A couple of weeks ago Maple helped my mom drive from VT to Wisconsin to deliver a packed car full of baby stuff to my little sister. Yes, there is a new baby coming in the new year and I am over the moon about the whole thing. For real. I actually cannot get into it too much right now because I am here to write about something else this morning, but trust me when I say: O M G I cannot wait to be this little bb’s auntie and I cannot wait for Freddy (and moo and bear) to have a lil’ cuz/sib. The very best. I’m dead.
However! I am here to share something far less exciting and far more irritating than all of the sleepless nights could ever amount to. For some. I actually think that it is a little tricky to figure out how bothered you should or should not be by what I am going to relay. It may seem slight, or average, or just how it is, but I want to encourage each of us, especially myself, to continue to ask why that might be and in so doing buck a little bit more of the cultural expectations and deferential surrender that this world and the status quo ask us to live inside of. Let’s see ok?
To start. We have all been dealing off and on with these interminable colds for much of the fall. It is ridiculous and unending and we are all over it. I have been down with it again this weekend which only bears mentioning because I was also feeling shitty the weekend that Maple and my mom left to drive west. Which was weeks ago now. So, yay, in and out of immune reboot or some such. Maple herself had actually been feeling quite poorly as well and there was some talk of her not going along at all, but clearly, in the end, she did. And while I am glad for it and also proud of her for doing so much of the driving to get there, I am also a little remorseful of what it feels like this kid has to deal with both in terms of familial expectation as well as in the world at large.
The incident actually took place at the very tail end of her journey. She was sitting in the Burlington airport waiting for me and wilfs to pick her up; we were late due to all of the peeper traffic in Stowe. Of course. We were on the phone actually. She was exhausted from her trip physically but also mentally and emotionally worn down from her time with her gran, which can be simultaneously wonderful and complicated. They have always had a very particular relationship and as maple has grown it has become more complicated as both her awareness and understanding of the dynamic and whatever inappropriate tendencies are at play have developed. It is hard. And she is a champ about it. Over and over again. It is delicate you know. Especially with our elders, to navigate the line between respectful deference and clear vision with a perspective that is rooted in reality.
I do not know how it is for other folks in their families, but I have observed in myself simultaneously a desire for along with a lack of any wise elder. It is a source of immense guilt in me. Like I am unable to perceive something that does indeed exist or that maybe it was a false narrative to begin with. I really do long for wise elders in my life. Guides, people to emulate or strive to one day become. It is an absence for sure but also seems to be somewhat the trend when I look around. Especially those of us whose parents are Boomers. They are missing something, are they not? There is an arrested development there that I can see in the culture as a whole but also within the context of my own family. It is also a gross generalization, I realize that. But there is something to it, I am certain, and it leaves the relationships lacking for those of us who are oriented toward the growing edge of our own development as humans. Plus, it is a compounded bummer to see the trickle down effect it has on my kids. And it is triggering in terms of my own parenting as well. Ok, so its a lot!
Anyhow. She was fresh off the excavating of some ancestral wounds, tired, and waiting for her mom to come and get her. She was perhaps a little weepy. And she was on the phone with me, her mother, when an older woman comes up to her, puts her hand on her head, tells her she noticed her in the airport, asks her name, and tells her that she would like to pray for her. Maple, stunned, says that she is ok and that she is on the phone with her mom and does not tell her her name. The woman walks away but Maple is shaken. Or, shook, as the kids say.
And now listen, this may seem like no big whoop. In fact, when she told Chris what happened that was more or less his response. I get that, I really do. I even have tried that response on for size a time or two in the processing of this event. But I would encourage us to not stand inside of that perspective for long. And here is why: this woman profiled a young (queer) adult, she took advantage of her older (white Christian) lady privilege, and she violated an individual’s personal autonomy. A lot of assumptions were made, and my guess is that they all lived inside of this person’s, as well as the culture’s, subconscious to such a degree that to call them out is making all of us uncomfortable right now. But can you see it? Why had she “noticed” Maple? The green hair? The Doc Martins? I mean, really? Why would she approach her, and then proceed to touch her, if she were not occupying a belief that she is somehow Maple’s superior whether by age, or by faith, or heteronormative identity; it doesn’t matter, pick one. If someone of almost any other demographic had reached out and touched my kid and asked their name, it would have been pretty near to the neighborhood of assault, would just not? So call it privilege, call it bias, call it whatever you like: my kid felt the same either way… the only difference being that she had to grapple with whether or not she was expected to simply take it because of the demographic. That is absurd and also, frankly, obscene. Not to mention the enormity of the contradiction that is the Christian Assumption. To which we all defer.
It rattled Maple. A lot. It is hard to know if it would have been so upsetting if it had not been on the heels of several days spent navigating the complexities of her relationship with her primary elder, but honestly, I am not sure that matters all that much. There is an effect here that I think is important to pay attention to. And listen, I do not want to come off as anti-christian, by no means. I love faith and I love prayer and I love all of the ways in which we each connect to our own sense of wonder to the great unknown as it moves through our lives. I am here for it. I am into it. What I am not into is in making any assumptions about what any person’s relationship to faith may or may not be, and certainly, I am not into superimposing mine onto another because of my belief in its rightness. No thank you. And that is what I see the Christian Culture doing time and time again. Whether it is in child-rearing, professional lives, education, local politics, or whatever. This is how it plays out with the rest of us entirely complicit by virtue of our deference to the Christian Belief Structure. Some of you may remember an article I wrote years ago about this contradiction in the home-education sphere that I had submitted for publication in a Secular Homeschooling rag. It was never published (and instead lives somewhere on this blog) because the magazine was nervous that it might be offensive to some. And yet! Don’t worry about offending the rest of us by assuming that we believe what you do, or even worse: disregarding anything we might believe as real or true in light of your own certainty.
A long time ago my big kids decided that they would always refer to themselves as Atheists instead of Agnostics so as to firmly keep the door shut tight against anyone who might perceive the inclusivity of one term as an invitation to convincing or converting. My kids are so smart like that. I keep holding out in my own referencing around self-proclaimed Spiritualism: I do really believe in the whole big interconnectedness of things. But never at the cost of anyone else. That doesn’t add up to a whole, does it?
This may actually be the easier piece to grapple with. Many of us have probably been doing it for years. But what about the automatic deference to our elders, or our belief (hope) that somehow elder is synonymous with wise? It’s not the case really though is it? Or we would have never had to remind ourselves to question authority. Be it the kind that comes with religion, or with whiteness, or with age. And listen I don’t really know anything at all except that I do hold out the belief that Black Elders know a thing or two more than any of the rest of us and I admit to feeling more deference and respect to an elder Black person than I do toward most White ones. This may be a can of worms that I am not very equipped to open and by all means correct my missteps and help me learn and become better. What I really want to say is that with age, discernment is a necessity. It cannot just be that because you are older you are wiser. I know I don’t need to tell you that but maybe if you are older and reaching out to someone younger you want to pause and give yourself an extra moment to consider where that might be coming from and what you hope to serve by doing so. That’s all.
So, today, I don’t know. In the last few months I have been admitting a few more difficult truths to myself, casting off my own internal expectations. And this presses near to that, ya know? I think that sometimes we do in fact make a big deal out of nothing, I know that I do. But I also think that when there is real upset or real dis-ease it is important to look to the roots of why we are feeling the way we feel. Is there some internal struggle with how we think we should be versus the truth of what we know is right? Is it possible to stay in the lane of doing no harm and also be honest? Or what sort of harm is ok within the context of growing our humanity? Truly, I do not have the answers. But I have some clues per the upset. I bet you do too.