Raising Conscientious, Wise and Good Men
I recently told a friend how, a couple years ago, we explained to our toddlers how they grew in my belly before before being born. A few days after that, after obviously thinking on it long and hard, L asked me somberly, “Mama, why did you eat me?” It makes sense. How else would he have gotten in my belly? My friend responded with a story of a toddler who said that two days before her birthday, her mama ate her, then threw her up and she was born. Anything is possible when you’re three.
About seven months ago, I took the kids to a baby shower where they played “Pin the Sperm on the Egg,” complete with a poster of a uterus with an egg in its lining. Someone actually manufactured this game. My kids did the donkey version once months before this, so of course they both wanted to play. This time, they tolerated the blindfold without peeking, giggled and swayed while being spun around, and staggered in the general direction of the poster taped to a fence. My boys are so big! They understand the game! The friend in charge of the festivities (a dear friend who knows the boys well, and who is also a teacher) was entertaining the crowd while the blindfolds were put on. Realizing this was probably the first time the boys heard of a uterus, she started to explain the poster and how it relates to making a baby. I choked a little. Here we go! Luckily the boys were so distracted by the game and being in front of a crowd, I don’t think they heard a word she said. At least they didn’t ask me any questions. Not yet. Does this count as conversation #2 after the dreaded donor conversation? It does not. I work from the mindset that when they are ready to know things, they will ask. I’m realizing they don’t ask. They form half-baked notions and wacky misperceptions, and I can only imagine how they might put “sperm comes from a boy” and “sperm finds the egg” together on their own. I realize I’m at the start of a long, grappling journey of deciding when to jump in, and how much “truth” to give the kids. I do not have this figured out. I stumble into it like an explorer without a trail, never knowing if I’ll find myself at a beautiful vista or in a patch of nettles. Kids blame mom if they’re laughed at for not knowing something, like how babies are made, right? I want them to trust me, to be able to ask me anything. Part of earning this trust is not traumatizing or confusing them further with too much information, and it’s also time to start filling them in about the world outside our door.
I decided I need to dive in. The plan is to build their trust that I can handle sensitive information. It’s also to make a conscious effort to direct my kids’ perceptions about important things, so they will grow up to be conscientious, wise, and good. There are so many subjects I care about to choose from: race, gender, religion/spirituality, animal welfare, economic segregation, environmentalism, respecting difference… I could go on and on. These are not really things you bring up on the fly to a five-year-old. The kids are, however, currently asking a lot of loaded questions, like, “What is drugs?” “Did we create all of space? – Then who did?” “What is ‘Gods?’” (after a friend told them Wonder Woman’s father is Zeus, one of the Gods) “Is this fish (that we’re eating) dead?” “Was Darth Vadar magic?” “Why did guys fly planes into buildings??” Each answer feels like I’m writing in stone on a whim.
Right now, as I flail around looking for direction, there is much work being done to illuminate and change America’s racism. It is a very good time to think about it, to pull it apart, and give the kids some insight. They can help build an institutionally different country than the one I grew up in. My goals are noble. My skill, not so much.
Awhile ago, I was shopping at Rainbow Grocery with the boys. We passed by a black man with white hair, who had a striking look about him, his brow hung low over his eyes. My kid did that thing every mother dreads. He said, loudly, “Mama! I hate that man!!” I died. I was so horrified, I didn’t even have the wherewithal to apologise. I said, also too loudly, something like “OH! Buddy, you don’t SAY that! That is so rude!” For the record, even in the re-telling, I am sick over the impact of those words. I send metta to this man. I wish him well, like, I wish he won a lottery that day, of love and money and good fortune. For any person who has ever felt hated for no reason as all, I send love and strength, and the knowledge that it truly has nothing to do with you. I don’t even know if he heard my son. But if he did, sir, my deep, deep apologies.
To break down that moment a bit, I have to realize first that my kids’ world, for all its diversity, just isn’t diverse enough. And, my kid has no idea what racism is. He was reacting to something unfamiliar, perhaps features that seemed scary, or because the man reminded him of a bad guy he’s seen in a cartoon. Fuck cartoons for using features unfamiliar to “white” America to signify bad guys. If my son had said the same thing about a typical white guy, it would have been odd, maybe even funny, but not nearly so horrifying. My white guilt was triggered. I have since tried to combat what I think might someday turn into internalized racism by pointing out how some cartoons use racial features to signify whether a character is bad or good. I’ve asked why they know a bad guy is bad. They can’t articulate it, it’s a one-sided conversation. I’ve pointed out things like having a unibrow do not make you a bad person. I tried to point out how they use black clothes and darkness to establish Darth Vadar’s bad-guy status, but Batman looks just like that, and he’s totally a good guy. It is all very confusing for them. They have no idea what my point is.
Recently we were listening to an NPR segment on the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. I asked the boys if they understood what it was about, and they said no. I fumbled immediately. I had no plan. It felt ugly somehow to even introduce them to the concept of discrimination. I told them that a long time ago (which could be yesterday in their world,) black people… and women for that matter (which I add suddenly because it feels better to identify with the oppressed)… were not allowed to vote. They replied, “What’s ‘to vote?’”
We waded through some layers: voting, who we vote for, our black president, whom they love. (An independent conclusion, surely.) We talked a little bit about skin color, and they responded as though I was saying people have different hair color, as in, “Duh, Mom.” When I told them it’s good because we can all vote now, they were confused, like, why was I even telling them any of this? If it’s all over, who cares? I felt like my noble efforts were failing. My plan to raise worldly, inclusive, conscientious, not-racist kids was off to a very messy start. In a last-ditch attempt to engage them, I said, “You know, there’s a country called Morocco that’s halfway around the world from here. A lot of people who live there have dark skin. You boys are one-quarter Moroccan.” There was silence from the back-seat. Nothing. I asked if they wanted more information. They did not, which was good, because I need to learn a lot more about Morocco. I realized I wasn’t actually sure about the ethnicity of Moroccans, other than the country is mostly Muslim. How dark-skinned are Moroccans? What was my point? And I hadn’t thought through the conversation about the genetics of their donor. We’ve barely even scratched the surface of the fact that they have a donor, much less what genetics are.
Wikipedia tells me Morocco is a Muslim country with a Mediterranean ethnicity. Donor dad had a Moroccan mother and a Polish/Russian father, both Jewish. We saw a picture of the donor when he was around three-years-old, and that was the main reason we chose him. He was adorable. D looks just like him. About two years ago, we saw a picture of the donor as an adult. He was quite handsome, and looked rather middle eastern. It actually hadn’t occurred to me before that moment what my kids might look like as adults. Those details ceased to matter after the second year of heartbreak trying to get pregnant. I’m melting-pot white. That baby picture with brown hair and big brown eyes was adorable and close enough to me to not think about it again. People are becoming more and more mixed, and I’m perfectly happy to have a family in the middle of that somewhere.
To realize my boys could be targeted at the airport because of how they look was a revelation. Honestly, the revelation was more the fact that they will one day be men. When they were infants, toddlers seemed big and scary. When they were toddlers, 5-year-olds seemed rough and dangerous. Now it’s teenagers. Since we are a household with two moms, I am rather sheltered from the men they will become. To see the picture of their adult donor was… unnerving. I saw this article about a black son raised by a white mom (http://wapo.st/1h52Dxk,) and I resonated with the family’s abrupt confrontation with life outside their sweet, loving reality. Who knows if and how my boys will be confronted with race, especially their own? I have a long road ahead learning about raising conscientious, wise and good men as we leave the baby bubble and engage in the big, bad world outside our door.
Do the revelations change anything at all? No. Love defines us. I realize that I was trying to judge if I was telling my boys the truth when I implied they were a quarter “dark-skinned,” which led me down this somewhat-uncomfortable path of what that means exactly. Was it about how dark? Then, I found an interesting podcast with a white guy saying, “Science Says There’s No Such Thing As Race.” (http://www.iflscience.com/environment/science-says-there-no-such-thing-race) Don’t worry! I don’t think for a minute this defines the discussion of race! Nobody is trying to say that ethnicity and racism don’t exist. The author’s point is that race is a social contract, not based on genetics. Regarding how to discuss race with my kids, I found it helpful. First, I realize it’s less about us personally, and more about how we treat others. Fairness is good, expected and to be strived for with everyone in their world. This is the basis of understanding how racism (and classism and sexism and…) is not fair, and will give them the foundation from which to fight it. Second, I can try to define race for my kids as a social contract that is optional. This means racism is changeable, a matter of choice. My job is to teach how we are all fundamentally the same; we are all on the same human race spectrum. The goal is make sure everyone has the same access to opportunity, to money, and to respect. The crazy thing is that kids know this intuitively. Their world is really big on fairness. I’m the one that needs to articulate it so I don’t fuck up who they inherently are. Another somewhat one-sided conversation with my boys (whom I’m sure are already starting to identify and roll their eyes at mom’s social-responsibility rants) is identifying the difference between patterns and rules. I learned this at a talk put on by our preschool about gender. A rule is that you have to stop at a stop sign when you’re driving. Breaking rules have consequences like going to jail. A pattern is that girls like pink and boys like blue. It may be true lots of the time, but you don’t have to conform. You have a choice. Imagine if my boys grow up able to see clearly the choices that cause racism instead of feeling stuck within it somewhere. At five, they really could care less about all of that. I can’t un-teach something that hasn’t been learned. I asked them what race was, and they said you can do it in a car, or by running.
For now, being conscientious means you excuse yourself after burping. Being wise means you decide not jump from the unstable log to the picnic table. Being good means you treat others how you want to be treated. Subjects like where babies come from and racism are deep in the outer space region of a five-year-old brain, a blip in a vast, starry sky that they zoom by occasionally in a Lego spaceship shooting lasers at a bad guy.
The boys spend most of their time in outer space, it’s true. They honestly don’t know that we can’t time travel or put rocket launchers on my car so I can zoom over traffic. They don’t watch much media, but they soak up all they can get, and play it back endlessly. From Wildstyle to Luke Skywalker, from The Odd Squad to the Wild Kratts, everything is possible. Every book or movie is followed with, “Do they exist in our world, Mama?” When the doorbell rings, it could just as easily be Batman as the UPS man. I hate lying to my kids. I tell them Santa and the Tooth Fairy are mythological beings just like Superheros. People call me a killjoy. I won’t even say things like, “if you don’t eat your vegetables, you’ll get scurvy!” So, when it’s time, I will tell them honestly how babies are made, and where their donor’s sperm came from. I will try to find the most politically correct way to explain racism, and how their job to be part of the solution. Each decision I make on what to say, what not to say, whether I gloss over something, or say too much will teach them something about the world and whether or not they can trust me. No big deal… I got this… except for the fact that whether or not they can trust me now sets the base for pretty much every other relationship they will have. Right?
Mamagrit 