Category: life

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Fear Of The Thing Itself

fear“No one is absolutely fearless. Many of us have simply learned to be good at facing our fears.” ~Theodicus

I fear that moment before someone says something I don’t want to hear. I can usually see it coming a mile away, by the expression on their faces, by the furrowed eyebrows, the subtle downturn of the lips, and then by their lead-in. “I hate to be the one to have to tell you this…” You know, that moment when you haven’t yet heard the negative but your disposition is no longer sunny because you know it’s coming. In that moment, every single time, I wish I could pause time and fast forward to the process of dealing with the news instead of having to hear it escape their lips.

I fear the dark, the pitch black dark that completely swallows me whole so I can’t even see a fraction of a millimeter in front of my own face. When there’s no light for miles around, or at least it seems that way. I remain sane through it only because I close my eyes and imagine there is a muted glow on the other side. I pretend the pitch black darkness is by choice and not because it was forced upon me instead. It makes it a little more tolerable, but we can’t truly trick our bodies to accept what we know isn’t true, not for long stretches of time anyway. Or can we? I wish we could.

I fear rejection — rejection of me, rejection of my work, or rejection of others who are close to me. When people honestly have a problem with me for whatever reason, or they dislike something I’ve spent a lot of time working on, or they dislike my family, it makes me want to scream, to holler, to lash out. But I don’t because somewhere deep down inside that fear controls me more than I’d like to admit. I would rather someone feel negatively about me but never say anything about it, to put on that fake face, but one that I believe, and go through life oblivious of their feelings than to have to face that rejection head on. And I know it makes me a weak person, and I’m trying to change it, but that’s how it stands right now. Continue reading “Fear Of The Thing Itself”

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The ‘N’ Word

n word nieema fosterAs a parent I want to protect my children from anything and everything that could hurt them, but realistically that’s not possible. The best I can do is prepare them as well as I can for dealing with and overcoming those issues as they come up. Of course some of the biggest issues that could hurt them come from factors they have absolutely no control over, a fact that hurts even more because, even though I wouldn’t want them to change to fit someone else’s standard, at least it is a flexible thing. When someone hurts either of my children, for whatever reason, though, I am like a papa bear who wants to rip down the entire forest to get justice.

I knew from a young age that if I ever brought children into the world they would be judged, not merely on their mental capacity, or on their empathetic scale, or even on the style of dress they fancied, but also on the color of their skin. Even when I grew older and married a woman who just happened to be white, I knew that skin color would still be an issue, because our children would never be “just” white, so they would be different, especially around here. Yes, we’ve made some great gains in race relations and issues surrounding the tension therein, but prejudice still abounds, even if it is done more subtly now than ever before.

In the class photos you can see the differences, in the abundance of curly, kinky hair, in the fullness of the lips, in the curve of the nose. These characteristics she inherited from me, and I’m proud of that, that I can see some of myself, and of my heritage, in her, even just physically. She gets so much from her mother too, but the one thing that stands out most, especially when looking at the class photos, is her skin color. There is a bit of a Mariah Carey light mocha coloring she has that is so beautiful to me, but I know when others see it they have their own ideas. I will honestly never know why, but some people can’t stand what they don’t understand.

When we are out and about without my wife, it’s interesting to see how differently people treat us, and how they treat me in particular. We are a black family when I am with my children on my own. It’s plain to see when older black women smile at the kids, as if they were their own grandchildren, or when we pass older white couples who look at us like we’re a completely new species. These same older black women, and these same older white couples, treat us differently when we are all together. In fact, they tend to ignore us and go about their business. They don’t “get” us. They can’t wrap their brains around an interracial couple, a mixed race family, even now, in this day and age.

The first time I heard someone use the ‘N’ word I was probably about 8 years old and it was on my block, a place comprised of all black folk, and the term was meant to be endearing. Continue reading “The ‘N’ Word”

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In Moderation

moderation1Remember the story of Goldilocks, the little girl who, somehow lost in a forest, happens upon the home of three fastidious bears and makes herself at home? However, she can’t seem to get comfortable at first, finding that, after trial and error, only one of these bears has her best interests at heart, or at least makes for the most comfort. The soup is too hot, too cold, and then finally just right. The chairs are too hard, too soft, and then just right. Even the beds fit the pattern, a moral to us that we can go through many challenges in life before realizes what it’s all about, what’s going to fit us best.

Goldilocks tried to fit the bears into a paradigm she had set for herself, but only one of them fit into that ideal, the one that fit right into the average,the one that strove for moderation. I read somewhere once that there was nothing wrong with most things, except that as human beings we tend to over-indulge whenever possible. I thought about that one for a long time and tried to come up with a challenge to it so as to prove the statement false. There’s a list somewhere around here.

  1. Spending time with friends
  2. Reading
  3. Listening to music
  4. Being with family
  5. Meditating

This list was incredibly difficult to make, and almost as soon as it was done I realized that even these pursuits were best done in moderation for a host of different reasons, not the least of which was that life requires much more from us as individuals, that responsibilities preclude us from doing these five things to excess. Oh, if that weren’t so!

I think back to the most free time I ever had, as a kid on school vacations, what I guess people would call staycations now, because most times we didn’t go anywhere. My mother usually still had to work, so sometimes she would bring us in with her, and we would go entire days coming up with things to do in her office. Now, my mom worked in this huge old building at Temple University, and there was a hallway that absolutely no one used anymore. It was a veritable smorgasbord of places to play hide-and-seek, of old machines to dust off and use, and of imaginations running wild.

We would go there and enjoy ourselves for the first hour or two, and it helped when some other workers’ children were there as well to slot into those inventive moments, but after that it started to get boring. It’s interesting, but we think if we have an endless amount of time and space that we will enjoy it, that we will never get bored. That’s not true, and one of the reasons why moderation is best in all things, even when it comes to free time. Continue reading “In Moderation”