Brace Yourself – Part One

“Mommy, will getting braces tomorrow hurt?”

I smile, showing a gap between my two front teeth and an overbite.

“Do I look like I know if braces will hurt? You should call your Aunt Christine and ask her. Grandpa loved her enough to get her braces.”

Kali calls my sister who tells her that it will be uncomfortable. Kali tells me later, “I feel like I should be nervous, but I’m not.” I go to bed thinking, “We just may get through this.” Then I wake up to this email from my sister:

So… You didn’t speak to me first, before you had Kali call. I wasn’t sure how honest you wanted to be.

I told her to expect discomfort and to take tylenol before the appointment. I didn’t tell her it’s going to HURT LIKE HELL!!! Having it put on is not that serious because they are gluing it on, but once they add the wire and tighten that bad boy!!!! The pressure from having her teeth being pulled together will keep her from being able to eat and will make her have the “F. U. face” for days….She may even cry tonight from not being used to that kind of pain/discomfort. Her teeth will be sensitive to touch and she may even talk funny for no good reason… just because her mouth is hurting…. It does subside after a few days…. However, she will experience it all over again, after every appointment.

Make sure the plan for dinner is mushy. don’t sit around the table having her favorite foods while she’s stuck sippin’ on soup. Think soup, mashed potatoes, even Ensure. Don’t make her chew!

Love ya!

Toodles…

And just like that, I want to vomit. I start thinking about cancelling. Upside: I save myself a $550 deposit and $156 a month payments for the next 30 months. Downside: My kid needs braces. Somehow, despite being up since 5:30am (and waking Kali up at 7:30am), I manage to still be in the house at 9:15 which is when Kali is supposed to be starting her day at school. Once I finally have Jack strapped into his carseat, he says, “Juice!”

“Oh, Jack. We’re late. I’ll give you juice when we get back.”

“JUICE!”

Kali sighs. She reminds me of myself at that age. She’s completely unaware that she possesses so many things that will make her both popular and envied, and that will drive boys crazy. All she knows is that she doesn’t like a lot of attention and that’s what she’ll get when she comes waltzing into class ten minutes late, toting a backpack and violin case. She says, “Really? You have to have juice now, Jack?”

As if he senses that today is going to be one of those days all about Kali, Jack looks at her like, “Yes, really, bitch.” I run inside for juice. After dropping Kali off, Jack and I head for the supermarket. While I’m grabbing a bag of 5lb potatoes (mashed potatoes for Kali’s dinner), Jack spots grapes. He loves grapes.

“Grapes!”

I give him a bag of red seedless and toss a bag of white seedless into the cart. He starts eating them immediately. I’m too frazzled about what Kali is going to be experiencing later to care whether or not they’re cleaned properly. I briefly wonder what I would say if management stopped me from letting him eat while I shopped.

My daughter is getting braces today. Back off!

I bypass the ready-made Jell-O cups and go right for the boxes of powdered stuff. Why? Because that’s what good mothers do. We feel guilty about everything! Even if she didn’t get the crooked teeth from me -

And she didn’t. That’s all DJ Spermdonor. So much so that I once gave him a disclaimer before introducing him to my best friend. True story. Just before we rang his bell, I stopped her on the walkway and said, “So, you know how I said he’s really funny and nice? Well, he is. But he’s not what you would call… traditionally handsome.”  So, yeah, this is all his doing.

- I do take responsibility for mating with Mr. Snaggletooth. Making Jell-O from scratch is the least that I can do. I also grab pudding, ice cream, heavy cream so I can make my own whipped cream (the LEAST that I can do, people!) and a Waterpik cause they say it will make cleaning easier.

I head over to the pharmacy for some Tylenol. Children’s Tylenol stops at 11 years old and up to 95lbs. Kali is almost 12 and weighs 100. I wonder if I should get her something stronger. Like whiskey.

Angry Black Woman – Part Two

My friend, Ben, linked my Angry Black Woman blog on his Facebook wall the other day. The first comment came from a gentleman (I use this term loosely) we shall call “Dean”:

I hate to say it, but when you stick a bumper sticker on your car and forcing your opinions down everyone’s throat then you’re challenging them to respond, and opinions are like arseholes: everyone has one, which means that arseholes are going to give you their opinions.

I hate to say it, but your friend threw down the gauntlet when she slapped on that sticker.

Wow. Just wow.

Yes, my bumper sticker is forcing my opinions down his throat. Because, you know, when you’re out and about it’s impossible to concentrate on anything else but the bumper stickers around you. Furthermore, he would have never normally use the word nigger; it’s my fault for having a political opinion and the gall to display it in the wonderful, red, Republican state of Georgia.

I guess I now have the right to attack people with Pro-Life stickers as “baby killers” and people with Eagles NFL stickers as “animal cruelty advocates,” and people with New England Patriots stickers as “douchebag supporters.”

I threw down the gauntlet, apparently, and said, “Please, everyone that doesn’t agree with me politically, I dare you to use hateful, disgusting, vile, racist names in front of my children.”

This guy is clearly a fucking asshole and I seriously doubt that he “hated to say it,” as he twice claimed.

Ben, God bless him, tried (at first) to get dickhead to explain himself and maybe (just maybe) redeem himself, but decided that was a waste of time and deleted the guy instead. Ben (who is white and married to a black woman) did what I would expect from any of my white family and friends when in the presence of such racial ignorance – he shut it down.

Since posting the last blog, I’ve decided I will no longer give a pass or shake my head politely when a white family or friend practices passive racism – not saying anything when surrounded my racist remarks spewed by their family and friends. So, please, I warn you: it’s no longer a good idea to tell me such things unless you want me to lose my shit. Unwillingness to stand up to it may be more dangerous than spewing it. I’m not naive enough to think that this will eradicate racism or racist remarks, but I think the fucktards should stop and think, “I wonder why every time I’m around my own and I use the word nigger, someone hands me my ass.”

I don’t think this is too much to ask of family and friends who are the right side of this. I really don’t. I’m not gay, but I have gay friends – one very dear to me. I don’t tolerate “fag” talk on my blog, Facebook page, and definitely not in my home. I will no longer entertain the, “Well, black/gay people get to say it,” debate either. I will tell you what I tell my 11-year-old daughter when she says, “Diana gets to do it!”

“Stop worrying about what everybody else does, and worry about what you do.”

Decide what you stand for, what you believe is right, and stick with it.

I’d like to think that Ben’s ex-friend’s comment was just poorly worded and that maybe it’s not really what he meant to say, but then I read this comment by a mutual friend of theirs in regard to the statement:

I actually went to de-friend Dean for this one, only to find he’d de-friended me first! Wonder when that happened… Probably about the time I pointed out his kid likely doesn’t gets in physical fights with teachers and bites other students DESPITE Dean beating the living shit out of him (for such infractions as ‘having a disrespectful tone’ on a phone call) as BECAUSE he does.

Regardless, Dean’s been given too much leeway over the years by folks due to his playing up to his comedy buffoon image. At the end of the day, this is still the same guy who claimed in the midst of Katrina to have friends in the New Orleans PD, that the deaths weren’t down to the floods and FEMA’s slow response but to black people turning on each other ‘like animals’ (his solution being,if I recall correctly, to fill the stadium with concrete with everyone inside). Naturally ye olde liberal media supressed this.

Dean’s a dick, is what I’m saying.

Anyway, I completely agree with your friend’s anger, Ben. The use of the ‘n’ word is just totally unacceptable. Racism SHOULD make people angry.

(and even leaving aside the distressing racism angle – a bumper sticker isn’t an open invitation for comment, any more than wearing an NFL jersey is a licence for strangers to come up to you in the car park and tell you your choice of team sucks. It’s just RUDE.)

He nailed it on the head. Dean’s a dick.

Angry Black Woman

For a long time I was careful not to fall into that stereotype of  the angry black woman – mad at her kids, mad at the world, mat at her man, mad at the white man more than anything else. Just mad, mad, mad.

This morning I realized that I am. Sometimes. And I’m okay with that. Because sometimes I have every right to be mad. But what makes me really upset is thinking about the times when I’ve curbed my anger because I didn’t want to come off as the angry black woman – the number of times I hesitated saying something out loud or on Facebook because I don’t want to make my white friends and family members “uncomfortable.”

This morning I went to the Walmart. Not just any Walmart, but the Walmart, the scene of the incident. The Walmart where a redneck, douchebag, asshole looked at the Obama ’08 bumper sticker on my car and said, “Nice nigger sticker you got there,” not caring that my child was standing right next to me.

Ever since then (12/31/08), I’ve always felt a sense of dread and disgust when going back there. And not just that store, but the whole area. I started wondering how many other white people were walking around with the word nigger on their tongues just waiting for a moment, a lost election, the loss of a parking spot, anything, to let it fly.

And I’m supposed to be the bigger person. I’m supposed to “let it go” and just brush it off as a rare, isolated, event. I thought that I had, for the most part, until this morning when I decided to go back there because it was the closest place selling a video game Donny and I both wanted. I couldn’t even park near the spot from that night because it made my stomach knot just looking in that direction. I put Jack in a shopping cart and headed for the store. One of the wheels made a clacking sound in a kind of one-two rhythm. And as I pushed it all I heard was:

clack-clack-nigger sticker-clack-clack-nigger sticker-clack-clack

I just wanted to be done and out of there. See, that man had tainted the whole area. He felt safe enough to spew his hate there. Was there a reason for that? Did he know something that I didn’t?

Driving home I thought about the book I’m reading, The Help, and why (at times) it bothers me so much. It’s set in 1960′s Mississippi and follows two black maids working for white families. At first, the dialect was a little hard to swallow. Friends told me, “Well, you know that women back then spoke that way.” No shit. I have a grandmother in her 80′s, born in the south, who cleaned a lot of white houses and helped raise white babies. I know that some black people spoke that way and still do. That doesn’t mean I have to like it. And I’m allowed to have an emotional reaction to it.

But it wasn’t until today that it hit me what’s really bothering me. The attitudes depicted in that book aren’t gone. They’re just more subtle… most times. In the past two years, do you know how many white friends have admitted to me that they have parents/siblings/in-laws/aunts/uncles, etc., that use the word nigger? More than I’d have imagined. And my response is always the same, “What do you do?” And the shuffle begins where they back step, side step, and pretty much just step in it. But I get it. These are their people. They have to share meals and holidays with these people. They may have to borrow money or ask these people to watch their kids. They’re not trying to rock the boat.

I get it. Doesn’t mean I like it because I understand it, though. It makes me feel like, “What does that say about how you feel about me? What does that say about how you feel about yourself?” I judge and I get angry. I picture them standing there with polite smiles, fitting in, standing by, while the word nigger floats around the room. Sometimes I think those people are worse. I assume that racists are idiots, so what does that say about the people that sit in the midst of the racism and sip from their cups, and pass the plate of string beans, and turn up the music, like it didn’t even happen?

I hate that people keep telling me, “Well, that was x number of years ago.” It wasn’t that fucking long ago! My Grandmother is 83. That means she was well into her life as an adult and couldn’t use the same bathroom as white people. That means she lived a long time with white folk not acting right. It would be nice to say that the true old school racists will die out soon, but Mr. Nigger Sticker was about my age. I remember glancing at his fat ass wife and later thinking how could she even tolerate that. But she probably feels the same exact way and for all I know they’re raising little mini-racists right now.

So, what the hell am I supposed to do with all that? I think I can be a little fucking angry, for one. It kills me when people want to compare struggles. Like, a white woman might say, “I know discrimination, I’m a woman!” Uh, I’m a black woman, doubly-fucked, what else you got? “I’m fat! People discriminate against me all the time.” Then lose some fucking weight! The last time I checked, this blackness ain’t washing off. You can’t even count ugly people because ugly is subjective. One man’s ugly is another man’s juuuust fine.

I think the only people that can come close to relating are mentally-handicapped people. To have something “wrong” with you, something that sets you apart, something you can’t hide when you go out in public, and then question the sincerity and motivations of everyone that deals with you while you’re out. That’s what it’s like to be black in America.

Make no mistake: being anything in America is infinitely better than being anything anywhere else. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. And sometimes, it’s harder. This wonderful free country where I gotta worry about a white person spitting in my food, or mistreating my child when they find out her mother is black, or being called a nigger just because.

And give me that, white people. Stop trying to sugar coat that shit. Stop telling me, “Well, you know, that was a long time ago,” or, “You have to let that go,” or, “Don’t think that way.” It’s kinda hard not to think that way when you’re getting nigger sticker thrown in your face. I don’t have the luxury of not wondering or worrying. Do you know how many interviews I’ve shown up to and seen the look of surprise on people’s faces when they see I’m black? And then I have to sit there the whole time wondering if it’s a bad thing.

So, yeah. Must be nice to not have those worries on top of all the other worries we all have like, paying bills, affording health care, making time for work, family, friends and ourselves, etc. So, cut me some damn slack.

A few weeks ago I brought up the Nigger Sticker incident while talking with some friends on Facebook and a white friend emailed me a day or so later and said that every time I talk about it, it makes her uncomfortable. And that I can’t continue to let it bother me because the racist wins.

First of all, I felt like this was her polite, white, way of saying, “Get over it.” Secondly, he already won by spewing his filth and not catching an ass whupping for his troubles. Finally, if it makes her (or you, for that matter) uncomfortable to hear about it, then take that discomfort, mix in some humiliation, a dash of fucked up history, a pinch of having relatives that remember what it’s like to fear talking to a white person wrong because they might get strung up, toss in side-eyes when you’re out with your white husband and mixed children and chew on that for a while. Then multiply it by one thousand and imagine how I feel.

Then politely wash it down with a frothy mug of shut the fuck up.