On Being a Creative Maladjusted

This week George Zimmerman was released on bail.  His family had to come up with about $15,000 to get him bonded out on $150,000, and he was responsible for his own security. He did not tell the court that he had over $200,000 in a Pay Pal account donated by supporters of his fatal action. I so wanted to believe this man was a good man who made a terrible, irrevocable error, even knowing that he continued to trail Trayvon Martin after the police told him not to. I wanted to believe he was truly remorseful when he publicly apologized in court to Trayvon’s parents. But sometimes I give people too much credit. Then the disappointment I wear like a shroud smothers me in reality.

Wake Forest University announced the 50^th anniversary of its integration on April 27, 1962. It was the first private Southern university to allow integration of students. Prior to the integration effort many (all white) Wake Forest students had joined a lunch counter protest, similar to the historically famous one staged in Greensboro, by students of the historic black college Winston Salem State University. The timing and the environment were right for university officials to open Wake Forest to integration before the federal government forced them to. Martin Luther King would deliver a speech on campus just months later on October 12^th, nine months before he organized the March on Washington in 1963, an event that propelled him to national prominence.

The Charlotte Observer published a short AP wire story on October 13, 1962.

“Maladjustment is Needed – King.” 

Rev. Martin Luther King, 35-year-old Negro integrationist, told 2,200 white and Negro persons here Thursday night that the biblical prophets, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Jesus were all “maladjusted to the evils around them.”  The Baptist minister said the hope of the world lies in the emergence of “a society of the creative maladjusted.”  King received a standing ovation after his talk in Wake Forest College’s Wait Chapel.

I was about to turn five in April 1962 in a suburb of Albany, NY, and I had no idea that there were places some people weren’t allowed to be. My father’s best friend, Harold VanZandt, was a black man, and I loved him and he me. I had no reason to think he would be treated differently than my father. It wouldn’t occur to me, that fall when I entered kindergarten, that there was not a single black child in my class. Nor would there be for my entire school career, although there were a few black children in the district – about forty in my high school of 3000 students. I also never had a black teacher. Was Wake Forest progressive and caring or were they simply bending under the tide of change?

I read a great post, A Complete Guide to 'Hipster Racism', by Lindy West on Jezebel.com. It’s over the top, comical, honest, well written, and a must read. I wish I could find my humor about this shit. But I can’t, not in public at any rate because I worry that the people who need to won’t get the joke. Besides, I’ve lived this, and most incidents weren’t funny; they were scary. In private is another story – we joke about it all the time.

I read about Peter Keller in the news, a survivalist who lives in the state of Washington and who killed his wife and daughter, set the house on fire to cover up the murders, and headed to the underground bunker he spent eight years constructing and stockpiling with food, supplies, and arms.  What is an American trying to survive? And why didn’t he include his wife and daughter? Perhaps it is the perceived war being waged against his socio-political beliefs and status as a white man. I find it confusing and irrational, since we are a country rich in resources, enough for everyone and more, if we were of a generous collective mind, a be like Jesus collective mind. In some ways it makes more sense for the have-nots to be in survivalist mode – but I guess they don’t stand to lose what the haves stand to lose – wealth, power, and the ability to oppress others. But survivalists often feel disenfranchised and excluded from the elite. It’s tough to be white and not feel the privilege that one expects will go with whiteness. Disenfranchisement creates angry white men, although those same men cannot understand the anger of disenfranchised minorities.

Amendment One is up for vote in North Carolina on May 8^th. If it passes it will change the state constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Same sex marriages are already illegal in this state, but this is a last holdout state in the South as far as amendment changes, and some people don’t care to be different about it. They want the power of the Bible in their constitution, to forget the necessary and legal separation of church and state, so they can say they’ve saved sinners from themselves. But we are all sinners and we could all use saving when you look at us from the Old Testament point of view, which is the section of the Bible many proponents of this amendment are quoting from. Forget the good news of the New Testament.

I remember my Catholic upbringing. I imagined my soul like a glass bottle of milk, white with dark spots like rot or cancer or the floaters that now obscure my vision sometimes when I awaken in the gray of dusk. Those spots represented the sins tarnishing my spiritual pureness. In the Catholic religion there are different kinds of sins.

Mortal sins are grave sins, they destroy a person’s charity, and they were listed as follows up until 2008: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride. In 2008 Bishop Girotti redefined them as follows: polluting, genetic engineering, being obscenely rich, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia, and social injustice.

For a sin to be considered mortal, three conditions must exist: it is a grave matter; it is committed with full knowledge that it is a mortal sin; and that it is committed with full consent.

Venial sins are less serious. While mortal sins destroy a person’s charity, venial sins merely weaken it. Both can be forgiven, as well as original sin (which is forgiven through Baptism), but not blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. That is considered an eternal sin.

Those that blaspheme the Holy Spirit, for example, by claiming God wants them to be elected or that they are speaking for God against others, are facing certain damnation. Legislate that.

This past week while Ronald and I were out, we saw a truck with its grill decorated with a Confederate flag and a car with a Confederate flag vanity plate just a few minutes later. A photograph of a lynching in Marion, IN, popularly used as a postcard in the 1930s, popped up on my computer screen as I was doing a search. The burned bodies of two black men hanging from a tree, surrounded by a mob of white men, women, and children, some of whom smile at the camera, inspired the poem and song Strange Fruit penned by Abel Meeropol and sung by Billie Holiday. Every time I see the photograph my stomach turns and my disappointment in humanity turns to horror.

Last night I watched a show on the history channel, Third Reich. The first world leader to use “the communist threat” to strike fear in the masses was Adolf Hitler in 1933. He systematically eradicated communists, then Jews (six million by the end of the war), from Germany. He ordered the involuntary sterilization of over 400,000 people in 1934 alone for reasons such as blindness, deafness, homosexuality, promiscuity, alcoholism, and physical deformity in the quest to eradicate genetically inferior humans. Aryan couples were encouraged to have as many children as possible. Germany needed “better Germans [and] more of them.” Teenage Aryan girls were placed in camps where they were impregnated. The unwed girls were known as “the Fuehrer’s brides.”

I learned the interesting fact that Hitler rose to power with only 37% of the people’s support of the Nazi party. Take note. Sounds like conservative right numbers here in America. The Moral Majority that is really the Moral Minority shouts louder and more vehemently to deliver its subliminal message of hate and oppression.

Within fifty-two days of Hitler coming to power, the government suspended freedom of the presses, tapped telephones, and opened and read mail. People supported the effort because they believed it was for the greater good, and they turned in neighbors and even family members in their vehemence to be accepted into the Reich. Time Magazine named Hitler Man of the Year in 1935. By 1938 he planned to conquer the world. Many people around the world, including many Americans, were philosophically in agreement with him. The US also engaged in involuntary sterilization and human subject experiments.

Today is my twin daughters’ birthday. I had hoped for a better world when I gave birth to them. Someone showed me a book soon after Ronald and I started dating in 1976 titled The Browning of America. I remember telling the person that showed it to me that Ron and I were doing our part. I thought that trend would stop racism and further the civil rights movement. I thought feminism would rid the world of gender oppression. But both movements have only brought out how very racist and misogynistic the fabric of our society is, and in many ways our progress has created a nasty backlash.

I realize I spend a lot of time feeling like I’m from some other planet, wishing for it, perhaps, as I witness this world that appears like a science experiment gone terribly wrong. In his speech at Wake Forest, King said he was maladjusted to “some things in our social order . . . and would hope that men of goodwill all over would be maladjusted to these things until the good society is realized.” I am one of the creative maladjusted.

Family Values

Hope everyone is enjoying the holidays. I had a lovely Christmas with my family and stayed far from the computer, hence the lapse in my posts. Here is a second excerpt from my essay, Mother Mother.

Wishing all my readers a prosperous, healthy and happy New Year!

(Excerpt from essay Mother Mother)

Dad was a traditional father who provided for us and was not at all involved in rearing us. He did, however, take us to church every Sunday. Ma was a converted Catholic and had nothing good to say about the Church. “Christians on Sunday, heathens the rest of the week,” she said of Catholics in general and Dad, his family, and, as his progeny, us, specifically. She stepped inside the Church three times in my memory, when Andy got baptized, when my oldest brother got married, and for my father’s funeral. She was not present at her own memorial service. We cremated her just as she had requested in the months after Dad died.

I only remember a few tender moments between Dad and me. The most memorable one was when, at about four years old, I fell down the cellar stairs and my neck lay in the crook at the bottom where the rail post met the stairway. Dad carefully untangled me, my head in his hand, and cradled me against his chest. I knew from that moment on, despite his no-nonsense approach and explosive outbursts of anger during which curse words sprayed the room like buckshot, that he had a soft spot for his children.

Ma did, too, and I see those times it was expressed more clearly now: the way she sat and played Scrabble with me for hours, our bone china tea cups beside the playing board; how, when I finally learned to read, she let me take any book off her bookshelf stashed in the narrow hallway; how we watched old movies made in the 1930s through 1950s together, before color TVs, VCRs and DVD players. Andy and I became movie aficionados. Andy could name every actor and actress as if it were for a school exam. These were the times I felt wanted instead of resented.

They are the things I did with my daughters. Even though Cara and Mackenzie are grown women, we still talk about getting together to watch movies – a girls’ night.

But I fretted as a mother. In the age of intensive mothering that began in the 1980s when my daughters were born, I felt my inadequacy. Sharon Hays describes the onset of intensive mothering in her book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood.  She says:

What Every Baby Knows is the title of a child-rearing manual by the pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton. In many ways this title epitomizes current notions of appropriate parenting. Child rearing today is, more than ever before, child-centered – it follows not from what every parent knows (needs or wants) but what every baby knows (needs or wants). This, as we have seen, is the approach that has come to be called permissive. And this…is also the approach found in most of today’s top-selling child-rearing manuals.

I read T. Berry Brazelton’s book and watched his show. I wanted to be a better mother than Ma but I didn’t know what every baby knows or every mother, for that matter. Most women of my generation didn’t have role models, even those who had loving mothers, because we would enter the workforce in numbers not seen since World War II when Rosie the Riveter dropped her children off at a government sponsored day care center on the way to the factory. Unlike our mothers, we had the innate sense to know that we needed more than childrearing to give us purpose and identity, but our guilt drove us to over-mother.

Quality time became the goal. Even if it was five minutes, if we were completely child-centered, it was more effective than the mother who spent the day at home with her child but spent it cleaning or doing other things while her child played in proximity. I came to question this in later years, but as a new mother, it weighed on me.

When I discovered I was having twins, I spoke to my husband about how long I would stay out of work. “Three months,” I said.

He nodded but said nothing. After I brought Cara and Mackenzie home from the hospital, suffered my own bout of post-partum depression, and discovered how much work it was to take care of two babies at once, feeding on demand and trying to log that all-important quality time, singly and together, I realized I would not feel comfortable leaving them with anyone else.

“I need to extend my leave,” I said to Ronald.

“I know,” he said. “I figured you’d come to that conclusion.”

I stayed home for nearly eighteen months, feeling guilty for not earning a salary when we needed a house. The apartment super kept asking us when we were going to move. Our apartment building housed mostly single professionals or childless couples. Two babies crying and then, later, two toddlers running back and forth in stiff-soled shoes were more than most of our neighbors could tolerate. Notes were slipped under our door or taped to our mailbox: Please keep your children quiet or If you would keep your voice down, maybe they would be quiet.

Did they know what it felt like when one baby went one way and the other the other way? How helpless and paralyzed I felt standing too far from either to do anything? Or how I felt when both were crying and I could not figure out if they were hungry, colicky, tired, or wet? It took time to change two babies and fix the source of the tears. Mackenzie howled as if death were upon her when she was hungry, and Cara nightly cried herself to sleep while I sat crying in the living room. I realized early on that holding her only made her scream and fuss more, her body stiff and recoiling from my touch. She was already over stimulated and sometimes she would cry for as long as forty-five minutes before she would abruptly drop off to sleep. But, even as I knew I was right to let her expend her tremendous energy until there was nothing left but to go to sleep, it still made me feel like a bad mother, judged by others. When Mackenzie, who was born with Metatarsus Abductus, a C-shaped foot (crooked like Ma’s had been), had to wear a cast at five months old, people glared at me when I took her out in public.

“What happened to your baby?” strangers felt comfortable asking in a judgmental tone. Each time I carefully explained that she was born that way and we were getting her foot fixed. Just as I calmly explained to people that yes, they were twins, fraternal not identical, or that their father is black. That was a frequent question, “what is their father?”