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
I’m attempting to start a series on my blog, helping me do two things.
1) Document the creative and different foods I put together — forcing myself to rethink conventional food prep and cooking
2) Provide a tiny space on the internet that answers the annoying question that I get all the time, “What do you eat?” once I say I’m vegan
This week I answered a question I’ve been asking for a long time: what to do with the pulp of veggies and fruit when I juice them.
As many mornings as I can, I try and juice fresh fruits and vegetables for me, Nick, and Isaiah. Juicing veggies is an excellent way to stuff more good nutrition in your kid who loves fruits but won’t bother with anything green and leafy.
Isaiah will slurp down green peppers and kale, provided it’s in a rotary of apple, carrots, pears, and cucumber. I prepare everything and let him drop it in the juicer shoot and he squeeeaaaals in delight when the juice shoots out of the machine. Add a straw and voila! my kid has a decent amount of vitamins in his little bod.
I tend to make mine as green as possible. In addition to peppers and kale, I use beets, carrots, celery, and anything that I think has some hidden vitamin that I normally do not have in my diet. The juicer producers a ton of pulp. All of the water’s out so it’s as dry as a desert, perfect for…something.
Sauteeing it just doesn’t do it because the fruit and veggies just don’t jive that great under heat.
BUT! two options emerged this week. First, I added some canned sea salt tomatoes, tossed the pulp with olive oil and pepper and it made a handsome salsa. Hearty whole grain tortilla chips. Mhm mhm mhm. That pulp was gone in an afternoon.
For another fresh round of juice pulp, I added some toasted almonds and used it as a lettuce wrap filler. Boston (Bibb) lettuce laid on a plate, add a few slices of avocado, cover with newly seasoned pulp which explodes with pear, apple, carrots, kale, cucumber, and beets – tasty little suckers, I tell ya.
It’s another way to treat your fruits and veggies — juice ’em in the morning and give your digestive system a break from working so hard by giving it fresh and raw juice. And then use that pulp to fill your tummy up later!
On so many levels, this explains my intrepid spirit to go, do, be, feel, experience anything and everything. And simultaneously, the sardonic evil emotional twin that accompanies this. I would argue, however, that my writers’ greed has another contradicting face: the voracious need for community.
God’s bipolar.
weeping in our losses
laughing a second later
savoring our whispered prayers
all the while
maintaining a deep secret
of identity
shroud in possibility
shouldering the accusations
and disbeliefs we hurl at It.
nodding
shrugging
dipping Its fingers
in the ocean
–holy schizophrenia–
From a distance, yet next door
It voyeurs wars and indifference
and celebrates
a built bridge
across nations, or even streets
while
the rivers wash the stones anew
–Bless me —
with your manic depressive tears,
share with me your ability to be Here
and There.
So I
–so fragmented and lost–
can feel
Your undivided fullness
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.
Doing research for a writing assignment and found myself in arms/pages of Audre Lorde’s, “Sister Outsider.”
I wonder how some people survive without reading her brilliance. She is such loving brilliance.
The distortion of relationship which says “I disagree with you, so must destroy you” leave us as Black people with basically uncreative victories, defeated in any common struggle. This jugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion of affirmation of self is an attack upon my self – or that my defining myself will somehow prevent or retard you self-definition. The supposition that one sex needs the other’s acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons toward a common goal.”
You see? We do nothing NOTHING for anyone, least of all ourselves, when we shrink to make others comfortable, when we pander to the least to avoid conflict or challenge, or when we prostrate ourselves to avoid confrontation of the mind and heart. I think maybe if we were all more fully realized, we would be capable of living our lives fearlessly and, consequently, more truthfully.
I’m sick with a virus and can’t do much of anything right now. Except send some love to all those out in Oakland.
While I’m not sure how I feel about the Occupy movement as a whole, I do know many people who are reporting the police violence and brutality in Oakland and want to send my support to all of you who are organizing and trying to respond with energy, positivity, and strength in the face of threats of violence.
This article has been floating around quite a bit and since it’s on parenting and relationships, felt an overwhelming need to respond and clarify my position on the relationship and friendship changes when a person has a child.
1. Why did you decide to have a kid anyway if you’re so stressed out? You chose this.
Response: Why did you decide to get up out of bed this morning if you knew that struggle and pain and work lie ahead of you? For many of us, most of our lives are building blocks of choices and while having children (for most ) IS indeed a choice. It’s also a blinded choice where you do not know how you will navigate it until you are in the drivers’ seat going 50 miles per hours on a road laden with oil.
2. I hate kids.
Response: I myself personally am not a kid person. I’m nuts about my own kid, and I have come to appreciate things about having a child that make me more sensitive and aware to the world around me, but hating kids is like going around to a friend caring for a parent and saying, “God, I hate old people.” When is it acceptable to hate children? Because they can’t wipe their noses and drool on your work clothes before you even go out the door? They’re PEOPLE, not pets.
3. It’s going to be a late night at the bar, soooooo, I hope you can make it. *sarcastic tone*
Response: I actually go to bed really late because I have a spouse in graduate school who is up pretty late working on his papers. And I have a full time job in addition to researching and writing my own projects. I can see why you’d assume that, but I’m tired because I live my life quite fully. I stopped measuring life by my alcohol tolerance when I affirmed myself as a writer, not a mother.
4. What happened to you? You used to be fun.
Response: Change is not just Obama jargon. Change is a part of life. Interdependent families, with two partners dedicated to the livelihood of another human takes an enormous toll on your life. You pay with time, energy, and brain space. “Fun” as defined by late nights, spending money, traveling changes, spontaneity transforms over time. But I don’t know if that’s all parenting related. It’s like how making out in a twin bed was really hot when you’re 20 years old. At 32, that just sounds ridiculously uncomfortable. Long, deep kisses in a car before your partner goes off to work? Um, yeah. That’s hot. And still a lot of fun.
5. Why does everything revolve around your kid?
Response: See answer #2. Kids are people. They’re as diverse as they are curious, and they change daily. Children are not soon-to-be adults. They are fully formed, fully ready, fully alive. And they require attention from the moment they wake to the moment they fall asleep. And even then you’re making sure they’re still breathing at night when you watch them sleep. If it’s not children, others find vices and projects that require attention: caretaking, work, social lives, gardens, reading, fitness. People fill their lives with all kinds of time-consuming efforts. A child, a person, has feelings, thoughts, questions, and energy that is directed at their parents. They get priority.
6. You need a box of condoms. (Usually directed at families with multiple children.)
Response: It IS possible that having more than 2 children in the United States of America is actually NOT caused by mental illness.
Choice can be exercised in the refraining of reproduction, choosing how and when to reproduce, and how many offspring you’d like to have. Some people actually decide, and love, to have big families. It’s true. And they’re not all trying to get a reality TV show, either.
7. Do you want more?
Response: Families come in all sizes and shapes and colors. For me, I don’t know if I want to have more. I really love enjoying my son at every stage he is at and giving him as much attention and love as I can possible shower on him. I don’t buy that you have to give a child a sibling to be “normal.” I don’t buy that you should give birth relatively close in years so your children will “get along” and have one another to grow up with and play. Too often, I hear friends who are parents go with the flow and forget that having #2 #3 #4 is just as much and as big of a choice as deciding to become a parent. But my decision to become a parent of one doesn’t mean I want to be a parent of 5. Let me figure it out. I’ll know when I know. And, contrary to what a lot of people think, women don’t have as much control over their fertility as you’d like to think.
8. I understand.
Response: No you don’t. Just like how I don’t understand pre-school teachers. I will never get how people can do certain things day in and day out. Why pretend you know what it’s like to have and choose this responsibility of parenting? You didn’t choose it, so why say you do? The best is to say, “That sounds like a lot. I’m sure you’ll get through it just fine!”
9. I’m important, too.
Who says you’re not? Most of my childfree friends CHOOSE to be childfree, but also feel this sudden urge to petition all their childfree peeps and claim a day of importance. The nuclear family unit is dissolving. Today “families of origin/families related by blood” are different than “families of choice” and this distinction is important. No matter where we are, we need family. We need a group of people to support us and hold us when times are shitty. Family/community is one of the few places to be affirmed of our value and worth. If you find yourself saying this a lot, it has little to do with my choice to be a mom. It’s more to do with your need to find a group of people who love you.
10. Why don’t you have time for me anymore?
Response: Dude. I ask myself that very same question every. single. day. Get in line. It’s not all about you. Or me. Or the kid. It’s about transition, changing priorities, proximity, new demands, and juggling self, health, relationships, and friendships. Adjust your expectations of me. That’s what I had to do.