Author: Ellen Beaulieu

Dearest Darling-

For a week, you were mine.

When I saw it on that Saturday morning, the plus sign, I was elated. I immediately took a picture of it with my phone and sent it to your aunt. I had to tell someone (I didn’t want to wake your dad). She was at soccer practice. She said she couldn’t see it in the light. This deflated my joy. But hours later she got home. She texted I SEE IT! With smiley heart eye emojis. We started planning your future. Your dad and I were so excited to become a family of four.

For the week you were mine, I thought about you constantly.

I thought about whether you would be her baby brother or sister. I thought about how she would love you completely either way but how she has really been asking for a sister named Rose. I don’t think she even knows you both had a Canadian great grandmother with that name.

I thought about how you needed to grow. I thought about every bite and sip that crossed my lips. I instantly almost completely quit coffee which is a feat when there are only 3 weeks left in the semester. I gave up lunch meat which wasn’t that hard. I tried to eat eggs again, which was harder. I thought about how my first festive beverage in the future would come right around New Year’s 2019 as I toasted your arrival. It was when you were due. I knew the wine in our cellar would keep.

I thought about all the sleep I would lose soon. No one tells you how much you lose during pregnancy. I was ready for all of it because I knew that in the wakeful moments before you arrived, I would be feeling your life blossom inside of me. In the times after you joined us, I would be nuzzling your soft head.

most weirdly, I actually thought about your immunity. I projected when you would need to enter daycare. I tried to calculate when your dad and I would be able to take leave and when I would be able to go back to work, calculating how much teaching load I have in the bank. I wanted as many months as I could steal with you without throwing you into the mixer. I was optimizing conditions in my mind.

I thought about how I would tell everyone all about you at our upcoming family vacation in Florida. I just knew your grandmothers would be elated. A new baby in the family would make everyone more joyous that week. I thought about how I would need to enjoy that trip because I likely wouldn’t be making too many more as we waited for you.

And then the ominous signs of Friday came. I had meetings all day. I kept sneaking out of them to the restroom to see if it had stopped. It didn’t. Your aunt texted me to relax. She knew it could be fine. But as the day progressed, other things did too, and by the night, I didn’t really feel fine about anything. I tried hopelessly to sleep on it.

By the morning, it was much worse. I called the advice nurse in desperate need of advice. She told me things could still be fine but that I needed to go to the ER. The ER I said? Really? She said yes they need to check your hCG levels and do an ultrasound to establish a baseline for monitoring your growth. Again, she encouraged me it could all be fine. She said do not go alone.

Since the nurse had said it was just to set baselines, I didn’t see why I needed to ruin your sister’s morning, so I took her to gymnastics watching her swing from the monkey bars and balance on the beam. I took her to my favorite Mother’s Day weekend event, the edible schoolyard plant sale. I picked out tomatoes and peppers for our summer garden. We ate a lovely lunch before we left your sister with your cousin and headed out to the hospital. Tears welled up in my eyes as we left your sister smiling at the door. She didn’t know about you. I hadn’t told her yet. She just said, “It’s ok mommy!”  I said thank you baby, and I knew it could be.

It was a bright sunny day as we entered the hospital, but I couldn’t look up. I saw expectant moms and babies in arms, so I couldn’t look out. I just looked down. The triage nurse was wearing a black t-shirt that said Mom Bod, clearly 4-5 months along. It seemed I couldn’t look anywhere.

The waiting was agonizing, but they finally took us back. They drew my blood. Then I rode on a gurney though the hospital keeping my sandals on as they stuck out under my blanket. I don’t know why I kept them on. I don’t know why I thought they would let me walk gowned to to the ultrasound. The technician took so many pictures, I didn’t think there was any way they couldn’t all be of you. It turns out she has a really great poker face. She should take it to Vegas.

While we waited for all of the results to be analyzed by the doctor, the receptionist came in to take my information for insurance and billing. She took my copay, showed me where to sign. I was so out of it, I noted it was three o’clock but I wrote down all the dates in March. She wished me Happy Mother’s day as she walked out. I know I am a mother, but did she not realize why we were here? I teared up again in anxious anticipation.

After reviewing all the blood work and ultrasound pictures, the doctor came back in. He said, “Did you have a positive pregnancy test?” I said, “Of course, last Saturday.” I knew it then so I just only half heard the rest. He said my hCG was at 5 and that the pictures I had thought were all the first ones of you were just empty. He said with a positive test a week ago but with the levels now only at 5, I had had a complete miscarriage. I was in shock. I didn’t know if he was implying you had never been. Your dad held my hand comforting me after the doctor had left, gently saying he thought the doctor awkwardly just meant for me to know you never would be and not to seek the second opinion he had also told me was within my right to find. We both wished he had had a bit better bedside manner.

I have spent the day since, my fourth Mother’s day as a mother, fighting back the tears of your loss. I feel empty, a fact that has now been medically confirmed. I miss you. I had no idea I could be so attached with only one week connected to your not quite yet heart. Your sister doesn’t know why I keep crying. She asks me why, and all I can tell her is I lost something. She asks what, and I say it is hard to explain, but it was something very very special. I had the brightest future for you in my mind. For a week you were mine, and I hope you know, you were so deeply loved.

Love-

Your mother

For me, she hung the moon. Here is my black mother hugging me at an event honoring my graduation from college summa cum laude and First Honor graduate with a degree in chemistry. You don’t get where I got on this day very easily without a good start. My parents hired her solely to care for me. I was born as my dad started his practice and my mom managed his office. My sister was in a preschool program, and I was a very busy child. My mom needed a little help, and she was all mine. She held my hand, allowed my free spirit to soar, and encouraged most every early whim as I explored my brand new world. She became such a fixture in our family that my dad later hired her as an assistant in his office. She would joke with the patients as she took their vitals. I could see her every time I came home. In many ways, she was such a part of my family.

As such, I found it hard to live in the rural south where there were still so many elements of society that appeared segregated and belief in racist stereotypes was so commonplace. Who among us southern white people has not been in a social situation generally not of your creation and someone says something uncomfortable, ignorant, or misinformed about people of color?

I can say that anyone who knew me or knew my family never ever assumed I would be sympathetic to a comment like that. But it was hard to fathom the ignorance that went into many of the stereotypes of black people in my community, as somehow ignorant or all criminal or government moochers, from the perspective of black culture that my parents and grandparents provided. With them, I celebrated at black weddings, I mourned at black funerals, I worshipped in black church services, I visited friends in black homes. Black women cared for me, my cousins, my great-grandparents, my grandparents, and now help my parents. We never considered these women just “help”. Many of these women are considered members of my extended family.

I found the black people of my community always opened their doors and their hearts to me and my family. They lived lives that were not so different than white people in my community. Working one-two jobs or side jobs, or volunteering in their community, going to church every Sunday, every Wednesday, and many other days for good measure, playing with friends in the neighborhood, spending a lot of time with family, reunioning at the local parks.

The difference was that black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods were largely segregated and it seemed like few people socialized in both. I lived in a home that was on the border of the largely white community as it transitioned into the black community. As such, based on racist stereotypes, you would think my parents would have bars on the windows and multiple locks on the doors, but for most of my childhood, they left both cars unlocked and frequently the house, and we were never robbed.

When I was in high school, I went into the low income housing units of my small town to tutor football players in math. These young men aspired to get college scholarships. It was pretty powerful to work with these gentlemen in trying to reach their goals. It was also pretty informative to observe their families on the periphery, siblings caring for siblings or mothers coming in from job number two to get dinner on the table. These were hard working people supporting their families and welcoming me into their homes as I helped their child reach for his dreams. My mother always told us that we could do whatever we dreamed, and with role models like my parents and their siblings, I never doubted I could do or be anything I wanted to be, regardless of my gender, if I just set my mind to it. It really wasn’t until I actually regularly visited homes where dreams were going to be so much harder to attain and where impediments to success instead of visions of success were the norm that I began to appreciate the fallacy of the bootstrap argument and how certain segments of society were always going to have a harder time pulling on theirs. I never asked for any money. I felt completely enriched by the experience.

When you are like me, it is hard to have conversations about race in the south especially with white people. I grew up in a family that desegregated the local school, at that time West Point High School. In the interim while my dad was at college and then medical school, a private school was created that recruited many of the white students from my small hometown. When my dad moved his young family back to that same small town to start his practice, we went to the public schools. I was one of 4-5 white people in any class in elementary school but I actually only really recognize that now as I look back at snapshots of my classes at the time. In my mind, in my youth, it was just my school. When I want to high school, some of the most influential people in my class, black and white, were alumni of West Point Elementary. It was an amazing place to learn and a proud place to reflect upon.

Realtors who show homes to affluent people interested in moving to my town like to show them that private school. They do not tout the amazing work of the teachers at the local public elementary school, my alma mater. But you would be hard pressed to start a conversation about how that private school conspicuously founded in 1970 allows a segregated school system to persist in our community. It would be a challenge for you to communicate to these affluent people of my home town the value of receiving their education with all members of their community, not just primarily the ones of their same socioeconomic stature. It would be hard for your to discuss how a solid education isn’t merely “book learnin'” but also an appreciation for the status and challenges of your community, how all children in your community could benefit from the collective experience early childhood education can provide. You would be considered offensive. People would not want to listen. So it largely goes unsaid. And yet, the patterns persist in small towns and urban areas alike across the nation, not just the south. In this way, the rural and the urban aren’t all that different. In this way the south and the rest of the country aren’t all that different.

I now live in a medium sized town of El Cerrito in the Bay Area. My town feeds a high school whose students in large part hail from towns built by oil and shipping industries. The high school is incredibly diverse. The facilities are immaculate. But the standardized test scores are lower than the high schools in the neighboring town of Albany. Consequently, property values in Albany are $100-$200K higher for comparably sized homes just 500 yards away from ours. So the population of the Albany school system is largely caucasian and asian. In all parts, there are numerous private options. People ask us where our kid will go. It isn’t even a question to me; she will attend the lovely Harding Elementary just three blocks away from our front door. She will learn and love with the children of our neighborhood. She will be fine.

I will likely walk her to school. It is after all just down the street. But when I was a child, a lot of learning happened on the bus. The stop was in front of my grandparents’ house, so I learned to run to be on time. There was a lot of vying for position on the bus. I remember it was the only fight I ever got into, defending my sister for some silly reason long forgotten. I doubt I was very good at violence which is why I never really tried it again. The black children on my route were picked up first and dropped off last, so though they never saw it in the morning, every day they passed a large plantation home at the top of the hill where my street begins. Did anyone on that bus ever ponder the history of our neighborhood symbolized by this antebellum relic? Did anyone ever consider the blood, sweat, and tears sown into the soil beneath its streets? Do the parents of these children ever discuss these periods with their young ones? My parents did and they didn’t. It is hard to believe how much history happened in their high school years that I never thought to ask about until I was much much older.

Children on that same bus ride these days must have noticed the emergence of yard signs that say “Back the Blue.” Before you tell me these are absolutely to show support for local law enforcement, tell me if you saw a single one before the Black Lives Matter movement began. To me, these signs are just a window into the impulsive white resentment to the increasing visibility of the fight for social justice and the ascendence of our first black president, a resentment that Trump masterfully harnessed in his rise to power.

In a way, the occupants of homes with these signs have done me a favor. They have shown me that they need to hear about the ways that police disproportionately target black and brown people for things like traffic violations. They should probably learn about the statistics that show that these are exactly the types of incidents that all too frequently escalate to senseless violence and death disproportionately for those same black and brown people who are all too often maimed or killed when their only crime is being in any way perceived resisting unnecessary force, if that. And all too often they are teens. I wonder how they would react to the research on how cops even in Oakland CA treat black people differently in routine traffic stops, from their language to their mannerisms. They probably don’t want to hear about how rarely, if ever, are the law enforcement officials held accountable for their crimes. They definitely don’t want to acknowledge how the disenfranchisement of black felons has kept the solid red colors in voting across the south. And that is why the word black matters. I wonder how they would engage in a discussion of the appalling and egregious inequalities that are especially acute for the long wealth and earning potential of black men in this country studying demographic data for all Americans in their 30s. What was their reaction to the appalling and embarrassing incidents of the last week where two men were arrested for the crime of being black and early to a business meeting at Starbucks or the two men evicted from an LA fitness for being black and active. There are real conversations about race to be had, especially by white people in this country with other white people. I could link to a hundred other topical articles and books that could and should stimulate local conversation to improve cultural awareness and promote the value of the movements for social justice and equality in this country and elevate the message.

What do the children on that bus route see today? As I have said, my parents live on the border as the white neighborhood transitions to a blacker one. Do the young black children feel afraid as they enter the neighborhood? I find it as unlikely they have never noticed the signs as I do that they all treat them with indifference. Do the young white children accept the signs as unquestionable support for law enforcement?  Is there ever a moment that the parents of all of the children on that bus ride discuss the current climate around the color of justice in our country? I find it as unlikely that those conversations ever have begun as I do that the emergence of the signs themselves has gone unnoticed by the people of color who live nearby, child and adult. I guess ultimately those signs show me why starting those uncomfortable conversations is vital to breaking so many of these patterns that leave our communities separate, unequal, and no closer to the dream.

I teach at an open access community college. When I applied for this position, I actually googled open access having little concept of what it truly meant. I was responding to the supplemental questions for the job application, which were designed to illicit responses that showed I belonged in the community college environment and knew the mission and the purpose of my role. I have no idea how what I said to that question at the time was responsive to the people who read my application because it is only after having been immersed in my position for almost five years that I truly know what those words mean.

When I applied for college, I applied. I wrote essays about my qualities. Who even knows what I thought those were at the time? How I wish I still had a copy of those precious mementos of a young, innocent, optimistic premed with a love of chemistry and an interest in herpetology. I only applied to the two state schools. The Hope Scholarship was going to fund my tuition and a science book. And since I was a female in the south who wanted to study chemistry and had a 4.0 GPA, I got everything else funded through scholarships as well. So college was free. I worked in college out of minimal necessity to fund some fun in jobs that were in my discipline, lab assistant and then teaching assistant. It only took one semester in college to show me research, not medicine, truly suited my passion and talents. I was surrounded by my home state’s brightest and best. When I graduated from that state school, I went to another state school for graduate school. It happened to be a top tier chemistry research institution. I spent five years feeling like a poser as I was surrounded by our country’s brightest and best. But I earned my degree. I have never been prouder of my ability to persist.

Then I started my career in medicinal chemistry research. But my post doc was not that lucrative and tutoring at night and on the weekends for undergrads seemed very fulfilling. It was the beginning of Obama’s first term, so government austerity was en vogue. Grant money was hard to come by. I made a decision. I was going to reenter education. But I wanted to focus on teaching. I did not want to dilute my focus by trying to be everything. I was hanging up my lab coat and molding the bright minds of the future. So I applied to all full time jobs available. I thought I would get some experience at community college and help a lot of students. My college is known for transfer in science, and since we are Berkeley and Davis adjacent, that is where so many of our students go. I knew what it takes. I had taken it. I could help these kids see that vision.

Before I took this position, my husband warned me. He said, “Ellen, you have a big heart. Make sure you don’t see every cause as yours. If you do, you are going to kill yourself.” My husband knows me well.

I started teaching Organic Chemistry, my wheelhouse. My first class was probably the best class I will ever have. I could get 10 of them to hang out with me on Fridays at an office hour coming to campus on a day most of them don’t even have class. I wasn’t supposed to do committee work, I was supposed to teach. I taught the hell out of that class. I made the craziest problems and learned so much about myself and my college and the experience of highly successful community college students. I was spoiled.

My second year was harder. I was still in organic chemistry, but the class wasn’t quite as eager. The Fridays were a total flop, so I stopped them. But I immersed myself in some of the work of the campus. I joined the steering committee of the newly forming MESA program, a learning community intended to support first generation financially challenged STEM majors. I helped develop a plan of action, an application, a recruitment program, an interview process, get a physical space, and become established. I met some amazing motivated students with real challenges. I have since left that committee but I marvel at the success it is bringing to such deserving students and still work to support its mission through my other roles on campus.

My third year I had a baby and switched to our introductory chemistry course. This course serves many masters. It is a GE class. It is an option for nurses, dental hygiene, and allied health. It is also a prerequisite for our General Chemistry course for science majors. I had a full spectrum. There were kids in that class who had never lit a match. In their lifetime. Some were challenged by most everything I threw at them while others were bored out of their mind by the slow pace. Others were skating by with minimal engagement and less successful than they would have been because of their lack of effort. It was a challenge to keep all of them buying in.

Many worked one or two jobs, many were parents or supported their families by providing child care or elder care. I began to realize just how selfish my college experience has been. I just left home, moved into a dorm, removed myself from the daily needs of my family. I didn’t have to worry about getting my grandmother to her doctor’s appointment or picking up my cousins from school. My students were trying to do it All: finance the education they were seeking and supporting the family that housed them. Well those that had a home to go to. That year I had homelessness, bankruptcy, and emotional collapse from grief all plague my students. They pay more for my textbooks than they do for the units they get lectured from me, but the bill can still cripple them and the stress of college science even at the introductory level can break them. I began to recognize the nature open access to college science.

My fourth and fifth years have been in our first semester of General Chemistry course. My first Fall in that assignment I had some of my C students from the previous semester. I was so flattered they wanted to learn with me again. Then, two weeks in, we all were crying. The class has an intensity unmatched in the courses I have taught. It was my first time in it, so I had no idea what to expect. I tried my best, but I saw so many of my students from my intro class flounder. I had such little idea how to bridge the gaps between the courses but knew my mission must be to figure out how to ease the transition into full blown science major for the raw talent that finds a seat in my classroom. So that spring I enrolled in a class to improve my teaching methods. While I was teaching, I was also learning about research into the best practices for turning novice learners into motivated experts.

I have spent the past three semesters teaching this same class, designing a classroom on the premise that to be learned chemistry must be interesting and social, improving my discussions, growing as a teacher facilitating deeper learning. But this semester is providing my biggest challenge yet. I am working with a student who has almost no vision. In chemistry. It is challenging my perception of the visual nature of each and every learning objective. It is forcing me to anticipate more fully simply anything I might want to do or say in class. Is my doing or saying that providing meaningful learning experiences for this student? It is challenging my perception of anything I require in assessment. Is it fair to ask that of this student? Is doing so holding all students to the same standard?

The thing is, this student is damn inspiring. They are so motivated, so engaged, so eager to share in their love of science, anxious to tell you about this one other blind chemist they heard of who provides an endless source of motivational fuel. Representation matters.

We were talking about the energy of the atom. I brought in the lamps and the diffraction gratings to demonstrate line spectra. This person attempted to hold the grating, swore they thought they saw the line, squealed with excitement. I am not sure what they really saw, but I am pretty sure it wasn’t the tear in my eye.

We got to molecular structure last week. I seriously almost went to the store to get puffy paint and lentils to make a kit until a desperate plea for help hooked me up with a campus technologist. I spent hours designing and hand drawing the kit with atom label in English letters for their scribe with Braille letters for them. I worked with the technologist who took my hand drawings into raised dimensions with a puffing printer. I made the kit have XXs for lone pairs instead of dots so as not to confuse the Braille. I had bonds made that could show multiple bonding and dashed and wedged bonds. I know there are molecular models but you have to have a good Lewis structure to get there. I had to get them to see the picture.

We pulled out the kit in Lab. I held their hand. Showed them the features. I taught the scribe the design elements. They were elated. The student had had the Intro course and said they simply didn’t understand this topic. My kit brought it to life. Our hands worked to help them grasp the shape of water. It was a great day. The biggest flaw was how much the pieces moved around. I thought about going to the craft store and getting felt and velcro, but I just didn’t have the time. The kit has a hundred pieces!

The student came the next day to my office hours. I was working extra hard with the kit and the models and a set of structural scaffolds I had had printed with the puffy machine. I was trying so hard to get them to understand dimensionally the molecule and the 2D drawing convention of dashes and wedges. It took an hour rotating through the modalities, holding their hands on the models and raised graphics, and their Braille-note machine. I am not sure it worked but I tried so hard. Afterwards, my coworker said she overheard the session. She said, “Ellen, it was magical. You are like Annie Sullivan if Helen Keller wanted to be a chemist.”

That is the opportunity teaching at a community college gives. We take all comers. We welcome all people, no application necessary, to join us on their educational journey. We invite you to explore your passions but we hold you to our standards because we know what your road holds.

I am sorry if I haven’t really written much this semester. I mean I totally embraced this new opportunity to grow and help, but none of my other professional obligations to my class, my committees, and my research went away. I am exhausted. I have been fully immersed in the work of shepherding young scientists from my community with such a diversity of life experiences including one in particular through one of their first huge steps on their path to a rewarding career in science. I completely love my job. I am exactly where I am supposed to be. A lecturer position at UC Berkeley posted recently, and though several people forwarded me the posting, I didn’t really consider applying. Sure, I could be working with amazing young minds at one of the premier universities in this country, but I could never be someone’s Annie Sullivan. In truth, my colleague is too nice as I am closer to feeling even with all the effort, I am still not making my class accessible enough. But we are both giving it every ounce of effort and creativity to bring the world its next engineer, each finding joy in the small breakthroughs like grasping water’s simple, beautiful shape.

People work really hard to have their Christmas cards reflect their idyllic family life. Some book photographers, others coordinate outfits, still others seek the perfect natural backdrop. In 1987, my parents chose the main entrance of my elementary school. It was the last year all of their children would attend the same educational institution. We all loved this school, we attended it with pride, my parents were active in its PTA, my dad coached its Academic team, my loud laughter resonated through its halls. None of us ever said goodbye to our parents at its doors worried about our safety. We only ever had an occasional precautionary fire drill, nothing like the lock down drills of today. It was 1987. Columbine wouldn’t horrify parents for 12 more years.

I was in first grade in this picture. I had an amazing teacher who was incredibly encouraging. I felt she was incredibly warm and caring. She was in the twilight of her career, her methods informed by decades of experience in the classroom. I am not sure what she would have done in an active shooter scenario. She was older; I wouldn’t describe her as nimble, and yet, my class was the same age as the one mowed down in a small town in Connecticut. But it was 1987. It was a simpler time. The atrocities of Sandy Hook wouldn’t horrify parents for 25 more years.

What happened in the interim?

Gun laws are such that federal law prohibits you from purchasing a hand gun until you are 21. However, since the assault weapons ban of 1994 was allowed to expire in 2004, most state laws permit 18 year olds to purchase AR-15s . (AR-15, aka: the type of weapon used to annihilate a freshman class this week as they exited their classroom in the wake of a false fire alarm triggered by the expelled assassin.) What do hand guns and AR-15s have in common? They are both designed specifically to kill people. They are not for hunting animals. They are used exclusively for homicide. How do they differ? AR-15s are much more efficient in this task. While classified as semi-automatic, they can be retrofitted easily to be even more deadly.

The other thing that has changed is the rise of the internet where sullen teens can find camaraderie with radicalized white nationalists who empower them with militia drills and a president who gives this divisive viewpoint a national microphone. Such was the case with the Parkland shooter. He trained with a Florida militia before carrying out his premeditated murder of former classmates. He is wearing a MAGA hat in his online profile picture. The president didn’t start this trend. He just legitimizes their fringe voices for personal gain. Elections have consequences, and one of this last one is that a lot of hateful speech is getting a more powerful microphone.

In the wake of the rise of school shootings, many K-12 schools have instituted active shooter drills, just like the radiation drills of the 50s, in response to the existential threat posed by the ready availability of guns in this country and its stable of troubled white males. My sister teaches in the same school where her daughter is in second grade. I can’t really imagine if one of these scenarios played out at their school. I am quite certain my sister would selflessly shield any proximal children while also being paralyzed with fear about the potential fate of her own. But here is the thing, I am a teacher too, and I feel my school is underprepared.

I teach college chemistry. If you want to be amused but suddenly quite alone, go to a wedding and pretend to be a college chemistry professor. You will immediately bring a very visceral sense memory to the surface in a larger percentage of partygoers than you might think. If you are sociable and kind of humorous like myself, you will catch many of them entirely off guard. You will watch their countenance contort as they try to reconcile their brief amusing interactions with you with an educational experience that for them was entirely unfun.

As a professor of chemistry, I push people. I push them sometimes to their limits. It is my professional obligation to promote the transition of novice learners from the status of regurgitative to innovative. I like to say I teach an applied mathematics class, but I also teach a foreign language class. As chemistry professors, we demand you have the math competency but that you also develop an intuition based on empirical evidence of physical properties and chemical reactivity. To the uninitiated, it can be maddening. When I considered taking this job, a mentor of mine from my alma mater recommended that the first thing I buy for my new office was a box of tissues. At the time, I did not realize just how prescient he was.

I am new to this profession, but when events like Parkland happen, I already have moments in my career that make me shudder. I teach at an open access community college. I have a broad range of students who come to my classroom from diverse backgrounds with a spectrum of preparedness for the intensity that college science demands. Every time an event like this week happens, I cannot help but reflect on students I feared could become that next headline. But I also cannot shake the feeling that my employer has not prepared me for such a scenario.

A year ago, active shooter training was mentioned at a meeting of leaders in my division, but since that mention, no training has been offered. My college has installed the boxes with intercoms last semester, but I have received no training on how to use it.  I have no idea where the signal goes and what response time I should expect if I ever press its button.

My classroom doors lock from the outside.

In my role, I am a teacher of adults. These adults can have access to weapons. Some of them have had military training. I have definitely had veterans almost every semester. I can’t shake the feeling that in my role as a professor in courses that by their challenging nature weed students out of potential career paths, I might be providing the stress that breaks them. Perhaps my anxiety is misplaced. I mean, Virginia Teach was almost 11 years ago.

I kind of completely don’t understand the perceived injustices under which young white teen males labor. I completely don’t understand the reflexive defense of the unassailable civilian right to bear any and all arms in the wake of a river of blood shed by school-aged children.  I always thought it would take something truly horrific, something truly indefensible to shift the chilly climate on gun reform in DC, and then the mass loss of innocent first grader life in CT moved no one.

How many more of these moments will we allow to go unchecked because “freedom”? How many educators will enter their classrooms on Monday considering their students’ best exit strategies in the event of a threat? It doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. I have called my elected representatives every day this week to register my concern and support of any and all efforts to bring the conversation even remotely close to a middle ground which is supported by the majority of my fellow citizens. Many times I have fought off tears of fear and anxiety.  I love everything about what I do to bring my students to a greater appreciation of science and of their potential to better themselves. I just pray I never have to become a human shield in defense of them their right to pursue it.

But I am not just going to sit around and twiddle my thumbs. I am making a new syllabus for classroom policies around student stress. I detail all of the psychological and financial supports our campus offers for students in crisis. I know there are lockable doors from our classroom that lead into spaces with no windows, so I detail a plan of evacuation for if shots ring out. But lastly, I implore them to be vigilant. They are on the front line with their peers. Students admit more to each other than they ever let on to me. I outline a procedure to follow if one suspects a fellow student needs support. I encourage every instructor who has not received training and whose students are not continually drilled in such scenarios to confront the harsh reality that one might arise and take the available measures to inform students of their options. Let Parkland, with its chilling cell phone coverage student terror, be the clarion call to action.  Let it call to action people like me, who were underestimating the power of their denial that such an event could occur to subvert common sense measures that would make everyone in their classrooms feel marginally safer. Now is a time for action, and like all meaningful change, it begins at the local level with honest and earnest human interaction.

This is me with my daughter circa age 5 months. We were out brunching with her daddy as I wasn’t yet back to work full time. We were enjoying these peaceful moments of early parenting before our kid was really mobile or vocal and was generally chill and excited to be out and watching the happenings in public.

As a new mom, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I loved motherhood. I am an anxious person by nature, so before she arrived, I was certain I would be quite lousy at this. I was blessed with a very happy inquisitive child who made my early momming look so easy. My own mother was famously quoted as saying to my sister, “Who would have thought Ellen would be such a good mom?” And as poorly as it sounded when it came out of her mouth, I knew exactly what she meant because it was a sentiment I shared.

As much as I enjoyed early motherhood, I no longer knew my body. After spending 9 months as an occupied territory and the first 6 months postpartum as almost her sole food source, pretty much everything in my body hurt, exercise time was hard to find, and I was experiencing huge hormonal swings in my moods that I remember left me sobbing after an episode of Law and Order feeling sorry for a police officer who kidnapped a child because his wife couldn’t carry one. In short, I was a terrible wife. It wasn’t my fault because it wasn’t my focus. Early motherhood was all consuming, as it should be, and my relationship with my husband was, well, changed.

He never faltered. He let me treat him distantly. He let me snap at him from the stresses of extreme sleep deprivation. He held me when I cried. He cleaned my home, maintained our yard and car, shopped for and cooked our dinners. He was what he had been for the decade before her arrival, my constant.

On January 12, 2018, The Wall Street Journal broke the story that the president had purchased the silence of an adult film star with whom he had an affair in July 2006. The payment occurred in October 2016 to buy her silence before the now fateful election in November. If true, this affair would have happened when his youngest son Baron was merely 4 months old. The president stepped out on his wife for a fling with a porn star at a time when his new wife (they were married in 2005) was experiencing probably very similar body insecurity and hormonal swings as I was. Unfortunately, Melania didn’t have a quilt of a decades worth of memories with her husband to keep her warm as she built her relationship with her new child.

And yet, this story completely flew under the radar. It wasn’t even the most shocking news story of the week. It was a week where we learned of the “shithole countries” and when Oprah was floated as a potential candidate in 2020. People heard shithole on NPR for the first time and were certain they were experiencing the apocalypse. It was a week when some senators claimed they just heard shithouse which gave them plausible deniability to call other senators liars. It was a week where a false missile alarm in Hawaii sent natives and vacationers alike into 30 minutes of decidedly unrelaxed island living which revealed the administration has no plan for such a scenario.

So the president buying the silence of a porn star with campaign funds for an affair that happened while his wife was nurturing his newly born son wasn’t even a blip on the radar. Furthermore, white evangelicals are just giving him a pass, because of course they are. The son of Billy Graham takes to the air waves and says the president is a changed man from the man in 2006 or the man before the election with simply no supporting evidence in the public record. He said the president has a “concern for Christian values.” I guess it shouldn’t surprise me to see how far the evangelicals have gone in defense of the indefensible.  The evangelicals lament the emptiness of pews each Sunday. But who would want to go share a seat with someone who can defend behavior like that listening to sermons from a man who would basically condone the bad behavior of the president from their pulpit? How far this group has sunken to advance their social conservative agenda dispensing of the need for a moral compass and family values in the leader who can deliver it to them. Baby Baron was 4 months old at the time. How can you as a Christian fully embrace a man who walks out on his wife in her most vulnerable early motherhood months for a fling with another woman who enriches herself by the depravity you claim to deplore?

Ironically, the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause, the same people who secured jail time for John Edwards after it came to light that he had used campaign funds to buy the silence of a woman with whom he had had an affair in the run up to his bid for the presidency, has filed another complaint with the Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission this time against Donald Trump. The complaint alleges that the amount of money $130,000 vastly exceeds the minimum amount any individual can contribute to a campaign ($2,700) and the source of the money has not been revealed. By current law, any person contributing more than $200 to a campaign must be identified.

How far we have come as a country that this bombshell story didn’t even make a blip on the news radar. It seems every single day there is some detail of this administration more sordid than the last, some corruption in the heads of the federal agencies more inconceivable than the previous, some new racist or bigoted policy intended to increase the margins separating already marginalized populations. If you are news hound like me, at this point, you are practically numb. Nothing makes any sense and you pray for the day it will all end, but you know the scar tissue is there. You don’t know how this country you love will emerge from this period and realize the potential you thought it had in it. The stature of the nation you love has fallen so far on the world stage that you wonder what if any impact it will have in the largest issues that plague our planet like geopolitical instability in the middle east and the warming global climate. In fact, you are certain in this administration, they mean more harm to both than good.

Congressional leadership has shirked their responsibility to check the excesses of the executive branch because it means they craft and pass historically unpopular policies like sweeping changes to the tax code in almost total isolation. It means they can further their ultimate legislative agenda of dismantling the social safety net that protects millions of the most vulnerable Americans to give more money to the already ludicrously rich ones. They seem unconcerned about the regular scandal that engulfs the White House. They seem blind to the corruption, deaf to the excesses, complicit in their steady resolve to deny all of it. How far we have come in eroding the prestige of the office and our nation’s global influence. How far will we have to go whenever this crooked road ends?

#electionshaveconsequences

The Children’s Health Insurance Program or CHIP is a program that provides health insurance to 9 million children whose parents are too rich for Medicaid but too poor for anything else. It is the other hostage in the debt crisis. It easily could have been funded way back in September with a clean bill and overwhelming bipartisan support. It could be passed today as a clean standalone bill. But that isn’t how the GOP rolls. They call themselves pro life but they hold these children and their families hostage, leverage in a fight that isn’t even about these children.

It is amoral to do this.

The maddening thing is, Trump could have had it all. He could have gotten 1.6 billion for the stupid boondoggle wall. He could have saved the hostages, the children and the Dreamers. Even on Friday in a one on one meeting with Chuck, he was going to get this bill of love and his precious wall/fence/flight of fancy. But he says one thing, then he talks to xenophobic nativists and sows enough confusion that there is clear evidence you simply can’t negotiate with him.

So Chuck Schumer is negotiating with terrorists. He was nice enough to compare them to Jell-O, but I am not. The nativist wing of the GOP is pulling all the strings. These people are terrorizing immigrants who came here at the average age of six years old. They have lived here for decades. They are simultaneously terrorizing millions of poor children and their families who receive letters threatening the loss of healthcare for their beloved child as an early Christmas present. Chuck and Dick before him think they have deals, and then hours later, the president is singing a markedly different tune.

Paul Ryan isn’t in the business of passing bills the Senate would clear because he has an unfortunate medical condition of been not born without a spine. Mitch McConnell isn’t interested in putting clean DACA or CHIP bills or even a bill to protect military families and death pay during the shutdown because he has the unfortunate medical condition of being born without a heart.

There is one party and one party only who believes there are valuable government solutions to the plight of regular Americans and who fights to protect social programs that elevate the poorest among us. The other party decries the futility of government solutions and makes its bread and butter on lamenting its lack of function. Give them unfettered control, and look what they do: create facts on the ground.

These people can’t be trusted. Let’s wave them goodbye from Congress in record numbers in 2018, so their fearless leader can get evicted in the next.

#electionshaveconsequences

I am not going to take the bait. I am not going to act like the dogs on a mission in the movie Up and have a “Squirrel!” moment. I won’t let the horrifying racist statement distract me from the true purpose of the meeting, restoring the protections to the almost 800,000 people in this country known as Dreamers.

On September 5, 2017, the president signed an executive order ending the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), a program designed to give undocumented immigrants who arrived here in circumstances beyond their control a way to safely avoid deportation. But more importantly, it gave them a legitimate status that allowed them to come out of the shadows and become more effective, contributing members of the only country many of them have ever truly known.

To receive DACA status, you had to be under the age of 31 before June 2012 and had to have come to this country before you were 16. So, clearly, your coming to the United States was not your decision nor was it under you control. 45% of Dreamers are in school. Of those over 70% are pursuing bachelor’s degrees or higher.

Over 25% of them live in my state. The modal (most common) age of their arrival to our country was the age of 3. The average age of the arrival of a dreamer in our country is 6. My daughter is approaching age 3, and while I think she is a genius and in my weaker moments, it feels like her will triumphs over mine, she is not in control of our family.

But more importantly, our government made them a promise. Our government said something to the effect of, “If you give us your information, you will have a status that allows you to have a gainful employment without the threat of deportation.” So they came out of the shadows. They registered in the DACA program. They were subjected to background checks. Many got drivers licenses. And their earning potential increased. Their average hourly income increased by $7 an hour by coming out of the shadows. Roughly 700,000 people stand to lose their jobs. We made them a promise. And reneging on that promise throws their safety and security into chaos. They could be deported from the only home some of them have ever known.

And as of March 2018, not only have they lost their protected status, they could be subject to deportation. And they would be relatively easy to find. They registered with our government on good faith because our government made them a promise of a legitimized status.

On the plight of the Dreamers:

• An estimated 1.9 million people are eligible for DACA. Of those Roughly 800,000 have had their DACA status accepted.
• In a Center for American Progress Survey, the US stands to lose $460 billion dollars from GDP over the next decade due to the loss of an estimated 600,000 workers from the workforce if the legal status of DACA recipients is changed.
• An estimated 20,000 are teachers.
• A recent Quinnipiac poll finds 80% of Americans say Dreamers should have the right to stay in the US and apply for citizenship.

It is time to stop playing politics with the lives of real people in our country who love our country and who are working to make our country a better place. It is time to honor our promise to them and pass a clean Dream Act that protects their status and allows them a path to citizenship.

But the hateful comment was born from discussion of a different set of immigrants, those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). These are 300,000 people who migrated to our country because conditions in the home country were not sustainable at that point in time. And, sadly, the deteriorated conditions have not improved.

To focus on the “shithole” nature of the countries in question is to ascribe that quality to the people themselves and not the root causes of geopolitical instability and natural disasters exacerbated in many cases by US inaction. That would be a lie. It takes great courage to flee your home on a prayer of a better life for your family. To create that better life, you must be your best self. You likely came with nothing, so you must work hard from day one to provide the security your family needs. You must behave impeccably because the xenophobic grip on our current government is ready, willing, and able to send you back to the nightmare. Almost 90% of these immigrants work. They clean our homes and businesses, construct our buildings and roads, tend our gardens. It is the hard work of honest people that brings 4.5 billion to our GDP annually. We should honor their hard work and faith in the American dream, not denigrate their homelands with words unbecoming of a high school class president let alone the leader of our nation.

Republicans own all branches of government. Theoretically, they could enact any single change they desire. If they really want to take a stance against the president’s racism, they could pass a clean Dream act and honor our promise to these valuable people. Call your senators and representatives. Tell David Perdue you wish he had a better memory, sure. But make sure you also demand he and they all honor this “no-brainer” concept.

#electionshaveconsequences

Recently my sister made a very eloquent statement about the complexities of her relationship with the south in her post Southern Discontent.  Here I would like to offer a slightly different perspective as a Georgian by birth who has been a California resident  for over 13 years.

I am originally from a town of about 3000 people little more than an hour south of Atlanta. I was born in a blue house in a red state with a big mouth and a typically small tape delay for stating the things that race through my active mind. As such, the south was not such an easy place for me growing up. Some of the reasons were apparent while I lived there. Some only became apparent with perspective from years on the West coast. My parents raised me encouraging my free spirit and my free thought and engaged me in discussions that showed they valued my young and naive perspective, but they also frequently implored me to restrain my speech when it could cause unintended harm. They knew I could be indelicate and felt it would be best if I could just refrain.

It is only now I ask, best for whom?

It certainly wasn’t best for me. While it might have kept me a few more friends, they rarely heard from the true me. As a GA resident, I never felt truly free to express myself and my views. In a large way, I was a closeted liberal and a female scientist, all things that seemed a little deviant. It definitely wasn’t as mentally and emotionally damaging as being a closeted homosexual in the south, but over time, it did take a toll.

For as much as my parents and siblings joke about the contrary, I must have gotten quite good at suppressing myself. At my going away party just before I embarked on my drive across the country, my neighbor who lived across the street from me my entire life says, “Just because you are moving to Berkeley, don’t go getting radical on me!” Don’t go getting there you say? Moving to Berkeley was like the mothership calling me home. My neighbor of 22 years whose child had been a close friend of mine had no idea who was standing across from them saying goodbye.

As such, to me, southern hospitality felt like a bit of a facade. People put a smile on their face while loaning you that cup of sugar, and that is fine as long as you don’t shine a light on the unpleasant aspects of your shared communal experience. As long as you are comfortable being the mirror people need to believe about the self they present to the world, you are considered hospitable and kind. To do so may require that you censure yourself to spare someone else’s feelings, so if you are vocal and opinionated like me, you will never be completely at ease.

I would argue this isn’t necessarily a uniquely southern phenomenon. It is a self preservation mechanism in rural America. I can’t say I have had a large sample size, but from my perspective as a former rural now urban resident there are certain challenges to one’s full self expression in small rural communities.

In urban America, you are surrounded by all kinds of people with all kinds of beliefs and all kinds of outlets for expression and all kinds of businesses selling you all kinds of goods. It is almost impossible not to have enhanced cultural awareness as you live in close proximity to such a diversity of thought and life experience, and you can tap into as many new and crazy experiences as you can fit on your dance card. It actually might help your small business if you are a bit eccentric. It could give you an edge in a marketplace with a lot of consumers who want to seem like they have the finger on the pulse of a certain niche market.

Rural America houses small business owners in small communities with a finite number of consumers. It houses retirees in small rural communities with few prospective new friends. It houses people who yearn to congregate with others celebrating their faith but in doing so may find themselves on pews with people with whom they disagree on a range of issues. If you really aim for assimilation rural America, it is important to measure your expression even to the point of the bumper sticker you put on your vehicle.

However, you can do such a good job of assimilation, people can mistake you for someone sympathetic to their view. Any social situation can provide an opportunity for another person to state a thing with which you vehemently disagree, and an instantaneous cost benefit analysis of the ramifications of your response must ensue to preserve your position and your sanity. Then as a resident now as a visitor, it was and is like this for me on a range of issues that has only grown as I have matured and further refined my positions.

To be honest, I have been writing this post for weeks. And as I explored all of the positions of my personality in which southern rural living was challenging for me, the post grew longer and more cumbersome diluting the impact I intended it to have. As my sister said so perfectly in 2018, this year is all about being true to ourselves and honoring our true selves in the best expression of us. I want to allow myself the space to explore, but I want to put the exploration in more manageable chunks. It is my hope that you will join me as I explore the complexities of my personal self-censureship in an effort to encourage people to find their voices and spark richer, more honest local conversations about the times we live in and the changes we hope to see.

I am not ashamed to admit I was an inquisitive child. I had a voracious appetite for learning. My father was a zoology major and a medical doctor. My mother was a math major then math teacher then stay at home mom and dad’s office manager. My parents never felt my education should or would be confined to the classroom. They took a very active role in guiding our learning at home as well as at school. I would say my home schooling was much more of a liberal arts education. My mother loved to read, but only fiction and definitely not science fiction. My father loved to read anything really but held a special passion for history.   Dad would read on his bed every night with my sister and  me reading as bookends on the neighboring pillows. He would help us with words we didn’t know or provide a context for a confusing situation. I was the only child who gravitated towards math and science, and they both fed my hunger. My dad got me an algebra book in fifth grade. Who does that?

But I found it hard to be a true scholar in my small town. I was enrolled in the gifted program at my school and had sort of a ready made micro community of similarly inquisitive children. But as we entered middle school (what my dad called the seething cauldron of hormones), social hierarchies formed, and I never quite seemed to fit into any of them. I had political opinions that weren’t very popular, so I tried not to share them. They would surface at points, and it would cause friction and fractures in my friend groups. I had a few extremely close friends but I kept many more at an arm’s length. As we entered high school with college applications looming, even my close friends in the classroom began to compete, and further fractions occurred. I almost tried to transfer to college a year early just to escape, but my parents and teachers convinced me to persist. In the end, I am thankful I got to build some important core memories in my senior year.

I found it hard to be a scientist in the rural south. For one thing, there was very little opportunity outside of academic research for aspiring young science professionals like myself (a medicinal chemist) or my husband (a medical device engineer) to find gainful employment.  Actually there were very few places in the country where both of us would be able to find employment, and that played a role in my application process for graduate school. The only southern location that met our criteria was in North Carolina, and I didn’t even apply to Chapel Hill or Duke. I guess I always knew I was leaving.

But aside from need for employment (which came later), it was also hard for me to live there as I grew and matured. From my studies, I believe the science is completely settled on climate change. The overwhelming majority of scientists across disciplines agree. Human consumption is driving chemical pollution and warming temperatures that endanger every life form on this planet but especially the poor in coastal climates most immediately. But I have held my beliefs around climate for a very long time. When I was in fifth grade, I bought a book at a book fair called“50 Simple Things You can Do to Save the Earth.” I was hooked. I walked the neighborhood with my little wagon collecting aluminum cans. I made my parents drive me and my bags of stuff to the drop off site for recycling. I took all of the six pack plastic rings and cut them all for the turtles. I felt so empowered, so motivated by these simple strategies, and then no one joined me. I didn’t understand why no one else was interested in doing such simple things to improve the health of our planet. It was discouraging.

In the rural community of my childhood 20 years later, I still see only modest course correction. Now on trips to the south, I hate parking in the lot of a grocery next to a sea of cars that don’t even  get 20 miles per gallon. And people are filling the trunks of them with one time use disposable garbage like the plastic bags holding the groceries of plastic beverage bottles and prepackaged dinners. I question how I can help people see that the choices we make around cars and consumption endanger the security of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the coastal communities of the planet we share. I wish I could communicate that since we probably all hope to live in a region with safe water, secure food resources, and one virtually free from the threat of natural disaster, we probably should avoid consumption patterns that endanger all of those goals.

In urban California, my little life is very different. When my husband moved here 12 years ago, we sold my car and bought our first Prius. We have been a one car family ever since. We live near transit, and one of us bikes or transits to work or for a while we carpooled. We have solar panels on our house, and haven’t had an electric bill in 7 years. It seems every other car on the road around us is a Prius or now an electric model. Many homes and businesses are retrofitted with plugs for plug ins powered by solar panels that cover the parking structures.  The grocery stores in my city (and most cities that make up the Bay Area) won’t give you a free bag. You have to bring your own or pay $0.50 for each paper one. Plastic is forbidden. I shop at a store where my milk comes in a glass bottle that I return every week. I have alocal butcher shop where the meat is locally and sustainably farmed and gets carved in front of me. I have curbside green waste composting, recycling, and landfill pickups which is kind of amazing. It is a hot compost, so you can even compost chicken bones! On top of that the city site for vast array of other reuse initiatives like electronic recycling and community free exchanges is but a mile up the road. California certainly has a representative democracy, but we also have a lot of decisions like the grocery bags and the green infrastructure improvements like solar panels and electrical outlets at public places like schools funded through local and state ballot initiatives. Rural and urban communities alike could begin to adopt some of these if citizens propose, support with signatures, get the votes, and then implement a local or state tax funded initiative to make their state and local economies greener. This would be important grassroots organizing for real cultural change, but to be successful, it will take building a real dialogue around the need. 

I have a family of three with a toddler and a 20 gallon trash can with a weekly pickup that is rarely full which I find kind of remarkable. When my parents visit, they never quite know which receptacle should receive their refuse. It is almost never trash. They should defer to their 2.7 year old granddaughter. She has proven a quick study. In short, I am able to live the life of a low carbon footprint that I have longed to live since I was 8, and it is incredibly easy because I am surrounded by similarly concerned people who have enacted local and state changes that help our community behave responsibly and sustainably. I guess I could say it’s like in moving to CA, I really came home.

I also found it hard to have a diversified historical perspective in the rural south. I must admit I wasn’t really a student of history when I lived there. I mean I took required classes and even some AP history classes at my high school, so I didn’t really have to take them in college. It wasn’t until I voluntarily took a few in college around topics that interested me that I knew very little about (The Arab-Isreali Conflict and Modern Egypt) that I appreciated how woeful my historical preparation was. Whole segments of the world and moments in time were missing from my education and there were contextualizations that were fairly suspect in hindsight. From high school, I knew almost nothing about the Middle East or Asia or Geography really. I think the Ottomans were mentioned once or twice. I mean, when we were in high school, my husband and his very close friend interviewed for the same scholarship. The question was asked, “With which historical figure would you most like to dine and why?” My husband said Eleanor Roosevelt. Our friend said Andrew Jackson, a personal hero of many of the young men at my school for his brash tactics; anecdotes about him were the stuff of legend. The interviewers looked a little taken aback. I mean, what about all the stuff with the Indians? I wonder how much of it our friend actually knew. My husband got the scholarship. I hear from my sister that standards (at least the ones in GA) are improving these types of deficiencies for today’s GA students. Having not been involved in K-12 education in almost 20 years, I can’t really comment, but I was encouraged to hear that feedback from her!

When I first came to Berkeley and had a thicker accent, people would ask me if in the south we called it the War of Northern Aggression. I casually laughed, but in all seriousness, when I took AP US history, my highly respected instructor painted the civil war as merely a war fought over economic differences. I’ll say. The southern side wanted to enslave humans for greater economic gain. The Northerners felt that was inhuman and untenable. Thus, war ensued over economic differences. Am I oversimplifying the cause of the Civil War? Perhaps. But human slavery was the right the states fought for, it was the key economic difference, and some thought that it was a war worth fighting. As far as I am concerned, have your civil war reenactment only if you hold it next to a presentation of the implements of enslavement and the stories of the true heroes of the 1800s, the abolitionists. It would be hard to deny the importance of the war if you had run your fingers along the spikes of the masks used to cage the heads of the enslaved.

I was actually loathe to ever use the term states’ rights until my now state of CA is fighting to preserve first the rights of immigrants with the Muslim ban and increased ICE aggression, more recently the coast from offshore drilling, and most recently people for their right to legal weed all from intrusion of the federal government as they seek to undo seemingly every regulation put into place by the previous occupant of the White House. So now I am kind of ok with states’ rights conceptually for the first time in history.

To be honest, there weren’t a lot of moments I tried to start conversations  or interject a controversial point about science or history when I lived in the south. While topics around our dinner table, these weren’t the substance of the conversations I overheard in social settings. This portion of my discontent only really became evident with the perspective. But I question why? Did I just not hear them, or were they not topics of discussion? My parents’ closest friends in my childhood were largely from their church community. Social gatherings were often church related. It is fairly logical that science and history would play a limited role in the kinds of conversations that would be initiated amongst a mixed group of rural southern Baptists. In the spirit of southern hospitality and considering the audience, these topics would have been taboo.

Now as an adult, there is rarely a social gathering I attend in which I do not engage in a discussion around science, or history, or culture. I almost always come away with some new insight or some new piece of culture that I must add to the growing list of things I don’t have the bandwidth to fully consume. In my social sphere, I am still a student. This is probably due to a selection bias. Most of our closest friends we met during graduate school or in our employment or in a local prenatal yoga group I joined anticipating the arrival of our child and a need to connect more concretely to my community. I have yet to realize the dream of hosting one of those interdisciplinary salons in the homes of professors portrayed by Hollywood, but I think we have come close. It is a personal goal of mine. It is important to have goals.

I question whether I could create the kinds of stimulating social gatherings if I were still a rural resident. My husband and I somehow found each other when we lived in our rural community. We would be able to find others like us, I am sure. But in doing so, would we just create an echo chamber of like-minded individuals? That wouldn’t really change community culture all that much and might leave us to feel as isolated as we did when we were in high school. Instead, could I encourage this dialogue in a broader audience? I am trained in hypothesis driven research with data, findings, models, and further hypotheses, and it is hard for me to accept how evidence-based positions had very little traction in a faith based society. Could I navigate those treacherous waters in a non-threatening way? I am not sure if I could and still be a successful professional and fully part of my small community. I am sure I would try.

Prelude to this posting: A Defector’s Southern Discontent

As transplants in our hometown, I am struggling to create the kinds of reliable holiday traditions I treasured as a child for my child. I am searching for traditions.

I have been in CA for 13 holiday seasons. Every one we have flown back to GA for the holidays. I guess it feels easier since all family is there and we have the time off.

Counterintuitively, it was harder for me to book the flight this year. Now we have her, and she needs to spend time with her cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles, but I am her mom and have a really strong desire to build her holiday connection to her home. Being the adult now, it is my responsibility to create the magical holiday memories she will be nostalgic for when she is momming for her children. She may only be 2.6 but she has an incredible memory like my husband and I wager even some of this season will be remembered by her next year and beyond, so the pressure on me feels intense. The last two seasons, I just got through knowing I could get serious about it when she will remember. Memory seems to be here, and the intense internal pressure that created was unanticipated.

So here it is my 13th Christmas as a Californian, and we got our first tree. Our place is small, no room for a big real one, and it took me 4 different stores before I finally found a fake one in stock and under 7 ft tall. It was her size, 4ft tall, so my husband called it our Charlie Brown tree, but she absolutely loved decorating it. I mean it was about the size of a toddler attention span, so there’s that. In fact, she spent every night undecorating and then redecorating it which was also great. But she is very independent and could not understand why she wasn’t allowed to plug it in every morning so the new threat of electrocution was less great. But lighting the tree morning and evening having her chase the green lights as the little tree we found and cycled through, that was pretty magical. So I will call the tree a win.

Mondays at our house are craft nights. The first Monday I got a big tub of holiday stamps and a red and green stamp pad. We went to town making a paper chain for the tree. But then I had forgotten to get tape or staples to form the links, so that was only kind of a fail. The second Monday, I had my husband get candies for decorating cookies, and I whipped up a batch of ginger bread dough, but I was short on molasses, the cookies were hard to roll out, and when I opened the red sugar, though it seemed sealed, red sugar fell all over the counter and appeared opaque. Not wanting to poison my child but still wanting to be festive, we stuck with the green sugar, but the candies my husband found were for birthday cookies, so it wasn’t quite the red and green explosion I envisioned. But they got eaten so it was a another partial victory. We met up with friends later that week to craft gingerbread houses and learned the importance of making that a multi day affair. Day one: walls. Day 2: roof. Day 3: decoration. If you try to shove it into a single afternoon with 1-3 year olds, the structure can not withstand the force. In the end, I am going to call our Christmas crafting marginally successful.

She is totally on board with Christmas lights. She already enjoys looking for the moon when it is dark. So looking for Christmas lights was a logical progression. I would pick her up from school. She would comment on the darkness and say, “now we can look for Christmas lights?” I would say yes, and that would sustain her interest for the 30 min car ride home. It would also occupy her interest for any walk we took, and especially excited her the night we took a walk just for lights! And the new popular projector light things provided endless driveway dance party opportunities! My fail was not really taking the time to string outdoor lights for our place. I sense next year she will be a big help with that! Looking for lights was our biggest holiday win!

Of course, we had to see Santa. But I was more behind than I have ever been grading this semester, so I put it off until 5 days before Christmas. Toddler attention spans being what they are, I could sense this was going to be a fail, so I booked an appointment with Santa. Even still, a 45 minute wait ensued. Thank goodness for fake snow and a similarly aged toddler next to us in line. She was so excited to see him and tell him about our jingle tree right up until the moment it became her turn. I leapt out of the picture to catch a smile and no more words were exchanged with Santa, only tears. I suppose that was to be expected. Maybe next year Santa will be traditional. This year, his lap was still obligatory.

Perhaps the reason I don’t have a great track record of established CA traditions commensurate with my years as a resident is because my foot is always halfway out the door. We always fly back almost as soon as we can wrap up our professional obligations. All of the traditions I identify with at Christmas are found on my sleepy little street in my sleepy little hometown where I have the same bedroom I have had intermittently since birth swapping only to the one that adjoins through the bathroom when I was in middle school. But now my old room is my nieces’ room, and instead of getting locked out of the shared bathroom by my sister, I get locked out by her daughters. Instead of being bathed in a warm orange tone in all pictures from the wood paneling in the living room, we are all brighter from the light paint that now coats it, but there is no mistake. This is the home of the Christmas of my memory. This is where my family has joined hands to say a prayer of thanks for prosperity and togetherness before sharing a Christmas feast for over 30 years.

So this year, I tried to stay as long in CA as possible to maximize home memories coming into Atlanta in the early afternoon on the 23rd. By the time we arrived, I could just hear the chorus of that song, “we need a little Christmas right this very minute” ringing in my ears as the soundtrack to the immediate family time that ensued. We had barely put our bags down when we were furtively sneaking Santa presents from them to the tree trying not to wake her. Still jet lagged and groggy she bolted upright when she heard her cousins and joined them in welcoming Santa. She seemed not to notice the smallest stack was hers being that which I could fit in the corner of my checked bag. She definitely didn’t seem to note the hastily assembled ziplock bag of cookies from Sissy’s kitchen were the sad offerings in a stocking I forgot to plan on. In the end, permission to rip paper seemed more satisfying than the content of the package. I am sure this is probably on par with the Christmas mornings of other toddlers this year. For some reason, I thought all the anticipation would generate more. More emotions in both of us were interestingly lacking. Perhaps the hurry up to Christmas exhausted us too much for simple enjoyment.

But there was also no mistaking that the homestead felt half as big this year. We lost our matriarch last fall. We lost her home across the street from my parents’ home last spring. We lost our traditional Christmas Eve gathering last week. Fire truck santa passed almost without observation because my two year old was screaming louder than it sirens because she wanted to change clothes for the 13th time that day. But we made it outside just in time to watch him pass because he was a perfectly timed diversion. And that makes me sad. At her house, he was a magical treat we shared as a family sipping egg nog in her driveway, one of those fabled Downs holiday in West Point traditions. This year when I felt so much pressure to create the magical Christmas memories for her, he was a diversion from her tantrum.

Family Firetruck Santa viewing 12.2016

So who knows what 2018 will bring? Who knows what if any of this 2017 holiday season my child will remember? Who knows if we will do any of these same things next year or what crazy new options we will explore? Who knows how much of it will be spent in each location for optimal holiday togetherness and enjoyment? I just know adulting is sometimes hard. I know it is strange to feel pulled between creating the moments of family and togetherness you treasure while still maintaining home holiday traditions when the homes and the family you need are a continent apart. I also know Christmas knows no property. It lives in the love and laughs we share with the people we surround ourselves with in the moments that we gather. Perhaps one day many years from now when she struggles to balance the needs of her family with her memories of the traditions of ours, she will read this meditation and know that we tried.