When I was working at Hollywood Fringe's closing night party and awards show recently, I walked past a woman who stopped me to say, "You made me feel unsafe." I was taken by surprise. My mind briefly considered, was she kidding? Had I had some interaction with her where I acted like a goof and she was joking about that? As those thoughts passed through my mind and presumably an expression of confusion passed over my face, I don't remember if I gestured towards her or said something like "I'm sorry?" but she followed up with, "I'm going to report it, but I just wanted you to know you made me feel unsafe."
I had been hurrying away from our merch table toward backstage because I was set to announce one of the first awards. She did not seem to want to engage in conversation with me, so I just said, "Okay," and walked away.
I had never seen that woman before that moment or had any interaction with her, as far I know. But I was wearing watermelon earrings and had a keffiyeh tied around my waist. I wear these symbols of Palestine to signal to everyone my support of Palestine and my condemnation of Israel and the US's genocide of Palestinians. It feels like the very least I can do in the midst of the never-ending horrors in Gaza that I witness on a daily basis.
(That, and share posts from Palestinians on Instagram, where I seem to be currently "shadow-banned." I never really knew what that meant, but earlier in June, at Fringe's opening night party, a new Fringe friend followed me while standing next to me. They and I were surprised to see a warning pop up, something along the lines of, "Be careful with this account." Shortly thereafter I noticed that every time I clicked to follow someone--someone with a public account--I saw a notification that they would need to review my request.)
Isn't it bonkers? My watermelon earrings and keffiyeh sparked fear in someone to the point that they left our event early. Maybe, probably, they had other stuff going on, and seeing these symbols of Palestine was the last straw for them. It reminds me of FB friends I no longer have, people who unfriended me because of my "one-sidedness" regarding Palestine. One cited how her fiance was afraid for her to leave the house wearing her Star of David, for fear she would be harmed for being Jewish.
I feel empathy for people who feel this much fear. I understand that their fear is based in their lived experience and perception of the world. And I know my own lived experience and perception of the world is very different. I don't feel the same fears as others. I don't fear being attacked because of antisemitism or Islamophobia, I am neither Jewish nor Muslim and I am obviously White. And though I am a woman, I don't fear being attacked for my perceived gender. I'm thinking now of my friend who was not comfortable walking around our old neighborhood of East Hollywood after dark. I don't know all the details of her history, but I know her trust had been betrayed by men in her life and that impacted her perception of the world. I have been sexually harassed but never sexually assaulted, or assaulted in any way.
I don't know exactly how to hold all this. Though I feel empathy for people who are deeply afraid of the world around them, I think we should draw clear distinctions between feelings of fear and actual harm or unsafe conditions. That woman at the closing night party was not actually unsafe because of my keffiyeh and earrings. Her feelings that she was unsafe is something she needs to unpack with her loved ones or a therapist, not something I need to change my wardrobe choices for.
I'm part of a committee planning an event at a local park. Someone who's a part of the overall group the committee springs from suggested that we get the sheriff's department to clear out the folks who congregate and hang out around some of the picnic tables at the park, so that people coming to our event feel safer. But the people hanging out around the picnic tables aren't harming anyone. Officers with guns are more likely to harm someone than the people drinking alcohol at the park.
Part of me feels very hardened about this. Like I just want to say, get over your fear, because the actions you take, driven by your fear, cause harm. But I know that won't help.
Have you ever stopped to think about what a fear-driven society we live in? It causes us so much harm and we're just so used to living with it, we think it has to be this way.
And I haven't even talked about fear-driven parenting.
The antidote to so many of society's ills is community. Capitalism thrives on separating us from one another. I wish that woman had been willing to talk with me. Perhaps I should have made more of an effort to engage with her and let someone else announce that first award. I don't think she was really in the space to accept that, but in the moment, I didn't take the time to really pause, breathe, and offer her more space, so I'll never know for sure.
At the same time, I think fears like hers are given too much weight. So much weight, that it is used to silence those speaking out against genocide.
I don't know all the right answers. But I know I felt emboldened to speak out about Palestine because some of my friends were already doing it. I hope my speaking out has emboldened even more. Don't let fear stand in the way of using your voice to oppose the murder of thousands upon thousands of Palestinians, and other injustices around the world and right here at home.
Imagine the world. Now imagine all the children in the world. Now imagine those children at schools all over the world. Now imagine you spin this imaginary world, like a globe that rotates on a stand, until your finger points at the West Coast of the United States. Now imagine the view zooming in to Los Angeles, right down to street view of an elementary school in south LA. Imagine a 6 year old child walking to school with his parents to attend first grade.
That six year old child is my kiddo, to the extent that any child belongs to their parents (they don’t. We all belong to us all, or maybe we all belong to the planet, but that’s a philosophical discussion for another day). I’m going to talk about children’s education, but my experience is rather limited to this child—Lochlan. So I'm going to approach my research and discussion into the educational state of things through that lens.
Here's my POV:
Lochlan on the first day of 1st grade
Ain't he cute? (I know, I know, all parents...)
Let's go back a little further, to when Lochlan was starting kindergarten in 2023. We were a little discombobulated because we'd just moved from East Hollywood to South LA that summer, then traveled up to WA state to visit friends & family and so that Brendan could work the ren faire.
Actually, allow me to interrupt myself. This blog post isn't just a long overdue life update, it's a school project, and not for Lochlan's school, though I will talk a lot about that. Nope, it's my school project—I'm in grad school! I'm back to school for poetry, but this post is for my Theory, Criticism, and Research class. So if you're reading this, you might be my mom, or you might be one of my classmates or my professor. So for the sake of the latter folks, please know that by "we," I usually mean my husband Brendan and myself.
So, we had checked the school district calendar prior to planning the trip, but at some point after that, LAUSD moved the first day of school to an earlier date. There was no way we could get back in time, so we missed the "preview" day for kindergarteners, and Lochlan missed the first day of school. So when it felt like we were off to a slightly rocky start a little later into the school year, I attributed some of it to that wonky beginning.
I got a couple clues that something was a little off about school early on. The first was that there was homework. In kindergarten. Alfie Kohn, educator and parenting expert, says, "after decades of research on the topic, there is no overall positive correlation between homework and achievement (by any measure) for students before middle school, or, in many cases, before high school" (The Homework Myth, 38). Thankfully, Lochlan's teacher, we'll call her Ms. K (for kindergarten), deemphasized the importance of actually completing the homework right from the start, and said what she really wanted was for parents to sit and read with their kids every day, and the homework was meant to help facilitate that. So, boo homework, yay homework not being a big deal.
Another early hint was when the school held a literacy event after school one afternoon. Parents and kids went to the kid's classrooms and the teachers explained how they were teaching the kids to recognize letters and sounds. Interesting stuff, especially since he's in a dual-language school (English and Spanish) but it was explained in the most boring way—lecture style. And our kids were with us. So, after they had already been in school that day for about six hours, we all had to sit through an hour-long talk. That one just felt like a missed opportunity to me—why not have the kids participate so it could be more like we, the parents, were getting to sit in on an actually classroom experience?
But a little later I realized that the actual classroom experience was kind of like that. By October, Lochlan was having a hard time in school. Well, we think he was having a hard time right from the get-go, but by October, his pent-up feelings were coming out in the form of physical outbursts—throwing things, kicking things, knocking over chairs. Lochlan was struggling and Ms. K did not have the resources she needed to fully support him (like a classroom aide, for example, or perhaps an entirely different model of classroom education). One day, I got a call from the school. Lochlan had gotten upset (it was almost always about something that seemed on the surface minor, like he thought he messed up on an activity) and thrown something and he couldn't go back to classroom unless one of his parents could stay with him the rest of the afternoon. Thankfully, I was free, so I went.
I couldn't believe how boring kindergarten was. And when I say boring, I mean orderly. Here were all these five-year-olds, and the classroom was like something you'd expect of an older grade level, maybe 3rd at least, when children have a greater degree of impulse control and have had time to adjust to the expectations of school. There was no chaotic joy, no free play, just table work and floor-mat sitting and lining up and raising hands. To be fair, it was toward the end of the school day, so I was only in the classroom for about 45 minutes, but that brief glimpse gave me an idea of why my child was struggling. He was used to a lot of freedom and self-directed play. I had been hoping kindergarten would help him learn more about cooperation and compromise in play with his peers, but instead found that it was focused on compliance and consequences.
That's chocolate on his face
(Lochlan's favorite food)
This educational model is what Alfie Kohn refers to as traditional education, or "Old School." He says, "Proponents of traditional education often complain that the model they favor is on the wane. They're apt to describe themselves as a brave minority under siege...such claims are understandable as a political strategy; it's always rhetorically advantageous to position yourself as outside the establishment and to describe whatever you oppose as 'fashionable.' To those of us who spend time in real schools, though, claims about the dominance of progressive teaching represent an inversion of the truth so audacious as to be downright comical" (The Schools Our Children Deserve, 6-7).
Ah, good old rhetoric. Takes me right back...to ancient Greece. We (humans) have been learning about rhetoric, the art of persuasion, since at least the beginning of our Western (read: Eurocentric) written history. And speaking of our Western history, I'm interested in that quote for the reference to political strategy. What's the end game for proponents of traditional education? I'm guessing there's a money trail to follow, because there always is (hello, capitalism), but that will have to wait for my final paper.
Lochlan's outburst behaviors got worse leading up to the winter break. At one point he received a three day "in-school suspension," which meant he wasn't allowed back in his classroom but could be at school in an office (we kept him home instead of that nonsense, which thankfully our work-from-home jobs gave us the flexibility to do). We started to recognize that he was worried about things like hand-washing and the possibility of getting sick to a greater degree than seemed normal, so we sought a psychological assessment through his primary care doctor.
Lochlan received a diagnosis of ADHD and anxiety, and Brendan and I started learning how to respond when he was feeling anxious—we needed to have confidence that he could tolerate these uncomfortable feelings, and express that confidence often. We needed to remain calm and confident ourselves when he was at his most dysregulated. The diagnosis helped us understand why it was extra-difficult for him to adjust to the school environment, and helped us articulate and emphasize to the school that what Lochlan needed was extra support when he was having a hard time, not to be kicked out of his classroom. The school responded fairly well, overall, and assigned a floating classroom aide often to Lochlan's classroom to provide that extra support.
The growing maturity that comes with age and his familiarity with the school meant that Lochlan got off to a good start in first grade. We shared his diagnoses early with his teacher, Ms. F (for first grade), so that she could have some ideas of how best to support him. But Lochlan worries a lot about the bathroom. All of the students in Lochlan's class are supposed to go during recess times or lunchtime. One time Lochlan needed to go during class time, and Ms. F said no. He got so upset that he slammed his water bottle down on a table. I mean, when you gotta go, you gotta go, right?
When she told us about this incident, she also said, "Tomorrow will be a better day, right, Lochlan?" Brendan was the one at pickup that day and he responded, "Did something else happen?" thinking something else must have happened for her to be framing it as a day that needed to be better. She said no, and Brendan said, "Okay, so it wasn't a bad day." It was a moment. An understandably upsetting one, from Lochlan's perspective.
What we learned most recently regarding bathroom usage is that if anyone in Lochlan's class needs to use the bathroom outside the prescribed times, the student that needs to go is required to give one of their bucket tickets to the student that accompanies them, thereby turning a reward system into a punishment one. The rewards system itself is a whole 'nother thing that we've only just begun to tread into with the school. Students receive bucket tickets when they are displaying desired behaviors, such as walking and talking quietly in the hallways, or following the playground rules, and we're they're "caught" doing acts of kindness (like helping a peer). On Fridays, they can exchange bucket tickets for small prizes.
Lochlan gets so worried about having his bucket tickets taken away that we've sometimes been late for school because he is trying to pee one more time before we leave, even if he just peed twenty minutes before—he doesn't want to have to go during class. We've talked about this with Ms. F and she has made a special accommodation for Lochlan to use the bathroom when he needs to with an adult accompanying him (because he tends to take a long time) without the repercussion of losing a bucket ticket. We brought up how the anxiety around gaining or losing bucket tickets is harmful to all the kids, but as far as we know she is still employing that tactic with other students.
I don't mean to disparage Lochlan's school or his teachers. I do believe they are doing their best with the resources they have and within the educational model that has been prevalent for at least the last hundred years (The Schools Our Children Deserve, 6), and that it's the whole model that needs to change, and society-wide priorities that need to shift (and I think are shifting).
Right now, we've got a model heavily influenced by men like B.F. Skinner. Harvard University's Department of Psychology profile on Skinner says, "Skinner was influenced by John B. Watson’s philosophy of psychology called behaviorism, which rejected not just the introspective method and the elaborate psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung, but any psychological explanation based on mental states or internal representations such as beliefs, desires, memories, and plans."
For every theory out there, a new one develops to build on or dismantle an old one (Derrida, anyone?). Skinner believed everything we do is in response to stimuli. He was an empiricist and empiricist ideas were nothing new to public education in the United States when Skinner came on the scene in the mid-20th century. Aristotle's influence had been touching American public education since the Puritans (Reynolds and Kendi, 16-17).
In Schools for Growth, developmental psychologist Lois Holzman takes the build on or dismantle idea further: "Like other societal institutions in Western culture, schools are committed to the philosophical position that human life and growth require some way of knowing the world. This belief, thousands of years old, has rarely been challenged; indeed, it is taken to be as 'natural' as our upright stance...in my opinion, we need to question whether knowing itself—not merely the kind of ideologically biased knowing that schools perpetuate—is the source of our problems. Might it be that centuries-old philosophical biases about what it means to understand, to mean, to learn—to be human—have as much to do with how schools run as do politics, economics, and pedagogy?" (Holzman, 5-6).
Reading and copying that over just now kind of blew my mind. It reminds me of the interview we read for this class with psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, in which he said, "We often hear it said that we have to give meaning to this or that, to one’s own thoughts, aspirations, sex, life. But we know absolutely nothing about life. Experts run out of breath trying to explain it to us."
To me, this comes back to Plato and the idea that we should all be aspiring toward some perfect Form—the idea that we must constantly be trying to be something more that what we are, when what we are is already so beautiful.
Later in the same book, Holzman talks about Jean Piaget, a Swiss biologist, philosopher, and psychologist (often cited in Kohn's work) who studied the psychology of children. "Piaget's child is active. She or he does not adapt through responding to stimuli but assimilates and accommodates, constantly and actively adjusting the relationship between her or himself and the things, people, and events in the environment."
This reminds me of something I came across while researching Donna Haraway, the trailer for the documentary about her, "Storytelling for Earthly Survival":
I just love that trailer. I should watch the documentary, I bet I'd love it too. I think meaning is what we make of our lives. "We engage each other in doing something," Haraway says. That's all life is. Living and doing things together.
Thinking about all these things, these many theories and ideas we've been reading about this whole semester, and what I'm researching now regarding education, I keep coming back to Jacques Derrida's monstrosity. In his essay "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," he said, "...the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity."
I feel like I can't quite wrap my mind around it. Reading Holzman's work is having a similar effect on me. Are we at a point in human development where we can create new worlds that are not based on old systems? What's coming? As we become more and more aware of how harmful so many of our systems are, as we recognize more and more our interconnectedness, how will the old fall away and what will we build in its place? "Are we more inclined to want schools to turn out kids who accept or who question, who conserve traditions or who create new ones?" (The Schools Our Children Deserve, 116).
For now, Brendan and I are trying to get our kiddo's school to implement Dr. Ross Greene's "Collaborative and Proactive Solutions" method. It's an entirely approachable system of problem-solving with children and adolescents when they display what we consider to be challenging behaviors. It's all about building relationships and trust between children and caretakers and involving children in the problem-solving process. As we continue to advocate for Lochlan at school, we're also trying to move the dial on the overall school culture so that it treats children as whole people, worthy of trust and respect.
Here's a parting image from one my favorite Facebook parenting groups, Visible Child (also an excellent and resource rich website):
Works cited
Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." https://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f13/DrrdaSSP.pdf, 1970.
Haraway, Donna. Trailer for Storytelling for Earthly Survival. YouTube, uploaded by Queer Lisboa and Queer Porto, 20 July 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xNPSoc6Mq8&t=1s.
Harvard University Department of Psychology. "B. F. Skinner." https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/b-f-skinner
Holzman, Lois. Schools for Growth: Radical Alternatives to Current Educational Models. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997.
Kohn, Alfie. The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing. Da Capo Press, 2006.
Kohn, Alfie. The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards." Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
Lacan, Jacques. "'There can be no crisis of psychoanalysis' Jacques Lacan interviewed in 1974." Verso, a blog post by Jordan Skinner, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/1668-there-can-be-no-crisis-of-psychoanalysis-jacques-lacan-interviewed-in-1974, 22 July 2014.
Reynolds, Jason, and Ibram X. Kendi. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You. Little, Brown and Company, 2020.
I’m sure you’ve seen the Baldwin quote going around, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
But did you know it comes from the essay Notes on the House of Bondage? The “house of bondage” is the United States, the "empire," and wow oh wow are there some other great quotes in that essay. As in, the whole essay. READ IT.
He wrote it in 1980. 44 years ago. It could have been written today, so little has changed. But things ARE changing. Consider this quote, while thinking of the Palestinian people sharing their heartbreak, sharing themselves:
“I am speaking of the breakup–the end–of the so-overextended Western empire. I am thinking of the black and nonwhite peoples who are shattering, redefining and recreating history–making all things new–simply by declaring their presence, by delivering their testimony. The empire never intended that this testimony should be heard, but, if I hold my peace, the very stones will cry out.”
Wow.
Or think about this quote, when you think about anyone celebrating the rescue of four Israeli hostages without giving a second thought to the fact that over TWO HUNDRED Palestinians were murdered, mowed down, in the process getting those four:
“When Americans look out on the world, they see nothing but dark and menacing strangers who appear to have no sense of rhythm at all, nor any respect or affection for white people; and white Americans really do not know what to make of all this, except to increase the defense budget.”
And think of this quote, when you think of Israel starving Gaza, when you read on Jurist.org that “The World Food Programme (WFP) reported Thursday that Sudan is experiencing unprecedented levels of hunger and violence, with the nation’s conflict on the verge of becoming the world’s largest hunger crisis due to increased violent attacks by paramilitary groups.”
“This is the charged, the dangerous, moment, when everything must be re-examined, must be made new; when nothing at all can be taken for granted. One looks again at the word "famine." At this hour of the world’s history, famine must be considered a man-made phenomenon and one looks at who is starving.”
Oh man. The rest of it is so good. It’s about the relationship of children to their elders, and vice versa. It’s about learning from one another.
“Someone my age, for example, may be pleased and proud that Carter has blacks in his Cabinet. A younger person may wonder just what their function is in such a Cabinet. They will be keenly aware, too, that blacks called upon to represent the Republic are, very often, thereby prohibited from representing blacks. A man my age, schooled in adversity and skilled in compromise, may choose not to force the issue of defense spending versus the bleak and criminal misery of the black and white populations here, but a younger man may say, out loud, that he will not fight for a country that has never fought for him and, further, that the myth and menace of global war are nothing more and nothing less than a coward’s means of distracting attention from the real crimes and concerns of this Republic.”
And it ends with an action; forging a new language. This is the beauty of the dreamers, of anyone with half an imagination to envision a world beyond capitalism and colonialism. This empire WILL end, one way or another. Start building a new world now. Hey, you could join the IWW, that’s what I just did. Get to know your neighbors and be there for them when they need you. You can't wait.
“We have come to the end of a language and are now about the business of forging a new one. For we have survived, children, the very last white country the world will ever see.”
Early on, one of the first things I journaled (in my private, real paper journal) about COVID was that everything fucked up about our world was just going to get ten times worse because of it. And one of the first things to annoy the shit out of me was seeing people (older, white, financially stable people) share some stupid post about how this was a forced pause on the frantic pace of our lives, an opportunity to enjoy dinner with our children, read, rest, blah blah blah, shit shit shit. It was so oblivious to or uncaring of the crisis that COVID caused and is causing in so many people's lives. Lost jobs or trying to work from home while caring for children; so many people who can't access what few benefits there are because they are labeled "illegal." People who are doing just fine and are far removed from money stress or housing instability or job insecurity just don't give enough shits about everyone else who is struggling. I guess there are studies that have shown that the more one has, the less empathy they have.
Now it's been four months since we first started seeing lots of cases in the US, and I have such a strong feeling of cognitive dissonance every time I see people post or share photos of their vacations. Brendan and I have canceled all our travel plans for the year and we aren't making any new travel plans anytime soon. Well, we have talked about going camping, just us, but no definite plans yet. We canceled our flights to Wisconsin back in May, when we were supposed to go help plant trees and spread Wes's ashes at Bur Oak Farm. We canceled our plans to drive up to Washington to visit our family and friends in July-August. We won't be planning a big 10 year wedding anniversary celebration in October. We had hoped to rent a cabin and invite a bunch of friends to have an artsy fartsy weekend with us. We haven't talked about the holidays yet, but we won't be inviting anyone over or going to see anyone. Cases are surging in many spots around the US because there's been a total lack of regard for science, a push to reopen and get people back to work, and very little social support from the government. IT'S A FUCKING SHITSHOW. And yet people are going on fucking vacation and it pisses me off. Because it's such a normal thing. But nothing is normal right now.
And that's the thing. Everyone's normal has been disrupted, but for some people, that was a good thing.
April 12, 2022
Brendan walked into the kitchen as I was washing dishes and watching Ozark and said, "You're brilliant." I asked him what he was specifically talking about, and he said he'd been reading my old blog posts. So I came back here to read my old blog posts. I have a terrible tendency to forget about this blog for long swaths of time, but, you know what? I enjoy my writing, too. And then I logged in and saw that I actually had the above draft from 2020. I guess I was planning to add more to that. Now here it is, one year and eight plus months later, and I'm afraid I've become a bit COVID-numb. Which is to say, I don't even know exactly how I would continue that particular blog. Has everything fucked up gotten ten times worse?
To do that question justice, I'd first have to make a list of everything that was already fucked up. Then I'd have to do some decent research into what's changed about those things since COVID. I don't have the time or energy to do that tonight, at least, and I'd like to go ahead and publish this post.
So let me just come back to the title of this post. COVID thoughts. Something I think about a lot is the COVID death toll in the United States and how we're very close to one million. The current toll, according to the CDC, is 983,237. Compare that to China, a country with one billion seventy million five hundred thousand more people than the United States. Incomprehensible numbers. Their death toll, according to the WHO, is 14,319. Incomprehensible loss all around, but for the United States? A fucking failure of the US government.
Speaking of failures, basically all the West Coast dropped masking requirements last month, with some exceptions (public transit, healthcare facilities). Meanwhile kids under 5 (which includes Lochlan) don't have a vaccine yet. That's fucked up.
What's wonderful? I've gotten a bit more active on Twitter. Not that that's necessarily wonderful, but there is an account that is dedicated to honoring those who have died of COVID in the United States: https://twitter.com/FacesOfCOVID
It is beautiful and tragic. Another way to say fucked up and wonderful.
I have to walk the dogs. We have two of them now. I have to scoop out the litter box. We have two cats now. Normally those are Brendan's nighttime chores, but he has a cold (not COVID, but of course we check now whenever we are not feeling well), so I will do them for him. He did a good task tonight, in reminding me of this blog.
March 9th, 2020
Off and on this past year, and especially last month, I was thinking about how March was coming up, and March was the month that my dad died, so the one year marker of his death was coming. And now March is here and that date is closing in. March 30th. I just looked back through my texts and it was only nine days before he died that my mom texted, asking if I could talk. We were at a play that was about to start, so I texted her back with that information, and asked if everything was okay. She responded, "Not really...Daddy has cancer..."
When I logged back into this blog today, I saw a draft post from April 2018 that I had decided not to publish. Here's some of it:
"Death. I think about it more than I should, perhaps. I've questioned within myself why this might be so, and I think it's at least partly because I have never experienced the death of someone very close to me and feel totally unprepared for that inevitability. Death scares me. Or, perhaps, the thought of grief scares me. And because it's scary and unknown, part of me wants to prepare myself for it.
Since having a child, I seek out stories of child loss. I think I'm just trying to wrap my mind around how people go on after losing a child. Maybe some part of it is masochism. Maybe I think, by reading of how others have lost children, I can prevent it from happening to us."
I couldn't keep death at bay.
March 16th, 2020
I saw a therapist on Friday, three days ago. This was my first time seeing a therapist. Brendan and I both sought this out through our primary care physician, hopeful that something would be covered through Medi-Cal. What is covered is short-term therapy, so I will have eight sessions. Toward the end of the first session, the therapist was going through a list of questions with me, and one was something like, "Do you worry about losing people you are close to, or about them being harmed?"
I realized that I worry less about that now that I have experienced loss. In the past year, I lost my father and father in-law, and our close friends lost their child. And now I know the enemy, grief. It's not so much that it's any less scary. It's just, I see how every day just marches on. Nothing I do can stop it. Not that I want to stop time. I want to go back in time and change things, stop people from dying. But I can't, and it marches on with no regard to my feelings.
And now there's COVID-19, or coronavirus disease 2019. I don't even know what to say about it. Of course it relates to death, but for me, personally, I hope it won't. I hope I don't lose anyone I know because of it. And not just from contracting it, but from the greater effect it's having on people's livelihoods and mental health. At the same time, I am fascinated by it and the impact it's having on the world.
March 27th, 2020
I wonder what my dad would think about COVID-19. I think he would also be fascinated by it and the impact it's having on the world. I'm sure he read books about pandemics or worlds changed by pandemics. I could look at the notebooks my mom gave me, where he wrote down the titles and a brief blurb about books he finished, and the date he finished them. He'd been keeping these notebooks for years, going back to when I was a teenager, up until he died. And my mom didn't know! Isn't that funny? You can share a house and a life with someone for forty years and they still have their own private world.
I think my dad had a rich inner life. I've had this idea, to read all the books he read, and blog about it. I'd include what he wrote about the books he read, and my own thoughts about them. It'd be an ongoing, lifelong project, at least at the rate I read books lately. It'd be a way to continue sharing experiences with my dad. I'm glad he kept those notebooks.
March 30th, 2020
I donated blood this morning. I didn't pick today in honor of my dad, it was just the first available appointment I could get. I have a hard time calling this the anniversary of his death, because anniversaries are usually something to celebrate. But then what do I call it?
My parents celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary in 2018. In the couple years leading up to it, I had imagined I would plan a big 40th wedding celebration for them. I had organized something when they had their 25th, and 40 years seemed like another good big one. But then life just seemed harder. I mean, it was. We had a kid. I didn't get a full night's uninterrupted sleep from November 7th, 2017 (probably before then, what with being pregnant and pee) until at least the end of October, 2018. Probably not even then, but that's when we night weaned. And their 40th wedding anniversary was October 29th, 2018. So it's understandable that planning a big event in another state just didn't happen. But boy do I wish I'd done it, now.
I don't think grief is the enemy. I know I said that before. But it's death, really. Grief is dealing with living after death turns your world upside down. That's a friend more than an enemy. But death? Death can go...I was thinking of saying various expletives. But really, it can just go. Go away. I think I believe that there's a time for it. But I wish it could be more like the very end of The Good Place, but instead of choosing to leave the afterlife, that's just how it would be for actual life. You get to live it all until you're ready to go. And until your loved ones are able to accept that you're ready to go.
That's the name of the squirmy worm growing inside me.
We just had the anatomy scan ultrasound, and now we know the sex of the baby. We're not keeping it a secret. The baby has male genitals. Now we can refer to the baby as a he instead of an it. Mostly I want to get used to calling him Lochlan. Loch for short.
I've felt hesitant about how to share this news on social media. I don't think it should be a big deal. I don't get those reveal parties, where someone close to the parents knows and there's a party where the sex is revealed and the parents' reactions immortalized by pics and vids.
I don't think the baby's genitalia can tell us much about the person he will be. Human behavior, and what of it is biologically or societally determined, is complicated. These are not questions with easy answers.
I do know that I hate how gender divided our society is. I inwardly cringe whenever someone says to me, "You know how it is, you're a woman" or "They just don't get it, they're men" or anything along those lines.
Sure, women and men will in general have some different experiences throughout life because of their sex. But two things.
One, any individual will have their own unique set of experiences that may or may not fall in line with the majority of others of their sex.
Two, sex is not gender and gender is a spectrum. People just don't always fall in line with binaries or societal expectations.
And another thing (there are always more things, why did I assign it a number?): When people say stuff like "You don't get it, you're a ____" it is almost always a discussion ender. And I think that's usually because discussing complicated things is hard and people don't like hard things. Or sometimes it's just lazy shorthand, a thing people assume most others agree with. Either way, I don't think it's helpful and I do think it's dismissive. Let's try to do better.
So, his name is Lochlan. He has male genitalia and is healthy and is still squirming up a storm. Here's his spine:
I'm thinking, lately, it'd be better to just have this up and going, whether my posts are well-structured, well-thought-out, well-written, or wells. It might be interesting if they were wells. Hell, that would definitely be interesting. How can a blog post be a well? A literal well, that is. Metaphorical wells are easy.
I am incubating life. That's new since last time.
I am often overwhelmed by life. Last year I started to feel like life was a freight train that is chugging away slowly in front of me. I am jogging behind it, trying to catch up and hop on. The best thing would be if I could hop on it, clamber my way to the captain's seat (the engine car? Are those in front?) and hop in and set the pace for the train.
All the things I want to accomplish are sitting in the cars of the train. Or maybe the car they're in is rusting and falling apart, so some things are falling off the train. If I stopped and and tried to catch them, the train would just get further away from me. I dunno. It's not a perfect metaphor, but it's the best image I've been able to come up with for how I feel.
