White Noise

Yesterday, on Facebook, the source of much of the world's troubles, a popular black blogger posted this query:

Okay black people...

ask white people one

question you always

wanted to know 🤣

The resulting thread was fascinating. Responses were funny, touching, wise, and real. I learned a LOT. Some themes just kept recurring. For example, white people, if you, like me, were under the impression that mac and cheese can be a main dish, we have all apparently made a grave error. Discussions ranged from the absurd--"What is a Hooting Nanny?? Did I spell that right?"--to the sublime--"You do know Jesus wasn't white, right?" 

Soon, though, another theme began to make itself apparent. Not all white people recognized themselves in all the questions. And when that happened, white people who don't let their dogs lick their mouths, or who don't put raisins in their potato salad (WHO DOES THIS, I MEAN IT), or who always use a washcloth when they shower, began responding with a similar comment--"I guess I must not be white!"  White person after white person responded to questions by saying, "I sure don't say, 'I'm just going to sneak by you', and I don't know anyone who does--I guess I must be black!"

At some point, one of the commenters called this out. "What a white person response," she said.  I was relieved, honestly, that someone else brought it up, because I was feeling uneasy. Which is what I said in my own comment of agreement. Maybe, instead, we could say, "This one doesn't apply to me," or "I don't do any of these things," I suggested. But it seemed to me like maybe it's a bit disingenuous to answer by distancing ourselves from our white experience, when the whole point of the post is to elicit honest discussion about it. After all, even if we can't relate to the specific question, we are white. We're not black. So maybe, although it is important to acknowledge what we have in common, it's not respectful to act like we're the same.

You might be able to guess what happened next.

Replies started rolling in to my comment. I was being too serious, they informed me.  People were just joking. Couldn't I keep things light, funny? Why did I have to ruin everything? It's all in good fun, there is no harm done. Why did I, one person asked me, have to make everything about skin color, when we are all just humans? 

Now, I think it's pretty obvious that the entire point of the original post was to spark discussion between people of different skin colors, so this was hardly a difference being raised by me. Also, on this post, questions have been asked such as, "If you're not a racist, why don't you speak up when you see racism?" So I also don't believe I was personally bringing down all 800K+ commenters with my seriousness. However, if you guessed that all the people who immediately chimed in to tell me that it is fine for white people to make this joke, and I am wrong for suggesting that it might not be OK, are, in fact, white people, you would be correct.

I will be the first to admit that I know nothing about this, and I might be wrong and all those other white people might be right. However, here's what I do know. I'm a single mom. I haven't always been one, just for the last six years. Just while my kids went through adolescence, so no big deal. 🙄  Sometimes, I will hear a married mom, when her husband is out of town on a trip, or is working long hours, or is temporarily physically separated from her for some reason, jokingly talk about how she is a "single mom for the weekend", or some other similar phrase. And I know this. You can't be a single mom for the weekend. Not for the day, not for a month, not for a while. If you have a partner in life, in responsibility, in investment in your children, with an equal share of hope and dread and fear and joy in everything that you carry together, you are not a single mom. 

Before anyone gets all upset (as if that didn't already happen back there when I started talking about white people), I'm not trying to say that every mom's job isn't a hard one. We are all just slugging it out the best we can. But the experience of a single parent is a different kind of hard. And it's a kind that is difficult to understand unless that experience has been yours. It's OK. There's no blame and there's no shame. But it's not all right for you to invoke it so casually. It's an unintended, well-meaning blow to those of us who are just white-knuckling it through the real thing. 

I'm not the first to point this out. There are hundreds of articles, blog posts, and online discussions about it--Google it and you'll see. And it's not the only thing of its kind. Many of you may have just recently seen all the social media posts around April Fool's Day, asking people to realize that it's not a funny joke to read your fake pregnancy announcement for someone who has just experienced their third miscarriage. Another example is the conversation I had with my teenage son about why some girl was "overreacting" to a joke someone (thankfully not him) made, that she called sexual harassment. To you, I told him, it was just a dick joke, because to you, it can be. It can be that way to everyone who never had to hear an unwanted dick joke when they were just being a professional, respectfully doing their job. Those of us who are parenting together can be unaware of the challenges of parenting alone, and those of us who haven't battled infertility can be cavalier about surprise pregnancies, and those who don't feel sexually endangered (largely men) are often unconscious of the constant vigilance that is routinely experienced by women.

We all have some area in which we have been untouched by pain or struggle, and this can make us not only insensitive, but unseeing, to the difference between our experience and that of others. For those of us who are white, our race has often been an invisible experience, seen only by those who don't share it with us. Our whiteness is so taken for granted that it is simply part of the backdrop of our lives, real white noise--constant yet unheard, blocking out all other sound. It seems harmless to us to set it aside, to say, lightheartedly, "Well I guess I'm really a black person!" But when I listen to my non-white friends, race is not something they can jokingly set aside. They cannot un-see their own skin color, cannot, as one of my scolding commenters on the Facebook thread told me, feel free to "identify" with whatever race they choose, black or white. In many ways, blackness defines their experience of the world, and it is a vastly different experience than anything myself and my white friends can identify with just because we might think we share an equal knowledge of how to correctly season chicken or discipline our children.

The bottom line is that jokes are made by people who can afford them--the people who have power, or safety, or resources. But if you feel unsafe, the constant recipient of unwanted attention that invades your space and violates your bodily autonomy; if you are in pain and grieving the loss of something deeply wanted and longed for; if you are struggling just to make it through the day, deeply convinced that you are never doing enough, can never be enough; if you continuously experience a deck stacked against you and the constant invalidation of your dignity, your personhood--it's hard for the joke to sit lightly. As a result, when we are in the power position, the position to joke, we can instead unknowingly hurt, and I think that means we have a responsibility to be more careful. All I'm saying is maybe we should consider it. I'd like to try.

Laura Knows

In one of my favorite pieces of writing, an article called 7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable, author David Wong describes how the number of close and trusted friends that most of us have in our lives is drastically dropping. Most of us, he says, have at most two people we feel we could confide in, and about a quarter of us have no one.

Given these statistics, I've been fortunate in my life to have a number of close and trusted friends, many of whom I've either been lucky enough to know for a lifetime, or hope to know for a lifetime from now. But for the last 20 years, the good fortune that has been a part of my adult life in a way that goes beyond friendship--that has been companion, sister, partner, and soulmate--is Laura.

Laura is the best, in the way that I know that all your best friends are the best. She is smart, and funny, and brave and beautiful. She is faithful, and always has your back. She is the definition of humility, and sacrifices herself for others. She has a list of other good qualities a mile long. But Laura also has a superpower, and it is this--Laura knows.

She knows all the things that I don't know, like how to re-create a perfect replica of Chico's tacos, and how to do math problems that have "infinity" as a possible answer, and how to put a strip of toilet paper over the sensors on those awful automatic flush toilets to keep them from flushing before you want them to. She knows about science. She knows about engineering. She knows about education. She knows about marketing. She knows about pets and shoes and hair and jewelry and how to make tamales without a recipe and how to lay shingles on a roof. She knows the right questions to ask about everything, all the time, even when she's just hearing about that thing for the first time. She knows how to think about things, and how to think about people--how to listen and learn and understand.

Most of all, Laura knows about me.

By that, I mean that Laura knows the real me. There is no part of my life that is off-limits to her, or hidden from her. She knows all my stories, all my secrets. She has been there, not just for me at my best, but for me at my worst, and then some. She doesn't think I'm some otherwordly saint, or wise counselor, or supermom--she knows I'm nothing special. She has seen, and keeps on seeing, all the ways I'm broken, messed up, selfish, prideful, foolish, wrongheaded, and blind. Laura knows exactly who I am.

To be honest, it hurts a little to know that Laura knows all this. I guess I'd like it if she thought I was the most special person, you know? Sort of a perfect person, without all that bad stuff.

But you know what the best part is? Laura does that too. She does that anyway. She believes I am special. The difference is, I just don't have to live up to the impossible standard of being free of all those other things.

Laura has taught me--is teaching me--the most important thing I need to know in life, which is that this is how love works. This is what it means to be the Beloved. She is helping me learn to be less of all those wounded, broken things; and, even when I can't, she is leading me to live better with myself and others. She is doing all this just by loving me as I am--as if I'm the most special just the way I am.

And I am strangely willing to take her word for it, because if there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that Laura knows.

Beautiful

Beautiful (adj.) beau·ti·ful \ˈbyü-ti-fəl\: 

Having a quality or aggregate of qualities

 that gives pleasure to the senses or 

pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit

In case you didn't know, I'm a cancer survivor. Every cancer is different, but the particular kind of breast cancer that was discovered at my (fortunately) very early diagnosis almost 10 years ago now is aggressive, destructive, and fast-growing. As a result, treatment for me was comprehensive. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, drug treatments--whatever we had, we threw at it. I'm luckier than many; my prognosis was good, and my chances of recurrence are low. But my body still bears the marks of the battle.

I've graduated now, finally, to annual follow-up mammograms. It's nice to go less often, but even so, I have been there so much that the routine is familiar. You put on the gown, and answer all the same questions. And then, before the 20 minutes of freezing cold and pain and pressure and holding your breath first because you're told and then because you can't breathe and then again until you hear someone say cheerily from behind the screen of images "Looks good!", there is the moment when you will mark your scar. To clearly identify your scar tissue on the scan, lest it be mistaken for something more ominous, a tiny wire will be shaped and taped along the length of your surgical scar, marking it out for the techs and doctors who will view the films.

At my latest appointment, not that many weeks ago, after the gown and the questions and the rest, the nurse who was prepping me finished her notes, packed up her paperwork, and said briskly, "All right, now let's see your scar."  I lifted the gown in the now-familiar motion, turned and gestured so that she could see, and her businesslike bustle came to an abrupt halt as she drew in her breath and just stared for a moment. "Oh my god," she said. "That's beautiful."

It isn't the first time someone has had that response to my scar. Actually, it's never once been shown to a nurse, doctor, lab tech, or any other medical professional without getting that response, and it's because they know what they are looking at. But if you are not a scar professional, if you don't know what you're seeing when you look at my scar, or at any scar, you might be tempted to look at it as just the opposite of beautiful. Scars are just one of the many things that we often view as physical faults or imperfections--things that destroy beauty.

In my past, I was given that message--that the scar was a flaw, a blemish, something to be ashamed of, something that ruined me. That it made me unlovable. That it destroyed my value. But I am learning, slowly, over time, that it is a thing of beauty. I have had great love and care given to me in my life, have walked through deep valleys, have experienced enormous good fortune. The scar tells all those stories. If I foolishly wished it away, I would erase with it all the power and love its story holds.

I know this is true, because it is true for others besides me. I think of the little one dear to me, and the birthmark that is simply a testimony to the miracle of her existence. Of my own two boys, and all the bumps and scars and faded marks that are the witness to the adventures of their childhood. Of the partner in my life now, and those deep, crinkly laugh lines around his eyes, which cannot come overnight, but tell the story of a life lived oriented toward joy. The marks on our bodies are the marks of our lives. All these things we view negatively, and too often, we can begin to view ourselves negatively because of them, yet all the imperfections that we believe mar us, mark us, are actually the things that illuminate us.

Once upon a time, I was often told that to find me beautiful would require changing the definition of the word; and this, unknowingly, was a profound truth. There is a distortion running deep in our society, a stunted definition of beauty that revolves around an artificial, superficial flawlessness. But if we cannot see beauty in those around us, we are using a faulty definition. A true beauty is found in the stretch marks that tell the story of the birth of our children, the calluses and bruises of hard work done well, and even the generous waistlines that speak of good food, warm hospitality, and time well spent with family and friends. It's found in scars, those stories of battles that have been fought and won, and of those who carried us through them, of things greatly dared and bravely endured, of adventures that have changed us and that define us. These are moments and memories that could not be traded for a superficial snapshot or a slimmer silhouette. These are the beauty marks, the marks of all that matter. This is beautiful.

Monarch

I have never been much of a flowers-and-frills, sunshine and butterfly type of girl, but I love the monarch. 

I first learned to love them from my grandmother, and my mother--as a child, it was simply a routine activity to scout yards and fields, pastures and road ditches, looking for milkweed plants and their tiny inhabitants, the caterpillars that we would take home, house, feed, watch, and eventually release to their new lives. I learned how to recognize the eggs and capture them before the caterpillars had even hatched. I learned how to collect the milkweed leaves and keep them fresh in the refrigerator, and how to use nylon stockings to make the perfect breathable jar lid that doubled as a safe place to attach a chrysalis. Grandma showed me how to use sugar water on a cotton ball to feed the butterflies once they had hatched, until they were ready to leave and fly. 

Once I had children of my own, I passed this part of my childhood on, and my boys became avid monarch caterpillar collectors. The large jars with their homemade lids, the Ziploc bags full of leaves in the refrigerator door, the kamikaze missions to the nearby road ditches for supplies, all became a normal part of the rhythm of our household; and as I've grown older, my love for the monarch has grown and deepened too, as I've come to understand the profound mystery behind its magic.

Often, you will hear people talking about how a butterfly "makes" a chrysalis or a cocoon. But the monarch, like other butterflies, doesn't actually make a chrysalis. (And, a bonus PSA, cocoons are made by moths. Not butterflies. No, not ever.) The chrysalis is not a constructed thing, it is a developmental stage. It is the pupa stage in the life cycle of a butterfly. The monarch, as you can see in the video above, does not make the chrysalis--he simply sheds his skin to reveal it. He has shed his skin many times before, and this last time we see what he has always known, that the chrysalis has been there the whole time, underneath it all.

What does this mean, then, to the story that the caterpillar will go inside a cocoon, this hiding place that he has constructed, and inside, through some secret process of transformation, he will become a butterfly, and then come out? Well, it blows the entire idea out of the water. If the chrysalis is not the caterpillar's construction, but is simply his next stage of becoming, then it is not a hiding place for transformation, but a part of it--what you become while you are becoming a butterfly. We can see that this is true because the chrysalis, far from being a shield that conceals transformation, only to reveal it when it reaches completion, actually becomes more and more clear as transformation takes place, allowing all to see the butterfly inside. And when he sheds his skin, that hard chrysalis shell now thin and brittle, for the final time, there can be no doubt--this is what he has been becoming from the beginning.

So if you are in the process today of transformation, as indeed we all are, understand that transformation is a process that happens from within. We are transformed, as my own Great Story says, by the renewing of our minds--or, as Eugene Peterson puts it in his own translation The Message, "You'll be changed from the inside out." As we grow, we will shed our old skins again and again, and this may even be painful at times, may even require help from those who love us, as in my most dearly loved passage of the Narnia stories, where Aslan's sharp claws dig deep to strip the layers of dragon skin away until only the boy, Eustace, can be seen. But eventually, be seen we will, because what we are becoming is already inside us. The caterpillar skin sheds to reveal the chrysalis, and the chrysalis skin splits to release the butterfly, and by this we know the mystery of the monarch:

The butterfly is inside the caterpillar all along. 

There is no need to worry if right at this moment what is seen may not seem, to the unknowing onlooker, to be worthy--if it looks ugly, or plain, or unfinished, or if it's hard to see the beauty. There is no need to hide our transformation away from the world until it's complete. Everything we will be is inside us, and we are only in the process of becoming.