This has been quite a year am I right? I saw a meme the other day and it said "stop saying we are in the same boat, we are not in the same boat. Some are in yachts, some are in boats, some are in dingy's and some are fucking drowning. We are in the same storm...not the same boat.-Anonymous".
I recently pondered what that meant to me. What kind of vessel have I been in this last year? I would say that at the beginning of the 2020 I was definitely in a yacht. I was naive about COVID at first because I hadn't really been listening to the news. All I knew about COVID was that people were getting something flu-like that was caused by a Pangolin in China. But to me all it meant to me was that my husband could start working from home, the kids couldn't go to school and neither could I...suh-weeeeet! Yacht living for me (as long as I stayed healthy).
After a couple of weeks quarantine I was beginning to feel a little crazy. I drank a lot of coffee and even more wine to help cope. All I wanted was go outside, mother nature was calling out to me. But at this point no one knew enough about the virus. We were told told to stay inside for at least 2 more weeks but I was doing alright. I turned my garage into a theater/gym, I started getting my groceries delivered, I had enough toilet paper. I was feeling alright and we were all healthy...absolutely boat living.
2 months into quarantine everything changed when I saw it and heard it..."I can't breathe." I watched George Floyd die on my iPhone. All I could see and hear was a grown man cry for his "mama!" as he took his last breath. Pit in my stomach, pain in my heart, tears in my eyes. How could people just watch this man be murdered? He begged, he pleaded, he faded away.
Adding salt into the wounds of America was our President. He who shall not be name referred to protesters as thugs. He was even quoted as say "when the looting starts the shooting starts." The quote he referenced had originated in 1967 by a notoriously racist Miami police chief. Skip the dingy the world was fucking drowning.
I wiped my tears, I felt compelled to be brave, how could I not? After all the injustice how could I say silent? My husband and I took this moment to have a real conversation with our children about what was happening in the world. It was a really hard conversation, we all cried. My eight year old daughter asked if we could make "Black Lives Matter" shirts so we did. We took it a step further, we took the kids to the Oceanside BLM protest and let them experience it all first hand. There were a few moments where I questioned myself. "Would we be safe? Would the kids see something that might traumatize them?" Some people feel like this everyday but still they persist. The pull to "go" was bigger than the pull to stay home. We went as a family of 6, the kids made signs. We all laid face down on the concrete as a family and quoted George's last words together, we sobbed together. This was one of the first moments I didn't shield my kids from the world. I deliberately let my kids feel emotional pain and, I didn't cover their eyes. I wanted my children to see that the world was not alway "fair" like they had always thought. How was this experience going to affect them in their adult life? We shall
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In hindsight I'm proud of my family. I know that I am raising kids that will stand up against injustice and fight to make the world a better place. I thought the world was drowning. But I realized that I'm the life preserver. We are all our own life preservers. We can all choose to listen, decide and act deliberately. It's like Ghandi said "we are the change we want to see in the world."
This year I've been in all kinds of boats. Despite all the tragedy and loss we all get to choose how we respond. I'm choosing to live in a yacht but be fully aware of the storm. I know my privilege, I know I won't be silent or live in fear. I get to be "here" and I won't take any breath for granted.
To find out how you can get informed about current issues and how you can help please visit: https://naacp.org
To find out how to talk to your children about racism please visit: https://childmind.org/article/a-clinical-perspective-on-talking-to-kids-about-racism/
