I am a strong woman
I was thinking this morning about Lance Armstrong because something on a smaller scale happened recently. I met someone and thought they were truly fine and then out of the blue met mutual friends who said something ugly about the person. It gave me pause. But with Lance, it gives me big pause. Lance was a doping fiend – good god I thought when I heard this – what’s next?
Recently, I’ve been thinking about my mother, because we are getting to that time of year when she passed, and this year will make three years from that date. She seems to be ever present in my mind as if she were here with me – and I hate to say it – but telling me, “I told you so.” My mother, who used to tell me she was the strong one, the one who stayed with my (mainly verbally) abusive father because of her children. I used to think, “huh, yeah right,” because I spent a lifetime thinking she was weak.
Sister, was I wrong. Her unconditional love and pacifism had more underlying strength then my father’s aggressive, macho, chauvinistic personality could ever bear. So how did it come to be that I was so wrong? I think it is a perception you gain by being there and you align with that perception and it becomes truth for you.
I was backing out of the car uptown the other day, getting a friend’s child out of the back of the truck, and a young black man was approaching. As he passed, I turned to him and smiled and he said, “You are a strong woman.” Then he kept walking, and as he passed, I realized how young he must be – maybe 15 years old, with a school backpack and shoelaces untied.
I’m back to reading Beverly Daniel’s Why Do All the Black Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria? and my thoughts were heightened about how my son will grow up and be perceived. But then as I drove away I thought of what he said, “You are a strong woman.” I wonder if my mother put those words in his mouth. But then I thought he most likely said that to me because I’m bald and most people think I have cancer. Or maybe he didn’t think that at all, maybe he respects any woman who bares her pate in public because, she must be strong.
Lance is a fool – he had the whole world in love with him – but we were all duped. How could we be duped by a dope fiend? I don’t get it. How could there be an underlying response to a young black man approaching you from behind that causes pause? How could it be that a child brought up listening to verbal abuse cringes when she hears it in her adult life?
Habit. We’re in the habit of looking for heroes, and for those to condemn. We want an athlete who we can exploit – like Drew Brees – I’m always half worried we are going to find out he is a pedophile because so much is at stake with his reputation. I think this city is in the habit of disposing of young black men to such a degree that it is almost conscious-soothing to think they are to blame for all our collective fears. I think kids who listen to abuse from adults either become abusive or recoil in a tight fist inside.
I think, I think, I think.
Cogito ergo sum.
Am I?
I am a strong woman
But maybe all I think is way too simplistic. I listened to Mitt Romney last night saying something about how families should be two parents, a mother and a father, and my stomach turned a flip flop. Oh yes, in that perfect world where there is a mother and a father and they are raising their children in this perfect world where when the kids need they could just borrow from their ‘rents and create jobs. Why does that set my nonexistent hair on fire?
So this morning, in order to come to terms with everything I don’t know that is pushing up against everything I feel so intensely, I opened the Tao te Ching and this is the page I found:
#8
The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.
Thus it is like the Tao.
In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don’t try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.
When you are content to be simply yourself
and don’t compare or compete,
everybody will respect you.