What Happens When Your Kids Are Raised In “Foodie” Culture

1. They Invent dishes. Like the one below. My son calls it Pastrami Sushi.

2. They think about presentation when they make their snacks. When creating said dishes, my son declares – “I need a condiment on it.“ I ask, “what did you choose?” He answers: “I put a drop of soy sauce on each one for decoration and a touch of olive oil.”  After invention of snack, my kids say, “cheers” before eating it.

3. They think that food needs a name. Actually decides to rename his dish “snackers delight” and declares it should be surrounded by kale chips.

4. They ask about the “origin” of their food and have favorites. My daughter declares that she loves her Mast Chocolate from Belize. Well, I guess a kid liking any chocolate from Mast Chocolate is already a tad on the foodie side. My only defense is Free samples and 3 blocks away from home!

5. They have very pronounced opinions about food. We walk past the Mast Chocolate Brew Bar and my daughter says, “remember when we tried that Chocolate water? There was not even a touch of sugar in it! I mean, I want to taste the chocolate but c’mon! It needs some sugar!”

6. They pick sushi over all other food options and the local sushi chef is impressed by your kids’ palate and has memories of them double-fisting pieces of sashimi at age 2.

Mike Brown and Talking to Our Children About Racism & Walking With Them To Fight It

Here’s the thing – recently I have heard people talking about WHEN they should talk to their kids about race, as if our children will first hear about it from us – but our society and culture ALREADY teaches our kids about race. EVERY SINGLE DAY. The experience is different depending on the skin you walk around in, but the truth is – ALL our kids are learning their respective places in the racial caste system of the US.

Our children learn about race and White supremacy from an early age. When my daughter was just 3 or 4, she declared that White skinned girls were prettier and that she wished she didn’t have brown skin. Of course, this killed me. My daughter didn’t learn about our country’s racial caste system from me, she learned it from being a brown skin girl in America. White kids know it too, but they don’t have to grapple with it like our children. It is easy to bask in the beauty of whiteness when it is all around you. No need to look at your skin the mirror and wish/ache for something more. And of course, why question it? White children are so used to being the center of everything – movies, books, celebrities, political figures, historical accounts, that when a movie like Hunger Games dares to make a small Black girl an emotional center (not even the star), White children felt free to complain about via social media. And while all children of color experience racism – in this country, with it’s history of slavery and genocide of the First Nations – anti-Blackness and Anti-First Nations has it’s own particular virulence.

We talk about racism all the time in our home. We use it as frame and explanation for many of the questions that my kids feel free to ask. But with the recent murder of Mike Brown, I realized that talking about fighting racism, while essential, was not going to be enough to counter to the anti-Blackness that our kids are exposed to every day.

But actually being out there fighting for a Black life with Black people as the lead – well – that is the heart of it, right? Our children needed to see our anger and despair over the loss of a Black life at the hands of the State. Because in this society that our children live in – they learn that Black life is disposable, not to be celebrated, not to be cherished, or mourned when taken so brutally. They needed to see their non-Black parents watch the racist’s state announcement that essentially blamed Mike Brown for his own murder & they needed to hear us declare the prosecutor’s words to be racist lies. They needed to see us mourn a Black life. And then they needed to see us all march in the street together and take the streets and declare that yes #Black Lives Matter.

Brookyn Barangay Joins The People’s Climate March!

Getting ready to make some art with DAMAYAN, Filipino Domestic Workers group!

This Sunday, September 21, Brooklyn Barangay will be joining the 100,000’s of people expected to march in NYC to show the world that we DEMAND our world leaders to act now on climate change.

We March because Typhoon Haiyan was the strongest storm to ever make landfall – in the history of the PLANET.

From pics taken in our province of Aklan, Madalag, Philippines, after Typhoon Haiyan.

We March because the Philippines, our home, suffers from energy poverty, has contributed a tiny % of the green house gases that causes climate catastrophe and YET is one of the countries most at risk for the havoc caused by climate change.

DAMAYAN’s Banner Clean up! FIGHT Corporate Plunder.

But Marching is not enough. We need to start to act like we are in a climate catastrophe – because we are.

We Need to Fight For Community and Worker Control of our Energy Systems. We must understand that the companies who are the worst polluters : oil and coal will literally let this planet burn for profit. They have manipulated science, public discourse, laws, in order to make a buck KNOWING that they are destroying the world. The very definition of Psychopaths.

We Need to Fight For a Different, Sustainable Economic System Because: CAPITALISM Is UNSUSTAINABLE. 

See You on the Streets!

If measured by how we treat the most vulnerable of us – charter schools would not do so well..

Amazing things happen in our public school all the time. Teachers who call me at night to discuss a wonderful thing my daughter accomplished, text messages of my children enjoying a group art project, a classroom project about Odetta – the voice of the Civil Rights movement. But there are tough times too, kids who act out or are disruptive in class.

Pic from NYC schools website

There is a recent NYTimes Op-Ed about stats that show children with special needs don’t do well in charter schools like Success Academy. In fact, statistics show that much of the “success” of charter schools is based on the fact that they push out children who can’t survive their “no-excuses” regimes, something that public schools can’t do. And should not do! Read the Op-ed here, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/05/opinion/charter-school-refugees.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=1

And read a great blog post about it here: https://teacherbiz.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/quick-send-your-kids-to-charters-lest-they-be-tossed-in-the-lions-den-with-the-special-needs-student/

It has made me think of a child in particular that our public school has worked with this year and the impact on our children. First, to preface, my girl, is very sensitive and a tad on the anxious side, and other children’s emotional distress has a big impact on her. In the beginning of the year, there was a child who the school was trying to mainstream into our class. I, of course, don’t know all the details of her, or her IEP, but I knew enough to see that she was struggling. Her behavior was disruptive, she was angry in class. The teacher tried hard to work with the child, she also asked the class to try and work with the child. “Let’s all try and help X with his feelings and respect when he is feeling upset and give him space.” I think this was a good thing for my Girl to see, to see grown-ups give attention and caring to another human being who was hard to deal with & to NOT see a child thrown away or discarded.

Unfortunately, in the end, the child was unable to be mainstreamed and was removed from our class and placed in a different class. My children observed this transition, my girl was relieved, because the constant disruptions were hard for her. BUT what was outstanding/miraculous even was that they never learned to stigmatize or blame the child. My children used language that they obviously learned from the school, like “well he needs to learn to deal with his anger more” or “he was moved to a class where there is more support for him.” They learned to have compassion, love, and patience for someone struggling.

Again and again, I see my school treat struggling children with love and compassion. What do children in schools like Success Academy feel learn when their classmates get kicked out of school because they couldn’t follow the strict letter of the law?

Sheltering in Place school drills, DARE dogs, Fallout Shelters and the Monsters under our Beds

Image borrowed from http://www.otrcat.com/this-is-civil-defense-p-48769.html

My children are learning how to “shelter in place” in school. In Kid’s words, “If someone with a gun comes into the school, they will say a code word on the intercom and we all go into a corner of the classroom, after my teacher locks the door.” At first, I had this moment of mourning for their loss of childhood, etc, but then I stepped back and remembered that kids throughout US history have been practicing drills for different monsters under our collective beds.

In my childhood, it was the War on Drugs and DARE (Drug Abuse and Resistance Education). I still remember the movies – kids on PCP who thought they could fly, kids high on weed who let their baby brother drown, all the while laughing hysterically.  And who can forget the commercial – “This is your brain on drugs” – a sizzling fried egg!~ One of my earliest memories of school is of the DARE bear, or was it a dog? I looked it up, turns out it was a lion?? A policeman and his DARE bear met with us every few months to tell us the dangers of drugs and urge us to turn in our parents if we caught THEM doing drugs. “Just Say No kids!” My kids have heard very little about the dangers of drugs and certainly have never seen a DARE bear. They HAVE learned about the dangers of obesity and Kid #2 always asks, “Am I burning calories? or Is this calories? as she takes a bite of food.” (This DOES NOT come from us, we don’t believe in the body shaming/dieting fad of our culture).

During WWII kids in schools practiced diving under tables in case the Axis powers conducted an air raid. In the 60’s – 80’s the cold war with Russia had us all looking for fallout shelters or building them in our back yard.

I guess my point is that in the moment our fears and anxieties seem very real and terrifying. After Sandy Hook, our schools appear to be nightmares of possible gunmen and murder. According to media, our children all more obese than ever so we should teach our kids about calories. Gunmen in schools, childhood obesity  – these are our children’s monsters under the bed. But in other generations, their monsters also seemed very real and terrifying – drugs, nuclear warfare, German airraids. Today, the monsters of the past look small, even quaint. Or they, themselves, were the actual things we should have feared. The WAR on drugs has arguably done more damage than drugs – the mass incarceration of a whole generation have destroyed families and communities. It also distracted us from what we really should have been fighting – the growing inequality, the failure of trickle down economics, for instance.

My question is  – if this is true, the monsters of the past were just distractions or worse- then maybe our monsters of today aren’t the ACTUAL monsters. Yes, a lone gunman did enter a elementary school and committed a terrifying act and thereby entered all parents’ nightmares. But he was also a child himself, who had long suffered from mental illness and his parents’ hadn’t been able to find him help. Maybe the real monster is the failure of our mental health system. Maybe it is an society that glamorizes violence, guns, and a mean-spiritness that makes it ok for politicians to attack teachers, firefighters, and other public workers as the drains on society.  Yes, obesity and diabetes is on the rise among children. But Maybe the REAL monster is that parents are both working full time (which are 50-60hours a week), jobs don’t give us any time to take care of family, including cooking of healthy meals, parents increasingly rely on empty calories of McD’s dollar menus. Maybe it is the privatizing of our schools and the resulting pressure to produce high testing children and so they don’t have time for physical exercise, art, music, or other creative work.

As a parent, it feels like an exceptionally scary time to be raising children, there is a myth that times were simpler and the monsters tamer in the past. But in truth, children in our society have always been in danger, in capitalism, it’s the most vulnerable that are the least likely to survive. From Black children throughout the US history, to child workers in the factories, and even now children working in our fields, children dying at our borders, it is only the death of certain children that become a national tragedy. Our children are at risk differently, based on race, class, and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation – the fact that we help some children thrive while letting others die – that is the real monster under our collective beds. As poet Audre Lorde said:
“So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive”

But those are not the monsters that our children are being prepared for when they learn to shelter in place. 

My Self-rationing of “Alone” Time

I find myself self-rationing personal/alone time. In so many ways – as a parent, as a parent that works outside the home, as an activist – my time is always on demand and my supply seems constantly low. In the end, it feels like I have very little to give myself.

It is like a self-imposed self-deprivation. If I go to yoga or see a “grown-up movie” at a movie theatre or meet a friend for dinner, I feel like I have used my allotted time for the week. I don’t allow myself another personal time event until the next week. It’s pretty messed up, I know!

I don’t know where I came up with this unfair system. I am guessing that I have internalized the gender bias that places the primary responsibility of childcare on mothers, and condemns women who assert their own needs over their children.

In law school, we read a case from the 60’s where a judge took custody from the mother because she was in law school and was seen reading her law school book during her children’s recital. That was totally me in law school, reading my law books while my kids were taking trapeze class. I had to use every “extra” moment to get through law school. And that was ok, despite what that asshole judge ruled. Law school was one of the most fulfilling projects I ever completed. I felt like a superhero, making Halloween costumes while acing my Contracts exams. It was good I did it, I kicked ass! And I still derive satisfaction from that fact, even if now I am not so sure I want to practice and work the grindstone of a law job (assuming I could even get a legal job in the worst legal job market in history).

It is the balancing act that I find unbearable. Work, children, self, these categories are simultaneously distinct and intertwined. My level of happiness in one activity directly connected to my satisfaction in the other activity. For instance, having my own work outside my children makes me appreciate being home even more.

The famous quote from Khalil Gibran reminds us that our children cannot be OUR project/work.

“ Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”

This rings true for me. It is our obligation and sometimes our joy to raise them, but their lives are their own and not ours to lay claim to.

Conversely we, as mothers, do not belong solely to our childen. Adrienne Rich writes beautifully in “Of Woman Born” about the creation of “Motherhood” under patriarchy. This social creation of a “mother” that is created to fulfill a “need vaster than any single human being could satisfy, except by loving continuously, unconditionally, from dawn to dark, and often in the middle of the night.” She writes about our loss of self, our anger, and fear of never finding our way back to our selves again.

When I left for law school and felt racked by guilt, my husband said – Our children need to learn to share their mother with the world.

So, as I begin a new year (it is the Jewish new year), maybe I can do the opposite of rationing and assign myself personal time instead. I am thinking a sticker chart to reward myself.

The Tsunami of Parenthood & Turning 40

Tray tables up, seats in their upright position, we are fast approaching – 40!! Yes, I turned 40, which has driven me into the rabbit hole of looking into journals from 20 + years ago. It is so strange, I recognize the handwriting as my own, but much of the details I can’t remember recall. On the other hand, there are entries that I can remember exactly where I was. I can see my 18 year-old-self sitting at the Village Café in Richmond, Virginia on Grace Street scribbling away in my journal, with my straight-edge boyfriend sitting across from me. I can still remember how cool I felt to be in the big “city” of Richmond and not out in the suburban mall where most of my classmates spent their days. Being a tiny, mestiza Filipina, teenager in Richmond, Virginia was hard. My journal entries were mostly about overcoming, or resilience, with a lot phoenix references.

But looking back on these last 10 years, the most important event in my life was becoming a mom. To my surprise, and all my friends, I got married at 27 and we tried for years to get pregnant. So those lost years were hard as anyone who has gone through the trials of infertility can tell you. I won’t go into it here, except to say that my heart broke after several failed IVF attempts, and my arms had tracks on them after so many blood draws, and my ass hurt after so many huge, progesterone shots. Anyway, it all turned out OK because we became parents to our beautiful twins and then my life shifted and the landscape change like a tsunami had swept through it. Washing away all the unimportant things, like brushing my teeth before I leave in the morning, and revealing the truly important things – like today, I mostly succeeded in feeding and clothing my children and they are still alive.

It’s funny, some people tell you it is hard to have children, but you don’t listen, you think well it can’t be that hard! Or some people lie and tell you it isn’t hard at all and that they can parent without even breaking a sweat. Well, I can say that more than marriage, more than losing my virginity, by far, parenting was the biggest thing to hit my life this decade. In fact, there were moments when I really, truly wondered – how did the human race continue and not sink into extinction?

I also started to hate my friends without children – I hated when they called me to tell me that they were doing nothing, just laying around doing nothing while I had two screaming toddlers wrapped around my ankles. I hated when they told me having a dog was like having a child, while I had to spend an hour dressing, and taking two toddlers outside and into car seats just to move my car to other side of the street, because unlike dogs, I can’t leave them in the house while I do a quick errand.

My other mom friend in law school and I used to laugh about our parenting struggles until we cried. One day, an innocent, fellow student without children, said in a tiny, scared voice, “guys you are making me not want to have kids.”  That’s when I realized that non-parents aren’t supposed to hear these stories, they are stories only to be told and shared with other parents, preferably over whiskey.

But of course there are the other moments – the exquisite ones, the achingly, satisfying moments, the ones where our children smell like sunshine and rich soil and fresh breezes and wild ocean all rolled up into one. When they hold our hand in such a way that we are finally and totally quiet and time stands still. When we roll in the grass together and laugh until our stomachs hurt and we thank the universe or god or whomever we believe in that we were placed on this earth to share it with this little creature, this burning star that chose US to be their parents. There are those moments too. And since it such an all-encompassing experience, only a poem will suffice. Here is a draft…

Becoming

a mother

is an unfurling –

a position you grow in

to.

 

Having children

or they having you?

their always physical presence –

a light, always touch, like air

or

heavy like 1000 leagues underwater

where it is dark and still and full.

 

my children

stretch out like giant sequoias over the landscape

of my life

creating primordial darkness where shadows and sun

intersect

and small creatures live and make their homes.

 

Career Day – I wanted to be an eagle

I think the Tinman and lion in the wizard of oz is a great career choice

My kids had career day at school yesterday. You remember career day – the kids are supposed to dress up in the outfits of their chosen profession. Over the years, I have seen many doctors, veterinarians, artists, rock stars, baseball players, comic book artists, school-teachers and fashion designers. Today, I was thinking how this is such a relic of a bygone era – when people graduated from college and actually got gainfully employed and stayed in their chosen “careers,” because careers has a real long term connotation. But today, most work is precarious and temporary. And you can hardly call work in the fastest growing sectors – retail or food service – “career” worthy.

The other thing that gives me pause about career day is that it is supposed to be the answer to the age old question, “what will you be when you grow up.” I feel like this simple question has haunted me almost my entire life. What will I BE? As if there is one answer to that question.  When I as 5, I used to think an eagle was a viable option or a monkey, but soon the prejudices of the world made me focus on “real” options and money making ventures.

The pressure of that question makes most of us chase ourselves around in circles. We struggle with BEING, with BECOMING, with striving to some place, where we can define ourselves. And worst yet, we define ourselves with our wage labor. As if there is no other labor out there except what someone decides to pay us for.

Just the other night, I literally was lying in bed and thinking again, what do I want to be? Do I want to be an attorney? Do I want to be a union educator, do I want to be….. I was chasing my tail, my monkey brain was in full swing, my inner committee was is full, riotous form, when suddenly, I heard a another voice say, “Wait, I don’t need to BE or BECOME, I ALREADY AM”. I AM, I just am, no need to be anything.

Whew, I thought, I can just relax then.

So for the kids “career day” we encouraged them to be nothing. After all, they already are something, no need to aspire for anything more.