377 days - Blog #118 or how sometimes in order to think I write and I'm going to take you, dear Reader, down the rabbit hole with me

A couple years ago I was having dinner with a friend and we were reflecting on our age and how it related to our child bearing potential.  She said how sometimes she imagined the child that could have been born if she had a baby at the same age as her mother… or some other benchmark of significance.  I shrugged and said I never thought that way.  I wasn’t in that place yet.

As I approach the end of my 30’s, I confess sometimes I do that now.  If I had a child when I was 27 or when I was in the company of someone I might have let get away.  I don’t like to live in regret… but considering the best potential of my child bearing years is now behind me, I can’t deny the ghosts of those children sometimes float into my brain.

The thing is they could be anyone.  They could be a boy or a girl.  They could be a toddler or a teenager (I guess I could have a 16 year old at my age).  If I don’t think about the father, the child could be white or black or any combination of our amazing American rainbow.  And it isn’t really regret that comes with them.  Maybe it is the writer in me that imagines a life – and the imagining is usually about two or three minutes – so it isn’t a very detailed life – in which this child might live.

This isn’t to say I have ANY concept of what it is to be a mother.  I know every mother on the planet will hasten to remind me how good I have it as a single person who can sleep in on the weekends.  But there is a lot of untapped love and fear and grief and joy wrapped up in those imaginary offspring.  Which is probably why I can’t watch violence against children on television.  Or why I hear the laugh or a cry of a toddler in the store now as some sort of melody.  Or why I feel so crushed about a headline like the one exploding across the country today.

This morning, that is where my thoughts lingered.  On the mother of Michael Brown who, regardless of the headline, must confront her first Thanksgiving without her son at the table.  I confess I tried to think of Darren White’s mother… but, I guess that’s where my imaginary sense of motherhood failed.

Actually, I felt a bit of a failure last night when I heard the news.  I wasn’t even paying attention, really.  I happened to be on the phone with my sister and she was the one who lost focus.  I wasn’t really there mentally or emotionally, but after I got off the phone I went on Facebook.  I listened to Obama for a bit.  But I didn’t have any sense of what to think or feel.  I wasn’t angry.  I was… kind of numb.  Almost apathetic… because, really, is it that surprising?  Any of it?  The grand jury’s decision?  The fact there was violence. I mean, Jesus, we can’t keep our shit together over a hockey, baseball or football game… why do we expect reasonable behavior after a pressure cooker of waiting and hyping up the fear through media all day long?  I wasn’t surprised at any of the headlines.  Nor was I surprised very much by the opinions I ended up seeing on Facebook.  A little disappointment, I confess, in some… but whatever.  I didn’t want to get too worked up.

If I’m honest though, I was mostly disappointed in myself.

It’s been a year since I left my job at Urban Improv.  I work in an art museum now.  I live in a rural town.  I do community theater.  My life has become so very white.  So very white.  Not just socially – but I feel disconnected from the conversations and debates that pushed my way of thinking about these social injustices.  My life is budgets and excel sheets and Raphael and armor.  My theater is doing plays about white people that seeks out white people except when absolutely necessary and still thinks it is okay to use the word oriental.  My writing is even… I have a book on the back burner.  A book that, I tell myself, is marinating.  I’m actually just scared to go back to it.  Because no one will want to read it.  Because I fear my ability to do it justice.  Because it is about race.

Wait.  What does this have to do with anything beyond artistic ego and self-pity?  Maybe nothing.  Maybe everything.

It would be very easy to fill this blog with pointed fingers.  With cries over what is wrong with our country.  The excesses of police force.  The targeting of young black men.  Fear. Guns.  Why this opinion is wrong.  Why my opinion is right.

But what is the point of that?  Really.  What happened last night wasn’t a surprise.  And it won’t be the last of its kind.  So why rant and rave about all those things in this blog?  Haven’t I already done that before?  And what does that opinion matter if the reality of my life is so very contrary to those opinions?  If I only seek to complain about the problems and do nothing to participate in their solutions… how am I any better than that grand jury or a looter or the person who watched this story on Fox News this morning?  

Sigh.

Maybe it is the latent mother in me.  That desire to want to fold the world in my arms and say it will be better, but also put the ones who got it wrong in the corner until they figure out how to do it right.  But I can’t do that.  Not really.  That’s actually a lame metaphor.

But I’m going to keep it there.  I’m not going to delete that paragraph… because the whole point of this rambling is that I am struggling today.  I struggle to know how to feel, how to think… and most importantly how to act.

I encouraged my Facebook friends to take these debates offline and have a conversation.  I know that no one will take up on my personal invitation to actually do that.  And I know my own failure in personal conversation when the subject of race clunks out of someone’s mouth onto my dinner table.  I can’t even talk about that book that I’m not writing without feeling some sort of apology for bringing up the subject with people who get all squirmy about it.

I need to stop.  And I need to stop waiting for people to talk to me.  I need to talk to them.  Not confront.  I need to remember it’s more like saying, hey, you know you have a piece of spinach in your teeth.  Not pretty, but it’s not an insult to tell you that it’s there.

 Watch this. If not now, come back to it.  He says it all a million times better than I ever can.

I need to talk about this more.  I need to expand my own circle so I’m not just talking about what I don’t know.  I need to learn and listen as well.

I want us to talk about this.  So, dear Reader… I know I have a few of you out there and I’m not the kind of blogger who encourages conversation and comments very much.  But today, if you are scanning through this, please say something.  I am listening.