When my babies were little, I wrote a poem about the experience of sleeping next to them. My husband on one side of the bed, and my child in the middle, I often felt like I got the short end of the mattress space. I contorted my body in all kinds of directions just to get an hour of rest here and there while the sun was lighting up the other side of the world.
I remember thinking that once those little bodies spent the night in their own beds consistently that I would get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. Twenty-one years later, I’ve learned that I will never sleep as well as my 19-year-old body did.
I’m sure it’s a plague that has riddled mothers since the beginning of time. Even that instinct to make sure they have hats and gloves on a crisp fall morning is something that can leave us tossing and turning into the wee hours of the morning.
We write our notes and make our lists and hope that as they walk out into the world the other mothers have also prepared their child to be kind and hopeful, honest and thoughtful.
But because we’ve all been in the halls of school, in the mall and on the telephone, we know that there is a child sitting by herself on the stairs at lunch, that someone has made fun of the girl with the socks that don’t match and that there is a boy who won’t get a fair shot on the soccer team.
Sometimes I imagine that as I’m up with the stars they may be heating another planet where another mother is just as worried that a shooter might walk into the cafeteria and kill her child.
And then I remember that there are thousands of mothers, just in the United States, worrying about how the school will protect her child and wanting to make sure the environment she sends him to at 8 a.m. will not be conducive to breeding alienation, anxiety, and hatred.
Doing this work, though, collecting the pang of the unimaginable, has left me staying up with other mothers in my mind.
Some of my greatest worries have been if the mean girls were going to throw another muffin at my daughter’s head while she waited for school to begin. It’s certainly not something she will ever get over—just as I know that the boy who my son tripped at school will never completely get over how that moment felt.
While I spend time worrying about if my daughters will be assaulted, kidnapped, or raped or if they will have a fair shot in the professional world, I know that they, who are white, straight, cisgender, and generally do well in academics, work and extracurricular live in a different world than many others do.
I’ve watched mothers’ faces, filled with disbelief and distrust, as they recount the experiences of their child. Perhaps the incidents have happened with frequency over a long period of time, but more recently, more children and their parents are willing to tell those stories. When printed, it’s said that Mahomet has always been this way:
Black children being referred to as a “dipped cone” either because of their “white” personality or because their adoptive parents are white;
Black children listening to their teacher use the “n-word” and seeing the administration stand beside them;
Black children arriving home, only to tell their mother that their classmates referred to them as an “n-word” again;
BIPOC children being targeted with stereotypes of what it means to live in a diverse community;
Hispanic children getting a wall built around them after Trump won the election in 2016;
Asian children being subject to racist beliefs as students study WWII;
Black children having to allow white children to touch their hair while they sing “fuzzy wuzzy was a bear” or “friends” throwing things in their hair or teachers not helping when Black students ask white students to stop touching their hair;
Black children being called “ghetto” and “ratchet” in class and teachers doing nothing;
Bi-racial students being asked if they “can only half swim”;
Black children being pushed to the front of a march because of their skin color;
Black children listening to their white classmates dictate whether or not they can make a political statement;
Black children watching their classmates change their white skin color to brown on social media;
And this weekend a video surfaced on social media of a Black boy’s fist-bump being likened to a first bump of a monkey, and a “friend” singing about his Black friend in the cotton field.
Even if I had to worry about my children being called “white trash”, “redneck”, or a “hick”, those words certainly would not even come close to the dehumanization that their Black and BIPOC classmates have endured.
As a white woman, these instances are something that could be easily brushed aside as “jokes.” As adults, we gather “facts and evidence” to make sure that all sides of the story are presented. We do our best to make sure that these stories stay where they should be, with the parties involved, and then it just becomes another mark, another time when something happened and we moved on to something different and more uplifting. This is how we justify #allbulldogs.
As a community, this is what we do. But I can assure you that the mothers of these children have not just moved on. They are up in the wee hours of the night knowing that if this is what their child’s “friend” was willing to put on social media, they have to be experiencing more extreme racism behind the scenes. They know that maybe their child laughed or smiled, but it was only because they did not know what else to do in order to be liked or accepted. They know that these are just the first instances of racism that they will have to endure over decades of life.
And so, they are holding meetings with the administration to try to find accountability within a system that likes to brush all types of circumstances aside. They are trying to educate their children so that they know their being is more than what society makes it to be. They are advocating for their children to make sure they have the same opportunities as everyone else. They are holding their babies’ heads high for them as the children wish they could be somewhere else or someone else. They are researching laws and policies to ensure that tomorrow might look different than today.
This is all while the rest of us are finding ways to honor the football team or sharing videos of the staff throwing a frozen turkey at some bowling pins. We never think about the mother up in the middle of the night, worrying about her BIPOC child. She knows that it only takes a split second for the condition of her child’s heart to be shattered forever. And we know it only takes a split second to explain away our child’s ignorant beliefs.
