My School Bus Sedan

24 Jan

I’d be destined for jail if the supposedly existing seatbelt law were anything more than some distant formality that only exists on paper somewhere. In the states I’d have all kinds of extra charges, I’m sure, of reckless endangerment and who knows what kinds of other great stuff they could drum up. For now, though, I live in small town Southern Mexico, and I drive a 4-door school bus at liberty.*

I drive half of my kids’ kindergarten home in a four-door Nissan Sentra. There are only fifteen kids at this fabulous school, so the six- and sometimes seven- that I chauffeur around town is only minimally outrageous. It’s perfectly in keeping with that aspect of Mexican spirit that I so appreciate- making happen whatever needs to happen, despite the obstacles. It’s that spirit that causes folks to ride a motorcycle with a full-sized ladder, for example, or to tie a refrigerator on top of a taxi. It’s that spirit that made my mother-in-law encourage Conan to “just do some kind of home remedy” to fix the brakes on a borrowed car once: Extreme Driving, A Year- Round Oaxacan Sport. It’s why my weights for exercise are different sized plastic bottles filled with sand or concrete. Folks here tend to be much more creative in finding solutions when they don’t have the ideal resources or circumstances, and I love that about Mexico.

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just waiting for the kids to get out of school

School buses don’t exist here, and vans use up too much gasoline. All four of us families in the carpool have small cars, so at least I don’t feel like we’re the only ones schlepping the kids around like sardines. I’m still so thrilled that we have any working car at all, I do a happy rain-dance sort of prayer/celebration every day I go outside and the car starts up.

It almost didn’t start on my second day of carpool, and my heart essentially stopped for several beats.“This cannot be happening already! We can’t be flaking out on the second day of carpool! This car cannot be as bad as the other one!” I might or might not have screamed at the trees and stray dogs. But then it did start and life continued to be well. Well, there’s a trick to it, and I think I’ve got it figured out. Good enough. 

I do a lot of screaming in the car, but not like you imagine with me as the bus driver. (I haven’t even cursed yet!) All of my screaming happens before the kids get in the car, when I’m screaming (aka singing) along with my music because (GASP) there’s a working CD player in the car! So I get 25 minutes of alone time with my jams before the seven little savages hop in the car. It’s really a brilliant set-up.

It takes me ten minutes to get out the door with all of them. The teachers help me get their shoes on, and even my almost-two-year-old (the 2nd youngest in the posse) can carry out his own lunch box. Despite that help, and despite telling myself that I’ll get faster at it with practice, somehow corralling them all is more time-consuming than I psyche myself up for it to be. Two weeks in, I’ve only gotten about one minute faster, and my measly minute is totally negated when one or more of the older kids are sleeping.

They hold hands in pairs to go out the door and get into the car. The baby of the crew (one year old) goes in the car seat in the back. Khalil and one other kid get strapped into the front seat (with the lap part of the seat belt). Then in the other two seats in back we squeeze in another 3 and sometimes 4 kids, obviously not with a seat belt because it just won’t go over all of them.

They are some very well-behaved savages, except for my two savages, of course, who feel more at liberty to throw tantrums because I’m the Mommy. So of course it’s always Lucia who’s screaming about something if there’s screaming happening. Sigh. It’s pretty easy to distract and entertain them all with fun games like, “Who’s not here? Raise your hand if you’re not here!” And we pretend that none of them are there. I love this age group (one to four). Mostly they entertain themselves, and if I really need to distract them, all I have to do is encourage them to talk about bodily functions and fluids. Poop is their number one idea of fun discourse these days.

The kids sometimes enjoy my music-fest as well. Lucia is currently obsessed with a Sleater-Kinney song. When I play it she and Khalil tap their fingers and wave their arms in time to the music. (I can’t imagine where they learned to dance in the car. Ahem.) A couple of the other kids mentioned that they liked one of the songs I was listening to, too. They will surely be finger-dancing with us eventually.

Lucia’s current favorite jam

Really, carpool with the kids is kind of a blast.

Thanks to the universe and Conan’s savvy in car shopping, we found an automatic car in the right price range- which is not the easiest task around here. The original plan was for us to get a standard, and I was going to learn how to drive a stick. I already had a teacher lined up. Being the brilliant procrastinator that I am, however, I didn’t get lessons before buying a car. So by the time we were buying the car I would’ve had about 2 days to learn how to drive it before rolling across town, navigating the countless speed bumps, the holes in the road, the motorcycles swerving around cars unexpectedly, with a carload of small children loaded in.  “And on top of that you want to be learning something new?” Conan asked, shaking his head at my shrug and grin. (Perhaps I’ve adopted some of that “I’ll make it work anyway” attitude. Thank you, you wonderful Mexican folks, for teaching me this important life skill.)

Despite my nonchalance, I was a train wreck of nerves the first day I had to go get everyone. I had to call my mom to talk myself back into calm (okay, this might be a frequent occurrence). She reminded me that I do actually know how to drive, AND it’s far from being my first day driving in Puerto. And I’m certainly not worried about dealing with the seven small savages; two of them are mine, and the rest are sweet and lovely little savages, too. I got this.

So I didn’t panic that first day when there was some random rerouting lane-share happening for no apparent reason. The traffic cop didn’t even look twice at me when I passed again with a boatload of children. Totally rocked it. All was fine.

I sweated a bit that first Friday, though, when I thought I picked up a kid by mistake. There’s one little boy who goes to his dad’s house some days and his mom’s house other days. When he goes to his dad’s, he’s part of our carpool, but not when he goes to his mom’s. Well, another parent asked me to pick him up one day, and I thought that maybe his dad hadn’t been able to get ahold of me or something. I stopped at the usual spot but no one was there. I called his dad and he assured me that no, it was not his day. I pictured the little boy’s mom going to pick him up, frustrated that I’d taken him by accident and possibly questioning my faculties. The parent who had called me about him didn’t answer the phone. I wiped the sweat from my brow and drove on to the next drop-off spot, where, luckily, the boy was, indeed, supposed to be going, to go play with another girl in the carpool.

It’s true that driving here is not at all like driving in the US, but it’s not as tricky or scary as Conan might make it sound. Nobody can drive all that fast, thanks to all the speed bumps, pedestrians in the street, animals, bicycle carts, and other random road blocks. One day last week half of the highway-two lanes, for about a block’s stretch- was closed off for what appeared to be some kind of festival they were having in the middle of the road. (Highway is a loose term, I guess. There are two lanes going one direction and two going the other direction.) It’s never a dull moment on the road but it’s not rocket science to navigate, either. Many folks around here do it without ever having lessons even.

Of course, there are other things to navigate additionally, like the situation with the folks on the side of the road/in the middle of the road. Sometimes there are street performers who are juggling or spinning fire or hula hooping or something. Those are the traveling kids, I presume. There’s been a family selling some kind of blow-up toys at one big intersection. There’s another guy on crutches with only one complete leg who is often at one intersection asking for money. There’s another kid (adolescent, I suspect, although he could be in his twenties) who often asks for money at an intersection, who calls me “madre” and blesses me, even the days I haven’t had any change to give.

Then there are several different guys who seem to take turns at a couple different intersections, cleaning windshields for change. Now, this is a great service in our dusty, sandy town, as pretty much everyone’s windows need cleaning every single day to be in optimal condition. Furthermore, they are working, providing a service, and not just asking for money, and I get that for many people that encourages them to give. (Not that I have drama with people asking for money because they have no other options. I think that’s a hard and nasty job in its way, and I am not judging them, especially when I don’t have a clue what circumstances have forced them into that position.) But apparently I have a sign on my head that says, “Please wash my car, no matter what I say,” because almost all of these guys are aggressively insistent with me. Is it because I’m a woman? Because I’m light-skinned? Because I look foreign? Some of it is just them, perhaps, because it does happen to Conan some, too. I’ve learned to have a few coins ready every day, like a “highway” toll I pay to someone or the other every day. I feel pretty lucky that I can spare a few pesos every day now.

In general, I’m thrilled about so many aspects of my mini school bus drive. I’m pleased to be one of the school bus drivers for our kids and their friends. I’m so pleased that Conan and I are now able to share the burden of labor and gas money. I’m so happy that my kids are stoked to see me, and that now Lucia isn’t the only ones whose parents never go to school to get her.

I miss my daily walks and bus rides with Khalil, in which we grunt and scream at the sight of every dump truck, bus, and other large vehicles/heavy machinery. My body doesn’t much appreciate driving in place of walking, but it’s still a totally worthwhile tradeoff, for my kids to go to a school we all feel good about. I’m ecstatic for Khalil to be in “school” with his big sister, instead of at home destroying my house out of boredom.

All in all, getting this carpool thing down is another daily adventure. Similar to riding my bike to and from work- navigating through the sand and around the rocks and without splashing mud on my clothes and carrying rocks to scare off the mean dogs- driving the carpool is another daily task that makes me feel like I’m living a video game.  I can only hope that your daily commute is half as interesting and fun as mine. And if not, I humbly suggest that you change it up, and at the very least, add some finger-dancing to the mix.

xoxoxo,

Julia

*Don’t get me wrong: I am a seatbelt fanatic under other circumstances. My dad, a photographer for the police department, used to bring home pictures of accidents to teach us about the importance of seat belts if we were in rebellion over it. My parents wouldn’t start the car if we didn’t have seat belts on.  And it makes good sense; it’s an easy, simple, free thing to do that is likely to save your life. And yet that is not the reality that we live in; it’s just not always possible, as I’ve written about before.

 

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Our Mexerican Christmas Spirit

8 Jan

 

“But Santa didn’t come to my house!” one of my students jokingly complained when I told her my new shoes (“princess shoes” as Lucia calls them) were from Santa Claus. “Sometimes, especially when you’re an adult,” I replied, “you just have to make your own magic.” I told her how I even took the time to wrap them up, even though I’d bought them for myself. I acted like it was a surprising gift when I opened it- not to trick my kids, but rather to enjoy myself.

 

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My princess shoes from Santa Claus

This year was by far my best Christmas as a grown up. It was very much not USA-style and also not Mexican-style. It was very much ours, a lovely mix of traditions and inventions and doing what feels good and makes people happy. (Satisfied Sigh.)

 

As Christmas neared here in Puerto, I remained blissfully isolated from all the consumerist, excessively capitalist culture that overwhelms the holiday season in the US. Plus the temperature is in the 80s every day, so it’s easy to feel blissful, or at least generous and optimistic.

 

I was excessively lucky in the capitalism department this Christmas, so I tried to spread the wealth-based joy around (nope, wealth and joy are not the same thing, but sometimes a thoughtfully purchased thing can bring great joy). I got my Christmas bonus from work (Thank you, Mexico!) I got money from family to spend on Christmas (a shit-pot-full when you convert those dollars into pesos!! Thank you, family!) I immediately went out and got WILD AND CRAZY! I was a spending machine. I bought all three of the books I liked for the kids instead of deciding on two! I bought a tree-topper star that cost 1/3 of what the tree cost, just because it was the best and I knew Lucia would love it. It was a major shopping extravaganza, at least compared to my usual non-spending, thrifty self.

 

When it came time to open presents, it didn’t seem like I had been on a wild and savage shopping binge. The kids each got six presents, plus two stocking stuffers from the elves. Six presents is a lot around here, although it’s practically nothing in the US. Some of their presents were items that they needed anyway, like a new towel for Khalil, and new shoes for Lucia. They each got two new books, because, you know, priorities. Khalil got a new puzzle, with an easy part he can do himself and a harder part that Lucia has to help him with (I patted myself on the back extra on that one). The elves brought us new mugs, including mini-sized mugs (delicate glass, says Lucia) for the kiddos. I immediately made hot chocolate to break them in, of course. The elves also brought us new bath sponges, with different colored squares meshed into the loufa part- and that continues to totally thrill the children, even days later.

 

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Our tree,  complete with presents (guitar is an old present)

Aha, I said to myself! This is what makes giving gifts so marvelous! When it makes somebody sincerely excited or pleased because of this useful or interesting thing that you thought of for them, gift-giving is utterly joyful. Sitting around drinking hot chocolate with our matching mugs was so surprisingly fulfilling. Watching Khalil be able to open presents for the first time, appreciating his rapture in tearing paper, was so gratifying. Even when Lucia cast aside the book I had ordered her off of Amazon for the more graphically-enticing one, it was okay. Days later, once she finally wanted to read it, she asked to read it about 7 times straight. It’s so endorphin-producing, this gifting thing done well. When giving gifts is obligatory, when you’re too strapped for cash or don’t have a clue about what someone would truly enjoy, that’s when gift-giving is a nightmare. But this having small children who are stoked about everything? Gift-giving nirvana.

 

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Khalil showing me how he’s going to drink from his new mug

So I’ve willingly spent more money on non-emergency items in the past two weeks than I have possibly in the past few years. But I’m not worrying about spoiling my kids. I have zero worries about my kids becoming thing-obsessed Me!Me!Me!Monsters. First and foremost because they don’t watch TV. No ads = less implanted desire for crap. Number two, because they aren’t surrounded by kids who have everything they want and another 82 billion things they might or might not even want. Number three, because I am their mother and Conan is their father and neither of us are especially materialistic. Number four, because they already have a room full of toys strewn about everywhere, thanks to birthday parties and grandparents and whatnot. We’ve probably bought about 10 of the 100 items currently being showcased on the bedroom floor. They have plenty, but they don’t get new stuff all the time; mostly only on their birthday, Christmas, and certain grandparent visits. I feel like it’s a pretty happy medium, and I’m grateful that my “village” is there to help make some of my kids’ material dreams happen.

 

So what else did I buy with my Christmas bonus money, besides these few gifts for the kids? I bought them a #$%^damn Christmas tree, for the first time, finally. Since it was the first Christmas we spent here, at our house with electricity and not in Juquila at my mother-in-law’s, I decided it was time. Well, maybe I bought it mostly because my four year old asked me relentlessly if we were going to decorate the Christmas tree yet, until finally I just had to make time to run out and buy one. Every single morning she’d ask, “Are we going to decorate the Christmas tree? Can we do it now? No? After school?” And every day I’d be like, “I still have to buy the Christmas tree. We can only decorate it on the weekend.” (Because we literally have about 10 minutes of time where all four of us are together and awake on week days.) So finally I made time to go select our permanent plastic tree.  A fake one, mind you, because there are not a lot of real pine trees around here, and they don’t cut them down and sell them for Christmas.

 

After I bought it, I still had to listen to a couple more days of whining about decorating it now, today, right now. “We can do it with Papi while you’re at work,” she reassured me on Friday morning, trying to convince me it didn’t require the whole family. (“I don’t think so, my darling. I want to do it with you.” I countered.)  “We don’t need to wait for Papi,” she insisted on Saturday morning, and I insisted that we could indeed wait a few more hours.

 

Once it was a reality, Lucia told me about 20 times that day some version of, “I’m so happy we decorated the Christmas tree!” Thankfully, Conan weighed down one side of our tree with a concrete block, which made it last several days longer than the 16 hours that I estimated before the nearly-two year-old destroyed it or got destroyed by it. It has zero breakable ornaments on it, so I’m also winning there. (Perhaps it’s a blessing that I can’t find the Xmas decorations I bought the first year we were in Mexico?)

 

What else did I lavishly purchase, you ask? I got all the ingredients to make Christmas cookies, including sprinkles and glittery edible stuff and store-bought icing, because, sorry, Martha Stewart, some of your recipes are too damned hard. It took me (us?) about 4 days to make cookies this year, mostly because the little one is neither little enough for lots of nap time nor big enough to actually help. Mostly he wreaked his usual havoc upon the process, until I got smart and gave him and Lucia their own bowl of flour and measuring spoons and such to work with on their own, AWAY from the big-girl cookies. Even then, I only made two dozen cookies before I officially declared that they had done a great job, and we are finished now. I refrigerated the rest of the dough. I ended up making cookies late at night and early in the morning in the days that followed so that we’d have enough to give everyone. I let Lucia decorate enough for everyone to get one decorated one. That was all I could handle, since each cookie took about 7 minutes to decorate, all the while fighting off Khalil who immediately devoured the cookies I gave him to decorate. He is right at the perfect age of being big enough to understand that he is not supposed to eat the cookies (he’d point to his mouth and shake his head no) but unable to actually resist the impulse, shoveling the cookie into his mouth immediately after telling himself not to.

 

More than anything, it was important to me to make cookies so that the kids get excited about giving gifts almost as much as receiving. I don’t think they are capable of appreciating the giving quite as much as us adults can be, but at least if they get in the habit and have a good time doing it, it’s a start. “I’m going to give them the bag of cookies and they’re going to hug me and say, ‘Gracias,’” Lucia told me, smiling and giddy after we sorted them. It’s a start.

 

So what else, you ask, did I purchase on my rampage? I got gifts for the parents who have covered our butts by fearlessly, selflessly driven Lucia to school this whole school year so far. I donated to the White Helmets in Syria (Dear universe, it’s the least I could do). I determined what gift I plan to give when my buddy in the copy room has his (and his wife’s) twins in spring. I chipped in on the massage gifts for Lucia’s teachers (thanks, other parents, for organizing that business). I’ve spent almost all of my Xmas money on local vendors, carefully avoiding our two or three big-time department stores (yep, only a few in existence here).

 

I’m feeling pretty damned satisfied about my overall Christmas experience- perhaps for the first time in my adult life. Besides being excited about gift-giving, I was also feeling extra good this Christmas for various other reasons. For one, I made awesome lists and got a large portion of my shopping done in one day, even with Khalil strapped to me (high-five to myself!). Some other random good stuff happened, but mostly the thing is that this year I was pretty much thrilled with everything. I adopted the attitude of my children that everything is fabulous.

 

In part, it’s that I’m for-real in my 30s and I don’t have to wait around for someone else to give me permission to do something, or to join me in my joy. I know what my mission is and I will figure out how to accomplish it, mostly on my own, and still enjoy the hell out of it, thank you. So, for example, when the four year old won’t shut up about decorating a Christmas tree, but you don’t even have a tree to decorate? Go out and buy one on your lunch break. (Or do like we did last year and get a tree stub with various branches to decorate. It totally works.) Plastic trees even fit on the bus. Your coparent doesn’t like shopping? Great. Make your list and go. When there’s no one to ask, you can make yourself be more decisive in your purchases without anyone being upset about it. No one around who’s a brilliant gift-chooser and you don’t want to be disappointed? Buy it for yourself and wrap it. Or at least snap a photo of what you want and send it to someone who might buy you a gift. You are kind of a grinch but kind of a jolly old person? Figure out what traditions reflect your values and hopes, what things bring meaning and joy to your family’s life, and make a valiant effort to follow through with those. Throw the rest out the window. Don’t kill yourself doing even the things that you think are worthwhile. This year, just making cookies was so hectic that the craft-making/gifting I planned with Lucia was over the top. Maybe another time. All of this is my teensy-tiny tidbit of self-wisdom as I near my 33rd birthday. It was so helpful for me. (Who in the world really wants to go back in time? Ugh.)

 

Despite some of my concerns, I decided to do the whole Santa Claus thing with the kids, for now, while it can still be somewhat vague magic. Once Lucia starts asking intense questions (beyond the current, “What’s a chimney?”), I’m gonna have to give her a more-real explanation. But I’m already thinking about how to phrase it all, because we are not giving up on magic. Magic there will be- every Christmas and all kinds of days in between. Because sometimes, or maybe usually, when you’re a grown-up, you have to make it for yourself. You have to make it for other people, too. That is the magic. Sharing the joy. Sharing the power of our love. So better “late” than never, happy holidays and Happy, Happy Magic-making and Joy-sharing, from my Mexerican family to yours!

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Reversing Course: Appreciation of Things I Used to Loathe

30 Dec

Now that I am almost completely acclimated and comfortable here in Puerto Escondido, I’m ready to start thinking about leaving. Go ahead and shake your head; it might be a little crazy. Apparently I equate comfort with stagnation, or so it would seem based on the course of my life thus far.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking lots about why I love it here now, and the multitude of things and people that I’ll miss when I move back to the states. I’ve been reflecting on all the things that I disliked when I first arrived in small-town Oaxaca that now make me feel kinda warm and fuzzy.* Here are a few of the things I’ve adapted to appreciate.

Anti-Safety:

I don’t love the lack of safety, per-se. I do think that it’s nice to not need lids that caution you about hot coffee being hot. I appreciate that kids can be trusted to differentiate the chocolate in a chocolate egg from the plastic toy inside that is too big to choke on anyway. I love that nobody’s actions are based around whether or not they might get sued. It certainly makes a cliff more thrilling when there is no railing to prevent you or the cars from falling off the giant cliff into the abyss. I like the tremor of excitement from the occasional motorcycle ride, the breeze in my hair when I’m riding in the back of a pick-up truck. I’ll miss seeing folks holding on to a bar, riding the back bumper of a truck. Furthermore, I think that the safety measures in place in the US aren’t typically there to protect vulnerable people, and they don’t protect everyone equally. For example, they don’t want kids to have those chocolate eggs with toys in them, but they expect refugee kids to defend themselves in court (but that’s part of a whole ‘nuther rant, I guess).

While sometimes I think the lack of safety measures here is the opposite extreme, I’m no longer shocked by it. I might have gotten nervous watching the one year old I saw the other day, standing up and bouncing up and down on the moving motorcycle with his parents, no helmet for anyone. But I didn’t freak out at anyone. The electrical socket that my kid tried to stick his fingers in among the baby books in the library this year was a bit unreasonable, in my opinion, but I distracted my kid and kept my mouth shut. I still can’t quite appreciate the irony of not having soap in the bathroom of a hospital or clinic. But mostly I am able to laugh about it all. In the van to Juquila this trip, I was marveling at the seat belt situation. Even after years of being here, even though I’m not shocked- it’s still a little baffling. They took such pains to make sure that nobody ever uses the seat belts- folding them up neatly and putting plastic cuffs around them, just to be on the safe side (hahaha).

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Seatbelts? What are those things for?

I certainly appreciate this forcing me to go with the flow more, to just breathe my prayer into the wind and keep going, something I might never have learned to do raising kids in the US.

(Isn’t culture funny, though? This culture is not big on some kinds of safety, but people do vaccinate their kids, almost religiously- partially because it’s free. Women will totally wait in line for 3 hours, a few days postpartum, to diligently vaccinate their baby. It’s pretty impressive what public health campaigns could do if they put the resources into it. Imagine what things would look like if they gave out helmets for kids!)

Anti-Technological-Dependence:
When we first moved to Juquila, in 2012, that first month we ran out of everything. We spent a couple days with no water for washing (or flushing, etc. Yeah. Think about all the implications of no water). The electricity went out for a day and a half. We ran out of drinking water and the truck with the big jugs just wasn’t coming. Sometimes the cell phone wires were so saturated that you could’t make a phone call. The internet went down in the whole town for a week. I couldn’t imagine how all this lack of services and technology was possible. How can people live like this? I didn’t even realize then that that would be my “easy” life, compared to living in Puerto without electricity.

More than anything, living on little-to-no technology for all this time has reframed my ideas about necessity. We’ve now spent a year and a half in our house with electricity- the same amount of time we spent without it. I still feel grateful every morning that I plug in the coffee maker, every night that a fan blows on us, every time Khalil goes to flip the switch all by himself- a baby who can take electricity for granted. We’ve made so much progress, and I don’t really want to live without any of it. But I know that I can. Doing without has trained me to ask a lot of questions about what’s important in life.

Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Google. I love my National Public Radio news. I love the Hurricane preparedness website. I love exchanging morning emails with my mom while I’m at work. I dream of all the music I would have Youtube access to with home internet. Khalil and I just did a video call with my mom while visiting in Juquila, and it was so fun! It made me think that the whole feel of my life might be different with at-home internet. Publishing a blog every week would be less of a monumental challenge, among other things. I could read all of the interesting articles that my friends post on Facebook. I could convert celsius to fahrenheit when my kid has a fever without having to call my mom.

It would be helpful to have internet. But really, I don’t need to read all of the articles on Facebook. Even the fact that this year I got a cell phone with Facebook access was another good news/bad news scenario. It’s nice to be able to “keep in touch” like that, but some days it just makes me feel more alone and isolated. I can’t actually get together with most of the people I’m friends with- even the ones who live here, thanks to stressful schedules and whatnot. Thus, I also have my doubts about the true benefits of at-home internet, as much as I pine for it sometimes.

All in all, I’m still a technological dinosaur, a bit by choice and a bit by force. But I hope I keep myself in check despite having a smartphone. I hope I never read all the articles my friends post on Facebook, even though someday I will have home internet. I hope I keep asking myself what is really necessary and what is most important with the time and resources that I have.

Anti-Fashion:

If you know me, you know that I have loved thrift stores and other discount styles forever. Y’all know that I’m staunchly against the wastefulness, expense, and tedium of following fashion rules invented by anyone but yourself. That said, I’ve always had my own version of fashion rules. Like, if you wear some color, wear plenty of black, too. No flower prints. Those sort of rules I made for myself. I didn’t apply them to anyone else, and yet other sorts of rules had seeped into me from living in the states. So I was a bit taken aback by what, in my former life, would be labeled tackiness. When I saw a group of folks in matching spray-painted Jesus shirts, for example, I raised my eyebrows. Or when people wore a polka dot shirt with striped pants. What?!

Living in the land of fashion anarchy has slowly changed my patterns and liberated me from fashion judgment I wasn’t even particularly conscious of before. Granted, you will never convince this boot-obsessed, Tank-Girl type to run around in flip flops all the time like so many folks around here. I still have my own brand of fashion. But I sure have changed my ideas of appropriate attire. I love that there is complete and utter apathy and lack of consensus about what combinations are okay. Anything goes! Sweat pants and flip flops- cool. Prom-type dresses- whenever the mood strikes. A suit with sandals- absolutely correct. Yoga pants for class- very hip. There are no rules! I love this anti-fashion!

The other day I found myself wearing blue shorts, a purple shirt with different colored polka dots, a red hairband, and pink shoes with orange laces. I glanced in the mirror before I walked out the door and decided that it totally worked, and walked out laughing at myself for ever having thought that I shouldn’t look like a rainbow all the time. I have branched out from mini-skirts to include shorts, especially cut-offs, in my out-on-the-town attire. For work, I have many different pants, including various capri-type things. I often wear jeans, a tank top, and tennis shoes to work, thrilled that this is my professional professor get-up. Only in paradise! (Somehow this is okay, women in cocktail dresses or with raging cleavage is fine, but they draw the line at male professors wearing shorts of any kind. Men showing their legs is offensive and unprofessionally. I will never understand.)

I am not looking forward to having to wear more professional clothing in the future. Also, I have really had to face the fact that using what you wear as a form of self-expression is a privilege that many, many people don’t have. It’s important food for thought.

Anti-Following-the-Guidelines and Comparing-Children:

The first time we tried to take Lucia to a doctor for a check-up, the doctor kept asking, “But what’s wrong with her? Why do you want me to see her?” There are no check-ups here. There are no guidelines about childhood development. It was very disappointing, at first. And I worried about one of Lucia’s cousins, who still wasn’t really talking at age three, when Lucia was already talking in whole paragraphs at age two. Nobody else was worried, though. Instead they proclaim, “Oh, so-and-so still couldn’t pronounce half his words correctly at 6 years old.” Big old shrug. But have they gotten him checked out for problems? Nope. He’ll be fine.

I am sure that sometimes kids do have actual health or developmental problems and it would be beneficial to be checked out by a doctor, and to have routine wellness check-ups. For example, we discovered that Khalil was anemic even though he didn’t seem to have any health problems- thanks to check-ups with our fabulous pediatrician. However, I love that there is zero competition for your kid being “advanced” in their development. There is no judgment if your kid doesn’t fall in the standard guidelines on walking/talking/getting teeth/etc. Moms may compare notes and say, “My kid only has four teeth and yours has 10 already!” But they aren’t implying that your kid is better because they have ten. If your kid already talks at a year, they might even be impressed for a split second, but nobody thinks it’s weird or wrong or bad that some other kid isn’t really talking at three. If your kid’s not walking well at a year and a half, people are like, “oh, she doesn’t want to walk yet.” And that’s it- on to the next topic.

A happy medium would be nicer, where people in small town Mexico have more access to routine check-ups and help if something actually is going wrong in the child’s development. Meanwhile, the US needs to chill out quite a bit on fitting everyone into the same developmental boxes. And parents in the US need to take a good hard look at how not to judge and compete about things that aren’t even reasonable competitions!

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my fearless little busy bee/social butterfly who’s not ready to talk at almost two

Anti-Convenience:

When we moved here, the fact that it could take days to complete a simple errand was heavily disheartening on a daily basis. The slow-lane lifestyle, of every day being completely filled just with carrying out the basic necessities of life was maddening and gut-wrenching. But I’ve adapted and learned how to make this pace more convenient now. Sure, it would still be nice to find decent frozen veggies or canned garbanzo beans that didn’t cost a day’s wage, but now I freeze my own everything for later convenience; I work with the pace of life in many ways. And there is convenience food here. I love that the only kind of “fast food” is the stuff women make at home and sling in the streets- delicious stuff like tamales, healthy stuff like cut-up fruit, and worth-the-calories treats like homemade donuts.

Also, I love the other type of conveniences that are here, especially the way that so much stuff comes right to your door. Our drinking water jugs, propane gas tanks, and sometimes even freshly made tortillas, all get delivered. People pass by selling ice cream in their little push cart, or buying your used aluminum in their beat-up truck. Women carry giant baskets of fresh bread on their heads, or someone drives around a motorcycle with fish fresh from the sea. It takes a lot of adapting, and at the end of the day it’s still not easy- but it isn’t easy anywhere, I don’t think.

This year was extra challenging because we’d gotten accustomed to having a car that worked most of the time. Then it became a car that only worked sometimes. And right after we started sending Lucia to school on the complete other side of town, our car went to transportation heaven.

Not having a car presented so many new challenges. Thanks to the good will of other parents, we were able to work out sending Lucia to school. Even then it wasn’t easy, although now I’ve learned to love my long walks with Khalil to go get the big sister. When it rained, I took my rainboots and my umbrella to work and got through it. When the clocks went back and it got dark before I left work, I faced my fears and biked home in the dark- a rock in hand for the over-aggressive dogs, flashlight in the other hand for that section with no lights- but I did it. I got sort of used to it. (I don’t think I’ll ever get used to people letting mean dogs wander the streets. It just doesn’t make sense to me. But whatever.) I learned how to tell taxi drivers, “That’s not what the price is” when they tried to charge me too much.

It’s another kind of adventure, the inconvenience of not having a car, and another opportunity for lots of thinking. You can think about how much harder other people have it, like the women and girls who walk miles for a bucket of water. You can actually notice flowers and cactus shapes and lizards and birds and the colors in the sky. You can count dump trucks (okay, this is probably only exciting if you’re with small children). You can appreciate the sunlight on your face. You can observe other people in the street- because lots of people are out walking, not just you. (Something so lacking in so many spots in the US) Riding a bus is a great chance to read- to yourself or to your kids. You can play games and really talk in a way that’s much harder when you’re driving. It’s an obligatory slowing-down of life, in some ways, although in other ways it makes you more stressed-out, because something simple like an errand or picking up a kid from school takes double the time. But it has been a good constant reminder for me that so many of life’s circumstances we don’t get to choose, but that we can choose how we react to them. It’s such a cliche on one hand, but it gets said all the time because it’s so valid, too. So I wouldn’t say I totally love all the inconveniences, especially not having a car, but I definitely appreciate it for what it is.

*(Nope, I still don’t love Juquila, though. That town seeps depression into my bone marrow upon arrival and it stays in my core until I’m safely back to the humidity of the coast. You just can’t love everything in life.)

Looking at the Road Ahead/Holding that Thought about Appreciation in the Midst of Adversity

We’re not planning a move back to the states because I dislike Mexico or the life we’ve made here. In fact, I like my life here now more than ever before. I have so many moments of joy and gratitude every day that I wake up in my imperfect “paradise.”

Partly, I know, though, that my joy and gratitude about my life here are because of my weight-lifting exercises in appreciation of life. My biggest “resolution” is to carry all this with me when I go back to the states. It won’t be too hard; I am a very different person than I was when I came here four and a half years ago. My gratitude/joy/appreciation muscles are much, much bigger than my anxiety and stress muscles these days. I still have anxiety. I still get overwhelmed in stress. I still need to complain some of the time. But I’m so much better at letting it go. And I’ll need that for the culture shock and adaptation that lies ahead.

Also planned for the coming year:

Goal #1- Read and write more in Spanish! I know it seems ridiculous, but my Spanish skills diminish every year that I’m here, thanks to being an English teacher and speaking to my children in English. My conversational Spanish is still decent, but my vocabulary is shrinking from not reading and writing in español. I’ve got to remedy that.

Goal #2- Find time for poetry! I managed to give myself an hour of free-writing time the other day, thanks to vacation. I played with words with no intention to publish them or keep the same train of thought. I let my creativity soar out and oh! I hadn’t even realized how sorely that was lacking in my life. I don’t know where or how I’m going to make time for more creative writing, but somehow I have to. Art and expression should not be luxuries; they are life.

What are your plans for the coming year? What are your big lessons you want to take with you from this year? What’s something you used to dislike that you’ve learned to appreciate?

 

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A Major Merry Xmas Parade

25 Dec

If I had studied at the university where I work, I would have been a Biology student with a lot of Animal Science and Forestry friends. Bio students are the most curious and nerdy-with-a-cause, Animal Science are the big party kids, and Forestry kids appear to be total nonconformists. But that’s not all!

I’m always studying my students anyway, but I got an extra opportunity to watch the student groups when I was asked to be a judge this year for the floats in the Christmas parade put on by the university. I agreed, even though I dislike judging in general. I am kind of one of those hippie types whining about not being able to quantify everyone’s great effort. Thank goodness most of the student tests are multiple choice, because I agonize over grading their writing. I make sure to point out something they’ve done really well and something they need to work on for every single student. I think effort and the process of learning is often more important than product, and I think it’s necessary to recognize where people are. And I don’t grade 100% “equally” because some students are at a different level of English than others, but sometimes have learned more than someone who writes it better. But when it comes to parade floats? Turns out I’m almost ruthless at judging.

As a natural sociologist aka curious people-person, I LOVED observing how these groups work. My English classes are separated by major, so I already have some general working knowledge of differences among groups. But it was really fun to see it in action in the parade. For example, my nursing students rocked it in terms of group cohesiveness. They are the kids who follow the rules, who memorize, who wear uniforms complete with the mandatory bun hairstyle for women. Many of them are golden-hearted kids who really care about helping others, but of course they’d have it together to be nearly uniform in their dress and actions.

Thus, my nursing students had their routine down pat. They had matching outfits (Mario from Mario Brothers, with a few Luigis thrown into the mix). They had dances along the parade route. They were flawlessly in-sync. Obviously, they won first prize for their performance of a dance routine at the end-of-the-parade site. Because there are so many nursing students, there was also a group who made outfits to match the parade float. They had incredibly intricate shirts with ice cream cones and candy canes and other such treats in 3D form made out of who-knows-what because I hate crafts and therefore have zero knowledge on this base. But this is how it is. Nurses have to be details-based and intricate and work well with others. They spend hours doing elaborate projects like the way they did their ice cream shirts. So it makes sense.

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The Nursing students’ float: very busy,

My Computer Science kids are the most anti-social, according to themselves. I’m pretty sure these video game lovers, online addicts, and techie introverts only participated at all because their professors made them. There are about three raging extroverts among all of the perhaps 30 Computer Science kids. Two of the three extroverts wanted to dance and all that business, but they got summarily shot down by everyone else. Thus, the CS major kids did the bare minimum, which was to have a float in the parade. Well, I guess their “extra” thing was having a dragon parade puppet thing (see pic below) behind the float so some of the shyest kids could hide under it and still be in the parade. Their float, however, was spectacular. These kids do all kinds of great work behind-the-scenes. To program and whatever else it is that computer people do (obviously this is not my field), I know they spend hours staring at screens and pecking away at keys and toiling on the intricacies to come up with one thing. And their perseverance was obvious. Their float was like three levels more well done than everyone else’s. I happen to know they spent weeks laboring over it, and you could tell. It was a total work of art, and if I had been the only judge, they absolutely would have taken first prize.

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This is the dragon-type thing I’m talking about. I didn’t get a pic in the parade, so this picture is courtesy of this pinterest page: https://es.pinterest.com/em1776/dragonlion-dance/

 

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Is this amazing, or what? All made out of recycled materials (except the balloons).

The Biology students were hands-down the most original in their creation, of course, which is probably why they walked away with first prize. These kids are always questioning and thinking outside of the box, plus they’re dedicated to whatever they set their minds to. They’re the kind of students who tell me things like, “My personal goal is to reduce the use of straws in the population.” Oh, right, isn’t that everyone’s personal goal? (Can you see why I definitely would have been a Biology student? Plus they look so sharp in their white lab coats.) Anyway, their float’s theme was Plants vs. Zombies. They even had a zombie vs. plants battle/dance at the culmination of the parade, complete with Michael Jackson songs. Even my student who says she loathes styling her hair got hers all zombified for the event. I’m telling you,dedication.

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The Forestry students had the saddest float of all, although they had the best materials. They used all kinds of wood scraps, and made their own trees and… unrecognizable other things made out of cool materials. Now don’t be fooled- I would vote these kids second most studious/dedicated, right up there with the biology students. I always have lots of super sincere kids and incredible thinkers in the Forestry groups. But it’s the major with the lowest number of students, and apparently they all refused to participate. The only reason they had a float at all was thanks to the six Forestry students who are in their first semester. All the upper level kids were AWOL through the duration. I suspect the no-nonsense head honcho of Forestry (a woman, by the way) did not make participation mandatory, and all the non-newbies had better things to do.

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The Forestry float…. very forest-y.

Last but not least were the Zoos, as I like to call the Zootecnia kids (Animal Science? Animal Husbandry? Bachelor’s in How-to-Run-a-Farm-with-other-vet-skills-mixed-in? I’m never sure how to perfectly translate Zootecnia). Calling them the Zoos is perfectly apt, since they tend to be rowdy and rambunctious all the time. Their performance in the parade was a fitting reflection of that. Their float was nothing to write home about; I don’t even understand exactly what their theme was supposed to be. There was a chair for someone to sit under some big plastic-looking bubble, surrounded by balloons. There were two students dressed as penguins, and some other random stuff. When I asked about it, none of the students could tell me any more than their individual part in the float, so perhaps there was no theme. But goodnight! they had the absolute coolest performance of all. They took it way over the top. The first thing you saw after the Forestry float was a line of bicycles, biking in sync, each bike with a letter at the helm to spell out ZOOTECNIA. After them there were a few more bikes with paper-maché (spell?) animal heads on them. After that there was a line of kids walking on stilts (they learned in about four or five days, they told me). Behind them was one of those Chinese dragon type things, but it was a unicorn, and they were taking turns running circles with it, running through the crowd at small children and everything. Then came their float, and behind the float was a whole posse of girls spinning batons with long ribbons on them. (The other roles were mostly coed, but for whatever reason, spinning ribbons was only for girls. I don’t understand these things.) It was an incredible performance! It was semi-chaos, just like it is in class with them, but they pulled off something wildly fabulous.

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The Zoo float

(Sorry, y’all, all my action shots came out terrible and blurry. These kids are just too fast for my cell phone camera.)

That was the Christmas spirit, here in sunny paradise university. Based on this description, what would your major have been at this school? Who would you have hung out with?

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A Taste of Teaching Triumph

12 Dec

“Your class was hard. You’re very demanding! But we learned a lot in your class.”

Some ex-students actually said these very words to me last week, and I almost keeled over from teacher ecstasy. It was music to a teacher’s ears, music like when you do karaoke to Madonna’s Like a Prayer or Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, or whatever is your favorite jam from the 80s, with your very best friend (yippeeeee!). It was that level of thrilling, and yet I didn’t have a hangover the next day.

I am that vexatious teacher that’s always on their case, asking them extra questions, coaxing them to talk and to SPEAK LOUDLY PLEASE; I CAN’T HEAR YOU. I am always insisting that they can do more- or at least they can try to do more, at least during their English class.

Thoughts on Homework

I do not, however, insist they can do much more in their spare time, because they really don’t have enough of that- especially my nursing students. I do strongly encourage 15 minutes a day of review/study, but that’s about it. Most of these students will not go on to use English for much more than reading some scholarly articles, listening to music, and a brief conversation with an English-speaking tourist every once in a while. Most of them will be able to accomplish that regardless of homework, if they just attend our English classes most days for their 3 years of required English. (Yep, three years, y’all. That’s six semesters. So quit complaining about your 2-4 semesters of required foreign language.)

When my level one class first started this semester and we discussed ground rules for my class, I asked them what else they needed or wanted in order for us to have mutual respect and to have a good class environment. One of my cheerily cheeky students said, “No homework!” I told him that I agree, that I know how much homework they already get from their other classes and that to me it’s disrespectful of their right to free time (and sleep) to add to their list for English class (a class that is obligatory but doesn’t count towards their grade point average).* The whole class looked surprised and/or pleased by my answer, but this student was so tickled that he said- slowly, but in English, no less, “Teacher, I love your class!”

Questioning the Teacher is Good for You

The only thing that makes me happier than a student disinterestedly telling me that they learned a lot (disinterestedly as in they aren’t trying to talk their way into a better grade or changing their attendance record) is when my students start to question each other- and me! “Why? Where’s the evidence?” they’ll half-mockingly ask another student (mockingly because they’re partially mocking me by using my standard, constant question from our reading comprehension practice. I am like a broken record with the “why” thing. “How do you know?” and “Where is the evidence?” are the only rivals in popularity.)

Questioning me about my vocabulary or grammar in Spanish is kind of nice, especially because lately I feel like I’ve lost a good portion of my language skills in Spanish since moving to Mexico. (Oh the irony!) Once upon a time, Spanish was one of my two majors. At one time, I was writing scholarly articles and reading novels and watching movies and facilitating parenting workshops at one of my jobs and doing a zillion other things all in Spanish. In the US, I was living my life about 65% in Spanish. Here, on the other hand, most days of the week I only go to work and back home. At work I teach English, and talk to my coworkers in English. At home I insist on speaking to my children in English to guarantee their learning of it. Furthermore I now speak at least half of my words to my spouse in English, so he doesn’t forget his English, too. I read mostly in English, because I take advantage of what my mom has on her Kindle account, which is linked to mine. (Thanks, mama.) And it shows that I no longer use Spanish more than English. “Use it or lose it!” As my Nonna used to say (about language and your body). Thus, anytime they can critique or correct my Spanish, it’s good for me, and it’s good for them. I try to keep up my language use and they get a decent chance to feel how they should feel- more like learning peers than students vs. teachers.

Thus, I appreciate their questioning me about my Spanish, but the extreme kudos and bonus points are for questioning my teaching or my English. This mostly only happens with Biology students and the occasional Forestry student, for reasons that my sociology-trained brain strongly suspects but doesn’t want to comment on at this time. I don’t count my Animal Science students’ incessant “Teacher, finished class?” as questioning, although if I did, they would be the hands-down winners of questioning the teacher. My nursing students rarely question me… or anything else.

This is what frightens me the most- the lack of questioning. Nurses are scientists, too! Different than biologists, sure, but their brand of science is just as important. Instead of teaching them to question, though, they’re mostly charged with memorizing. They’re the only students on our campus who have to wear uniforms. They’re the students most likely to be sleep-deprived, staying up all night to finish coloring some anatomy chart or make a board presentation or cram for their rote-memory exam. They don’t really get vacations because they’re always doing practicums. I hear it’s like this for nursing students in the US, too. But to me it’s a way of telling them that their own well-being doesn’t matter, even though they’re charged with taking care of the rest of us in our most vulnerable moments. Seems like bad policy to me, but what the hell do I know, anyway?

But back to the questioning me business. The other day, I was making my 2nd year students practice writing in English. “Does the author think moving humans into space is a good idea? Why or why not?” I asked them. Of course the author didn’t state his/her opinion. I wanted them to note the fact that all the reasons given in the article were pro moving into space, and that theoretically we can deduce, or at the very least suspect that the author is interested in the same. But as a couple of students rightly pointed out, the author was giving reasons by other scientists; we don’t know what the author actually thinks. Well played, pupils, well played. Extra applause for critiques and input in your learning proccess! Success!

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Yeah, I applaud errors consistently, and failure is valuable. But it’s important to feel some kind of successful about something some of the time. 

Bragging Rights

Am I sharing the teaching gaity and triumph to toot my own horn? No, but also yes! This post started as a monologue about the importance of critical thinking. But lately I have about six blog posts going at all times and don’t finish a single one of them, so it’s only partially about critical thinking and questioning.

Regardless, as it turns out, I am absolutely in favor of tooting your own horn, because sometimes we are good at something, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of that. There’s enough to be ashamed of, (what with the state of my bathroom alone), to not have to add to the list with things that I am actually proud of. I’m doing a crappy job at various things in life, (baby nap schedules, keeping up with the laundry, having time to finish a blog post, for instance) but at least there’s this triumph! This ain’t arrogance! I have a healthy dose of self-doubt about some things I do or don’t do in my teaching too, of course, but there’s nothing wrong with celebrating when I do something that actually seems to help students learn. I’ve been teaching formally for about six years now, after all, so there damn well better be something I do well at this point.

And this is my best thing. My best two things. I appreciate and respect my students, even when they are giant pains in my head in the middle of the day. And I make them question and look for the evidence. For every freaking thing. All the freaking time. And they hate it and love it. So there. I’ve got loads more to share on this and other teaching-related, student-related subjects, so hang on for part two. Hopefully I’ll be back in the swing of blogging by then, and perhaps I’ll even be able to keep on the same train of thought. Only time will tell!

*I’m not saying all homework is useless in all contexts, by any means. But it doesn’t work well for my classes, and I certainly think we should question homework’s purpose and function.

No Need for Thanksgiving, but Thanks Anyway

28 Nov

The best thing that happened this past week was seeing Khalil’s feet lift off of the ground. Y’all, this child has been trying for months to imitate his sister in jumping. He would kind of bend his knees and then straighten them back out, raising his arms and grunting in a hilarious imitation of jumping. He even made it up onto his tippy toes after a while. Still wasn’t jumping, though. But now, folks, suddenly and certainly, he jumps! His feet go up in the air! If small children can’t make you see the miracles in everyday life, if you can’t feel the magic in absurdly simple things like rocks and bubbles and successfully pooping in a potty, you are missing out.

Speaking of poop… I know, who wants to talk about poop? Four year olds, apparently, because that is the number one topic of conversation for Lucia at the moment. Poop and princesses, but mostly poop. In both languages. This is a normal conversation for us:

Me: What did you do at school today, Lucia?

Lucia: Poopies!

Me: Did you play with so-and-so?

Lucia: No, just popo.

Sometimes I even know that they’ve done a certain activity- like they go on a walk every day. Every single day. Sometimes I’ve even seen pictures of them doing something, like making a lantern. So I’ll be like, Did you go on a walk today? And she’ll tell me no. Did you make lanterns? No. Did you do anything? No. Finally I asked her one day, So you just sat in the corner by yourself all day? Yeah, she said. That’s what I did. Smiling. We both know damn well  that is not what she did. But now that’s the game. Alas. That and poop. It’s a wonderful life, folks.

Lucia is also really into fashion these days. And I love her four year old fashion. She dresses up “really pretty” in shocking, eye-dazzling combinations of patterns and colors. She tells me, “My teacher’s gonna say I look so pretty today!” (I think she has some really awesome teachers, or else she has my outrageous self-assuredness. Perhaps both.) I try not to piss on her parade, although she does have to wear somewhat sensible shoes to school for their long walks. She’d prefer these crappy rubbery pink shoes or the Mary Janes “princess” shoes that are now too small for her.  Also, I did try to intervene the other day in the name of preventing excessive laundry. (As the sole laundry-doer in the house, this is a big problem.) She wanted to wear a tutu AND a dress. And you couldn’t even see the damn tutu under the dress. I tried to tell her that. We began a power struggle. I decided it was not a worthy battle and threw in the towel… And she ended up ditching the tutu and keeping the dress. Hopefully my tactics remain this effective when it’s time to discuss sex and consent and protection and whatnot instead of tutus and dresses.

In the moments when Lucia doesn’t want to be a goat (so she doesn’t have to clean up) or a grass-cutter (because those riding lawn mowers in Kentucky impressed the hell out of her), she’s now started saying that she’s going to be a teacher. “I’m going to go to work with you, Mommy!” As if it were all that simple. Of course she’d teach at the same place I currently teach. Of course I won’t ever change jobs and of course she’ll get hired there as well as soon as she’s a grown up and gets some magic fairy dust to turn into a teacher. I miss how small and intimate the world felt when I was her age and even older, when being able to go to the corner store a couple blocks away- without parents- was the biggest responsibility and privilege that you could imagine.

I love when she’s decided to play pretend and be a teacher. She walks by me and says, “Hi, student!” So that I say, “Hi, teacher!” Just like she’s seen my students do to me (for the record, I say their real names when I see them, not ‘hi, student.’) It’s like the way Khalil, who still prefers body language to words, will wave bye-bye to me for 3 minutes, in silence, until I notice and say “bye!” when he’s pretending to go bye bye in his plastic car or his broomstick horse or whatever. Sometimes my role seems like a bit part but a word or two is still a starring role to them.

Lucia is so much like me in her character. There was a little girl Lucia’s age at my volleyball game the other night, and she got mad about something and stomped off to sit down by herself. It was like the mildest tantrum I’ve ever seen. And another prof who always plays, who doesn’t have children, was like, “Does your little girl do that too?” I burst out laughing. “No, she’s way more demonstrative!” I told him. “She has your temper?” He asked me playfully, making fun of the fact that I get huffy and bossy when the boys start invading my territory and stealing the ball from me in volleyball. I wanted to tell him that he hadn’t seen nothing from me yet. And that Lucia could hold her own, too. She huffs and puffs and blows your whole damn house down. But instead I showed him my radiant smile and agreed. “Yep, definitely my character.” She gets hangry like me, too.

Khalil is his own force to be reckoned with as well. He hasn’t yet turned two, and he’s already training himself to eat spicy food. The other day I was seasoning my food with some medium-heat curry powder, and he insisted that I put some on his food. I told him and told him that it was spicy- pica, we say- but he kept pointing at the container and at his food. He beat on his chest like he does to say for me. I put a little bit on his food. He ate it. His eyes got very wide. He drank several gulps of water. And he ate some more. And more. He liked it! It was like the time I thought that my strong, bitter black coffee was going to cure Lucia of her desire to drink coffee, when instead she asked for more. Whoops. Remind me not to play chicken with these children.

Yesterday I made pancakes in a pan that I’d reheated salsa in. For some reason, even though I’d washed it well with soap, the first pancake in the batch came out with a spicy aftertaste. I split the first one between the kids because, as ALWAYS, they were starving to death. Khalil had already devoured most of his half when Lucia tried hers and started complaining that it was “pica.” I tried it, and sure enough, it was fairly spicy! Khalil finished off all his water but he sure didn’t complain. He’s gonna take after his mommy on this, apparently. (Don’t kid yourself that Conan loves all things spicy because he is Mexican. He likes some, but I could kick his butt in a chile-eating contest.)

I’ve mentioned before Khalil’s obsession with the garafones– the big jugs of drinking water that we buy. He’s now started speaking his first two words in Spanish, motivated by his need to communicate with his future boss, the garafon vendor. He can now say both “uno” and “dos”- theoretically depending on how many bottles we need, although really he just says either uno or dos when he wants to refer to garafones in general. Like if we see a truck full of them go by, he points and says “uno!” It’s pretty endearing.

This child is the kid who wants to do ALL the grown up things already. He is so uninterested in the majority of his toys; he’s very interested in re-organizing everything in my kitchen, and “helping” me with every single thing I do. We went to a birthday party the other day, and there were a bunch of plastic chairs sitting out for the kids. Khalil spent the first hour of the birthday party stacking them up and then putting them back when I’d unstack them, only to stack them all back up again 30 seconds later. I am always asking myself if there’s some way he can actually help me, and if not, how can I make it appear that he’s being helpful by doing the thing that I want him to do? These monsters certainly force me to stay creative. Khalil was giving me a very hard time about taking his new inhaled asthma medicine, but finally I brought his stuffed cat into the mix. Now Khalil has to give medicine to the cat before he does his own medicine. It’s doing the trick so far! Score one for Mommy!

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These are the chairs Khalil was stacking. And this is how he wanted to sit in the chair. All by himself. No help for him, thanks. 

While Khalil still refuses to use words to communicate most of the time, his big sister is a verbal giant. Her Spanish has exploded thanks to her new school, and her English continues to grow to astounding new heights. I love talking to this child about as much as she loves to talk. I am hoping, however, that she doesn’t suffer the same fate that I did, thinking that because she’s all verbal, she can’t be visually creative as well. I’m feeling extra hopeful about it after she wrote her first book yesterday! I also wrote my first “book” at four, but I dictated it to my mom and then drew pictures to go with the words. Lucia was much more autonomous about it. She got scrap paper from the pile of scrap paper. She drew a bunch of pictures. She asked me for glue. I suspiciously inquired about her intentions for the glue. She explained, and I got all excited and instead of gluing we sewed the pages together with cheap dental floss (thank you, punk rock traveler kids from the 90s for teaching me to sew with free dental floss). Within a couple hours her brother had crinkled one page and then she left it in some water that had leaked out from the washing machine. It survived, but while we were waiting to see if the sunlight streaming in the door could cure it she went ahead and made another one, just in case. I am raising some resilient babies, after all.

When she was reading me her first published work at bedtime tonight, she made up all kinds of fascinating details for her squiggly lines and circles. But the best was her showing me two connected circle-ish parts and saying, “This little one is Khalil’s house. Us three live in the big house, and he lives in the little house.” When I probed into the reason behind Khalil living separately from us, she thought for a second and said, “Because he’s little. He needs a little house. We’re big, so we need a big house.” Uh-huh. No underlying psychology about getting your little brother out of your hair there, kiddo. Sure thing.

Lucia presents her book:

They’re growing so much, and teaching me so much. Although I could do without the constant tornado damage that Khalil leaves in his wake, and I hope he learns to respect books instead of tearing them up so lovingly like he does now, he is more fun than should be legal. And while I’d appreciate a little less screaming and melodrama from Lucia over every single thing (e.g. “Khalil’s wasting the water!! I don’t want you, Khalil!!”), hanging with her is such a wonderful adventure.

I don’t need any Thanksgiving holiday to be grateful for these monsters. (And no, nobody down here celebrates Thanksgiving.) Every day is Thanksgiving in my house, minus the brutally oppressive history and the consumerist free-for-all the next day.

I’m so grateful for these kids that even when I am pulling my hair out and losing my temper, even when it’s my turn for bedtime and they refuse to sleep, I valiantly resist all urges to sell them on ebay… Oh, wait, that’s just called parenting. Whatever. The point is, I love my pumpkin (Khalil) and my sunshine (Lucia) more than even real pumpkins and real sunshine. That is true love.

Thanks, Obama. (Did I utilize the meme right, Conan? No? I never get it right. Bwahahaha.)

 

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Disasterous Dreary Doldroms of Despair

22 Nov

I doubt you want to read this, because I don’t even want to write it. I wish that I were writing about something else, but I’m not. I can’t. I can’t think about other things, still. I’m spending way too much time reading articles and scrolling facebook, trying to understand how this happened, and what to do from here. I don’t think things will ever “go back to normal.” The veil is lifted and it just gets uglier and uglier. I know this sounds melodramatic. I can only hope that I will look back later and think that I was being excessively dramatic. Based on what I’m reading and hearing, though, my anxiety being overzealous seems improbable at this point.

The day after the elections in my home country, I couldn’t mask my despair, even in the classroom. It was all over the news here, but I asked my students to give me time before we could discuss it. Silent tears betrayed me in one class, despite my best efforts to put on my mask. My dear, sweet students kept wondering out loud why their ever-enthusiastic teacher was gray and dreary.

I was extra ashamed about election results with my students because I am always trying to share a different image of the US with them. I’ve even made a powerpoint about Kentucky to give them an idea about something more real than Hollywood and some of the blond folks they see on the beach. (You can see it here: My Kentucky Heart, Sautéed, Not Fried) I always discuss what we have in common, how Oaxaca and Kentucky are among the poorest states in each nation, but both are rich in cultures and histories. I tell them about all the immigrants and refugees who are improving my city, how that is such a big part of what makes my home a good place to be. I’ve missed my community in the US so much that I finally plotted my return. And then this happens. And I am shattered, and unsure whether my dreams of home can come to fruition like I planned.

Nobody around here seems to understand just how devastated I am.* Yes, I knew before this that there was still major racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, etc. to fight against. But I’ve been here for four years, and the people I keep in touch with in the states are activists and artists and teachers and inventors and peace-makers and other amazing folks. So it seemed so improbable that the current political situation could ever possibly happen. Two weeks later, I still feel like surely this is some kind of sick joke someone is playing for the next dystopian novel. This cannot be a reality in my country. But it is.

It’s impossible to explain to “outsiders” how betrayed I feel. And by “outsiders” I mean folks who have never been blissfully surrounded by wonderfully social-justice-focused, beautiful, talented, brilliant people that I know and love in the USA.** If your image of the US is based on Hollywood, or the tourists at the beach here, you don’t know my people! You don’t understand the life I had in Kentucky (yes, poor “backwards” little Kentucky) and how lonely life has been here the last four years without a community to anchor myself in. Without mentors and surrogate big sisters and second mothers.

It’s not just my students who don’t get it. Other immigrants, folks from more civilized nations, are giggling at the prospects of gringos fleeing their homeland. And understandably, to an extent- the US is probably the most arrogant nation on Earth, as a generalization, and so to see its citizens potentially desperate and fleeing- as a generalization- could seem like a good comeuppance. But only if you don’t mind the context. Because the reality is that it probably won’t be those arrogant rich white tourists fleeing the country. It’s going to be the same folks who have always been shit on by the establishment, only more so now. The folks who have always been comfortable will probably continue to be okay, for the most part. Nothing righteous will come from this, in my humble opinion.

“Teacher, you’re in Mexico. No problem!” One of my students tried to console me. They don’t know about my hopes and dreams of going home. Even more importantly, even if I weren’t trying to go home, it affects me. It affects everyone I love in the US. I’m worried about all the hate crimes and extra hateful words amongst children. I’m worried about the proposal for a Muslim registry and hints about internment camps, and so much more.  And of course, there are all my concerns about global warming, about nuclear war, about human rights abuses- I could go on, but let’s not. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you’re probably freaking out about the same things. And it’s not like it won’t affect everyone here in Mexico, too- wall or no.  “If the US sneezes, Mexico gets a cold,” as Paulina says.

Folks here are much more accustomed to going about their life no matter what happens in politics. In general, they’re much more resigned to politicians being bad for them, to the system destroying them, and doing the best they can in life anyway. A taxi driver the other day assured me that my president-elect can’t be any worse than the current Mexican president, who was elected via fraud.“You have to work outside of the system anyway,” one of my other immigrant friends, who’s lived here much longer than I have, reminded me. Which is both true and yet not enough. The system affects us all, to some extent or another, no matter what. You can work outside of it but even that is a privilege sometimes- and what happens to all the folks who can’t work outside of it? And will I be putting my children directly into harm’s way if we move back now? And is the potential extra danger to them worth it- to have a community again, to be with my family again? Isn’t that part of what I’m teaching them, to stand up for what’s right, danger or no? Will there be a community for us to be a part of? Millions of questions about my priorities in life are on constant shuffle in my mind now. ***

I don’t have any answers- about anything. I’m having another existential crisis. Maybe the election is just one root cause of the rumination and contemplation that I’d be experiencing anyway with this life-altering move back to the US on the horizon. Regardless of why, I’m dumping my drama and doldrums on the rest of you. Sorry- a little. But I’ve got to get all this off my chest or I may never write anything fun or interesting again.

Meanwhile, telling me to cheer up or to quit thinking about it is not particularly helpful and not something I’m willing to do. Obviously, I am trying to cheer up, by continuing my gratitude practice, and trying to be more in the moment. But this is major, and I am not going to pretend that a crisis is not happening in my country. I need to stay informed, but I suspect that I’m going to have to put myself on strict time-limits and schedules for looking at Facebook and reading the news. (As some genius said, my desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.)

I also suspect that I need to quit looking outside of myself for answers about major life changes. I need to sit with the fact that we don’t know exactly what will happen, or just how bad it will be. We don’t ever get to really know these things. Even if I make what seems like the best decision in the moment, of staying here or going back to the states, will it be the “wrong” decision if it has severe, negative consequences later? There will be positive and negative consequences either way, and many consequences on either side of the border will either be not forseeable or not preventable. So why am I in fight-or-flight mode about it now, 24 hours a day?

And that’s the definition of anxiety, right? Buying into the illusion that you have much more control over life’s outcomes that what you really have. Your control is probably nothing, or at least next to nothing, in the grand scheme of the universe, right? So how does one make any decisions in light of that?

Obviously, I’m having major anxiety and grief issues. I need to find some ways to manage that, but that cannot ever translate into doing nothing or ignoring the problems. Thus, I’ve taken on emailing my representatives on an issue, for example. I am signing petitions out the wazoo. How much will this help? Probably not much. What else can I do from here? This is a sincere question, not a rhetorical one! Beloved folks in the US, how can I support you from here? Please let me know!  I’m on the look-out for things to do in my own backyard, too.  I need to have some faith in humanity and I need to feel less isolated. So please let me know about opportunities to do something for someone else (that can happen from here with almost no money and not much internet access), especially as part of collective action,  or in a way that brings positive human interaction. Please and thank you.

I’m also appreciating my family, meanwhile. I’m thanking the universe daily for them. (And thanks, mom, for calling me to let me freak out about something or other almost every day.) My kids are doing their part to remind me to smile and enjoy the moment. That first week after the election, when my despair was a thick cloak that was slowly smothering me, I kept crying at random moments. I tried to explain to Lucia, in 4 year old terms, why I was so sad. Finally, by the weekend, she told me, “Mommy, I’m gonna make you laugh, so you’re not sad. I’m gonna talk to you about poopies!” Poop is better than the political situation, for sure, and an apt ending to this piece I wish I weren’t publishing.

 

*I won’t go in to all the details about why I feel like this, because so many other people have already said it so much better. This is one good example: about despair and such

**Yep, I was totally living in a bubble of awesome people. Sorry, but there it is.

**We will absolutely be moving back at some point or another. So if you’ve donated to our family unity immigration fund, rest assured that the money will still be used for the intended and express purposes of moving our family back to the US. We’ve already paid for the first step in the process thanks to your generosity, and we have the start of the next steps. It just might be longer than we planned.  We will keep you updated.

Also, Y’all: In case you weren’t sure about the racism and racist policy that is happening and is going to be a bigger and bigger part of our government and our lives under Trump, here’s one of many recent examples.  About how all racists are more and more excited and inspired by this election and Trump’s staff picks- from NPR

Another good, quick read that I’m not alone in my panic: from Dan Rather (not some radical person)

Also, here’s something elso to do and read about- which is an example of how there was already plenty of justice work to be done BEFORE this crazy election. AAAHHH! about sacred water- celebrate Thanksgiving by taking action!

A Gratitude Interlude

8 Nov

Lately I’ve pretty much been one giant ball of stress, chaos, and anxiety, so…. We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you this important announcement:

These things only happen to the living. (like my Nonna always said)

I write at least three things to be grateful for every morning as I drink my coffee. It’s a good way to start my day, and over time it’s augmented the fabulousness in my life tenfold. But sometimes the morning gratitudes are just not enough. I need a bit more focus on the gratitude. A bit less wallowing in my problems, pulling my hair out trying to find solutions that don’t exist. So here goes.

First off, our car is permanently dead-to-us (RIP Poderoso), despite all our valiant efforts. So I’m incredibly, madly grateful to the parents with functioning cars who are schlepping Lucia to school and back with their kids. (Thank you, thank you, thank you; it is the difference between our kid going to school or not.) I’m grateful that public transportation exists to get Lucia to the car pool pick-up spot so she can get a ride. I’m grateful that Lucia gets to go to a school that she is thrilled about every day of the week, and that it’s a school that’s also totally in-line with our parenting values (more on that to come). Even though sometimes I feel bad about needing help, I know that we would do the same for someone else, and that makes me feel better about it.

I’m grateful that Conan has a paying job outside of the house! It means more work and more stress for both of us, but the economic stress is already greatly lessoned. “Conan,” I said, “we’re halfway through my pay period and I haven’t had a panic attack about money! This is serious progress!!”

I’m insanely, intensely grateful that we’ve turned in the first step of our paperwork for immigration. That people threw a benefit karaoke potluck for us, and more folks keep donating, keep sending us their wishes and energy and hope and love. Can’t even tell you how awesome it is.

I’m majorly grateful that Arturo is lending us his truck for Conan to get to work and back. I’m grateful that there were no accidents in the week that Conan spent driving it with nearly non-existant brakes until we had enough money for repairs. I’m grateful that the bald tires are holding out so far (keep your fingers crossed for us- it’s next on the list).

I’m grateful for the obligatory quality time I have with Khalil every day that we go to pick up Lucia from the carpool drop-off spot. I used to spend a good portion of my lunch break getting lunch ready, but now Khalil and I go for a walk to catch a bus or a colectivo (shared taxi) and we have a big adventure to pick up the big sister. The whole ride there, he shouts about every big vehicle that he sees, which is approximately every three seconds. “Yes, dump truck,” I agree. “Yes, another big semi.” He barely says words- except more, his first and most important word- but he make a vroom vroom noise, and a buuuuhhhh deep rumbling in his throat noise that means ‘big.’ This child is determined to communicate. We continue our fun if Lucia’s not at the spot yet, playing with sticks or leaves, or throwing rocks or reading a book. It’s truly a pleasant time that I used to not have on a daily basis.

I’m grateful that at least the three of us still get to eat lunch together, and that I have a crock pot! It has rescued me in a big big way. Otherwise we might be eating tuna sandwiches every other day.

I’m grateful that we’re not totally destitute. I’m grateful that we have nutritious food to eat and a safe and sturdy shelter. A man was working on a neighbor’s yard the other day, “cutting the grass” like they do here- by hand, with a machete, slowly wacking away, in the sweltering heat and humidity, for two days, at the tall weeds that had overtaken the landscape. While we talked, he inquired about the casita– the “little house” on our property. “This building?” I asked him, pointing again at our shed. Yep, he meant the shed- the tiny tin shack where Conan slept while the house was being built. He wanted to live there for a while with his family. “Got my perspective back in check,” I told my mom, “when I realized that we are ‘rich’ enough to have a garage that could be someone’s house.”

I’m grateful that we have a home- not just a shelter, but a refuge. It’s an appealing, spacious-enough-for-four, comfortable, comforting place that’s all our own. Even though it’s unfinished and might never be finished, even though we still don’t have doors separating rooms, even though half the time it’s a hurricane-style disaster of toys and clothes strewn about and dishes left undone, it’s ours and I love it.

I’m grateful for this past weekend’s few calm minutes to sit by the back door and look out at the world with my littler firecracker. For smoothies made of strawberries and Oaxacan chocolate, and a surprise afternoon storm.

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Khalil’s favorite spot- looking out the door… Normally he likes to sit in this little chair, but when I sat on the floor with him, he decided to sit on the floor, too.

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Cheers! To chocolate and children.

I’m grateful that thus far my rambunctious, determined, fiercely excited littler one hasn’t injured himself in any dire way yet (I’m pretty sure it’s going to be inevitable with this one). That so far we’ve managed to keep him from ingesting bleachy cleaning water; he only dumped a little bit on top of himself that one time. That the soapy dirty bath water he drinks on the sly sometimes doesn’t seem to do much damage (and let me remind you, tap water here is not drinking water to begin with). That just yesterday he only drank about 1ml of Lucia’s steroid dose that he grabbed off the table in the .2 seconds that I turned my back; glad it was not the whole thing (especially since it was right after he’d had his full dose). That despite several falls (off the bed, against the concrete wall from throwing himself in playful abandon, etc.) he seems to have avoided concussions so far. That he has so many moments of random tenderness and hugging and loving and smiling to make up for wrecking the entire house every 15 minutes of every single day.

I’m grateful that my wild thing older one has such a strong, unstoppable imagination. That she can play by herself and create an entire complex little world for sometimes hours at a time. I love that she’s never seen a whole princess movie and yet she proclaims herself an expert in princesses. I love the rules she makes up about them. “Princesses are always nice, right?” she says. Or she refuses to brush her hair because apparently that’s princess-style. Even though I thought I was anti-princess, I love the conversations we have thanks to this princess obsession. She puts on one of her fancy dresses and says how pretty she is, and we talk about how everyone’s pretty in different ways, for example. She told me the other day, “Mommy, you’re the prettiest, because your hair do like this,” and she fluffed out my hair and made little wispys like it does. “Your hair is the funnest,” she said, and my heart totally melted. Every other day, between bouts of screaming at her brother and throwing tantrums, she says fun and interesting and tender stuff that makes me glad to keep her. More love in my heart than I thought I could stand- thank you, universe, for this.

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Lucia’s make-believe time: always an elaborate affair

 

I’m so grateful that we’ve been able to buy a nebulizer to treat our kids’ asthma. That Khalil doesn’t mind wearing a mask over his face because we read so many books while we do it. That we have such a fabulous pediatrician, who’s very experienced in asthma treatments, and who doesn’t even get pissed at me for calling in the middle of the night in a panic. (Read more about how great she is here.) That both of our kids are now going to be on daily asthma preventative medication (WHAT did people do before all these treatments existed?). We just had a crazy week with the both of them with asthma attacks- even though Lucia already takes preventative medication, and it’s been so stressful and anxiety-inducing. But I’m so grateful that they’re okay, and they’re going to be okay.

I’m grateful that my kids are awesome, healthy eaters. It kind of makes up for them being such crappy sleepers. When Lucia practically begged me to share my broccoli snack the other day, and then Khalil ate a bunch later on, I laughed maniacally to myself, thinking, “Yes, I accept this sure-to-be-temporary victory!”

I’m grateful for about a kajillion other things, but this has been enough to stem the tide of chaos and woe for a bit. I’ll leave it at that and give you time to think about your own “gratitudes.” Thanks, universe, and thanks, friends. I’m happy to be here with you.

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Rejecting Compliments, Resisting White Privilege: A Call for Help

1 Nov

I first realized just how disgustingly prized and privileged being light-skinned is here when we lived in Juquila. When people commented about my appearance, I could never quite separate out how much of their impression was just because I was foreign. A gringa living amongst us! Can you imagine! Men would congratulate Conan in the street for bringing home this rare, first-class acquisition. (I know. Patriarchy on top of it all. Sigh.) That was bad enough, but at least I could blame some of my ill-gotten fame on the small town, we’ve-never-seen-foreigners factor.

When people complimented baby Lucia, though, it made me particularly uncomfortable and embarrassed. “Look at her!” They’d say, “Just like the Gerber Baby! So adorable!” Which might seem innocuous enough, until you saw the larger trend of comments. “She looks just like her mama,” they’d say, totally negating all the obvious facial features that she inherited from her Papi, which to us were plain as day. “She got the light-skin from her mama; how beautiful!” and even things like, “Look how white she is! It’s a shame she didn’t get her mama’s eye color, though!”

Just look at these two. There’s no way you could deny their resemblance. Except people did!

I couldn’t say thank you, because it felt awful. It was like they were negating my husband. Like they were lessening themselves. Like they were denying part of Lucia- specifically the Mexican part of her. Like they or their child’s brown skin, brown eyes, black hair wasn’t as beautiful. How could I say thank you for that? I needed to respond, and I didn’t know how.

I still don’t know how. “Look at that precious guerito!” people gush over Khalil. When it’s another parent and they’re with their child, I am quick to pay some adoring compliment to their child, but beyond that I’m not sure what to do. I second-guess every compliment aimed at my kids. Obviously, I think they are adorable, because they’re my kids and I adore them, but I don’t want them to be taught that they’re good-looking because they’re “white.”

If it sounds like I’m over-reacting, let me give you a clearer example of the problem:

“I wish I were guerita (light-skinned) like Lucia,” Evelyn, one of the kids’ cousins, told me one day. It wasn’t the first time our 8 year old niece had mentioned skin color to me, but it was the moment that it was painfully obvious to me just how deeply society’s systemic racism had penetrated her little-girl psyche already. Just in case I didn’t get it, she bemoaned herself further, complaining, “I don’t want to be morena (dark-skinned). It’s ugly.”

The ambulance in my head switched on the siren and roared into gear. Help! Emergency! Pre-pubescent girl already hating herself! Code red! All hands on deck! (Okay, obviously I’ve never worked in health care and I know zero emergency slang. Forgive me. This is totally the kind of blubbering idiot that I am when in a panic. Which I was.) “What?!” I asked her, trying not to yell and shake her.

I took a breath and tried to talk and look normal. “You don’t need to be guera,” I started. “You’re already beautiful, just like you are.” Cliché, I know. But it’s true, it’s so true- Evelyn with her friendly, extroverted spirit. She’s who always comes and takes the hand of whatever family member of mine is visiting, to lead them around, to show them all they need to know, entrusting them with her wide open heart. Evelyn who’s curious and unapologetically opinionated. Evelyn who also has gorgeous wide eyes and a lovely smirk, among other radiant attributes. Evelyn who is brown-skinned and beautiful.

“Yeah?” she asked, sounding as hopeful as I felt disheartened by her remark. “I’m beautiful?” I reiterated that she was, and that I love her. She smiled and swept me away to show me something her parents had bought her.

I wanted to sit her down to talk about all the shades of beautiful. I wanted to talk about beauty’s source, about how it’s what’s on the inside, and how you feel about yourself that makes or breaks beauty. I wanted to say that society’s views on beauty are a total load of horseshit anyway. I wanted to sit down and have a long, age-appropriate talk about racism and prejudice and discrimination. I wanted to find time to walk around together, surf the internet together, and point out all the beautiful women with skin like hers. I wanted to find princesses and doctors and fairy godmothers and warriors and presidents and other Wonderful Women with brown skin like hers, and talk about how beautiful they are, to discuss the different forms of beauty. I wanted to rant and rave about the system and how fucked up it is that an 8 year old girl has already gotten the message that she’s not worth as much as another little girl. I started to say a whole lot of stuff to her, but I was so overwhelmed with how to go about it all, and she had already changed the subject.

Race in Mexico is fairly homogenous, in the sense that the grand majority of Mexicans are a mix of indigenous genes and European genes, with some African and some Asian genes in a few places. Despite this theoretical “sameness” there is a huge variation in skin tones and other aspects of appearance that people attribute to race. And there is absolutely a racism problem in Mexico. This is what racism looks like here. It has a different history than in the US, but the resulting prizing and privileging of all that is white is the same. It’s deeply rooted and entrenched in the culture, just like in the US.

So what does it matter, that I, the exotic foreign white girl auntie, am trying to tell Evelyn that she’s beautiful and valued? It’s so far from sufficient. She’s already learned and internalized the message that she’s not beautiful, because of her lovely brown eyes, because of her shiny black hair, because of her very own skin, the blanket enveloping her beautiful existence, that’s already betraying her, making her other, less-than beautiful. And if here in Mexico, where some shade or another of brown skin is the majority and the norm, if even here her brown skin is not valued, what must it be like in the U.S., in England, in Ireland, in all the places where brown skin is “other?” The injustice of it is maddening.

I’m not worrying about her beauty in terms of how many people might ask her out to dance, but I am worried about her feeling as valued and worthy as anybody. Even if it were “just” about a little girl’s body image, it still wouldn’t be okay to teach a girl to hate herself in the body that she lives in. But it’s so far beyond that.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his book Between the World and Me, talks about how it’s absolutely that kind of prejudice that is part of what leads us down the path to the devaluing and dehumanizing of a whole people. It really struck a chord with me when I read that he realized that “…the larger culture’s erasure of black beauty was intimately connected to the destruction of black bodies.”

This has severe consequences. It’s why people of color are constantly being killed by police officers in the US. It’s why there are so many cases of indigenous women here giving birth on the lawn or in the bathroom of the hospital, because no one could be bothered to receive their precious baby, who’s already being valued and cared for less, starting at birth. It’s why Conan got stopped by the police for walking with his own daughter (read about it here). It’s the kind of thing that they talk about in this study, where they found that teachers expect more bad behavior from African American boys in preschool. The effects of prejudice are so far-reaching, so consequential.

And prejudice starts with precisely this kind of attitude: that the lighter your skin is, the better-looking you are. I’m not blaming the entire institution of racism on friends’ and family’s comments, but I do think that what we say- especially in front of children- makes a difference. These seemingly well-intentioned compliments about my kids’ light skin perpetuates racism. I still don’t know exactly what to say when I hear it, but I know it’s imperative that I say something. Help me, please! I need suggestions! I realize now that it’s not enough to have conversations with my kids about it in private; I need to confront this racism in the moment- in a nice way, but in a way that expresses that I don’t agree, for example, that they’re cute because of their skin color. This is important not just for my children, but also for Evelyn, and all the other beautiful, valued, worthy people of all shades of skin, who need to get the message that they ARE beautiful.

There are lots of other ways I think we can make a difference. Please leave comments with suggestions!

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Prayer Parties! Inducing Yawns since Colonial Times

25 Oct

Thanks to the extreme lack of stimulation that going to church brought about for me as a child, I learned that yawns were caused not just from sleepiness, but also from boredom. I hadn’t even realized I was bored per se, but I remember asking my mom why church always made me yawn when I swore I wasn’t tired. Bless my little heart; I was just not cut out for Catholicism.

I still feel the same irresistible urge to yawn when faced with participating in the rhythmic ritual of Catholic prayer. This is now a rare occurrence, since I don’t attend mass if I can possibly avoid it. Here in Mexico, however, the unique Mexican brand of Catholicism is so deeply entrenched into social life that I occasionally find myself obligated to attend a prayer party. The one at my neighbor’s house last weekend was so- ahem- relaxing that I went beyond yawning; I was semi-entranced, nearly asleep in my chair at 8pm.

I know, you’re thinking that a prayer party surely should be more exciting than church. To clarify, it’s not a party like a fiesta, in the grand style of Mexican parties where you save up money for ten years and invite everyone you’ve ever met. Perhaps “party” is a poor translation on my part, but there’s just no equivalent in my culture for this sort of phenomenon. It’s absolutely part of what makes Mexico so special. Where else can you turn prayer into an important social and cultural event? In Spanish, in Mexico, the event is called a rezo, and it literally just means a prayer. It comes from the verb rezar, to pray. So we could call it a prayer…. circle, theoretically, but that doesn’t fit, either. A prayer hang-out session? I don’t know. Let me tell you about it instead, and maybe you can help me give it a more apt name in English.

As far as I can tell in my 4 years of sociological investigation here, there are two main types of rezos. One type is part of the obligatory action that happens when someone dies. (which I mention in this big rant of a blog post about a string of bad luck). This is tradition, first and foremost, and legitimized as THE way to properly honor the dead. I can certainly respect that. Also, I suspect that it forces the grieving parties to continue to function and to have a social and religious backdrop for their grief. It seemed a bit appalling to me at first, to make recently bereaved folks cook for others, invite people to their homes, and serve them food and drink. I theorized that maybe they set it up like that so folks would be too busy working to fall apart entirely? Maybe that’s the only way to ensure that plenty of people will go visit with the grieving- create this custom of 9 evenings of prayers and food? I don’t really get my own country’s culture on this issue, either, so I am certainly not one to judge here.

Whatever the case, the prayers-for-the-dead rezos are not something I would ever scoff at, and I’m excluding that type of rezos from my intense sociological scrutiny in today’s blog (haha). The other type of rezo, however, is kind of beyond me. It’s a little prayer party- a party like the way we say it in the States- a gathering, a get-together,that takes place at someone’s house with a bunch of invited guests.  However, there’s no catching up, no card playing. The music is abysmal (because there is no music, unless you count the sad singing/chanting business.) Not a bit of dancing. The conversation is pretty much limited to basic, boring small talk, if there’s any talk at all.  And there’s no alcohol involved, unless it’s the last night of a funeral-based prayer session. But there’s food! Free food! And coffee or juice!

The food is not usually that great, for the record. I’m an expert on this because my mother-in-law went to rezos weekly in Juquila when we lived there, and she’d always bring the food home instead of eating it there (another weird Juquila custom). So I know all about what food is given. Something big like pozole or tamales is awesome. Often it’s something simpler, like a piece of sweet bread or (gag) some gelatin (this is another cultural puzzle for me, this love for and creativity with gelatin). Granted, I appreciate the gelatin-givers, because I’m sure if I were religious and inspired enough for this sort of party, I’d be giving out something equally low-maintenance. All in all, though, the food in itself is not sufficient motivation to get me to a prayer party.

Even when they happen outside, somehow the atmosphere becomes dim, perfect for a nap. People set up chairs in rows facing an altar, with candles, incense, and religious images- especially the particular Saint or Virgin that they’re praying to (yes, there’s only one famous Virgin in the Catholic faith, but there are different versions of her- the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin of Juquila, etc.). Folks come, sit down quietly, and pray this advanced, fancy version of the rosary all together in unison. There are readings from the Bible that correspond with it. When it’s over, the guests get a plate of food and a drink of something handed to them, and they either eat it there or leave with it.

Above: A guide to the rosary- this explains why they say “second mystery, third mystery,” etc. Thank you, Google, for giving me more information. 

These prayer parties are fairly commonplace, too; it’s not like only fanatics have rezos. Tons of people have them. Totally reasonable, lovely people. For example, every year Arturo and Paulina have a rezo for Saint Jude. Before any big neighborhood parties happen in Juquila, people pass around statues of the saint in question and take turns having rezos for him or her. Our favorite neighbors here- the ones across the street- just invited us to their special rezo– the same one we attended last year. I don’t even know what saint I was supposed to be praying over, but I figured since it was our neighbors and they were kind enough to invite us we could go and show our respects. These people are not crazy, by any stretch. This is just what many people do.

The first rezo I went to was one with Conan’s grown-up niece Lili (whom I love and adore), when I lived in Juquila. I successfully avoided the prayer party excitement for the better part of my year there, until Lili made me attend. For some reason, Lili had felt herself obligated to commit to paying for part of a really big rezo, so she asked me to go and support her. We walked through town setting off fireworks all along the path (so Juquila-style). Lucia was right at that age when she was just walking and refusing to be still, ever, so I spent the whole time chasing her around someone’s yard instead of praying (and let me tell you how grateful I was about it). I let my curiosity die down about it from there.

I was talking to my mother-in-law about it again, as she prepares to go to her and Arturo’s yearly rezo. She explained to me quite a bit more about the “mysteries” that they talk about during the prayer- because I’ve yet to understand how/why different people volunteer to read the first, or second, or third “mystery.” “Just what are these ‘mysteries’?” I asked her. She explained that it’s all about praying the rosary in honor of a saint (or a recently deceased person). The mysteries correspond with the Hail Marys and the Our Fathers on the Rosary, and…. that’s about as far as I got in my Catholicism class before one of my children faithfully distracted me.

Of course, the most interesting part of our discussion involved the origins of this ritual. Paulina was telling me that this is how they do it because this is how the Spanish supposedly taught the indigenous folks to pray the rosary. “Aha!” I said, “That’s why giving out food is obligatory. That was probably one of the strategies the Spanish used to lure indigenous folks to their religion.”  And that was all the progress that I made in my intense sociological scrutiny.

Paulina explained that people do it for what she laughingly named the “celestial benefits,” which I suppose I could theoretically understand. Seeing as how I’m not religious and also not Mexican, though, I’m still slightly baffled about why people feel compelled to host these events. I mean, I’m a really big fan of certain saints, despite disavowing Catholicism for myself. But it would never, ever occur to me to invite people over to honor that saint. And okay, I know I’ve been known to have parties partly just to motivate myself to clean the whole house, so I guess the saint motive is loftier than mine. And sure, I cook food for folks at my get-togethers, but then we all enjoy it together; people don’t leave with their untouched food in hand. I guess their party is just holier than mine (hehehe). It’s one of these cultural mysteries that I can respect- because it’s culture- but I cannot really comprehend it.

Meanwhile, I’m still yawning over Catholic prayer- whether it’s in party form or not. And pondering a better translation than “prayer party”- so share your stroke of brilliance if you have one! Love you, dear, colorful Mexico.

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