If you didn’t know, a little black boy fell into a gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo. For ten minutes, he was dragged by a gorilla named Harambe before he was fatally shot and the little boy was saved. Harambe is dead. Little boy is alive. Not ideal, but child alive. Animal dead. Sounds about right if I had to choose one over the other.
But the little boy’s mother has been killed and brought back to life a million times over if the internet could have its way.
As a mother of a 4 year-old child, I weep for the mother at the receiving end of all of this judgment. She may have turned her back for only a minute, but in a crowded zoo it would have taken her longer than that lost minute to find him. We all would like to think that we would have been more attentive.
I consider myself a good parent. But the truth is that I’ve had that heart stopping moment when I’ve looked away and couldn’t find my child. And maybe that moment has been at a zoo, near a gorilla enclosure that has a space a small child can climb under.
So I give that mother the benefit of the doubt. I trust that she loves her child and watched her child and looked away for a moment and then shit just happened.
But a lot of other folks don’t give that benefit of the doubt. They especially don’t give it to mothers. ESPECIALLY not to black mothers. As if there is some truth that only women have eyes in the back and sides of their heads such that they can truly see their children from all angles at all times.
When I can’t SEE Ahmad, I’m asking, “Where is Ahmad?” Because that’s how fast he can disappear and be into some mess.
And once he was outside, in the dark, looking for his dad and I didn’t know he was out there. Could have gotten hit by a car or mauled by a dog. In the 30 seconds I didn’t know where he was.
Another time, I wasn’t paying attention, and I locked him and the car keys inside the car. And he was a baby, strapped into his car seat.
Another time we were at the playground and I checked my phone real quick and then he was gone and when we found each other one minute later we were both crying.
And I have three kids, hundreds of stories for each. So like a million stories where something catastrophic could have happened to my child.
Those acting like it couldn’t have happened to them are lying. Or, even more scary — they have no idea how often it ALMOST did happen to them.
It’s mind boggling that we can’t all just call this an unfortunate accident and focus on fixing what can be fixed — making zoos so that there aren’t any ways for four year olds to climb under, over or through enclosures (or better yet, stop caging wild animals) — rather than decrying something that cannot be fixed: four year olds doing what four year olds do, parents doing their best, and shit happening no matter what.
Pediatric nurse at their 2 year check up: “I suggest you get their hearing checked and call early intervention services.”
Wait, what?
My boys don’t talk. They intone, gesture, and communicate in manners other than speech. As a stay-at-home mother, I didn’t find this to be a problem. They are joyful, inquisitive, expressive, and grateful. I thought that we communicated well. I interpreted their lack of speech as a choice, not uncommon in twins. When the nurse suggested that I reach out to early intervention services, I was beyond wary. I was insulted, alarmed, and defiant.
There is nothing wrong with my children.
I am still processing my feelings. Without recounting the litany of cuss words that ran through my head, I will report that I questioned the authority of the pediatrician to be so critical of my children’s development without knowing their profile or story. She literally used one indicator and made a recommendation. Was it her bias speaking? Or was she following a checklist? I was quick to protect them from the milestone watch and developmental scrutiny that I feel derails normal, varied development in children. But the damage was done. My kids were not on “schedule” and I knew I could do one of two things – hope or help.
There is nothing wrong with my children.
As parents, my partner and I have done what we are supposed to do in this situation, and that is try to help our children progress. We had them evaluated by child early intervention services and it was determined that they have sensory integration issues. Not only are they not meeting the speech milestones, but they had other developmental delays as well. Therapy was available if we were interested. It would even be partially subsidized if we allowed for data collection.
My fears went to battle. I worried that the data collected on my boys would be used to create programs to pathologize black boys in early childhood. I worried that their highly developed emotions and willfulness would read as aggression, even though they are all of two years old. That their joie-de-vivre and energy would come across as imbalanced; when in fact they are simply secure, self-possessed, territorial, non-verbal toddlers. I worried that letting occupational therapists into my home would cause them detriment, such that I could not predict the outcome or protect them.
We decided to pursue the therapy and take the risks because I feared doing nothing.
What if they really need help?
I still believe that “everything will catch up.” But, I am not the only decision maker in the situation, and certainly not the greatest stakeholder. The most important people in this situation are my kids. Not the elders in my family that, like me, think that an industry has been made out of alarming parents. (We’re still right on that in some respects.) Not the friends and family that think that “they are just boys,” “will grow out of it,” and “are acting like twins.” Regardless of the cause, they need help and their well-being is paramount.
Everything has gone well thus far. The occupational therapists are positive about their progress. They have also discussed all of my concerns with candor, citing data they have reviewed and their own experience. My friends in early childhood education have assured me that it’s the best thing we could have done. It feels like a good decision was made.
I have been a friend to many parents during their journeys with their children. This battle between hope and help is constant. Whenever we tackle a ‘difference’ in our child’s performance, behavior, or health, we have to carefully measure the intentions of those involved. As a parent of color in a mixed ethnicity environment, I cannot ignore history. At this very moment, knowing that the boys’ therapy has helped them learn and develop, I STILL cannot shake the fear that they might feel like less – that they sense that someone has found fault in them and that that angst will be the foundation of an emerging “otherness.” It’s a stretch, I know, but I wrestle with the guilt of even that possibility. Every day I pray that the help we have sought will be effective, edifying, and not damaging in any way. It has to be better to seek help than to rely on hope.
There is nothing wrong with my children.
Right?
MamaBSquare is an old head mother of twin boys residing in the Philly metropolitan area.
Although I thought this was old news, there is a new picture of the Carters that apparently has some folks critiquing the parents and others, including this well written article, chastising those who are talking crazy about Blue Ivy’s hair. If you didn’t know, Blue Ivy is the daughter of Beyonce and Jay-Z, and her hair is a natural mess.
Yesterday, my daughter told me she wanted to celebrate Kwanzaa. I immediately felt bad; she certainly hadn’t gotten the idea about celebrating Kwanzaa from my husband or myself, and we live in an overwhelmingly white suburb of Northern California. When I asked her where she learned about Kwanzaa, she said, “school.” Which floored me because this school is no where near a bastion of intercultural understanding or learning.
In any case – I told her we would need to get a kinara, to which she informed me it was called a menorah. I laughed, and then told her she was confusing Hanukkah with Kwanzaa, with the former being a Jewish tradition and the latter a Black tradition. She didn’t really care too much, but just wanted to implement something she’d learned about in school.
So I said, yes, we can celebrate, but in my post-Christmas shopping yesterday, I forgot to pick up a kinara, and similarly today got away from me. My husband came up with the brilliant plan to find a Kwanzaa app for the iPad, and alas, I found one! So we’ll be lighting virtual candles and discussing the seven principles.
***
In the last week or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about my approach to parenting, especially given the response to last week’s post. In writing about what I am keeping away from my daughter (and my sons), I came to a better understanding of why I parent the way that I do. Why am I celebrating Kwanzaa when it something I’ve never celebrated in the past? Because I want to encourage curiosity and exploration. Because I don’t want my child to believe as I do simply because I’m her mother. So I want to engage in celebration of what is a new cultural tradition because my children are not robots or mini-mes. They have their own thoughts, and sometimes they need me to bring those thoughts to fruition. It’s not just about them; it’s about the kind of people I want them to be – loving, generous, thoughtful, engaged.
In a conversation on Facebook, a friend pointed out the obvious, but the rarely articulated: “All parenting is political.”
More importantly to what I’m going to speak on here, however, is that I am a mother. Of a daughter. A black mother of a black daughter. That’s really all the expertise that matters.
But in case you’re wondering, I am a black feminist. A young, married, heterosexual, highly- and elitely-educated, black, middle-class mother feminist. I own all of that. Please do not get that twisted as you read what comes next.
I have secrets. Several of them, to be more accurate. Secrets that I am not so much ashamed of, but are reluctant to tell people about. Reluctant because I don’t want to be judged. Reluctant because I don’t want to know people’s views on these sorts of things. Reluctant because I’m just trying to live my life the best way I know how for myself and my family. Reluctant because I feel like until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes, you can’t tell me a got-damn thing. Reluctant because black folks in particular are real iffy about mental illness and medications.
I’m pregnant. 21 weeks, 22 on Thursday. I’ve wanted this baby for a really long time. This baby is probably the most anticipated of my three children, as I always had this idea that three children would make my family complete. This pregnancy has been tough, perhaps tougher for me than the others since my illnesses now have names and recognizable symptoms. I’ve done a lot of work over the past four years since Little A’s birth to keep myself healthy.
But I’m not cured. Bipolar disorder does not go away. It must be managed and treated, consistently, continuously. So even though I am pregnant, I’m still on an antidepressant and an anti-psychotic, at relatively high doses. But being down to two medications is a victory for me, as I started out on five. And one that I finished only after I became pregnant is one known to increase the risk of birth defects. But I’m still stable.
Stability is a shaky thing. I’m not taking anything for the fibromyalgia, which is likely contributing to my aches and pains in this second trimester when I really shouldn’t be feeling this bad until the third trimester. I stopped my sleep aid, even though lack of sleep triggers hypomanic episodes. And the one that causes birth defects also helped with the body aches, and the headaches too. Between weeks 9 and 12 I had a migraine every single day. And stable doesn’t mean “like normal.” I missed the entire last week of classes and barely scraped together enough legal knowledge to get through exams. And now, I haven’t left my house in two days. I don’t feel depressed, just sluggish, but I would be doing better, I am convinced, if I was on my other meds.
I want to get off these last two drugs, but I don’t know if I can. My baby appears to be perfectly healthy, growing wonderfully with a strong heartbeat and none of the defects that the bad drug could have caused. He is likely to be a world-famous gymnast with the all the tumbling he is doing in there – sometimes his movements make me nauseous! But in the third trimester, which begins next month, getting off the drugs would likely be very beneficial for my son. While I was on the antidepressant for my other two children, we now know that third trimester use my cause issues with breathing and tremors after birth. And with the anti-pscyhotic, tremors and withdrawal symptoms of diarrhea, dizziness, headache, irritability, nausea, trouble sleeping, or vomiting may occur. But if I don’t stay on, I could have an episode that lands me, for the second time, in the psych ward. I would do anything for my kids, but I can’t imagine that being hospitalized would be good for any of us, my two big kids especially.
I also want to breastfeed, an experience I really enjoyed with my other two, even if it was hard going in the beginning. But both of these drugs are found in breastmilk. Studies conflict over whether the amount is enough to cause worry.
Bottom line is: I want to be “clean” so bad. I want to be “normal” so bad. I want my kids to have a great life so bad. But this may be one of those times that getting clean is not such a good thing. It’s one of those times where having a happy mama may be “better” than having a totally organic, medication free baby. It may be one of those times that we have to give up what we want in the short term to make room for infinite blessings down the line.
It may be one of those times, but how will I know?
It’s been a little quiet around here. For that, I take full responsibility. Things have been brewing in my life that have taken my attention away from here. Honestly, I have what I think is a pretty good excuse, but I need to keep that to myself for a few more weeks 🙂
What else has been going on? Well, my 5 year old started kindergarten and my four year old turned, well, four. My summer job with San Francisco Public School District ended, and I started a month long vacation of sorts which has been hijacked by a certain something. I’ve spent the majority of my days in my house, trying to save money and wondering about the future.
Wondering, but not worrying. Wondering what life will be like in a year, two years, three years. Wondering how my children are changing, not just the fact of it, but actually wondering about the process. Wondering about how their personalities are changing, if they are in the right schools, if they will excel in school, if that should be my focus. Wondering if I can do this, this mommy thing and grad student thing and eventually this moving away thing and becoming a professor thing. Wondering if I’m taking on too much, trying to be the black superwoman that kills so many of us. Wondering how to keep it all in balance.
This is not a long post. I’m in a particularly contemplative mood that I think I’ll be out of in a week or two. But I wanted you to know that I’m here. We’re here.
My teenage daughter often stops by my office for brief visits. During one of her recent visits, I found myself telling her about one of the couples I follow on Twitter, who are planning their wedding.
“Ugh, I guess, whatever,” she said, or words to that effect. “I mean, I just don’t see the point in getting married.”
This isn’t the first time she’s expressed those feelings. I understand why. During the time her father and I were together, we didn’t exactly model marital bliss. What she said next, though, shocked me.
“I hope you and ____________ [my current boyfriend] never get married.”
My kids get along great with my boyfriend. He likes them, and they like him. He does “guy stuff” with my son, like wrestling and playing basketball, that I can’t do or have no interest in doing. My boyfriend talks to my son about all those “guy” things my son no longer wants to share with Mom (although my son uses me as a sounding board for the advice he has gotten from my boyfriend). My daughter says he’s “cool,” and he gets extra cool points for treating me well.
But I have only been seeing my current boyfriend for less than a year. We’ve talked about marriage – as a concept, as an institution – plenty of times, but we’ve never discussed the idea of getting married to each other. So the fact that my daughter brought up the subject of us getting married seems a little odd to me. I guess it’s the influence of movies – in the movies, two people who get along and care for each other in a romantic relationship, are by definition head over heels in love and destined for the altar.
My daughter’s comments were even more pointed than, “I hope you don’t get married.” When I asked why she hoped ___________ and I never get married, she said,
“I don’t want a stepfather.”
The kids are 100% in agreement on this “no stepfather” thing. A few months earlier, my son told my boyfriend that his Mom didn’t need another husband. “It didn’t work out so well the first time,” my son said.
My boyfriend and I concluded “don’t marry my Mom” was my son’s way of warning, “Don’t hurt my Mom.” Later, I asked, and my son confirmed “don’t hurt my Mom” was what he meant. Judging from my daughter’s remarks on the subject, it sounds like she and her brother have talked and agreed that one father – even if they don’t see him very much – is enough.
In the abstract, it’s easy to understand why a stepfather would be undesirable. In literature and movies, and especially on TV news, stepfathers are violent, cruel, and abusive. The evil stepfather is almost as common a trope as the wicked stepmother.
But it is still hard for me to comprehend why the thought of my marrying this particular man – someone who is not violent, not cruel, not abusive – is so scary to them.
“It would change things,” my daughter said. “My attitude towards him would change.”
I could see from her facial expression that the very idea of it was upsetting her. There was no point in continuing the conversation, especially since it’s not even a possibility at this point.
“No need to worry about that, since it’s not something we’re considering,” I told her. “If we ever need to, we’ll talk about it again.”
“Ugh,” was all she said in response, making sure she got the last word – or noise – in.
The mommy wars are battling in my head. They sound something like this:
he's not really choking her...lol
I can’t believe you chose to work this summer. You hardly get to see your children. I enjoy working. The two hours I spend with my kids in the morning are really great. It’s true that I don’t always get to see them before they go to bed…What kind of mother are you? You don’t get to see them go to bed, read them that story, even tell them you love them? That’s just a shame. Well, yes, it is sad that I don’t do that during the week, but by working, I’m bringing in much needed income so they can have other things…What is more needed than a mother’s love and time? Money can’t…Yes, but, they spend the majority of their time in preschool anyway, where they are very happy, happier, I think, than if they were sitting at home with me all day. And they are really well adjusted kids, who have tons of friends but still are attached to their parents. I think we have a great balance…Balance? You think it’s balanced to have other people – strangers really – raising your kids? Haven’t you noticed some of the bad habits they’ve picked up from these so-called friends? Well, yes, but…But nothing! You’ve abdicated the responsibility of raising your children to someone else, who isn’t necessarily doing a good job! And you didn’t have to – you chose to! Didn’t your son just ask the other night if you could come home earlier so you could read him a book before he goes to sleep? How did that make you feel??Well, awful…
The lady in red has a lot to say.
When I decided I wanted to go from my PhD and JD and become an academic, it was for a myriad of reasons. Primarily it was for the lifestyle – the ability to do what I wanted as a career – study what I wanted, make my own life. It was also because I’m generally not a good employee. I don’t respect authority the way I “should,” I don’t like bureaucracy, I don’t kiss a$$, I don’t like small talk, I don’t do face time.
But I also knew that I wanted to work. Being a stay-at-home mom was never an option for me. From the perspective that I grew up with, a black woman who didn’t work was lazy, no matter how many kids she had or how much money her partner made. “Leave It To Beaver”‘s mom was not our reality; Claire Huxtable was. And furthermore, if you didn’t work as a black mother, then you thought you were “better than” the rest of us, with your nose turned up and all. Truth be told, it was not until I moved here, to this very wealthy suburb, that I even knew black mothers who didn’t work. I did not know any black mothers who had nannies or au pairs. And for me, even if the money was flowing copiously, as fascinating as they could be, being immersed in little people’s lives constantly is not engaging or enriching enough for me. And planning charity events would not be either.
This summer, I’m working a 9-to-5 to get a sense of what I might be missing by only going academic. And while I thought I would really not like it so much because of the bureaucracy, face time requirements, and other general BS, it’s really been the lack of time that I can spend with my kids that has really been the largest drawback.
And that’s a huge surprise to me.
At least in grad school, I’ve been a quasi-stay-at-home mom. Working around my class schedule, I can co-op at the preschool, pick my kids up from school in the middle of the day, be available to pick up a sick kid, skip class if I really need to. While I know being an academic is more structured than my life currently, I still see that lifestyle as much more flexible than being an associate at a law firm or working a 9-to-5.
But I’m still working. And hence the mommy wars are constantly going at it in my head.
The mommy wars are partly about privilege, and I think no woman can see the gift and the curse of working and having children more than a black woman. For me, being in this profession as a huge privilege, a privilege that feels uncomfortable. There are very few female law professors. There are even fewer black female law professors. And there are even fewer black female law professors with PhDs. I am (or will be) a rarity. And being rare, in academia sometimes, is a privilege. It’s hard to admit your privilege, especially when you understand the structure of opportunity in our society. Especially when you do not come from a historical place of privilege, and most of your family is not there with you. Yes, I’ve worked hard and yes, I’m bright, but I also had opportunities that had nothing to do with who I am but everything to do with where I happened to be, the chance of being born to certain parents and interacting with certain people who gave me a chance.
It seems that sometimes the meme of being Black in America is that we have to live the life that’s been handed to us. Especially for black women, especially for black mothers, not working a 9-to-5, or a 8-to-6, or a 7-to-7, as I remember my mom doing, is not an option. We, as black women, pride ourselves on working, pride ourselves on doing everything, pride ourselves on not being indulgent or lazy – sometimes taking that to mean that we should be at the bottom of the hierarchy when it comes to taking care of needs. And at one point this was our only reality. We had no choice.
These messages taught me to believe that even if I wanted to not work, being able to live the life that I’ve fashioned for myself feels…wrong. That to decide to use my talents to make life a little easier on myself is somehow…lazy. And being on the “side” of the mommy wars that favors being at home more than being at work, well, that just feels like being a traitor.
I didn’t write this because I have an answer. Five years into this mommy thing and thirty into this black woman thing, and I’m still just trying to ask the right questions.
A few weeks ago, my son asked for permission to walk around the neighborhood by himself.
When pressed for details about where he wanted to go, he couldn’t state his planned route, and couldn’t name the streets and avenues he would be walking. I encouraged him to lower his sights from taking a stroll around the block to just walking to the corner, crossing the street by himself, going to the next corner, and coming back home.
Even this abbreviated route gave me pause. I live in a very busy section of Harlem. My teenage daughter goes out alone with her friends, but my son, at 10, is not nearly as street-savvy as she is.
But I let my son go on his excursion. The joy on his face when he returned, safely, was palpable.
“I did it!” he shouted.
The illusion of independence fell with the news of Leiby Kletzky, the 8-year-old Brooklyn child who was murdered and dismembered by a stranger the first time his parents let him walk home alone from summer camp. My son greeted me with the news when I came home from work:
“Mommy, a boy my age was taken and killed.”
My son knew all the details of the case. He even compared it to the case of Etan Patz. A family friend, Lisa Cohen, wrote the book After Etan, about the abduction and murder of 6-year-old Etan Patz in New York City in the 1970s. My son learned of the Patz case through Cohen’s book. Two cases, a generation apart, sharing eerily similar details.
My son made the connection.
“Guess I can’t go out by myself anymore,” he said.
My son is two years older than Kletzky and four years older than Patz, but he sees the two little boys as “his age.” As a mom, it’s hard not to hear a story about an abducted and murdered child and not think of your own.
Cohen wrote an op-ed for the New York Daily News, in which she encouraged parents not to change their parenting solely because of the Kletzky case. Because I know Cohen not just as a writer and filmmaker, but as a caring mom, I spent a few days thinking about her op-ed. I thought about how scary news stories about child murder help parents explain “stranger danger” and many other evils.
When I was in middle school, an old perv in the apartment across the street from my bus stop would shake his penis out his front window at us schoolgirls waiting for the morning bus. We told our parents, and for a few weeks, our dads waited with us for the bus. But we had to keep taking the bus to school. We had to learn how to deal with it – and to stop looking.
And so I decided Cohen was right. Kletzky’s death, though tragic, was no reason to stop letting my son go out alone in the neighborhood. I talked to my son about not living in fear. But I also decided he needed to know his surroundings better.
Now, I make him listen to and repeat subway announcements. I point out to him the subway express and local stops. I grill him on neighborhood landmarks. I have told him how to know when he is facing north (uptown) and south (downtown).
Recently, I let him go to the neighborhood drugstore by himself. I made sure he knew what to buy, reminded him to count his change, and gave him responses to some basic “what to do if” scenarios. I was nervous until he came back safely, with correct change and no horrible experiences to report.
It’s too soon to let him go completely. He admits he’s not ready to take public transportation by himself. We have time to prepare.
The best we can do as parents is arm our children with information and the tools to develop good judgment. We have to teach them to be responsible, and ready them for independence. We can’t always protect them from the consequences of their choices.
And we can’t destroy ourselves with guilt if the bad thing we are afraid might happen, actually does happen.
CocoaMamas 