An Open Letter to the Next Young Man Who Decides to Take a Gun and Shoot a Crowd

I did not catch your name. Because we have never met.

I would catch your name if I could, hold it, here in my palm, while we sit. I would watch your face, looking for the ways your muscles tighten around your jaw when you talk of how no one treats you right. I would note the tempo of your voice. Do you talk slow and quiet, biting back the words of how you thought maybe you cared about someone once, your mom maybe, that girl, perhaps, your grandma, but she turned and walked away from you? Do you talk fast, anger and spit rippling through your voice, as your muscles tense and release, tense and release?

I would sit with you, the weight of your name in my hand. Hard, polished, rolled over once too many times by the sea.

I would sit with you and listen through the hate and blasphemy you spill until your pacing stops and the sobs take over. You are so aching. Could our sitting stitch your thinking back together? Could our silence, together, shear out the sludge and disconnect from your lungs and heart?

I know how you can do this thing. I know how you can destroy others. The gun is your hand; their deaths are your name. You have forgotten that you are not separate from them. You have forgotten that our breathe is shared. You have let their failures to show up in your life, their collective failures to hold your name carefully in their palms, make you think that you are separate from them.

You are not. We never are. We are cut from the same fabric, you and I. We are cut from the same fabric, all of us humans. It is only our thoughts and our frail bodies that disconnect us.

So we are failing you, today. You, foolish man, who are preparing the next mass shooting. We are failing you by not holding you close. We are failing you by isolating ourselves more and more from each other, retreating into our technology and our fantasy. We are failing to show up for one another.

But you are failing today, too. You are letting yourself swim in your own self-pity. You are fueling up on a craving to be seen and reviled. You are putting your grasping ahead of your ability to sit beside someone and hold their name, carefully, in your own hands.

So man up. Take some responsibility for yourself. Know that your name deserves to be held in living hands, and not splayed across newspaper headlines. Find the strength to be humble. Ask for forgiveness and offer it where it is due. Know that you don’t matter an ounce more than any other human being — but you also matter no less.

Get it together before you lose your chance to be held.

More Things Should Be Done in Public

Running through the neighborhoods of condo associations today, I passed few people. Mainly people walking dogs who looked at me skeptically. I don’t dress in chic running clothes. I’ve gained 10 pounds since I could vaguely consider myself athletic. But I was out there, damnit, doing something good for myself. I was in public, doing something that is core to who I am as a human.

Our days are full of the shells of other people. I could easily make it through a day and see only my family and the people at my job. I could easily travel between work and home and believe that there were no human beings around me, just cars in motion and the stale walls of the outsides of buildings. Living that way, I could hate the people. I could go a day and my only “interaction” with people would be flipping off a car/person merging poorly in front of me and grumbling about the condo/person that still has its grungy air conditioner in the window in November.

I could go a whole day hating on the shells of other people.

Imagine that day becomes weeks and months and years. My soul would degrade.

My friend, I do not want my soul to degrade. I do not want yours to. I am sick to the teeth of people with degraded souls pulling guns and killing dozens of people at a time.

We have to get our humanity back. We have to make our humanity public. We have to see each other as people and not as car/people and building/people and blank-faced-meaningless/people. We have to see that the people around us are full and living and holding on to some kind of belief. We are burning with some kind of goodness.

Laugh uproariously with your child in public. Show that joy exists.

Kiss your partner in public. Really kiss them. Show that real, devoted, passionate love can still exist.

Go for a run a few times a week rather than going to the gym. Show the neighbors that you have a physical body and you believe the physical world still matters in this age of technology.

Eat your lunch on a park bench rather than your cubicle at work. Show that you believe in the power of tupperware and home-cooked food.

Take your yoga practice to the local park. Read your book, knit your hat, work your crossword, practice your swordsmanship, care for your snake in some way that people can see it.

Turn your face to the sun, my mother always tells me. Show that our souls are still alive and lit on fire.

What about you? What will you do in public?

You Yawn in My Arms

You rub one of my ears with one hand, while you hold one of your own ears in your other. I rock you back and forth in the chair, the steady clicking of the wood infusing itself into the sounds of bedtime. Three years old, you sprawl across the chair. With a sudden inhale you yawn fully.

You yawned like that as an infant. Your mama and I would smile in delight. Yawning was one of the first things you could do — before talking or walking or even focusing your eyes. Your lungs would fill, your mouth would stretch wide, and your breath would flutter back out into the world around you.

We would watch you, mesmerized by your existence.

Rocking you tonight, I feel the rise and fall of your chest as you yawn. I feel the air in and out of my own lungs. We are so alike, my child, so oddly temperamentally matched given that I have no biological connection to you. We share the desire to draw the things we see in our heads; the frustration when it does not come out just so; the endless dancing in the living room. That breath, though, draws us even more deeply together.

The breath is never ours. It’s not our individual air. Our lungs and limbs and nervous system trick us into thinking we are Individuals, separate from one another. Our bodies con us into believing we survive on our own.

The air is never ours. Each breath in keeps us bound to one another. We are of the air. We are of the breath. We do not own it individually, or even collectively. We are graced by a god to be a part of it.

Yawn away, my three year old fighting sleep.

“Look at Him, He’s Just Fine,” or a Shout Out to my Mom

G shows me gleefully how tall he is, stretching his short frame as high as he can. I watch his belly arch, see how he’s lost his toddler pudge. The pit of my stomach drops. Is he losing weight? Or just stretching out taller?

I was his age, 3, when I started losing weight. I was getting sick, but we didn’t know it yet. Three more months would pass before I ended up in the hospital, stuck in a bed, waking terrified in the night.

The extended family who knows me now, and adores the small boy, tell me I am too anxious. They say my worrying will not help G. I have to relax. I should trust that he’ll be ok. I love these people; they are my family. I watch their faces, agree with them intellectually. They didn’t know me at age 3.

I go back to staring at G and wondering if he is losing weight.

Will it get easier once he’s past the 3 years, 3 months mark? I remember this from my years as a social worker. Parents get unsettled when their kids turn the same age they were when the Bad Thing Happened to them as a child.

I’m 35 now. The same age my mom was when Bad Things Happened to her kids. My mom looks at him and says “Look at him, K. He’s just fine.” She tells me not to make up things to worry about. I look at him. He is running excitedly to the couch, throwing himself against the side as he rapidly explains his latest discovery. He is not tired or lethargic or disinterested.

Her words stick in my head. She is maybe the only one who could get away with saying them to me. “Look at him, he’s just fine.” She spent years looking at me to see if I was fine. She learned to notice faint shifts in the color in my face; too pale and she would pour food into me. She learned to notice shifts in my mood, changes in the smell of my breath. She stood by my bed night after night, deciding whether or not to wake me up to make me eat a little more. She didn’t want me to pass out in my sleep at night, unsure if I would wake up in the morning.

I stand by G’s crib, listening to him breath at night. I wait through three breaths, making sure his lungs are rising and falling evenly. Look at him, he’s just fine. Can I be so lucky? Can he make it through age 3, solid and intact? I lay a hand across his back, feel the steady rise and fall of his chest against my palm.

The Kids of Old Friends

At 8 years old, K and I both loved the special reading group for the geeky kids at school. We skipped snack time to meet with a reading specialist to discuss the stacks of library books we devoured each week. At age 10, we were lighting campfires and whittling sticks in Girl Scouts. In our 30s, we were having babies.

Her oldest is 3 years older than G. Her twins just months older. I watch them voraciously on Facebook. Because they are beautiful kids. Because they sing and dance and draw things. Because they show me what G’s likely to be up to in a few months. Because Lord help her, she has toddler twins.

Trump won. I watched her Facebook more closely. An immigration ban was announced and I just stared at pictures of those beautiful kids. They have K’s love of books. They run like the wind, like she did as a kid across soccer fields. But they have their daddy’s skin color, his black hair. They look like what they are: the very beloved kids of an immigrant family.

After the Charlottesville hell, I posted to Facebook a picture of me and G with the words:

If the alt-right gains power, they will seek to exile or kill this little guy’s parents. I get physically ill thinking that they would harm Glen, too. I’m not on a bus to a counter-protest this weekend, so I WILL continue to take action to improve how people in positions of power (at my work) interact with people who are the targets of the alt-right. And then I will get braver and figure out how to do that work OUTSIDE of my job. And I make this public statement to keep myself that much more accountable for following through. A year ago, after the violence and murders at Pulse, I implored: WHATEVER PLATFORM YOU HAVE, USE IT. I’m shouting that even more loudly now. Wherever in your daily life you can take that extra step, take it!

And K wrote back: “LOVE YOU. With you. You are not alone. I’m so angry right now, have been, but am standing by this hope love light thing. You rock, lady. Hugs to the whole family!!”

And I cried. I cried for K and I, the good girls from a nice town in a quiet state, who were both so lucky to fall in love with good people. We were so lucky to have kids. We both have reasons to look at the small faces of small children and know how impossible it is that these children exist, that we exist, that we are parenting them. I cried for these small children of ours, who we want so desperately to shield from the dangers that come from this simple fact: we love our spouses. If we hadn’t loved good people, if we hadn’t started families that were so dearly wanted, these children wouldn’t be the faces of a mixed-race, mixed-national-origin family and of a queer family.

And I cried most because she’s home in the way childhood friends are home. She is home and she is holding her babies as tightly as I hold mine. She is home and she’s showing up at protests, too. When we were gangly-legged 8 year olds out on a playground, our teachers may not have known that someday we would be two parents with families in jeopardy, carrying ourselves with a fierceness that the nice girls in book club never had.

She is home and she is courage and compassion in action.

Why I Love My Wife: Part 1

My love is balancing on a yoga ball that has deflated over the years. She has patiently allowed me to keep it in our home. She has her tense look, her “I am saying words and I mean them” look, and I can feel that my eyebrows are raised back at her.

I let G have his paci this morning when he woke up. He’s supposed to be down to using pacifiers just when he’s sleeping or riding in the car. But he doesn’t want them in the car and doesn’t need them at night. He wants them, desperately, when he first gets up in the morning and he’s snuggled deep into my arms. Early in the morning, our living room has a warm gray light from a sun that hasn’t quite decided to rise. The air crisply darts into the room when I slide open the big doors. Our skin tingles from the sudden chill, and we cozy down onto the couch, happily being less than fully awake.

But that was hours ago, and now G is tucked back into bed and I’m recounting to my love how I thought it would be a good idea to let him have his paci in those first early moments each day.

She is talking me into not letting him have his paci and throws out phrases like “developmentally appropriate.” My jaw sets harder and my eyebrows raise further against her. I listen to our discussion as we have it. I try to figure out my own stubborn spot. Truth hits like the freight train it always is: I’m not ready for him to not be my baby.

My love is telling me in well thought-out and carefully researched terms that it is time for him to give up his paci. All my raised eyebrows amount to is a desperate cry of he’s still my baby.

She loves him that fiercely. She loves G not to own him. She loves him not just to delight in him and cherish him. She loves him to love him. She loves his whole life, even though most of it (please God may this be true) hasn’t happened yet. She sees the young adult he’ll be, and the ways she needs to love him now so he can thrive in the future. She loves him in ways that sow strength, confidence, and resourcefulness into him. She persistently loves that adult courage into him even though we usually talk about him in terms of sweet and endearing. She loves G in a way that instills in him what he will need to have learned at age 3 to be brave at age 18.

She is a rare one.

Blending the Water Into You

Dear G,

“I’m blending the water in,” you say, as you pour water over my arm. You are in the bath, and I’m kneeling on the floor. You’ve switched the tops around on bottles to make a water spout you can squeeze in small drops or quick rivulets, the water running down my arm.

“Blending?” I ask.

“I’m blending the water into you,” you say, calmly and resolutely.

You are, in your mind and in your actions. Except you aren’t. The water doesn’t blend into me; it beads up into drops that tilt and roll off into the bathwater below.

I watch the droplets stay stuck against the slight resistance of hairs on my arm. Just the other week Papa, your grandfather on my side, was here to visit. After he had been with us for days, you froze stock-still, staring at his arm. Finally you asked me: “what’s that on his arm?” You were too nervous to look him in the face. I explained that he has hair on his arms. You didn’t trust my answer. You asked again. We talked it through. Papa showed you the hairs on his arms, and how they were like the hairs in his beard. You stared.

Days later you asked me if I had hairs on my arm. You didn’t believe me at first when I said I do. You wanted to see. Mine are finer and lighter than Papa’s, not so easy to see. So you reached over and tried to get one, to see if I really did have hairs. You reached until you caught one, and held on tightly.

You asked if you had hairs on your arm. We held your arm up towards the sunlight, so we could see light glisten through the tiny filaments. “Yes, all people do,” I said.

You resisted that idea. You check periodically, my arm, your arm. You look for the little hairs. You ask why Papa’s are darker, and mine lighter. We talk about men and women, and how my hair is finer than Papa’s. Your brows furrow.

You don’t know yet that the years will blend the gender into you. You are soft and squishy like play-dough now. Your skin is smooth. Your toddler cheeks wrap around your jawline, hiding the square, sharp cut of your face. You giggle and dance and climb and sing and jump and swing like any other boy or girl in your class.

But each morning I lift you up from your crib, I swear you’ve stretched another inch. The long days will give way to short years, and you’ll be an angle-y, awkward teenager soon. Your sparrow’s voice will give way to crow-ish cracks. The hairs on your arms will look thicker and darker. The softness will give way, and you’ll grow away from your mama and me.

In family photos, you won’t stand out as The Baby of the Family. You’ll look like The Man of the Family, with a doting mom on each side.

You are blending the water in, blending it in. I wonder if you will.

Painting the Fish

The week was flooding into me. As I stepped off the sidewalk, into a gallery, the floor stopped moving. Sound muffled itself under the August heat. The people seemed to dissolve off the street. My attention fell into an oil painting of Philadelphia in the rain, in the cars, in the sky stretching out between buildings.

There is beauty in a thing well done.

G’s middle name is in honor of a family friend. He was a story-teller. He gathered up the wisdom and emotions of others’ tales, and wrapped them around us. He told me a story of a monk who painted beautiful pictures. One day, a man came to the door and asked the monk for a painting of a fish. The monk agreed, and told the man to come back in a year. The man came back a year later and asked for the painting. The monk invited him in, asking him to sit. The monk took out a piece of paper and in a few strokes painted an elegant fish. The man shouted at him: “If you could do this so quickly, why did you make me wait a year?” The monk calmly stood and walked to a closet door. He opened it, and hundreds of imperfect paintings of fish spilled across the floor. “It took me a year to paint the fish,” he replied.

I stood in front of the well-painted painting. There was no force in it. The strokes of it lay easily on the canvas. There was no fighting against the effort of painting, no clenchingly trying to get it right. I thought of years I had spent trying to paint. I tried too hard. I fought the paint. I strangled the brush. I feared the misplaced stroke.

I thought of the 2,000 people I marched down the street with last night here in Philly. Jewish men in yarmulkes and hipsters in tattoos. Black men in suits and the antifa kids dressed in black. White parents with babies sleeping in carriers and two Black moms with their four sons standing hand-in-hand in a row between them, teaching the 3 year old to shout: “What do we want? JUSTICE!”

In the midst of it, I worried that it was the 20-something-year-old white kids trying too hard as they started to chant “Black lives matter!” I strangled the brush of my voice. Should white voices be the ones shouting that? Are we dominating the moment by initiating the chants? Or are we finally giving voice to the things we should have been saying for the past 400 years? I took a breath and joined in. It will depend on the day, on the moment, on the particular people there.

Each moment we get a chance to paint a fish. Each moment we get to try to say the thing that should be said, even if we misplace a stroke. Each day we get to forgive each other as we loosen our grips on our brushes and open our hands to the work.

A Letter to My Almost 3-Year-Old, About Being Thirteen

Dear G,

You woke up this morning with words spilling out of your mouth: “I don’t want to be in the crib anymore. I want to get up. Can I have something to eat?” You followed it up with careful negotiations about how many blueberries you could have at breakfast, a complex description of the pick-ax you were making out of building blocks (“It’s a pick-ax because I pick things up with it!”), and a request for a story you wanted me to make up on the spot about you and some fictional friends.

Your words bubble up, and you want our ears wide open to them. You want our words. You claw your way up our legs and into our arms as you request stories.

You will turn thirteen someday. You will be too big to claw your way up our legs. You will think you are too big to share the words that bubble up. You will be wrong.

You do not, ever, get to be too cool for your mama and me. We are the epitome of cool. We are every last instance of cool, embodied. You will talk with us. The stories will change. They will become complex, nuanced, about real friends and experiences you have outside of our home, and outside of our reach, that we only know because you tell us. Our words back to you won’t be about fictional characters. They’ll be about you, and us, and our longing to see your beautiful soul stay solid and confident.

A co-worker shared her words with me today. It was a quick email about a shared client: “Three things could have happened: death, arrest, or rehab. I was hoping for rehab.” That was all it said.

Child, you do not, ever, get to stop talking to me. We will disagree. We will each be tempted to shout: “why don’t you just get it?!” and walk away. We do not get to do that. I have to hear you. I have to set down my own needs to get the laundry done, and clean the kitchen, and get us to school and work in a timely way long enough to listen to what you actually mean. I have to hold your words in my palms, feel how they vibrate. I won’t try to rub the sharp edges off them. I will hold them calmly while your face, your posture, explain to me what they mean.

Here, let’s practice. Here are my hands, open for you.

To the Neighbor, Carrying His Daughter

You walk each night with her in your arms. She is maybe one, a tiny pigtail on top of her hair, a back arching so she can look up at your face. You have an arm under her, the other hand half supporting her, half just resting in a familiar way. There is no effort in your face, no expression necessary. You walk with her this way.

I drive past you, slowing slightly to turn the corner from your neighborhood to mine as I drive home from work. I want to stop, but I don’t. I want to just stop and stand still beside you as you carry the one year old in your arms, in your nightly ritual with her.

My little one is almost three. I carry him still, but my face is no longer expressionless. Our walks are a banter of discussion and inquisitiveness. I have to lean my weight back away from him when he stretches outwards, to keep us from getting off balance and toppling over. I wouldn’t trade these days for the world. But I wish I could stop driving and stand quietly beside you.

You gotta know, every parent in this neighborhood loves you and your little girl: you are us, as we were. You are us, as our hearts still are.

Your hair is black, your complexion darker than us pale American-born Vermonters. I meet immigrants and refugees each week at work. Your face has the lines of those from south-east Asia, but I am still too ignorant to hazard a more specific guess. I wonder each night what brought you to this neighborhood, to this town, to this state always about to slide too far north into Canada. You walk with her in your arms with no expression.

I wonder if you fled, or if you came to study, or if you fell in love with a wayward traveler who convinced you that this small state has great wonders.

I wonder what assumptions our neighbors make. Do you fear the assumptions?

I walked in circles around our old neighborhood, G in my arms when he was just shy of a year. I worried sometimes what assumptions the neighbors made about me.

I wish it was always this simple: you are us, as our hearts still are.