Liberty and Justice... For Some

When I began my own little home school experiment, we started off our mornings with the Pledge of Allegiance, partly because I was trying to foster familiarity of routine for the girls and partly because my Irish husband needs to learn it in order to become a citizen. I had a little American flag proudly displayed next to my globe (it made me feel so teacherish and patriotic!) at the front of our schoolroom, which is really just our dining area, and we faced it with our hands on hearts, recited the Pledge, and then sang "America the Beautiful” (which we all know should really be our national anthem), sat down, and commenced our day’s lessons.

But on merely the second day of including my husband (remember, he is Irish, so rebellion comes naturally to him, as does an unusually strong sarcastic streak), we had to stop allowing him to participate because he is an atheist. Lest that sound like narrow-mindedness, I should qualify this exclusion… Although I don’t have quite the strength of conviction to be one myself, I love many an atheist (especially him) and respect them for their fervour; my agnosticism is just so much less work, so I’m really just a lazy atheist myself. But it was rather disruptive to our little routine, so I was somewhat put out. The problem was this: apparently my prospective citizen was unhappy pledging allegiance to God in the same breath as he is pledging it to America — he has a point there; separation of church and state, and all that — and this manifested itself in some rather rude (and hilarious) rewording of the Pledge which made the girls fall about laughing and rendered them unable to say the Pledge henceforth without giggling. (To whoever is reading this in some government office where they monitor potential citizens’ behaviour — because in all the recent dismantling and defunding of so many vital government offices and services, I am certain that particular team is nevertheless still intact — I hope you will still let him in; freedom of speech and all that. To our teachers, I apologise now and often for the feral people we are returning into your care this autumn, or whenever we hand these small, wild people back to you.)

So, really, I am not casting aspersions on my principled-but-mischievous husband; I giggled too. In fact I also feel a little ambivalent about talking to flags and how this may or may not translate into patriotism. Please do not misunderstand me: I love my country, despite (and indeed even more so because of) spending nearly half my life on the other side of the planet. That was not a judgement, it was just how things unfurled. I missed so many things while I was gone (more on that another time), and when we moved back to the US, it was with deep and true emotion that I joined in with the Pledge of Allegiance (or the “Rallegiance” as my older daughter called it, aged seven and utterly new to these strange American customs) at the weekly Friday flag ceremony at my daughters’ school. Indeed, so emotional did I become that sunglasses became de rigeur (luckily they are anyway in sunny southern California) because I would inevitably well up with tears every time we said the final lines together.

However, not long after we returned to the US in summer 2017, horror stories about the US-Mexican border began emerging. I was not unfamiliar with the heartbreaking poverty on the southern side of that border: not only had I read much literature about life there, but I had also volunteered in orphanages in Tijuana during high school, and seen firsthand the hungry faces and sad eyes that are the reality of daily life for many there. But decades of injustice and poverty since the 1990s had plunged Mexico into ever more perilous times, and the country to the north slid further and further to the right, while the wealthy on both sides of the border got wealthier, through means foul and rarely fair. This was a new low.

The world learned of the horror of the detention camps forming along that border, of the nightmare of children wrested from their uncomprehending parents’ arms, and of the increasing threats from a powerful government whose words and actions ironically echoed ever more strongly those of Latin American dictators of days gone by, while sounding ever less like the leadership of a free democratic nation built by immigrants. In a perverse elision of historical paradigms (liberty and justice to the north / corruption and danger to the south), the world seemed to be turning on its head. My heart broke and all my doubts deepened. What was happening to the poor and huddled masses, yearning to breathe free? Where was Lady Liberty now? And what of those whose parents had made it north in years gone by, only to have their futures and even their very lives thrown into doubt? What of their dreams?

I have been a migrant: crossing borders, papers clutched in hand, lining up to report to police stations, having paperwork thrust back at me to be resubmitted to a different office in a different way, being temporarily and accidentally illegal in another country while we desperately figured out the right way to transform me into a legal entity once more, learning (sometimes tearfully and fearfully and painfully) how deeply divergent the spirit and the letter of the law are when love crosses continental boundaries and families are broken up by artificial borders and arbitrary laws. Even within this country, for citizens who were born and raised and whose families have lived here for multiple generations and do not have to contend with the insanity of immigration law, life is often not fair, and the matrix of poverty and disenfranchisement and injustice entraps too many people in a cycle of desperation.

I sense myself falling into cliche here, but I am keenly aware that it is beyond my power and knowledge to capture the truth of the lives of those who fall afoul of laws and courts that are not always just, because there are so many who are better versed than I both in railing against and in battling injustice, in all its myriad guises. But things seem to go from bad to so much worse, and those tropes are all too true: it’s worth noting that I wrote most of this piece a few months ago, well before Ahmaud Arbery was — finally — in the national news, and we were reminded that a black man still can’t go jogging in broad daylight in the “wrong” part of town. As with the inversion of old expectations that we are seeing at the US-Mexican border, the stereotype of what might constitute the notion of the dangerous part of town is all too dependent on your perspective: the places — be it a neighbourhood or a country — that are perceived to be safe and free for everyone are, in tragic fact, only safe for a privileged few.

I promise I won’t get up on my soapbox too often; I never intended for this to be a platform for socio-political rants. But really, sometimes these things are just too much. Sometimes my heart is too heavy. Sometimes I cannot keep silent. So this is actually also about compassion and kindness, and their heartbreaking scarcity at a broad, public level in this country. This is about a sense of powerlessness and outrage at the flagrant contravening of laws designed to protect the vulnerable, at the blatant brushing aside of the legal right of children and asylum seekers to enter this country, at the shocking violations of the legal right of anyone and everyone not to be murdered for any reason, but especially not by reason of the colour of their skin and especially not by those who are supposed to protect them. This is about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and countless others, who should be alive but are not.

This is about a country that is broken, perhaps beyond repair. This is about how those who are supposed to lead us have failed. This is about knowing that we can be so much better than what we currently are as a nation. So when I stand there, hand on my heart, looking up at the Stars and Stripes, in my head I say instead: “with liberty and justice for some.”

Namaste-at-home

Bodies are curious things, and the more mine ages, the weirder it gets. When I first started practicing yoga, 25 years ago (how is it possible that I now measure my life in such massive tranches of time?), I was 21 years old, and as flexible and fit as I would ever be. Even as a beginner I could perform peacock pose, in which you lie on your stomach, cock your elbows with your hands beside your hips and then proceed to lift your entire body off the ground (the whole thing, so only your hands are now touching the earth) and, as your body cants forward, your toes naturally lift toward the sky like the tail of a peacock.

These days, my yoga practice is just a wee bit different because, more than twice as old as I was then, my body is almost unrecognizable. My joints may still be hypermobile, but my muscles most definitely are not. There is more of me to love these days, so I can’t reach around my more-is-more middle to tie myself into knots. Plagued by various aches and injuries, there are things I simply can no longer do. Or don’t want to do. And, in the spirit of yoga, in which we learn to accept what is and to live in the present moment, that is all completely fine.

When we first moved to California, I stumbled across a beautiful studio, very appropriately called Harmony. Located in a beachy, breezy, stylish outdoor mall, the space was large and airy yet also intimate; the vibe was very decidedly chill; the teachers were excellent. Whatever their individual style, the yoga was nearly always gentle (I tried one “power” class and spent days hobbling around afterward) and definitely always deeply relaxing. As the name suggested, the more I practised at Harmony, the more I began to feel in harmony. After a seriously stressful stint of solo-parenting-while-commuting-to-demanding-job, I was in need of all the harmony I could pour into my battered soul, and I was accordingly deeply grateful.

I also lowered the median age by many years in every class I attended. When I told people where I practiced, they would say, “Hey, that’s where my mom goes!” It was yoga with the oldies. But please do not assume that meant it was in any way easy. These peppy, sassy, funny, kind women were incredibly fit and flexible, truly humblingly so. I was definitely not front row material when I started; I would sit towards the back, by the wall, until I slowly found my rhythm again, my stiff, weak muscles slowly softening and strengthening until I could pretend to keep up with the grannies. And as my body healed and rebalanced, so did my mind. I pushed my demons off my mat, practiced gratitude, and rediscovered how to breathe. I loved every minute of my time there.

Which turned out to be a good thing, because within days of the stay-at-home order, Harmony closed its doors… for good. The wonderful owner could see that the uncertainty ahead was too much and she would not be able to continue to pay the hefty rent on that lovely space. In the cruel tension between the creative and the commercial, a place like hers could not survive. Multi-billion-dollar industries are bailed out and yet the things we need most are crushed. I cried when I heard the news. I was, and am still and will likely always be to some extent, out of Harmony once more.

We are all out of harmony these days, as individuals and as a nation. Never have Americans needed more desperately the balance and the peacefulness that we strive to practice in yoga. Even those of us who don’t know it need it, perhaps them most of all. We need to understand the necessary tension between softness and strength. We need to embrace the collective energy we create by sharing space with kindness. We need to inhale and exhale unitedly until we find peace and — I will say it again because it bears repeating — harmony.

Thankfully the universe is pretty good at opening a window when it closes a door. I could go on about instances of these new windows we are (re)discovering on a public level, but this is about the personal. One of my very favourite teachers (ever, in all the whole wide world) had just opened her own studio in January, and almost immediately after we all started sheltering in place, she began creating an online library of beautiful practices. Never has yoga mattered so much to me: if I practice, I am calm and centered and things hurt less; if I don’t, I am ratty and tense and sore. It’s that simple. So she has become my two-dimensional guru, a lifesaving presence in our living room. She has not seen me in months, but I see her almost daily. When my children hear her voice, they know to stay quiet. Sometimes they join me, but more often they just breathe easier, knowing that a kinder, gentler mommy will emerge at the end of each precious session.

This weekend Orange County joined the rest of the nation in starting to reopen. Despite rising infection and death rates, we are emerging from our cocoons. Like moles blinking at the bright sunlight, we are finding our way out and about once more. Our own little burrow has been a true shelter, a space of safety and — in those precious moments when no one is falling apart — harmony. I am reluctant to leave it.

After a previously unthinkable 11 weeks at home, punctuated only by walks around our neighborhood, our local park, or occasionally on the trails of the nearby wetlands overlooking the Pacific, this week we are finding new ways to see friends and to interact with the world around us. Our smiles behind masks, our gestures cautious and tinged with fear, we begin to leave behind the two-dimensional social world we have come to inhabit and rediscover the three-dimensional one we have longed for and missed.

Now that it begins to be possible, I am faced with a decision to practice yoga again with other humans, not at Harmony but perhaps in some kind of harmony. But I have decided — for now — to keep my fellow yoga practitioners safer by turning inward, still, again, and practicing here, alone in my little burrow.

Are you going out these days, now that we’re allowed to?

Nah, I’m a stay at home.

Or, as we yogis would say, namaste at home.

The Mute Button

Teachers, how do we love you? Let me count the ways.

It is not simply the fact that — as I have noted before — you take our children, care for them all day, and return them to us both more enlightened and more tired, so that our afternoon work is all a much easier downhill slope towards bedtime.

It is not simply the fact the fact that through some extraordinary alchemy you manage, surprisingly often, to transmogrify dull curricular restraints into fun: the sort of skipping-home-from-school, non-stop-chattering-about-the-day fun that uplifts children and parents alike.

Nor is it simply the fact that you spend most of your day on your feet, marshalling order in circumstances that often border on pandemonium. You manage to educate the well-behaved children, while simultaneously disciplining those insanely out-of-control students with no impulse control, who variously pick their noses, stick pencils up the same orifices, attack each other with scissors (I have witnessed this myself, more than once), and otherwise violently invade the personal space of the few pupils who are actually attempting to learn something. You do all of this in a cramped, overcrowded, outdated space… and you do it all with patience, forbearance, and a remarkable lack of shouting.

It is not even the fact that you do all of these extraordinary things for extremely low pay.

It is also the fact that now you do this — and oh so much more — from a distance, transforming yourselves into IT wizards who upload daily lessons and download finished assignments behind the scenes, and then appear onscreen (smiling, no less!) to channel all of your goodness and energy into a mere two dimensions, captivating and engaging our children from afar.

It is also the fact that the time you previously spent creating interesting projects, shepherding small groups through their teamwork while learning important social lessons alongside the academic ones, and generally pouring huge amounts of creative energy into the eternal challenge that is keeping small, wiggly people holding still and actually learning, you now spend wrestling with multiple seriously awkward systems. Logins fail, links fail, uploads and downloads fail. You did not sign up for this degree of failure and frustration, and yet here you are, thrust into the roles of IT gurus with very little training.

It is also the fact that you do it with a much broader audience than usual, because of course you are also doing this with far more parental oversight than you ever bargained for, as we eavesdrop — whether we like it or not — on your morning lessons. (We did try earphones but our younger one hates them, and we all know where that ends up; all of the five pairs they previously had have somehow mysteriously stopped working). You now also have myriad visitors dipping in and out of your classrooms: loud younger siblings, dogs, cats, turtles, birds, grandmothers, and parents in conference calls with no apparent awareness that they are walking through a classroom talking at full volume (it explains so much about their children), all causing a degree of interruption that would have previously been utterly unimaginable and indeed physically impossible: can you even fathom such a parade of noisy characters coming through a normal classroom?

It is also the fact that you do all of this while somehow also teaching your own children on the side.

It must be said, though, that for all its many (many, many) frustrations, the virtual classroom has its benefits, the primary one of which is the mute button, which I am sure you wish was viable back in the real world. Below follows a montage of actual real conversations I have actually really heard, amalgamated into a single exchange with one child, whom we all know; there are always a few in every class. Names have been changed to protect the innocent (by which I mean the teachers, not the children in question).

“Dweezil,” we hear you say, “please change your onscreen name from ‘fartface’ to Dweezil. Dweezil, please stop dancing on the coffee table. Dweezil, please stop pulling your dog’s tail. Dweezil, please take the blanket off your head so I can see you. Dweezil, please stop doing ALL of these outrageous things, or I will mute you.” You mute Dweezil and then he (for, I’m sorry to say it is nearly always a he) keeps going. “Dweezil!” you say with remarkable calm and forbearance, “If you do not stop sending poo emojis to the whole class while I am talking, I am going to turn off your video and exit you from the meeting.” And then, because of course he does not stop, with an Oscar-winning straight face (for how do you not chuckle triumphantly as you do this?), you click one button and Dweezil is gone. Poof!

Don’t you wish you could do that all the time? Go on, admit it, we know you do. You are human, after all, a fact we have only recently discovered as you have honestly and generously shared your own struggles, showing us the walls of your home and the limits of your previously seemingly boundless patience. I know I would be loving the mute button if I were you, but unfortunately I cannot mute my actual three-dimensional children in our proxy classroom. I am so glad that, for this bizarre and hopefully relatively short-lived time, you can use it.

In the US, from May 4th through 8th, we celebrated teacher appreciation week, so this blogpost is many days late — and also many years late. I should have written it as a letter to my teachers a long time ago, but I don’t think I truly knew how to say all of this until I had my own children, and found myself passing my education on to them. Some of my most beloved teachers are no longer with us, sadly, but for those that still are, and for the teachers my daughters have had thus far, have now, and will have one day: thank you. We appreciate you more than you will ever know. We are humbled by all that you do, especially now that we are trying (and generally feeling like we are failing) to be your assistants in this strange new world.

If I could, I would give you a mute button to take with you back into your real classrooms, whenever we are lucky enough to enter them once more.