Seventeen and Stupid

Site of my high-speed chase
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Here's how I view it:

When I was about seventeen, my friend and I parked, unknowingly, in front of a vacant house. We were just sitting in the seats of my car, talking, because it wasn't yet curfew time. A guy in a pick-up truck drove by us slowly, went around the block, and drove by us again.

At that point, we thought he thought we were making out and was coming back for another look. But when we started up the car to drive around the corner to my friend's house, the guy pulled a U-turn and started to follow us. We didn't want him to follow us to my friend's house, so we continued past and went to a main street. We picked up speed. He picked up speed.

I then got into the only high-speed chase in my life, because we didn't know who this guy was or why the hell he was following us, and it scared the shit out of us. I ran red lights. I got on the freeway and pushed my grandmother's tan 1980 Honda Civic to its limit of 70 mph. The pick-up was practically on my bumper.

Eventually, a cop pulled us both over. The guy in the pick-up turned out to be someone who had babysat my friend when my friend was a preschooler. The guy said, sheepishly, "I know this kid. He's OK." He had assumed we were planning to break into the vacant house and, when we started to drive away, it only proved to him that we must be guilty of something. The cop chewed us both out. To the guy, he said, "Next time, let us handle this." He asked me, "Why did you run?" I said, "We were SCARED." The cop let us go.

If we hadn't been an Asian-looking girl and an Irish-white boy, how might this have gone down differently?

I'm writing this post after thinking about Amy Davidson's question, "What Should Trayvon Martin Have Done?" And I realized, well, I know what I did do. And in other circumstances, in another body, I might have been shot to death.

Vigilantes are, frankly, terrifying: Who is this person? Why are they after me? In the vigilante's mind, you are someone suspicious. In your own mind, you are going about your own innocent business when some stranger starts to stalk you. A regular person would call the police and leave it at that. It's beyond the bounds of societal norms for a person to take the law into his own hands. It's one thing, after all, to stop a rape or a robbery in progress. It's another to target someone who isn't actually committing a crime.

Do you remember being seventeen? I remember being completely absorbed in a world of music, movies, schoolwork, peer hierarchies, and dating. When I thought about adults at all, it was the daily injustices my dad subjected me to: curfews, housework, family obligations, permissions denied. Adults occupied a realm of power that I hadn't experienced yet and that had authority over me. At seventeen, I dreamed of adult autonomy without understanding the reality. I was still living in my dad's house. I was closer to the age of being told to beware of strange adults than to being a true adult, on my own.

The way I reacted to being followed by a pick-up was stupid—I could have gotten into a car wreck, or caused a car wreck. If we had gone to my friend's house, gotten out of the car, and involved his dad, we would have cleared up the misunderstanding. And yet, if the man in the pick-up hadn't been a neighbor, but someone intent on harming us, then getting out of the car might have been the stupid decision. But until you know both sides of the story, you can't know which decision is the right one, if a right one even exists.

I'm sure Trayvon was afraid for his life when Zimmerman confronted him. How many of us, followed and then approached in the dark by a large man, would have fought for our lives in that moment?

If the racism of this case can be distilled to a single moment, it's the moment when you have a black kid and a non-black man facing each other, neither sure of what the other is up to. That the jurors and many, many other people identify solely with Zimmerman at that moment tells you everything you need to know about racism in this case. And it's the gap between those with Zimmerman's perspective and those with Trayvon's that seems unbridgeable. 

Where Do I Get My Ideas?

I am wrestling with an unscheduled post on race, body acceptance, and clothing. My younger child also caught an unscheduled virus, which means I won't be able to write tomorrow because he will be staying home from school, and I blew through my babysitting budget last week trying to Get Things Done and fulfill my activist duties.

But I promised myself to only take last week as a hiatus, so here's a quickie.

One of my biggest challenges as a parent is to not beat myself up all the time over not being a perfect parent. Yes, I've read plenty of articles on being "a good enough parent," and I am working on embracing my imperfections. I know, intellectually, that being a "perfect parent" is not possible, nor even desirable if it were possible, but perfectionism runs deep in my family.

For me, parenting is a daily struggle to rewrite old patterns of behavior and attitudes that stem not only from my own childhood, but that have been reinscribed over generations. I am learning about epigenetics, and it helps me to understand how we carry our ancestral histories with us, within our bodies. (I will write more, much more, on this topic.) It can make me feel overwhelmed, that I am trying to swim against the tide of depression, fear, and anger from two separate lineages that meet in me. But it can also help me forgive myself when I fail.

At her preschool, my daughter decorated a small journal for me for Mother's Day. It's exactly like the composition books they use at school to record their thoughts (either dictated to a teacher, or "written" themselves), except in miniature, the perfect size for me to carry around in my purse.

This is where I jot down my thoughts and ideas to explore and flesh out later. I glance at the inscription to give me courage and to inspire me to be the mother my daughter deserves. It is a gift that she gave me, and it represents what a gift she is to me. Parenting has given me focus and purpose that I was seeking before her birth. Not to say that I feel like I was born to be a mother, because mothering does not come "naturally" to me at all, but—to quote Talib Kweli—if life is a beautiful struggle, then creating and guiding the lives of my children is my beautiful struggle, in all its messiness, heartbreak, silliness, absurdity, complexity, and grace.

Aftershock

Facebook post from Saturday, June 8 at 4:30 a.m.

My kids playing at Virginia Ave. park in
Santa Monica. (Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Can't sleep. Haunted by the events of yesterday—bullets sprayed at the park where my children play, a woman carjacked at an intersection I pass several times a day and forced to drive the gunman and watch while he shot other people, a student at SMC who assumed the gunman was police... until the guy started shooting at him. My friend's daughter is an SMC student, so glad she wasn't there yesterday. I can't help but imagine the fear and pain of people who lost loved ones yesterday, who were injured, or who witnessed the mayhem. The students who heard the shooting and were afraid they were next.

I want this kind of terror to stop. I can't describe the depth of my frustration and anger that we know what to do to stop this, but we, as a nation, just won't take those steps. I'm going to keep agitating for change, but I also can't help but wonder, What is WRONG with people (ahem, NRA leadership), with certain members of Congress? Have you no compassion? Have you no intellectual sense of injustice? Is a gun "right" really worth the deaths that happen every single day because of guns? If you believe in a Maker, do you honestly feel you will be able to face that Maker with a Second Amendment argument?

Araña Mama - A Mommy-festo (Part 3)

(Continued from Part 1 and Part 2)

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

I sailed across the Pacific in a rowboat. Which is to say, from week 8 to week 20 of my pregnancy, I felt almost perpetually seasick. I lay on the couch, eyes closed, trying to ride out the heaving of my living room floor. Suddenly, fierce hunger would propel me to the kitchen, where I would frantically stuff myself with whatever seemed tolerable. Baked tofu. Grapefruit. Yes, pickles. The little beast inside of me satiated, I would reel back to the couch, hoping to keep the food in its proper place.

My second trimester, I got poison oak during a hike. I smeared the rashes with Chinese medicine, covered them with gauze, and taped it down. The rashes persisted—eventually I realized I was having an allergic reaction to the tape. My third trimester, I had a sinus infection. In May 2008, I had my daughter.

It is so commonplace as to be trite, and yet at the same time it is profoundly true: Nothing upended my life as completely as becoming a mother. I say “becoming” because I did not transform into a mother all at once, when my daughter emerged from my body and started her life separate from me. Rather, pregnancy was a process of metamorphosis for both of us. I am still becoming: as my children grow, they force me to grow along with them.

The threads of my life converge on the moment of motherhood, then expand outward as my children take their steps away from me into their own futures. The complexities of my body—my womanhood, my racial mix, my queerness, my health and sensitivities—inform my parenting every day. Parenting puts a new focus on these issues as I struggle with the heritage and legacies that I pass on—intentionally and unintentionally—to my children.

Nuestra ofrenda (Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

The global crossroads of my body are reflected and compounded by the global crossroads of my city, Los Angeles, which gathers people from over 140 countries. My cultural vocabulary has expanded to include Nowruz, the Persian new year; Día de los Muertos; and the Japanese Buddhist festival of Obon. I eat tacos sprinked with kim chee. My kids are growing up dancing to jarocho, Bollywood music, K-pop, salsa, mbalax, and whatever Ozomatli is.

In trying to convey the multiple themes of this blog, I wanted to name it after halo-halo, the Filipino dessert that brings together fruit, beans, shaved ice, sweet rice, condensed milk, tapioca, coconut jelly, and sweet potato—an unholy messy mix of things that synthesizes into a divinely sweet, complex, textural pleasure. I floated it with my audience: my friends on Facebook. Their reactions indicated that halo-halo seemed too culturally specific, inaccessible, and therefore limited in the marketplace of English-language blogs. I also would have to cope with unwanted associations with the English word “halo” (pronounced differently from hälo-hälo), as an accoutrement for angels and as a first-person shooter game.

Giving up on Halo-Halo Mama feels like a betrayal in some ways. In the past two generations, my family has given up our linguistic ties to our ancestral homelands. While Tagalog/Pilipino is the national language of the Philippines and, in many ways, the lingua franca of the diasporic Filipino community, Ilocano doesn’t have same the political and cultural authority to hold a place amongst global languages. Western Armenian’s status is even more fragile, now listed officially as an endangered language.

My grandparents, raising their children in the post-World War II era, pushed for integration into American society and so raised their children monolingually, in English. My parents nonetheless became bilingual—in Spanish. My dad, fervently opposed to the Vietnam War, joined the Peace Corps in 1969 and served in Costa Rica, and my mother joined him in 1971, although they weren’t yet married. In the earliest recording of my voice, I am counting slowly, “Uuuuunoooo, doooooos, treeeees...” And so our culturally specific languages gave way to two of the dominant global languages: English and Spanish.

I pass this on to my children. For days, my daughter has been chanting the Spanish nursery rhyme: “Un elefante se columpiaba/sobre la tela de una araña...” The image of a spider’s web has stuck with me (possibly because I hear it dozens of times a day). I saw my experiences being spun out of my body, weaving together in a pattern that can be elegant as an orb, or haphazard as a cobweb. In this blog, I hope to tie together, tangle, and unravel these threads. I may descend into a bit of tarantellism. But I also aspire to be as wise, gentle, and dedicated as that most famous spider mother, Charlotte, who has also been a fixation of my daughter’s.

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

A mommy-festo is not a manifesto. I have no fixed purpose, no clarion call. I have scattered thoughts engendered by toddler-induced parental ADD. My natural disorganization is enhanced by chronic sleep deprivation. Just think of this journey as taking a walk with a small child. I don’t know where I’ll end up, but I’ll find interesting things along the way—and poke them with sticks.

Araña Mama – A Mommy-festo (Part 1)

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

This is how we begin: mother as mundus. I nestled my firstborn against my chest—everything she was and everything she needed. Body, place, and belonging.

We can say that babies are perfect because they are the closest we come to pure being. A Senegalese friend once wrote to me that he and his wife had nicknamed their baby “Lekk Puup Nelaw”: Eat Poop Sleep. The barest essence of who we are. (The novel human’s novel.) The layers of identity, the ways that we know ourselves and our places in the world, lie in the future.

And yet: before I became a parent, I believed that environment and education, family and culture, fully shaped the individuals we grew into. Then I had a kid. I was astonished to see how early in her development my daughter expressed her character. My husband and I joke that we thought we had an easy baby for the first four months of our daughter’s life. When she woke up from the “fourth trimester,” we grasped the scale of our mistake.

Part of parenting is trying to figure out those lines between “Nature versus Nurture,” genetics versus environment, personality versus upbringing. In mothering, this question often boils down to, “Is this my fault?” Plenty of sources say “yes.” At any given moment, a mother can be insufficiently nurturing, independent, authoritarian, laid-back, present, absent, involved, hands-off, intuitive, communicative, Swedish, Chinese, African, or French. I’m pretty sure whoever coined “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” was a mom. (Sure, the official record says it was a male preacher, but how often does history record what some mother mutters under her breath?)

On the one hand, each mother struggles with her own mode of parenting. On the other hand, the cultural currents that often single out mothers over fathers for the problems of “children today” are tied into larger structures of prejudice and power. Sexism is an obvious first response, but “welfare mom” speaks to race and class in opposite ways from “soccer mom.” Hysteria over “anchor babies” brings in immigration, but only in reference to immigrants from the Global South. The question of gay marriage has come to focus on its effects on children and the redefinition of “parent.”

As I watch my children grow, these questions come up for me urgently as they discover and define for themselves the notions of gender, race, relationships (it’s too early yet for sexuality), and belonging/citizenship. Like any parent, how I guide them and converse with them on these topics has much to do with my own experience as a biracial, bisexual mother with immigrant grandparents.

This blog is where I explore these and other political and cultural issues that I grapple with in my role as parent and mother. But I feel a need to describe my background and trace the threads of my identity that inform my writing. Caught in the interstices between categories—Caucasian and Asian, straight and gay, immigrant and citizen, American and global cosmopolitan—I have few preexisting narratives to draw from. So I start with a history of my body—my origins, my travels, my experiences.

(To be continued in Part 2 and Part 3...)