Parenthood: Week 375 – My Heart's Inspiration

The worldwide pandemic turned our world upside down. If felt like everything changed in our personal life, our jobs, and in our lifestyle. With uncertainty, anxiety, and lack of direction, and knowledge we strove ahead, one week at a time, one day at a time and in the difficult moments, one hour at a time.

Now we find ourselves in an unprecedented time in our country. Racial tensions have once again boiled over and Black citizens who have been here before are being met by allies willing to fight, and willing to stand up against police brutality and anti-Black racism. Corporations are taking stands, and the people are being awoken the truth of our racist past and racist present. More of us than not are trying to figure out the best way to make we don’t have a racist future.

These are really tough times. There is so much going on. Every day there’s good news, and there’s horrendous news. While curves seem to flattening in many places cases of Covid-19 are spiking. Yes, more people than ever before are painfully aware of the murder of Black Americans by policemen while the whole world is watching, and the murders continue.

It’s not getting any better for Asian-Americans. The number of hate crimes directed against Asian-Americans continue to rise.

With all of this going on, life as a parent continues. Nothing was taken away from our work as parents to give us space to deal and process all of these things. It just piled on top of what was an already full plate of the emotional and the physical work of parenting. There are times when I looked at friends and colleagues who did not have children, and envied their ability to sleep in, binge watch television shows, and enjoy drunken zoom calls. However, those moments past.

The last thing I do before I go to sleep is kiss my family goodnight. I have found myself lately the last one to sleep. I kiss Ollie, Lucas, Ethan, Buffy, and then finally Diana. In the dark, I feel all of their presence, and hear the quiet breathing of my family, and I know in my heart that all of this is right.

My families very existence is an afront to all of those who would deny the pandemic, who would say that “all lives matter.” Our work, our relationships, and our family resists all of the bigotry, hate, ignorance, and racism with our love and kindness. All that we do for our children is helping them become citizens full of empathy and love so they will have the tools to resist and fight against the oppression.

When I didn’t that video, I thought of my children and pressed play. If I faced the horror, I would be better able to help my children eventually face it as well. When I’m tired of the work and it seems like everything is moving too slowly, I know that even the smallest amounts of progress will help my children. When I can’t find optimism in the sadness, I see hope in my children’s eyes.

I simply couldn’t do any of this without them.

How I Came To The Work - Part 1: Introduction

I’m new to the game.

I didn’t identify as a person of color until I was in my early 30s. I didn’t go to my first DEI event (conference, training, institute) until the summer of 2017, and it wasn’t until last year, that I didn't fully grasped the true depths of the savage inequities in the criminal justice system until…last year.

It took four different presentations before I understood the concept of privilege, and while the myth of meritocracy got demolished in my brain pretty quickly in one podcast, my understanding of true power of the patriarchy continues to evolve.

I am a proud anti-racist, anti-colonial, privilege-acknowledging, social justice-embracing, demolish-the-patriarchy-preaching, diversity practitioner. I see the racial, sexist nature of our society everywhere I go, and in everything I see. My work is interwoven deeply into who I am and it is impossible to have a relationship with me and not see how diversity, equity, and inclusion goes beyond my work to every facet of my life.

Like President Obama’s view of LGBTQ rights, I have evolved and continue to evolve. It has taken years of work, the patience of so many teachers, colleagues and friends, thousands of pages of books and articles, and hours upon hours of podcast and books on tape for me to get to where I am as a diversity practitioner. While I am proud of where I am, I know that there is so much work for me to do.

This work is will never end. There will always be another perceptive for me to experience, another concept to wrestle with, and more for me to learn. It’s a journey, and like a life well lived, the learning, the growth, the evolution will never end. That seem daunting, but for me exciting. At the core of DEI work is understanding myself better, and seeing the world for what it is, and in all of the darkness, and trauma, finding hope.

I’m going to spend the next couple Friday’s unpacking my journey with DEI, and how I got to where I am. In the whirlwind of all that has happened in the past couple weeks, I feel a need to reflect, honor those who have helped me along my way, and share with others what it means to be becoming.

As these posts help me better understanding my journey, I hope my story helps you find your own way into and through this work.

I came to this party late, but I was welcome in with open arms.  I'm glad you are here and wherever you are at in this work, I welcome you.  It's a journey that has changed my life, and if we join together in this work, we can change the world. 

Parenthood: Week 374 – Thorns & Roses 6/8/20

Thorns

Ethan screamed. For about ten minutes while Diana went outside to water the plant, Ethan demanded to water the plants with her. It was his bedtime, and I made it clear that he needed to get ready for bed. My words meant nothing to him. As he leaned on the baby gate at the top of the stairs, he screamed how he wanted to go outside and water the plants, over and over and over. Could I have relented and let him go outside and join Diana? Yes, but I felt it was important to hold firm and have him not dictate his life through throwing a tantrum.

It not fun to hear your child scream, no matter what the context. Even if you are 100% sure it’s a tantrum and you know intellectually it’s the right decision to let your child scream it out, it still hurts. The reptilian part of my brain still feels stress whenever I hear any of my children cry or scream and it’s a struggle to not give in. Sometimes doing what is right for your child feel horrible.

Trying to cook dinner with a baby with new found scooting abilities is challenge. Lucas is moving now. I’m so happy that he’s doing so well, at the same time, part of me wishes he would just cool it. He doesn’t move quickly yet, but it’s unpredictable. I’m not sure how he starts in the middle of the living room and ends up half-way underneath the couch.

Combined with getting dinner started late, getting ready for this meal was very stressful. There’s an art to cooking with little children around, and while I got it done, it was a mess. As much as I love the art of cooking, I don’t always actually love cooking, and today it was not fun.


Roses

It blows my mind that Ollie can read a book. Even though the book he was reading to me today had a part that was unfortunately racist, it was so wonderful to witness him exercise the power of transforming words into thought. Ollie has always had good reading comprehension, and what impresses me the most right now is his fluency. Ollie doesn’t love reading as much as other activities, and we’ll keep working on that.

Ethan is so much fun to play with. He just wants attention, and I feel the times when is most toddler are times when he’s not getting the attention, he feels he needs. We had a moment this morning when we were playing Duplos together and it was really wonderful to see how creative he was an persistent in trying to make the blocks do what he wanted them to do.

All of my boys have beautiful smiles but there’s something different about when Lucas smiles. Since he doesn’t talk yet, his facial expressions take on more importance in his communication. Almost all of the time when I look at him, he smiles at me, sometimes when I smile first and other times it happens before I smile.

It’s the most amazing thing to see him smile.  It really does light up my life.

Year 10: Week 37 – The Call

In the middle of preparing dinner, it hit me and I asked Diana to take over. She heard the trembling in my voice, and immediately took charge, as I ran upstairs and it all came out.

Was this the first time I cried about something that happened in my life as a teacher? Well, if there was another time, I don’t remember it. I mean this was a sit in a chair, hugging my knees up to my chest and crying into a hand towel moment.

So, what went so badly? A Zoom call.

Along with some other teachers I was working with, we had put together a wonderful plan for an Zoom music sharing for our middle school band students. The idea was that we were going to have a Zoom call with so that there was some kind of live sharing event. Instead of having students perform live, we’d watch videos of student performances as a group. This seemed like the best way to have some kind of group experience but not put the pressure of performing online on the students.

I worked hard on editing their videos together and arranging this event. I checked and double-checked the video sharing settings and everything seemed like it was good to go. Then the call happened and I shared the first video. The sound worked but the video froze. I frantically texted some other teachers on the call and they gave me helpful feedback, but I still couldn’t get the videos to work right. I tried everything I knew and after ten minutes of struggling, we finally got the videos to work. What should have taken twenty-five minutes took almost forty minutes to get through.

I felt horrible during that call, after the call, and well, for the rest of the day. Luckily the second Zoom event I hosted later that afternoon went out without any issues. I told myself that if that one had the same issues as the first one, I would be tears, but I did end up in tears a couple hours later.

This was about more than the fact that the call didn’t work. This was about weeks of uncertainty, the feeling of inequity in the world, doing so much and working so hard while others openly questioned the very reason that I was apart from the students that I loved. This was a harsh reminder that things are not fair.  Just because I kept it together for the other teachers in my department, for my students, and for my family, it didn’t mean that I was going to get a break. And sometimes you can do everything right, and work as hard as you can, and things fall apart, and it can feel like there’s nothing you can do about it at the time.

I’m okay now.

Diana, my wife was wonderful that night. The next day, I had a Zoom with one of my principals, and he told reminded me of all I had accomplished and that some issues with a Zoom wasn’t a big deal at all. He told me to be nicer to myself, and he was right.

Even with all of the issues in that Zoom call, and throughout distance learning, there was more good than bad.  More joy than frustration, and more laughter than tears for me and my students. 

Parenthood: Week 373 – Parenting In Such TImes

I just watched the videos of peaceful protestors in Washington D.C. get fired upon by with tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash bangs because trump wanted to walk over to a church and do a photo-op. I saw this on phone as I was browsing around while giving my son a bath. I didn’t have time really research all of what had happened or even process any of this because I was on, and needed to get my children through their bedtime routine.

That’s been this whole past week. Attempting to process all that going on in the world, while staying focused on taking care of children. Keep in mind, I got three little one. It’s at least a part-time job if not more that me and Diana put into caring for our sons every day. It’s feeding, dressing, laundry, cleaning, and educating. Yes, there are many wonderful moments that are stress-revilers, like when we went to the beach last weekend, but there’s a lot of this that is work. It takes a lot of mental energy from both of us to keep moving forward, and when there horrendous traumatizing events in our country, it’s even harder.

My sons have no idea what’s going on. Lucas is a couple months old, he was born in December. He has learning how to crawl! This is really exciting, but we are his world. Ethan is two years old and like most toddlers, he is very self-centered. He knows that there is different skin color and hair color in the world, but he has no idea about racism, and cannot grasp the concept of oppression. Then there’s Ollie, who has just recently turned seven years old.  We've made efforts to raise him through an anti-racist philosophy, however I’m not going to talk about what is going with him right now, while it lays in my mind unprocessed.

The events have been an important reminder that the anti-racist work at home needs to continue. We’ve been working our way through movies since we’ve been quarantined half an hour at a time.  It  hit me this past week that every single of these almost twenty films was written and directed by white people. So, for the last three days we watched My Neighbor Totoro. It was the first film Ollie has seen that was written and directed by people who were Asian with characters that were all Asian. This was a joyful thing, and really important to broaden his perspective beyond what is white in film.


Decentralizing white voices in my house for three nights through one movie was something that I felt l could do with my children. It also made feel proud that one of Ethan’s favorite books right now The Big Bed has all Black characters. It’s a cute book about a girl convincing her dad that he has no place in his bed because she wants to co-sleep with her mom, which is basically Ethan’s dream come true, though it’s probably co-sleeping with me.



We all have to do what we feel like we can handle.  If all you can do right now is hug your children a little bit longer, that's okay, that helps teach.  Love of a parents helps children develop self-love, which is a powerful tool against racism.  Don't forget, love will always be enough.  

Year 10: Week 36 – Are we there yet?

Yesterday I taught my last class. Next week there’s a couple online events. I got grades to finish and then this school year, my 10th at this school, and my 14th overall as teachers will be, as they say, in the books.

This summer, I’ll be helping plan for the fall, serving a special committee to figure out how we are going to handle next year. I possibly have some other projects that are up the air, that will hopefully come together. Yes, I need a break from school, but I also know that the work is important for me to keep engaging in, and I do love this work.

Even in the past a couple months throughout all of the chaos and uncertainty, I still love being a teacher. Now that I’m on the other side of this, remote teaching really wasn’t that bad. It was a shadow at best of what I do in the classroom, but that shadow still had shape and meaning.

There was a lot of technology things that I had to figure out, and curriculum that I had to adapt, but that piece helped me grow as an educator. The things that I learned and the curricular work that I did will resonate when I’m teaching back in the classroom. In this way, the past couple months felt more like a continuation of the journey than a detour.

I’m very lucky and privileged as a teacher. I have a great administrative team that supports me, and teachers in my school are organized as part of the American Federation of Teachers (UNIONS!!), which has ensured that my students have gotten the best educational experience possible, while supporting the needs of teachers. My wonderful colleagues make dealing with challenges feel more like an adventure.

The job of being a remote teachers in the grand scheme of things is an amazing job to have in the current crisis. And I feel very fortunate to have a job I could do from home, that also serves others. Balancing this out with my home life was not fun at all, and that piece made doing the job very difficult, but the job itself was more good than bad.

Part of feeling the way I do right now is feeling very differently in past weeks. There were times that I really hated teaching students online, there were times that videos I made for my younger students felt like a waste of time, and there were times in the chaos of all that is going on in the world that my job felt pointless.

We need to have space to complain, but we can’t forget our privilege. It’s a balancing act between these two needs, but both are important.

Making it through the summer and the fall is all about learning to accept uncertainty. We will not know for sure what the fall will look like until August as the soonest, and even then, changes could be made that steers the school year in ways that we cannot predict and plan for. One way to come to terms with uncertainty is to remember that the important parts of our job have not changed.

We are still teachers who have the incredibly rewarding and essential job of serving the needs of children. We are still inspired by the spirit, energy, and ideas of the children that teach, and we  still have the opportunity to change the world into place that is more equitable, and more inclusive through the work that we do.

The important stuff hasn’t changed, no matter what the future brings.

Parenthood: Week 372 – The Summer Of '20

My first summer as a parent was wonderful.

Ollie was only one month old when summer break hit. We moved into a new house in June. This was very stressful and took a lot of work. Also, that summer I started teaching at a summer camp for the first time. It’s not the stresses of the move, the new house, and the new job that stay with me, it was all of those wonderful moments with Ollie and Diana that stay with me.

For my summer camp job, I taught for two hours and the school was very close to home. That job was an adventure, more fun than stressful, and I learned so much about teaching through this job. I’d get home by lunch and have whole afternoon with my special little guy and Diana.

This set the tone for the next couple summers. This was a time when I got to spend more time with Ollie and Diana, work in a different context and go on adventures with my family. We'd explore cultural intuitions in Chicago, spend with friends, and travel to Seattle to visit my parents and my brother’s family.

As Ollie got older, it became clear that he needed more than just me and Diana during the summer, so he started doing summer camps. It was hard at first to have that time away over the summer, but Diana found such wonderful camps that enriched his life that it became something I was excited for him to experience. Among these experiences was a beach camp, and a camp at the Botanical Gardens. In those years, I continued to work at the same camp.

Now everything is different. The music camp job, I no longer do. This was replaced for the past years with some great administrative work at my school. In-person summer camps, aren’t happening in June, and may not happen in July. We have three children now who have been home since March. There is no novelty of newness of our being together more as summer begins. How we experience time with our friends and cultural experiences in Chicago is uncertain. Even more difficult to accept is the possibility that for the first time since I moved to Chicago twenty years ago, I may not travel “home” to Seattle to see my parents and my brother’s family.

This time of year, that in the past we so anticipated is coming, and the uncertainty we learned to live with over the spring, has become an uncertainty about summer we cannot process and understand.

There will good times, and there will be frustrating times this summer. We will take calculated risks to create positive experiences for our children and we will try to move through the day with structure, optimism, and hope. This will be work, and effort, and it will be draining. It’s not what we signed up for as parents, but it’s what we got to do right now.

Between the frustration, the anger, and the stress, there will laughter, hugs, and joy. 

As I was holding Lucas today as he napped, I was reminded of holding Ollie during that first summer with him.  At that time, I didn't feel like I knew I was doing as a parents.  I had no idea how I would be able to go back to work, and how to manage all of the challenges Ollie brought into my life every day.  However, with Diana's help I figured it out, and as overwhelmed I feel about the summer, I know that we'll figure it out, together.