just a little thing i do

I'm sorry my son refused to dance with you.

I could say that he needed a nap, which would be true. He may also need some more time to recover from the cold that smacked him around last week (mostly in the face, which he's not letting heal). He might even be freaked out about having to wear his backup leotard again, although he wasn't two weeks ago. But the fact is, he refused to go into the classroom with you when he was perfectly fine about participating in a make-up class at a totally different location with a teacher he'd also never seen before. A teacher who, unlike you, is white.

I tried everything I could think of. I reminded him of the class he'd taken with the other substitute teacher, that he'd liked it and that they'd done the same things as in this class. I reminded him that he liked dancing with the two girls in the class who are also not white, that he's met their parents and not been afraid of them. I told him that if he didn't go dance, you would never know how hard he'd been practicing to remember the "candy toy soldiers" music the class had been using to work on a mini-performance. I reminded him that you had opened the school front door for us so you had to be a kind person. I went so far as to promise him that you wouldn't hurt him, and to pick him up so that he could watch the rest of the class warming up and doing exactly what the regular teacher does with them. He demanded to get down and kept trying to hide. I told him that if he didn't want to dance today, he wouldn't be getting a make-up class because we were here and it was just him deciding he didn't want to dance. He wanted to go home.

So we went home.

I had thought I was doing good things for him with regards to teaching him about race. When, at his first dance class, he looked at me and observed proudly of those two little girls that "Those two guys are brown!" I nodded and smiled and gave him a thumbs-up for recognizing that fact, rather than shushing him or telling him not to talk about it. When, as kids do, he acts like a jackass in public and takes things from other kids, I make him apologize and I apologize too. I only accept their parents' "It's okay" when the kid is a white boy, because I'll be damned if I deliberately let him think his privilege should be any kind of shield for unacceptable behavior. His dad and I have explained to him the words for races and that no matter what that one awful Karen Katz book says you do NOT describe skintone in terms of food. He loves his book about Rosa Parks. We find ourselves at the Galleria more often than the malls in the whiter areas, and he's fine with that.

I am still failing him. And together, we are failing you.

I may be wrong. It may be that, absent all the other factors weighing on him today, he'd have bounced right in and been happy to dance. That doesn't change what he did, or make it acceptable for him to pull back and hide rather than take your hand. It doesn't make you feel better. And I'm well aware that, were you to read this post, it probably wouldn't either. But I feel as if I should say something, somewhere, the way you or any number of other well-meaning, beautiful, friendly black substitute preschool teachers might be saying, somewhere, "Little white boy was afraid of me today. What are his parents teaching him?" The answer is: What we ought to, but not enough.

We will keep trying. Should you sub for his teacher again, I'll be asking if I can be in the room for a few minutes to start. Should he act afraid of other black people in a place where I can see him, I'll be repeating what I told him outside in the hall today, that you are people and all people deserve his respect, not his fear. We'll keep supplying him with books from all points on the color and culture spectrum and hoping he'll make the connection with the live people we'll continue to make sure he sees and interacts with. And maybe, if there is a next time for you teaching his class, he'll bounce into the room, happy to dance.

Went to Comic-Con today. This involved getting up at 5 am after getting to bed at 12 and to sleep at 1. Also, as we left J with my family for the day, there was a lot of use of my Swing pump, which is pretty good, but not anything I could rely on for long-term heavy use. I don't think there's a pump out there that I could rely on that way, just because of the way I'm built. Coupled with the lack of places at the con to actually use the pump, this made for a nice big snack for J when we finally staggered back in the door at midnight and let my poor aunt and mother go home. He stayed quietly in my lap for a long time, dozing, protesting when I'd move him and returning to suck some more. And he still didn't get it all.

Finally, his Mommy-I-missed-you snugglefit gave way to sleep. I hoisted him up onto my shoulder, which sometimes wakes him up. Tonight it didn't. He stayed there, sleeping, and almost relaxed into me. It was so unexpected, and felt so right, that it brought tears to my eyes. I've never been comfortable describing my feelings for J as "love;" it's a complicated mix of awesome responsibility and frequent frustration while thinking he's a phenomenal little human being, but it's nothing I've felt before and I feel like it should have a better name. Tonight I think I found a better word: not the best, but a step along the way. Home.

Q: What do you get when two writing bibliophiles get married?

A: Paper. MOUNTAINS of paper.

This effect is magnified by the following:
- a tendency of either party to collect mementos
- a desire or need for either party to be prepared to produce and/or compile detailed financial records
- either party having been involved in a publication of any kind
- either party having majored, at any time, in the humanities or social sciences
- a tendency for the family of either party to place special emphasis on greeting cards
- a desire to save money by clipping coupons
- either party dealing with more than two fiduciary entities
- magazine subscriptions

I swear, I don't know how we've been managing not to ski around the place, there's that much paper. Part of it is that most of the useless bits have been more-or-less neatly corralled; unfortunately, they've been hanging out with the useful bits for much too long. We must have shredded more than half a file box worth and sent another box and a half to recycle...and this is mostly my private collection. The most amazing thing is that somewhere in the middle, it completely stopped being stressful. It's not like the stress of full-on hoarding, where just tossing the insert from a 2001-era electric bill can cause tears; I've known for a looooong time that this would need to be done, but I haven't wanted to do it. It was just the scope of the project, which I always knew was huge and which was the biggest reason to put it off. I should have remembered My Brain 101: I don't like throwing things away, but I like organizing; and if I organize some stuff into a "Trash" pile it feels better than tossing it outright.

The downside of committing all this neatness is that some of my old notes, and the humor scrawled in the margins thereof, will end up pretty inaccessible. But it's a price I'm willing to pay. The storage unit is pretty close by if I really need to verify something or other.

Day 29 - A song from your childhood

Dan Crow, "Oops." This song (the pumpkin pie verse) and "Silver Bells" were the two that made singing harmony click for me. Simple thirds, nothing fancy, but still a triumph for little me.

Day 26 - A song that you can play on an instrument

Once upon a time, I took piano lessons. I did NOT get along with the teacher or her style of teaching, and I never really developed a positive association with the instrument like everyone had hoped I would. So of the few recognizable songs I ever learned to play, pretty much nothing remains but my memory of teaching myself to play them. ("Stay" by Shakespear's Sister comes to mind; not many others do.) And now that I'm old and bitter, I'm going to have to go with "Chopsticks" or "Heart & Soul." I can actually play both the melody and the accompaniment (not at the same time) for the second one! Woohoo!

Day 27 - A song that you wish you could play

Vienna Teng, "Harbor." This could have fit in many other categories, but I'm putting it here.

Day 23 - A song that you want to play at your wedding

U2, "All I Want Is You." Actually did play it at my wedding, for the first dance. We provided all the music, which was sort of a snafu; we'd been told the sound system would hook up to an iPod, but never got to test it. So, on the day, of course it didn't work. We were extremely grateful that we'd thought to burn and bring mix CDs. And just as grateful that the playlists had been organized by artist-first-name, when it turned out that the guy in the booth didn't know how to hit shuffle. :p We also included "The Lady of Shalott" and "The Highwayman" by Loreena McKennitt (about three people actually listened closely enough to know what they were hearing, which was amusing), "Jackie's Strength" by Tori Amos (which I would have used as this item were it not for the item below), selections from the Lord of the Rings soundtracks, and the end-theme version of "Honey" from the CCS single collection, plus a bunch of stuff I can't remember at the moment.

Day 24 - A song that you want to play at your funeral

Tori Amos, "Happy Phantom." This is the list item that took me the longest to settle on. There's no shortage of death songs in the world, but some of them are so specific. I mean, I'm not a teenager in tragic love, so there goes what seems like half the library. And for a lot of the rest you have to know how you're going to die. Which usually only happens if you're clairvoyant or suicidal, and I don't plan on being either anytime soon; but I do like to cover my bases. So, if I'm killed in a car accident, especially if I'm the only one who dies from it, I'd like to amend this to "Passage" by Vienna Teng.

Ugh. Heat. We haaaates it, precious, we does.

Day 21 - A song that you listen to when you’re happy

"Fruits Candy," Cardcaptor Sakura single collection. Actually I listen to it and the rest of the album a lot when baking. Which also makes me happy.

Two days' worth again. Whee.

Day 18 - A song that you wish you heard on the radio

Thea Gilmore, "Call Me Your Darling." Not sure if it might have gotten some airplay when it was new, or in places that aren't here, because I haven't done much radio listening anywhere but public places for a few years now. But I haven't heard it anywhere but my own collection yet, and DO WANT.

Day 19 - A song from your favorite album

Another "I have to choose?!?!?" moment. And another round of ultimately fruitless statistical analysis. I don't think there's such a thing as an all-purpose-listening album without a song I find meh, unless it's something like the Mirrormask soundtrack that has a variety of types and tempos of music with very few words. ("Sausages!!")

So I'm going to go with "Where's Neil When You Need Him?" because it's my big gun for getting myself to write. (Consolation prizes go to "American Doll Posse" and "American Idiot.") And with "Ravenstar" by Lunascape, which should have been the end-credits song for Stardust if the world had any taste at all.