It’s been a loooong 4 years

I really didn’t think we’d make it these past four years.

I really didn’t think we’d make it through the elections.

But we did!

The last four years have been incredibly challenging.

The last 8 months even more so.

But a hike today with D and O grounded me in the hope and love of family. The now-ness of a child’s life and of being a parent for said child who is living in the moment. It is that which has enabled me to keep on keeping on.

Playing alphabet games, ooh-ing and aah-ing about the views and the natural wonders of fallen leaves and hills and valleys, enjoying a snack at the mid-way point, and coming home to a simple lunch.

It’s time to set course for cleaning up, continuing to push for change, envisioning another world, and setting a foundation for O to be a critically thinking, compassionate contributor to the world.

The last four years were a terrible detour but if anything they’ve been a solid reminder that racism and white supremacy are alive and well in this country.

“Get up, stand up. Stand up for your rights.

Get up, stand up. Don’t give up the fight.”

Bob Marley

Trying to make a comeback

It’s been over a year since my last post. A lot’s happened in the past year:

• Trump really became president and is still in office.
• I’ve made it past the one year mark at my job (not without scrapes, bruises, and fleeting thoughts of leaving).
• I’ve made it through another year of 40-something motherhood. And there’s a lot that comes with that:
  • still aiming for a week of uninterrupted sleep
  • still learning something new everyday about being a parent
  • still amazed that I’m a mother at this age
  • still blown away by the fact that this little person has half my genes
• I got back to running and practicing yoga (thanks to a health incentive at work that pays me money for doing that!)
• I’ve started reading for pleasure again (this motherhood thing was really kicking my butt when it comes to doing things for myself).

I’m hoping to get back into writing about this journey into middle-age as a working mother of a toddler. I’ll be sharing things that I’m sure are already out there in the blogosphere, but it’s a way for me to reflect and have a record of my life in this period that my son can someday read.

I’m also hoping to process work I’m doing at my workplace on diversity, equity, and inclusion, pushing myself and others to create a more just and sustainable world. I’ve been especially thinking a lot recently about how we tackle white supremacy, white privilege, and racism with well-meaning white folks who are doing (or think they’re doing) the work.

So this is just me trying to hold myself accountable, wanting to start writing again and hoping to do this on a regular basis again.

#10: Memory

Two nights ago, nine African American individuals were shot and killed in cold blood while in prayer at Emmanuel A.M.E Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The killer has been apprehended. This tragedy has left me stunned, angry, sad, frustrated, and questioning.

Our country’s collective memory is short, especially when it comes to racism and the oppression of people of color. And then something like this shooting happens, jogs our memory for a short moment, gets us talking and acting, and then the 24-hour news cycles ends and moves us on to the next big movie or celebrity gaffe.

The memories this moment jogged for me were other awful events from the past few years:

• the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the many other black lives whose soul and breath were taken unjustly and unceremoniously by police violence
• the shooting in Newtown at Sandy Hook Elementary School
• other mass shootings perpetrated by white men who were often written off as mentally unstable with no recognition of the larger system and society that has created these killers

President Obama gave a speech after the shooting. Some of his statements really resonated with me as I try to stay hopeful and optimistic that maybe THIS time there will be more action taken to control the rampant presence of and access to guns in our country.  He said, “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it. And at some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively.”

He also quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from a speech he gave in response to the killing of four African American girls when a church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed by Klan members. I went to read the full speech and it’s amazing, beautifully written (and I’m sure spoken), and inspiring. Here are a few excerpts, but I encourage you to read and re-read the whole thing:

And yet they [the four girls] died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death… They have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.

and then there’s this:

Now I say to you in conclusion, life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and difficult moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of the river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of its summers and the piercing chill of its winters. And if one will hold on, he will discover that God walks with him, and that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.

Let our memories not be so short at all the injustice people of color, especially black people and communities, have endured. When will Dr. King’s dream be realized?

#9: Laughter

There’s nothing like the laughter of a child.

I was skyping with one of my nieces, and for some reason she just got tickled with my saying, “Night, night!” to get her to pretend-sleep. And she’d crack up and roll around in her blanket and then get up. And we’d repeat the ritual, “Night, night!” “Heeheeheehee!!!”

Children’s laughter is so free of any artifice. It bubbles up and shakes their whole body. It’s contagious. It’s pure. What happens when we get older?

I love being with people who make me laugh. Laughter and vulnerability go hand in hand. Making someone laugh, you have to crack jokes, be silly, and open yourself up to uncertainty, “Will they laugh or not?” And when laughing, you open yourself up both physically and emotionally.

What an energizing feeling to laugh full from the belly! Laughing so hard your abs hurt and your cheeks are stretched beyond their capacity. Tears roll down your face, and you can barely breathe. Laughing in the company of another person causes an unending feedback cycle where you laugh and they laugh harder making you laugh even harder and on and on until you can’t remember what you were laughing about in the first place!

I laugh at a good joke.

At the great lines in Modern Family, especially those lines by Phil and Cameron.

At my nieces and nephew saying and doing funny and cute things.

At talking stuffed animals.

When being silly with loved ones.

What makes you laugh?

#8: History

I get a daily reflection from this site called Daily Om. They’re nice short nuggets of wisdom and truth that I ponder for the day, and often they relate to something I’m thinking or dealing with. It’s nice to read them and then delete them. Kind of like these ancestor cards.

So today’s Daily Om was titled “Knowing Your History,” amazingly enough coinciding with today’s ancestor card HISTORY. The reflection talked about the importance of knowing where you come from in order to better understand yourself. How true.

I recently heard about research that shows that a family’s history can be written into the genes. There is growing research that says, for example, that trauma is genetic, passed down through the generations. So if one generation went through a traumatic time like war or genocide, that experience gets transmitted, not only through the stories told (if they are told at all) but also through family members’ biology.

I’ve learned about my family’s history only as an adult. I knew that both my parents were children in the Korean War (mainly because I put 2 and 2 together – knowing their birth years and the years of the war), but we never heard the stories of those experiences when we were young. It wasn’t until I went to Korea after college and spent time with my relatives that I started getting snippets of what happened during that time. And I started asking more questions of both my parents, and slowly they shared the traumatic experiences they endured during that 3 year war.

At one point, I wanted to become a history teacher, to uncover the Lies My Teacher Told Me and to teach A People’s History of the United States. I wanted to teach what wasn’t usually taught – Asian American history, ethnic studies, the social movements – and connect that to what we typically learn in U.S. history – slavery, Manifest Destiny, the Industrial Revolution, the Civil Rights Movement and women’s movement. I wanted to connect the dots of all the facts, dates, and historical people we learn about to a larger framework of how this country came to be and why it looks the way it does today. I was especially interested in better understanding and teaching about systems of oppression – racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism – and about capitalism’s role in perpetuating oppression in U.S. society throughout its history.

I didn’t end up going that route, but I am still a lover of history and of connecting those dots. History is about interconnected stories which bring together characters who influence each other for better or worse. So while I try to understand those stories in my own past, both individual and collective, I also have been learning to let go of any hold that history has over me. Some history wants to keep us in its clutches, never to move forward. Other history is fleeting and passes through us (or us through it). When does history become an oppressive force? And how do we let go of that force when it seems to weigh us down?