Intention

And we are home again, back to our routine. Sam worked a 24 hour shift yesterday, so Beatrice and I spent the day reading books, running errands, finding activities around town...in the morning, Beatrice and I spent an inordinate amount of time with the camera. I taught her how to take pictures without me hovering, and let her go. She asked me to make silly faces. Click. She demanded I play her out of tune guitar. Click. She placed the camera an inch from my eye. Click. She photographed her books, my back, her doggie, my hair, the pillows. Then we finally stopped, and I paged through the camera. Seeing the world through a Bea's eye view is fascinating.

It got me thinking about how amazing it would be to have a day where everyone took their camera through their daily routine. And took photos of how the coffee lady looks at them, their commute in the morning, and just documented their everyday experience. Maybe it would be like a scavenger hunt. We would each get a checklist of things to photograph and compare our experiences. What could we learn about how each of us engages with our world?

Later, after camera-time, we hit the storytime at the bookstore. The lady who runs storytime asked me if Beatrice was British. Not a British name, but if she was literally a British child. The question/assumption happened in front of everyone, and the woman next to me looked shocked and horrified by her question, having had the luxury of hearing Beatrice call me Mama for fifteen minutes before the storytime lady arrived. Here is my photograph of the morning: having my motherhood denied by a well-meaning reader.

I know as a parent of a child that looks nothing like me, this is par for the course, but it gets exhausting. I just think if Beatrice were the dark one, and I were the white one, no one would assume I was the nanny. And that is so disappointing to me. There are some that would disagree with that, I'm sure. That think people would think it whether I was white or brown, but my experience as the mother in a multi-cultural family has shown me the world through a different lens. People are generally kind--ignorant, perhaps, making assumptions based on stereotypes, perhaps--but I think, in general, people are well-intentioned. They try to start conversations, telling me that my daughter is beautiful, questioning our interesting relationship. People have told me how much Beatrice seems to love me, even though I am the nanny. But the point is, they are drawn to talk to us. I just think in my head, "They are staring at us because we are so fascinating."

When I was younger, perhaps more beautiful, single, I would get asked at least once a week where I was from.

"Schnecksville, Pennsylvania," I would quip dryly.

Not the answer they were looking for. What they were looking for was something exotic. Something far away. Something to explain my black hair, interesting nose. "No, no," they would say, "What are you? Where is your family from?" If I wanted to be obtuse, I would say "Pennsylvania." And if I wanted it to end, I would answer my dad is Irish-American and my mother is Central American. That is the answer they want. What is my heritage. What they are asking is "Why do you look like this and talk like that?" I realize, now that I get asked a lot less, that it was a way to start conversation, a way to tell a stranger that she is beautiful. During those years, though, I frequently thought about what it was to be American, about my identity, about being Other, and about how different I was from both of the cultures that made me who I am.

I know the storytime lady's intention was not malicious. She made an assumption about us. There are many nannies at that particular storytime. If I had corrected her, or explained the genetics of our family, I'm sure she would have apologized, or corrected herself, or as most people do, joke about how different we look. But the point is, for me, I get exhausted by it all. I get exhausted having to justify our genetics. I think my daughter looks like me in some ways too as much as others think she doesn't look like me. I get exhausted at having to be compassionate with them, to think of people's intention, make apologies for the ignorant people in my head so I can continue thinking of the world as a place that accepts me, mixed ethnicity and all.

In this roundabout way, I've been thinking a lot about Mel's blog post yesterday, and the blog post that prompted it. And so, I think my thoughts have really been circling around the idea of intention.

This writer of the childfree/childless piece, inadvertently, hurt a community (ALI community) of women of which she claims to be a part. And I think, as I wrote on Cait's Mom's blog, she set off a bomb directed at a certain childfree group, but when you set off bombs, you easily hit innocent people in the vicinity. And as Cait's Mom said, she meant to hurt someone. She didn't write to explain or be kind or be compassionate. She wrote it to lash out at those she felt attacked her. That impulse is in all of us. But what do we do with those feelings of anger and hurt?

I have certainly used my blog to vent. I don't have nearly the audience as a writer for the Orlando Sentinel, but still, I cannot take the moral high ground. My blog is a safe haven for me. I have been unkind, I'm sure. Her post, and feeling a great deal of anger and offense at her words, made me think about my own intention. My intention here on my blog, and in this community.

I think I was most offended by the original blog post because it seemed so unnecessary. I felt a kind of visceral reaction to her flaunting her child's love, exposing her version of motherhood as the only way to experience a relationship with a child, and for belittling someone's choice in life. I, for one, applaud anyone who knows their limitations and knows for certain that living childfree is best for them. And her intention, from my best summation, was simply to be mean.

And so I will walk away from yesterday with thoughts of intention. Maybe for a day, I can see people as the series of photographs that make up their world, rather than the captions they write underneath.

"Breathing in, breathing out; feeling resentful; feeling happy; being able to drop it, not being able to drop it; eating our food; brushing our teeth; walking; sitting - whatever we're doing could be done with one intention. That intention is that we want to wake up, we want to ripen our compassion and we want to ripen our ability to let go; we want to realise our connection with all beings. Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us." - Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty