I Hate Vaccines

I hate vaccines.

I cry when my kids cry.  I hate to see them hurt.  I want to wrap them in bubble wrap and cut out a hole for breathing.  That way they’ll never get hurt.  I have spent five years taking Celaya for her shots.  Last year she screamed in abject terror and clutched me in her four year old death grip.  I physically had to hold on to her, pressing her arm against her body, so the nurse could administer the shot.  She then proceeded to cry for a good ten minutes.  Not pretty.

Yesterday my four month old got three shots loaded with multiple vaccines shot into her chubby little thighs, two on one side, one on the other.  She cried for a minute and then got over it.  Yay?  No such luck.  Just as I feel a sore throat coming on last night, Matilda decides to get a nice low grade consistent fever that keeps her restless in her sleep and anxious to eat every three hours.  Meanwhile my throat is killing me and I’m afraid to cough because I might wake the baby next to me whose hold on sleep is tenuous at best.  I’m a fan of letting a low grade fever ride itself out as long as my children are not in pain because I know that a fever is good for the body’s immune system, and may even help the vaccine do its work.  So I was awake and asleep awake and asleep awake and asleep.  Finally, at 4AM, Matilda let out a little cry, and I said fuck it and gave her some Tylenol.  She settled down, but now she was wide awake and looking at me with her little shocked eyes and cockatoo hair standing up on end.  So, there I was, exhausted, throat on fire, rocking, swaying, bouncing in my bedroom to help her get back to sleep, so we could both pass out for a couple hours before Celaya woke up and came in for her good morning let’s all wake up now visit. 

The fever never came back, and her spirits have improved.  I know she’ll be fine by tomorrow. 

But man I hate vaccines.

At the same time, I am so thankful for them.  I’m proud to wave my yellow immunization card for each of my girls.  And while I cringe at the idea of shots, I eagerly look forward to the opportunity to protect my kids a little bit more with each one.  It’s a mixed bag of pain and pleasure.  

I really don't want to do it.  But I really want the benefits.  So I suck it up and I do it.  Because it is what is best for my kids and best for my community.

So you can see why just the word vaccine infuriates me lately.  It riles up all the fury I have over the fact that not vaccinating your children is even an issue, and quite a widespread one at that.  

Recently I overheard a group of five year olds at an alternative school I was considering for my daughter discussing the fact that they’ve never had a shot.  One poor little girl had just gotten her recent round of vaccines and the other kids were outraged:  “what!?  I’ve never gotten a shot!”  “No!  Me neither!”

The little girl taps me on the shoulder as I’m desperately trying to inch my infant out of the same breathing space as these little unvaccinated children and says, “Can you please tell them why it’s important to get your shots?”

I turn to the group of kids and say, firmly and matter of factly, “if you don’t get your shots you could get very sick and die.”

Needless to say, we will not be joining that school. 

I’m not sorry.  I have zero tolerance for parents that refuse to vaccinate their children, opening up the country to the return of all but eradicated diseases, and threatening herd immunity.

It is even more infuriating to me that this is a largely liberal cause, and I take pride in being a liberal on the basis of logic and humanitarianism.  As a liberal I am all for personal choice.  But refusal to vaccinate your child is not a personal choice, it is one that affects the community you live in. 

We talk about choice and freedom in this country as if we all live isolated on islands and those choices don’t affect the people around us.  You say it is your choice to eat unhealthy, smoke cigarettes, drink to excess, drive everywhere instead of walking, and it is true.  Those are your choices, and I would not want legislation passed to mandate any of those choices away from you, but I would ask you to consider that your choice is not a personal one, it is a community one.  Your health affects your family, who lose you or suffer with you if you die early or come down with a debilitating disease.  It also affects the community, who must pay higher taxes and healthcare premiums to take care of the outcomes of our community members who are in poor health.       

And your insistence that not vaccinating your children is a personal choice is the most egregious of all.  Once enough people join together who have not vaccinated, those people are putting the rest of the community in grave danger.  All it takes is ten percent of a community to not vaccinate and the tipping point has been reached; we will see disease and epidemic spread at an alarming rate.  I belong to a homeschool group where many of our members homeschool specifically so they don’t have to vaccinate.  I’m quite sure we in our group have far surpassed the tipping point. 

What hubris it must take to believe yourself intellectually superior to doctors, scientists, and people who have dedicate their lives to eradicating fatal diseases, to saving children, including your own. 

What hubris to wield that kind of power, the power to hurt, maim, or kill my infant with your own infected child.  All with a condescending shrug of your shoulders.  Because you know better.

And then I’m told by some, seemingly reasonable people, that I will never change minds because I am too emotional, too passionate, too divisive.  I’m on my soapbox.

Yes.  I am.  And I just can’t get down.  You could kill my child because you’re afraid of…. What?  Autism?  That paper has been long debunked.  Mercury?  It’s not that kind of mercury.  Research that one a little bit more.  Some long term effect that we don’t know about yet? 

How about death?  That is a short term, immediate effect that actually has happened, that we do in fact, in science, know about.  The science on this is settled.  And I just don’t see how we can possibly move forward as a country, an American community, if we can’t trust the science that is settled. 

Plato believed that we should have leaders called “philosopher kings.”  Not war generals, not lawyers, certainly not businessmen.  Philosopher kings would be the wisest among us, the elders of our community if you will.  And why not?  We have had very few great thinkers lead us in our country, but when we have, consider any great thinker you wish, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, the other Roosevelt, and yes, Barack Obama, they have led us in a forward facing, positive direction.  They all have their flaws, some of them horrible flaws (I’m looking at you Jefferson), but they genuinely believed that they were governing as best they could for the greatest amount of people they could within the constraints of the power with which they had been entrusted.  Also, they trusted science, reason, logic. 

We are so far from that place, from pride in a great thinker as our leader, at this point in time.  Donald Trump is a staunch, confessed, anti-intellectual.  He absolutely promotes a drive of every man for himself.  The will to set out on our own, to make our own way, to take care of mine and mine only and forget everyone else is strong right now.  But we must resist it, if for nothing else, then for the sake of our children. 

Yes. I hate vaccines.  I lay with my baby’s warm body pressed against me last night, pressing my lips against her temple every time I roused from my own restless sleep, feeling her feverish forehead and her warm breath on my skin.  And I thought:  I hate vaccines!

But I imagined what mothers must have felt like holding their babies sick with polio, with measles, with rubella, with diphtheria.  Unsure if their babies would make it through the night.  There was a time when parents didn’t name their children for the first year of life because the infant mortality rate was so high.  We’ve come so far from that, largely thanks to vaccines.  I’ll take one or two nights of a low grade fever every couple months any day. 

Yes.  In the moment, I hate vaccines.

But I hate the idea of my child dying senselessly even more. 

I Mother

I mother.

It's what I do.

It's in the marrow of my bones, the ethereal quality of my soul, the code inside my DNA.

I mother.

I have been mothering since before I can remember, since I first caught infant Tammy's head in my four year old palm as it headed toward the hard tile.  I mothered Tammy when I was 17 and I aimed to wipe dark purple lipstick from her 13 year old lips.  And years later when I cautioned her against tying herself to a small town boy and getting stuck in small town life.  And still more years later when I insisted she take more time off work to be home with her children.

I mother.  I don't always do it perfectly.  It often causes problems with my oldest little sister and me because I know everything and she knows nothing.  Or, as she would describe it, I think I know everything and she's perfectly capable of running her own life, thank you very much.

But what does she know?

I mother.

I mothered Breezy when she was an unruly baby refusing to take naps, and I was a ten year old stroking her chubby little leg as it shot up into the air in a special ops military stand against falling asleep.  I mothered her when she was 7, still thick with baby fat, front teeth still not fully grown back in, and we danced and sang our way through a two person talent show like crazy fools in the front yard of my mother's house.  I mothered her as she entered high school and I moved my unwitting first husband and our whole life 300 miles north so I could be near her for that most difficult of times in a young girl's life.  I mothered her later that year when she snuck out to a college party and I called the cops on her.  I then grounded her to the house for the weekend and put her on hard labor, housecleaning for two days straight.  I mothered her as I insisted the older boy who wanted to take her on a date come inside, show me his driver's license, and open up under my interrogation.

I mothered my baby monkey Teno when I gave him his bottle every morning for his first nap of the day and we watched The Fox and the Hound.  I was 14 then, and just about to run away from home.  I mothered him for years upon years from a distance after the day I ran screaming and crying from the house at 15, fleeing an abusive stepfather.  And even then I left only reluctantly because I was convinced my siblings, my babies, needed me.  I sobbed for weeks upon weeks when I left baby Teno because I just knew he needed me and he would never know me.  Then I put my big girl pants on and remembered that I was a mother, and so I mothered.  I picked them up in my car as soon as I turned 16, and I took them here and there with me.  And when they moved 300 miles north I drove up to drive them back down here for weeks at a time, Easter, Christmas, summer vacation.  I watched WWE on Mondays and Thursdays with my five year old brother, and I learned how to perfectly imitate (Teno would dispute this) The Rock "If you smeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelllllll......... what The Rock...... is cooking."  Nailed it.  I mothered him when I drove up the coast weekend after weekend to watch him play baseball for 12 years.  I mothered him when I offered him a bedroom in my apartment so he could come to the Bay Area and play baseball for the local community college.  And I mothered him when I let him go again, months later, because he was homesick.

I let them all go, all my siblings, and I realized that part of mothering is learning when to not mother. It was time for me to be a sister.  A friend.

And years later, when I had my own child, I knew that all those years of trying and failing and knowing everything and being so certain and falling on my face or sticking my foot so firmly in my mouth had paid off.  My sisters and my brother had made me into the mother I always wanted to be for my own children.

Now, when I watch my children learn something, when I hold them close, when I smell their hair, dirty with sweat and dust or clean and fresh from a bath, when I nuzzle their necks and kiss their round cheeks, I try to remember to let go, but I worry.  I worry in a way I never did as a mothering big sister.  Often and deeply, I worry.  But I don't worry, as you may think, that I will lose one of them.  I worry that they will lose me.

You see, I have built a force field of love around my children, as my mother did her own children.  My mother swore that as long as she was alive, her children would live, because, she says, with a steely confidence unlike her, she cannot survive the loss of child.  So, quite simply, she won't have to.  I give my children that same gift.  They will be fine.  They will fall and get up, they will get hurt and heal, they will suffer, but they will survive.  They will be human, live human lives, and, ultimately, thrive.  Because I made them that way.

But my greatest fear is that I have worked so hard all my life to be the kind mother I always wanted to be, and that my children will miss that somehow.  Something will take me out of their lives.  I never felt my own mortality, never for a second worried about death until I had my daughter.  Of course I cannot live without my children, that goes without saying.  But what strikes me is how they could ever live without me.

Who will cry with them when they get their shots, when a friend betrays them, when they fall from their bikes, when they work hard for something and still don't get it?  Who will help them navigate when it's okay to just sit and cry and when it's time to dust themselves off and get back out there?  Who will savor their dirty sweaty scent before bath time?  Who will look at them with love, albeit a frustrated, exasperated love, even when furious at some juvenile misdeed?  Who will reprimand them, unafraid to discipline and help them become civilized human beings, but never for a second failing to love them deeply?  Who will there be that they know will love them no matter what?  Who will always make their needs a priortiy throughout their entire childhoods?

No one.  Let's be honest.

So I worry.  So I mother.

I don't think being a mother is "hard."  It feels very natural to me.  It flows through me like a river through a valley.  But I do think it is all encompassing, draining, taxing, and exhausting.  Mothering takes everything you have and rarely gives back in full measure, and almost never does it give back immediately.  That river cuts new paths, smooths rough rocks, changes the landscape entirely, never thinking of what it is doing, just doing.

Just mothering.  

So I am a firm believer in the airplane analogy.  Put on your own mask first.  Then put on the masks of others.

Even when I am taking care of myself, filling my own vessel, it is so that I can use my vessel to fill that of others.  So that I can mother.

I head out of my house to run most days of the week so I can stay healthy, so that I can be patient with my kids, so that I can live longer for my kids, so that I have energy for my kids.  I work so that my daughters see their mother proud of what she does outside of the house, contributing to society using the skills she has to give to others.  I try hard to have a loving, stable relationship with my husband so that my children see what goes into a strong marriage.  But I also do not hesitate to call my husband out for what I see as missteps because I think it is important my daughters see a woman stand up for herself and hold her own as a partner in her marriage.

My girls' eyes are always watching me, shaping themselves after me, trying to do what I do.  My five year old uses my words, my tone, and my body language.  My four month old already mimics my facial expression and the sounds I make.  I am their first teacher, and since I am homeschooling, I will be their primary teacher for years to come.

So today, on Mother's Day, I breathe through the worry that my children will lose the foundation under their feet, and I work to let go of the worry.  I take care of myself.  I take time alone.  I reflect on all the mothering I have done for almost forty years, some good, some not so good.  I take myself to a movie.  I enjoy a few peaceful moments in the bath before my five year old companion bursts in. And I remember the letting go.  I remember letting go of my brother and sisters.  Letting go of the need to control.  Realizing that I had done all I could as a mother, and that time was over.

And while my time as a mother will never be over with my own children, I can let go.  I can let go of the worry.  I can sit at the end of each day and know that I gave all I could, that I took what I needed to take, that I taught what needed teaching and let them learn on their own what they needed to.  I can let go of the worry that they will lose me because the reality is that I am doing what I can to be around, and beyond that, I have no control anyway, so worry is only wasted time and energy.  Because of my brother and my sisters, because of my own mother, who, although she doesn't always practice what she preaches, has taught me to practice what she preaches, I can let go.  I can enjoy my glass of wine, I can feel grateful for all the mothers in my life who have become my village, I can sit in my house at the end of the night, house quiet and candlelit, and rest in the comfort that I mother.

In the trifecta of maiden mother crone, I skipped right past maiden and went straight to mother.

And I remember that force field my mother placed around me.

And I rest easy knowing that someday I will be crone.  

I Want to Hear You, But You Have to Hear Me Too.

"You know you only have like 15 people on your invite list for your baby shower?"
My sister asks me as she's planning and organizing my upcoming shower.
"Yes.  I don't know that many people.  Correction.  I don't like that many people."
I respond.
We both laugh.

I have my people.  My sister is my ally.  My brother is my strength and my comic relief.  My mother is my student.  My few friends are my fellow soldiers.  And my husband, well, he is all of the above, and, sometimes most importantly, he is my emotional release.  I can be strong, vocal, independent, willful, and valiant.  And then when I see my husband, I can just cry.  And he will just hug me.

Here's the thing.  I like people.  I love people.  In general.  I just don't have very many truly quality level "gosh I really like that person" that I want to come to my house and celebrate the coming of my next daughter.  When I invite someone to my house, I am hoping we will have a good conversation.  That if we disagree about something, we will listen to each other.  That we share the same basic values of human rights and progress for our people.  That when we say "our people" we mean, quite literally, everyone.

I do not mind being disagreed with, argued with, corrected.  I look forward to it.  I seek it out.  My problem is that anyone that has not come to be part of my close circle of friends, is not in there because they refuse to present their case, and or they refuse to listen to mine.  We can't be friends if there are topics that are off limits.  We can't be friends if we can't engage in a rational, respectful discussion on any topic.

I don't attack people.  I don't insult people.  I don't get personal and try to make people I am talking to feel ashamed of who they are or their decisions.   And if people do that to me, I end the conversation, and likely the relationship.

Disagree with me.  Be a Republican.  Be a full time working mom with a kid in daycare.  Be religious.  Be pro life.  (All things I am not.)

But don't be hateful.  Don't ridicule.  Don't close your mind to ideas that differ from yours.

This is the problem with this most recent election.  Millions of people heard one position of Trump's and stuck their fingers in their ears and sang "lalalalalalalalala I can't hear you" not only to everything else Trump (or Johnson or Stein) said (that those people actually disagree with) but also to the rest of the world saying "this is wrong.  You cannot do this.  These will be the consequences of your actions."  We don't listen to each other.  We don't hear other people's genuine pain.  We can't recognize the struggles of others if they are not our own struggles.

I want to hear you, white working class people, telling me that wages have stagnated, that you feel unmoored, that the world is changing and you don't know how to respond.  That you are afraid of immigrants and refugees.  That you don't like to see women in positions of power because they make you feel weak and threatened.

But you have to hear me too.  You have to hear me say the positions you hold hurt others.  You have to hear me say that by allowing a person to represent one of your issues, you are also allowing him to represent so many more that you say you strongly disagree with.  You have to hear me say that your Jesus would never agree with the things your representatives and co-voters are doing.  You have to hear the cries of pain and injustice.  You have to look outside yourself and start thinking about how your struggles and my struggles and the struggles of every other victim of "the system" are actually much closer together than they are far apart.

You have to hear me say again and again that we are the system.  We are the change we want to see in the world.  We are the police, the judges, the governors, the mayors, the school board, the legislators, and yes, the president.  We give those people power.  If you are unhappy with the system, educate yourself, inform yourself.  Discover what decisions, what policy changes, what actual measures will improve your life, without hurting the lives of others.

But.  In order to do all of this.  We have to have a discussion.

I want to hear you.  But you have to hear me too.

Free State of Jones

I'm back!

It's been months, but I've finally gotten the chance to breathe and think about writing again.  And before I head out for my Avon Walk, and get inspired to write about that, I wanted to write about something that inspired me a few weeks ago, Free State of Jones.  Since it is History related, my boss asked me to blog for work, so I am pasting here the blog that will appear on my center's website.  

Warning:  it is not as radically, provocatively liberal as you may be expecting.  It is my attempt at academia over polemics.  

Happy reading.

Free State of Jones is a Lesson for US History

Right after finals in June this year, The Free State of Jones came out in movie theaters.  It stars Matthew McConaughey, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and Mahershala Ali, and tells the story of a white man, Newton Knight, who leads a counterrevolution during the Civil War.  He argues that he will not fight for something, slavery, he does not believe in, and he defects from the confederate army into which he has been drafted and takes refuge with runaway slaves.  As the war rages on, an increasing number of men also defect and join Knight in the swamplands of Mississippi, where it is very difficult to pursue them.  Ultimately, Knight and his fellow defectors, along with a handful of runaway slaves, found the Free State of Jones County in Mississippi, a small, slave free, rebellious state in the south in the middle of the Civil War, a war the south was fighting to preserve the institution of slavery.

I am a history tutor here at The Bay Area Tutoring Centers, mostly because I am in sheer awe of history.  In college I studied literature from around the world, but my favorite reading was always grounded in truth.  Of course, stories are always grounded in someone’s version of some truth, no matter how abstract, but the best stories for me have always had some relationship to actual events, even if the relationship is a loose one.  As a result, I was instantly attracted to this movie.  When I found out that this movie was not only based on a true story, but was actually heavily researched and that great pains were taken to portray the struggle of Newton Knight accurately, I was determined not only to see this movie as soon as it came out, but to write about it here.

Why? You ask.

Why is it important for a tutoring center to cover a story that no history book bothers with?

The answer is precisely because no history book bothers with it.

Presumably, we learn history to see ourselves, to understand where we’ve been, who we were, who we are, and who we hope to be.  Few would argue that it is unimportant for students in the US to understand US History.  Fewer still would argue that the Civil War, its causes and consequences, is an unimportant piece of US History to understand.  As such, how can we tell a story of the Civil War, how can we teach it in classrooms or in tutoring sessions, without teaching about the creation of a slave free state in the south?  Put simply, we should not.  I have been studying history for over a decade and I have never come across this story.  We teach and write about Nat Turner’s Rebellion, about John Brown’s Raid, about Sherman’s March to the Sea, about the Battle of Gettysburg, about Reconstruction, about Post-Reconstruction, but nothing about a southern white man who founded a slave free state in the middle of the south.

Knight went on to spend the rest of his life with a runaway slave, with whom he had children, and the couple then even took in Knight’s estranged wife, who had left him when he defected, when she returned after the war penniless and desperate.  During Reconstruction, the Reconstruction government put Knight in charge of defending Blacks’ rights in the south, a south that was violently hostile to them.  Knight’s children then went on to further his legacy, and people in the Mississippi today either revere him or revile him for that legacy.

It is important for all students who learn about the Civil War to learn about men like Newton Knight, and the many, many men who joined him.  There is a legacy in this country that teaches us that white people are slaveholders, that we are the devil, that even if we didn’t own slaves, we supported the institution, or at the very least, and in some ways the worst, turned a blind eye to it. 

“Not our problem.” 

It is important for our students to know that they do not have to see themselves, their ancestors that way.  That they can look back and say, “I would have been Newton Knight.” 

As Joseph Hosey, a forester in Jones County, Mississippi today says, “When you grow up in the South, you hear all the time about your ‘heritage,’ like it’s the greatest thing there is…When I hear that word, I think of grits and sweet tea, but mostly I think about slavery and racism, and it pains me. Newt Knight gives me something in my heritage, as a white Southerner, that I can feel proud about. We didn’t all go along with it.”  (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-free-state-jones-180958111/?no-ist)               

In this country so fraught with racial tension, when teachers and textbooks are teaching about slavery, the Civil War, Civil Rights, Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon B Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, and Rosa Parks, we should also be teaching about Newton Knight.  He was a hero, and he stands as a role model of courage as much as redemption and reconstruction.  As the Smithsonian article notes, reconstruction is a verb; we are always reconstructing our big, diverse, complex country, and we know that our children are the future reconstructors.  We better equip them to do that reconstructing by allowing them to hear from a wide variety of voices from the past and by showing them complexity and contrast in what is often told as a one sided story.  In US History, Newton Knight’s voice is one our kids should hear.

My First Sister, On Her Birthday

You gave me the very first taste of what it means to be a big sister.

You made me love in a new way.

You reminded me that I had been there before.

You have always been the yin to my yang.

From the very beginning you were pretty and perfect, clean and shiny.  I was plain and impossible, dirty and rugged.  You picked flowers and I climbed fences.  You spoke softly and I shouted for everyone to hear.

You have always been a constant reminder to me that "different" does not mean "better" or "worse."  That challenge does not mean competition and that role model does not mean only way.

You explored wth makeup and I explored with sexuality.  You chose reliable stability and I chose constant change.  You chose one love and I chose what the hell is love?

As fully grown women now in our thirties, we are picture perfect examples of stark opposites.

Just look at us:

Some might say rivals.  Others might say enemies.  Still others might say incompatible.

I say yin and yang.

You manage a full time career, owning a home, mothering two children, finding marriage balance, and maintaining a strong group of girlfriends.  You keep everything in a well organized, prioritized, well functioning machine.

I do yoga and buy organic produce; I take my kid to squish mud between her toes; I barely see my husband; my friends are scattered around the globe; my life is organized and it functions well, but it ebbs and flows, changing its contours with the seasons.  

And because you're my sister, my very first sister, and because of how much I love you, I can see why and how what you do works for you.  Your children and your husband love you.  Your friends adore you.  Your work depends on you.  Your life is yours and only yours and it has nothing to do with me and my life.

Because of you I understand how to love deeper than I ever could have without you.  We come from the exact same place and exact same circumstances and we simply chose different paths.  And your path gets just as much sunshine and rain as mine.

I don't need you to be like me in order to love you as much as I could ever love someone that shares the same blood, same genetic code as me.

It is often said that the difference between friends and family is that we get to choose our friends.

But if I could go back and choose my family.  I would choose you as my sister.  My first sister.  Every time.

You are amazing in your own right.  And I have a feeling our paths, no matter how far apart they may seem at times, will find us at the same end point.  In the meantime, I look forward to their many crossings.

Happy Birthday little sister.

late night wine soaked thoughts

Everyone is stressed out about.... something.

work.

school.

family.

relationships.

future.

politics.

politics!

politics!!!

I am not truly stressed out about anything.  Except the fact that almost everyone around me is stressed out about something.

I think that what we've forgotten to do is prioritize.  What really matters to me?  What else?  What matters a little bit less, a little less, and not at all?

My family matters most to me.

Then work. I love what I do, and where I do it.

Then friends.  I have great friends, and some of them fall into that family category, okay, most of them.  And some of them fall into the work category.  And some into both.  (I don't have a ton of friends.)

Then the world.

I want to change the world.  I want to leave my mark.  I want everyone to have the opportunity to not be stressed out all the time.  I met with a student recently who was so overwhelmed by her work load that she could not focus even on simple questions.  8 hours of school,  6 to 8 hours of homework, 6 hours of sleep (teenagers should be getting 8 to 9), at best that leaves 4 hours, for eating, showering, family time, social time (which is incredibly important for cognitive development), family time, personal time.  At worst, if she actually gets the sleep she needs and spends the max amount of time on homework that leaves..... less than two hours.  What hope does she have to not have a crazy busy packed schedule life from now until she dies?  And she's just a kid!

I look at my kid, animatedly wanting to know, on her hands, what 1 and 4 make, what 2 and 3 make, what 5 and 5 make.  I didn't teach her to do this.  She thought of it on her own.  She started holding up fingers and I followed her direction, guiding her along.  She's hungry for information.  She's curious.  Naturally.  Like all other children.

This is my mission in life, wine or no wine.  (But c'mon, why not include the wine?) To feed curiosity.  To provide guidance.  To engage with people at all levels who are open to engagement.

It is why I can't put my kid in school in the United States of America, the richest, freest country in the world.  I would be directly combatting my own personal mission.  I cannot plug my kid into a system built, as of this moment, public, private, or charter, to serve as a daycare center and mostly beat the joy of learning out of my kid.

I cannot watch her be pushed around by kids and adults alike, a victim to a system that aims to "toughen" people up, to mechanize them, to plug them into a workforce where many people are unhappy, underpaid, and undervalued.

I'll keep her home, I'll introduce her to circles of people who want to learn, who work for a better future, who want their children to be kind, who value kindness over academic success (what does that even mean anymore?).  I'll teach her to squish her toes in mud and paint rocks, to read books about heroes, male and female, to engage in politics and society at an early age (it's never too young to start) to love deeply and be vulnerable, to laugh with her head thrown back, loud and wild, like her mama, to take deep deep pride in who she is, whoever that may be at the moment, and.....

to.....

slow.....

down.


In fact, she's teaching that lesson to me.  I will teach it back to her when I have the chance.  And I think I will have it.

I let her wander, let her smell the flowers, let her wade through giant puddles in sand pits after torrential rain storms.  I let her take her time while she eats, and I read stories to her before nap and before bedtime easily and freely, not rushing, not shushing her questions and comments, because what a joy it would be to enjoy every single day of life.

This is what I can give my daughter, and the world.  My joy in life can translate to her joy in life, and hopefully to my husband's, to the rest of my family, to my students and my friends.

Because, having a child has helped my vision clear up, it has helped me ask a crucial life question:

Why shouldn't life be one big party filled with people we love?

Really?  Why shouldn't it?

If we could all just focus on being good to people, on loving everyone around us, and on surrounding ourselves with people who deeply love us back....

Then maybe we could have our party.....

With wine.