I’m thinking about writing more on this topic and why Nick and I don’t teach Isaiah about Santa…but for now, let me just put this up and let you ruminate on your own about the ramifications and ripple effect of Santa Claus.

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There’s nothing like a little perspective to make right your day. While we hear about how hard times are, and we throw self-pity parties and believe our families are hit the hardest, our credit card debts are eating us alive — check yourself. Compare yourself to the world. Prioritize. Reflect. Make some changes.

Get perspective. See how rich you are (financially) compared to the rest of the world.

I knew about the concept of in-laws before I even had in-laws. The Golden Girls, The Facts of Life, Silver Spoons, Growing Pains, Three’s Company…I grew up on television shows that always insinuated something about your non-blood related family: it could be torturous.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the families we all belong to. There are some that have nothing to do with choice – biological families are just handed to you. You have no more say over them than you do over your own existence. And then you have your chosen family – the peeps you meet over the course of your life where you just love ’em so much you call them family because they know more about you than anyone and put up more from you than anyone.

And then there’s in-laws. Not biological, and not technically by choice. They come with the partner you pick, but you have no control over what kind of family your partner belongs to, so it’s not by choice, voice, or preference.

In-laws, it seems, can be like the luck of the draw. I know so many people whose lives are lived in strategic plans to actively AVOID spending time with someone they’re in-lawed to, or at the very least goes through the holidays half wishing they were someplace else so they didn’t have to deal with __________ . And every time I hear that, I cringe. And I feel bad.

I met my in-laws well before I even thought of Nick as my future partner. I thought they were as delightful as anyone could possibly be, and never thought anything of it. Until I realized I was in love with their son/brother/nephew/cousin. And suddenly I had an entire world of people I would consider “family.”

It’s one of the things I know I take for granted – how I breeze through holidays and family get togethers with little to no anxiety about how my in-laws would react to xyz. I suppose I could credit Nick’s entire family for just being great people, but there is a particular phrase that I find hear spoken by his family that I truly wish more people practiced in the life: “I don’t care.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. Nick’s family is crazy caring, but they just don’t care about the fringes. His siblings are professionals and make good livings for themselves and families, but they’re not luxurious folks. As Keith says, “C’mon. Let’s not try to pretend we’re better than what we actually are.” Or how I used to care about what kind of clothes I wore to dinner in their house. It’s not like I wear sweats and a rip off tshirt, but showing up in jeans and comfortable hoodie garners no extra glances. I guess I’ve always thought that most people are constantly trying to prove something to other people, the “I don’t care about anything except YOU” is a welcome change of pace; a welcome cultural shift in perspective.

So often holidays evaporate into the meaningless and consuming aspects of preparation, details, food, tradition, aesthetics, and propriety. And then there’s travel, stress, relationships, and …and…and…

I’ve been laying here in bed, nursing a bad case of fatigue and a headache, while reminiscing how friggin lucky I am to not only have a family of origin that loves me, but a second family of in-laws who don’t treat me like an in-law. When I listen to my friend’s horror stories of drama and cold shoulder treatment and forced apologies and long periods of awkward silence, I inwardly breathe a sigh of relief and gratitude that I don’t have familiarity in that world.

A belated thanksgiving thought, but I am truly thankful for Nick’s family…

Sometimes I wonder
if activism
created compassion
for the unjust
while
my sense of humor
leaked out
of my brain

and then
Nick recites
quotes from West Wing
or
Isaiah dances on
one foot

and humor
floods my house

with no arc in sight

i happily drown in it
–bubbles coming
out of my mouth–

that kind of
happy

The dark staining circle of sexual abuse and violence is a tricky thing. It’s impervious to circumstance, family, culture, age, geography, or status. It can happen anywhere, at any time. And yet, when it hits a mainstream culture – like college football – it suddenly becomes this complex “issue” that everyone needs to start educating themselves about.

Sexual abuse and assault is actually quite easy to understand. It’s an act of power, of ruthless and violent domination. Unfortunately, outside of women, gender, sociology, psychology, and ethnic studies disciplines, most college students don’t learn that.

In Sexual Abuse 101, one would also learn there are circumstances sought out to repeat this abuse. Children, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the elderly, persons of less physical strength with higher rates of vulnerability are targeted. They’re targeted because they’re more likely to be controlled and silenced. They’re also targeted because they’re easier to dismiss if they ever come forward.

The silencing is not usually done by the abuser or rapist. The silencing usually comes from the others who hear of what happened after the abuse is done. Silencing is done by not believing the victim, disregarding their trauma, or just telling them other matters are more important than their violation. It would behoove Penn State students to understand that their “riots” – aka college kids wanting attention and not knowing how to see anything beyond themselves and football – are silencing and hurting the victims and their families.

But who are rape victims to get in the way of a football legacy? If the world was run by college students, this would be about the Board of Trustees firing a “coach” and all this other useless detail – accountability, responsibility, moral integrity, sexual abuse prevention (it takes more than just taking away locker room keys), and trust – is dust compared to JOE PATERNO getting canned.

And speaking of getting canned….

On my Twitter account I received a message basically stating that Mike McQueary should NOT be fired because if he is, it sends a message to all other graduate students that they shouldn’t report anything immoral or wrong to the university.

I replied: Right. He should’ve reported it to the police.

Replied tweet: YES! but the university *might* want crimes on university property reported to them ALSO. fire him = nobody will do that

So, let me get this straight.

1. McQueary witnesses a 10 year old boy being raped by his hero in the Penn State football locker room
2. Calls his dad
3. The next day goes to Paterno’s house to tell him
4. The day after that Paterno, McQueary and Curley meet at Paterno’s house
5. Some time after that McQueary goes through a myriad of meetings with Curley and Schultz who promise to look into it

Based on this, McQueary is called “the whistleblower.” And if fired, then this would discourage other whistleblowers?

Look, I get the academic scene. I went through a grad program, I worked at both college and universities, my best friends are all nerdy PhD grad students who tell me about the hierarchal power dynamic of the academic mill. I get it. I get that McQueary was a lowly grad student. I suppose that’s what other graduate students would see and argue: he had very little power, he told the people he thought he should, and now he’ll get fired for trying to do the right thing.

But here’s what I see: I see a (then) 28 year old man who saw a felony of the worst kind and didn’t think it through. Maybe he didn’t want to, or maybe he was advised not to. Regardless, at 28, at any point over nine years, you don’t think both the university AND the police should be called when it’s clear that Sandusky was not held accountable AT ALL? Not until 9 years later and then the REAL whistle was blown?

McQueary isn’t a whistleblower. To be a real whistleblower, the whistle has to stop the play. The game has to stop. The problem is, the game continued.

It continued.

If a segment of Penn State students want to thoughtlessly support Paterno and make this about football, and if their graduate students fail to report an immoral act or any other crime because McQueary lost his job for not interceding on behalf of a raped child, then Penn State has failed on more than just mishandling sexual abuse. They failed in their education system as well.

Here’s the thing about sexual violence. Once you work in it, once you know how the system works, and once you have 1/10 of an idea just how dark, and terrible, and unjust it is — you can never go back to NOT knowing. You can never return to the land of, “Gosh, that’s terrible.” You become a permanent resident of, “It’s OUR responsible to know exactly what to do if someone we know is raped or we witness an act of violence.”

So, you can imagine the degree to which I had a near heart attack today when I heard about the breaking story of Penn State’s sexual abuse scandal.

If you haven’t heard, read up and yes, it is that bad. And it’s gonna get worse.
Trigger warning, the excerpts of the Grand Jury report are dark and disturbing in every possible way.

I spent a lot of time on Twitter, reading the latest updates, minute by minute. The cancelled presser. The bold op-ed on an entire front page of a Pennsylvania newspaper calling for Penn State President Spanier and head coach Joe Paterno’s resignation. The two officials who stepped down because they’ll likely be charged with perjury. And, of course, Jerry Sandusky, the rapist himself. As of just now, I read about 12 more people have come forward saying they were sexually abused in some way. That brings the number to 20 survivors.

There are so many angles to approach this clusterf*ck. The entire thing is a trainwreck of biblical proportion. The grotesque nature of the crimes. The people who KNEW. What was at stake. The choices that were made. Sports culture. An ivy league name. College football’s most winningest coach.

It seems like everyone’s got a detail they just can’t get over, and I’m not excluded.

My hang up isn’t on JoePa, Sandusky, Spanier, or any of those fools who would actually call themselves men and/or fathers who cared about NOTHING but the potential scandal and fallout and decided to sweep it under the rug. My hang-up is on the 28 year old graduate assistant who walked away from a 10 year old boy being raped by a grown man. He walked away, also saying that he believed both Sandusky and the boy saw him. I do not even want to imagine what that 10 year old kid was thinking as McQueary walked away and called his father.

“He was distraught.”
“He saw something horrifying.”
“He didn’t know what to do.”

I wonder if his reaction would be different if, say, he looked up and saw Sandusky beating this same kid with a bat. I would bet that he would’ve screamed bloody hell and tried to wrestle him to the ground. But because of the vile, sexual, and evil nature of what was taking place, he was stunned. But not stunned enough to not call his own father to figure out what he should do. May I offer his age again: he was 28 at the time.

If I sound judgmental, it’s because I am. Even if you’re stunned to paralysis, after about 10 minutes, once you realize you just witnessed a child rape, how do you NOT call the police? Or have some kind of thought resembling, “God, I hope that kid’s alright.”

I think my favorite response on Twitter was something like, “As a 104lb grandmother, there’s no way I wouldn’t have done everything to get that kid safe.” But a former football player, someone who had been bred to fearlessly throw himself in the path of other beastly men with brute strength to get a first down, a grown man, sees an act of sexual violence upon a child, and…what? That’s too scary to confront? And at NO point since 2002 did McQueary ever think the police should’ve been notified? Or any of those officials?

Is sexual violence so removed from the consciences of male athletes and coaches that when it does happen, there’s no tool available in their system to dismantle the situation? But something tells me that rape and sport culture, especially football, are not strangers. What are we teaching young men? In college culture, if a woman is raped, she was either asking for it or lying. If it’s a child, walk away.

If there’s one thing I know about college football, coming from a Buckeye fan who married into a family who schedules weddings around college football games, there’s no such thing as doing the minimum. Staff and athletes have mantras of honor, excellence, and going beyond, teamwork, brotherhood, achievement. Strength. No pain. Give it your all.

But when in the face of sexual violence, when the opportunity to save a young child comes, Mike McQueary walked away and made a call for help. The problem is, McQueary LEFT. He left. And the call of help was to help himself deal with what he saw and figure out what to do while that boy was left alone with a monster.

So, Mike McQueary, even if you never broke any law, even if everyone says you tried to do the right thing, even if Penn State somehow redeems itself in many many years from now, even if Spanier, Paterno, and others find ways to save face, there is one person that matters in this story and there’s no way to hide from your memory. For all the years of studying routes and back-up plans, defense and offense, for all the lifetimes spent studying plays, recovering fumbles, and coming back from adversity, you have to live with this basic truth for the rest of your life: you left that boy to deal with his nightmare alone.

We set our clocks back an hour, yes, but can we ever really go back in time? No. Of course not.

Lately, I have been thinking how quickly our small children move on to the next thing. From mispronouncing a word to saying the word correctly. From laying on their backs at the highest level of a crib to climbing out of the bottom setting of that same crib. Little by little, inch my inch, they overcome any struggle or challenge. Poof, one day they can pick up a crayon and say BROWN. It startles me sometimes when I reflect on how quickly it all goes. I blink and two years go by.

I blink and I know another twenty years will pass and he’ll be telling me some obscure story about his social life, I’m sure, and I’ll be holding onto every word, like I’m holding onto his chubby legs and arms right now.

What is nostalgic to me is ecstasy for him. Each little milestone empowers him even more. And knowing that that is the way it’s supposed to be comforts me as I watch him try to jump off a neatly arrange row of toilet paper which he set on the ground by himself.

Instead of grabbing my camera or trying to scribble it down to record it, I just linger and meet his smiling eyes with my own teary ones. Grateful I am here. Grateful he is born.

But that doesn’t make growth – for him or me – any easier to comprehend.