“You’re Black,” The Kid said to the woman behind the cash register at Target last week, pointing in her direction and looking at me for confirmation. “They’re not nice to you in America.”
She smiled warmly as I died a little inside, and told him, “They’re not always nice to me here, either.”
My children are growing up with an awareness of issues that I never possessed at their age. One night when we turned on the news, coverage of the Black Lives Matter protests (ignited by the murder of George Floyd) led to questions that still persist. And just last week, I turned on the debate only to hear the kids ask, “Why are they so mean to each other?”
There is one road that avoids these conversations; that sees them as detours to rush past. Celebrities who write books on how to entertain that include admonishments like “don’t talk about politics at the table with family.” Friends who go on social media to bemoan political posts because they’d rather see photos of dinner. Be positive may as well be the Eleventh Commandment in some circles; it could be argued that Hitler himself was a fan of the idea.
In other words? Bitch, I’ll pass.
If you want to talk about hard stuff, come sit by me. If you want to talk about fearful stuff, come sit by me. If you want to talk about unfair stuff, come sit by me. I’ll likely be there with my kids, clumsily but honestly having those conversations already.
Because I’m tired. I’m tired of a dearth of self-reflection, an absence of curiosity, an unwillingness to venture from the known and comfortable to the new and challenging. I’m tired of that response to inequality that jumps to consternation rather than introspection. I’m tired of an over-reliance on memes when therapy is available. Hard, but available. I’m tired of people not doing the work.
I should be empathetic; I went for years without doing the work. Reading and watching and listening to only people who agreed with me. Maintaining relationships with only people who looked like me or lived near me. Then I got my ass kicked to New York, then Australia, and grace does not provide round-trip tickets, so predictability fell by the wayside and safety could no longer be found in my own plans.
If the Me that is reflected in some of my Facebook memories found out that I’d be voting for a Democrat for president one day, she would fly into a tailspin. And you know what? I love that.
I love that grace has not seen fit to leave me on the well-worn path that I already knew and could navigate without help. I love that grace has sent me all over the spectrum (neurologically, politically, geographically, every other way) rather than leaving me in one spot to grow old and die there. I love that, though my student loans keep me from totally giving up on a career that I would never choose a second time around, I was driven to my true passion–and to the people and website who indulge it and support it and even publish it–because I was fired from a job.
I love that our story is messy and ongoing and real and that it’s full of twists I didn’t see coming, that I raged about at the time and now see as utter beauty. And I love that my kids get to see that and know there is more than one way to live a life, there is more than one skin colour that matters, there is more than one history of a nation, there is more than one party on the ballot, and there are countless paths to take–but all of them, my dears, lead straight home.