Duckie Mugs and Field Trip Lunches

After a conversation with my kiddo about how it’s much different to choose to be weird vs. your parent sending something weird to school, I was a little worried that he’d find the duckie mug that I’d sent for his Journalism Solstice Party embarrassing….

Turns out he loved the duckie mug! On the other hand, he might have been a little embarrassed when his teacher, weeping at the front of the room, announced that Lukas’ mom and another student’s dad had sent extra mugs and affirmations, in case they were needed.

I remember my own feeling of mortification when my mother sent me to school on field trip days with a lunch for myself and a couple extra, in case they were needed. And I’m not talking brown sack lunches, I’m talking folded over grocery bags filled with all the Little Debbie Snacks food stamps could buy. Even while mid-year I was still borrowing school supplies, that food stamps couldn’t buy, from my neighbors, after my mother had angrily turned down my teacher’s offer to buy me glue and scissors and markers. (And if I were to take us off course, this would be a perfect glimpse into the difference between charity and mutual aid, but that’s not today’s story). I still remember holding these giant bags up with my teeny hands and apologizing with my eyes for my mother’s eccentric behavior while I whispered: “My mom said these are for kids who don’t have lunch.”

The teacher who I handed the giant lunches too didn’t weep. She seemed annoyed and made eyes with another chaperone about the whole thing. But later, sitting at a rotting picnic table, I watched another kid devour one of the lunches my mother sent. Completely unaware of where it came from. And I felt so proud of my mom for knowing better than my teacher in that moment. In this moment, curled up next to an artificial fire with mild pain in my aging knees, I’m realizing that my mother was just 2 or so years older than my child who I sent these mugs with is now.

I’ve been building a list of all the positive things that I’ve received from the people who helped to raise me. Who were more often than not also people who provided me with endless list of things to heal from. And this memory keeps resurfacing as one of the most precious gifts. I wonder often whether it was the abundance, and not generosity nor acknowledging need, which embarrassed me. This thing I still struggle with now: to have enough without shame.

No one needed the extra mugs I sent last week. But the teacher, instead of shuffling around need like whispered secrets, openly weeped in front of the class, reminding them each that they’d always be cared for.

As it turns out, my kiddo wasn’t embarrassed about it at all. ❄️♥️❄️

2021, A new year

May you spend your year

noticing the magic

in the little things,

in the broken things,

like the dandelion growing in the cracked pavement,

like the hole the bug chewed out of the banana leaf into a perfect heart shape,

like the shy smile that lasts just a few seconds,

just like the new coffee mug that broke and became the favorite little planter.

May you spend your year

living intentionally

even the little things,

especially with the broken things,

like multilingual invitations and practicing unfamiliar words until dinner is burned,

like knowing who you are in the moments you’re exactly who you hope to be,

like Christmas presents wrapped and unwrapped and wrapped perfectly again,

or like being on time because you don’t want to help anxiety have her holding her breath and counting seconds like years.

May you spend your year

with someone who, with many who,

notice you like magic,

and your little things,

even the broken things,

like the way you prefer to eat all foods with your fingers,

like the way you gasp in fear when you’re woken, even gently,

like the way you can find home inside most people and make home out of most things,

and like the promise of kisses, or lessons, at Midnight on New Year’s Eve.

May you spend your year

living intentionally,

even the little things,

especially with the broken things,

like driving around the block because you’re early trying so hard not to be late,

like loving yourself in the moments you are too ashamed to lift your eyes to a mirror,

like extra preparation for vegetarian guests for recipes that never had meat anyway,

like understanding magic has been mostly intention in caring relationship all along.

May you spend your year

noticing the magic

in the little things,

in the broken things,

living intentionally,

in caring relationship,

even the little things,

especially with the broken things,

like

like

like

like praying with friends who used to be strangers.

Systemic Relativity

It took me nearly 30 years to realize that when other people said they had no food they meant they didn’t like their variety of choices. 

Which is also to say that for over 30 years I offered half of not much to people who had plenty. 

Perhaps it doesn’t matter much, if we’ve already decided that to have no food is as relative as we’ve decided everything else is. 

But of course I’m still sharing with folx who will always have more than me. And of course it matters.

It matters in the same way it matters that the young woman I just talked to can’t vote this year because she can’t afford to replace her birth certificate to get the required ID to register. In the way some of us are far less likely to ever have to replace a birth certificate or experience any of the reasons this kind of thing comes about. Or how often others of us will need to. 

Relative to the ways that the most marginalized of us continue to offer the most of ourselves with the least amount of time/resources/safety but still somehow always have enough. To share with those who have plenty. 

Often I’m grateful that not everyone has experienced the kinds of trauma that lead to a limitless amount of enough. 

But mostly I think that’s what we need to give up in order to balance things out and make sure everyone has some. 

I know, I know. You need to put your oxygen mask on first. 

But what if there have always been a set number of oxygen masks?

And what if they’ve always been inherited through privilege lines?

And when does everyone else get to breathe? 

National Coming Out Day 2020

It feels right this year to sit quietly near a fire, feeling and thinking about all it is to come out, all it is to connect to culture, all it is to weave or grow or heal or sew our fragments whole, while pulling back the leaves to reveal so much breathtaking variety beneath. To hold the fully grown magic that became of the teeny seedlings barely able to push through soil not that many months ago. To remember their recent newness and smell their decay in the same moment. Each plant recreating its own version of self and community and the patterns that give breath to both. The seeds that aren’t quite sure which color they’ll end up yet. And the way all of the plants together spent the last months protecting the squash, which couldn’t grow fully if exposed. To know all of this is only possible because of those who came before. And to intentionally collect each kernel to place in the care/palms of children.

Black Lives Matter, even when it’s not trendy

Oshkosh, WI

Mask Mandates? Enforced by defunded police?

I believe that we should be wearing masks, even from a socially accepted standard 6-foot social distance. I’d say more about this, but I’m not a health expert or a virus expert or a mask expert.

But I have quite a bit of experience seeing between and beyond binaries, existing between and beyond binaries.

Note: The “you” I’m talking with is not an assumed you, but generally folx who carry certain privileges in a conversation. The you in this post is certainly not disabled folx who often have their well being and participation in community overlooked for the *greater good* and their voices should be sought out on this matter.

My main issue with a mask mandate is that we haven’t even tried to educate the public in any consistent or meaningful ways and I don’t believe a mandate can be effective or safe without public education. And I don’t want to hear that we adequately educated the public from folx with educational privileges, who read and write in English, or don’t have multigenerational reasons to mistrust the government, health care workers, and/or the police. And we haven’t even tried to educate ourselves on why folx are resistant either. We want folx to be instantly onboard with something that they’ve gotten all kinds of misleading information and no clear direction on.

And we want folx who the greater good has never given a damn about to give a damn about the greater good. And we assume everyone has a life they want to survive as much as we want to survive ours, and forget all the other reasons folx lives are made up of the expectation (and sometimes desire) to die daily. We forget that long before we had real worries about survival, whole communities of people, children, have been surviving (and sometimes thriving) by accepting that they won’t survive.

And our approach is to point and yell in their faces about respecting others and to repost disjointed academic reports and info graphics that change nearly daily. 

I’m aware that public education takes more time than we have, given that seatbelt laws took a lot of consistent messaging over multiple decades and a generation to become common practice. And there are whole communities still that we’re disconnected from where people don’t wear seatbelts in similar ways to not wearing masks.  

The ways we’re disconnected from each other always make us look so ridiculous to each other:

Wear your mask like you wear your seatbelt!

Exactly! I’m not fucking wearing either!

Good talk.

One of the biggest ways we’re miscommunicating around mandatory mask wearing is by assuming that we have a shared understanding of the value of human life and equal chances at access to general survival, before and after COVID-19, and the same fear of death/loss. You expect me to protect your life the way you protect your life and are outraged when I don’t because you take it as an assault. Because you feel entitled to a protected life. You don’t understand that I’m caring for your life in the same way that I’d care for my child’s. You don’t understand the ways you disregard my life regularly.  You don’t understand that I have to become apathetic about my life, and yours, in order to take the risks necessary, the risks you won’t take, to provide you with the food and supply deliveries that you’re ordering on the regular. This is like you having pet health insurance and my mom dying before her 44th birthday from poverty while other folx sell their bodies for life saving insulin. No, my cats have not ever been to the vet and no, it’s not because I’m ignorant. And yes, I’m often sick from things you don’t give second thought about preventing or treating and yes, sometimes that’s your fault. Are you aware of the weight of your conveniences measured in human suffering? I mean, how many masks are made in sweatshops?

Refusing to hear someone is the worst route to effective communication. 

Given that a virus on this scale was inevitable, we should have been preparing for it. Like we do for tornadoes. And while we didn’t and we need solutions now, mandating something that no one is even trying to adequately explain to the public appeases *us*, but solves nothing. And the regulation of it will carry many inequitable consequences that we may never know about, some of them also deadly. 

We need to look past the meme image of Karen refusing to wear a mask and see the whole wide communities of diverse folx actually not wearing masks, if we want to solve anything. Because “Frak Karen” as a public mask mandate enforced by the police we want defunded isn’t going to solve much while it creates even more issues. Most of which *we* won’t have to deal with. 

I agree we need to be following extreme measures to keep our communities safe. I mean, fuck masks, we should be staying home.

But it should be a clear and consistent message from national or state government and public health experts and it should come with the funding to make it possible. And instead of putting pressure on a system we’ve given up on to do right by us, we’re taking things in our own hands almost as rashly as folx going out without masks. 

I hate to blame our specific flavor of racist capitalism for everything, but if we look at how other countries are being successful right now, and the reasons we’re failing, it’s difficult not to.  And that problem needs us to stop redirecting our energy to patch millions of small leaks. And it needs us to be a whole hell of a lot less focused on Karen in the MAGA hat and so much more compassionate than we’re willing to be.  You cannot treat the Coronavirus with *flesh-colored* bandaids.

I know, I know: “But Nik, people are going to die in the meantime.” 

My sweet loves, if you’ve been paying attention, you’d understand deeply that people have been dying in large numbers since the very birth of this country, without reprieve. 

And it comes full circle. The reason folx refuse to wear masks is the same reason we’re desperate for them to:

Because we can’t absorb so much devastating truth all at once. 

Black Lives Matter

Today in conversation with the teenager we arrived at something that might be useful for other folx to hear:

You cannot listen to someone out of context and hear them.

This is always true, but I want to offer it especially to folx that still have an emotional “all lives matter” response to listening to Black Lives Matter. (Even if you’ve learned not to say it out loud).

You’re hearing Black Lives Matter in a utopian context that does not exist. And so you’re hearing it as if the world is equitable and just and a group of people stood up and declared themselves better, more than, more important than. This is not real.

Try hearing Black Lives Matter in the context of reality. Because in reality Black children and adults are being murdered by public service employees, without consequences, in broad daylight, repeatedly, in 2020. Sometimes in their homes. And in this context Black Lives Matter is many things: a rage, a wound, a plea, a reminder, a protest, a riot, a defense, a love. And many more, some of which I’ll never understand and am only trying to define for the purpose of creating understanding because it is not my place to put words to. And while Black Lives Matter may mean many things, what it is not, in the context of reality, is a declaration of superiority.

At the risk of getting us back to a place of defensiveness, I’m going to go ahead and just reflect out loud that assuming it is a declaration of superiority is a projection of oneself, and not an attempt to understand someone else.

And that all of this has been explained before. In context, but you’re not hearing it. And if you’re hearing it for the first time now, it’s less about the way that I’m saying it or how someone else has said it, than it is about the way you’re choosing to listen differently in this context.

World’s Best Dad, Joke

#1 Father Participation (Or Not) Trophies will be half off tomorrow, but I’m not sure our father’s egos can handle the wait. 

Maybe we should buy them for our mothers, who absorb so much bullshit and lie to us in smiles so that we can love our fathers enough that their fragile egos don’t break us. Or them.

This too is white supremacy. Colonial rules.

I wonder what kind of world we’d live in if we didn’t all feel obliged and compelled to convince average parents that they’re the absolute best, #1. 

I wonder what kind of world we’d live in if parents didn’t need false validation from their children to be whole. What kind of world we’d live in if more parents were whole.

I wonder what kind of world we’d live in if so many of our fathers weren’t rapists posing with cheesy smiles and #1 trophies. Celebrated. Hilarious.

Dad Jokes.

World’s best. #1.

This is not controversial.

Rewriting our Response to Looting

We live our lives from a place where we have to consciously unlearn our conditioning to be able to value human lives more than we value corporations. Including our own lives.  And we value the avoidance of conflict in this way, too.  It’s incredibly difficult work to unlearn what has become our nature. And even if we’re really good at it in one context, we can be so ignorant that it’s happening in others.

When we compare looting to more horrific acts, to say it’s not what we should be focusing on, we’re categorizing it as crime. Forgivable crime. Excusable crime. A sort of reactivity we can pardon, or at least tolerate, given the circumstances. Even as a response to those protesting looting, we’re once again distracted and elevating law and order above human life. And we’re callously and robotically using images of someone’s death to make our case.  At the least it’s patronizing. And a way to distance ourselves from rage and keep ourselves from heartache.  

Let’s unapologetically stand behind it as an effective and smart means of disrupting deadly systems. Systems that thrive no matter how many lives are taken.  Let’s feel the rage and let our hearts break.  Let’s require the world stop to mourn.  Let’s not apologize for it.  And let’s try to remember it was never ours to excuse from behind the safety of our computers.  

Note: I’m responding to recycled posts, usually in meme form, directly comparing looting to George Floyd’s murder.  I’m not responding to posts asking us to question why we are more concerned about looting than human life, especially Black lives.  To me there are many differences, the most important being George Floyd.  He was more than the brutality he experienced. And he deserves more than an easy, one-click response in place of dialogue and the emotions of disagreement and grief.