Category: Takes a Village

Posted in Fragile Life, Insight, Mother to Crone, Takes a Village, Teens

Sleep entitlement

Posted on by Kelly (and the Buck)

One of the things I most look forward to in my time apart from family is the opportunity to rediscover my own rhythms… with food and work and most of all (and particularly in the throes of this final hormonal coup) SLEEP.

Ahhh, to sleep through the night!
Without the torment of teenagers traipsing and a snoring bedfellow (with an aging prostate.)

But alas, 5 nights & counting, and it wasn’t meant to be.

There are many factors to blame for this injustice.

But there is also something else.

Curiosity.

How is it that I have come to expect that my sleep be insulated from the world around me—from the weather, from fellow human beings, from four-legged ones, from neighborhood celebrations, from worrying about the news and from the sounds of sudden middle of the night emergencies…

Who I am to deserve such isolation from the life we share?

When I was a young mother faced with friends & relatives who had schooled their infants into sleeping through the night (while my toddler was still woke to nurse), I read something that stuck with me:

“Parents and doctors aren’t entitled to sleep. Waking comes with the job.”

To be awakened.
Not a bad thing.

And so the same might be true of the homeless people who disturb my walks downtown, and the immigrants who disturb my sense of belonging, and the strangers who disturb my sense of community.

We are infinitely among.
How might we better abide this?

How might this abiding lend itself to a softer surrender into all that is and into a fiercer voice for that which truly shouldn’t be so–for anyone.

Posted in Fragile Life, Insight, Legacy, Takes a Village

a boy my son’s age

Posted on by Kelly (and the Buck)

~This is the face of a boy about the age of my youngest son Aidan.

~This is the face of a boy who became my neighbor’s father.

~This is the face of a boy who became the grandfather of one my son’s earliest friends (who is now his co-captain on the highschool frisbee team.)

~This is also the face of a Jew on the day he was arrested and brought to Buchenwald with his brother, a Tuesday in early June, in the year 1944.

The NY Times said that the Holocaust is Fading from Memory, while a candidate for office in this nation claims it never happened.

We must do what Germany did.

The study of the Holocaust was made a mandatory part of the curriculum in their schools, as they continue to make reparations as a nation.

How might we as a people turn to face our own past? Can we commit to remembering that which we have inflicted on the inhabits here? Indigenous. Black. Japanese. Woman. Child.

Whenever we assign “other,” we seed the unthinkable, like the shooting up of a classroom of first-graders or highschoolers or the perpetuation of years of institutionalized sexual assault.

There is light and shadow to each of us and to each nation, and to ignore it is to participate in the legacy of suffering.

Because he was liberated from Buchenwald by US troops, Mr. Rosner, #1364472, will celebrate his 90th birthday this year.

He cannot deny or forget,
because he was there.

Posted in Legacy, Nuts & Bolts, Takes a Village

Democracy & the library

Posted on by Kelly (and the Buck)

(written just after the 2016 Presidential election)

When the kids were little (and before the internet), we spent hours in the library each week. Dashed out to the car with coins, not once, but twice, even though we all promised: “Only an hour on the meter this time!” Filled growing arms with piles of books even though we brought the beefy canvas tote and committed, ahead of time: “10 books each is plenty!”

Inside the library, there are still places, long neglected by my feet, which are so familiar to me. Stacks and rows, like old friends… 100s, 200s, 300s, 600s. Places where I opened my world, narrowed my world, explored my world, defined it as a new mother, as a mother beginning to reclaim herself, as a woman stepping forward.

There is the table in the mezzanine where I sat working while my kids were at school. There is a view of the town. Of cars passing. Of leaves falling. Of first flurries.

And inside–readers & writers & viewers & nappers, of all ages, and race.

There are those who always vote. Those who never vote. Those who voted democratic for the first time. Republican for the first time.

We all remain quiet.
(Most of the time.)

We share tables and chairs and computers and books.