the learning curve
My grandparents were democrats. My grandmother, I'm sure, still is. My grandfather has been dead now for 8 years. They taught me about recycling and composting before those things were commonly practiced. My grandfather, a farmer all his life, consulted the farmer's almanac, planted by the moon, and incorporated organic gardening principles into his farming, though he never gave up certain pesticides. They were/are both thoughtful, compassionate people -- they both love(d) books -- they are/were spiritual.
I list these things now to prove or at least offer evidence that they were/are good people. Sort of progressive, even. Because it's very hard to look at the reality that these people who I really love and who really love me were/are also racist and xenophobic and homophobic. I remember a conversation I had once with my grandmother who explained very carefully that she thought interracial marriage was ok because all people are alike on the inside, *but* (and this is a very big but), the children of interracial couples will be the ones to pay the price because they will be ridiculed for their mixed race status: the only solution, in my grandmother's "progressive" view, was for mixed race couples to be sterilized. Yes. Sterilized.
I remember also the last couple of conversations I had with my grandfather. It is easy for me to think only of the last trip I made to visit before he died in 1998. He was laying in a hospital bed they'd set up for him in the dining room where he'd been laying for months after stroke upon stroke had rendered him unable to walk. He called me into the dining room one afternoon, just the two of us, and told me all the sweet things he wanted to tell me, knowing as he did that this was probably his last chance. He told me how proud he was of me and how much he loved me -- how he and Margie always thought of me as one of their kids, not just one of the grandkids, and how they always wanted to be able to help me in any way they could. I am very fortunate to have had that conversation and it still makes me cry to think about.
It's much easier to remember that conversation than another one we had about a year earlier. It was during a family reunion when he was still able to dodder around a little. The night was winding down and we were all getting ready to leave. Someone had already packed him off into the van and I was encouraged to go out and keep him company while Margie finished up some things. I went to the van perfectly happy to hang out with him, but when I got in he was strangely quiet. He seemed to be thinking about something and didn't respond to my joking. After a very long, heavy silence he said, "It's just not right. You, at your age, not to have a boyfriend. Not to *ever* have a boyfriend. It's not right." He wasn't joking or whining or cajoling. He was telling me it wasn't right. He was being stern. I'd only ever encountered him "stern" once before, when Margie wanted to take me shopping for clothes when I was about 15 and I didn't want to go and was being an asshole about it. He got stern with me that day and I deserved it. This time, in the van, it made me sick. What he was saying and why he was saying it. I was shocked, in the moment. I hadn't seen it coming at all. I was coming out to keep him company, I was happy to do it, and he took the opportunity to tell me I wasn't right. I sat for just a moment, I stared out at the reunion, I didn't say anything. Then I got out of the van and closed the door. That was it.
Why am I writing about all this? Why lump these two stories together? Margie and her sterilization and Grandaddy and his stern warning that I wasn't right? Why stop with just these, why not tell the story about my dad calling the women in a prison "queers" or the time my mom told a very little me (5 at the max) that I shouldn't be friends with a black girl in the neighborhood just because she was black. Why don't I also explain how my mom's dad taught me that Jane Fonda was a communist and that Martin Luther King Jr. was a troublemaker, which led me to refuse one day (at age 9) to join the music class singing the song "We Will Overcome," because I thought it represented something I wasn't supposed to agree with or support. I would like to dredge up and lay out in stark and disgusting detail all the big and little ways I was taught to be racist by people who were also taught, somewhere along the line, to be racist. And don't forget homophobic. And xenophobic too, though the evidence for that is less stark and harder to explain.
But still, why? Why now? SK and I have talked about race a lot lately and we talked about it again tonight, in the context of my trip to Georgia this week. We keep coming back to a couple of conversations we've had during which I've told her some of these stories with a totally flat affect and she has been left to hold all the emotion. Initially, when she expressed dismay that I could tell her without emotion that my grandmother wants to sterilize interracial couples, or that my mom told me not to be friends with a black girl, I couldn't understand her concern. After all, for me, these are old stories. I know them so well, I've had them with me a long time. The thought of getting angry or upset telling them seemed almost ridiculous.
When SK and I talked about it tonight, I noticed I was feeling really uncomfortable. I was starting to shake as we talked and I felt cold all over. I decided to pay attention to that feeling. I noticed I wanted to argue with SK. I wanted to be defensive about my relationship with my family, defensive about their beliefs. I wanted to make SK wrong somehow. I talked a lot, tried to explain a lot of things, tried to justify some stuff, but eventually petered out and we got off the phone. I felt annoyed with SK, like I wanted to be stroked a little more, taken care of more, not challenged all the time. But then I realized that I was channeling all the emotion I was feeling into an easy beef with SK, when all that emotion was really about something totally different. It was all the emotion that should have been associated with the heartbreak of all those stories I just told: all the -isms I've been talking about.
It was easier to feel annoyed with SK because that kind of annoyance is immediate and much more known. It is way more complicated for me to let myself feel all the frustration and disappointment and fear and sadness that has been building and building over the years because of my family. All their -isms come from ignorance, but ignorance isn't a good excuse. They haven't been challenged to learn, challenged to change their perspectives and grow. Those -isms create a field of aggression, even if it's subtle. That field of aggression is scary and painful to enter and I spent a lot of time building up big protective walls and creating coping mechanisms to keep myself safe from it all. On this trip, I will challenge myself to actually feel some of the feelings associated with my family -- our personal relationships and the -isms that are also there -- because the feelings will be there and if I don't actually feel them as they come, in the moment, they will just end up hidden and unexplored, stored away somewhere to resurface later as a body symptom or depression or displaced anger or whatever. And if I don't look at it all now, I'll never be able to understand all my own -isms and I'll just keep perpetuating the same ignorant mess.
I list these things now to prove or at least offer evidence that they were/are good people. Sort of progressive, even. Because it's very hard to look at the reality that these people who I really love and who really love me were/are also racist and xenophobic and homophobic. I remember a conversation I had once with my grandmother who explained very carefully that she thought interracial marriage was ok because all people are alike on the inside, *but* (and this is a very big but), the children of interracial couples will be the ones to pay the price because they will be ridiculed for their mixed race status: the only solution, in my grandmother's "progressive" view, was for mixed race couples to be sterilized. Yes. Sterilized.
I remember also the last couple of conversations I had with my grandfather. It is easy for me to think only of the last trip I made to visit before he died in 1998. He was laying in a hospital bed they'd set up for him in the dining room where he'd been laying for months after stroke upon stroke had rendered him unable to walk. He called me into the dining room one afternoon, just the two of us, and told me all the sweet things he wanted to tell me, knowing as he did that this was probably his last chance. He told me how proud he was of me and how much he loved me -- how he and Margie always thought of me as one of their kids, not just one of the grandkids, and how they always wanted to be able to help me in any way they could. I am very fortunate to have had that conversation and it still makes me cry to think about.
It's much easier to remember that conversation than another one we had about a year earlier. It was during a family reunion when he was still able to dodder around a little. The night was winding down and we were all getting ready to leave. Someone had already packed him off into the van and I was encouraged to go out and keep him company while Margie finished up some things. I went to the van perfectly happy to hang out with him, but when I got in he was strangely quiet. He seemed to be thinking about something and didn't respond to my joking. After a very long, heavy silence he said, "It's just not right. You, at your age, not to have a boyfriend. Not to *ever* have a boyfriend. It's not right." He wasn't joking or whining or cajoling. He was telling me it wasn't right. He was being stern. I'd only ever encountered him "stern" once before, when Margie wanted to take me shopping for clothes when I was about 15 and I didn't want to go and was being an asshole about it. He got stern with me that day and I deserved it. This time, in the van, it made me sick. What he was saying and why he was saying it. I was shocked, in the moment. I hadn't seen it coming at all. I was coming out to keep him company, I was happy to do it, and he took the opportunity to tell me I wasn't right. I sat for just a moment, I stared out at the reunion, I didn't say anything. Then I got out of the van and closed the door. That was it.
Why am I writing about all this? Why lump these two stories together? Margie and her sterilization and Grandaddy and his stern warning that I wasn't right? Why stop with just these, why not tell the story about my dad calling the women in a prison "queers" or the time my mom told a very little me (5 at the max) that I shouldn't be friends with a black girl in the neighborhood just because she was black. Why don't I also explain how my mom's dad taught me that Jane Fonda was a communist and that Martin Luther King Jr. was a troublemaker, which led me to refuse one day (at age 9) to join the music class singing the song "We Will Overcome," because I thought it represented something I wasn't supposed to agree with or support. I would like to dredge up and lay out in stark and disgusting detail all the big and little ways I was taught to be racist by people who were also taught, somewhere along the line, to be racist. And don't forget homophobic. And xenophobic too, though the evidence for that is less stark and harder to explain.
But still, why? Why now? SK and I have talked about race a lot lately and we talked about it again tonight, in the context of my trip to Georgia this week. We keep coming back to a couple of conversations we've had during which I've told her some of these stories with a totally flat affect and she has been left to hold all the emotion. Initially, when she expressed dismay that I could tell her without emotion that my grandmother wants to sterilize interracial couples, or that my mom told me not to be friends with a black girl, I couldn't understand her concern. After all, for me, these are old stories. I know them so well, I've had them with me a long time. The thought of getting angry or upset telling them seemed almost ridiculous.
When SK and I talked about it tonight, I noticed I was feeling really uncomfortable. I was starting to shake as we talked and I felt cold all over. I decided to pay attention to that feeling. I noticed I wanted to argue with SK. I wanted to be defensive about my relationship with my family, defensive about their beliefs. I wanted to make SK wrong somehow. I talked a lot, tried to explain a lot of things, tried to justify some stuff, but eventually petered out and we got off the phone. I felt annoyed with SK, like I wanted to be stroked a little more, taken care of more, not challenged all the time. But then I realized that I was channeling all the emotion I was feeling into an easy beef with SK, when all that emotion was really about something totally different. It was all the emotion that should have been associated with the heartbreak of all those stories I just told: all the -isms I've been talking about.
It was easier to feel annoyed with SK because that kind of annoyance is immediate and much more known. It is way more complicated for me to let myself feel all the frustration and disappointment and fear and sadness that has been building and building over the years because of my family. All their -isms come from ignorance, but ignorance isn't a good excuse. They haven't been challenged to learn, challenged to change their perspectives and grow. Those -isms create a field of aggression, even if it's subtle. That field of aggression is scary and painful to enter and I spent a lot of time building up big protective walls and creating coping mechanisms to keep myself safe from it all. On this trip, I will challenge myself to actually feel some of the feelings associated with my family -- our personal relationships and the -isms that are also there -- because the feelings will be there and if I don't actually feel them as they come, in the moment, they will just end up hidden and unexplored, stored away somewhere to resurface later as a body symptom or depression or displaced anger or whatever. And if I don't look at it all now, I'll never be able to understand all my own -isms and I'll just keep perpetuating the same ignorant mess.
posted by reasonably prudent poet at 12:36 AM
2 Comments:
a blog that asked for and got a double posting
put tears in my eyes
it all starts so young and for those young ones I feel to cry and cry
i look forward to a good round of 'we shall overcome' when you get back
-tufty
This I understand completely. My mother's family is southern (poor Georgia farmers on her mother's side, and pioneering and more prosperous professionals on her father's) and I've always been so startled by the disconnect between my loving and intelligent grandparents and their very narrow prejudices. My sweet grandfather would say some of the ugliest things -- how is this possible? And how do you reconcile it? I still struggle with it.
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