Kids > Advertising

Photo by Haan-Fawn Chau

My latest piece on Zócalo Public Square: Your Edgy Billboard Is My Kid’s Nightmare. An abridged version of the article appeared in Time. I discuss the billboards advertising FX’s show, “The Strain,” that frightened young children all over Los Angeles, and respond to the CEO, John Landgraf, who said, “We had to terrify some children in order to launch this show, but I think it was worth it. Just saying.”

If you care about this issue, here are more resources:

1. Sign the MoveOn petition, “Ban Violence and Sex on Billboards” (California)

2. Join the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (national)

3. Support Ban Billboard Blight and follow their calls for action (Los Angeles)


To take action on an offensive outdoor advertising campaign in your city:

1. First, call the company responsible for the ad campaign (in this case, FX) to demand that the ad copy be replaced with less offensive content. Be sure to follow up. FX announced that the ads for “The Strain” would be pulled, but most remained up until after the show's premiere nearly a month later. 

2. Call your city council to complain about the ad campaign and urge the council to put additional pressure on the media company to pull the offensive copy. The council will be effective and responsive in direct proportion to the number of constituents who call in.

3. To target a specific billboard, call the outdoor advertising company that owns the billboard. 

4. Continue to advocate for stronger regulations on outdoor advertising.

Changing Schools

First day of kindergarten.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Today, I took my daughter out of our local public school and enrolled her in a charter school.

I didn’t think I would announce it, but then I realized, hey, I write about parenting and politics, and I have just committed a huge political act.

We live in an excellent school district, and our home school is one of the most desirable in our district. We were looking forward to our daughter receiving a solid education while also enjoying a truly diverse peer group.

My daughter, I should say, adored her preschool. She came home covered in paint and mud every day. The love between Silver and her teachers was plainly mutual. At school, she would pet animals, make rivers in the yard, create stories with her friends, pick and eat vegetables from the garden, and pretend to be a kitty, or a mama, or an astronaut, or an excavator. On the way, she learned to write and gained the fundamentals of reading, math, and science.

In the first few days of kindergarten, my family experienced the shock of transitioning from preschool to the regular school system. My daughter seemed oddly unenthusiastic, and one day as she settled into her car seat, she asked, “What does it look like inside your body when you cry?” My husband and I tried to take statements like these with a grain of salt, unsure of how much weight to give them during this time of flux.

The afternoon before Back to School night, I asked her what problems she had that she wanted me to talk about. In order of importance, she listed:

• Sometimes my teacher yells really loud and it hurts my ears. 
• Leila gets lunch at the cafeteria and sits with all of those kids, but I want her to sit next to me, but she never can. 
• Sometimes we have to sit on the rug, and it’s boring. 

So I sat through the Back to School night rally in the auditorium, then we parents filed away to our children’s classrooms for another presentation by their teachers. I sat down on a tiny chair and filled out several forms. The teacher talked about curriculum goals—writing aptitude, sight words, scissor skills—and also described the kinds of homework he would assign. He held up a composition notebook showing lines of upper- and lowercase L’s on one side and cut-out photos of a lion, a llama, and a child licking an ice cream cone on the other.

Silver expresses her displeasure with me.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I had my reservations about my child having to sit and write letters in long rows, when all the writing she has done so far has been on her own initiative: grocery lists, birthday messages, angry letters to me when she is mad. Nevertheless, I could see that her teacher, trained in studio art, was trying to work creatively within the limits he was given. Their first homework assignment would be to draw a picture of something fun from the summer, label all the parts, and write a sentence or two about it. (A rather long assignment for kindergarten, admittedly.)

With only 10 minutes until 8 p.m., the scheduled end of the evening and my children’s bedtime, he asked for questions. On my turn, I asked, “Can you talk about your philosophy and some of your methods of discipline?” The teacher walked over to a small rectangular table with three chairs ranged around it: green, yellow, and red.
 
The red chair was the last straw. My daughter had, in preschool, participated in a democratic classroom. As she has told me many times after I apologize for yelling at her, “The teachers at school don’t yell.” It’s true: they don’t. Of course, at preschool there are five teachers for 25 kids. In kindergarten, there are two. But my daughter is accustomed to being part of the classroom process where limits are agreed upon collectively and enforced gently, and I’m not ready for her to grapple with an authoritarian system yet.

The charter school I am moving her to practices project-based education, which to my mind, is what every school in the U.S. should practice. Diversity and social justice explicitly make up part of their mission. They emphasize experiential learning tailored to each child’s particular style. Collaboration forms the foundation of their structure.

I am, in theory, committed to public education. And yet, as every parent realizes when her or his child begins school, I want my daughter to have an excellent education right now. Public education in this country is a large, unwieldy vehicle, constructed rigidly, and difficult to turn in a different direction.

If our education system is supposed to prepare our children for life as adults, what are we teaching them? To respect authority. To tolerate repetitive, boring tasks. To understand that the system is unresponsive to their desires, needs, and emotions. And, above all, that the pleasures of education—personal attention from a teacher, play- and project-based methodologies, richness of materials, opportunities to go outside in a beautiful environment or take exciting field trips—are limited by economics. That we live in a two-tiered society, between those who find school a trial and those who find school rewarding, becomes obvious to our children from an early age.

People always scoff that we can’t buy our way to a better education system. (But maybe we can.) And yet, what would it be like if we abolished private schools and channeled all those funds to public education? What if we did only this: reduced class sizes, paid teachers wages respectable for trained professionals, and improved facilities so that schools could be open, airy, green, and pleasant places to be? What if we could make arts available to every child, every single day? You can’t convince me that education wouldn’t improve.

And what if we went further and made the goal of education to instill a love of learning in every child?

I know, it sounds like I am asking for the moon. And yet, like every parent, I want my child to be happy and smart; I want her to have ambitious goals and feel capable of reaching them. I want her to delight in learning rather than approach school with dread. It doesn’t seem like so much to ask.

My Daughter the White Girl, Part 3

"A rainbow would be boring/if it were only green or blue/
What makes a rainbow beautiful/is that it has every hue/
So aren't you glad you look like you?"
From We're Different, We're the Same.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

(Continued from Part 1 and Part 2)

At first, I followed the red herring that the word “pretty” represented. I told her, “I know all the princesses you see have light skin and yellow hair, but that’s not the only kind of beauty. There’s lots of different ways to be pretty.” She said, earnestly, “But some of the princesses have brown hair, like me.” She nodded for emphasis. I realized I’d gone down the wrong path in the conversation.

Silver was telling me that people’s value hinged entirely on their “prettiness,” a value inculcated in her by books, videos, and toys, most of them by Disney, and most of them outside my house—at her day care, at friends’ houses, at the doctor’s office. Girls also cannot escape the peer-pressure of “prettiness.” It doesn’t help when adults reinforce this value by constantly commenting on little girls’ outfits and looks. (Latina Fatale made me notice my complicity in this.)

I found myself facing two fronts instead of one. Now, it was not just the question of working against cultural messages of race, but also gender.

It was actually Po Bronson himself during a live chat about NurtureShock who gave me the word I should have used in the first place: wrong. “People with light skin didn’t want people with dark skin to go to the same schools or eat in the same restaurants or live in the same neighborhoods because they thought they weren’t as good or pretty or smart as people with light skin, but that was wrong. And people with all different colors of skin, they fought long and hard to change that. They said, ‘No, that’s not fair.’ And they got hurt because of it. Other people hurt their bodies. But they did it anyway because it was the right thing to do.

“And Silver, it doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside. Whether you’re pretty or not, it’s not as important as being a good person. People stood up for what was right, for what was fair, and that is the most important thing.” I could feel pressure building up inside, the urgency to pass it on. Miraculously, she was quiet, her eyes fixed on me.

I said, “You know, if they hadn’t stood up for what was right, then Grandma wouldn’t have been able to marry Mezhaidig, because Grandma’s skin is brown and Mezhaidig’s skin is light, and I wouldn’t have been born.”

Then her eyes lit up. “And you wouldn’t have been able to marry Daddy, because his skin is light and yours is brown!” “That’s right!” I said. The pressure eased. Daddy was ready. I helped Silver put on her shoes, hugged her tightly, kissed her, and said, “I love you, baby.” “I love you, too, Mama,” she said, and walked out the door.

No bunny's really color blind/Maybe it's a fact/We all should face/
Every bunny makes judgments/Based on race.—
with apologies to Avenue Q.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I have to keep reminding myself that I can’t overcome racism and sexism in a day, not even with my own children. It’s a process. Just as absorbing racism and sexism is something she has learned little by little, every day. I have to remain vigilant and pounce on the moments when I can change her perspective and reveal the prejudice for the injustice it is.

But I can’t help but feel a little sadness and distance. For her, these discussions will continue to be abstract. She is protected by the privilege that her skin color provides her. For me, racism is something that I will always take personally, as an attack on my very being.

It’s funny how we can wish for our children to have it easier than we did. And yet, when it comes, success is bittersweet. We pass on our wisdom, but will they really know it if they don’t live it? The only president Silver has known is Barack Obama. While I grew up at a time when being biracial was so unusual as to be almost freakish, she is growing up at a time and in a place where being biracial is almost the norm. I have to console myself with the knowledge that, in our microcosm at least, this is progress.

My Daughter the White Girl, Part 2

Silver and Ocho's dolls. (Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

(Continued from Part 1)

There’s nothing quite like having spent your life being mad at racism, learning about its insidious effects, living on both sides of the equation in the United States and in West Africa, and having your precious child say something racist. It sent me into a full panic. How could this happen? 
 
Ever since I had read NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, I had made it a point to talk openly with Silver about skin color and body difference. In the chapter entitled “White Parents Don’t Talk About Race,” the authors trace a variety of studies to build a case that not talking about race explicitly with children results in kids forming their own biases in favor of their own race. White parents in particular felt uncomfortable talking about race with their children. They relied on vague statements such as “everyone is equal” to convey a message of colorblind equality. One of the researchers, Brigitte Vittrup, summed up the problem when she said, “A lot of parents... admitted they just didn’t know what to say to their kids, and they didn’t want the wrong thing coming out of the mouth of their kids.” 
 
These parents assume that children are born colorblind and that if they don’t practice prejudice in their own household, the children won’t pick it up. For them, drawing attention to racial difference is tantamount to opening the door to racism. Bronson and Merryman argue that children already notice racial difference, and that by not talking about it, parents convey the message that only people like themselves are OK, and they imply that racial Others are somehow less nice, trustworthy, friendly, etc. as whites are.
 
I had my own experience with a child “naturally” noticing—and fearing—difference. When I lived in Senegal, my youngest “sister,” less than a year old, would cry the moment she saw me. Even in a cosmopolitan city like Dakar, she saw few foreigners in her neighborhood, much less in her house. It took a week of seeing me every day before she warmed up to me. This story, of African babies crying at the sight of a “white” person, I heard repeated often amongst Peace Corps volunteers and expats. Similarly, when Silver was an infant, my Congolese ex-boyfriend came to Los Angeles with his Senegalese wife and their dance company. We spent an afternoon and an evening catching up. Silver, not a very trusting baby to begin with, wanted nothing to do with them. 
 
Bronson and Merryman only touch on the role that cultural and social messages play in forming racist attitudes outside of parental influence: “Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth, and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence.” They don’t speculate, however, on how early these messages in the cultural environment begin to saturate a child’s mind with information on racial hierarchies. 
 
It was easy to know when Silver began to notice gender differences. Her favorite colors seemed to change overnight from turquoise blue and red to pink. She would say things like, “Boys don’t have long hair” or “No, Mama! Not those pants! Those are boy pants! I want girl pants!” I blamed the older girls at day care. 
 
And yet it seems that kids rarely come out with overt signs of noticing racial difference by themselves. Certainly, Silver didn’t talk about it until I started to. But if African babies cry at the sight of a “white” foreigner, and my “white” daughter cried at the sight of two Africans, perhaps attitudes towards racial difference form so early, in a pre-verbal stage, that our only choice is to undo early racial bias.
 
Armed with the evidence from NurtureShock, I diligently acquired all the right books: We’re Different, We’re the Same; Shades of People; All the Colors of the Earth; Whoever You Are. We talked about the people we knew and what colors their skins were. We talked about how we have different skin colors within our own family, how Grandma’s skin is darker than Mama’s skin, and my skin is darker than Silver’s. 
 
Silver has, and had, plenty of African-American teachers. For a while, her favorite teacher was a woman of Xhosa heritage—not just Black, but Africa Black. What we don’t have here are friends (e.g., people who have come over for dinner or had us over for dinner) who are African-American with dark-brown skin. Most of my African-American friends are on the East Coast, and the few I had here finished graduate school and scattered to take up jobs in Chicago, New York, Boston, Ohio, etc. Since I became a parent, I haven’t met many other African-American parents because I live on the Westside in Los Angeles. We have white people, Asians, and Latinos in abundance. Black people? Not so much. Many of the African Americans I know are mixed—I swear, we halfies/hapas/metis/mestizos must be the majority here—and so come in a range of shades, few of them dark.
 
So when my daughter told me, “I don’t like people with dark brown skin,” I knew I had to seize the moment to undo my terrible mistake. I said the two words that opened the door: “Why not?”
 
And that’s when she said, “I don’t like them because they aren’t pretty.”
 
I started cursing Disney in the foulest terms I could come up with. Silently, of course. 

(To be continued in Part 3.) 

My Daughter the White Girl

Photo by Kevin Miller

“I don’t like people with dark brown skin.” 

This is so hard to write. I mean, who wants to start a conversation that goes, “My five-year-old daughter is racist”? But this is how deep it goes in our culture. My daughter doesn’t know how to read, but she has read the signs that tell her: Black people are marginal Others. 

Of course, this conversation started right before she had to leave for preschool. She had been dressed, brushed, fed, and sunscreened. My husband’s coffee sat ready on the counter. Any moment now, he would emerge from the bathroom with clean teeth, and they would have to put on their shoes and go. 

Moments before, her little brother, Ocho*, and I were reading Bear on a Bike, and Silver* came to sit with us. When we read books now, the kids point to characters in the book and say, “This is me. This is you. This is Mama. This is Daddy.” So Ocho pointed to a girl with dark brown skin and a star-shaped thatch of curly hair and said, “This is Silver.” She immediately protested. “NOOOOOOO! I don’t want to be her!” 

I could ignore where this was going. I knew this moment could mean the difference between my husband getting to work on time... or not. 

But then again, I couldn’t ignore where it was going. Not when I had grown up feeling acutely conscious of being the only brown girl in my class. Not when I had struggled with seeing only white girls around me at school, on television, in print, and no reflections of me or my family. 

And not when I had learned the names of Martin Luther King, Jr., El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Rosa Parks, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and on and on to those whose names I don’t know, but whose courage not only changed my world, but made my life possible. Those who marched in the streets, faced savage dogs, fire hoses, fists, clubs, and bullets. 

In moments like these, I am overwhelmed by what I know and what she doesn’t yet. Yuri Kochiyama. Cesar Chavez. Leonard Peltier. Audre Lorde. More names than I can possibly list. Loving v. Virginia. The Bluest Eye. This Bridge Called My Back. Social movement upon social movement. A lifetime of history, literature, political analysis, and lived experience of discrimination in America. Enough examples to fill a library of books on how ugly and twisted human nature can get, and the myriad ways that we, the marginalized, have fought back. 

And here my daughter sits next to me: to the eye, a white girl. California tan skin, brown hair with sunny highlights. Round, brown eyes. Wherever she goes, adults coo over her, call her “princess,” and tell her how cute and adorable she is. 

People mistake me for a nanny. Children look at her, look at me, and say, “You’re her mommy?” 

Between what I know already and what she will learn is a gaping maw of meanness and hate that I am not willing to teach her about yet. Like any mother, I would like to spare her the fear, shame, loneliness, and self-hatred I grew up with. Mean, to her, is when a kid in her school calls her “poopy,” or when she wants to watch a video and I won’t let her.

My previous attempt to explain discrimination to her completely backfired. We were listening to Sweet Honey in the Rock’s All for Freedom. (I mean, how much more racial could I get? There’s even a version of Kumbaya on it—“Cum Bah Ya”—with African-style polyrhythms.) Her favorite track at the time was “Calypso Freedom,” which she called “Freedom is coming and it won’t be long.” “Mama, what does it mean?” she asked. 

So I tried to explain segregation. I used much of the same language that Sweet Honey uses on the CD. I said that kids with dark brown skin weren’t allowed to go to the same schools as kids with light-colored skin. I tried to explain anti-miscegenation laws, red-lining, and Jim Crow in four-year-old terms. I asked her if she understood. She said yes, and added, “Mama, I don’t want to talk about this any more.” Which is how I knew I’d overwhelmed her and that she didn’t get it. 

But I didn’t realize how badly I had done my job until months later when Silver said she didn’t like people with dark brown skin that she didn’t know. “Why, honey?” I asked. She answered, “Remember how you told me that people with dark brown skin aren’t trained the way that people with light skin are?” 

Oh shit. 

(To be continued in Part 2.) 

*Not their real names. I'm not that L.A.! 

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?

Guns and Anger, Part 2

So: More on that anger (continued from Part 1).

Less than two weeks before my kids were locked inside their school during a gun threat, Sarah Palin, addressing the NRA convention in Houston, accused President Obama and other politicians of using “the politics of emotion” following the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, CT, to raise support for anti-gun violence measures. She said:

“Emotion is a good and necessary thing. Who among us didn’t feel despair, sadness, and that anger, absolute anger, after Newtown, and Columbine. We could use a bit more emotion, by the way, about what goes on every single day on the streets of cities like Chicago and New York. But here is the thing that Nancy Pelosi and Feinstein and Boxer, what those gals won’t tell you: emotion won’t make anybody safer. Emotion won’t protect the good guys’ rights. And emotion is not leadership. The politics of emotion, it’s the opposite of leadership. It’s the manipulation of the people by the politicians for their own political ends. And it’s not just self-serving, it’s destructive, and it must stop.”

I am surprised to hear that Palin now cares about what happens on the streets of Chicago and New York, and while part of me is itching to unpack the racial implications contained in that sentence (“It’s those ghetto black people who cause gun violence, not the white ‘good guys’ like us!”—sorry, just slipped out), I’m going to try to stay on task and focus on the use of the word “emotion.” Robin Abcarian noted in the L.A. Times that the NRA seemed to have highlighted the word in their talking points for the conference.

I have certainly said things in anger that I regret. For me, the image of saying something in anger brings to mind a preschooler screaming, “I hate you!” And the proper response is not to say, “What?!? How can you hate your own mother?!?” but to sigh and say, “You sound really angry.” I know as a mother that my daughter doesn’t hate me, but what she is saying isn’t exactly wrong or untrue. She just doesn’t have the words yet at age five to articulate precisely the quality and degree of her anger towards me. Instead, she uses what she has.

When I’m angry, I express my thoughts and feelings in a way that is less delicate and more barbed than I would during a time when I’m calm. (Right, honey?) Issues that I have submerged can bubble over in a torrential release of grievances. Yet the actual things I argue over are not phantom complaints: finances, inequality in housekeeping or child care, miscommunications.

And no one can argue that gun violence in the U.S. is a phantom threat.

I detect in the way the NRA and other gun enthusiasts dismiss angry, “emotional” responses to gun violence a soupçon—or a ladleful—of sexism. In her speech, Palin named Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer, but not Michael Bloomberg, and termed them “those gals.” (The best way to deflect the accusation of sexism? Have Palin deliver the message.) The words the NRA and their minions use—“emotional,” “hysteria”—are those typically deployed against women to discount or silence them. If stronger evidence is needed, any casual look at the comments to articles about Gabby Giffords will find the predictable invective: mannequin, whore, pet monkey, ugly, bitch.

Since writing my open letter on Facebook, I have joined Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. I can only imagine that we are exactly what the NRA expects in a gun-control organization. And yet, as advocates for universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons, a ban on high-capacity magazine clips, and HR 2005, which would mandate personalized technology for handguns, we are not making an emotional plea, but rather putting forth the only solutions that have been scientifically proven to work. (Of course, I could strengthen this argument if the NRA didn’t block research on gun violence.) So sure, we’re angry, but not based solely on emotions, Sarah—based on the evidence.

So, who is employing “the politics of emotion” as defined by Palin?


 

QED.

(Tomorrow's post will be a coda: my huntin’ cousins, political barriers to change in gun laws, and thoughts on activism.)

Guns and Anger

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

On my way to my kids’ preschool on the morning of May 16, I found my route past Santa Monica College barricaded. When I arrived at school, a teacher told me that they had received an alert about a man with a G-U-N at SMC and so were keeping the children inside. John Adams Middle School, across the street from the college, and Will Rogers Elementary School, around the corner, were also on lockdown. I talked with other parents dropping off their kids. Should we take them home? Or should we continue with normal life and not alarm the kids unduly? The threat seemed vague, and our school was not within the lockdown perimeter, so we left the kids there. I came home and immediately went to the Los Angeles Times blog to learn that the man had specifically threatened schools. I kept refreshing the page until they posted that the police had arrested the man.

This is a tirade, lightly revised, that I posted on Facebook while I was waiting for the lockdown to be lifted. I wrote this in the heat of the moment, and it shows. In Part 2 of this post, I have a calmer response. But I wanted to post my initial reaction because I want to honor my anger, and the anger of so many other people who have suffered due to gun violence.

***********

Santa Monica Community College is on lockdown this morning because there’s a man wandering around the campus with a gun. Off the top of my head, I count three elementary schools, two preschools/day cares (including the one where my kids are), one middle school (also on lockdown), and two public parks that are always filled with children located within a few blocks of his location. I dropped off my kids as usual, and they are staying inside until we get the all clear.

On the east side of Los Angeles, in Monterey Park, schools are in lockdown as well because someone called and threatened to “shoot up” one of the schools.

So here’s what I say: Screw you, America. We tout being the “land of the free,” but hundreds of supposedly “free” children are confined indoors because one idiot managed to get possession of a gun. Is “freedom” blocked-off streets, refreshing internet news to see if the danger is all clear yet, and parents huddled in groups, wondering if they should just take their kids home?

I don’t call this “freedom.” I call it tyranny of the few. The few who are so afraid of “government tyranny” that they are willing to impose gun tyranny on the rest of us.

I’m not willing to let my children be sacrificed to an antiquated and outdated “right” to form a militia. My children are smart, and they are going to be well educated. They are, to put it in crude economic terms, money in the bank of the nation.

But apparently this nation doesn’t care enough about the health and safety of its future citizens to protect them from what is a clearly defined mortal threat with an obvious solution. There is no “debate” about whether gun control works—it does. And yet as a nation, we can’t muster the strength to pass the laws that will ensure that no child will die of a gunshot at her school, that no mother will be pierced by a bullet while dancing in the street on her day, that no teenager will be massacred in a movie theater. >

So screw you, United States of America. You’ve lost the right to my love, to my patriotism. Screw you, all you Senators who worked against gun control laws. I’m calling on citizens' groups to make gun control the centerpiece of your agenda. I’m calling on local representatives to show the courage of conviction that escapes our national politicians.

Because this is terror. I don’t worry any day that I send my kids out the door that a random extremist with a political agenda who hates our country is going to kill my kids. I’m afraid that a U.S. citizen with a gun and a chip on his shoulder is going to kill my kids. Take away the gun, you take away his power to end my child’s life in a fraction of a second. It’s that simple.

I don’t want this in another election cycle. I want this NOW. There are helicopters circling over my house NOW. We can do this NOW if we say: We won’t shut up. We won’t forget. We are watching you, and if this doesn’t change, we are going to force it. We will withhold donations. We will keep our tax dollars. We will stop work. We will take our kids out of school. We will stand in the halls of our government houses until gun control gets done.

I’m done sending e-mails and tweeting my reps because frankly, the only response I get back is bullshit. I’m ready to put my body on the line—in a demonstration on the street, in a sit-in in the state capitol, at the steps of the Senate—to keep my kids out of the line of fire. Who’s coming?

(To be continued in Part 2, in which I quote Sarah Palin and my 5-year-old daughter.)

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 2

(Continued from Part 1.)

My chance at an uncomplicated life was doomed the moment my mother, at college at U.C. Berkeley, needed a pot to cook spaghetti. Her roommate said, “I’ll bet those guys down the hall have a pot.” She surmised this from the sign on their door advertising “Armenian and Chinese cooking.” So my mom, the descendant of Filipino immigrants, walked down the hall and met my dad, the descendant of Armenian immigrants, who was rooming with a Chinese-Peruvian. When I tell this story, I say, “Only in America.”

Past "the Mad Russian" phase.

As a baby, I was olive-skinned with almond eyes and a shock of black hair. My parents called me “the Mad Russian.” During the course of my life, people have asked if I am Hawaiian or American Indian, Mexican or Puerto Rican, Brazilian or Italian, Sephardic or Ashkenazi, Persian or Moroccan, Anglo-Indian or Punjabi. As was typical of biracial kids of my generation, I belonged neither with the Armenians nor with the Filipinos. Growing up in a very white community in Sacramento, California, I clearly wasn’t “American,” either. On forms asking my race, I had to check “Other.”

But race was only one thread. When I was 19, I came out as bisexual. During a suffocatingly hot East Coast summer after I graduated college in Connecticut, I shaved my head. Elderly women and men addressed me as “sir.” Amongst queer women, it was as if I had raised a flag signaling “potential date,” and my flirting rates improved.

While working on the “Relationships with Women” chapter of Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century, my co-editor introduced me to the term “chemical sensitivities,” which finally made sense of why fabric softeners, perfumes, and cigarette smoke gave me nausea, dizziness, and migraines—a condition that affects women more than men and so, predictably, was long ignored by the medical establishment and is still not well studied or understood. This discovery changed my perspective on the queer women’s community: a high concentration of women also meant a high concentration of chemical sensitivities, chronic illnesses, and alternative therapies.

Dancing with the women of a groupment,
an economic collective, in Diofior, Senegal.
(Photo by Janet Ghattas)

I spent my weekend nights in Boston’s dyke bars, but I devoted my weekday after-work hours to West African dance classes. The demographics of these two sites never overlapped. My five-evening-a-week dance schedule led to a year-long residency in Dakar, Senegal. On the westernmost point of the African continent, I transformed from a woman of color with middle-class means to a white woman with dazzling economic privilege. I weaved between my professional life as an English teacher amongst Dakar’s educated elite and my social life amongst dancers and musicians, many of whom had little formal schooling.

I can’t speak Armenian, Tagalog, or Ilocano, but I can speak French, Spanish, and Wolof.

Ultimately, cultural and class pressures as well as a conflict between my queerness and Senegalese society brought me back home to the U.S., and I moved back to California. I maintained a transcontinental relationship with my boyfriend, a refugee from the Republic of Congo, and I planned to go back in October 2001. I had tickets on Sabena, the Belgian airline. After September 11th, a Sabena agent told me, “We can get you there, but I’m not sure we can get you back.” I couldn’t get any promises from Swiss Air, Air France, or Alitalia. And then, the U.S. was at war. I used up two pre-paid calling cards to break up with my boyfriend. I was in Marin County, but I could hear halfway around the world a muezzin singing the call to prayer across a Dakar rooftop.

As a NorCal native, I never imagined I would move to Southern California. But I wanted to keep traveling to West Africa and studying dance, and I thought that UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures program would help me do it. My friend mentioned that her girlfriend’s step-brother was also in grad school for ethnomusicology at UCLA. A week after I moved, I invited every connection I had in Los Angeles to my housewarming party, and in perfect rom-com fashion, I met my husband-to-be.

During graduate school, I was plagued by recurring sinus infections. Over the years, I had developed allergies to several antibiotics, and avoiding them often meant weeks battling illness. I worried about my ability to hold down a job given my apparently fragile health. I finished my Master’s degree, then had my wedding. The stress of these two events gave me vertigo, and I spent the first days of my honeymoon with my head over the edge of a bed, trying to stop the spinning, and taking refuge in sleep.

Dressed for a wedding in Fiji.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

A few months later, my husband and I moved to Lautoka, Fiji, where my husband planned to research the music of Fijians of Indian descent. English colonizers had brought Indian indentured laborers to work the sugarcane plantations, and about a century later, many of their descendents still farmed sugarcane. When the cane was ready to harvest, the farmers burned their fields. The smoke permeated the air, and black ash covered every surface. I continued to get sinus infections every few months and developed an allergy to another family of antibiotics. Since I was periodically confined to our apartment, I was unable to get momentum on projects with local organizations. A friend in my graduate program asked for my help editing her dissertation, so I worked from my bed when I wasn’t watching Bollywood videos.

We returned to the U.S. My husband got his PhD. My department at UCLA fell into conflict, and the chair of my project left. I decided against continuing in graduate school, and instead I picked up more editing jobs.

And in 2007, I finally got pregnant.

(To be continued in Part 3.)

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...)