Monthly Archives: April 2013

 
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Commentary

How to Say ‘Divorced’ in Spanish

Best of In The Fray 2013. In search of healing, I took a three-month trip to South America after my marriage ended. But the memory of my divorce was never far: in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, Peru and Chile, it seemed that almost everyone I met was recently divorced. And then, I met Hugo.

Story and photos by Alexandra Levine
Weeks after I ended my marriage, I headed off to South America to clear my head.
Weeks after I ended my marriage, I headed off to South America to clear my head.

Yelling over the loud rock music in the small border patrol office of the Chilean desert town, San Pedro de Atacama, the tan, jolly officer looked at my paperwork and asked in English:

“Married?”

I nodded.

He raised his eyebrows in surprise and looked around for evidence of a husband. Not finding any, he asked, confused:

“Happy?”

I shook my head.

“Por qué?”

Why? All the Spanish in the world wasn’t enough to explain why I found myself alone in the middle of a Chilean desert on the opposite side of the planet from the man with whom I’d shared more than a third of my life.

Having grown up in a divorced household, I had always been so terrified of divorce that for years I didn’t want to get married. But eventually, on one sunny afternoon, I uttered the words I do and till death, only to discover a few years later that I no longer meant them.

After a ten-year relationship, our divorce came as a complete surprise to everyone close and far, and although it was my decision to leave, that didn’t make it any easier. It felt like getting off a bus at the wrong stop. The bus pulls away and suddenly you stand there wide-eyed and alone, in the middle of nowhere, not knowing where to go, unsure whether this detour will lead to a serendipitous discovery of something new and amazing — or a sluggish struggle to get back home.

After the first few weeks of oscillating between the ecstasy of newfound freedom and pangs of loneliness and failure, I decided to make the best of my predicament and skip town. I wanted to go somewhere far away from the epicenter of my former life, leaving everything familiar in hopes of forgetting, distracting, discovering, healing, and eventually moving on.

I looked at the world map and saw South America, which beckoned with the promise of untamed nature, sexy music, exotic fruits, and tropical heat. The fact that I didn’t speak Spanish or know a single person on the continent wasn’t a problem. I had been comfortable far too long. Now I needed an adventure.

Traipsing through five countries in three months, I climbed huge mountains, gasped at divine waterfalls, danced until the wee hours, and ate a lot of strange things. But the memory of my divorce was never far.

No matter where I went, I seemed to meet other young divorcés.

Hours after my plane landed in Uruguay, I met Ignacio, a thirtysomething local businessman who married his young girlfriend after she became pregnant. The marriage didn’t last long, but he didn’t regret it because of the beautiful daughter they share. He told me my situation was easier because we didn’t have any children.

Then, at an expat happy hour in Buenos Aires, I met Leo, a freckled New Yorker who needed a drink after the latest frustrating attempt to divorce his Argentinean wife. She was ignoring all his communications, thus solidifying his belief that all Argentinean women were crazy. Not surprisingly, Leo’s advice to me was to get a lawyer.

Being a crazy Argentinean woman was exactly why my other new friend — Ana, a tall and striking redhead — was forced into a divorce by her Spanish husband. Two years earlier at work, she had a breakdown that turned into a bout of depression, and he wasn’t willing to deal with it. Ana told me she would never love again, and although I’m sure that won’t be the case, I knew exactly how she felt.

In the Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca, I spotted this mural by the graffiti artist Stencil Land. It perfectly captured my mixed feelings about marriage.
In the Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca, I spotted this mural by the graffiti artist Stencil Land. It perfectly captured my mixed feelings about marriage.

Another friend I made in Buenos Aires, Pablo, told me his marriage ended after he started his business, a neighborhood pub. Or at least that’s what I understood from his long, Spanish-only monologue over two bottles of wine we shared in an old San Telmo restaurant. Having started a business with my husband, I knew more about that than I could express in my limited Spanish.

Then, in Chile, I met Raj, a Canadian entrepreneur of Indian descent, who told me about his marriage to an Indian high-caste girl, his first love, who wasn’t willing to stand up for herself — or for them — to her strong-willed parents. He said that after he left her, he was certain he had made the right decision because she never asked him to come back. Ah, I know the feeling, I thought.

In Peru, my Spanish teacher revealed that she had left her partner of fifteen years — the father of her two children — after he decided to have children with someone else. Naturally, our lessons quickly devolved into exchanging post-divorce dating stories, which left me with some unique Spanish vocabulary.

In Rio de Janeiro, my youthful, blond roommate Leticia turned out to have a twenty-year-old son, whom she’d inherited from her first husband. She has had many lovers since but never remarried. On the night I received my divorce papers, she took me to a bar and said Brazil was one of the best places on earth to get served. I couldn’t agree more.

Although these people’s circumstances were different from mine, I was starting to feel much less alone as my divorce became just one dot on a world map of broken hearts. And then, I met Hugo.

A tall and soft-spoken man with red hair, Hugo was a friend of a friend who owned a mountain lodge in a small resort town in the lake region of the Argentinean Andes. I went up there for a weekend to ruminate. I was the only guest, so while cooking dinner in the kitchen, he took out two beers and asked for my story.

As soon as I got to the “I’m getting divorced” part, he stopped, turned from the stove where he was stirring something in a pot, and said, “You too?”

He told me he was also getting divorced after also spending a decade with his wife, who was also my age. It was starting to sound familiar. Then, he sat down opposite from me, took a sip of beer, and told me his wife had left him because he’d been addicted to drugs.

I was shocked. Not only because of the courage it took to admit that to a complete stranger, but also because it was the exact same reason I’d left my husband.

We both fell quiet, as the boiling water gurgled on the stove. This is what it must feel like when two soldiers from the opposite sides of the trenches meet after the war, I thought.

Slowly, Hugo began telling me the story of his transgressions: how his wife found out, how he kept promising he’d change, how he kept lying, and how finally she stopped believing him and left. I was listening to the story of my life.

He told me she was still angry with him. Check, I thought. He told me that she doesn’t trust him even though he no longer lies. Check and check.

It was the lying that was the worst, I explained.

“I know,” he said. “I wasn’t just lying to others but also to myself. I thought I could stop anytime I wanted to, but instead I kept going.”

Why couldn’t I have heard this from my ex-husband? God knows we tried to talk it out, but anger, shame, or pride would always cloud our minds. Instead, here I was having one of the most intimate, gratifying conversations I’d ever had, with someone I’d just met.

We moved to the living room, where Hugo, a father of two young children, told me about the guilt he was now feeling for having lost his family because of a substance. His words reminded me of my ex-husband’s post-divorce confession, “How am I supposed to live with the guilt?” I could see the agony in Hugo’s blue eyes, and it made me empathize with my ex-husband.

It was getting late and we were both exhausted by the emotional conversation. After Hugo went to bed, I sat on the terrace gazing up at the unfamiliar South American constellations, bright and clear in the cold mountain air. How was it that despite being half a world away from my former life partner, I felt I understood him better than ever before?

It was a therapeutic weekend for both Hugo and me. We took his kids sailing around the mountain lake, hiked through pine forests, and went to a party where he introduced me to other business owners in town. It was more than I had expected from my short getaway. And yet, when I was leaving, it was Hugo who was full of gratitude: “Thank you, it has been a very long time since I had such a nice, peaceful weekend.”

Even though I’ve now left South America, its magic is still with me. I keep in touch with Hugo and other divorced friends I made on that continent, and I know that no matter where we are, eventually we’re all going to be all right.

Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identities of the individuals mentioned in this story.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Calls for Submissions

Call for Submissions: Transience

In The Fray is seeking submissions on the theme of transience. The chaos of our lives can be difficult to reconcile, and it is hard to find comfort in knowing everything is in a constant state of flux. For some of us, the experience of transience is more apparent. It is a way of being — sometimes chosen, sometimes not — that defines us.


Note: In addition to the theme below, we welcome submissions on all topics. In particular, we are seeking photo essays on any subject matter.

In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | May 2013: Transience

In his essay, “On Transience,” Sigmund Freud relates a walk he once took through the countryside with a poet friend. This companion told Freud that he could not enjoy the natural beauty when he considered its impending doom. Freud found it incomprehensible that the transience of beauty should interfere with our enjoyment of it.

“A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem on that account less lovely,” he wrote.

The chaos of our lives can be difficult to reconcile, and it is hard to find comfort in knowing everything is in a constant state of flux. For some of us, the experience of transience is more apparent. It is a way of being — sometimes chosen, sometimes not — that defines us.

In The Fray is seeking submissions on the theme of transience. This might be a travelogue from a meaningful journey, an essay about migrant workers who see something new with each passing season, contemplations on how changes occur over time, or a humorous story about a short-lived job.

Please email submissions@inthefray.org with a well-developed, one-paragraph pitch for your proposed piece — along with three links to your previous work — NO LATER THAN JUNE 30, 2013.

We are open to submissions on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: promoting global understanding and encouraging empathy.

All contributors are urged to review our submissions guidelines at http://inthefray.org/submissions/.

We look forward to hearing from you.

The Editors of In The Fray Magazine
submissions@inthefray.org

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog / Interviews

Better Living through Empathy: Emily Bazelon Stands Up to Bullying



Emily Bazelon began reading about the way young people treat each other online in the most apt location: the Internet. The mother of two adolescent sons, Bazelon was interested in how using technology to bully peers made the experience different for contemporary youth. She was deeply curious about how her own children’s lives were affected by bullying, and decided to write a book to aid a generation of parents who grew up without social media or texting.

Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy chronicles Bazelon’s visits to homes, schools, and the office of social media giant Facebook to understand the new face of bullying. Her research identifies strategies to reduce the harmful practice in teens’ lives and promote a culture of empathy.

In this interview, Bazelon spoke with In The Fray about how the Internet has transformed bullying and why Americans have only recently begun addressing the problem in young people’s lives.

Although bullying has been around for centuries, how did the Internet create a new incarnation?

Prior to the Internet, if you were a target of bullying, you would get a break from the harassment when you came home from school. You had a chance to put yourself back together. The social media aspect of bullying can be really devastating because Facebook and Twitter make kids feel like bullying is happening 24/7. Also, there’s a sense that a lot of other kids are witnessing your humiliation, and that is really difficult for targeted kids to deal with.

Are all bullies the same?

There are different types of bullies. One type is physically dominating, the old-fashioned big kid who steals your lunch money. Another type is what we often think of as “mean girls” — though they can be boys also. These bullies use a particular kind of harmful aggression in order to score social points. They are mean to become more popular, and they’re often the hardest for adults to spot because they’re clever at manipulating people and disguising their behavior.

Then there are kids who are both bullies and victims. These kids tend to have the biggest emotional problems, and they all struggle socially. They end up doing the dirty work for the mean kind of bullies. It’s important to understand the distinctions and figure out which intervention makes the most sense for each kid.

How does bullying in the adult world affect adolescents?

Adults are modeling a culture of enormous conflict and aggression for kids. When they watch [characters on] Jersey Shore, and see the uncivil way people comment anonymously online, they learn people can be incredibly cruel. Kids absorb that from adult culture, and it makes it seem like it’s okay for them to talk and act in those same ways.

Why is it important to show that bullying isn’t just about victims versus offenders?

Almost all kids are capable of empathy, but kids who act like bullies are cutting themselves off from those feelings. I wanted to understand why this behavior is going on and what motivates it. It’s only when we understand kids’ detrimental behavior that we are able to help them stop doing harmful things.

A recent study shows that, twenty years after childhood, the people who were bullied, or people who were both bullies and victims, are more likely to have depression, anxiety disorders, and suicidal thinking. That is the best evidence we have of bullying having long-term, adverse psychological consequences, and it underscores the importance of taking this problem seriously.

Facebook has put various methods in place to oversee cyberbullying. Should they be doing more to regulate what is happening on social media?

I was struck by the enforcement challenges in addressing cyberbullying. For example, Facebook has a rule against bullying, but millions of complaints come in every week, and they have a relatively small staff to monitor those complaints. This raises questions about what Facebook’s responsibility is to enforce their own rules.

Also, Facebook cares a lot about building brand loyalty among teenagers and doesn’t want to do anything that’s seen as uncool. But it wouldn’t be that hard for them to have an early warning system, or even respond more quickly when schools complain.

What role do school administrators and teachers play in preventing bullying?

Schools can effectively reduce bullying if teachers and administrators take the issue on. Adults are really crucial and set the tone of the school. They can help kids by leading the way, setting a good example, and responding when they see bullying. We still have the problem of adults turning a blind eye.

The most important thing a school can do is figure out which problems are worth addressing and come up with a strategy. Isolating the problem makes it more manageable and allows the school to throw more resources toward the kids who are acting out.

The second step is giving kids the tools to regulate and express their emotions. Some families do this intuitively and don’t need a curriculum, but other families are doing less in this domain, and the schools have to figure out how to do more.

Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Robin Charboneau and her children. PBS
Blog

The Prejudices We Permit


 

Robin Charboneau and her children from "Kind Hearted Woman"
Robin Charboneau and her children. PBS

Prejudice can kill. George Zimmerman saw a young black male wearing a hoodie, and made a decision that reflected the dictionary definition of prejudice — a “preconceived judgment or opinion … An adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge.” Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch coordinator of a gated community in Sanford, Florida, didn’t know Trayvon Martin, the teenager he followed. Martin didn’t do anything specific that would have been suspicious to an unprejudiced observer. He was unarmed and gave no indication that he harbored criminal intent of any kind. Zimmerman simply prejudged him. And it cost Martin — a seventeen-year-old out to buy some Skittles — his life.

Prejudice killed Trayvon Martin. But there are other, less obvious forms of prejudice, ones that even those of us who would rightly condemn a man like Zimmerman might be tempted to practice and justify.

Recently, I had a disagreement with friends over the PBS documentary Kind Hearted Woman, which profiles the Oglala Sioux woman Robin Charboneau, a divorced single mother and recovering alcoholic living on North Dakota’s Spirit Lake Reservation. The filmmaker, David Sutherland — who also made the celebrated 1998 documentary The Farmer’s Wife — is white. 

My friends argued that only someone who was Sioux  — or at least Native  — could do justice to the life experience of this woman, who as a child endured repeated rapes and molestation at the hands of her foster family and as an adult struggles to win custody of her kids and take her ex-husband to court over the abuse of her daughter. They were particularly upset that someone like Sutherland was doing the film, given the centuries of injustices that white men have inflicted on American Indians. For his part, Sutherland has said that he originally meant for the documentary to focus on the theme of abuse on the prairie — “My thought was, middle-aged white men have caused [Native Americans] enough trouble” — but after interviewing fifty women, he settled on Robin. (Since the film’s completion, Robin has decided to go by Robin Poor Bear, using her mother’s last name rather than her ex-husband’s).

I can respect and sympathize with the criticisms that my friends made. There is understandable sensitivity about who tells the stories of historically disadvantaged groups, given the barriers they have faced in telling their own stories in Hollywood and elsewhere. For American Indians, these concerns are all the more poignant: well into the twentieth century, the U.S. government sought to wipe out their tribal cultures (a campaign darkly remembered in the phrase, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man“).

But fundamentally, this line of criticism — that artists or writers can’t tell a particular story because they are of a different ethnic background from the subjects of the film or history — is a form of prejudice, too. It may not have the life-and-death stakes of the kind of prejudice that motivated George Zimmerman, but it is prejudice nonetheless.

This is a topic I’ve written about in the past. When his book The Corner was turned into an HBO miniseries, David Simon came under fire. The plight of black drug addicts in Baltimore was not “his story to tell,” critics said, because Simon is white. What I wrote back then applies to today’s criticism of Kind Hearted Woman as well:

This assumes that only black people can or should write about black people, and implies that there exists a single, unanimous perspective that all black Americans hold.

Many black Americans did not grow up in an inner-city community, so they would not be any better ”witnesses” than Mr. Simon to such a story. If this philosophy is pushed to its fullest conclusion, only autobiographies will become acceptable representations of life. If we accept that race and ethnicity have trumped our ability to understand, empathize and write about the sufferings or joys of those with whom we share this country, we are finished as a society.

Of course, The Corner would go on to inspire Simon’s critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire,  which the current president and prominent African American scholars alike have lauded as a deeply realistic and moving portrait of inner-city America and a groundbreaking analysis of the roots of urban inequality.

And that is my point: if someone of any background tells the story of a community or ethnic group in a way that is disrespectful or just plain wrong, by all means call them out on it. Yes, history has countless examples of stories that have been misused, misappropriated, or simply stolen for personal gain. But assuming that there is one acceptable perspective (or that all or most people from a particular group share that perspective) is prejudice, any way you look at it. And if we argue that prejudice is acceptable in the “right” circumstances, then how do we, as a society, determine which are those circumstances? This kind of thinking just provides intellectual cover for those who would justify racial profiling. It becomes harder to argue that prejudice is wrong in certain cases when you insist it is okay in others.

In short, we have to take a morally consistent approach. We should judge people based on what they do, not on a simplistic group label. We must loudly condemn prejudice of all kinds, and not just the kinds that seem the most harmful to us. That is the best way to overcome the strain of deluded and dangerous thinking that led George Zimmerman to get out of his car that February night in Sanford.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Abby and Sonya
Brooklyn, New York
Commentary

One Last Kiss for Sonya

Obsessive-compulsive disorder dominated my life until the birth of my child pushed me to find sanity.

By Abby Sher
Photo of Abby and Sonya
Abby and Sonya.

From the time she was born, my daughter Sonya has watched me kiss our mezuzah one, two, sometimes fifty times as I walk through our apartment door. I kiss that prayer scroll before I kiss her, most often before I even say hello. She also knows that Mama prays once a day, which means I go into our basement with a candle, and no one disturbs me for thirty minutes.

“Why Mama pray?” my four-year-old Sonya asked last week.

“Because she has to. Because she wants to. Because — I’ll be back in a little bit.”

I’ve been in treatment for severe obsessive-compulsive disorder for most of my life. I’ve cut myself, starved myself, and scrubbed my hands raw. Daily prayer is the one healthy practice I’ve kept the longest, and it’s grounded me when I feel most unmoored. It’s also been the hardest to explain.

I had a mezuzah in the house where I grew up, but I never saw my parents kiss it. We belonged to a Reform Jewish synagogue and had chicken soup and challah for Shabbat every week. My mom taught my brother, sister, and me to say the Shema prayer before bed each night. It gave closure to each day and made my mom smile, and that was all I needed.

But soon one Shema wasn’t enough for me. When I was eleven years old, my aunt and father died in quick succession. I was sure I’d made them die, and I had to atone before I struck again. After Mom tucked me in, I added five, ten, twenty recitations of the Shema, a song of thanks, and a list of sick people I needed to heal. I remember nights when I woke up frantic and hot, furious that I’d fallen asleep despite more prayers to say, more kisses to blow to the heavens.

Did I do it right? Did I do it enough? Did I sound devoted? Did I please Him?

In high school I snuck into dark closets — not to kiss boys, but to chant Psalms. I went on medication briefly in college, but took myself off for fear it was blasphemous, and my mom would die next. When I moved in with Jay, who is now my husband, he watched me kiss my mezuzah urgently.

“I wish you felt like you had to kiss me 250 times when you walk through that door,” he said sadly.

My prayers got longer, my lists and songs multiplying. If Jay wanted me, he had to accept my beliefs without question.

Our daughter Sonya was born on October 5, 2008. As I lay with her slippery skin pressed to mine, I knew this would be the scariest day of my life. It was the first day in twenty-five years that I ever willingly skipped prayers. There was no place to cloister myself in a shared hospital room, much less with a seven-pound newborn mewing for milk. Sonya was someone I had to take care of with my hands, instead of with my pleas.

I looked through the hospital window and smiled shyly at the sky. I wanted Him to know I was so wildly grateful for this child that no words could suffice. I held Sonya tightly and babbled at her to fill the empty space of my fear. I could no longer try to control the universe from behind a closet door. I was a mother with vital responsibilities.

Those first twenty-four hours were a terrifying relief. As it turns out, no one died because I skipped my prayers. But the bliss of those first coos and milky grins soon hardened. On the fourth day of Sonya’s life, I left her upstairs with Jay while I went down to our basement and sat on a pillow, sore and shaky. I wanted desperately to thank Him for this miracle, to pray with an honest, open heart. No mindless repetitions and rituals would suffice. I was too evolved, too in love with this new human to simply follow a pattern blindly.

Yet, motherhood could never be a remedy for a mental health disorder. Everything about being a new mom felt groundless and out of control. I left Sonya in Jay’s arms each morning so I could pray regularly, insistently.

My life outside the basement became a series of new, unwavering practices too. Repetition was supposed to be comforting for children, I reasoned. Every evening, I massaged Sonya’s toes and sang a series of lullabies. When I felt too exhausted and cut off a verse, the tug of fear closed in.

If I don’t sing to her, I’m unfit to be a mother. If I don’t beseech G-d, Sonya will disappear too. Cradling my daughter fiercely, I read the same book in the same cadence night after night for an entire year:

Photo of Abby and Sonya, older
Abby and Sonya.

Goodnight comb, goodnight brush
Goodnight nobody, goodnight mush.

Somehow the soothing part got away from us. Sonya wasn’t following my lead. She fell asleep in the middle of a meal or refused to nap in her carrier. One night I tried to light the Shabbat candles with her, and she banged on her high chair howling until I blew them out. She had her own rhythm, her own needs, and they were completely out of sync with mine.

Each time she squirmed away during the massage, I pinned her down and started again, both of us whimpering. I coped in the only way I knew how — by adding more ritual and repetition. Sonya followed my lead, running headlong into the spiral I know too well.

Our bedtime routine turned into a one-act drama: kisses on her toes and lotion on her belly. A review of her day and an outline of how her sleep would unfold with fairy-tale dreams. After two books and a cup of water, turn out the light and tell a story. Walk to the crib, press play on her lullaby CD, then one kiss for Waldorf (her toy duck), one kiss for Pepto (her toy pig), and one kiss for Sonya.

We added a kiss for each palm, in case she got up during the night and needed another. Then there was the butterfly kiss and the kiss through the bars of her crib. Finally, there was the kiss called Last Kiss. We said (in unison) as we leaned in to touch lips, “I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.” Five times. A tight, fast hug. Then I would close the door to the sound of her wails.

Sometimes I didn’t even make it out of her room before she started crying. I pulled away from our goodnight hug just in time for her to yell into my face, “Lastkisslastkisslastone!”

With her tiny shoulders hunched and her lips pinched, she panted as if being hunted by wildebeests. I explained firmly, “We just did a last kiss and a last hug. Three of them, actually.”

“Last ooooone!” she moaned.

“Last one,” I repeated.

I leaned down to give her one more. But she still screamed as I left.

Some nights I went up there three or four more times, trying to slay both our demons. Other nights I sat at our kitchen counter and came up with all the fatal illnesses she could have.

Hours after I’d been up, I heard her whimper drowsily, “Lastkisslastonelast …”

The crucial task left unfinished.

I worked with my doctor, tried new medications and breathing exercises. I started with a cognitive behavioral specialist and added exposure to my therapeutic tools. As always with obsessive-compulsive disorder, it took lots of lurches and stumbles to get to more stable ground. I knew I was working not only for myself, but for my child too.

There did come a day — not too long ago — when I was able to tuck my daughter into bed, read her two books, sing her a lullaby, and simply walk toward the door.

“Wait!” Sonya yelped. “Last —!”

“If you say last kiss, it has to mean last kiss,” I said calmly. “Otherwise it’s just words.”

“But that kiss wasn’t a good one it was —”

“Stop.”

I cut us both off. We waited in the dark, hearing each other pant. Then I landed a question: “What do you think happens after last kiss?”

This was the open-ended unknown she had witnessed in me every day. The tension and also the hope.

Sonya thought for a moment, and then said, “Mama go to sleep and have cup of tea.”

“Exactly,” I told her proudly. Chronology was unimportant. It was her trust that meant everything. We were both here for each other, the world would keep spinning, and it was safe to close our eyes.

Abby Sher is the author of Amen, Amen, Amen: Memoir of a Girl Who Couldn’t Stop Praying (Among Other Things). Twitter: @abbysher Site: abbysher.com

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Blog

Lions Lying Down with Lambs


John Lewis speaking in panel discussion
Civil rights activist (and future congressman) John Lewis at a 1964 meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress.

I have a remarkable story to tell you about forgiveness. A week ago, a man named Elwin Wilson died. A member of the Ku Klux Klan, Wilson was part of a group of white men who attacked two Freedom Riders in South Carolina in 1961. The victims, one white and one black, were traveling together throughout the South to protest Jim Crow segregation laws, and had stopped in a bus station in Rock Hill. When the two dared to step foot in a waiting area marked as “whites only,” Wilson and his group jumped them, leaving them bloodied.

The two Freedom Riders, Albert Bigelow and John Lewis, refused to fight back and did not press charges. Lewis, a pacifist, later became the chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and a major leader in the civil rights movement. Decades later, he bears visible scars from having his skull fractured on “Bloody Sunday,” when Alabama state troopers beat civil rights protesters during the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.

Four years ago, the story took an amazing turn. Wilson, then in his seventies, sought out the civil rights protesters he had harmed and asked for forgiveness. He learned that one of them was Lewis, now a Georgia congressman.

Lewis not only accepted Wilson’s apology — the first one, he noted, that any white supremacist had ever offered him — he also went on the road with his old nemesis. The two appeared on Oprah and accepted recognition from various organizations. Lewis said he wanted to use the occasion as an opportunity for racial reconciliation. It brought to mind words that the Reverend Martin Luther King once spoke of the day that “the lion and the lamb shall lie down together” — the one-time oppressor and one-time victim now hailing each other as “friend,” with the irony that their positions of power had been, in many ways, reversed.

At the end of his life, Wilson revealed a fundamental decency. If we had grown up in the same climate of hate, how many of us would have had the strength not just to overcome it, but to reach out to those we had wronged so many years ago? We should recognize men and women like Wilson who radically change for the better, who embrace love and reject hate.

But I also want to emphasize the courage it took for Lewis to accept that apology. Forgiving someone who not only beat you but rejected your very humanity takes tremendous character. It requires denying a very natural desire to hurt the person who hurt you, to inflict some of the pain that person inflicted on you, even if not through an equivalent act of violence.

Rather than taking his crimes with him to the grave, Wilson repented. Rather than indulge the impulse for vengeance, Lewis forgave. We could all learn from their example.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Twitter: @IanReifowitz

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Photo by Victoria Peckham.
Blog

Love like Exclamation Points: Growing Up with Mental Illness


Statue of Mother with Child
Photo by Victoria Peckham

This story was selected for the Best of In The Fray 2013.

I said good-bye to my mother only twice in thirty-four years. The first time was when I abandoned her in the Bronx to start a new life at boarding school when I was fourteen years old. I’d earned a scholarship to attend the Emma Willard School in upstate New York, and instead of being proud of my achievement, my mother wailed as though I were the parent leaving her child instead of the reverse.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” my mother, Marguerite, whined with a pout. Along with a borrowed, green suitcase full of my clothing, I carried the confusion, guilt, and shame of leaving my mentally ill mother behind in order to make a life for myself. But I still left.

If there’s such a thing as a normal mother-daughter relationship, what I had with my mother was far from that. Our bond was unbreakable, yet destructive. I was the baby, the last of Marguerite’s five children, and had been born to replace my brother, José, who had been killed in a bus accident when he was twelve. My name is a combination of José and Shunda, and as far back as I can remember, my mother instilled the importance of my life being a tribute to my dead brother.

Marguerite possessed a euphoric mix of bipolar and borderline personality disorders that enthralled me like a whirling dervish. A big-boned, black, Cherokee woman, she spread panic and jubilee whenever she moved. The frayed bangs of her wig splayed around her chiseled cheekbones, and her always-damp skin excreted cheap perfume. A permanent wind seemed to encircle Marguerite, swirling the Holy Spirit around her omnipresent rosary in a way that was messy, endearing, and violent.

My childhood was tormented by my mother’s unpredictable fists, which came interspersed with love in the form of exclamation points. One moment my mother would brutally beat me and call me out of my name like a demon possessed. The next moment she would be a total goofball, dancing wildly to Tina Turner by shaking her shoulders and hips like a quarterback in the end zone after a touchdown.

As a young adolescent, I wanted my mother dead during the worst of her manic episodes. She frightened me by disregarding adult responsibilities, like paying the rent and shopping for groceries. We moved so many times that by the time I left to attend the Emma Willard School, I found stillness and quiet suspicious.

I had no instruction guide on how to deal with my mother’s moods, and I didn’t know her narcissistic fury was the result of untreated mental illness. To be black in America, popular culture suggests, is to be crazy. The only escape was flight.

So, I packed my things and my mother wept. Her tears continued right up until I boarded the bus to leave. “Good-bye,” I said flatly, my stoic demeanor a defense against the range of emotions that tugged at my soul.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” she responded, giving me a trademark sloppy kiss that left her maroon lipstick smudged on my cheek. “I will miss you.”

My mom called me daily, then weekly. Since “good-bye” was her least favorite word, she would always end our calls by simply hanging up.

After I graduated from boarding school, I went to Vassar College. In the land of “normal” folks, most of them white and wealthy, I learned that the isolation and chaos of poverty was just one kind of childhood trauma. There were other traumas that came to pass in other kinds of families. Some of my classmates had been raised with too much money and not enough love. Others developed a deep self-loathing that led to self-imposed starvation. Seeing this was the start of my process of understanding my relationship with my mother.

I began to heal from my tumultuous past when I understood my mother’s emotional flaws emerged not from a faulty heart that was incapable of nurturing, but from a chemical neurological imbalance. Realizing the true culprit of my struggles with my mother, I wanted Marguerite to live forever so I could also free her from the tangled mess of our dysfunctional history.

At the beginning of my sophomore year at Vassar College, my mother was evicted from our Bronx apartment and moved across the street from me in Poughkeepsie. I’d stumble out of bed to the cafeteria and find her there, showing pictures of me to the kitchen staff. If she had any boundaries, she never let on.

In my twenties, I left the state and eventually settled in Texas. I carried the inexplicable hope that my mother would get well on her own, that she and I would eventually chuckle about how she ran up my phone bill by calling me at 5 a.m. regularly. But our final good-bye came in a flash, and it was a mixed blessing.

On the heels of my father’s suicide, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer. That Christmas, I returned home to spend the holidays with her. The cancer had shrunk her body in a way that made her appear older than seventy-two. She was in a lot of pain, so a nurse administered morphine.

“I love you,” I told her quietly, as she stared at me blankly. “I will miss you.”

“Good-bye,” I thought, but didn’t say, when I walked out of the room.

My mother died six days before my thirty-fourth birthday. When my sister called to deliver the news, I felt bereft and relieved. I understood that my mother’s death was my clarion call, a way for me to be born again and rise from the ashes of our story.

Marguerite’s unexpected passing required me to take a longer, more compassionate view of the many wounds she left behind. My mother never acknowledged that she needed my forgiveness, but I needed to forgive her for never fighting for a better life or her own well-being. I understood my mother had been the best version of herself that she could be, but I never got to thank her or tell her I’d be fine after she was gone. Maybe she understood the words that were left unspoken, just like she understood good-bye.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: