So here's a string of Tweets I just posted.
It's 5:45 over here in Central Standard Time and I'm up after I don't know, Daylight Savings effed me up, four? hours of sleep since we stayed up to watch SNL, the four of us screaming so loud with laughter at "the floppy floppy birds" and the turtles and Che and that John......and that John @mulaney story in the monologue of the left out girl at the sleepover that had both my teenagers wide-eyed and struck dumb because THAT VERY THING HAPPENED and...so...I'm awake even though I'm tired.
But it doesn't really feel like the election woke me up although I know it did. I'm up because when I gently rose to consciousness, like I often do in the middle of the night, this time, instead of disconnecting my thoughts and floating away on a fantasy of a more comfortable......a fantasy of a more comfortable bed in some more comfortable far away land, my mind went back in time to work Zooms, then the colleague who said I was such a happy person and my replying "it's a coping device because I had a really fucked up childhood" and it was the exact......right thing to say, even though it was an F bomb on a work Zoom because I'm not mincing my words anymore as I work to recognize how whiteness has fucked us all. And that phrase "really fucked up childhood," although it is as familiar to me as the lines on my own palm......this time the familiar phrase brought up the image of Grandmother Helen Fey walking into our bedroom, Nancy and mine, the bedroom I shared with my little sister, disappearing into the tiny walk-in closet and emerging with the pink dress with a white collar and long pinker...The dress was pink with a white collar and a long pinker scarf, a 70's style dress says my 2020 mind and Her Dress said my 1976 voice, I said, "that's Nancy's" in a voice that was correcting Grandmother, as in "don't take that" as in "you're wrong" as in "don't touch that" and...in typical Helen Fey fashion, the woman whose parents were born in Poland in the 1800's, replied that she was taking it to dress Nancy in for her casket. I don't remember her retort, but I do remember it was not couched in any kind of modification for the 11 year old with the dislocated hip who lay...before her. In typical Helen Fey brutality, my grandmother taught me. Taught me much. And that scene woke me up. I'm grateful, of course, as this spring of waking up to Whiteness has made me a Person for the first time, and People are grateful for every goddamn thing in the world so even this horrific scene of cruelty by an adult to a child who is grieving the loss of her sister brother mother father and has an undiagnosed femur bone dislocated from the hip socket to boot has good lessons for me. I will let you figure out those lessons (hint: compassion, kindness, gentleness, the precious immeasurable value of childhood, protecting the young AND whiteness whiteness whiteness)
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