What I do want

I want to sleep. Sleep for hours and hours, maybe even a whole day, or at least until late in the morning, so that when I wake and look out my window from my bed, the sun has been poured across the bay, making it a glistening, white pool.

I want to meditate upon waking each day, sing a song or two, and pray.

I want to write a little, or a lot, every day, so that the words stay fluid and free in my fingers.

I want to honor my recently declared three month fast from shoe and clothes buying. I want people to see through the economic privilege needed to even declare such a fast, and see why I am really doing this. I want to prove to myself that I have enough, that no new pair of shoes or new jacket will make my wardrobe feel complete, and that the completeness I seek in my wardrobe is just a desire misplaced.

I want to uncover the places in me that lack cohesion, coordination, unity.

I want to spoon more Chocolate Hazelnut Fudge Coconut Bliss Ice Cream into my mouth, except that, at the moment, I want more to honor this body temple of mine, to honor the organs that do not need more food tonight. I want this honoring to last me until bedtime, through tomorrow, and I want to be forever plagued by the ability to honor my body's (and my heart's) needs for nourishment.

I want to solo the song that broke me open back in 2007 when I was so weary with resisting faith, and made me believe in more than just myself. I want to stand up in front of a packed house at my church, with my choir behind me singing their hearts out. I want to sing of letting go, of surrender, of just letting it be. I want the nervousness that claws inside my throat and makes my singing less strong and clear and beautiful to be transformed by the vision of my ministry into freedom in song.

I want the my muscles in my lower back to stop seizing and shooting out tendrils of pain.

I want to be witty and smart and assured, sorta like a straight Rachel Maddow.

I want the wars to end, for the Supreme Court to make gay marriage legal, and for health care reform, including a public option, to pass and show all the naysayers it's possible to honor everyone's right to health care without the world falling apart.

I want to tell the truth. I want to be free of the endless mind-fucking that not telling the truth does to me.

I want to tell the truth: You made a list of the ten main qualities you want in a partner just before you met me. Passionate, happy, intelligent, maternal, humorous, to name a few. You made a list of my core qualities. I want you to see that you drew me into your life. The truth I want to tell is this: I don't think it's possible to make a list of what you want in a partner and then dictate the time line of when the physical manifestation of this list shows up. I want to say: There's a disconnect between not being sure about having kids when "maternal" is on your list.

This is more truth I want to tell: I have never in all my years of dating connected intellectually so well with a man. When you quote to me lines from great literature, or read to me in bed passages from a book that a deceased friend of yours wrote, and I can hear the tears haunting the words, or you consider thoughtfully my distaste for the word "ghetto" without getting defensive, or call me to get my input on an assignment or discussion questions for your students, I weary of, once again telling my heart not to leap into my throat and force me to say the thing I'm afraid is "too much" for you, that I can't keep seeing you and not grow to love you. I want you to know that when you told me you watched me while I made dinner the other night, I lied and said I didn't notice. I want to believe that there's something to the warmth and tenderness in your stare that has to do with love.

The truth is: I'm not one of those women who can just live only in this moment, and not think about where this is all going, unless I am being honest about where I am, in this moment.

Because I want to be treasured, I want you to fall in love with me because of who I am and what I bring to your life, not because I am here now, a comfortable fit.

I want to be a truth teller.

I want to say all this, and let the words fall where they may. I want to be that bold.

I want to think it's possible that you are falling in love with me as much as I think you may be too full of stories about your past relationships, age, and doubt that will prevent you from seeing that you've got what you want, and that I've got what I want, right here.

I want, more than anything right now, to stop wishing you would text me, or call me, and reassure me. Just as no man has ever been able to do before you, I know that THAT kind of reassurance, that I am treasured and adored and loved will mean nothing if I don't already treasure, adore, and love who I am.

I want to remember that you can't read my mind, you don't know how I feel unless I tell you, and that you appreciate when I am honest with you. I want to tell you, and actually mean it, that I want you to be honest with me about where you're at.

I want to not make too many excuses about how busy we both are to avoid this conversation.

I want to have the sweet, lovely, light quality to our interactions untainted by my insecurities.

I want to stop wanting and start experiencing the things I want.

"It wasn't that I changed, I simply recognized the continuity that always existed," said Jaroslav Pelikan, Biblical historian, talking about how his "conversion" to Orthodox Christianity was not so much a conversion, but a process of becoming aware that he had always "spoken" Orthodox Christianity in his day-to-day life, but had never named it that.

Krista Tippet, his interviewer, and host of Speaking on Faith, a radio show I listen to, laughed with him and said, "Well, isn't all change like that?"

I repeated what Pelikan had said to myself: Change is recognizing the continuity that has always existed. I like the sound of it, it's linguistic simplicity, though I'm not sure I believe it. Certainly, my own spirituality has been just this, just seeing, bit by bit that I've always gotten what I needed, that I've never felt alone, that despite feeling like I'd inevitably get hurt or disappointed, I always wanted to believe; so that one day, while listening to a woman sing, I recognized the continuity of connectedness I'd always felt and finally felt ok calling it God.

But the events that have changed my life completely, I'm not so sure. Consider my mom's stroke when I was 15 years old, and all the change that it precipitated. Was there a continuity revealed there? Our family's response wasn't so much a pulling together, a rallying of love and revelations of support for one another. Matt, at 20, quit school and began working overtime to help pay the house payment and put food on the table. I quit babysitting and got a real job and worked as much as I could legally. Mark, so ill-equipped to deal with upsets held rigidly to his routines. With Mom in the hospital for weeks and all of us "doing our own thing" to get through, it was only our daily visits to Mom that brought us together and her urgings to pull together and show one another care and concern didn't really reach our freaked out and bereft hearts.

We never sat down and talked about what it felt like to have had our mother nearly die, for me to be the first person to hear her having the stroke, for Mark to be woken in the middle of the night and help me drag her out to the car to go the emergency room, for Matt, who had drank too much and slept too soundly to be roused by my screams for help. Two teenagers and one barely adult, we didn't know how to rally, to bond and become stronger, and left to our own devices outside of the hour or so with my Mom each day, my brothers and I became estranged from one another, fought endlessly when we were all together, so that I began spending less and less time at home, more time with extra-curricular activities, friends, and, even, dating.

By the time Mom returned to the house, the changes that had passed between my bothers and I were buried, we put on a front, without even talking about it, we tried to be more civil, more united, more of what my Mom needed. She recovered, more or less, completely over the next year or so, but I wonder about how well we recovered as a family sometimes. Now, today, with Pelikan's words echoing in my mind, I wonder what continuity was revealed by this massive assault on our lives.

I have a photo of us in front of the Christmas tree the December after Mom's stroke. She was still not very mobile and had asked me to buy sweatpants and sweatshirts for all of us for Christmas. She didn't have money for anything else. In the picture, we're sporting our colorful, warm fleece and smiling. Looking at the photo now, we all look tired and the smiles don't seem to come from deep down. It's my Mom's eyes, though, that give away how I think we all felt: they're teary, and though I don't know what she was feeling at that moment, I imagine that Christmas she felt overwhelmed with relief that her babies were all around her and imagine she was overcome with gratitude for another shot at being alive. How tired we all were with working or running away or trying to keep us together and bonded, didn't really matter, because we were still a family, and would go on being this imperfect, unprocessed, forever healing family. One that laughs easily, feels strongly, argues from time to time, but is also bound together by a significant trauma, by the obligation of blood, and most of all, by the power of love to transform it all into our individual and collective experiences of growth and humanity.

Ah, so this? This is the power of writing. I wasn't so sure there was continuity in this changing event in my life when I started writing, but here it is, revealed word by stealthy word, without my knowing it would get there. And so it seems that yes, I do believe that change is simply recognizing the continuity that has always existed.

What I don't want

I don't want to write right now.

I don't want to have a time limit imposed by my parking meter.

I don't want to be inside a cafe right now.

I don't want to have to avoid wearing my jeans another day because I can't seem to shake my China weight gain. I don't want to continue feeling fat, when, clearly, I am not, or as though I've learned little about self-control over the past few years.

I don't want to disappoint my nieces or my ten year old friend, Indigo by not spending time with them.

I don't want to run around trying to fulfill competing obligations anymore. I don't want to have a to do list that never get's done.

I don't want the cold to come to Santa Cruz, even though I have more scarves and coats than anyone else I know.

I don't want to start another week tired.

I don't want to be cranky or melancholy anymore.

I don't want to try so hard with Joe. I don't want to stop seeing him. I don't want to keep seeing him if I'm going to continue to want him to be someone he isn't. I don't want him to keep understanding me so completely, to keep saying things and doing things that endear him to me, to keep texting me sultry texts and kissing me with such sweetness. I don't want him to quietly correct me when I talk of us having sex, supplanting it with "making love" because I so much want that to be what we are making that I need to call it sex to keep my heart from leaping way ahead of where we're at. I don't want him to like the same books as me or harbor dreams of being an author like me. I don't want him to speak so thoughtfully about racism. I don't want him to be so very almost the person I want to be with. Almost, because the thing I don't want the most in all this is that I don't want him to be unclear about whether or not he wants a relationship that is leading to marriage and a family. I don't want to be that woman, again, who hangs on, waiting for him to see that I really am the most amazing person he's ever met and he'd be crazy not to fall completely in love with me. I SO don't want to be that woman. I don't want my heart to sigh when I inevitably think that being that woman feels so much easier and more rewarding (in the short run, anyway). I DON'T WANT TO KEEP TAKING THIS NEW, EXCITING THING WITH JOE SO FUCKING SERIOUSLY!

I don't want the way I've always been in relationships to spark such fear in me as I try to treasure and stay present in getting to know this good man. 

Finally, I don't want to keep thinking about what I don't want, because, let's face it, cranky Mandie isn't so much fun. Perhaps, if I'm feeling inspired next week, I'll have a list of what I do want. But for now, what I want more than anything else is to remember that my life really is all about being Love.

Race, babies, and being white

On NPR's All Things Considered today, there was a story on infant mortality, and the U.S.'s abysmal ranking as 30th among industrialized nations (It was once 12th) Listen here, if you want: http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=120098242&m=120098821

Though this is pretty sad, what I found more maddening was that the preterm birth rate for black women is two times that for white women (The preterm birth rate for Latino women is lower than blacks and higher than whites), even when adjusted for things like income, obesity, education, income, and disease. The fact is that babies born to black and Latino mothers, even those who are well educated with good incomes, are still born preterm at a higher rate (and die at a higher rate) than babies born to the poorest, least well educated white women. A researcher who was interviewed said that it may make some people uncomfortable, but that it really is related to the physiologic effects of experiencing lifelong racism.

Uncomfortable? I'm not uncomfortable, I'm pissed. It's not that I'm surprised that there are serious physiologic consequences to living as a person of color in a racist society, it's that it's such a sensitive fact to discuss that a scientist who is clearly disturbed by this trend has to "prepare" the listeners to hopefully hear her message, which, I believe is this:

Stop. Stop denying racism. Stop this bullshit about a post-Obama/post-racial society. If nothing else has swayed you, consider what it would be like to be an expectant parent, all the planning and preparation and money saving and excitement. Then imagine that baby being born too early, and struggling to live in a NICU, hooked up to tubes and monitors. Imagine the sleepless nights in NICU rocking chairs, holding on to needle-thin fingers of your too-small baby's tiny hand. As painful as it is to imagine, now think about losing that little soul you forged out of love and tears and hope, imagine that infant not making it, imagine burying that baby before it was even supposed to be born.

Are you uncomfortable yet? You should be. Our collective white denial, my white friends, puts the infants born to our sisters of color in this situation at a rate we should all be ashamed about.

All this is what was left unsaid in the story, what was whispered between the spaces of the words.

Hear what I am saying here; it is not my aim to create or contribute to collective white guilt. Guilt serves no purpose at all when it comes to healing our perniciously racist society. This is yet another call to action. I know the economy is preoccupying us all. I know health care is stealing all the headlines. I know global warming may make all of this other stuff a moot point anyway. And I don't have a clue how to remedy the racial disparities in infant mortality in the U.S., but I do think whites can work individually and collectively to at least begin to minimize the physiologic effects of lifelong racism. Maybe it's picking up a book by Tim Wise, or challenging a racial joke, or becoming aware of our privileges. But we can do something, and we should.

I know it's not a task that's easy, or without complicating factors. This was made explicit for me last Saturday. I was at a writing retreat with a nearly all-white group of authors, editors, and aspiring writers. (That's basic step number one, by the way. If you're white, note all the places and spaces you go that are majority white. Most, if not all people of color do this as a matter of day to day life, so let's do the same. This will show you how starkly segregated our society still is, a result of racist real estate policies in Post World War II America). In one session, I came a few minutes before the start and I heard the white instructor  assuring one of the other participants, an Asian woman, that of course she belonged at the retreat, and said, "You're Asian after all, of course you belong here." The Asian woman smiled flatly and the instructor hurriedly explained that she was referring to an old Doonesbury cartoon where the "model minority" stereotype was invoked as three students with Asian last names were given academic awards after the teacher gave a speech to his multiracial class about how diverse and equitable the school was. The instructor laughed and said, "That is one of the funniest cartoons ever."

I, apparently, didn't get it. There was no reason at all to refer to race in this situation in the first place. And then the cartoon reference, it wasn't funny. So what if there are educators who portray that racism has been eradicated because Asian students often have high achievement rates. How is a cartoon-referenced stereotypical intellectual superiority of Asian students (which is, in itself a myth) supposed to assuage a woman who was expressing vulnerability around a soul-exposing creative pursuit such as personal writing (the theme of the retreat)?

I had to say something, so I asked the instructor to explain why the cartoon was funny and how it applied to this situation. The more she explained, the more it was clear to her that she'd blundered racially, so, as we whites often do, she continued to talk, attempting to knit together the story in her head that keeps her believing she's not racist. When I remained unconvinced of the validity of her amusement with the cartoon and it's use in the session, I said, "I just find that more offensive than funny." She conceded that she could see how it might be and thanked me for asking the question.

At the close of the workshop, the instructor made a quip about being worried that I might think she's a racist. I was thankful for it becuase that meant she'd be willing to talk more about it. As a white person, I know such a comment is code for "please reassure me that I'm not a total racist and didn't just totally make a person of color totally uncomfortable." We talked for about twenty minutes and I felt like it was a frank conversation that brought some things to the surface for her to continue to engage with. I started and ended with my basic premise: I do think you're racist, and so am I, and so are all us whites. We can't not be in this country. It's how we act on our racism, or don't, that makes the difference to our non-white friends and acquaintances. She seemed receptive to hearing that. I also got feedback that she appreciated me addressing her comment. I felt good about how I handled the situation, and I believe she'll think twice about using race in a similar manner in the future

In fact, I felt a little too good. And this is where the insidiousness of white privilege piece comes in. The Asian woman in our session was one of my roommates for the weekend. As I walked back to our room, I noticed that I was walking faster, feeling eager to get to the room to see of she was there to debrief the whole situation, and, and... "Aw, fuck!" I thought then. I realized that what I was hoping for, what I wanted to do was to go talk to this woman so that she could validate me and thank me for my valiant effort at calling out the less evolved white person, for coming to her rescue and saving her from having to call out yet another racist white woman.

I don't regret saying something. I think we all need to step up the ways in which we speak up and stand up. But I was disappointed that my motivation turned out to be that I wanted to be seen and appreciated and liked by one of the few people of color at the retreat for doing so.

Step number two, perhaps, in social justice work, is to know that people of color, or any person who's a member of an oppressed identity group that I am not a part of, do not need to be saved. They've managed remarkably well for centuries under fairly brutal societal conditions. We need to be saved from ourselves, white folks.

Having caught my motivation, I slowed my gait down, took my time on the walk back, and slipped quietly into my room. I said hello to the two roommates who were there, one of them the Asian woman from the session, and left quickly to join a Halloween party at the retreat center. I refused to bring up what had just happened, even though a part of me, the immature part of me that still longs not to be identified as racist, really wanted to. She never did bring it up, and all I could do was laugh at that privileged part of me, the part that loves to ride out on my horse and save people of color from other white people's ignorance.

And yes, even now, that part of me is thinking ahead to which person of color who reads my blog will applaud me for a piece well written. But my stronger motivation for me to include this personal experience, and for writing so raw about the infant mortality story, is that I want to connect with my white brothers and sisters out there. I want to engage your stories and your experiences, to connect to that part of you that I think all humans have that all about love and equity and respect. We're not subject to those physiologic effects of lifelong racism referred to earlier, but I have to believe that none of us wants to remain a silent part of the conditions that mean others experience lifelong racism.

What can you do today to destabilize racism?