The long road to "That isn't on me."

A young girl wrote wrenching words to a group I’m in. So young. A pretty, thin teen with charcoal hair, umber skin and eyes that clearly move non-traditionally. .

She said she was struggling with the concept that she would never be able to do so many things she wanted to because she was born blind: ”I wanted to drive a car, sneak out with friends, go to parties, have a sleep over… And I wanted to see and flirt with cute guys. That was the life i was excited for. Now I’m realizing it wasn’t meant for me.”

A lot of people wrote back, telling her to believe in herself, not to set limits on her dreams. “Blindness doesn’t have to define you…” But others admonished her for appearing to ask for sympathy, even though this was a support group for blind people, not exactly mixed company. “Don’t fish for pity…” Yadda yadda yadda….

But I read her words over again and sat lost in thought. This girl wasn’t limiting her dreams. I don’t hear her saying she can’t be a scientist or a professional athlete or president. I hear her saying some very real things. Yup, driving a car is out for us. We learn that early on.

But then there are the other things—the social life, the little crowd of friends, the parties, the giggling under the covers when a friend spends the night, the staying out ‘til the streetlights come on or sneaking out afterwards.

Image via Pixabay - Two girls with arms around each other’s shoulders pumping their fists with a bleak gray background.

That isn’t a girl limiting her dreams. She has a couple of friends, kids of her parent’s friends, who have known her since before her difference was “weird.” But they also have their crowd and the cost of inviting along one’s geeky blind childhood friend with the creepy eyes is steep. There may be someone out there who would do it, but most blind kids aren’t lucky enough to have a badass, social daredevil for a friend.

This girl isn’t limiting her dreams or fishing for pity. She’s just expressing sorrow over coming to grips things that are denied to her. She’s young and she has probably been told she can do “anything, even if you’re blind” by people who mean well and who also don’t want to feel uncomfortable emotions. And she’s starting to find out that it’s not entirely true.

If she is making a mistake, it is only in lumping the social things together with driving a car, as if they too were a natural consequence of blindness. They aren’t. But I didn’t know that when I was that age either.

I remember being fourteen and noticing the blurry sunlight in my bedroom window turn orange, signaling the end to another solitary Saturday in June, listening to the happy yells of teenagers in the alley through that open window. That day—for the first time—I knew where the party was. Someone had let it slip within my hearing at school. I didn’t know who lived there, but it was just a couple of blocks over.

I put on my jean jacket, which had once been fashionable back when I went through a phase of studying fashion and trying really hard to be “with it.” I put my hair in a scrunchy and walked the two blocks to the place where the party was happening. I put a smile on, carefully rechecking it internally—not too big or obvious but enough to be friendly. The door was open with music blaring out, so I walked up the steps past a couple of guys sitting out front.

No one acknowledged me. I couldn’t see their faces. But my little bit of residual sight and their breathing and low conversation told me they were all guys. They might not even really know me, but I could tell they were my age, not grownups. I slipped into the doorway, which was festooned with streamers. The bold, cheerfully brash tones of the 1980s screeched from speakers and the sound inside was so loud that most of my skill at echolocation was wiped out.

There were girls dancing just inside. I could tell by their dim silhouettes and their giggles. There was a burst of laugher and someone slammed into me, pushing me against the wall and sloshing a drink across my chest. The girls erupted into gales of laughter. Then they were gone, scurrying away into the crowd of amorphous shapes.

I looked down and sniffed. Sprite. Well, at least it was clear and only a bit of my shirt was wet. I was used to rough and tumble with two brothers, so I wasn’t immediately sure that I wasn’t welcome. I stood against the wall for a long time, observing as best I could and trying to look friendly and “with it.”

I could hear the occasional voice I recognized from school. I didn’t know the names to go with those voices. The other kids were only ever introduced at the beginning of the year and then they only said their name out loud once in home room. That wasn’t enough to capture the voices and put names to the kids nearest me in school. But after a few months I did know when kids from my class were close by from their familiar voices.

Even so, no one spoke to me. A few dancers stepped on my toes or pushed me aside a bit with gradually increasing force. But no one directed so much as, “oops!” to me.

Finally, someone whose face I couldn’t see came up and took my shoulders, steering me toward the door. And I went. I made sure I was steady enough to keep them from pushing me down the steps, but I didn’t resist. I walked home along the sidewalk, my head up, pretending I didn’t care.

It wasn’t the first time I experienced that kind of cold shoulder and rejection, and it wasn’t the last by a long shot. But it was the last time I tried just going to a party put on by my classmates that I had heard about. And it was the only private party for teens I went to during high school.

Nope. No one ever invited me. There were a couple of kids I was friends with at the three different schools I attended during my teens, but they weren’t either the partying type or in a position to throw a party.

Is not getting invited to parties the worst thing in the world? Of course not. I lived in a sheltered, nice small town. I didn’t have to worry about hunger, violence or familial abuse. A lot of teens have terrible problems that I didn’t have. But when I crept out my window on Halloween to roam the streets, I did it alone, a real ghost walking in the dusk with kids speeding by, shouting and laughing in their own pursuits.

I wanted so badly to be part of a happy and inclusive crowd, to feel friends’ arms around my shoulders from either side, to share my excitement with someone, to laugh at their jokes and to know that if I fell behind they’d reach out pull me along because I was one of the pack.

All these years later, I know what the pretty teenage girl is talking about. I listened to well-meaning adults back then. I went to a self-esteem building program called “Wings” and I chanted affirmations before going to bed every night. All those messages from adults warned me that the worst thing a person with a disability can do is to complain or elicit sympathy from others.

Now, with the experience of an extra thirty years, those people telling this girl not to “put limits on her dreams” or “fish for pity” make me want to gnash my teeth.

Instead, I wrote to her: “I hope you know that you can do all those things as well as anyone, with the sole exception of driving a car. The problems you have doing these things are what we call a ‘social construct.’ It isn't ‘meant to be.’ It isn’t God or biology or your body that has taken those things from you. I snuck out of a windows as a teenager. I was quite good at it in fact. But no friends ever did it with me because I had eyes like yours. These things were ‘off-limits’ only because of social constraints.”

“As for putting limits on one’s dreams, I have been a war correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, a major international publication. I have published ten books and travelled in 35+ countries. I am raising two kids. I have built rock walls with my own hands. I have fed my family by farming the land. Believe me. I am not a blind person who puts limits on myself or spends time in self pity or in fishing for other people’s sympathy.”

“But society does put limits on me. For years, I beat myself up mentally because I wanted what you want and I thought it was me that was the problem. I thought I should learn to accept it. That’s what my mentors told me. And they didn’t blame me exactly but they implied that the exclusion was my fault, or at least a consequence of being visually impaired. I thought I just needed to try harder.”

“Now I’m almost forty-five and I want to tell you that that is bullshit. Certainly, avoid putting limits on your dreams. But your words don’t sound like that to me. I was a nice, friendly girl with a ton of interests and a good sense of humor. But I didn’t get to go to parties and I had precious few sleepovers, almost entirely with the kids of my parent’s friends. I didn't limit myself. Society and prejudiced people did. I was outgoing and friendly. I got kicked down, told ‘Oh, it's just for us and a few close friends!’ or ‘Maybe sometime!’ or just given a cold shoulder so many times there is no counting. That's society. That's prejudice, even bigotry. Call it what it is. Don’t blame yourself and I hope the people telling you to try harder and implying you are fishing for sympathy are reading this too, because putting this on you is abusive.”

“I wish I could give you a hug. I hope you will find your own dreams and follow them. But I’ve also got to tell you that this crap that is social exclusion has nothing to do with you. It’s all on them. I’m sorry to say that it isn’t likely to change soon, but you will find the occasional person who is open-minded and a real friend. Value them and give them your best side. Try not to let the negativity of bigots make you bitter, so that you can still turn around and be a good friend to those who are ready. But don't blame yourself because it just isn't about the blindness. It's about the same old sickness of our society that brings racism, sexism and all the rest of it.”

That may seem harsh, calling kids “bigots” because they don’t invite the blind girl in their class to a casual party. But that is actually putting it mildly and with a large dose of emotional distance.

I did meet a new friend that same year—when I was fourteen—who was ready to be friends with the blind girl next door. At least a little. Like a lot of friends, she didn’t act like she knew me in public. That was okay with me. Or at least it was worth the price. She was a good friend and we shared real interests, like the medieval history club.

Life happened and even though my life took me away from that small town and around the world over the next couple of decades, circumstances brought that friend a lot closer and into the circle of my family. There have been a lot of times when social things were tough, and I’d think of the handful of people I could really count on—my friend from that old neighborhood among them, even though thousands of miles lay between us. We’ve supported each other through some very tough times.

This past year, divisions split many friends in the US and while we agree on almost everything, there were some things we didn’t see eye to eye on. There came a moment when my friend was so angry that she lashed out at me in text.

As happens with a lot of arguments, my friend made it personal. But instead of just calling me argumentative or selfish or closed-minded or insulting my sources—all things that could at least be rationally argued—she went for my disability and my writing about my experiences, accusing me of making up the social difficulties related to my disability in order to “manipulate people and get sympathy.” To be clear, the argument wasn’t even vaguely related to disability or social exclusion.

I know my blogs have increasingly become about disability issues and maybe it bothers more than just this friend. I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read my blogs, whatever your reasons. And I can see that it might seem like I obsess about this stuff, if you go on what I write here.

But the truth is that I rarely talk about these things in offline life. Last night, I mentioned something about my vision to a local friend because I had just spent the day seeing a major eye specialist in the city, and I was surprised at her shock. Then, I realized that I never talk about this stuff in person, even something innocuous like saying that I went to the eye doctor.

I spend most days thinking about kids, chickens, gardening, teaching students, preparing lessons, cleaning, cooking, doing the dishes, making crafts and now homeschooling. I don’t have a lot of time for disability issues, even being socially isolated enough that Covid lockdown barely changed my life at all.

Maybe that’s partly why I write about it, because it is an otherwise neglected part of my life. But I know it is also because these are issues I don’t hear anyone else talking or writing about. Or at least very little. And yes, while I don’t focus on the social impacts of disability every day, they underlie my whole life. They are defining factors that I have to take into account, like gravity or Covid. But unlike universal restrictions, that social exclusion is something I observe only affecting me and other people with disabilities.

So, I write because it is needed and silence hurts.

I don’t write this stuff to garner sympathy, and that’s fortunate because I haven’t received much sympathy since I started writing here. Instead, I have developed some great connections with people who experience similar things or who want to understand reality better. But even that isn’t really the point. The point is that I am a journalist. I write the things that need to be told and things that the world needs to hear. That’s just what I do.

If you’re a reader who came to my blogs for the general social justice stuff or to see what it’s like to live in the Czech Republic or to get books or to learn about herbs or earthy spirituality and you find my posts about social exclusion, disability and societal prejudices to be uncomfortable and out of touch with the reality you know, I hope you’ll bide a moment with your discomfort. It is okay to feel uncomfortable.

When someone tells about social injustice that they experience, the rest of us often feel an obligation to do something. And that is why it can seem like they are complaining or trying to manipulate others. But the fact is that there is no specific action I am asking for. It is really the understanding and the awareness that will help. If anything, share a post that opens you up to a new and uncomfortable reality.

But mostly just be open to the perspective. That openness alone will create the change we all need in this troubled world.

It is a stereotype like any other negative stereotype, that people with disabilities—or at least some of them—are “fakers” and “complainers.” Partly that stereotype comes from the (often-subconscious) fear abled people have of the inevitable disabilities of old age.

Partly it comes from the kind of jealousy my children have of adults. “You don’t have to do chores and homework!” They can’t see how much adults do have to do. Abled people see disabled people getting a few little curb cuts in life, and many think we have it easy and enjoy a little mooching… or that SOME of us must be faking or exaggerating just to get the bennies or at least to garner a little sympathy.

Just like I explain these things to my kids, you have really got no idea. The only breaks disabled people actually get are things that society has figured out will make us cost society a lot less because they allow us to deal with our own lives by ourselves better. That’s it.

Frankly, the only time I ever got “sympathy” for being blind was one time when I was a kid and some lady at a bus station prayed over me and it was a distinctly strange and uncomfortable experience. Most people with disabilities avoid “sympathy” like the plague for precisely that reason. It might feel moderately good from the giving end, but it is usually really weird and unrewarding on the receiving end. And that’s real sympathy, not even the toxicity of pity.

More than anything, if there is one thing I do want to try to manipulate people into it is to refrain from making abusive and prejudiced remarks that hurt people with disabilities. It doesn’t really matter if you once somewhere heard about a person faking a disability to get something or an actually disabled person trying to manipulate people’s sympathy, please don’t use that stereotype as an accusation or an automatic way to discredit a person with a disability in a disagreement.

That accusation is exactly like using racial epithets or calling a woman the slang equivalent of “sex worker.” If you go there in an argument, it isn’t about the argument or the person you’re arguing with. That’s on the person using the bigoted remark. It is a sickness that is within those fostering prejudice.

That isn’t on me. It isn’t on us.

Postcards from American social studies class

It has been a month since I pulled my son out of Czech school mid-week and put him in an American online elementary school. It’s been a month of complete reorientation. I even feel like I have jet lag.

Our living room now looks like a homeschooler lives here. We aren’t technically allowed to homeschool because of Czech authorities, but we have been able to enroll in an American online school, thanks to technology that has only existed for a few years. And even with school online the physical environment is starting to look different.

Now we are surrounded by three US maps (two of them in puzzle form), a daily schedule on the wall, science projects involving balloons, makeshift beakers and lots of rocks, a writing lab and color-coded notebooks with big bold labels in English. This isn’t how Czechs do school. My son’s previous school room had piles of identical gray notebooks—six or more per class—a couple of textbooks and nothing with color or three dimensions.

Image by Arie Farnam

In other rooms of the house, I am packing and stacking boxes. I came here twenty-two years ago with a single backpack, a laptop and equipment to make a documentary film. In a few months, I’ll be going back. One acquires things in twenty-two years—important things… and people. I’ll be heading back with two kids and about ten large boxes full of books, clothes, special dishes, candle-making equipment, herbalist paraphernalia, children’s toys, board games and much smaller electronics.

I’ll still be leaving behind a lot of value—the huge wooden table my Egyptian carpenter friend made for me, my antique sewing machine, my house, my garden, my animals, a husband. This isn’t all celebration. There is a lot of loss and heartache.

This morning I realized for the first time that we will technically meet the definition of refugees. We are leaving because of community harassment and particularly racially motivated physical and psychological attacks on my son, from which authorities refuse to protect us.

Sure, unlike most refugees, we actually have a pre-set safe harbor to go to. We have citizenship and an apartment already waiting, But still… this isn’t how I ever imagined going home.

The ever-intensifying Covid lockdowns here leave us in a limbo where we might as well have already crossed the ocean. A thick blanket of fine sifted snow has fallen and the temperature has been well below freezing.

We haven’t seen neighbors even poke their noses out of doors in days. But we are out and about, feeding animals, sledding, snowboarding, skating on a nearby pond and shoveling snow. It’s a wonderfully quiet and blissfully unthreatening world for a change with only the sounds of neighborhood dogs and a few engines down on the county road.

Our trans-Atlantic transition has already begun. I’ve got the measuring cups out and we’ve been baking—preparing for a world of cups, ounces, pounds, quarts, gallons, feet and inches. My son is justifiably confused.

“Why, Mama, why do Americans do this? Centimeters are lots easier!”

Oh honey, you have no idea.

The complexity isn’t just in units of measure by a long shot. Europeans don’t study fractions much, which are mostly a consequence of weird American units of measure.

And did you know that European and American cursive handwriting differ significantly? No wonder I haven’t been able to read handwriting for the past twenty years! I thought my eyes were just getting worse. But as it turns out, almost all the capital letters are different and many of the lower-case letters are quite different.

Of course, there is the whole language thing. I didn’t get out of home teaching by going for American school, even if the online teachers do actually teach concepts. My son needs vocabulary help roughly every two and a half minutes, and that definitely includes math class.

The most foreign class though is social studies. Czechs do have a somewhat similar class. It is called “homeland studies,” and is completely nationally focused. In fourth grade, American social studies is quite similar actually—just with information about a different country. A few concepts, like how to read an elevation map, are transferable, but all the facts are, of course, different.

Before enrolling in American school, my son could just barely find the United States on a world map, primarily because “Grandma lives there.” (Not to mention a passel of cousins.) But that’s as far as his knowledge of America went—to my dismay. I thought I’d done a half-way decent job, importing hundreds of American children’s books over the years, many of them about American history or regional cultures. But apparently my son assumed these were every bit as much fantasy as the fairytales and let them go in one ear and out the other.

The social studies teacher in our new school is also the weakest of the teachers, in terms of teaching style and even knowledge base. He’s a middle-aged guy from Ohio named Todd, and I was warned by reviewers that this school has a conservative bent.

But even so, I was disturbed when the first lesson was on the hemispheres of the earth and the teacher insisted that the earth has four hemispheres—northeast, northwest, southeast and southwest. “Hemi-sphere” means “half of a ball.” You can’t have four halves of one ball.

Next, the teacher just goofed. He was trying to explain to the kids how landforms have an impact on weather patterns. One of the simplest examples of this comes from my home turf in Eastern Oregon, where the Cascade Mountains block the wet sea air from the Pacific Ocean to the west and force it to rise, cool and dump all of its moisture before continuing on to the eastern part of the state. That’s why Eastern Oregon and Washington are mostly desert.

But Todd from Ohio got his mountain ranges mixed up and insisted that it is the Rocky Mountains that block the wet air from the Pacific, despite the fact that the Rockies don’t really start until you get into Idaho. And he put it on the unit exam.

But those things are non-controversial, just mistakes, that in reality any teacher makes. We just don’t usually have to teach our classes with parents looking in, analyzing and rewinding the video recording to harp on every little thing. So, I wrote to Todd and told him about the issue gently and I don’t hold it against him. (Well, the bit about the earth’s hemispheres counts against him maybe just a smidgen.)

But the real trouble started in the unit titled “Who are Americans?”

First, the teacher proclaimed that all Americans are immigrants. He made a point of calling out any Native American kids watching and specifically denigrating anyone who says Native Americans are not immigrants. He explained the archeological land bridge theory, though he neglected to mention that this is our best guess as to how Native Americans got there. Mostly it was his tone that was irritating at this point.

But then he made a point of insisting that those first migrating humans or pre-humans were also immigrants and thus “all Americans come from immigrants.” First of all, this isn’t technically correct. “Immigration” describes the movement of specific persons from one inhabited country to another inhabited country. An immigrant goes “in” among those already there and does it during their own lifetime.

The people who crossed the land bridge, if that is indeed how it happened, were not immigrants. They were nomads. They didn’t make the trip all in one lifetime. It took many generations. They didn’t go to live in another country. They just slowly moved around and eventually found themselves on a different continent.

Now, I’m not Native American and I don’t know if Native Americans care whether or not they are considered to be the descendants of immigrants or not. But I do care about the evident reason Todd was making this assertion—to prepare kids to believe that Europeans had every bit as much right to the land of North America as Native Americans did back in the 1400s. That’s a problem.

If that were true any invader could just declare themselves immigrants to any country and might would always make right.

Furthermore, If Todd were right about all Americans being immigrants, it would mean that Europe is a continent of immigrants too… and Asia and Australia as well. The only continent with any claim to having indigenous people would be Africa and all humans would either have to be considered indigenous Africans or African diaspora of various time periods. That is clearly unhelpful and not the meaning of the concepts involved.

This is where the fundamental building blocks of a vast social misunderstandings start—at least some of them. Conservatives in the US have long complained that teaching the facts of US history constitutes the shaming of the white portion of the nation. As a result, I had to learn much of this history outside school from reading and from experiences with people. The primary shame I ever felt over it was that we didn’t learn it in primary school.

This is a political ploy in the classroom. I’ve heard right-wing politicians say the same thing on TV, “we all came as immigrants and we all had the same opportunities.” It’s a comfortable falsehood to shake off uncomfortable feelings that arise from acknowledging historical and present-day injustices.

In the next unit, Todd opened up the topic of the economy of the United States. He defined “free market economics” as “a system where you can make as much money as you want. You decide how much money you will make.”

Creative Commons image by Kath B. of Flickr.com

He never hinted that you don’t just get to say, “Oh, I’d like to make $200,000 please,” and it’s done. Well, I suppose that Todd had that option because he’s an abled white man from a privileged socio-economic background, so maybe he actually thinks that’s an option for everybody. He does point out that he chose to be a teacher, even though it doesn’t pay as much as some other things. But he never hints that not everyone gets to simply point to a dollar amount and choose their salary, as if it is an ice-cream flavor.

Next, Todd addresses America’s political system. America is “unique,” he says, because it is a democracy. He digs deeper into the idea that America is alone in being a democracy when he defines the concept of a political region as “America is a democracy, so that is a political region,” as if the border around the United States was the border around the democratic region of the world.

This, despite the fact that the fairly conservative Pew Research Center found in 2019 that more than half of the countries in the world are now democratic.

And then this morning, a whopper that left me breathless. In discussing America’s borders and neighbors, the teacher claimed that the Mexican-American war was a border dispute over which river should be the border. It was presented as a silly little argument in which the United States proved that the Rio Grande was the right border. In reality the Mexican-American war constituted a massive land-grab on the part of the Americans. It was so unjust that there were quite a few Americans who fought on the Mexican side. And when the United States won anyway, the border was moved and the USA gained 500,000 square miles of territory, increasing the nation’s size by a third. This was no minor squabble over “which river the border should follow.”

One of the ways I deal with the problems with social studies class is to supplement. I brought out the world-map puzzles and eventually my son got the idea of cardinal directions and the hemispheres of the earth. I also got a topographical map of the US. so we could study. the real positions of the mountain ranges and their effects on Eastern Oregon high desert country. And at the moment, we’re reading children’s books about the historical labor movement led by young women in textile mills for a bit of perspective on our economic system. We have books about Native American kids—both present-day and historical—as well.

But now I see the divide in American social studies education in all its glory. To be on the side of facts and history puts me in the position of sounding like I am constantly harping on some injustice or another. This isn’t the choice of those of us who care about our children understanding the real world. I am not in fact against America or focused on complaint and gloom. I don’t even think America is really any more unjust than the vast majority of countries in the world.

But when teachers strip out any sign of the injustices of the past and focus on the myth of glorious European “Founding Fathers,” it makes it hard for facts to come across as anything else.

I find myself longing for a social studies class that would just teach the facts and the story of the country and its many peoples with integrity in the first place. This was one of the reasons why I wanted to homeschool my kids early on, a dream I gave up on due to bureaucracy, special educational needs and the wishes of my children. That’s why I have all these picture and story books on historical, geographic and social matters.

To counteract the sense that even my. blog posts are often a litany of complaints in a world of unrelenting hardship and injustice, I let myself dream about the way I would teach social studies.

We’d build maps where the equator was actually in the middle of the map, rather than in the lower third. We’d sing the oceans and continents. We’d make food from various countries. We’d mix the same paints to get the various shades of brown that color all the peoples of the earth, including those of very light-brown hue. We’d read real or realistic fictional stories about children in different countries.

When we turned, as we eventually must in an American school, to a more in-depth exploration of the United States, we would first spend quite a long time on the first several thousand years of American history and study the physical regions of the country in that context. We would have to search to find child-friendly books and materials on Native American civilizations and we would study their many discoveries and the development of mature democracy in some of them.

Then we would move on to all the history that came after and the nation of immigrants that largely replaced those civilizations. We would study the stories of those immigrants, including real stories of children in those times. We would not look away from hardship, desperation or exploitation. We would see how even good intentions sometimes brought tragedy and not all intentions were good. We would look at how people in the past viewed those of other groups and how that influenced what they did.

We would look at the founding of the United States and the Constitution as significant events, but not as the all-defining, most important events they became in the social studies of my childhood. We would look at exactly who designed the Constitution and why and how they hoped it would work and what worked and what didn’t and how it has been changed and whether or not it now works better. We wouldn’t be looking for saints or devils but rather at people, who were shaped by their times and circumstances.

As we moved toward more recent history, we would have more stories of real people to work with. We’d break down myths and tell the stories with nuance. Rosa Parks would take her rightful place as a savvy, planful activist, rather than just someone who was too tired.

We would learn that there are rarely easy answers, and that while there are sometimes people with dishonorable intentions, most people throughout history took the actions that seemed right from their own perspective at that time. And yes, this would mean in the end that we would not be able to cover everything in one year, because nuance takes a little while, but we could cover it all in the end, since we wouldn’t spend every year repeating the same tired myths.

I hope—I have reason to hope from what I haver read—that there are schools in America that now teach social studies more like this. I have no illusions that we are returning to a country that is truly safer or gentler than the one we are leaving. We are simply going because we must go, due to clear and present danger, and that is the place we can find safe harbor just now.

Gratitude lessons

Seven fifteen on a Monday morning.

I’ve managed to get the kids up and dressed. I didn’t manage to do my meditation before dawn. It was another interrupted night, but I’m at least half awake.

My fourth-grade daughter is eating her cereal when she cocks her head, frowns and declares, “I forgot about some homework for today. I have to find out about the Age of Gold and tell about it in class.”

We don’t live in one of those kind, gentle school systems with lots of second chances. There are cumulative consequences and my daughter is already struggling. She cares a little but not much, and her multiple learning disabilities make it easy for her to forget. This time she asks for help… nicely for a change.

The kids’ encyclopedias are missing from their places and both claim no knowledge of their whereabouts. I rush to start the computer. She has to leave by 7:30 to get to school in time. And the research info has to be in Czech.

Wait… “The Age of Gold?” I didn’t know there was one.

I do a quick Google search and find dozens of advertisements for gold jewelry, endless gratuitous references to something being “the golden age of …. whatever” and nothing on a historical “Age of Gold.”

“MOM! I’m going to be late!” my daughter’s voice isn’t nice any more.

Creative Commons image by Liz West

I try another type of search. I am sure by now that no one refers to an “Age of Gold” in English histories, but that doesn’t mean the Czechs don’t have one. It could have been the era when royalty in the valley of Bohemia got a bunch of gold for one of those ridiculous crowns that make you pity young medieval kings—for all I know.

“Stupid idiot!” My daughter curses her younger brother in a loud hiss from the hallway, “Get out of the chair! I want to sit there!” There is only one chair for putting on shoes in our tiny hallway.

He shrieks in pain. It’s the standard thing that happens if I’m not there to physically separate them while they get there coats and shoes before school.

And I come unglued.

I tried to help her because she did ask nicely and the consequences of completely blowing off the assignment will be harsh. There are no accommodations for kids with learning disabilities. But I make a massive effort to teach my kids both responsibility and kindness.

My daughter regularly has to do “do-overs”. to speak nicely or do push-ups and squats for hitting and pushing or do “time out” for total freak-outs. She gets the consequences of poor grades regularly and we talk about cause and effect while tucking the kids into bed.

It isn’t the forgotten (or possibly blown off) homework that really gets me. It isn’t even the constant hitting, pushing and general meanness, it is the utter lack of awareness that someone is doing something FOR her. I’ll admit that I’m oversensitive to this at the moment because I find it to be a chronic deficit among the adults in my vicinity as well.

In the environmental organization where I volunteer, we had a crisis a couple of months ago We had several major actions set up but no one willing to volunteer to guide journalists around the site and answer questions. I would have done it myself, except it all had to be done in a language I speak with an accent (and occasionally creative grammar). No one wanted me in that role—least of all me—so I went looking for volunteers with the promise of my presence and support.

Finally, I found a petite young mother who wasn’t in a position to do the major organizing roles or to do direct action—given that she had a toddler in tow—but she was passionate and wanted a volunteer job. So, with a crash course in media relations she went into action. For two months she threw herself into the task. Finally, we had the media issue covered.

But then a competent professional came along. As a journalist, I’ll be the first to admit that he knows his stuff and he’ll likely do a great job. But there was one small problem. He didn’t thank the young woman, who had set everything up for him and held down the fort through those first rugged months. The organizers didn’t thank her for saving our bacon back in August. She was overstepped by the professional and dismissed.

I also worked as a full-time volunteer for two months last summer. I had some time off of work and time when my kids were with their grandmother. Instead of taking that time to write a new book or study medicinal herbs, I threw myself into the struggle for climate justice because it is the burning issue of our times and self-respect demands it of me..

I didn’t go into it because I wanted to be thanked or even appreciated, anymore than the impromptu press spokeswoman did. But I will admit that the respect I felt from other activists for the work I did was a major source of my intense physical and mental energy in those months. It was a much needed boost.

Through the summer, I welcomed, nurtured and trained hundreds of new volunteers. And I have been thanked at times, and once the people in my closest team commissioned a chocolate cake with my name on it when I stepped down as coordinator to give someone else a shot at the role. Thanks isn’t why you do it, but it matters.

As I breathe in the crisp air of late autumn in my withered garden, I discover something unexpected to be thankful for. The power dynamics I witnessed as an activist this time around have given me an unforeseen gift—just the plot twist I needed for a novel outline I’d been stuck with for more than a year now.

I come in with my cheeks burning from the cold, get some tea and head to my writing corner. While last year my writing muscles were exhausted and I could barely get through these blogs, let alone start on another book, I’m ready. Really ready.

That is something to be thankful for.

I am, of course, thankful for the tree just outside my door. I’m thankful for my husband, imperfect as he is who none-the-less means I’m not doing it all alone. I’m thankful that, after long struggle, our children are home. I’m thankful for mostly functional technology that makes the life of a mostly blind person much easier than it otherwise would be. I’m thankful for the literal fruits of my garden, my animals and this first blast of cold winter wind. I’m thankful for the warmth from my radiator and other small luxuries, for the very fact that I can write and my words do not stay silent in a box.

Gratitude is the most necessary element of relationship, even when it is the mere acknowledgement of a helpful presence or a mundane task done well for others. Gratitude is likely at least part of the key that we are missing in our disconnected world.

I am not a vegetarian for health reasons. But I am mindful in the way I eat and live. My thanks goes out to the animals and plants that I need to eat in order to live. And I wonder how the global crisis of meat production might be altered if everyone would take a moment to thank each animal consumed. It isn’t that often or that much for most of us. Many cultures used to do it and that one thing alone, might make all the difference.

P.S. There isn’t an “Age of Gold” even in Czech. She meant the “Age of Bronze”. or the Bronze Age but got her metals mixed up. Another frantic search in which the only purpose was caring for a child as best I can.