long section in which she has discussed the various strategies white adoptive parents use to address their child's race (ranging from denial of the child's race, interestingly enough, by such techniques as asserting that a child is mixed-race, not black, or by commenting on the lightness of the child's skin; to active efforts to create a more racially-integrated social circle), Gailey moves on to looking at how black adoptive families deal with their adoptive children's race--and this is fascinating.

Gailey found that adoption researchers had been almost universally unwilling or uninterested in looking at issues of color preference among adoptive families. But she wanted to know if, and how, that played a role, and so she asked both adoptive parents and adoption workers about it. She says, with what I can only take to be monumental understatement, that these were uncomfortable conversations:

For African-American social workers and adopters, it meant having to confront patterns of color preference and racial stereotyping within black communities in front of a white person who was going to be writing a book. It meant deciding or not deciding to speak or not to speak to an audience that would include whites. For some of the white adopters, it meant finding the words to talk about their children having been rejected by potential adopters who were black, without condemning a racialized community or appearing self-righteous or entitled. I could sense their struggles, and some expressed their discomfort to me. (38-9)

One African-American social worker was willing to talk about her experiences placing black babies, but only after talking about her own experiences growing up, in which her family privileged her brother over her because of his lighter skin and "better" hair. "It's a problem, but it's not much compared to what happened to me because I was a black woman in this society. Just get that down: I want that in the book." (39)

This social worker went on to talk about the reasons she sometimes had problems placing black children with black adoptive families. Often, the reasons are what makes children hard to place in any case: developmental delays, a history of abuse, behavioral problems. These children are often refused by black and white adoptive couples and end up with the "least desirable" adoptive families: single white women. But the worker talked about how these factors intersected with the darkness of the child's skin and the type of hair the child had. One baby, who had been born prematurely, was turned down by two black families before being placed with a white family, one because she had "bad" hair, and the other because they expected her to "darken up" too much to fit into their family.

As a white adoptive mother, this kind of story feels a little bit like a get-out-of-jail-free card, and a little bit like a point of solidarity, if that makes any sense. For good or ill, according to Gailey, black adoptive families wrestle with some of the same questions white adoptive families do, and are just as imperfect in their responses to the multiple issues raised by adoption.

She goes on to quote a number of social workers at length, who thoughtfully consider the issues and talk about how placing black children with white families, while being an option of last resort, is nonetheless an option they turn to more often than they'd like. And then she gets this refreshingly "curt" response from one adoption worker:

They're not kidding when they say these kids are "hard to place." We're lucky to get anyone to adopt them. I should, but I don't even bother about whether it's transracial or not anymore. The ones [social workers] I know who handle the crack kids would tell you the same. If [the prospective adopters are] alive and not child molesters, we'll place 'em. (40)

Only one of the adoptive families in her study said they'd had a color preference for their adopted child; in that case, an interracial couple wanted a child who would not be obviously adopted, but who might plausibly have been their biological child.

Gailey points out that transracial adoption is less common in public (foster) adoption. Private adoptions are common in the US, and take many overlapping forms. One is "facilitated" adoption (adoptions arranged by a person who might or might not be an attorney but whose role is to match adoptive parents with babies). Another is adoptions in which prospective adoptive parents are primarily responsible for making contact with birthmothers, through placing ads, posting websites with contact information, and so on. There are also private agency adoption, like our adoption of Yehva, where an agency maintains a pool of potential adoptive parents and is also the contact point for prospective birth parents; the adoptive families do not advertise or attempt to find birthmothers. [Many potential adoptive families pursue more than one of these paths at a time.]

Gailey points out that all of these forms of adoption are illegal throughout Europe, where they are seen a constituting a market in children. [I am curious about the details of this, as I know that, for instance, our agency places babies with European families, but Gailey didn't go into detail.] And I admit to feeling a bit uncomfortable when she talks about how much easier it is to get approved for private adoption than for public adoption, even though private adoptions often deal in the most "desirable" children: newborns, especially white ones, with no health problems or risk factors. For instance, a family seeking approval to work within the foster system, either as a foster family or in hope of adopting, needs to complete a course: a 3-hour class once a week for 12 weeks is typical. On the other hand, David and I were required only to take a course in "Becoming an Interracial Family" that lasted for, IIRC, 3 2-hour sessions.

The point Gailey is trying to get at, I think, is that private adoption skews more toward meeting the demands of potential parents for babies, while the public adoption system has no choice but to wrestle with meeting the needs of children, including the challenging ones. There are not a whole lot of white babies placed for adoption, compared to the number of families who would like to adopt a healthy infant, so, even though Gailey reports that adopters are less likely to cite "the long wait for a white infant" as a factor than they were 30 years ago, there are certainly "market forces" driving the higher number of transracial adoptions in the private adoption arena.

There's a part of me that does agree that private adoption and international adoption constitute a market in children and babies. I think it's naive to not take that into account. On the other hand, I think the private agency option was a good one for Yehva: she was drug-exposed in utero, and her birthmother was on drugs when she arrived at the hospital to give birth. K.'s decision to place Yehva for adoption allowed Yehva to bypass the foster care system, where she might have moved through multiple placements before being either reunited with her birthmother, or released for adoption. Gailey cites research that has found that 8 out of 10 black girls over the age of four have been sexually abused while in foster care [edited: this was her finding in her own research for the book. She was unable to find any other research that tracked this statistic, and hoped that her sample for the book was somehow anomalous]; although Yehva might have entered foster care as a newborn, it's a risky system that is not often able to provide stability for children, and I'm glad she, and other newborns like her, didn't have to spend time in it.

I didn't mean to digress; Gailey doesn't need to be argued with. She's thorough and clear-eyed and, so far at least, doesn't seem to have an axe to grind. This is a really worthwhile book. At least, the first third of it is.

Understanding Normal

My Facebook status this morning was: I feel so sorry for the mothers of only children. They'll never experience the joys of the extended, passionate, knock-down, drag-out fight over a toy nobody had previously touched for six months.

A friend commented that mothers who are only children will never understand such fights. Which reminded me of something I've been thinking about lately: David's and my efforts to understand what's normal when it comes to kids fighting.

David was an only child. I have an older brother, and for most of my childhood our relationship was so terrible that for, for awhile in my 20s, I actually considered myself to have been abused (I have a much more nuanced view of things now, and a lot of respect and affection for the man my brother is, but growing up in the same house with him was such a crap experience that when he left for college, I felt like I was being let out of prison. [Second parenthetical: apparently growing up as my sibling was no bed of roses, either. I just want to be clear that I'm not trashing my brother here.]).

My brother and I, in our mid-to-late 40s, have only in the last couple of years tentatively begun to have a relationship that goes beyond showing up at our parents' house at the same time twice a year on major holidays. Because of the way my relationship with him played out, I have never quite believed it when people told me, "My sister and I fought like cats and dogs the whole time we were growing up, but now we're the best of friends." I have always thought one of two things:

1. This person does not really understand what it means to "fight like cats and dogs," and did not in fact do it with her sister. Or,

2. They're not actually best friends.

So, because of David's lack of experience with siblings, and because of my bad experience with my sibling, we are at a loss when the kids fight (and my buttons are pushed big-time, especially if Eric does something that leverages his bigness and older-ness).

You can imagine, then, how tremendously helpful it was to me to read recently a report of a study that followed siblings through childhood into young adulthood, and tried to understand the factors that led to good or bad adult relationships. One finding was that all the siblings fought, to more or less the same degree. What made the biggest difference in predicting the quality of their adult relationships was what they were doing when they weren't fighting. Siblings who ignored each and spent time apart when not fighting tended to grow up to be estranged, like my brother and me. But siblings who had positive experiences together when not fighting grew up to be close, like my hypothetical "you" and her hypothetical sister.

I now believe you when you tell me that you fought with your sister but are best friends now. Because I'm guessing that when you weren't fighting with your sister, you were spending at least some time hanging out with her having a good time.

I'm also pretty sure, too, that my kids are doing OK. This morning's knock-down drag-out between Carl and Yehva, for instance, was followed by a half-hour or so of cheerful quiet pretend play together. A balm to the motherly heart.

That study reminded me of some of the findings in Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, a book that, first, you have to respect for having the most straightforwardly descriptive title of the 20th century. You're probably familiar with some of the study's findings even if you haven't read the book; it's the source of the datum that children of professionals hear 5-8 million more words in the first three years of life than children of working class parents or of parents receiving welfare benefits, which I still see cited all the time, and which has led educators to really wrestle with the question of what kinds of interventions, if any, can make up for the deficits even preschoolers can bring with them to school.

But another piece of info I carried away with me from reading it a few years ago is that all of the children heard "No" and its variants--"Don't touch that," "get down from there," "come away from that"--at roughly the same level. But one of the class-based differences researchers found is that for working-class and welfare kids, that's often the vast majority or even the only speech directed at them by parents, whereas the children of professionals also heard a great many positive statements--"I see you," "Good job," "Go ahead, try it," "Wow, I like that picture."

Both of these findings--about siblings fighting, about saying No to children-- have helped me as a parent to relax about the moments when things aren't as smooth and good as I wish they were, either between the kids or between me and the kids, by reminding me that these moments exist within a greater context that makes a world of difference.

Oh, man, I would so much rather keep writing, which I am really in the mood for, than put laundry in the dryer, load the dishwasher, update the checkbook, call the vet, and take the kids grocery shopping. I have a blog post in my head about my upcoming chore of writing the annual letter to Yehva's birthmother, and another one about something else I forget right now but that will come back to me [Edited: I remember! It's about portrayals of adoptive parents in the media]. Also, the parrots remind me I have not fed them breakfast.

On the one hand, if I didn't have the kids, I could write as much as I wanted. On the other hand, if I didn't have the kids, what would I write about?

Detroit History; Black Boys in Public Schools; the TBR pile

I've got a couple of books going at the moment. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue has been such a mix of what I already knew and what has completely taken me by surprise. The influx of Black people during WWII was not a surprise to me; I knew that bit of history. It was likewise not exactly a shocking revelation to me that that they were often shunted to the most dangerous, filthy jobs--one that was described in pretty graphic detail was a job workers called the "mankiller," in which the worker had to lift a heavy white-hot spring coil off a fabricating machine, to chest height, and then submerse it in a cooling bath, all within a few seconds.

I was disturbed by how deliberate the maintenance of black ghettos was, even as they were increasingly overcrowded and underserved by public works. That Cobo Arena is named for the mayor who pretty much devoted himself to maintaining a segregated city and blocking the construction of affordable public housing for black people makes me want to vow never to go there again. Well, maybe once. To spit on it.

What surprised me is that I had (from my own narcissistic perspective, I guess--did anything that happened before you were aware of it really matter?) always imagined that Detroit had a kind of Golden Age that stretched from World War II until the deep recession of 1981/82, when I was in high school.

But in fact, Detroit had something more like a Golden Blip during and for a couple of years after WWII. By 1950, there were no more parcels of land near railroad tracks that were big enough for manufacturing plants, so development within the city came to a standstill. Automakers had to build new plants someplace, so they build them in Ohio, in the South, in California--places with weak unions, lower taxes, and vast tracts of undeveloped land.

I was amazed to learn that Detroit lost 70,000 jobs in the decade of the 50s. Jobs were lost to automation (no more "mankiller" once a machine could do it...but then, no more job, either), to companies' shifting of manufacturing to other locations, and by the weeding out of the many auto companies and related industries that had sprung up during the Blip and later failed.

By the end of the 60s, the city had lost a total of 130,000 jobs. When the book was written in 1996, the author was able to say that Detroit had sustained a steady decline in jobs for over 40 years. Who knew?

After WWII, companies like Lockheed stayed in the defense business, but in Detroit, auto companies couldn't re-tool factories and get car production up and running fast enough, in anticipation of high demand as soldiers came home, got married, bought houses, had families.

But putting so many of its eggs into auto production made Detroit perpetually vulnerable. New cars are one of the first things people put off buying in an economic downturn, even a small one. So, rather than being the powerhouse I imagined it to be, Detroit spent most of the 20th century limping along, booming and busting, struggling with race relations and economic downturns and business failures.

I'm not done with the book; I'm in 1960, where:

Only 15 years after World War II, Detroit's landscape was dominated by rotting hulks of factory buildings, closed and abandoned, surrounded by blocks of boarded up stores and restaurants. Older neighborhoods, whose streets were lined with the proud homes that middle-class and working-class Detroiters had constructed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were now pockmarked with the shells of burned-out and empty buildings, lying among rubbish-strewn vacant lots. (pp. 147-148)

That is not the image I would have come up with for Detroit in that era. The first Detroit history I was aware of were the late-60s race riots, and white flight (my mother says that white people from Detroit used to drive out to South Lyon, where we lived when I was very young, and knock on doors in our neighborhood, offering to buy houses that weren't even on the market). I always thought of that as a kind of sudden explosion, but it had been simmering for 25 years.

This may be the kind of academic book I don't end up finishing; I'm interested, but not sure how much tolerance I have for year-by-year analyses of housing patterns broken down by race--though there's a chapter coming up about how class divisions within the black community created conflict in the 60s and 70s that looks pretty good.

Mostly, it's a sad, sad story. And I'd like to warn any of my Black friends away from reading it, the same way I'd warn a rape victim not to rent I Spit on Your Grave because--well, because it seems like the history of Detroit from 1944 to 1996 is pretty much a 50-year parade of white people fucking Black people over on purpose, viciously, humiliatingly, and with malice aforethought. I know Detroit is not alone in this by any means. But you probably don't need to hear it again.

I'm also reading Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity by Ann Arnett Ferguson. It's a meaty book, written by a sociologist using participant-observer techniques. Since it was a dissertation, it's perhaps a bit heavy on jargon ("This can be understood as a transgressive act...[that] can be seen as redressing a fundamental social lack.") though readable enough overall. What I am finding especially interesting--as I did when I read Literacy With an Attitude: Educating Working Class Children in Their Own Self-Interest--is how people who not only don't intend to stereotype children, but in fact may see themselves as deliberately doing the opposite, nonetheless manage to conspire with other factors in children's lives to push them into predetermined roles. (On the other hand, an administrator in the school introduces the author to a 10-year-old boy with the words, "There's a jail cell out there with that boy's name on it," so it's not all about damaged institutions overriding individual good intentions.)

The author of Bad Boys is also interested in the narratives educators tell themselves about why children are the way they are (family factors are a common one), and in the ways that classroom misbehavior and deliberate challenges to authority can become adaptive responses for Black boys, a source of self-esteem and peer respect.

At the school she studied, she was also interested to discover that the room where kids served in-school detentions was essentially hidden from the rest of the school; it couldn't be reached from the school's interior, but only through an exterior door that let onto the playground, the windows were arranged in such a way that people couldn't see inside; the children serving detention had playground and lunch times separately from the rest of the children in the school. Not only would it be almost impossible to stumble upon this room, she could barely find it after she'd been given directions.

Her sense that problem Black children were being hidden away led to her exploring, and finding evidence for, the theory that one of the school's agendas was to hide problems in the school from white families, for fear they would exercise their options to take their children elsewhere to be educated.

I don't always love the author--her analytic sections seem very good to me, as do her descriptions of what she observes in the school. But memoirish "field notes" sections between chapters seem a little precious and self-indulgent to me, and I have taken to skipping them, mostly. I hope her next, post-dissertation book won't read quite so much like she's trying to impress her committee with her grasp of theory and jargon. I may get worn out and come to feel I've learned as much as I need to know about how Black boys get shafted in school--especially since it's really no surprise to anybody that they do. So this is another one that has felt worthwhile but that I might not read every page of.

On the other hand, I have just learned that the publication of One Was a Soldier, the new Clare Ferguson/ Russ Van Alstyne mystery, has been pushed back to March of 2011, so I may read every single page of both these books, including the footnotes, because what else am I going to have to do?

In my to-be-read pile:

Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say): Reflections on Literature and Faith by Frederich Buechner

Claiming Abraham: Reading the Qur'an and the Bible Side by Side by Michael Lodahl

Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time by Sarah Ruden

Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: A Sourcebook and Critical Edition by Ezra Greenspan, which I really want to dive into in the next 10 days because I am leading my workshop on Song of Myself at the summer gathering and I always like to know something about the poem that I didn't know before when I teach it.

I also have an annotated edition of Song of Myself (published just a few months ago) to take along. Very excited about that. We can look stuff up!

Blue Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love: Race, Class, and Gender in US Adoption by Christine Ward Gailey. This one may end up back in the library bag unread; it's possible I've read so much about race etc. in US adoption that the marginal utility of reading another 200-page book on the subject is approaching the vanishing point. Though the class and gender stuff could be new and interesting.

The Preaching Life by Barbara Brown Taylor. I've started this several times and not finished it because it's so good I want to be able to really take it in and digest it and never feel like I have time to do it justice.

Liturgies of Quakerism by Ben Pink Dandelion. I paid a lot of money for this last year at the summer gathering, after considering it for several years, and I have tried several times to get through it. Here's what I said last time I attempted it, in September:

I’m not sure I’ll ever get through The Liturgies of Quakerism. This is an import from Britain, and it cost $35. I’d been looking at it in the bookstore catalog, and at the Gathering bookstore for a couple years, and thinking, “That’s a lot of money for a book.” Finally this summer, I decided to buy it. I am very interested in this notion that Quakers have a liturgy and curious about what that might mean.

However, this is my third attempt at the book since I bought it, and I have yet to make it past page 2, “The liturgy functions as a hermeneutic of sorts that, through its ordo, helps to make sense of numinous experiences,” or page 3’s “A rhetorical transaction, therefore, may be best understood as operating at some point on a continuum of conscious choice-making on the receiver’s part.”

It’s not that I’m not equipped to read this sort of thing; a graduate degree in Political Philosophy and two years of graduate work in literature render it all very familiar. It’s just that one of the consolations of having dropped out of grad school eight years ago when Eric was born was the freedom to never have to read about hermeneutics or rhetorical transactions or “the artificial tensions and releases created by consonance and dissonance” or how the Quietist experience is “inherently related to a realized eschatology” or the “de-coupling of a sense of end-time and a sense of intimacy.”

I think there’s a lot of good stuff in this book. I just don’t know that I have the intellectual energy to cope with the language. On the other hand, I paid $35 for the damn thing. I suppose if I were to add up all the $10 words I would see that I was getting much more than my money’s worth.

Broke, But Not Really

I know I talk about this a lot, and while I suppose that will fade in time, I also think that our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather will remain one of the defining events of my life.

One of the ways it's the gift that keeps on giving right now is that, 14 months after the appeals court finally ruled in our favor, we're still paying the bills. Lots and lots of bills.

Some of our debt pre-dates the adoption, but most of the debt we're carrying is from the fairly modest amount we borrowed to pay adoption agency fees and then, when C. showed up, to pay the lawyer. And then borrowed again to pay the lawyer again. And then borrowed again to pay the lawyer again. And then, finally, when she called to say the birthfather had filed an appeal, to not borrow any more because we couldn't--we were tapped out. I told the lawyer then, "I don't know how we'll pay for this, or when. But I promise we will."

We initially thought this adoption would cost about $14,000. That was revised upward by a couple thou after we paid birthmother expenses for a woman who decided to parent. And a little bit more when problems with our home study stranded me and Yehva in Illinois while we got them fixed. But still in the range of about $18,000--a lot of money, but nothing to panic about.

Until the custody fight, and the endless months of our lawyer filing papers and responding to the other side's filed papers and attending hearings.

By the time the dust settled, the adoption had cost us something close to $65,000. A number that makes me either laugh or cry every time I say it out loud. I laugh because it is so completely ridiculous and unbelievable, or I cry because the effect on our family of incurring that kind of debt could so easily have been catastrophic.

It's been hard. We have so many payments that by the time I pay the bills, and we put gas in the cars, and we buy groceries, it's pretty common for us to have almost nothing left to get through the week. I can't tell you how many times I've cried when I thought I had the pay period all figured out and then was reminded that we had a $40 prescription to refill, or opened the mail to find a bill I hadn't expected, or had a sick cat, or something broken on the car.

I never thought I'd pay my mortgage late. I can't tell you how many times I've paid my mortgage late over the last three years. A year ago, we took a forbearance for 90 days because we got behind and realized we would never be able to catch up.

I've needed a new pair of sneakers for six months, and every month I say I'm going to get them, but by the time I sort out the more urgent bills and set aside the mortgage money, there never seems to be any extra. I'm still wearing my post-surgical bras from my breast reduction last November because there are always better things to spend my cash on than new bras--though we're getting close to the crisis point, undergarment-wise, and it will have to be a priority soon enough. The kids' birthday presents come from craigslist and the local consignment shops; David and I just didn't give each other presents for birthdays or Christmas last year.

I had promised myself a new dress for Joann and Carolyn's wedding in May. Back in January, I was sure that sometime in the next three or four months, there'd be a little extra for me. But as the date approached, it became clear that there was not going to be any extra, and I would not be able to buy a dress. (Let alone the new bras, dress, slip, and shoes I had originally envisioned. What was I thinking? I pay the bills. I know where the money goes and exactly how much is left every week.)

And this is where my story turns happy. Because I e-mailed my friends Adrianne and Carla, and asked if I could root around in their closets for something to wear to the wedding. They both dress professionally for jobs, and I was sure I'd be able to put together some flowing pants and a dressy top, maybe not a perfect fit, maybe not in my colors, but nice. Good. More than good enough.

But they e-mailed me back and said they had talked it over and, while they'd be happy to let me into their closets, they wanted to buy me a dress instead.

So I had a beautiful new red dress for the wedding, because my friends bought it for me. (I wore an old bra, no slip, and old shoes...it doesn't seem to have ruined the wedding.)

Our version of broke is a pretty good one. We've never been without food, only, sometimes, without a favorite or a treat. We've more than once eaten the pantry and freezer to the bare walls while waiting for a paycheck, but we've always had the pantry and freezer to turn to. David doesn't have an Xbox 360, and I don't have an iPod Touch, and Yehva won't go to preschool this fall even though I know she would love it, and Eric doesn't get to take a summer class at the science museum this year, and Carl...well, I can't think of anything Carl wants and doesn't have right now. Carl's good.

We're all good. The stuff we do without is stuff most people do just fine without anyway.

And there's a lot of stuff we haven't had to do without, and I want to say why. It's because so many other people have been pouring money into our household. Not just the hundred dollars for a dress. The kids and I haven't missed a summer gathering, because my monthly meeting pays for the kids to go, and FGC itself gives me scholarship funds, and FLGBTQC helps out with travel funds. This winter, we were able to attend the FLGBTQC midwinter gathering because one friend just flat out wrote me a check for half the kids' cost, and the friend we traveled with paid for gas and our meals (though writing that I am reminded that I still owe her for hotels). Just last week, I got to go out for a really nice dinner with a fancy appetizer, because a friend treated me. Friends have treated me a lot. Adrianne even invited me and all three of my kids out to dinner the other week, which has got to be the very picture of generosity.

Two families in my monthly meeting, independently, were led to send us $1000 each to help with lawyer bills, "or for any need," as one put it. My monthly meeting helped us through the Fund for Sufferings, as did FLGBTQC. My parents lent us $10,000 and then forgave the debt, and then a year later sent us a check for another $10,000 when the birthfather appealed. Without my parents' generosity, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say we would have had to choose between paying the lawyer and keeping our house.

I'm thinking of all this now, because I just asked my monthly meeting to help with travel expenses for the summer gathering. I didn't think I'd have to--between my discount for leading a workshop, and my meeting's Connecting Kids to Quakers money for Eric, Carl, and Yehva, and the gathering being only two hours from my house, I only needed to come up with $307 plus two tanks of gas. I was sure I could do this. I even have an excel spreadsheet showing that, on paper at least, that money could be squeezed out of the budget.

But it turns out that, like the money for my dress and the money for Yehva's preschool and the money for every other thing I thought we'd surely be able to pay for in another few months, that $307 doesn't exist. So somebody else is picking up the slack for me, one more time.

There is an endpoint: in June of 2011, we pay off a loan whose payment is $525 a month. And then the rest of them drop like dominoes month by month, until (knocking wood) by the end of 2011 we have somewhere between $950 and $1100 every month that we don't have right now. When I look ahead, I'm amazed by how suddenly we're free of the whole thing: a matter of a few months. Like snapping your fingers, once we get there.

And then, as I e-mailed some friends this morning, we'll be wallowing in money like pigs in shit, frolicking through meadows tossing dollar bills like rose petals, lighting our cigars with $20 bills.

I'm trying to remember why I wanted to write a blog post about this, other than to invite others to boggle at the numbers, to laugh or cry with me about it as led. Or to get my perpetual fretting about money out of my head and onto paper so I could let go of it for awhile. Or to explain to the world why I asked my Friends meeting for $200--again!--to do something as arguably self-indulgent as attend the gathering. Or to remind myself to stop complaining because we really have nothing to complain about.

Oh, I remember--I think it's worth knowing, for those of you who haven't been through anything catastrophic like this, that when push comes to shove you have a lot more to rely on than just your own resources. That people love to help. That sometimes they act like you're doing them a favor by letting them write you a check. That they can surprise you by choosing compassion over judgment. I used to hate to ask for help, and usually turned it down when it was offered. Turns out, it's not so bad, being humbled. It's been one of the unexpected gifts of the custody fight, this whole mess of help coming our way, when we asked for it and when we didn't ask for it, whether we wanted it or not.

We're so damn broke. But so much goodness came to us out of this mess that I honestly would not wish for it to be different.

I kid you not, come January 2012, I'm lighting a cigar with a $20 bill. And then we're re-starting our savings, and catching up all the deferred maintenance on the house, and giving money to charity again, and, yes, buying poor David his Xbox 360. And looking around for opportunities to pass on a little of what we've been given in such abundance.

A couple of more things about my meeting

I am loving how many comments I've gotten on my last post, and a few private e-mails as well. I want to be clear about something, though, which is that my monthly meeting is actually a splendid one. We are very good at listening to each other and holding our differences lovingly. For instance, year before last the Adult Religious Ed committee held a retreat at which we talked about our different relationships to Quakerism. It began in the morning with a panel of Friends describing their paths, and in the afternoon we did this great exercise where the leader would read a statement, such as, "I have a personal relationship with God," and then we would place ourselves along a continuum based on how true it felt for us.

The discussions then of why people places themselves where they did were deep, loving, and at times hilarious. Sometimes a person listening to someone else speak would move a few places down the continuum; once the people on the opposite ends of the continuum decided that they were talking about exactly the same thing using different words and that we should more properly therefore form a circle. It was great.

And I want to say, too, that during our almost-two-year custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather, my meeting's support for us was incredible. The meeting helped us financially through the fund for sufferings; two different families in the meeting were independently led to send us large checks to help out with legal fees; the meeting convened a support committee for us; and, more than any of that, I could feel how deeply people in the meeting were entering with us into our fear of losing her and our deep love for her. People's sympathy for our situation seemed to go so deep that I felt like some members of the meeting, at least--and not always the people I'd had the closest or best relationships with--were feeling it all with us.

That my hiatus from meeting began only two months after the appeals court finally settled the case in our favor once and for all sometimes makes me feel, as I told David recently, like the guy whose wife puts him through med school, and then he dumps her for a younger woman right after graduation.

But, you know, it is what it is. God told me to leave my meeting for awhile, in one of the clearest messages I've ever gotten in meeting for worship. I'm just a little cranky that the next step hasn't been made so clear.

Still Thinking About My Quaker Meeting & Me

A few months ago, our Ministry & Outreach committee was working on a pamphlet that might give a brief introduction to Quaker faith & practice to people attending an open house at our new meetinghouse. They brought a draft to business meeting that included something like our usual, "Quakers believe in that of God or Spirit in everyone." We usually say "or Spirit" because some people aren't comfortable with the word "God," and treating "God" and "Spirit" as roughly equivalent is something we've gotten used to over time.

This draft pamphlet, though, added "or goodness" as a third option. This was the first time I'd ever seen "goodness" used in this context, although, interestingly, I have seen it again since then on some Quaker blogs.

I've been struggling with my meeting for a couple of years now, and although I have been making efforts to return in recent weeks, have been on hiatus--not attending worship--since May of 09. Every week lately, as I've been trying to return, there has been some barrier to me attending meeting for worship, either at home or at the meetinghouse: I've been sick, the aforementioned patchouli-drenched hippy has sat down near me and I've had to leave the room, I'm so raw that a minor crankiness between me and a beloved Friend has led to a big emotional explosion on my part, or Yehva has fussed so persistently that I've decided to take her home.

I think most of these things would hardly be obstacles if I were more sure about my need and desire to be there. I think it is a sign of how fragile my intention is that a pebble in my path ends up feeling more like a military roadblock, complete with snarling dogs, circling helicopters with searchlights, and sarcastic immigration officers sneering, "And just what brings you to this part of town, girly?"

So, anyway, the committee brings this pamphlet draft that says Quakers believe in "that of God, or Spirit, or goodness, in everyone," and my heart sinks. One of my struggles with Quakerism is what I see as its secularization; I want to be part of a religion, not an affiliation of nice people with good intentions. The person presenting the draft asked the meeting for approval to print the pamphlet, and the immediate response was a number of voices saying, "Go ahead!" and "Good job!" and "Roll the presses!" and such like.

I thought that if it was really OK with my meeting to have a pamphlet published that equated "God" and "goodness," then I was definitely in the wrong place. And I also felt that I did not have it in me to be the lone voice of dissent; I really, in that moment, intended to let them go ahead and publish that pamphlet. And then, I thought, I would go home and write my letter withdrawing my membership.

"I'll stand aside," I said, which, many of you know, is that a Quaker does when she cannot unite with a decision of the meeting but recognizes that the meeting is otherwise in unity.

And the clerk accepted that. She was ready to move on, except that over the next couple of minutes, other people raised concerns as well. I don't remember about what, exactly; not the same as mine, I don't think. The M&O committee felt time pressure; they needed to get a pamphlet approved in time to have it printed for the open house. And the clerk, I think, felt time pressure, too--we used to have business meeting before our 12:30 p.m. meeting for worship, and that created a fixed end time. This was, if I recall correctly, our first business meeting in the new meetinghouse, and our first one on the new schedule: starting business meeting at 12:30 or so, after morning worship and the social hour, with nothing to force an ending on us if we ran long. And we were running long. Oh, so long.

Time pressure has got to be the number one cause of bad practice among Friends.

So, a few people raised concerns, but the clerk tried to move us along. "I heard a lot of approval in the room," she said, "and Su has agreed to stand aside..."

And damn if God didn't give me a word to speak in that moment.

I don't remember it very well--I often find that when what I have said is spirit-led is that I don't remember much of it afterward. But I said, "I may have been hasty," and then I went on to say something about "goodness" being a weak word, a word that seems to me to be almost completely about a human quality. God is not all about goodness, I said. God is a big dark hard mystery that we wrestle with, and it is a disservice to reduce God to this single quality. I said...I don't know what I said. But I was eloquent! Damn. And I felt as I said it that I was saying exactly what I meant, exactly what I needed to say. And I felt that it came inwardly from God.

We went on to have a good discussion. A couple of non-theist Friends spoke, and in hearing them I found raised up in me a concern for non-theist Friends in my meeting. I found myself wondering whether "we believe in that of God in everyone" has become an empty phrase we mouth, if half of us don't even believe in God; I found myself concerned that we were asking non-theist Friends to accommodate themselves too much; I went away musing about why we continue, as our first answer to the question of what Quakers are, to assert a question of belief as a defining thing when Quakers do not in fact share a unifying belief; and then I found myself wondering what, if not a belief in That of God in Everyone, does make us Quakers.

We were eventually able to unify around language for the pamphlet, much to the relief of the M&O committee. The woman who had presented it thanked us, and said, "I move every time we have this conversation," which felt true to me as well. This, to me, is the thing Quakers do better than anybody else I've ever encountered, this deep listening to each other (and, yes, to the Divine), and coming to a decision that respects all those voices. I felt pretty good after that meeting, actually, which was quite a change from "the first thing I'm going to do when I get home is write my anti-membership letter!"

And since then... *sigh.*

Yesterday I was at the meetinghouse for a committee meeting, and I found myself standing on the porch gazing at our sign, which is leaning against the wall there. "Red Cedar Friends Meeting," it says, and then the Quaker testimonies, based on the SPICE acronym: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality.

I have always hated that acronym, without really thinking about why, beyond, "Oh, isn't that adorable, how my whole big messy deep religion can be summed up a cute little five-letter word?" (But I just googled for the SPICE acronym and found that I am not the only Quaker who doesn't love it.)

Yesterday, that word "integrity" really jumped out at me. This is a word we use in place of Truth, as in Publishers of Truth, the term early Quakers used to describe themselves. What truth? God's truth, as revealed to Quakerism's founder, George Fox.

Now, Quakers don't necessarily think there's one Truth for everybody (two people praying about whether they should take a certain action may well get different answers) and we have never claimed to posses the whole Truth. And some of what God revealed to Fox seems downright nutty to us now. But we have believed that seeking the Truth would lead to an increased measure of it, and that as our measures grew, we would find ourselves more and more in accord with each other. (Big generalizations there, many of which could be contested. It will do for now.)

"Integrity," though--there's another one of those human words. For a person to have integrity, her words and actions should be in accord with each other. But integrity does not require a person's words and actions to be in accord with God's will as they understand it.

Truth, on the other hand, calls us to consider not only our own human wishes and actions but God's. A person of integrity is not necessarily a person of God. A good person is not necessarily a person of God.

I want to be a person of God. I want my faith community to aid me in becoming a person of God. I want, in my faith community, to be able to use the word "God" without someone immediately following up with a comment about how uncomfortable they are with that word.

I do not like listing our testimonies as a way of defining ourselves. I don't like the SPICE acronym. And I don't like suggesting that what we strive for is personal integrity rather than Truth. Might as well put up a sign, I thought, reading: "Red Cedar Friends Meeting: We're Nice People."

Now, I recognize first, that this is getting really long and probably nobody is going to read it. But second, I recognize that there is probably no congregation of any religious body anywhere in which everybody is all heated up about discussing God and God's will. When my friend Julie and I were at the Festival of Faith & Writing in April, we both talked about how good it felt to be among people who wanted to wrestle with the questions we like to wrestle with. That festival draws on people from all kinds of Christian denominations, probably most of whom also don't have a whole lot people in their home church who meet their need for questioning and examining every last little thing. If we all had that at home, there'd be no need for the conference.

So I know that it is unreasonable for me to expect my monthly meeting to meet my every religious need, and I don't expect that. And I know that when I speak honestly about my concerns and interests there, I am heard with sympathy and respect. And I take very much to heart Friend Martin Kelly's point in the blog post I linked to above, that "comfort is not necessarily what God has in mind for us," so I wince when I hear myself wanting to be more comfortable in my monthly meeting.

And yet...

I thought it was time for me to go back to worship, but every time I go to the meetinghouse, there's a pebble in my way that feels like a wall.

More About, Of All Things, Perfume And Race. Ranty!

My friend Julie commented in my post about the Black student who was removed from her class by a teacher because of the hair products she was using and I wrote such a long ranty and profane reply I decided to edit it for profanity and turn it into its own post. (Profanity not aimed at Julie...more about strength of feeling).

Here's what Julie, very reasonably, said about a time some years ago at a Quaker conference when I did not move my seat when a Black man wearing cologne sat down next to me, for fear of him thinking I had moved because he was Black:

My two cents is, just move when you have to move, and don't worry about what anyone else is thinking. You're responsible for taking care of your needs, not their potential or imagined reaction.

Julie is not wrong. But this is what I found myself writing in response:

The "just move" thing is a little hard for me, Julie. There are very few Black people at FGC Gathering most years, and I have heard some Black men in particular tell stories about women clutching purses or otherwise seeming wary when a Black man comes into the room or gets behind them in line at the cafeteria. I don't know how much of that is perception and how much is reality. I'm not a big fan of mind-reading in general, assuming you know somebody's motive, so when I hear "this white woman clutched her purse because she was afraid of me," I reserve judgment. I don't assume that's an accurate perception of what that woman did and why. On the other hand, I would like the Gathering to be a place where people of color feel welcome, like a part of the community. And having heard those stories, I just wasn't easy standing up and walking away.

As far as telling the man why I was moving--it can be so hard. One thing that happens with a perfume exposure, for me, is emotionality--I think emotion welling up is part of my body's response to the chemicals or whatever I'm reactive to, and part of it is just plain old weary, "I just want to sit here and worship God and all you damn people coming to morning worship straight from your showers with your hair still stinking-shampoo wet and your lotion freshly applied and your hairspray and deodorant are making it really hard for me to do that." So it's easy to imagine, sitting here, a really calm and rational response (and I have gotten better at this with practice, to be sure, because it's been a lot of years now) but it can be well-nigh impossible to do in the moment, especially if I forgot to be prepared for the possibility and am taken by surprise.

Perfume exposures in worship are about the worst for me. Not only do they mean that I have to get up and leave worship but I've of course been sitting there trying to get as open as possible. It's hard to open yourself up to Spirit while simultaneously keeping your guard up against the possibility of some patchouli-loving hippy sitting down in the next seat and wrecking half your week.

Here's an experience I had once with a Black woman at the downtown post office in Lansing, probably close to 20 years ago now. I was waiting in a long slow line, and this woman a couple of people ahead of me was wearing a really beautiful dress that just draped on her wonderfully. She was about my size, and I was lost in a reverie of thinking about how beautiful she looked and idly wondering how a dress like that might look on me.

And all of a sudden, she flew out at me. "What the fuck are you looking at? You got a problem with Black people? You got a problem with me?" I was so taken aback I couldn't say anything, let alone tell her that I hadn't meant to be staring at her but if I was it was because I thought she was beautiful.

That idea just doesn't seem to have been available to her, that a strange white woman in a public place would be staring at her in absent-minded admiration.

Sometimes I have an over-strong reaction to somebody wearing perfume not just because they're wearing perfume but because they're the 100th damn person this week who has made me give up a good seat in a movie theater or leave a restaurant before my dessert or drop out of the line at the grocery store or walk out of a kitschy little shop I wanted to browse in for awhile longer or go home and change my clothes even though my shirt was clean out of the wash two hours ago because the damn stink is all over me now just from standing five feet away in an aisle at Target. Or go back into my own house and close the windows instead of enjoying my yard because the neighbor's dryer sheets are so toxic and the wind is blowing my way. Or get out of the shower half-rinsed and run down the hall to my dorm room mostly naked because the person who just got into the shower next to me apparently doesn't understand what it means to agree to room on a fragrance-free floor and I value my ability to keep breathing over being clean and maintaining my dignity.

I told David the other day that I've had so many little aggravations lately that it's like I'm carrying this "Fuck you" around inside me right now and it's going to pop out at some, I don't know, perfectly nice lady at the grocery store who's doing nothing worse than moving too slow in the pasta aisle when all I need to do is dash in there and grab a box of rotini. That's how I feel if I've had a lot of perfume exposures, too, like I could just strangle some poor woman emitting a light and airy citrus scent because it's not just the light and airy citrus scent, it's that the light and airy citrus scent is the straw, baby, and citrus woman is the camel's back and I am so gonna break her.

So, this man who sat next to me was the metaphorical citrus woman, you see? And in the post office, I was the citrus woman. But I did not want to be the 100th person that week to do something that might or might not be a racist reaction to a Black man coming into the room or joining the line or sitting down to worship. I did not want to be his citrus woman. I wanted to be his Friend.

The Penn Family Talks about Guns and Babies

I had a nice visit with my parents yesterday; they came to drop off a big cushy recliner my mom isn't using anymore and stayed for several hours, mostly just chatting. My nephew Garrett, who is 14 and much-adored by my kids (and by David and me), came along and spent most of the time running the kids ragged in the backyard.

My mom looks good. She had a cardiac catheterization some weeks ago that showed that she has a fully-blocked artery to her heart, and it can't be repaired, and week before last she had a procedure to clean out her carotid artery. So I have been worrying about her. She seems to be recovering well; I could tell from her voice on the phone when she called to ask if yesterday was a good day for a visit that she was feeling better.

It charms me that Yehva reminds my mother of me as a little girl. "How funny," she said drily, "that you should get a daughter who's smart, outgoing, and headstrong." A little bit of grandmotherly schadenfreude there, I think. There's a famous family story (with picture!) about her finding me standing naked in the bathroom sink when I was about Yehva's age, planning to give myself a bath because I wanted one and she wasn't going to give me one. And another famous story from when I was maybe a late 3, and sang a little song for the church. It was my first time in front of an audience, and apparently it was quite a challenge to get me to yield the stage when I was done. I'd still be up there singing, apparently, if I hadn't been small enough to carry off.

We like smart-baby stories in our family, and my parents told me a good one about my 11-month-old nephew, Oscar. Apparently my sister-in-law got him a jack-in-the-box. She cranked the handle, it played its little tune, and then pop! up came the jack-in-the-box. Oscar liked that! So she did it again. He liked it again!

So she scooted the jack-in-the-box over to him and suggested he crank the handle himself. Oscar looked at it a second, and then reached over and popped open the latch on the lid.

We laughed. We are all familiar--as you probably are, too, if you have kids--with those moments when you are torn between thinking, "Wow, I'm so impressed with this kid," and "Oh, man, I am so doomed." Smart kids, we agree, are both a blessing and a burden.

I told my parents a friend's story about taking her kids to a shooting range as part of Be A Tourist In Your Own Town, an event here in Lansing every year where you buy a passport that gets you into all kinds of attractions free for the day. Her son, almost 8, is interested in target shooting, and my friend asked one of the staff how old kids have to be to take lessons. She figured the answer would be "older than 8" and this would be a backup for her own uncertainty about the idea. The guy answered, "Old enough to do it safely, and to follow the rules. These guys could absolutely do it! We work with beginners one on one until we're confident they can do it."

She should have seen enough lawyer shows by now to know you never ask a question you don't already know the answer to.

That story got us talking about guns in our own families. My mom grew up in a house where guns were propped in the corner in every room, and she was always afraid of them and says she only ever fired one once in her life. My dad had a couple of guns in a rack behind the door in the spare room when I was growing up, but I don't remember him using them (he goes to deer camp every year, but he's the kind of "hunter" who can spend a week at deer camp and not notice he forgot his gun at home). He did hunt when I was younger; I was born in October, and he went hunting soon afterwards. He sent home a postcard with a picture of a deer on it. If I remember it correctly, he wrote "Daddy has not seen any deer yet." He addressed it to my mom and brother, and then squeezed "and Susan" into the margin. That offended me when I was a kid: I was an afterthought! But I'm pretty sure 3-week-old me was not bothered by it.

I mentioned my friend Adrianne's Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, and my one experience shooting it. My dad said, "I got a concealed carry permit a few years ago."

Me: Oh, yeah? What made you decide to get a concealed carry permit?

My dad: I didn't have one.

Ah.

There was a big locked gun case at my grandparents' house in Gaylord, and men and boys sometimes went shooting when a bunch of us were up there. I shot some, I know; I mostly remember a few times doing target practice in my backyard, shooting paper plates with a gun I only remember as "grandma's deer rifle."

My grandma could shoot a gun; there's a story about her shooting a rabid dog from her back porch when she was eight months pregnant. Though I could be mis-remembering the pregnant part because there's another story about her getting bit by a dog just a few days before my Uncle Charlie was born, and then sometime later my aunt Clara Jean, who was 5 or 6, got bit by a dog and wouldn't stop crying, and when she finally calmed down enough to tell them what was wrong, she said, "I'm too young to have a baby!" An early lesson in correlation v. causation.

On the other hand, my grandma was pregnant six times, so maybe both those things did happen when she was about to have a baby. Just different babies.

My grandpa once shot and killed a rat in the wall of the house. With the expected unpleasant results.

My nephew Garrett seems to be following in my brother's footsteps. He loves dirt bikes and snowmobiles, things with big engines that go fast. He also likes to shoot. His big present from my parents last Christmas was a new rifle he'd been wanting. He's a very good shot, I'm told. My dad said that he is interested in firing "the pistols" but my brother isn't sure about letting him do that. "He's fired a lot of guns, though," my dad said, and rattled off a little list that ended with, "and of course he's fired Gary's machine gun."

Me: Gary has a machine gun?

Not a fully-automatic one, I am assured. Those are illegal. It's a Thompson--a Tommy gun! I said delightedly--with that round magazine like the gangsters in Bugs Bunny cartoons carry around. He also has some kind of deadly Eastern European-made not-an-AK47-but-something-like-that. From this I infer that one of the many things I did not know about my brother is that he collects guns. I think it would be interesting if he agreed to show them to me next time I visit.

Sometimes I feel like my family are all very much like each other--they live together on the same piece of land, for crying out loud! I call it The Penn Family Hilltop Compound. It has two houses on it, and two enormous pole barns full of pickup trucks and motorcycles, a race car, a dune buggy, my dad's little bulldozer ("you'd be surprised how many uses you find for it once you have it," we joked yesterday), the almost-bigger-than-my-house RV my parents roam the southwest in every winter, and God only knows what else. I didn't know about the bulldozer or the machine gun; what other surprises might there be?

Very much like each other, I think sometimes, and not so much like me. This is a feeling that was very painful to me as a child and young adult. But I get more and more peaceful with it as I get older, because, you know, I like them. And because it gets easier for me to see the ways we are alike--my parents and I laughed a lot yesterday, because we have the same sense of humor. We like to tell each other stories. I knew they'd like the story about my friend and her kids at the shooting range; they knew I'd like the story about Oscar and the jack-in-the-box. I told stories about Yehva, full of piss and vinegar and always into something, and my mom told stories about me, much the same. It was a good way to spend an afternoon.

I Can See the Other Side

There's a lot of outrage at Racialicious about a teacher who removed a child from the classroom because hair products were making the teacher ill. There are also problems with process--apparently the school moved the girl to another classroom without telling her parents--but the language is really distressing to me. The teacher "claims" the child's hair was making her ill. This is being described as a white teacher "removing a black child from the classroom because of her racially-different hair."

Boy, this pushes a lot of buttons for me.

Because it's not the hair. It's the stinky hair products.

I'm white. I have chemical sensitivities. Perfumes in products (and perfumes are in almost all products) can make me very ill. One bad exposure when I'm vulnerable can lay me out with dizziness and headache and hives that can last for days. Over the years, I've had many painful experiences of being excluded from places I wanted to be because someone was wearing very smelly lotion or had used hair spray recently, or used a smelly conditioner. And I have had more than my share of people denying that this could be a problem. Some people don't believe in chemical sensitivities at all; some are sure their hair gel can't be making me sick because it's "all natural"; some are convinced that what I'm experiencing as a toxic cloud of sick-making poison is "lightly scented" and is therefore OK; and some, to draw on a real experience I've had, just flat-out put their "need" to moisturize their hands right this second above my need to not be in an enclosed car full of perfume.

So one button that was pushed for me was the dismissive language used to describe the teacher's allergy.

But I also had a reaction to the racial element of the story, because I've had my own experiences with that.

For instance, years ago I was at the FGC Gathering, and tried to attend all-gathering worship. I arrived early, and a couple of minutes after I arrived, a white woman who was reeking of shampoo sat next to me. I got up and moved.

A minute later, another white person who had just put on lotion or something sat next to me. I got up and moved.

I moved three or four times. And then a black man dripping cologne sat next to me. I almost burst into tears. But I did not move, because I did not want that man to think even for one moment that a white women had gotten up and changed her seat because a black man sat down next to her.

I paid a pretty high price for that choice.

Right now, I have a black child from down the street coming to my house every day. He uses some kind of grooming product that is very perfumed. I haven't said anything to him, and I won't, because right now it is very important to me for a number of reasons that he feel 100% welcome in my home. We send him home at dinner time, we send him home at bedtime, we send him home if somebody here needs a quiet day. But I never send him home for reasons that have to do with him, because I want him to feel that this is a place where he is accepted. But I pay a price for having perfume in my house every day, too.

The teacher certainly handled things badly. She should have spoken to the girls' parents and kept the focus on the possibility that it was a product being used on the girl's hair causing her nausea, rather than addressing the girl directly and describing the problem as being her hair. I'm not going to let her off the hook for that.

But comments like this:

THIS shit right here pisses me off. I read about it earlier and it rankled me highly. Now that the details have come out, my blood is boiling. Oooh the ugly little savage Negroid is making me uncomfortable with her hair and it’s “smells”.

Yes, "ugly little savage Negroid" is exactly what the teacher said and meant. And by putting "smells" in quotes do you mean to imply that the product used--which lists "fragrance" as one of its ingredients--didn't actually have an odor?

My heart goes out to that little girl and I hope the teacher owns up to her bad handling of a difficult situation. But when I see people making this more racial than it was, imputing language and motives to the teacher that go far beyond what she actually said and did, it frustrates me.

I am grateful to the commenter who said:

I come to racialicious because it’s a safe space, not only for racial minorities but for people with disabilities, and I cannot believe that this possible disability (anaphylactic shock!!) was dismissed so callously and casually.

Other commenters also tried to separate out the teacher's possibly-real sensitivity from her bad handling of the situation. No teacher should publicly shame a student for any reason, and that's worth calling her out, and possibly disciplining her for. But--well, I've been sitting here a bit, and I don't have a good conclusion. Just these thoughts.