I Learned You Were Racist Today

One day, back in 2008, when my son was in the second grade, as I did every day, I asked him how his day was at school when I picked him up.

“I learned you were a racist today!”

“Um, OK.  And how did you learn this?”

“We had mock elections, it was a lot of fun.  But if you didn’t vote for Obama, you were racist.  You are not voting for Obama.”

“It’s a little too complicated to explain to someone your age, but I’m not voting for Obama because I agree more with Bush’s policies, that is what voting is supposed to be about, policies.  I don’t choose who I vote for based on skin color.”

“Well, everyone at school says you are racist if you don’t vote for Obama.”

“Well, if you see me do or say anything racist, let me know.”

“OK.”

Years later, when my son was in middle school and had found an interest in history and politics, on the way home from school one day, he out of the blue said, “Mom, I’m sorry for ever calling you racist.”

“What?”

“Remember, about Obama.”

“Oh, OK.  Thank you.”

“You aren’t racist, and I really don’t like some of Obama’s policies either.”

“I’m glad to see you have learned to think about this stuff.”

In 2008, I did not have a Facebook account, and probably many of you did not either.  I wouldn’t doubt, though, that if we did, I’d have been called a racist there for the same reason as what my 7 year old had been told, and that is the point where I think all of this began.  By all of this, I mean the assumption that anyone that has conservative views or is Republican is ABC and anyone that has liberal or Democrat views is XYZ.  It’s when we really began categorizing people and assuming who they voted for told us everything there was to know about them. The popularity of forums like Facebook and Twitter really amplified it, even to the point that many people deeply believe that.  I really understand now why my parents would not even tell us kids who they voted for.

I’m don’t belong to either of the 2 major parties.  I haven’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since that 2008 election.  However, it is not because I assume the party to be racist or any other mass categorization, I just haven’t liked the candidates and some of their policies.  Ditto with the Democrat candidates, I didn’t vote for them either, not because I assume them all to be snowflakes or any other mass categorization, but because I didn’t like the candidates and some of their policies. 

A week ago, I stated that, though the white supremacist groups may have a hate message, they still have the same rights as the rest of Americans, including their right to protest and to free speech (as does any other group) and I was deemed to be racist and supporting the supremacists.  It wasn’t because I actually have racist or supremacist ideology, but just because it was the narrative of the day.  Personally, I’m not worried about the people who may think that of me, any more than I was worried about it when my son told me he learned I was.  I know what is in my heart, and, honestly, there is no way to “prove” that to anyone else, others have the choice to think what they do.  However, that type of assumption towards large groups of people because of what party they may belong to or who they voted for or because they support the laws of our land, it just fuels more hate and it’s not productive.

If you ever see me actually do or say something racist let me know.  If you see your coworkers,  neighbors, friends, or family do the same, let them know. 

Be mad at those that are yelling racial or religious epithets, be angry at those who belong to white supremacy groups, say something when your neighbor whispers, “I think the people who bought that house might be black.”  Remember that bigotry comes in a lot of forms, and stop yourself when you are about to say something about Muslims when you are actually referring to a terrorist group or about Christians when you are actually referring to the actions of one televangelist.  Realize that a hateful response to hate only fuels more hate, and that hate can only be overcome by our own loving actions. Know that hate is something that consumes and blinds you.  Understand that if someone has hate in their heart, that the blame does not lie on anyone but themselves, and it can only be eradicated by appealing to their heart. 

Listen to people, accept that there are different opinions, realize that most situations have a lot of complexity that can’t be summed up in a sound bite, and truly try to understand that there are other legitimate points of view on just about every topic.  Grow from being the 7 year old boy who believed the soundbite generalizations to the middle school one that learned how to look at people individually.  That’s how we combat hate.

When we start assuming everyone’s motives are racist, we diminish those that experience real racism, and we lose sight of who the actual perpetrators are.  Don’t be a part of that.

That’s why they have wine.

It's Not About Us

Parenting.  It’s not about us.

Well before I had a child, there was a sermon in church that for some reason really resonated with me.  The point of it was that in order to effectively raise a child, you had to learn the “language” of your child, and that language would not necessarily be the same among all of your children.  That language, that is the thing that should guide you in how you talk to, discipline, and even love your child.  That language is how THEIR brain works, what they think, what is important to them, how they react to things.

I was blessed with a wonderful, funny, intelligent, strong willed child.  However, that blessing came with some issues, issues that caused friction, distress, and even pain in him that I was unaware of, that were the source of some frustrating behavioral issues.  I was so sure all I needed to do was be strict, to demand he behave in a certain matter, to punish him when he didn’t meet my expectations.  I completely ignored the message of the sermon that had really touched me a couple of years before.  I was sure that I knew how to make a child grow up to be the perfect adult.

I was wrong.  So terribly wrong.

I see some other parents or caretakers make the same mistake, and it breaks my heart.  It actually brings me to tears reading some posts online.

Our kids, the majority of the time, they aren’t being “bad” just for the sake of being bad, to hurt us, or to try to make our lives difficult, yet that is usually our first response.  So, we go into the situation concerned about ourselves, we take it personally, our focus is on our feelings of anger or disrespect.  I know this well, because this was me.

The result of my parenting choices the first 9 or 10 years of my son’s life was that I had a child who didn’t fully trust me, lied to me, hid things from me, hit or bit me, was afraid of me, was destructive with his belongings, got in trouble at school, and if he did what I wanted him to do, it was out of fear.  Something obviously wasn’t working.

Around that time, he also started failing in school.  He always had some struggles, but they intensified greatly.  Though I had previously brought up behavior issues to his pediatrician before, they were now taken seriously.  After extensive testing, he was then diagnosed with several disorders better known by their acronyms, and it was then that the sermon from so many years earlier smacked me upside the head.  This wasn’t about me, it was about my son.  Had I only realized that earlier.

I let go of everything I thought was right about parenting, and relearned it all.  I have learned not to react to things as if they are an assault on me, but to find out the WHY, and to deal with the underlying cause.  I don’t automatically punish, I approach everything with as a teaching moment.  I realized that as a parent, I am here to guide and teach, not to scare into compliance.

Right now, I’ve got a teenager who has above a 3.0 GPA at a private college prep school, who plays for his school baseball team, who has some incredible friends, who volunteers in the community, and, the next time he leaves his room to go get a snack or use the bathroom and sees the light on here in my office, will pop his head in just to tell me he loves me.  I can’t tell you the last time I disciplined him.  I’ve had to ask him to repeat himself in a more respectful manner, or to point out that something he said was rude, but that is normal teenage boy stuff, and I recognize that.

It's not about us.  It is about our kids, and I will tell you from experience, it is the most rewarding thing you will ever do to accept that.  This isn't limited to parents of kids with disabilities, this is relevant for everyone.

That’s why they have wine, a toast to the parents who all work so hard to have great kids!

Life, LIBERTY, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Freedom.  It’s what the second word in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” means.  It’s supposed to be what America stands for, but is it?

I was mocked the other day for holding a certain opinion, not just because I had the opinion, but specifically because my opinion was that the option was what did not impede the freedom of Americans.  It was the freedom part that was mocked.  At first, all I could think was ”Was my nap today really decades instead of minutes, is freedom no longer important in America?” but then I came to realize that we have been slowly losing that concept for a while.

Bring up about any controversial topic, and what you will here is people talking about if it should be legal or not, how the government should deal with it.  We’ve become a country that no longer cares about the freedom for everyone to make their own choices, we want the only choices to be the ones we agree with, and we want the government to tell them so.  Every time we do this, that word liberty loses more of its meaning, and it affects the life and pursuit of happiness of millions of people in this country.

Many people can’t even fathom anymore that just because something is legal doesn’t mean it is right, or because it is illegal that it is wrong.  It’s the law, so “fact.”  We let the government tell us what we should think.

Drinking soda is not the healthiest choice we can make, but we’ve gotten to the point that instead of letting people make decisions about how much they want to consume, we allow laws to be made to regulate what size cups can be sold at convenience stores in various places. 

Making laws that take away freedom of choice does nothing to change people’s minds about what is right to do, what is good for them, or is even going to change their behavior.  The soda drinker who can’t buy a 20 oz cup can still buy two 10 oz cups.  Sometimes taking away that choice can be harmful to some, such as when we make marijuana illegal so that we can pretend that people then can’t use it recreationally, and in the process keep a useful medication from people such as cancer patients.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having opinions on matters, feeling that something is right or wrong, is good for you.  As long as something does not infringe upon the rights of another or causes another harm, it shouldn’t be something that gets legislated, something that the government decides. Influence people with mature, reasonable discussions of matters (though the erosion of that ability could be a whole other blog post), that is how beliefs and behaviors will change.

Many times, trying to specify legalities to issues takes away our ability to use common sense.  The whole which-bathroom-does-a-transgender-person-use comes to mind.  We never really had a big problem with this, didn’t even notice who was in the bathroom with us, until we tried to decide this as a black and white matter.  It’s not black and white, it’s a great big, giant gray, a gray that can only be navigated with common sense on an individual basis.

I personally believe abortion outside of medical necessity is wrong, I feel that infringes on the rights of life of the child.  However, my goal is not to make it illegal, and it is also not a black and white matter.  My goal is to try to show people options and find ways to facilitate those options, to highlight the value of life, and to express my opinion on the correlation between the acceptance of abortion and the decline of the respect for life, in the hopes that maybe I can convince just one person to make a different decision.  Looking for the easy way of having the government say “No” isn’t going to change anyone’s mind, it’s just a way to hand over the responsibility of speaking what I feel to someone else.

Gay marriage, marijuana use, sodas, birth control, breast feeding, motorcycle helmets, and on and on and on are things that affect only the people who make those choices or not, let people make their choices instead of the government.

Freedom.  I hope that maybe I influenced at least one person to find that important again.

That’s why they have wine.

No, Thanks, I'm Good

Today when I was working (I work from home), there was a knock on my door.  Two twenty-something young men in dress shirts and ties and name tags identifying them as members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, asking me if I knew about Jesus.  "I'm a Christian, and I'm busy working," I replied.  "Well, can we help you to strengthen your faith?"  "No, thanks, I'm good."  I shut the door.

This inquiry into trying to trying to appeal to who I already am, someone who believes in Jesus Christ, but with the intention to sway me to abandoning my beliefs for a "better" way, made me think of something else I encountered this week that tried to do the same, and really bothered me.

Earlier this week I read a blog post, a post that used feminism as it's way to try to appeal to who I already am.  A post that touted the writer and others that engaged in her hobby of pole dancing to be someone that did so for the obviously commendable cause of furthering the lives of women in our society, particularly those who would never pole dance in public themselves.

Hmm, well, I wouldn't pole dance in public, so I continued reading to see what exactly she was doing for me. What I was supposed to learn was that I am supposedly afraid of my own sexuality, and that I am being repressed by society, that I had poor body image, and, the thing that really ruffled my feathers, that I was to be felt sorry for, yes, felt sorry for, because I couldn't possibly enjoy sex.

That was what I was supposed to learn.  

Let me clear up the fallacies here.

Because someone chooses not to make their sexuality public does not necessarily mean any of that. As an aside, many people who choose that activity as a profession actually do it because they have had sexual abuse in their past, but that is a vast subject for another post.

I just plain old don't think my "goods" are public property so I CHOOSE not to engage in activities or fashions that make it public.  That's it.  If you choose to pole dance, fine, but you are not doing ME any favors by doing so.  I'm not crying alone at night in the corner.  No one makes me dress how I do, it's my choice.  My body displays it's 50 years of living, with wrinkles and stretch marks and a little extra fat, and I'm good with that, I don't need to twirl around a piece of aluminum to convince anyone of it.  I find my sexuality to be something intimate to be enjoyed with only my husband, and I'm really not seeing why that is wrong, as a matter of fact I think it would be disrespectful to him to think otherwise.  And, guess what, people who don't pole dance still have good sex.

Base emotions and actions don't make us more powerful.  They just make us like everyone else.  If you want to do something in the name of feminism that actually helps me, then stand up against 6 month rape sentences, try with all your might to break into a male-dominated field of work, heck, just make your husband KNOW who your children's doctors are.  

Pole dancing doesn't make me an equal to anyone but those who pole dance.  I've not come this far in life so that I can spread my legs in a seductive manner for a bunch of men who are not my partner.  Don't feel sorry for me.

I'm good.

That's why they have wine.

We're All In This Together?

We’re all in this together.  It’s a very popular phrase.  But are we?

We’re not if you log into my Facebook account.  I see too many posts and articles that include the words and phrases “privileged,” “snowflake,” “sheeple,” “shaming”…And that is just in a support group for parents of kids with ADHD.  Add to that all the names people call various politicians, thinking they are being cute, the assumptions made of people in any named political, racial, gender, sexual preference, economic, or religious group.  Heck, we even categorize cat and dog people.

We’re all in this together.  Bull Freaking Crap.  We’re not.  And you know what, the majority of people don’t want to be.

You know what happens when you pick out one group or one person to be the “blame” of everything in your life?  It means you hand all your power over to them, every single bit of it.  You are saying you are helpless, because, well, THEM!  You are absconding all responsibility, and that is what I think makes it attractive to people.

In the last week, I read a comment on the aforementioned ADHD support group I joined that said that the parent didn’t care at all what the other kids in the class had to deal with (in their mixed class where there child with disabilities was with those that don’t have any), they had enough privilege, they just needed to cater to her kid, it didn’t matter if it negatively affected the other children.  To my amazement, and honestly, utter disgust, most people agreed.  I’m sorry, that is not “We’re all in it together.”  That is “My life is hard, and I’m deciding it’s harder than yours, so mine is the only one that matters, and, well, SCREW YOU!”  Yep, that is exactly what it says, and it happens in every area of life.

 

My child has ADHD, and a couple other acronym diagnoses.  He’s not special.  His education isn’t more important than anyone else’s.  It is AS important, but it is most certainly not MORE important.  Teaching him that the system is against him, that others might see him as less, that he deserves special things because other people have some stuff easier, all that would do is make him a victim with no motivation to make the best of his life.  Instead I’ve taught him that things may sometimes be harder for him than some others, but he is completely expected to do them anyway, to work hard, to not give up, to realize that if someone thinks he can’t do something doesn’t mean they are right.  He’s not a victim of his circumstances.  He’s an amazing human being and he knows it.

And then the rest of my Facebook feed, same theme, different privilege or people to blame.  It makes me frustrated, because that will never lead to change.

Our lives are our choices.  Make them wisely, and know that you are in charge.

That’s why they have wine.

Happy Mother's Day To Some Wonderful Kids!

On this Mother's Day, I'd like to acknowledge all of "my kids."

Yes, only one is biological, but there are so many others that hold a place in my heart:  My nieces and nephews, all the neighborhood kids who used to use my bathroom and drink out of my hose on the back patio of my condo and sometimes just came over to talk to me when my son wasn't even home, the baseball teammates that I drove to and from practice, the group of boys who used to run to my car in the school pickup line to say "Hey, Mom!" and who I still joke around with when they are playing PS4 online with my son, my son's best friend who came to Disney with us for Spring Break and played right along with my silliness and stupid jokes.  You all are amazing young adults, and I am blessed that you have been in my life.

This is what Mother's Day is really all about.  Mom's aren't special without their kids.

That's why they have wine.  Or, in the case of most of you who are still young, Pepsi.  Love you all!

Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged

Judge not lest ye be judged.

Not only is this one of the most misinterpreted quotes in the bible (Jesus is talking about hypocrisy, not telling us to not use our brain), but it’s the Makes-Me-Better-Than-You popular sentiment these days.  (Did I mention hypocrisy?)

We all make judgements.  At least I hope we do.  If you do not, how do you know if you should be wary of a stranger?  How do you decide who to date?  How do you decide who is acceptable to babysit your kids?  How do you know if that investment is a good idea?  If we never drew conclusions based on dirty shoes or shifty eyes when talking or when someone just didn’t seem to belong, we’d have a heck of a lot more of unsolved crimes, like, well, all of them.

Judgments are necessary.  Some are inappropriate, say assuming someone is incapable of something because they are a certain gender or a criminal because of their race or a pervert because of their sexual orientation.  However, what reigns in those judgments in our society?  Chew on this a moment.  It’s the JUDGMENT on those people for their views.

Am I judgmental?  Sure I am.  So are you, whether you want to admit It or not.

And if you start a sentence with “I don’t judge…” I’m going to judge you as a liar, ignorant, or most likely, someone who wants to seem better than others.

Judge away at what I just said, that is your right.  We don’t have to agree.  Then actually try to live your life making no judgments whatsoever.  Good luck making it out of your driveway.

That’s why they have wine.  My judgment tells me that mine tastes pretty good.