#charleston

Early this morning, I posted this message to my Facebook page: 

If anyone continues to feel that we need more relaxed gun laws in this country, I say to you that you are crazy. Slaughter and murder are happening all around. Let's get our collective head out of our collective, fraidy-cat ass, and make some change. Holding ‪#‎charleston‬ in the light.

Twelve hours later, I concur.

I just don't know what it's going to take for our country to move on the issue of gun regulation, nor do I understand why we appear to be marching backwards in time towards an ugly past. Racism and guns are a combustible mix. They aren't causal but the connections are clearly there.

Black Americans are "killed at twelve times the rate of people in other developed countries." (Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight, 18 June 2015) If you want to see how we compare, read this piece from FiveThirtyEight that was published today. A sad comparison within is this: the homicide rate per 100,00 people for black Americans is 19.4; for white Americans it's 2.5.

I am so angry and demoralized about the lack of government leadership on gun control. Columbine happened in 1999. Since, there have been more than 40 more school shootings, including that at Sandy Hook which killed more than 25 and seemed so horrific that I thought change might actually come.

In the meantime, there was the Aurora, CO, theater massacre, the Fort Hood disaster, Oakland, Santa Monica, as well as all the many individuals shot dead. 

Last year alone, there were "283 separate incidents in which four or more people were shot." (Gary Younge, The Guardian, 18 June 2015)

Gun-regulation rhetoric grows louder but nothing happens. Citizens and government leaders who have no real idea what the Second Amendment was written to protect scream like feral beasts about their rights to bear arms. Instead of restricting where those arms can be brought, we expand their reach by allowing them in bars, churches, airports and college campuses. We enact bullshit legislation like Stand Your Ground and we elect racist assholes like Sheriff Joe Arpaio. 

All of this serves as a hideous veil behind which killers hide and then get away. They are police officers who murder unarmed citizens and are then acquitted. They are bigoted punks who promote themselves to neighborhood guardians and shoot and/or report suspicious -read: "of color"- others in their midst. Some are mentally ill, but not all; some are just hateful and mean. They are racist and ignorant. They shouldn't have guns in the first place.

More guns does not a civilized society make.

We watch again and again and again as the tears of mothers, fathers, children and friends are prayed for and then forgotten. We wring our hands in sympathy and outrage but when the dirt covers the coffins, our attention shifts. 

This is shameful. It is not leadership, and it is not compassion. It is immoral and cowardly and weak, and all who do not vociferously insist on change are culpable in the continuation of such unnecessary tragedy and inexcusable disregard. 

If we cannot simply say "NO MORE" after children are slaughtered and families are ripped apart and welcoming church congregations are shot up during a prayer group, then we are a pitifully impotent country. 

Not a day after Dylann Roof murdered nine black people (including three older than 70) at the Emanual A.M.E. church in Charleston, right wing pundits ignored the racial dimension and asserted that his rampage was an attack on faith. They asked whether pastors should be armed. And the Confederate flag at the South Carolina capitol building continued to fly high. 

I don't understand how these images don't haunt change into our leaders. I am outraged and heartbroken and ashamed. 

courtesy of the NY Daily News

An honest take on current events

What is happening in this country? Why are we allowing ourselves to devolve into craven, feckless idiots with no eyes turned toward the future? 

1. Look at Baltimore, and the tragic, though in my opinion the rage is totally understandable, reaction to yet another killing by the police.

Freddie Gray, a young, asthmatic black man chased by the police for as yet unknown reasons, is said to have been having trouble breathing when first pinned down. He also had a leg injury or sustained one during the pursuit. Yet he was put in leg irons, placed in a police van, not buckled into his seat, and by the time he arrived at the station, he had a severe spinal cord injury, a crushed voice box and was unable to talk, walk or breathe. No, it does not appear that any one police officer used excessive force, but the police van in which Gray rode was driven by officers familiar with the "rough ride" concept, a way of driving that results in passenger injury. 

The Baltimore police department has acknowledged that Gray was not given medical attention in a timely manner "multiple times" during the course of his time with them. It is clear that Gray died from the spinal injury he suffered while in the van. So, do the math. Either he was beaten or driven to death and the police are culpable. 

We just watched, literally, Walter Scott be gunned down. He was unarmed and running away.
We've buried Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old, shot to death in a park while playing with a toy gun.
We've buried Eric Garner, the Staten Island man choked to death for selling cigarettes on a street corner.
We've had to watch as a 73-year-old insurance executive moonlighting as a reserve deputy shoots a man, Eric Harris, to death when he mistakes his gun for his Taser. As Harris lay dying, the other cops cuffed him anyway; when Harris said "I'm losing my breath," a cop replied, "*(&(^ your breath."

This egregious, dismissive violence is almost too much to bear. Except bearing it as a stunned observer is easy when you consider the families and communities and senses of self and identity torn apart by these killings. Imagine what they are going through. How they must feel.

Not all those killed were law-abiding citizens, but none deserved to be murdered at the hands of rabid, ill-trained gun-slingers.

We have got to deal with racism, police misconduct and utterly wrong-headed gun laws.

2. Look at Kansas, as it pushes ever backwards in time and civilization. Women's rights to decide what THEY do with and within their OWN bodies are being taken from them at an increasingly vociferous rate and using a disgusting, dramatic marketing campaign. Stupid Brownback, already a titan of failed tax policy, has renamed Dilation & Curettage, dismemberment abortion. And, because he's so keen on celebrating his ban against it, he's taken to a publicity tour of Kansas, reenacting the bill's signing in three different high schools with giant posters of fetuses behind him. Terrifically appropriate, yes?

I happen to be pro-choice, and though I wish everyone were, I'm certainly not into taking away your right to not be. That's what pisses me off about these stringent, ideological bills; they take away the rights of many on behalf of the beliefs of not as many. 
*See also, terrible inaction on behalf of climate change because of lobbyists and their ilk.

3. Let me also issue a brief statement against the recent spate of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men who believe they cannot sit next to a woman who is not their wife on airplanes; men who have refused to sit down unless the women are assigned new seats.
Men, this is YOUR issue, your very narrow and strictly-defined religious prohibition. YOU go find a new seat. 

We're not hearing each other, seeing each other, sitting next to each other for pete's sakes. We're running pell-mell into partisan, one-dimensional silos; we're moving further and further apart, away from science and fact and modernity, and the outcomes aren't looking good.

4. Nepal. I am just stunned by what a tragic disaster the earthquake and its many aftershocks continue to be. Send prayers and vibes and money, whatever you can. 

Three is not for me: Simba, Nanny, Writing and Twosiness

www.em-i-lis.com

(Just look at Leone (aka Lamby) and me at the National Geographic Museum yesterday. I'm not sure my mouth has ever looked so enormous, but whatever. A successful, happy selfie if ever there was one.)

I brought my sister and her wonderful family to the airport this morning. It was a teary goodbye made mercifully short by their need to hurry inside and check in. My parents waited for them in Louisiana, eager, as I was, to scoop Lamby up. It's Nanny's birthday today, too: she would have been 94. I miss her. My mom also misses her, and something about the newest generation going to spend time with the now-matriarch -on today of all days!- made me feel grateful and good. Simba heads south to complete the circle of life.

Lamby has colic and loves to eat, but when he's comfortable and fed, he is a delightful baby with whom I am besotted. I love my sister and her husband as well; they are great parents, and it's a joy to watch them in that role. You can tell that parenthood came to them at the right time. They'd lived life, settled oats, established themselves and then welcomed, with open arms, all the changes and challenges a baby brings.

On their second night here, after we'd enjoyed a marvelous meal and were all tucked in our respective beds, Tom turned to me with concern in his eyes and said, "Is this making you want a third child?"

"Heavens to Betsy, NO!" I nearly shouted back and with an assured immediacy that surprised even me. And I certainly didn't say, "Heavens to Betsy," but you get my drift.

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I loooove babies. Love them. Love holding and nuzzling them, love degrading myself in any manner necessary to elicit their smiles. I love their coos and bleats, their purrs and whinnies. I love the urgency of their hunger cries and their dramatic tongue undulations and lip quivers when the milk doesn't come quickly enough; as if they will literally perish if you withhold the goods for one second more. I love watching them learn and study the world, and I love feeling them burrow into my chest and arms when sleep is a foregone conclusion.

Babies warm me from the inside out. They are so simply complex: meet their elemental needs, and you are rewarded with a front-row seat at an incredible cabaret. In that promise, though, lies enormous responsibility and commitment. A bargain that I happily made -twice!- but do not wish to make again. A contract I was lucky to have a say in and one I have never been so gratefully sure to have left behind as I am now.

Yesterday, Lamby stayed with me while El and Mic picked the boys up from school. It had been a busy day, what with baby visitors and a lengthy trip to the museum, and I was beat (not least because I'd been up since 3:30am for no good reason at all). El put Lamby on a playmat in front of the chair on which I perched, and I'm certain he'd have been content staying there and doing his own thing. But, I want to know him. I want him to know me. He is my nephew, and were anything ever to happen to my sister and Mic, I would raise Lamby as my own.

So I got down on the floor next to him and sang a ridiculous song. He beamed and flirted, and I did all manner of idiotic behavior to keep the smiles a'coming. We locked eyes, and lost in the depths of his I felt again the commitment and fierce love inherent in the responsibility of caring for a dependent child. I remember all the minutes, hours, days spent on the floor with my boys. In the library, playroom and mommy-and-me groups. I remembered the walks and the sleepless nights and the nursing and the boundless love. I remember feeling so happy and lucky to be a mother, but also feeling like my well was not limitless.

Lamby cooed again, and I knew, with utter certitude, that I did not, DO not, have one more round of that in me.

My mother-in-law visited on Tuesday, and my sister asked, "Did you have a favorite age or stage of your kids' development?"

Claire answered, "I loved them all, and you will too, but I was always ready to greet the next one."

I feel much the same way, and while I treasured my time with Lamby, I also felt an odd sort of relief. Relief that my days of endlessly tending a pre-verbal, immobile, eat-and-poop factory are behind me. Caring for newborns is like being sucked through a weird time machine. Whole days pass, and you haven't the slightest idea how you spent them. And you're cool with it. Until you're not. At least, I was, until I wasn't.

Wasn't came round about the time Oliver turned two. One night, the eve of this blog's birth, I declared that if I didn't have some time of my own to dedicate to something of my own, I simply might burst. Repeatedly, sometimes daily, since, I have felt tremendous gratitude for this space. It is endlessly restorative and educational. It has enabled me to document the miles I've traveled since its inception as well as all I've learned about myself on that journey.

My children ushered me into Em-i-lis, into writing my way through our world. Writing helps me process the ways in which being a mother meets and falls short of the expectations I had of it. It helps me vent and learn and better understand myself and my experiences in the weeds of Mom. I am a better mother because of writing, just as I am a better writer and person because I am a mother.

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I can recognize and honor these truths not least because of choice. Because I could decide to have children when I was ready and choosenot to have more when that time came too. Having children and being an aunt has made me more pro-choice than ever. Raising a child is such an immense job, such an extraordinary role. If a woman doesn't want to have children or feels she simply cannot/doesn't want to have more, why on earth would we push to bring her child into the world?

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I missed Lamby today, and I was thrilled to see my boys after school and pepper them with kisses and lasso them with hugs. What's left is for me. For my marriage and my life and all that lies ahead.