I’m one of those mothers who walks around fairly confident that my kids are smarter than yours. Not that my kids make better grades than yours, or read faster than yours, or perform better than yours on standardized tests. I’m not competitive about this. I do not need to wave report cards and test papers around bragging about the academic brilliance of my kids. Because I’m also realistic about the fact that one of them is lazy, like moi. Sure, he could make straight A’s if he wanted to, but he could also watch more TV if he just settled for above average B grades, so he’ll just go with that option. But thanks so much for your input, because he really loves input. The other one has a brain that is difficult to control, and it does not always mind when someone says he needs to learn, retain, or complete information. There’s only so much you can do, with what you have, where you are.
My kids have endured more adult-sized life experiences than their peers. (If you’re unfamiliar, read the “About Us” section on the right.) So they are just smarter and more aware of things than other kids. Their life lessons involve more loss, survival, and truth than most. They have eyes that see and brains that comprehend ideas and situations that are beyond the capacity they would have if only...lots of experiences and events have forever changed the kids they would have been sans all that stuff.
So I grab at that. I try to add opportunities for their view on the world to grow. I am a liberal, but I want them to form their own opinions about political issues. I am honest about why I feel the way I feel when they inquire, but I want them to be informed and decide what complements their core. Even if it does not match mine. What I do want them to have is my social conscience. I am my brother’s keeper. What happens to you happens to me. These are principles the three (sometimes the four) of us govern ourselves by in our dealings with each other as family, and it is the way I want them to look out into the world.
I am a white girl living a middle class life in a modest home surrounded by affluent neighborhoods. We send our kids to Catholic school, and we struggle elsewhere to make that happen. The fact that some months we rob Peter to pay Paul and some months we have enough to buy plane tickets is knowledge my kids are not privy to. Their clothes are clean. They eat fresh food. They have ample resources with which to entertain themselves. My boys can play safely up and down their street and stay home alone for an hour without any fear of being harmed.
It is my duty to make sure my kids know that not all little boys get to live this way. Beyond the trees and sidewalks of our neighborhood of manicured lawns, boys their age have been thrust by their circumstances into lives of crime. Their middle-school peers boys are asking for free lunches from failing public schools, ones that cannot prepare them for college. Near where they live, kids do not have two parents, safe homes, clean clothes or proper nourishment.
Every child should have what mine have. It would be irresponsible to let my boys live in a bubble where they do not know that there are conditions - better and worse - than the ones in which they live. They do need to know that not living in the problem does not mean you are excused from it or are entitled to ignore it. We are responsible for each other. We show care and concern for people we know AND people we have never met.
Which brings me to Trayvon Martin.
We listen to CNN on the radio in the car, the short distance between home and the places we frequent – school, taekwondo, YMCA, Winn Dixie. They knew that a man was on trial for shooting a teenager after a fight. They knew that the man said he did so in self defense. They knew the man was found not guilty of murder. When they asked me questions about the specifics of what happened, I told them the facts of the case and the arguments each side was making. They, at 10 and 12, figured out for themselves that when 911 tells you what to do, you should do what they say. They decided for themselves that if someone is hitting you, you should hit them back with your fists, not shoot them.
That is not the big picture I want to imprint upon them.
I am a mom, and I think all moms are thinking about, have always been thinking about, the two sons whose lives are forever changed by what happened that night in February last year. A mother lost her child – her young, smart son, a rowdy teenager with a ton of potential. Another mother’s son took that boy's life, and regardless of how her son explains his actions that night, his mother has to live with the pain we all feel as mothers when a child is lost. Everybody loses, some more than others. Everybody hurts, and some live with unbearable pain.
I worry that my kids will be kidnapped if they run ahead of me and turn a corner where I cannot see them. I make them go to the bathroom as a pair in certain public spaces. I worry they will be hit by a car if they do not stay behind me in parking lots. I fear them being teased for being short, thick, or odd. I dread them coming home rejected by girls or cast out by boys.
I do not have to worry that my child is unsafe because of the color of his skin.
The power of that statement is jarring. It is inescapable. I am not sure what to do for the mothers who do have to worry about that, but give what I have when I can, raise big-hearted children who love on character and do not fear what they do not know. We keep getting them to be better than we are. That they contribute to a community that evolves so much that to my grandchildren, any kind of inequality is a history lesson, not a current event.
On their own, Jake and Landen have sent one parent to heaven and one to a war zone. They have called almost ten places "home." They struggle with self esteem, anxiety, and executive functioning. Daily life is difficult for us, but if Trayvon Martin holds a lesson for my sons, it is that other people - people of color, disabled people, homosexual people - are made to suffer just for being born. And if all I have to give is two sons who abhor that, who treat everyone the same, who never taunt or assume, who understand that the whole belongs to everyone, and whose hearts are called to help when they see a need, I am giving not only all I have, but the best I have.
Imagine what would happen if we all - worldwide - raised our sons so that the mothers of young African-American boys did not lose theirs. We'd get better, one mother at a time.
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