I just returned from Thanksgiving weekend with my family. They live 500 miles away, which is a perfect distance because it isn’t too far for a quarterly road trip but it is too far away for impromptu drop-ins. Every visit with my parents and siblings is rife with family-dysfunction landmines, no matter how peaceful relations seem to be leading up to the visit. This trip was no different, so I’ll be processing the psychic aftershocks for weeks to come. The origins of these land-mines will be explored in the forthcoming thinly-veiled autobiographical novel, so I won’t delve too deeply here. Suffice it to say that, despite my high hopes, the family peace continues to be almost as tenuous as that between the Sunni and the Shi’a.
One diversion from the traditional sources of family tension was the anticipation of my younger sister’s impending nuptials, which is a joyous occasion, to be sure, but also a new source of tension. My sister is a cool and funky lady. She is an acupuncturist who is into yoga, meditation, art, and music. She’s independent, sensitive, and smart, and she holds very high yet idiosyncratic standards for her friends and potential partners. She once called me distraught because her then-boyfriend (now-fiance) did some kind of trippy visual meditation during a Zen mindfulness meditation group and, consequently, she didn’t know if she could trust him. Coming from a conservative middle-class Catholic background and living in a blue-collar city, she is quite a cocktail, and she has had some problems connecting with guys. The fellow whom she is planning to marry is a bit out of the mainstream himself. He is a Syrian Muslim who sometimes goes to Catholic mass and, as mentioned, attends Buddhist meditation groups. He is great with kids and pets, does Internet design for a living, plans to go back to school for an MBA, and runs marathons. He is a millennial man.
My sister surprised my mom this Thanksgiving by inviting her fiance’s family – three siblings and his mother -- for dinner at the last minute. There was plenty of food, and on such a family-oriented holiday it was perfectly appropriate to share a meal with the future family. Despite some panicky grumbling, my mom did a surprisingly good job of rolling with it. She explained a bit defensively that she hadn’t invited them herself because she didn’t know whether the fiance’s family celebrates Thanksgiving since they are Muslims. Rather than explaining that Thanksgiving is not a religious holiday and that everyone can give thanks without worrying about breaking the rules, I took a breath and congratulated her on being so flexible and welcoming to my sister’s future in-laws.
We had a lovely dinner. The fiance’s family was warm and gracious and seemed to enjoy the food and the company. There were a few variations to our typical Thanksgiving dinner. The fiance’s mother and younger sister wore hijabs and remained behind for a few minutes to perform private prayers before joining the rest of us at the dinner table. The grace that my dad mumbled when we were all sitting together was a little more stilted and generic than usual. The Muslim guests abstained from drinking the wine that my father poured generously for my family (except for my mom, who is in AA). Otherwise, though, the experience of sharing a holiday with a Muslim family seemed more mundane that I would have expected. We played pool, watched football, and worked on puzzles with the kids. We all groaned about being too full of pie and complained about the weather and the economy.
In one of those funny little cosmic coincidences, my husband and I turned on "The Simpsons" for the first time in a long, long time when we got home from our trip, and the show was about Bart’s new Muslim friend, Bashir. Marge and Homer invite Bashir’s family to dinner, but Homer’s motives are less than friendly – he grills Bashir’s parents about their connections with terrorists and offends them so much that they leave in the middle of dinner. In his effort to make amends, Homer breaks into their home and goes all Jack Bauer on them, hacking into their computer and searching through their mail. This was funny, because prior to our Thanksgiving meal together I could imagine my parents behaving similarly, if slightly less excessively. They are both pretty freaked out about my sister’s marriage.
I haven’t spoken to her about it, but I’m sure my sister recognizes my parents’ apprehension. I found a book that she bought for them called “The Muslim Next Door,” which I picked up and started to read. It is a memoir, written by a young Muslim woman who grew up in Suburbia USA, which demystifies some of the questions and misperceptions about Islam, particularly as it relates to life in the Western world. One thing that I thought was interesting in the book is the way that the author explains that Islam is a religion of orthopraxy, or one that emphasizes behavior and conduct, as opposed to orthodoxy, which emphasizes faith and belief in the way that most versions of Christianity do. Basically, Muslims must wear their religion on their sleeves. Just saying that they believe in the Koran, or even believing that they believe in the Koran, doesn’t count. They can’t skip Ramadan or refuse to wear a hijab and then go to confession to wash away their sins. Islam is not just an individual belief, but it permeates family relationships, the educational system, and the legal system in the countries where it represents the majority. This outward demonstration of belief challenges the deny-and-repress, don’t-ask-don’t-tell religious attitude that permeates most of our day-to-day relationships in this country.
This can be awkward and inconvenient, and it can challenge our personal beliefs. Waiting for my sister’s future mother- and sister-in-law to say their private prayers while we all stood around the Thanksgiving table was a little uncomfortable. The kids were hungry and cranky, and the grownups didn’t really know what to say to each other. The publicly private display of piety made us all feel like heathens, which probably accounts for my dad’s mumbled version of grace. My sister and her fiancé visited us for a weekend at the beginning of Ramadan this past summer, and her fiancé was too tired from fasting during the day to do much more than sleep on the beach. He also needed special food for his pre-sunrise and post-sunset meals, and it felt weird to have him sit at meals with us but not eat. This was all kind of a hassle, and it made us non-Muslims feel a little bit like jerks for not fasting with him.
When it comes down to it, though, I think, or hope, that even my parents recognize that our lives will all be enriched by stretching the family boundaries to include different global perspectives. Every family merger challenges the status quo, no matter how similar the families seem to be on the outside. A family's fate becomes tied to that of relative strangers by a sacred bond between members of the two clans. My brother’s wife’s family has a similar religious background and values to those of my parents. They live in Mexico City and don’t speak English very well, though, which initially caused my parents a great deal of consternation. My parents are still puzzled and irritated by the language barrier (Sample conversation between my mom and my brother about his two-year-old bilingual son: Mom -- "It's cute how Derek makes up his own words for things." Big brother -- "He's not making them up, Mom; he's speaking Spanish."). But they enjoy having family in Mexico, which is a great place to visit. As far as my own challenge to the status quo, my husband's family is highly functional. All of the healthy, joyful communication among these in-laws probably made my parents very uncomfortable at first, but I think they have found a way to live with it.
It's a slow evolutionary process. While every addition to the family brings about its own new sources of tension, it seems to dilute the old sources of tension and send them a little bit further into the background. The family disputes that used to be more akin to atom bombs have now become mere land mines. Hopefully, over time, these land mines will become just shimmering fireworks as the creative destruction of my parents’ family unit approaches its peaceful conclusion.
Showing posts with label families. Show all posts
Showing posts with label families. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Community organizing
My in-laws are very cool people. They both just recently retired – my mother-in-law from teaching and my father-in-law from a career in journalism – but you would never know it from how busy they are. And they’re not just busy with stamp collecting or Alaskan cruises. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If you’ve worked for forty years and have decided that stamps and cruises are your thing, then God bless. You’ve earned the right to spend your time any way you want to, short of torturing small animals or grandchildren.) One of the things that they are busy with is community organizing. Remember the sneer on Rudy Guiliani’s face when he spat out that term during the Republican convention a couple of months ago? “Barack Obama was a community organizer.” Pause, sneer, snort. “What is that?” Applause. What an ass he was. I enjoyed the editorializing in response to that speech: “Jesus was a community organizer” and “Our nation was founded by a band of community organizers.” Community organizers do good work.
One of the projects in which my in-laws are involved is an attempt to get a college-prep charter high school approved to be built in a nearby town. The town is less than ten miles away from the upscale town where we live, but it couldn’t be more different in its demographics and income levels. It is impoverished old industrial town and, I’m estimating, inhabited by about 80% black people and Latinos. They have scant resources, huge classes, high dropout rates, and low test scores. My mother-in-law recently invited me to go to a meeting to “learn more about” the charter school proposal. I am in fact concerned about education reform, so I eagerly accepted the invitation. I figured I would be listening to a presentation, perhaps offering some perspective or advice or otherwise getting involved in working on a strategic plan. I like watching presentations and working on strategic plans. These activities are fun and interesting to me.
After my in-laws picked me up to drive to the meeting, I learned a little more about where we were heading, and I realized that I need to ask more questions the next time I am invited to a meeting by community organizers. It wasn’t exactly a strategic planning session. It was a demonstration to demand that the charter school be approved by the town’s school board at its monthly meeting. We met in a church basement with about two- or three-hundred other people, mostly families from that community but also a number of people from surrounding areas who were there with church groups or social service organizations. In the church basement, a light-skinned black woman in red boots and a red wrap gave us our instructions – stick with the group as we walked together to the high school for a school board meeting, sit together in the middle of the auditorium, cheer for the charter school proposal presenters, and leave together at exactly 8:30 PM, whether or not the school board meeting was over. Then another woman, more cheerleader-ish than the first woman and also wearing red, stood up and led the “pep rally” portion of the meeting, encouraging the crowd to chant, whoop, and holler good-naturedly as we walked the two blocks to the school.
Before I knew it, I was handed a red t-shirt and swept out the door with the crowd. We walked to the high school together, marching and chanting:
What do we want: CHARTER SCHOOLS!
When do we want it: NOW!
This was a bit out of my comfort zone. As my husband pointed out after I told him about the demonstration, “You usually don’t like to dive right into things.” My typical style is to observe and gather information before I become a vocal proponent of something. I’ve never been involved in a march or a protest. I have, though, knocked on doors and gotten into verbal scuffles over political issues, but only after I’ve done my homework. There was no time for homework in this situation. These families wanted a charter school now, and I was there to help. Marching and chanting were the kinds of help they needed at that moment.
After we arrived at the meeting and settled into our seats, the school district’s superintendent introduced a number of school board members and district officers, who were sitting in a row up on the stage in front of us. The president of the school board, seated in the middle like a Grand Inquisitor, was a white woman who looked a little bit like a toad. She sternly reminded the audience members of the rules and time limits for guest speakers. She seemed particularly surly in her admonishment to parents of young children that they take unruly children outside so they wouldn’t disturb the proceedings. Then, after a brief introduction of the charter school leadership team, the head of the charter school company, a small, youngish white woman wearing a pantsuit and boasting both a PhD and a great vocabulary stood at a microphone on the floor of the auditorium and began to address her remarks to the members of the school board.
As if on cue, every child under the age of five (there were at least ten in the auditorium) promptly started to throw tantrums, except for the sweet little boy in the row right in front of me. He seemed to be around four, the same age as my daughter, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. He didn’t have any crayons or toys, but he amused himself by looking around at the crowd and giving his mother hugs and kisses. He was at that wonderful age when he was in love with his mama, just like my daughter is right now. Ten times a day my little girl sighs, “Mama, I love you,” or “You are so pwetty.” I wish I could bottle these moments up to uncork and savor when she is a teenager, stomping and slamming doors.
After a number of parents shuffled their wailing toddlers out of the hall, the presentation continued and evolved into a Q and A between the charter school leadership team and the school board about finances and taxes. The school board clearly opposed the charter school on the basis of the lost tax revenue that it would entail for the main high school in the community. As planned, our group of two- or three-hundred red-shirt wearing fellow demonstrators rose and left the auditorium en masse before the meeting adjourned, so I don’t know if things started to look up for the charter school team, but the board didn’t seem very happy with the plan at the time we left.
Despite my marching and chanting, I still don’t know how I feel about the charter school plan that was presented that night. I can’t imagine how helpless it must feel to have a child in a crappy, dangerous school and to have such limited resources that they are stuck there, without any alternatives. Charter schools offer alternatives, and for that reason I hope that the school board approves it. The families who were demonstrating for their right to provide their children with a better education deserve to win their battle.
The flip side, though, is that charter schools come at a cost to the other schools in the district. What happens to the students who don’t have the motivation or the family support to apply to the charter school? I would like to think that introducing some competition into the system raises everybody’s game, but I don’t know if the rules of capitalism apply to schools. (Given what’s happening in our economy, I don’t even know if the rules of capitalism apply to capitalism.) It goes without saying, though, that raising the level of educational opportunities for all children is good for everyone in our society, and that every kid deserves a good education.
One of the projects in which my in-laws are involved is an attempt to get a college-prep charter high school approved to be built in a nearby town. The town is less than ten miles away from the upscale town where we live, but it couldn’t be more different in its demographics and income levels. It is impoverished old industrial town and, I’m estimating, inhabited by about 80% black people and Latinos. They have scant resources, huge classes, high dropout rates, and low test scores. My mother-in-law recently invited me to go to a meeting to “learn more about” the charter school proposal. I am in fact concerned about education reform, so I eagerly accepted the invitation. I figured I would be listening to a presentation, perhaps offering some perspective or advice or otherwise getting involved in working on a strategic plan. I like watching presentations and working on strategic plans. These activities are fun and interesting to me.
After my in-laws picked me up to drive to the meeting, I learned a little more about where we were heading, and I realized that I need to ask more questions the next time I am invited to a meeting by community organizers. It wasn’t exactly a strategic planning session. It was a demonstration to demand that the charter school be approved by the town’s school board at its monthly meeting. We met in a church basement with about two- or three-hundred other people, mostly families from that community but also a number of people from surrounding areas who were there with church groups or social service organizations. In the church basement, a light-skinned black woman in red boots and a red wrap gave us our instructions – stick with the group as we walked together to the high school for a school board meeting, sit together in the middle of the auditorium, cheer for the charter school proposal presenters, and leave together at exactly 8:30 PM, whether or not the school board meeting was over. Then another woman, more cheerleader-ish than the first woman and also wearing red, stood up and led the “pep rally” portion of the meeting, encouraging the crowd to chant, whoop, and holler good-naturedly as we walked the two blocks to the school.
Before I knew it, I was handed a red t-shirt and swept out the door with the crowd. We walked to the high school together, marching and chanting:
What do we want: CHARTER SCHOOLS!
When do we want it: NOW!
This was a bit out of my comfort zone. As my husband pointed out after I told him about the demonstration, “You usually don’t like to dive right into things.” My typical style is to observe and gather information before I become a vocal proponent of something. I’ve never been involved in a march or a protest. I have, though, knocked on doors and gotten into verbal scuffles over political issues, but only after I’ve done my homework. There was no time for homework in this situation. These families wanted a charter school now, and I was there to help. Marching and chanting were the kinds of help they needed at that moment.
After we arrived at the meeting and settled into our seats, the school district’s superintendent introduced a number of school board members and district officers, who were sitting in a row up on the stage in front of us. The president of the school board, seated in the middle like a Grand Inquisitor, was a white woman who looked a little bit like a toad. She sternly reminded the audience members of the rules and time limits for guest speakers. She seemed particularly surly in her admonishment to parents of young children that they take unruly children outside so they wouldn’t disturb the proceedings. Then, after a brief introduction of the charter school leadership team, the head of the charter school company, a small, youngish white woman wearing a pantsuit and boasting both a PhD and a great vocabulary stood at a microphone on the floor of the auditorium and began to address her remarks to the members of the school board.
As if on cue, every child under the age of five (there were at least ten in the auditorium) promptly started to throw tantrums, except for the sweet little boy in the row right in front of me. He seemed to be around four, the same age as my daughter, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. He didn’t have any crayons or toys, but he amused himself by looking around at the crowd and giving his mother hugs and kisses. He was at that wonderful age when he was in love with his mama, just like my daughter is right now. Ten times a day my little girl sighs, “Mama, I love you,” or “You are so pwetty.” I wish I could bottle these moments up to uncork and savor when she is a teenager, stomping and slamming doors.
After a number of parents shuffled their wailing toddlers out of the hall, the presentation continued and evolved into a Q and A between the charter school leadership team and the school board about finances and taxes. The school board clearly opposed the charter school on the basis of the lost tax revenue that it would entail for the main high school in the community. As planned, our group of two- or three-hundred red-shirt wearing fellow demonstrators rose and left the auditorium en masse before the meeting adjourned, so I don’t know if things started to look up for the charter school team, but the board didn’t seem very happy with the plan at the time we left.
Despite my marching and chanting, I still don’t know how I feel about the charter school plan that was presented that night. I can’t imagine how helpless it must feel to have a child in a crappy, dangerous school and to have such limited resources that they are stuck there, without any alternatives. Charter schools offer alternatives, and for that reason I hope that the school board approves it. The families who were demonstrating for their right to provide their children with a better education deserve to win their battle.
The flip side, though, is that charter schools come at a cost to the other schools in the district. What happens to the students who don’t have the motivation or the family support to apply to the charter school? I would like to think that introducing some competition into the system raises everybody’s game, but I don’t know if the rules of capitalism apply to schools. (Given what’s happening in our economy, I don’t even know if the rules of capitalism apply to capitalism.) It goes without saying, though, that raising the level of educational opportunities for all children is good for everyone in our society, and that every kid deserves a good education.
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