"How to Share Power - Kid Ninja Starter Pak"

11/28/14

I was going to write tonight about how “I Wanna Be a Foot Model,” but something happened a couple of hours ago that feels far more “timely” and helpful for today’s NOW moment.

Tre is having a sleepover tonight, and he was starting to get a bit surly and show-offy.  In hindsight I can understand: he is proud of the relationship we have together, and my efforts to try and share power with him.  Yesterday, though, I had had nearly all that I could take without getting really ugly in front of “Friend,” which I was not yet prepared to do.   

I wrote earlier in the year about the idea of power.  Power over, power shared, personal power.  It is always a very timely topic and recently, I had the very sticky, uncomfortable experience that comes with having an interaction with a person who chose to abuse her power over me.  But - that’s another blog.  

Children have power.  Lots of it.  Obviously, there is the power that a baby and small child have over their caregivers, compelling the parent to care-give (feel, clothe, cuddle, nurture).  Children also have a ton of creative power.  In her book “Living with a Wild God,“ Barbara Ehrenreich writes this about her about her own children:

“…They were not notably human when they first appeared, more like fuzzy, pale nocturnal animals, lemurs perhaps, without language or loyalties, habits or traditions, entirely devoted to eating and processing raw sensory data as it came to them.  I saw my opportunity at once, which was not to extend any biology self through some sort of dynamic imperialism, but to … rebuild the world for myself, only this time with a couple of brilliant and highly creative collaborators.”

Adults have power too.  We have power OVER our children.  We can physically hurt - even kill them, and we can also abuse them with our words.  Imagine having an argument with an 8 year old child.  No matter how advanced a child’s vocabulary, it’s just not a fair fight folks.  

So tonight, the child was cutting up in front of Friend, and I exited stage left to go take care of the laundry before blowing a gasket and ruining the play date /overnighter.  Outside, fuming at his behavior and how I was going to handle it in a way that allowed all of us to keep our dignity in tact (including Friend), I began mentally preparing myself for how far I was willing to go – empty threats are the devil’s handiwork.  First on my list: Friend goes home, playdate/overnighter over.  Game over.  I am ready to go there and all prepared to lay into him, when he steps out on the porch, looks at me, knows what’s up, and says:

“I know mom – I have been acting VERY badly!”

My heart melts right there, in a puddle in front of the child.  Suddenly, he and I are secret allies in all of this!  We both want the same thing.

 

Me: I know, dude!  What’s going on in there?

He: I don’t know.  I just, just –  (I can see he doesn’t has the vocabulary to express why he is compelled to flaunt his power in front of Friend)

Me: I know.  Listen.  This is why I pulled you out here.  I don’t want to embarrass you around Friend.  So Please – turn it around.  Stat! 

He: Right.  OK.  

Then we hugged it out.

 

It was a great night. 

Who Told Me I Was Ugly???

As I continue to chip away at some of the false boundaries between “self” and “other,” I often bump up against some hard-stops.  Some wired-in misconceptions that are REEEEEEALLLY difficult to try and (1) un-tangle, and (2) re-wire.  I guess that’s why they thought lobotomies might be good thing.  Great idea…poor execution.

My point is, since posting the photos of myself without hair and feeling fairly good about it, I have been trying to get at just when it was that I lost the sense of self, and thus the sense of my own beauty, both inner AND outer.  When now as I flip though old photo albums for new material, i come across photos where I had earlier mentally blasted myself for the way I looked, I look at now and a sad beauty stares back at me.  Along with a puzzling question: 

 Just exactly when did I decide that I was really, truly “ugly?”

And this is important!  Because even though I have always been a bit lost and misguided, as if I were just kind of plopped down on this straaaange  blue planet - taken from my mother, placed into homes with stranger-people, folks I KNEW were not my kin…miraculously, I seemed to have (mal) adjusted to all of that.  After all, children are resilient and I can remember the kind, sometime longing stares of strangers at the angelic beauty of a bi-racial child.  It truly is a sight to behold.  

So I had a sense of my own self, my own beauty and attractiveness at a very young age.  But - somewhere along the way, I claimed the idea of ugly.  And now, as I continue to feel more (inner) freedom, a freedom that demands my (inner) child be granted 100% discretion to play “dress-up” with all of the “outer” parts of how we define beauty - body shape, clothing, expression, and I am thinking to myself long and hard these days…”Just where along the line did I get the idea that I was ugly???”

And I do believe I pinpointed it the other day: the move from Boulder to Lakewood.

Observe photos pre LilyWhite Lakewood, CO:

  I mean, I am obviously feeling myself here:

 

And here…

 And check me out here, with my busted fro, still gettin' down to the get-down:

And even though I was one of the very few brown children in my 5^th grade class at Flatirons Elementary School in Boulder Colorado, there was enough ethnic difference not to feel so much “otherness.”  And, as you can see here, I was still very, very certain of my own ability to attract, with my million-dollar smile and square-do. 

 

And those are REAL MOUNTAINS behind us there – our elementary school was at the bottom of the Flatirons mountain range in Boulder.  
 

But then – in the summer heading into my 6^th grade year, we moved to Lakewood Colorado, a lily-white suburb of Denver, Colorado known for its – homogeneity and general intolerance, I suppose.  We moved there because my father was trying to escape a 1 hour-per-way commute.  I understand.  Commuting is hell.  But for me, availability of reflections of myself, of looking into the faces of others and seeing my own beauty, those days were gone.  

And my parents bought out of their price range, too.  They were tired, weary, hungry, and the “staging” on this particular home was irresistible.  My folks fell into a “money pit” in an area called “The Glens” in Lakewood, Colorado.  Immediately, I decided that my afro was  unacceptable and must be hidden:

Me during our 7th grade camping trip

To my left in the photo is Tiger Lily.  She and I and a couple other girls were so close we created our own language and made fun of others around who couldn’t understand us.  Her brother and she were re-named Ram Shannon and Tiger Lily early in their youth, in place of their birth names, Gerbox and Gerbonnie.  True story.

This is my 9^th grade school photo.  I had started tamping my hair down on the regular, braids, bun, whatever.  Notice also the feeble attempt at bangs.   We have a special name for what you see here: “fro-bangs.”

And then by the time high school came around, I gave up altogether, cut most of it off, peroxided the front in rebellion, blow-dried my bangs to a worn frazzle, and gradually got used to the idea that there was just something wrong with my hair.  Oh, and obviously something wrong with me:

Off to college I went, and it wasn’t long before I realized my curls held currency and so I started growing my locs:

And if you are wondering if this is half a picture, indeed it is, my friends.  I ripped out the other half – she was a bitch.  Her skin, not much darker than mine, she teased me mercilessly and cruelly about my brown-on-the-outside-white-on-the-inside demeanor, from the clothes I wore, to the way I talked, to the men I chose. 

And then I straightened it.  And started wearing rrreaaaalyyy ddararrrkk lipstick. 

But – not for long!  After going platinum for the first time post-baby in 2003, I have kept my locs close cropped.  Way-low maintenance, and - I am a bizzy momma.

And the other day, when I was snapping selfies for the blog, with my nearly bald head, I was feeling myself, something that is returning to me in waves:  sometimes I can really feel myself, other times, I am lost at sea.  But only for now, not for long.   

And, thankfully, what strikes me as beauty these days is far broader and more encompassing than what I used to define as beauty. 

At the end of the day, all I am saying is this:  as i grow out of adolescense and into my angsty teen years (i have heard the first 40 years of childhood are the hardest), i am finding that my insides are beginning to match my outsides. And on those occasions when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and it does not accurately reflect back to me my inner beauty, I look away. 

"Dear People: I’m sooooo glad I’m not White."

Which I know sounds odd, coming from somebody who came out as “Not Being Black” just a few short weeks ago, but such is the life of the half-breed city-dweller.

It’s 2014 A.D. and there is a movie out called “Dear White People.”  I saw it – it’s not very good, but what it has done, is it has officially sanctioned it as socially acceptable to make fun of White people, with all of their racism and social ineptness and just general “whiteness.”   It’s like how folks used to say how the last safe minority to poke fun at were fat people.  Well, push on over, fat ppl, it’s now white ppls’ turn.  Like I said: I am soooooo glad I’m not white.

This thought (being soooooo glad that I am not white) occurred to me when I came in on the tail end of an interesting Facebook thread the other day.  The thread had a racial angle, and the original poster was making a point about the online magazine Salon and how, as far as Salon was concerned “If you are White, you skate” [through - in life, without consequence, as a by-product of White privilege].

And, I guess I should be thinking “I am so glad I am not brown!  Because that is the popular thing to say, isn’t it? Oh, wait, that’s not it.  The saying goes “I am so glad I am not Black!” Wait, that’s not it either...nowadays, it’s more like “I wish I was Black.”  There. That’s it. Right there.  I wish I was Black.

"Obviously not Black"

The other weekend I was having a conversation with a long-time friend of mine.  A Black man with roots deep in Jamaica.  He said to me, as if I didn’t know, “Well you know, Maureen, about the "1 drop rule" - if you have 1 drop of Black blood, YOU ARE BLACK.”  

Yes, m’dear - I am fully aware of how the slave-traders, and owners, and would-be owners defined what it meant to be black in terms of who was and who wasn’t ‘up for grabs’ during the slave trade, and Jim Crow thereafter, and even now in certain parts of Amerikkka, I suppose you still have those white folks who use the word ‘nigger’ freely and proudly and are boastful of their Aryan affiliations and White Power associations and all of that, but certainly by no means is the “one-drop” test the Gold Standard these days.  And besides, all of that is irrelevant since I happen to have Half The Drops, but besides my blood, what has been my EXPERIENCE, in this skin?  Please do not pretend to know.  I don’t pretend to know what it feels like to be a Black man in America.  

“Who says you’re not Black, Maureen?” he challenged, when I insisted it was “really OK” that I did not identify as Black.  

To which I replied “Well, Black people of course!” 

And then crickets.  Because quite frankly, what could he say?

And don’t get me wrong, Black people (those who I have identified as Black) have mistreated me because of the power my light skin grants me as I walk through this life.  White people have mistreated me in far more subtle ways: I’m the “safe colored girl.”   My skin suggests ‘indigenous culture,’ (that’s cool, right?!), but my energy suggests 'neighbor.'  Thus, when they slip and make some sort of off-color remark or downright racial slur, there is always an awkward moment of “Crap. Damn her, I forgot that she’s not White!” Followed by “Is she gonna be OK with what I just said?” followed by “What the f#ck did I just say?!?”  Yep. Whoopsies.

Anyway my point is this: if a gun were put to my head and I were forced to choose a side, well obviously, I would choose Black.  And the reasons are layered and varied, complex and also simple.  But a gun is not at my head at this very moment.  And once again, I tell you this: as much as i would like to to choose a side, I simply cannot.   So today, I choose to revel in my particular shade of brown.  As my birth-mother once said to me about our prominent noses: it's functional.