2018-01-21 - 9:11 a.m.
I haven't posted in a long time, but want to maintain this page because of its long history in my life. I began posting here in 1998, so it will be 20 years this fall. This diary has been called "my heart has hit ground zero" before 9/11 happened, and the meaning of that phrase changed drastically, especially for those of us living in new york.
In 20 years I have built my career in education, worked for over 15 years in NYC Public Schools in various capacities, in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx. I have found the love of my life, gotten married, had two wonderful children, and gotten pulled away from writing a thousand times. But writing is at the core of who I am. I have never and probably will never make money off of it in my lifetime, but it is how I live life, and where I return in times of struggle.
Our country has spent a year in the turmoil of a government that has no business running a PTA bake sale. We are currently in government shut-down in a Republican controlled Congress, court system and White House. We are living the white supremacy dream, in a time when fading baby boomers want to hold onto a semblance of power in an increasingly black and brown world. I am teaching resistance on a daily basis, trying to hunker down and not let the gross incompetence of this regime get me down. I am living through my students' new forms of resistance, power and communicating who they are. I believe in the next generation's ability to make change in the society they inherit, I just hope there is a society left for them to inherit.
I am raising bad-ass, intelligent, womanist, Muslim, mixed-race children in a country that would rather they learn to be silent and obedient, and I truly wonder on most days of the week if we are better off outside of the U.S. until this regime loses power. My son is only 5, but I worry about his safety with his defiant spirit and sense of justice. I fear and hate the day I will have to fully explain the injustice of the country we live in. He is proud to be black, proud to be Senegalese, proud of his African language and culture and I never want him to question that, but these are things I cannot shield him from in 2018 in the United States. I knew this abstractly before, and certainly wrote about it while pregnant with each child (What business do I have making these lives?), but the fear and anxiety about living with your heart in other human bodies over which I have less and less control as they grow, this is almost too much.
Meditation is needed.
Travel is necessary.
Light and warmth on my skin
is the prescription.
Love is the medicine for fear.
I need to keep repeating
what I need
to keep moving.
