Running scared

A few weeks ago I went running in the early morning and two men in TRUMP gear were flanking the sidewalk.

I felt my heart rate quicken and I darted past hoping they might not notice a small Chinese woman in liberal athleisurewear passing them.

I was scared.

I did not lift my chin and puff my chest, or draw on my girl boss self. I was a rabbit at the dog races. I have not felt that way in very long time. I had a quick flashback to age nine, moving to a new town and being taunted with "Hey Chopsticks!". I grew up feeling small. So, so small because of my Asian-ness, my slanted eyes and rosewood decorated home. 

I am now an almost forty-something, wife, mother, physician who has seen her fair share of life, trauma and loss. I am not supposed to worry that two older men in my small suburban community might try to assault me for my race. I am the product of two immigrants who came to the United States in hopes of a brighter future for their children. A place where girl babies were cherished and not cast down a grassy hill, where women were equals and there were no quotas on childbearing. 

I felt that that America had been lost last night.

So, like the rest of my peers, I retreated into my Facebook bubble. I felt the weight of this giant oil spill, slicking our skin with its filthy tar. I feared for my mixed race children, for women seeking reproductive choice, my Muslim friends. 

I didn't want to feel small again. What did this mean about the country I lived in?

Wait, yes! This is America. It is just because of our Democratic process and collective right to vote, our ability to exercise free choice that TRUMP happened.  The same America that elected Obama, elected TRUMP. 

We HAVE to listen to this vote. I know minorities, women and non-Christians who voted for the president-elect. They are not all bad people or deplorable. There were Muslim, Ivy League-educated, lesbian, millennial undecided female voters who called into NPR and told Brian Lehrer that they just found Clinton to be disingenuous and didn't know what to do. I would have knocked on doors for Bernie, waited in the pouring rain to hear him speak, hosted randoms in my home to campaign for him. I felt no enthusiasm for Hillary and I am a liberal, minority female. ( I did not vote for TRUMP to be clear). It's too easy to scream, RAPIST, RACIST, SEXIST! And to shrink away like a field mouse and run away to Canada. When I was a nine year old girl, I shrunk and looked down, I should not be doing that now. 

The country needs change. Huge change. We cannot ignore that 58 million Americans were so disillusioned with establishment politics that they elected the most outrageous outsider. 

We need to be honest about how the divide between the richest of rich and those barely making minimum wage is expanding and expanding, forming a chasm that conjures images of a starving Fantine, a real life Les Miserables. This is not hyperbole. This election was about feeling disenfranchised and about an America that we New Yorkers just don't see. 

It's about women (and some men like my husband) who make family choices to stay home and make their kids lunch everyday and want to feel valued for that and don't want liberals yelling at them, belittling that decision. It's about the lovely man who delivers my takeout, afraid he will go to jail because he can't afford to buy the health insurance that he is required to by law. There is no way in hell that he can pay those premiums....even though he works 16-hour days.

I should not have bowed my head that day and run scared. I should have said good morning and smiled, because painting those two men as racist, sexist assholes who victimize the women in their life is just widening this gap. It's playing into the media-driven stereotypes that galvanized TRUMP. Those same stereotypes paint me as a Socialist who wants to put lollipops in the mouths of the homeless and lazy, raise everyone's taxes to 90% and destroy free markets. This is not the time to call TRUMP "learning disabled". How are we any different if we sling petty insults back and forth?

Part of why I left Washington DC was because it felt so very bifurcated to me. Gray suited slabs of humans in stone castles running the country, not noticing the city they lived in had the worst public schools in the nation. It felt very black and white as a city and I could feel the resentment brewing, bubbling in the Metro everyday. 

I am fearful of publishing this blog, because I know this is an unpopular opinion. We don't want to believe we are all at fault. That the divorce wasn't one-sided. Blame, blame, blame and yell and call names. Hillary was a bad choice, TRUMP, a far worse one, but they were born of a broken two party system and a growing discontent among a working class that is simply faltering economically. 

We need to really look at this and ask why. We can't write off 58 million humans coexisting among us as Nazis with psychiatric disorders who want to deport us. 

It's far more complex than that. I am not running scared.  This is a wake up call. We are in a powder keg of emotion. I have to make choices now that are for my children's future. I want to help protect their rights in a cooperative way. This is not reality television, this is just reality. 

Impermanence

When I tell you I just stayed up way past my bedtime writing a heartfelt piece about the anniversary of my mom's death (8/16/16) only to have my app shutdown abruptly and erase the whole thing...I can only laugh. 

Impermanence. There you have it. That is the lesson of loss. Everything we have is just barely slipping through our fingers all the time. I had never heard of a sand mandala prior to meeting my husband. And I'll be darned if every life lesson I have had in recent years all comes down to a dang sand mandala. 

It's all fleeting. Appreciate this moment in front of you and create beautiful things /relationships/memories when you can. I could labor over the loss of those words I took time pouring over in the last hour, desperately trying to recreate them. Or I could move on, learn a lesson from my loss and create something new. 

We miss you Margaret Tham. Your silence over the last two years has been surely tough to handle. I have felt robbed by and at peace with your malignancy, enraged and blunted by your untimely loss all at the same time. I have yearned for a few more minutes, one more phone call, one last question, a small piece of advice. Searched for you when I found a dish you would have loved to eat, a dance you would have wanted to learn. But all I have is a legend, a memory that kindly polishes up the good times and slowly blurs the edges of squabbles and harsh words. I remember a great woman. 

A woman who would give me permission to find joy again despite the awful thing that happened to her. Permission to create something intricate, special and complicated with my own life...knowing all the while that it too will be delicately brushed away, its individual colors indiscernible with time one day despite how beautiful and rich it may have been. 

Raising men and women

In the echoes of my daughter coughing at 1am, I can hear her sneaking in the front door from a night at the movies, an hour later than she said she would be. In the hazy streetlight peeking through my sleeping almost two-year son's window, I see a barely arousable teenager luxuriating in a lazy Sunday morning. It hits me that being pregnant and anticipating these warm cherubic babies was not exactly the point. Although this is an incredibly adorable time sprinkled here and there with the frustrations of sleep arrangements, demands for specific stuffed friends and toilet habits, this is not really the meat of what reproduction is all about.

We are raising men and women.  The hands into which we leave our earth, the users, preservers or consumers of what fruitful years are left without leaking ozones and dripping glaciers. It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day slog of pickup, dropoff, drooling, spilled soup and wearing enough layers. My two little doe-eyed sponges are soaking it all in. It's my responsibility to be an active, graceful participant in their social and emotional development. The how and whys of learning the days of the week and using a fork matter but maybe not as much. I will blink and my children will be grown, with fierce opinions and curious minds and I am laying the groundwork now for their moral compass.

Of late I have been reflecting about our brief cameo in the expanse of time. We need to make it good. We need to raise good humans that will promote others to be the same. I don't want a nation of gimme-gimme mini Drumpfs. How are we here? How did the beckoning eyes of our Statue of Liberty become so ignored? Are we a nation of hateful, hairspray-ed, gun-wielding, racist, uneducated fools who shun diversity?NO. NO. There is a chance.

 It starts here, in this moment when maybe you huff at the cashier for fumbling with your change. When you drive past your garbage man, your mailman, your local crossing guard and don't give a warm nod of acknowledgement, that we are all doing this. THIS. Being human and that at our core we are chemically, genetically the same. Separated maybe just by the good fortune of being born to a family with rich real estate roots, or the bad fortune of being born at a time when your country is ravaged by war. What good comes of teaching our children to hate our neighbors and turn our backs on refugees? I imagine most mothers show their toddlers how to share on the playground, to take turns on the swings, to call for help when a child is lost. As adults it isn't that different, the same rules apply. Shove shove and me first and stealing all the sand in the sandbox looks bad at any age. 

In this moment. Now. For parents and uncles and honorary aunties of young kiddos. Let's teach them that we are a global society, flesh and bone inhabiting one earth. All with hopes and dreams for our warm sleeping babies. All with an incredible opportunity to shape human interaction. This culture of hate and anger isn't sustainable and I don't want my children growing up in a world that doesn't even abide by the basic rules of the playground. 

Xo,

M