the one with the bright skin

Welcome to the July 2013 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Learning About Diversity

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have shared how they teach their children to embrace and respect the variety of people and cultures that surround us. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

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Shortly after the Presidential election last November -- after we had, as a family, watched the debates, attended rallies and painted our windows on election night with Obama logos, then paraded outside with noisemakers as the results were announced and we breathed a collective sigh of relief -- we had friends over to play. George sat on the couch looking at a magazine with our neighbor's middle school-aged daughter, and they came to a picture of the newly reelected man we'd rooted for. 

"Who's that?" our friend prompted.

"Barack Obama," George replied. "But I don't like him. I like the man with the brighter skin." 

Are you a racist, bro?I couldn't help myself. From across the room, I yelped, "WHAT?!" Do I need to put a disclaimer here, saying this is not the way I recommend you deal with the issue of racism with your kids?

"Th-th-that's not true," I stammered. Our friend looked on in what I perceived to be sheer horror but what was probably actually bemusement. "You like Barack Obama! You LOVE Barack Obama!" I don't even love Barack Obama, but by golly I needed George to recant, but fast. Unsurprisingly, he didn't. Like most people who are confronted with their prejudice when someone insists that they've simply misspoken, he shrugged and carried on. 

For awhile, I freaked out about it. Was George being cold to the biracial kid in his preschool class? Was there a reason he hadn't recently asked to play with Juanito from across the street? Has this affected any of the people of color in our lives? I didn't have to wonder for long if he realized they weren't white, because he began pointing out anybody whose skin color was darker than his. I countered with white people's hair color and eye color, trying to make it a zero sum game. But it didn't matter, and it didn't stop him commenting on even the subtlest tan. So I dialed back my anxiety that I was raising a racist, and remembered that, actually, I don't want to participate in color blind culture. I want my kids to see race, to value differences and, most importantly, to examine their feelings around it, not to mention their privilege. 

So, we talked. I stopped trying to equalize George's every observation. I let him have the floor and when he asked me questions, his openness surprised me. Reframing his observations as...well, simple observations rather than the sinister, loaded comments I was inclined to bristle against has helped me to think more deeply about my own bias and privilege. And I began to understand, too (on another level, at least), how ingrained prejudice is in a culture when three year olds hear and take to heart the dog whistles sounding around them. Having a respectful, open dialogue about his ideas and challenging them, helping him to see the beauty in differences when his mind craves sameness, understanding what is developmentally appropriate instead of expecting him to have a nuanced understanding of race: these things have been imperative to our successful exploration of an admittedly uncomfortable topic.

I look forward to the day when I can point out to George that the luxury of having this conversation at all is part of our privilege; that many, many people, some of whom we love dearly, experience racism, with no explanations, from the day they are born. With a foundation laid in honest, open dialogue, I'm hopeful that those discussions won't be far off, and their gravity won't be lost on him.  

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Visit Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!

Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

(This list will be updated by afternoon July 9 with all the carnival links.)

• A gift for my daugther — Amanda, a special education teacher for students with multiple exceptionalities, discusses at My Life in a Nutshell how she will enrich her daughter's life by educating her the amazing gifts her students will bring to the world.
• The Beauty in Our Differences — Meegs at A New Day writes about her discussions with her daughter about how accepting ourselves and those around us, with all our beautiful differences and similarities, makes the world a better place.
• Accepting Acceptance and Tolerating Tolerance — Destany at They Are All of Me examines the origins of and reasons behind present day social conformity.
• Differences — sustainablemum discusses what she feels to be the important skills for embracing diversity in her family home.
• Turning Japanese — Erin Yuki at And Now, for Something Completely Different shares how she teaches her kiddos about Japanese culture, and offers ideas about "semi immersion" language learning.
• Celebrating Diversity at the International House Cottages — Mommy at Playing for Peace discovers the cultures of the world with her family at local cultural festivals
• Learning About Diversity by Honoring Your Child’s Multiple Heritages — Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama looks at the importance of truly knowing your roots and heritage and how to help children honor their multiple heritages.
• People. PEOPLE! — Kellie at Our Mindful Life is trying to teach her children to use language that reflects respect for others, even when their language doesn't seem to them to be disrespectful.
• Call Me Clarice, I Don't Care - A True Message in Diversity — Lisa at The Squishable Baby knows that learning to understand others produces empathetic children and empathetic families.
• Diversity of Families — Family can be much more then a blood relation. Jana at Jananas on why friends are so important for her little family of three.
• Diverse Thoughts Tamed by Mutual Respect — Amy at Me, Mothering, and Making it All Work thinks that diversity is indispensable to our vitality, but that all of our many differences require a different sort of perspective, one led by compassion and mutual respect.
• Just Shut Up! — At Old New Legacy, Becky gives a few poignant examples in her life when listening, communication and friendship have helped her become more accepting of diversity.
• The World is our Oyster — Mercedes at Project Procrastinot is thankful for the experiences that an expat lifestyle will provide for herself as well as for her children.
• Children's black & white views (no pun intended … kind of) — Lauren at Hobo Mama wonders how to guide her kids past a childish me vs. them view of the world without shutting down useful conversation.
• Raising White Kids in a Multicultural World — Leanna at All Done Monkey offers her two cents on how to raise white children to be self-confident, contributing members of a colorful world. Unity in diversity, anyone?

• Ramadan Star and Moon Craft — Celebrate Ramadan with this star and moon craft from Stephanie at InCultureParent, made out of recycled materials, including your kid's art!
• Race Matters: Discussing History, Discrimination, and Prejudice with Children — At Living Peacefully with Children, Mandy discusses how her family deals with the discrimination against others and how she and her husband are raising children who are making a difference.
• The Difference is Me - Living as the Rainbow Generation — Terri at Child of the Nature Isle, guest posting at Natural Parents Network, is used to being the odd-one-out, but walking an alternative path with children means digging deeper, answering lots of questions and opening to more love.
• My daughter will only know same-sex marriage as normal — Doña at Nurtured Mama realizes that the recent Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage will change the way she talks to her daughter about her own past.
• Montessori-Inspired Respect for Diversity — Deb Chitwood at Living Montessori Now tells about her multicultural family and shares Montessori-inspired ideas for encouraging respect for diversity.
• EveryDay Diversity — Ana at Panda & Ananaso makes diversity a part of everyday living, focusing on raising of compassionate and respectful child.
• Diversity as Part of Life — Even though Laura at Authentic Parenting thought she had diversity covered, she found out that some things are hard to control.
• Inequity and Privilege — Jona is unpacking questions raised by a summit addressing inequity in breastfeeding support at Life, Intertwined.
• 3 Ways to Teach Young Children About Diversity — Charise at I Thought I Knew Mama recognizes her family's place of privilege and shares how she is teaching her little ones about diversity in their suburban community.
• Teaching diversity: tales from public school — A former public high school teacher and current public school parent, Jessica at Crunchy-Chewy Mama values living in a diverse community.
• 30 Ideas to Encourage Learning about Diversity While Traveling — Traveling with kids can bring any subject alive. Dionna at Code Name: Mama has come up with a variety of ways you can incorporate diversity education into your family travels (regardless of whether you homeschool). From couch surfing to transformative reading, celebrate diversity on your next trip!
• Diversity, huh? — Jorje of Momma Jorje doesn't do anything BIG to teach about diversity; it's more about the little things.
• Chosen and Loved — From Laura at Pug in the Kitchen: Color doesn't matter. Ethnicity doesn't matter. Love matters.
• The One With The Bright Skin — Stefanie at Very Very Fine tries to recover from a graceless response to her son's apparent prejudice.

like rain on your (neighbors') wedding day

Spring around here is a funny thing. It rains; it pours; your carport floods. And then, for one day, it is 62 degrees, bright and warm from the time the sun shows his unfamiliar face until he lays it down in the Sound. And those twelve hours are enough to make you optimistic about the possibility of enjoying outdoor life again, in a sincere way, not a ha-ha, good thing I'm wearing galoshes kind of way.  

We actually had, like, THREE of those in a row, a week or two ago. And then my poor neighbors who had waited TWENTY FIVE YEARS to get legally married found themselves putting up clear flashing around their gorgeous deck in preparation for a torrential downpour that waterlogged their wedding day. PNW, we can't quit you, but you sure are a jerk sometimes. 

To console ourselves after we put some measly starts into the garden only to have it frost overnight at 37 degrees and kill our broccoli, George and I decided our raised beds could use some flags to jazz them up a little. Zelda had never potato printed, so we got out some muslin, cookie cutters, a potato, some paint and a paring knife.

If you don't know how to print with potatoes, there is no shortage of tutorials online that probably give all the details you need, but all I do is press a cookie cutter deep into the freshly-cut side of a potato, then slice into the side of the potato with my paring knife and cut away the excess potato. Not exactly rocket science.

George and Zelda chose an arrow, a heart, a star and a leaf. One arrow attempt failed, and turned into a bunny. Zelda kind of just tried to eat the potatoes, but George had a good time stamping the strips of muslin I had torn. Speaking of which, I didn't bother hemming these; I just snipped the selvedge edge of the muslin and tore it along the entire width of the fabric, leaving me with strips. 

I gave George dishes of the paint that came with a paint-your-own wooden car kit. I have no idea what kind of paint it is, but it's labeled non-toxic, and it hasn't yet run. Do I need to tell you how many times it's rained? When the kids were satisfied that they'd eaten enough raw potato and sufficiently stamped the soon-to-be flags, we cleaned up, and let everything dry while we ate lunch.

While George napped that afternoon, I cut the strips into smaller pieces and sewed a ribbon across the top, bunting-style. We stuck bamboo poles into the ground on each end of the garden and tied on the flags. I love that it helps give the kids some ownership of our garden in these early, boring days of germination and perseverence. 

on language

On Language -- the title of both a Julie Ruin song and a Noam Chomsky book -- was my email address for many years, beginning in, like, 1997, when my family had AOL and I was a teenager trying to figure out the world through punkrock and discussions of semantics. Language and its use (not to mention misuse) fascinate me, so the way my kids communicate is both an endless source of interest and worry of mine. Watching vocabularies develop, seeing conjugation begin to make sense, helping with the sounding-out of words, and noticing colloquialisms creep in are some of my favorite things about parenthood. I've never been concerned that my children won't be able to express themselves, given that their mother is one of the most direct people I know, but this morning while getting ready for preschool, George said he was nervous.

"What's making you nervous?" I asked.
"The boys make me be a bad guy, and I'm not a bad guy; I'm just George."
"Well, do you tell them you don't want to be the bad guy?" I asked.
"I say honk, but they don't listen!"

Now. George has a sort of punchline to everything, and it is the word 'honk.' It ends several songs in the way that a knee slap and jazz hands might, and it also serves to express confusion (...honk?), appreciation of something amusing (*satisfied smile* honk!), and punctuate human contact (*poke* HONK!). I'm not sure when or why it started, but it's at once a funny quirk, and not exactly my favorite thing he does.

"You can't say 'honk' and expect people to understand that you mean, 'I don't want to play like that' or 'please use gentle hands,'" I told him.
"But mama," he said, plaintively, "if I tell them 'gentle hands' they will feel bad, so I tell them 'honk' but I say it like this, with a sad face: 'ho-onk'."

I'd just like for you to imagine the sad, sad face of a three year old disappointed in his playmates' misunderstanding of the blow-softening "honk" meant to deter them from pretend-demonizing him. It was so unbearably cute and funny and sad, and awesome to see his understanding of social conventions developing. I understood; we've been working on saying excuse me rather than get out of my way! And I don't care for that rather than this food is yuck. I was heartened that he cared so much for his friends' feelings that he didn't want to upset them even though he felt they were kind of terrorizing him, but passivity is not something I ever expected would come out of my household.

I gave him some useful phrases like "I don't want to play like that" and "I don't like those touches; do you want a high five instead?" and "I'd rather play on the same team" but he was skeptical. Meanwhile, his sister threw across the room the shoes I'd picked out for her and staggered over to the shoe basket, retrieving her own choice. She thrust them at me, saying firmly, "SHEES." Shoes, these? Who knows, but it certainly wasn't unclear what she wanted.

These little people are so different: from me, but not me, and that's something I relearn on the daily. I think about my struggle to understand language -- to harness its power -- at seventeen, when Noam Chomsky and Kathleen Hanna felt like they were speaking to my very soul, and I want to do that for my kids. But I know they'll find their own versions of those angry songs and dry, plain reading. Until then, I guess there'll be a lot of honking.

I am not an astronaut and other failings

A question I heard on the radio today struck me: would your six year old self like you? I hope that in my case the answer is yes, but what I really got to thinking about was if my adult self would live up to the expectations of my childhood. And that answer is, unequivocally, no.

Many girls, whether because of social constructs or through their own choosing, dream of and plan to have children when they're still kids, themselves, but I wasn't one of those. I didn't fashion wedding gowns from my mom's cast-off dresses and I didn't imagine myself caring for babies. Once, while walking to my mom's car with her after a school function, she remarked to one of my ten year-old classmates that the baby on the girl's hip -- her own little sister -- was positioned just right, and I remember the eye roll of annoyed pity I shot in her direction. I just won the science fair, but have fun with that baby. 

You could attribute my disdain for motherhood (because, let's be honest, that's what it was) to any number of things: the fact that the feminism of the time wasn't particularly supportive of mothers (and my exposure to it WHICH I DO NOT REGRET FOR ONE MOMENT through my own mom), my disappointment in the way women were pigeonholed into the role whether they wanted to be or not. But the biggest reason was probably the fact that I had little faith in my own ability to rise above my family of origin and the world around me to turn out happy, functional people of my own making. 

Now, that sounds really depressing, especially coming from a then-ten year old, I know. It was depressing. I was a depressed kid, situationally, chemically, but my line of thinking also felt plainly realistic. I believed what others told me -- that everyone was just doing his or her best -- and I assumed that anger, cruelty, addiction, apathy and all the other trappings of dysfunctional families were just some people's natural states, and the matter couldn't be helped. The best I could do was take the phone off at the root, so to speak. If others just did the same, I thought, we'd certainly have less unhappiness to deal with.

In my late teens and early twenties I adopted as reasons for childlessness the issues of overpopulation and environmental responsibility. Having kids was just irresponsible, I railed. I've heard it over and over and over since then, said by young women not (in any substantial ways) unlike I was at twenty to my face while I held a baby in my womb, in my arms, as my only child turned into two. They don't mean harm, and I don't take offense. I've thought the same thing, and don't totally disagree with them, in any case. 

I don't mean that they're necessarily going to see the folly in their thinking; plenty of people choose not to have kids for exactly those reasons, justifiably, and stick contentedly to their choice. But I don't guess I'm the only one who looked for more socially acceptable, more enlightened, less pathetic-sounding reasons for childlessness than I'm afraid of myself and the world around me. 

Obviously, at some point, I changed my tune, since I have two children. I never stopped questioning my own desire to have kids (and this is the reason why I try to limit our consumption and live consciously), but I did stop questioning my own ability to grow. Because I don't consider myself a naturally nurturing person, I researched. I researched my ass off, and continue to. I read a lot about child development so I know how to adjust my expectations. So I can forgive myself the time I embarrassed my dad in a restaurant and received a spanking despite my behavior being normal, expected, and incidentally out of character for a child like I was, who had been manipulated into "behaving" because I believed my parents' love to be contingent on my doing so. I contracted with my kids that I would learn everything I could so that I could be the mama they deserve.

I also stopped telling myself I was doing the best I could. My therapist argued about this for years, literally, but I think this practice can serve as one big crutch to lean on when our pasts loom so large that we feel bent under their weight. Even though I knew that I would fuck up, I birthed these little creatures, and despite fucking up all the time, I keep trying. Yelling is not my best. Manipulation is not my best. Bribing is not my best. I will own up to feeling the tsk-tsk of my conscience when I resort to bad mothering, and ignoring it. I admit that I think, sometimes, I just want you to ___! What will it take? And it's in those moments that I am willfully not doing my best. It pains me to say so; one of the traits I adopted when my family made it obvious that my brain mattered more than my feelings was precision. Correctness. I hate being wrong, and yet. I am, many, many times a day, because I'm a parent. Because I'm human, and we're wrong. A lot. This is not something that ever was presented to me as a possibility, let alone a universal truth. 

Even though I'm wrong like a million times an hour, I'd like to think that the six year old me, and the ten year old me would be impressed that I've taken the initiative to learn. They'd look at my empirical data, they'd look at my bookshelf and be satisfied that I may not be an astronaut but I am using my brain. In fact, I might be using my brain in a way more beneficial than they teach at space camp. They might like to hang out with me. They might think I was a loser, but guaranteed they'd think I was a nice, respectful one. 

birthdaze

It was George's birthday, it was Zelda's birthday. We had parties. I was going to write things about them, but everything I started to say was uninteresting. My kids had birthday parties like pretty much every other kid has at some point in their lives. 

(I love this picture for many reasons but one of those is that Autumn is just cruisin' the internet)

And the bowler:

(his favors)