Because now we must save the whole world, my son’s bow slips from the strings. The last reverberation hums against windows closed against night. So does the cold flash of his gaze when he slaps the songbook shut.
He refuses.
I walk out.
Category: Change
Carry On
Poor as sin, a bottle of wet, two friends dead. A man outside her window. Wallet on the car floor, wheels spitting asphalt, WaWa bathroom, brown tile walls. Lady pushes her girl into the stall, “You go even if you don’t have to.”
First book with chapters: Sweet Valley High. Which one, all the same. Skin dry, skin slick, so pretty before but realized it too late, that’s always the story. She borrows makeup from a friend, color off. Friend is a generous term. They had been small enough to fit on the same block. Once. Adults now, those girls, dulled but also steady. Selective memory to fill gaps.
New shoes she didn’t buy. Two quarters and a dime, a pack of gum gone soft, the name of the baby they took or she gave, who remembers. The recipe for making him stay, the back of a stained receipt, a language she learned to whisper but never to speak. Paycheck stub, proof of value, plastic troll with hair, once blue.
Making Way
On bike, top of hill, foot down. Red light. It was green as I was climbing but turned yellow before I could get through. It’s a quiet Saturday, holiday weekend. A few cars cross in front of me, no one behind me. The rotation complete, my turn next, I step on the pedals and inch out. The light stays red, though. It is red as oncoming traffic starts to enter and turn left. Because no drivers had joined me on my side of the intersection, the signal never kicked to green. I could wait here all day at a red light that stays red. Instead, I press through. The oncoming drivers pause for two extra beats to wait for me before turning left across the empty lane.
A man jams his body halfway out of his driver’s side window. His head, arm, torso look like they’re about to climb out after me. He screams across the road, “Why don’t you obey the law, you fucking idiot!”
I catch my breath and keep riding.
Through my head race all the answers I would say if his were a real question. Louder than my imagined response is the clang clang clang of his fury: “You fucking idiot, you fucking idiot, you. . .” For the next mile at least, I tense at every approaching engine, sure he’s whipped around to come after me. Will my helmet work when he clips me and I flip onto the side of the road? It’s a quiet, leafy neighborhood. People are out. Surely someone will see it and call 911.
You fucking idiot, you fucking. . . Continue reading “Making Way”
Becoming Who
As I shift, so does my son. I invite him to “special time,” a goofy name for a powerful connection, and he first rolls his eyes. “I’m not doing that.” The idea of playing just with me for 30 minutes is near the bottom of his list.
“You get to be in charge,” I explain. “It just has to be between here and the park.” Also, no screens, and no one’s hurting anyone else. Other than that, we can do anything he wants.
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
“Can I throw pillows at you?” His eyes have stopped rolling and now they’re fixed on me.
“Sure, as long as you’re not hurting me.”
“Can we go outside and play a tag game?”
I laugh “Of course.” Tag is the one thing that I almost always resist when he suggests it. Chase my son endlessly around the neighborhood? I’d rather stay in and clean hair out of the bathtub drain. As it turns out, it’s not tag or pillows. “Pirate ship!” he shouts, and runs into the living room to start moving furniture. We pull out the ladder for scaffolding, king-sized sheets for the mast. Bug creates turrets using plastic wine goblets. He also creates something called a “maker” which is a kind of on-deck factory that turns raw materials into weapons.
If someone asked me to describe my son with naked honesty, I might say obstinate, aggressive, bright and powerful. Curious but easily frustrated. Sometimes cold and snubs emotional connection. The boy hates to lose. He’s an Eeyore on steroids.
If that same someone were to walk into our house during our first shot at Special Time, they’d see an entirely different boy. Here is a child who is eager and spunky. He’s creating an elaborate game with unclear structure, and he’s persevering with enthusiasm. As he turns the form of Minecraft into a real-life activity, he’s engaging me in fizzy conversation. He’s cracking jokes.
The visitor in our house would meet a boy who is close to his mom, sharing and cooperating, confident enough to be fine with uncertainty. Here is a Piglet who is ready for anything.
So which boy is he?
We like to think of personality as fixed. That person in our life is a certain set of characteristics: maybe kind, a little introverted has good follow-through on commitments but fumbles in front of crowds. This is the person we know, and because we know she’s this way, we have a sense of predictability in our friendship, workplace, or marriage. If people are changeable, how could we function in our roles?
Indeed, we haven’t needed to ask this question much because most of the common (if mistaken) personality theory that dominates our lives reinforces the notion of consistency. It’s how we end up with ENFJs in workplace training with ISTPs, figuring out how to cooperate on a team. Nevertheless, as anyone who has taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) knows, the test has its flaws. A question comes up: “As a rule, you proceed only when you have a clear and detailed plan.” The test-taker then has to think, In a project meeting with my co-worker? When coaching my kid’s basketball team? Cleaning my closets? Working out at the gym?
Which rule for “as a rule”? The trainer is little help. She’ll say, “pick one area of your life and stick with that.” This test is supposed to map a person’s defining characteristics yet allows the random selection of context and perspective? A little skepticism is fitting.
The fact that organizational leadership and development professionals still rely heavily on the MBTI is not confirmation of its reliability. Indeed, there is no replicable research to back it up, and the science is flimsy at best. The lack of connection to any empirical evidence about “personality type” should gut its foundation and release its hold on us.
“What concerns me is the cultlike devotion of many consultants and practitioners to it without the examination of the evidence,” says Adam Grant, a professor of industrial psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
– Lillian Cunningham, “Myers-Briggs: Does it Pay to Know your Type?” in The Washington Post, December 14, 2012.
Corporate training is a $50 billion a year industry. Its influence is one reason we still believe so firmly in fixed personality traits. Another is based in the theory that we simply see what we want to see, that we seek out examples of certain traits and fix them to people. Personality, then, is an illusion.
Yet another curious idea is that personality, while unfixed and changeable overall, is consistent in a particular context.
Lee Ross, a psychologist at Stanford University, has another intriguing idea. . . He thinks we actually are seeing consistency in human behavior, but we’re getting the reason for it wrong. “We see consistency in everyday life because of the power of the situation,” he says. Most of us are usually living in situations that are pretty much the same from day to day, Ross says. And since the circumstances are consistent, our behavior is, too.”
– Alix Spiegel, “Is Your Personality Fixed, Or Can You Change Who You Are?” from Invisibilia on NPR.
Every so often, I look up exes to see where they’ve wandered. It’s a rare indulgence — rare enough that when I find them again, they have crossed oceans of life. One fellow was all braggadocio masking incompetence and sloth. He was stuck in debt and working a customer-service job he hated. Now runs his own business. His company lead tours in the mountains and edu-tains high school groups in the nation’s capital. The contrast is startling. It’s a marvel that he’s so completely not who I thought he was. . . or rather, that the man he was at that time and place was only one slice of a much larger, evolving person.
Traits may not be as inherent as we assume. Change the context, and the person himself can change.
If I want to become someone different (as indeed I do, with regard to how I approach my career and family), it’s not going to work for me to do so in the current stage-set of my life. If an environment rewards mediocrity, how can a person develop drive?
Shifting the situation invites a reworking of the self.
Taking on a project in a volunteer setting, or stepping into a leadership role in the kiddo’s school, or diving into HOA budget management, or committing to a regular childcare exchange with other parents in the community. . . these are just a few of the ways to “become” someone different. A new role in a new context allows for the cultivation of qualities not yet fully formed in the familiar self.
My son and I are not “who we are,” despite the inane it is what it is trope that comforts our dissonance and excuses our inertia. If we aim to invite a fuller version of ourselves, then we must change what we do, and where, and when, and how.
Image: Micah Bazant from the Trans Life & Liberation Art Series
White Privilege at a Racial Justice Action
In February 2015, Natasha McKenna, a 37-year old neighbor and mother, called 911. The help she expected was not what showed up. Instead, she was herself arrested on an outstanding warrant. In custody, she suffered a mental health crisis. She was restrained while naked and put into leg shackles and handcuffs. Six Fairfax County police officers in hazmat suits put a bag over her face and tazed her four times. She stopped breathing. Natasha McKenna died a few days later. The deputies responsible for her death faced no charges and continue to work in law enforcement.
Today, SURJ Northern Virginia gathered at the Fairfax County courthouse in front of the detention center where Natasha McKenna was held and brutalized. The protest found its way to Route 123, a narrow and busy corridor through downtown Fairfax. At 9:00am right during rush hour, we stepped out into the street and stopped traffic. Coverage of the story is here and here and here.
Continue reading “White Privilege at a Racial Justice Action”
Water, Light
Deadheading flowers will encourage more blooms on flowering plants. The normal goal of a plant is to flower, set seeds and die. Since we want them to continue to set flowers. . . we want to discourage flowers from setting seed. Deadheading the flower as it expires will redirect the plants energy from setting seed to creating more blooms. Additionally, keeping your plants free of dying material will discourage disease and allow more parts of your plant to receive sunlight.
From Cedar Circle Farm organic farmstand and education center
Someday I will live where I can garden naked. For now I make do with stepping out onto the balcony at daybreak, damp from a shower and dressed in enough to mask my skin’s craving.
July’s rain is nothing to its glare. A geranium in its pink pot drinks up half the jug without draining a drop. Everyone is thirsty.
A spider bobs on filament above a mess of thyme. Every time my clumsy elbows tear loose her spun walls, she rebuilds. I take care to duck under her strands but she knows better than to trust me. She skitters to the safety of the railing, her back an arrow of malachite flashing through a mica shield.
The thyme has tangled itself into the rosemary. Both started from seed two years ago. Now they are a wild fury. Winter buried their leggy stems, spring drowned them in pools of choked mud, and now summer burns them raw. As determined as their spider neighbor, they go on. New strands unfurl sometime in the night. When sun steams open the sky, tiny leaves press towards light. They grow even when the only sustenance is a stolen sip from morning’s turgid heat. Even left forgotten in the corner, they climb out of their barren beds and peel open their seams to free a thin, bristling marrow.
The marigolds and petunias perched up in boxes have curled in and darkened. I deadhead the withered, closing my fingertips gently around each base and letting the dry tissue fall free. It is more of a coax than a tug. Picking blackberries requires the same light touch. The ripe ones slip loose. Any that resist are left to darken their bite to sugar.
Ample rain and sun have kept these blossoms in a state of perpetual return. They begin even as they end. The petunias are tricky this way. Bud or compost? At a glance, it’s hard to know which are closed for good and which are waiting to open. The only way to tell is with a tiny stroke, just enough for the purple fullness to lay its pulse against the skin. The gesture is almost imperceptible. Does it fold itself over and surrender to its end? Or does it flex and hold inside its cocoon of flesh? Touch has no influence on the dormant thing, only on me. Its signal sounds through cell, through our common organelles, that it is bud and not corpse. I let go and step back. Somewhere deep in its furred sepal it clings to the threads of its root, churning sustenance into the shape of itself, murmuring, here, I am here, don’t rush me, I’ll know when it’s time to wake up.
Image: “Earth Goddess” from a 2013 exhibition at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens by Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal
Bridge
Support the person, change the system.
– Dr. Oscar Felix, Colorado State University
NASPA Closing the Achievement Gap: Student Success in Higher Education Conference
100 Blessings
In Jewish tradition, a person should recite 100 berakhot every day. That’s 100 blessings.
So you are not Jewish. Or you are. And you think maybe a blessing is something like prayer. Or gratitude. Maybe it’s different too. Maybe it’s noticing the azalea bush at the foot of the stairs and the way its blossoms began as thin green threads and now, after their full explosion, rest like a grandmother’s hands against damp leaves.
Maybe it’s also praising the rain. Continue reading “100 Blessings”
The Myth of Colorblindness
We tell ourselves the story that we have triumphed over the (official) racism of the land. We say, “It was awful then.” Then we twist ourselves into logical contortions to explain or ignore mass incarceration of Black men, the economic marginalization of communities of color, and a whole continuum of institutional racism.
In the post-civil rights era, newer forms of racism present formidable obstacles because they recruit and rely on our belief system about racial equality and egalitarianism. They hold that we exist in a meritocracy, and any consideration of race in policy or access is itself indicted as racism. The new forms are more insidious than the public expressions of white supremacy so easily identified and vilified as racist. Our shared narrative is a public expression of racial equality. Continue reading “The Myth of Colorblindness”
Tesselation and Return
Do you remember when we cracked our saddles against the flared skyline?
Morning is a container of lists now.
You rail in tight packets
and wear the fallen prism.
Swimming sidelong, the ring
in miniature
slides in next to the scratches
you squint into my waterlogged
furrow.
Your paddle, my web.
Your vigil, my birth.
The inverse of collapse is an empty rescue.
(Your collar
my attempt to soar)
Shannon E. Williams 