A Letter to the Parents Who Dread the First Day of School Photos

Hello, Dear One,

’Tis the season, again. I know how you are bracing yourself for the photos that dance across your feed of Everyone Else’s Children Who Look Happy. They appear thrilled to be headed back to school. You notice their ruddy, sun-kissed faces, their smartly pressed uniforms. Maybe it’s the backpacks full of brand new supplies and so.much.potential that grip you for a moment before you remember this is not your story.

Maybe once upon a time you were in the camp of those who were ecstatic to snap and post photos of your children on the first day of school. The two pocket folders were ready for A papers, the calendar was ripe for new adventures. You felt proud and excited and maybe a touch trepidatious. Would their teacher be kind and inspiring? Who would be their friends in homeroom? What would happen at recess and would your little person be brave and inclusive? Would this be the best year of school ever?

Perhaps you no longer allow yourself to feel this hope, because of how your story unfolded in school years past. You try to put stock in the promise of a clean slate, but all you hear are the calls from the principal or the school counselor or the learning specialist or the math teacher AGAIN, again with the missed assignments or the behavior or the sickness or the mood swings. Your heart is still aching from the bullying or the distracting or the excluding that went down last year. You don’t have to work hard to imagine the dynamics that will replicate themselves— just shuffle the cast and the scenery a bit and you already know the script for Act I.

Or maybe you do have all the hope in the world for this school year, given the only direction to go from rock bottom is up. You’ve already been to the darkest place, to the Upside Down, and you already got that ticket punched. You know what it’s like to watch your kid go undiagnosed or unmedicated or unacknowledged or unprotected. You are far too acquainted with a lack of to not be able to believe in the abundance.

Still, your optimism is guarded. You want to believe, but you are cautious. Your heart has been broken before. You are tired. You’ve had to advocate so fiercely in the past. You think, surely that needle’s got to move. Is this the year when the progress report shows actual progress? You see everyone else’s kids smiling as they board the big yellow school bus and you wonder if yours will ever have a seat on there, or if they will always ride the struggle bus.

Dear one, I want you to know that you are not alone. I have ridden the struggle bus as a parent and as an educator for years. I often feel that I am sitting alone on the bus, looking out a murky window to yards where everyone else is having the time of their lives. It is only when I have raised my hand, though, to let others know that there’s a seat next to me, right here on this busted bench with gum stuck to the bottom of the seat, that I’ve felt such freedom. The journey of shepherding kids through school is so damn hard, especially if your kid’s factory settings are not the default. But it can also be pretty gnarly and hilarious and complicated and enriching. Why would we want to pretend otherwise?

Back to school photos tell the story of A Beginning, but even beginnings, as you know, can be fraught. Everyone else seems to approach the year with ease. To you, the beginning of the school year can feel heavy and anxious-making and downright baffling. How did we get here again?

Except, we are not Here Again, after all. We’re another year wiser, and another year stronger. Our backpacks are a bit more battered, but they are full of lessons and strategies for navigating the difficulties and the red tape. We may again find a seat reserved for us and our kid(s) on the struggle bus, but we’re seasoned students of this struggle. The story of the year ahead may be familiar in theme, but if you thought it would be a solo journey—plot twist—your First Day of School Photo isn’t a selfie. It’s an ussie.

Solidarity,
A Struggle Bus Rider

Artifact

I teach an elective in cultural anthropology, but mostly I facilitate the discussion and my brilliant students lead me.

Today we were talking about the power of artifacts as a means of telling how people lived in a certain time. I asked, Tell me you were born in a particular decade without telling me you were born in a particular decade. Then I showed them my Paula Abdul cassette tapes.

We discussed how so many of our artifacts are now digitized and easily disseminated.

I then shared this digital artifact with the class in my Zoom screen:

photo courtesy Ben Crump Law Firm

I didn't share how I came across the picture; I offered it without preface of who and where and what. I simply asked the class how they felt when they saw it.

Peaceful, one student said.

Warm, another said.

A student who is a mother of two said, "That little boy is knocked out. He's living his best life. He's in the bosom place--it's the best."

We took a couple of beats to acknowledge how many of us knew this feeling, the mother and child bond, the safety of surrender.

Then I shared that this digital artifact, this picture, was used this very week in a court of law to tell a jury about how people lived.

Who is this little boy? I asked.

Oh.

Oh it’s George Floyd, they responded. It's George Floyd as a little boy resting in his mother's lap. The same mother, a woman some years deceased, whose name he cried out during his final moments.

That went from 0 to 100 fast, said one student.

Damn, said another student.

Why do we need artifacts to remind juries of people's humanity? Why do we need to see proof positive that we all come into the world defenseless? Why have the arbiters of justice and brokers of power in America so long subverted the humanity and equality of Black Lives?

Artist Titus Kaphar used this picture of a young George Floyd with his mother as inspiration for his cover of TIME Magazine. Kaphar wrote, “ I see the black mothers who are unseen, and rendered helpless in this fury against their babies. As I listlessly wade through another cycle of violence against black people, I paint a black mother … eyes closed, furrowed brow, holding the contour of her loss.”

"It's weird," said one student. "When you first showed us the picture, I felt all warm and now I just feel gut-punched."

It's my hope, though, that the jury members will hold this picture in their hearts, hold it close in their bosom place.

Documenting the Quarantine ed. 4: What I Miss

I was inspired by writer Austin Channing Brown to consider what I missed from Ordinary Time that is not Quarantine Time. In no particular order:

• Riding the subway to work and listening to a playlist that I curated in order to take my mind far, far away.

• Not being aware of how my TMJ appears to think it needs to hold up the entire North American continent with a tautness that is, frankly, admirable. (Also, if anyone has any pain relief for TMJ, I am all ears).

• Dairy Freeze. I think 65% of my grumpiness is knowing it will soon be warm and I will not be queueing with all my neighbors and their dogs in wait of a Reese’s Razzle in a waxy cup with a tall white spoon.
  

• Clear breaks from caretaking. Each and every day feels a bit like parenting babies where there is no weekend and no real guarded sanctuary of rest. There is just caretaking: for my children, my students, and my dog (who has regressed to new levels of diva infantilism). It is interrupted by moments of having to do administrative things or clean the bathroom floor or walking through the cemetery. I miss going to night class and buying myself a coffee just because. They were little totems in my week, little flags in the sand of where I staked my territory of being a human with singular interests and joys, and not merely a mom in servitude of others.
  

• Massages. Not that I got one very often, but merely the possibility of paying a stranger to kneed my back like a stubborn slab of bread dough is a huge luxury I took for granted.
  

• My students and their three-dimensional human forms and colorful ideas and incisive questions. This semester started out difficult and it persists in being really difficult but I miss the living, breathing, electric classroom experience.
  

• The library. The dining hall. The buskers in Park St. Station. The sweaty barista at the Arlington Starbucks. The hopefulness I felt about Election 2020 and which I hope I might feel again depending on whom Biden taps as a running mate (?). Concerts. Holding other people’s babies.
  
  I could write endlessly about the things I miss, but the present reality is blessed and full all the same. My house is rarely quiet, a reminder that there are people in this house laughing and FaceTiming and making friendship bracelets to deliver—delivering us indeed to a little freeze frame when we all were as tightly wound as the embroidery threads my children cross and loop and knot with conviction. We are still good friends, same as we ever were, we are just a few threads unslipped through knots for now. Ready and waiting for the chance to wrap around one another’s wrist again soon.