Maternally Challenged

Living in a Post-Racial World

This speech that Barack Obama gave yesterday on the subject of race--I tell you, it does my soul good. If that puts me in the tank for Obama, so be it; if this guy is spouting a line, then I've fallen for it. But I believe him. I think he sees something that's really there, and that nobody else has seen quite as clearly as he has: "This nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one." And that, despite the deep imperfections we all embody, that "what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change.  That is the true genius of this nation."

I believe this is true, in part, because of how much I have changed, and because of how much the world I live in has changed in the half-century I've been on this planet.

I grew up just south of Atlanta, next door to my grandfather's farm. Visible from the living room of our house was the tarpaper shack that my grandparents rented out to their tenant farmers, a black family named Strozier. I am not exaggerating for literary effect: this was a shack, and it was made of tarpaper, though the inside walls were insulated, if you can call it that, with layers of newsprint. It was four rooms and a porch, built up off the ground in the time-honored country way, and it did not have indoor plumbing. I grew up thinking that this was the way black people lived. I knew white people who were poor, too--we certainly weren't rich ourselves--but I just assumed that to be really poor, you had to be black, and vice versa. This was just a law of the universe, like gravity. And this immutable fact--that whites and blacks coexisted on friendly terms but were in no way equal--was reflected in the doors of the two waiting rooms of the dentist we went to in Fairburn, too. There were no signs on those doors, but the signs had been there so long that you could still see their imprint against the wood. One door said "white" and the other door said "colored." This did not seem at all strange to me. But life teaches you lessons, if you let it.

First lesson: In 1964, when I was seven, I was walking home from school one day with my friend Mike Polston. My daddy was a Goldwater conservative (this was the historic year Georgia went Republican for the first time since Reconstruction). and I was incensed to learn that Mike's daddy planned on voting for Johnson. "If you vote for Johnson, you'll have to go to school with niggers," I said. One of the realities of childhood is that you wind up repeating things you've heard without knowing what they mean, and that's what I had done. Nobody in my home used the word "nigger"--not because it was racist, but because it was uncouth; my parents taught me that the correct term was "colored"--so I don't know where I'd heard this line, but I said it, and the instant I said it I realized that Lovett and Roberta were walking home right behind us. And that was the other idiocy: the possibility I was taunting my playmate with was already a reality in our school (though not because of anybody's progressive policies; there simply had never been enough black children in our district to have ever justified a separate school system, or else I'm sure there would have been one). I've never forgotten the searing shame I felt. Lovett and Roberta never said a thing, never gave any indication they'd heard me. That's the way things worked back then, too.

Second lesson: In 1981, I was a rookie reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, sent to cover an inquest in Walton County, Georgia into the death of Lynn McKinley Jackson, a young black man found hanging from a tree in the woods there. Walton County happens to be the scene of the last recorded public lynching in the United States, in 1947. That's not a widely known fact, but it's encoded in the DNA of every black person who has lived in that county ever since. Many of those black residents crowded into the courtroom that day to hear the jury's verdict on this young man's death, and I still remember the collective gasp from that crowd when the jury returned the verdict: suicide. That instant brought home to me that there were two definitions of "history" and two definitions of "justice" in the United States. There was the conventional wisdom, and then there was the version that black people knew. Sometimes they overlapped, but often they didn't, and where a gulf existed between the two, it was huge. So was the amount of energy it took all of us, all day every day, to pretend--at least most of the time--that the gulf did not exist.

Third lesson: right now. We just moved into a new subdivision. It's only two miles from our old house and in the same county--but on our old street, the neighbors were all white except for two families at the end of the street, who were black. I had not realized until after we moved into our new house that now the situation was reversed: we are the only white family in our cul de sac. I would be lying if I did not admit that this fact has given me pause. It made me uneasy, in a way I could not define, and at the same time I felt ashamed of my uneasiness. The correct liberal view would be to say, "Don't be silly! White or black--makes no difference. Black people are just like you." But no one who has grown up where I grew up, and has had the experiences I've had, would believe this. We are not the same; our histories are profoundly different, and to pretend otherwise is insulting. How different? Let's take money. My husband and I bought this house with a substantial down payment made possible by money left to me by my mother--the results of some investments my father made back in the 1960s and 70s, which were possible for him to make because he surfed the wave of the unprecedented  prosperity that followed World War II in this country. Part of his money came from real estate, which ballooned in valued over this period. During that same period, there were real estate covenants in force in Prince George's County, Maryland, where I now live, which severely curtailed the home-buying options for black families. They were cut out of much of the real estate boom, just like they were cut out of many of the career opportunities open to my father. (The economic research division at Delta Air Lines, where my father worked, did not hire its first black employee until the mid 1970s.) This is not to say that the teachers, police officers and nurses who live in our cul de sac didn't benefit from inheritances, too. For all I know, they did. But statistically speaking, that's not as likely for them as it is for me. The mortgages they got likelier came with higher interest rates than the one we found. And while we can afford (for now, anyway) for me to work part-time, every other family in our cul de sac is a two-wage-earner family. "You work at home?" one of my new neighbors said to me when she learned I was a writer. Her eyes got misty. "You are so blessed." Yes. Yes, I am. And, in historical terms, race has something to do with that. Or, as Barack Obama put it in his speech yesterday:

"Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations."

I also know that Obama's words are themselves are a generalization; in my life, I've crossed paths with black people who had plenty of inherited wealth. I can count them on one hand, but yes, they exist--and I have no doubt that their grandparents probably looked down their noses at my grandparents, redneck toilers that my grandparents were. But the exception, as the saying goes, proves the rule.

Obama's speech happened to come two weeks after our big move, and just on the heels of my own realization that, you know, I'm over this stupid uneasiness; I like it here. Our neighbors seem to be nice folks. We may become good friends, we may end up hating each other, we may just remain polite acquaintances, but I'm pretty sure at this point that whatever happens in the next few years, race won't have much to do with it. Basically, they seem to want exactly what we want: a quiet neighborhood where property values are maintained and where kids can play outside safely with other kids in the neighborhood.

Getting over the racial stalemate in this country--acknowledging that great big gulf I discovered years ago, and finding ways to go over, around or through it--"requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper," Obama said in his speech yesterday. I do not hold myself up as any paragon of enlightenment when I say I think I've gotten to that point. I'm just saying: this is where I've come from, and this is where I am. And I do not think I am alone.

The Messy Building of Something Enduring. Or the Enduring Building of Something Messy. It Depends.

We watched the first two parts of the HBO series "John Adams" tonight and I thought it was pretty good. But aside from my critical evaluation of TV shows, which isn't worth much, I was also thinking about the nature of history and how messy it is when it's made--how little the people involved know at the time about what they're doing, really, or how it will all turn out. And then I looked up at this big new house we're in, and at the bedrooms doors of the two little girls who were sleeping upstairs, and I thought about how none of the present moment could have been foreseen by me or by David when we went out on that first date. And yet here we are 14 years later, a family. It's a messy process which never seems to end, this creation of a family, and you don't know how it will all turn out.

But somehow it seems worth doing.

It's Amazing to Me I Once Worked There

I wasn't going to say anything about this inane piece in the Washington Post by Charlotte Allen about the teeny-bopper kinda love the ladies have to Barack Obama ("We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?")--I mean, it was so stupid it passed out of my head about as fast as my daily horoscope--but then I see where John Pomfret, the Outlook editor who commissioned it, was quoted as saying the piece was tongue-in-cheek.

To which I can only reply: No, John, it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. It was head-up-ass.

I swear, weeks like this I find myself thinking newspapers can't die fast enough. It's not like people can't be sublimely stupid on the Internet, but at least they don't kill trees doing it.

Only in First Grade is a Rash a Social Asset

Bad weekend around here: my 7-yea-old, Suzanne, was walking around with a hollow cough that made her sound like Tallulah Bankhead after a weekend bender, so it was off to the doctor and then to the drugstore for a round of antibiotics. On Friday night (these things always happen on weekends) she sprouted a weird, vividly red rash on her butt. Thinking she is having an allergic reaction to the amoxycillin, I call the on-call physician, who says yeah, that's probably what it is, and prescribes a new antibiotic.....which we forgot to get on Saturday, since by then she was already feeling better.

Then, on Sunday, the rash spreads, she develops a wicked earache and my husband and I look at each other and go, Hey, why didn't you go pick up that prescription?? Because, of course, the only way to deal with something like this is to immediately blame your spouse. Anyway, back to the store, new antibiotic, but the rash persists. So yesterday, once again, we are hauling up the road to the pediatrician. This time, the doctor looks at Suzanne's butt and says, "Well, her ear is already better and I can't hear anything in her chest."

"So what about the rash?" I say.

"Don't know what it is," the doctor says. "But it's getting better, so don't worry about it. Sometimes we never figure these things out." And she ruled out lethal staph infections and ringworm and bedbugs.

Back in the car, headed this time to school, Suzanne sighs happily. "I can't wait to get to class!" she says. "When I tell everybody all about my rash I am going to be soooo popular!"

Random Thoughts from a Jetlagged Brain

Just got back from a five-day trip to The Hague (on a magazine assignment, yes I know, it was hardship duty) and I am here to report a few observations:

1. Dutch TV is every bit as inane as American TV. A big part of the reason is that much of it IS American TV. For the rest, I will name only two shows I happened to encounter while channel surfing: "Beauty and the Nerd" (title in English, show in Dutch, do not ask me why) and "Dancing Queen," a "Dancing With the Stars" knock-off (or inspiration, who knows) set to (steady yourselves) the music of ABBA. And only ABBA.

This is my idea of hell.

2. Of all the contributions America has made to the world, pop music may be second only to the Bill of Rights. I say this after five days of listening to Europop in various elevators. Their idea of pop music is a female voice crooning into a microphone some phrase ("I gave you my love" comes in mind) over and over and over and OVER, against a background of synthesized music made by machines that I do not think were even programmed by human beings. Same phrase. Again and again. The next song involves another phrase, set against a slightly differenet synthesized sound. Only heroin addicts would enjoy this stuff.

I have gotten old and crotchety, and I have been irritated lately at the style of many modern American singers, who either do aerobics while lip synching (if they cannot carry a tune) or, if they do have a voice, slide up and down the melodic scale as if it were a greased pole, searching for a note to  land on. But I take it all back. That is ever so much better than robo-music. One more day of listening to Europop and I would have had to stick my head in an oven, if I could have found one. Ovens, it seems, are not standard equipment in Dutch kitchens. Yeah, I know. WEIRD. But they have their reasons.

3. The Dutch have bathroom plumbing DOWN.  My  shower consisted of a knob on the left, which controlled flow, and a knob on the right, which was marked with Celsius degrees markings, so I could program exactly how hot I wanted it. Simple. Elegant. Only took me two days to figure out.

4. These little Euro cars--Tuk-Tuks, they are called in Holland--are so cute that I wanted to steal one and stick it in my suitcase. It almost would have fit. It makes SO much sense for short trips, schlepping kids, grocery store, etc. that I want to drive my minivan off a cliff. This is the future, people. When it comes to cars, Americans are stone stupid.

Check, and Mate

My seven-year-old: Mom, can I sleep with you tonight?

Me: Nope, I plan to sleep with Daddy.

Daddy: What's wrong with your own bed, in your own bedroom?

The seven-year-old: It's so dark in there!

Daddy: Well, turn on the light.

The seven-year-old: You know I can't sleep with the light on!

Show Me The Blood

That's what I tell my kids when they come to me with their problems when I am trying to write. Jane Austen was right never to get married and have kids, is all I can say, because I am dead certain that if SHE had had a seven-year-old turning up at her elbow approximately every 90 seconds to sigh heavily and say, "Mommmmm....." we would never have had Pride and Prejudice. I don't regret having kids, I can't imagine life without my kids, but there are times, and this is one, when I would really, really like to scream, "WOULD YOU PLASE JUST LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE FOR TEN MINUTES WHILE I FINISH A THOUGHT FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST?!?!" Instead, I say to them, "Come get Mommy if there is blood on the carpet or the cops are at the door," and they go away as if they have understood--when the reality is that they and I both know they will be back in less than five minutes with another Great Big Huge Honkin' Problem that only I can help them with.

In short, I've childproofed my office, but they keep getting in.

And here's the thing about parenthood: at this point, I have no idea if I am a) instilling a deep sense of worthlessness in my children, because some dumb magazine article always seems to be more important than them and their problems, or b) modeling for my children that you can be a mom and still use your brain--or what's left of it after childbirth.

I imagine that one day they will be discussing this with their shrinks. I only hope that I am still around to hear how it all turns out, because, man, I would really like to know myself.

What Would Normal Look Like/ Part Deux

My career as cultural arts committee chairman of the local PTA is over, and the verdict is in: I am Definitely Odd.

When I took the job last spring, my predecessor assured me it wasn't a huge task once you knew the ropes; basically, it consisted of lining up various performances for school assemblies. I thought: How hard can it be?--and the answer was, harder than it looks, but still eminently do-able. In theory. In reality, that question--how hard can it be?--is one which in my experience has always, always been a prelude to disaster. When it comes to this question, I have learned from my mistakes, and can repeat them exactly. That was my first mistake. My second mistake was thinking: I can do this pretty much by e-mail and phone, and I won't have to go to PTA meetings.

I hate meetings. My idea of a properly run meeting is the kind Ben Bradlee used to hold at the Washington Post. News meetings at the Post were held in a room that could accommodate, at most, about 20 people, and it lasted 20 minutes, max. You were expected to show up with your game on; there was intense competition to have your section's stories in the paper, as prominently displayed as possible. But there were also deadlines, and a paper to put out. To keep things moving and on track, Bradlee had this little device--a joke shop toy, I think it was--that made machine-gun noises. When somebody said something dumb or irrelevant or just started droning on too long, he'd point it at the offender--RAT-A-TAT-TAT-TAT--and, in a manner of speaking, kill him off then and there. It was hilarious--provided, of course, you weren't the victim. For that very reason, Bradlee didn't have to use his little machine gun all that much. A whole lot of work got done in those brief meetings, day after day.

This, I have slowly come to realize, is not the way most people think of meetings. There are a whole lot of people in the world for whom meetings are a kind of social life; there are bureaucracies in which the whole purpose of showing up for work seems to be to Have a Meeting. People have meetings to plan meetings; some people spend so much time complaining about having no time for meetings that they could have had four meetings in the time it took them to complain. Much of the time, meetings are like paperwork: the process of getting work done somehow becomes the work itself. Most people either don't notice this, or they find ways to cope (my husband takes laptops to meetings, and gets work done in the back of the room). But I do notice, and I seem to be totally lacking in coping skills. Being cooped up in a meeting that drags on too long is, for me, about as thrilling as growing dental plaque. Honest to God, I would rather poke a sharp stick in my eye. At least then the pain would be a distraction.

Obviously, not all meetings are the horrors I describe. I go to monthly meetings of an environmental group at my church without complaint, and, obviously, monthly PTA meetings need to happen. But on general principles, I try to avoid meetings, even routine PTA meetings. When it came to running the cultural arts committee, my plan was: a) find out what I, personally, was supposed to do; b) do it; c) report back. This way, I thought, I could avoid the slightest chance of getting stuck in a room with people whose concept of meetings was different from mine--and, given that mine is a decidedly minority view, this seemed fairly likely.

People like me should never, ever volunteer for the PTA.

Because what happened--you could see this coming, I'm sure--was a Tragic Miscommunication. Basically, I was told at the beginning of the year that the PTA didn't have any money for cultural arts, that the budget had been depleted by a big equipment purchase for the school the year before, and that for the time being I needed to work on getting some grant money. So I did, and then....the PTA got some money....and then (yes, I know this sounds weird), somehow, I never found out about it. How, you ask, is it possible that the cultural arts committee chairman never found out about the thousands of dollars she had to spent on cultural arts? Simple: a) nobody told me and b) I didn't go to PTA meetings. My only defense here is that everybody was on notice about my aversion to meetings, and there's nothing wrong with my phone or e-mail. I mean, I let people know what I was doing. And I knew money was coming in--the usual fund-raisers and stuff--but I figured that there were priorities, and that when Cultural Arts got some money, somebody would tell me. This is what's known as a Fatally Flawed Assumption. (Remember the old saying? "Never ASSUME. It makes an ASS of U and ME.")

Meanwhile, October, November, December were passing, and unbeknownst to me (busily working on grant proposals in my office at home) I am getting a rep as a Major Slacker. And then this week, everything finally comes to light, and somebody else leaps in to line up some acts for the rest of the year (from a list of potential acts I'd drawn up last August), and I offered to resign, and they took me up on it. And I am delighted, actually, because this was a job I am not suited for, and somebody else could do better.

But the fallout here is that in the Momworld that is an elementary school PTA, I now have a rep. Exactly what it is I'm not sure, but I am pretty sure that it's not as a team player, or as the exemplar of what a committee chair should be. With the facts people have at their disposal--and, really, it's not worth it to explain all this in detail, because the bottom line is, what needed to be done got done--I am pretty sure that people's impression of me is going to be that I am just, you know, somehow...not right. Which, believe me, is truer than they realize--I have the hospital records to prove it--but it's not true in exactly the way they are thinking. And of all the not-nice names people could conceivably call me, "slacker" is not one that would really stick.   

Anyway, yesterday I took a bunch of papers over to the school to drop off so the PTA president could hand it over to whoever gets the job now. I was planning to stick it in the PTA mailbox, but when I got out of the car I saw one of the co-presidents getting out of hers, so I said, "Hey, can I just leave this with you?" And we chatted for a moment, and she said how unfortunate it was that I wasn't going to be cultural arts committee chairman anymore, and I was trying to think of a way to say how happy this very fact made me, all the while thinking that this lady was giving me a strange sort of sideways look. And so that's when I looked down and realized that I had my husband's jacket on, and that it was inside out.

Yup. Definitely odd.

What Would Normal Look Like?

The night before last, our cat spent the night outside--which isn't supposed to happen, but it did. So yesterday morning we discovered the fruits of her night on the town: a dead mouse right smack in the middle of the front walkway. I saw it as I was rushing out the door and made a mental note to throw it in the underbrush later. When I came back it was gone (I later discovered my friend Ann had been by in my absence and had moved it just under the hedge to get it out of the way). Then Suzanne came home from school with her best friend, and the two of them found it, of course, and decided to give it a proper burial. Put on gloves before you touch it, I said, and they said they would.

So I'm busy, and I hear them running around, and about half an hour later Suzanne grabs me. "Mommy, come look where we buried the mouse!" she says, all excited, and I allow myself to be dragged out the back door into the yard over by the woodpile, where--

(cue Psycho soundtrack here)

--Suzanne, with her friend's help, had buried the mouse up to its neck, leaving its grisly little head--bloody mouth agape, one eye missing--staring back at me like a little furry miniature Freddy Krueger (sorry to mix horror movie metaphors here, but I'm still creeped out and it's all that comes to mind).

I've spent a great deal of my life striving for normalcy, God knows I have, and the results so far have not been promising. And now it looks like I am going to be raising kids who are just as afflicted as I am, because while Suzanne and her friend thought this whole thing was hilarious, especially the part where I screamed, I am quite sure that this is Definitely. Not. Normal.

Another Week, Another All-Clear! I'm On a Roll!

Got a voice mail from my doc, The World's Most Wonderful Gastroenterologist. I love him because he talks to me like I'm an intelligent person and we are two intelligent persons discussing complicated topics. Those of you who haven't spent as much of their lives being a patient as I have may not know, but that is a rare thing in medicine these days. Anyway: "Tracy, I've been trying to reach you. I have your path[ology report] here and it's okay, nothing to worry about. Call me tomorrow--ask for Stephanie, she'll know how to reach me--and we can discuss it in more detail."

Again--thanks, everybody. You guys are settin' the bar pretty high in the friendship department here. I hope I can live up to it if the shoe's ever on the other foot, which I hope to God it will never be. But I'm just sayin'.