I am a #RealAmericanBlogger

I am human. Sometimes I win, and sometimes I fail. I am a wife, mother, employee, friend, daughter, smartass, and writer.

I am a Heinz 57 of ancestral backgrounds. I have wide hips and thick legs and high cheekbones and round cheeks (either pair). I am not blond, blue-eyed, skinny, young, or looking to be.

I am a mother. I have the c-section pooch and the stretch marks to prove it. Oh, yes, and the natives. Mustn’t forget the children.

I’ve heard/read the word multiple times, but never cared enough to know what ‘chevron’ truly was, until this week.

I’ve never owned a maxi skirt. I don’t own a fedora. I get my beachy waves by wearing my hair knotted up in multiple ponytail holders, and then refusing to actually brush it.  

I do own a home in the suburbs. Nothing in it really matches. It’s never—and I mean NEVER – truly clean. I don’t own throw pillows. I do have a desk, but the children have stolen it from me for Minecraft, so the vast majority of my writing is done from my phone, with Siri’s help.

I like Pinterest, but mostly for funny shit, and many, many Doctor Who references. I love social media. I have found my tribe there. And I think the blogging community is wonderful—it’s witty and diverse and teaches me things I would otherwise not encounter.

I am a nerd, both academically and otherwise. I revel in the fact that I am raising nerds. We don’t take Easter pictures together dressed in our Spring best and with our manicured lawn in the background. We take pictures of one another playing Scrabble and participating in cosplay.

And I am a blogger. It’s not the only type of writing I do (not in the least). I have wrestled with the greater musings regarding our overall existence, and I’ve wrestled with what blogging means to me and to the blogging community. I do not fault anyone who wonders about it themselves, and seeks to find their place at the table.

I am, however, NOT represented by the new movie trailer for American Blogger, and that saddens me, deeply. It saddens me that so many of my tribe, my community (men, people of color, middle-aged of all types and sexes, nerd bloggers, humor bloggers, and all the rest) are not to be seen anywhere in that trailer. Because CHANGE is actually garnered when we show multiple perspectives and possibilities, not reinforce standing stereotypes.

I am a Real American Blogger. I know you are, too. I hope this helps you to understand why so many of us feel ignored. 

I wrote this post in response to the following trailer: 

To Openly Acknowledge

 I should have paid more attention. After quite a bit of soul searching, I’ve decided not to feel overwhelmingly guilty about this; as most of us do not pay close attention to something or another. Nevertheless, I now know I should have paid attention. I did not know him as well as I could have; should have. What I do know is this:

My grandfather was raised by a man that was, by all accounts, one of the kindest, most empathetic souls that existed. I have to rely on stories of his altruism, as I never had the chance to meet him. He died when my mother, his granddaughter, was a child. I’ve been told this man often gave medicines to the poorest of the poor for whatever they may have to give, and when that something was, in fact, nothing, he gave them medicines for free. I know that often the folks in the small Michigan town used him as their physician as well as their pharmacist. I know that he loved children immensely, especially his own children.

On the other hand, my grandfather was raised by a woman who was, by all accounts, an overpowering, controlling human being. Again, my experience does not inform this picture of her—she died when my mother was a teenager. The stories of her existence that have made their way down to me revolve around her constantly forcing her parenting views on others and he ability to always overstay her welcome. That being said, my grandfather never had a bad thing to say about his mother.

I don’t know why my grandfather did not aspire to be a pharmacist and business owner like his father before him; but he didn’t. Like many others who followed right on the cusp of the Greatest Generation, he chose to join the armed forces right after graduating high school in 1951; he wanted to travel the world, and showed certain aptitudes, and therefore, was enlisted in the Naval Training program as a midshipman and officer in training and given a four year Naval scholarship for college in New Mexico. When he wasn’t in school he was on a Navy ship. His Navy dreams died in the final semester of his schooling: in a flag football game organized by his fraternity brothers he was tackled. That tackle broke his back. Surgeries and halos and braces followed. He was unable to finish the term and he was honorably discharged from his training. Sadly, this meant his was not eligible for any Navy benefits, but they paid his medical bills and for his transport home, likely out of the goodness of their hearts.

The one thing I can say is, despite his disappointment in not being able to follow his dreams of a Navy career, he never played the “what if…” game. I asked him more than once what he thought his life would be like if he’d had the chance to serve in the Navy and travel the world as extensively as he hoped. Each time, he looked at me blankly—not understanding why anyone would ask that question, since that was not the way his life had transpired. He accepted what had happened to him and moved on.

After a year at home recuperating, what we do know is that he finished his teaching certification at a small teaching college in Michigan. I don’t know that he really wanted to be a teacher. I know that he enjoyed sports. I know that he enjoyed history. Perhaps this was the second-best option for him—being able to be a coach and high school teacher for 43 years. I know that, even if he didn’t enjoy teaching as much as he would have enjoyed other endeavors, he threw himself into his work. This was another thing he taught me—even when you’re frustrated with the system, the students, or the curriculum—throw yourself into the work. Find a way around barriers. Do not take no as an answer.

He met my grandmother at the wedding of her cousin and his best friend. From what I can tell, he’d had many other girlfriends, whereas my grandmother was called an old maid by the folks in the small town where she had lived almost her entire life. Her family had been poor; she herself had been born in a chicken shack. Her family and friends had mocked her for not accepting the proposal of the townsman who wanted to start a strawberry farm. They didn’t understand why she had worked so hard for two years in order to escape farm life and small town politics to go to college. And perhaps they didn’t understand why, when her father came down seriously ill and had to retire from farming and working at the lime kiln, she came back home to work again in order to help support the family.

What I do know, from my grandmother’s own words, is that my grandfather picked her out of the crowd—an anxious, mousy, painfully shy country girl—highly aware of her fears and insecurities and poverty-- and in the end married her. I can’t say that they always loved one another. I know they fought when my mother was a child. I know there was a significant period of time in my mom’s teenage years where my grandmother was hospitalized for a ‘nervous breakdown’ and my grandfather had run off to California. The speculation abounds, but consistently revolves around another woman or a drug addiction. Perhaps it was a little of both. My mother lived with her aunt off and on during her high school years—that normalcy was good for her—while my grandparents each worked out their issues; at first, apart, and then together. This is another lesson he taught me; you can go home again. It may not be the same, but you can go home.

My grandfather had a hell of a time staying still. It was obvious he wanted to travel since he was young, and I think the wanderlust was constantly nipping at his heels. He always wanted to move to the next thing, find the greener pasture, and accept the next challenge. This left my grandparents without an owned home, an adequate retirement, and bitterness between them—as my grandmother was much more of a homebody then he was. In my younger adulthood this bothered me to no end. Of course, in one’s first years out on their own, they are often living on the edge of existence, and only seek to feel secure and/or established. As I’ve gotten older I’ve felt the same pull of wanderlust, of the need to see new and exotic things, to write of my own explorations. I credit my grandfather for this pull—whether hereditary or taught—as this trait has helped me time and again to overcome my own tendencies of being risk-averse, and accept a new challenge that has, in the end, been the most beneficial thing for me.

I don’t know that my grandfather loved his family in the way Hollywood teaches us to expect love. I don’t know that any of us do, or even should, try to live up to that fantasy. His generation wasn’t one to fully embrace the self-esteem-building, hugging, embodiment of Dr. Spock, but I do know he tried, in his own way. I think he loved my mother significantly. I do think he loved me less, for my personality’s traits he did not understand and for my personal choices that he did not understand. He did want me to be successful, however, and he had specific plans for how that success would take shape, and he wasn’t afraid to contact my teachers in high school and prescribe to them how he expected me to be taught. He once cornered my English teacher at a school sporting event and told him to stop fostering a love in writing in me; the real jobs and money would be in computers. Given that this predated the dot.com boom; I now appreciate his ability to ascertain future trends, if not his meddling itself.

He tried to foster an appreciation in sports and history in my children; sadly that’s not exactly where their interests lie. My older son has an artist’s soul; he adores everything music and literature and writing and art. My younger son will likely be the one who cures cancer; he’s a fearless soul infatuated with science and math and has no qualms about medicine and how the body works. My grandfather’s endeavor fell on deaf ears, but  the he taught me lessons from this are twofold; that everyone needs to understand our collective human history as well as current social condition, and that to truly understand a person’s interests, strengths, and weaknesses is to be able to truly help them actualize their full potential.

Towards the end of his life, I did not see him as much as I should have. Here I am, caring for a husband and two children and a household and a fulltime job. He was trying to tell me that he was sick, that he was dying (as we are all dying), that he was hurting, and because this presented itself as an addiction to surgery, I bucked and fought against what he was really trying to tell me. It seemed uncanny; his surgeries were always scheduled for significant dates in my life—the day I supposed to present my practicum project in my capstone project for graduation from my bachelor’s degree was heart surgery, my commencement date for graduate school was a knee replacement, my wedding anniversary was shoulder reconstruction, etc. I thought he was aging disgracefully; trying to remain forever young. I thought it was his refusal to accept that the body starts to break down as we get older. It was ineffective communication on both our parts, and this has taught me that I need to be open and honest—with myself and my husband, my children and their children—about my health and what I am feeling. I will not be passive aggressive and seek attention for my health without telling people what is really going on.

In the end, in the last two months of his life, where he was confined to a hospice bed as the cancer encroached upward each and every day, we reached some semblance of closure. I was down there more often than I was at home-- caring for him, learning everything I could about his care from those angels who masquerade around as hospice nurses, sitting with him and counting his breaths and watching the ventricular tachycardia on the monitor and making sure he received the morphine each and every time he began to grimace. I rubbed his mottled skin with lotion and learned how to wash out his mouth in order to keep the skin within it from dying and peeling off and choking him. I learned how to roll him and flex his legs—even though it caused him pain and the breakdown of his skin and the tightening of his tendons was a battle I was just going to lose. Sometimes he was awake and lucid—and while unable to speak much, I would note the recognition in his face and I took comfort in the fact that he seemed legitimately happy to see I was there to care for him. Sometimes, when he was able to take water or food, he would be strong enough to hold my hand for a few brief moments or sometimes even blow me a kiss. I appreciate the fact that he gave me this closure, and I would tell him every day that we were all okay, that I was here to take care of everything, that he needn’t worry—because I would take care of it all. His last whispered words to me were instructions; he needed to know that I would make sure my grandmother took her medication and stopped standing on chairs to dust the ceiling fans. His very last word on this Earth, in the second before his last breath, when his eyes opened wide and the look of surprise overtook his face, was “Oh!”

I was raised to be a good girl in a town that considered itself Southern, and what I’ve written here is pretty much considered sacrilege. A traditional obituary lists achievements and loved ones in a manner that reminds me of some great competition or race to rack up achievements in the time we have. We never mention how imperfect our loved ones are; to speak ill of the dead? Well, I’m certain you’ve heard the cliché. And yet, those imperfections—those missteps and mistakes—that’s the important stuff, right there. That’s where we learn and grow. That is the space in which we act and interact each and every day. The way my grandfather handled challenges and changed trajectories and mistakes and imperfections is what has taught me to be a better person, a better teacher, a better parent. Sometimes these examples were demonstrative of how one should act and sometimes those examples demonstrated how one should not act. It pains me that it’s deemed unacceptable to speak of our lives this way. I feel as if it only presents part of the picture. We are not perfect. We are human, and we struggle. My grandfather was human, and he struggled, and sometimes he won and sometimes he lost, and that’s just the way it is. This is what I wish we could openly acknowledge; that everyone would acknowledge about each and every one of us.

Head-on

I am flying down the highway with my older son in the car (I remember flying down the interstate with my mother). He despises Radiohead, but he puts it in for me, cranks it loud, and we sit still, motionless, quiet—except for the actions I must take in keeping the car on the road. (It was U2 in the car with my mother, it wasn’t a band I hated, but the experience was so surreal, so slow, and so quiet). He’s demanded information from me; he has to know what’s going on. He makes the decision that he will be coming with me, whether I like it or not. (I needed to know what was going on. I needed to be treated as an adult. She was my family, too).

It has hit me head-on: I was his age when my mother pulled me out of school and flew down a highway so that we would be there when her grandmother passed. I have now pulled my son out of school and am flying down a highway so that we can be present when my grandfather passes. Here I am, witness to yet another cycle of life; cycles that get so terribly lost in the mundane tasks of daily life, until you are hit head-on with one and they are lost no longer.

Realization crashes into me. I realize that I am now setting the stage for how my son will react (just as she set the stage for how I react today) with his child when I call him and tell him that my mother is passing. And this is the way his child will react with their child when he calls to tell them that I will die. The specifics may change, but the cycle of familial behavior will likely remain the same. Who set this behavior in motion? Was it my grandparents, and how they responded to the deaths of their grandparents? Did my mother learn it from them, and they learned it from their parents?

I am suddenly witness to the past, to the present, and to the future of us all, and I cannot tell if the weight of this is overbearing or comforting to me.

On Inspiration Porn and Representation

I know, I know, I need to update you on the contest winner of the spam comment content (I will, I promise) and I also need to post something about the snownami that’s precluded me from getting numerous things done for the past week (because it was pretty damn funny, in hindsight) but before then I need to write a post. It’s not often that I feel compelled to write a post.

I need to write a post about ‘inspiration porn’ and the fallout I witnessed on a fellow blogger’s Facebook page when he dared to post that basketball video. Do you know which one I mean? It’s all over the Book of Face. It’s the one where the team allowed the team manager to suit up and play in the final game. He scores the last points of the game, after a member of the opposing team hands him the ball. His team had set him up with the ball several times, to no avail. It went in the final time. The big hoopla (pun completely intended) that started on Jim’s Facebook page was because the team manager had a developmental disability.

Inspiration porn (here is a much better description) as a term and as a critique hit the interwebs in a big, bad way last year. Several people with disabilities took offense to Tumblr/Pinterest pictures that, in essence, depict individuals with disabilities going about their lives with quotes that stated—in one shape or another—that those without disabilities should 1) stop whining about how hard their lives are, 2) see how difficult it can be for those with disabilities, and 3) be inspired to be better (usually physically) than we are now because those with disabilities are doing things that we would stereotypically think they were unable to do. That’s the inspiration part. The porn part comes about by having one’s body objectified for someone else’s emotional benefit.

Case in point, you can find this  picture on
Tumblr with titles such as "Suck it up, buttercup,"
and "No excuses".

And? I will readily admit that this sucks, I think it's wrong, and my eyes were opened quite a bit by the post I linked to in the paragraph above.  Yet…

While the basketball video didn’t have some items (the quote, for instance) that would mark it as inspiration porn, it did have some of the characteristics. Basketball games, for high school boys interested in such things, could be considered everyday business. There was someone with a disability present in it. And then there were able-bodied teen boys who were trying to assist him (with or without his desire for them to help him; we cannot know for certain) with something that they thought he wanted to do, and then feeling good about what they’d done. Oh, and the coach—who came up with this plan—felt pretty damn good about himself as well.

Nevertheless, many people—those with disabilities and those without-- consider the video to be a heartwarming depiction of how we should treat our fellow man—including those with disabilities. Others--a select group--thought it completely infringed on that young man’s rights, and objectified him in the hopes of making those without disabilities feel good about themselves and the world. Bickering in the comments of the post ensued (I used the nice words, here).

I spent the last 24 hours thinking about this in some really deep ways. First, I wasn’t certain the basketball video was inspiration porn to begin with. Was this young man objectified? Was this story video made to make those without disabilities better about themselves? I went back and forth over this for quite some time. I would want people to help my children achieve their dreams—even if they are not able to completely do something (like make the basketball team) by themselves.

Then, I realized it didn’t really matter, because something much larger was at work.

I am familiar with some mass communication research about the depiction of minorities. A scholar by the name of Cedric Clark came up with a model for minority representation in mass communication. He had four stages, and while I won’t bore you with all the deliciously nerdy details, these four stages have given birth to quite a bit of research and further elaboration of models that might fit what we witness when it comes to representing minorities on television.

His four stages were:

1.      Non-recognition- A given minority group is not acknowledged by the dominant media to even exist.

2.      Ridicule- Certain minority characters are portrayed as stupid, silly, lazy, irrational, or simply laughable.

3.      Regulation- Certain minority characters are presented as enforcers or administrators of the dominant group’s norms.

4.      Respect - The minority group in question is portrayed no differently than any other group. Interracial relationships would also not appear extraordinary.

Even though he meant to apply these stages primarily to representations of African-Americans on television, the model has been expanded to include almost any minority group in any media—including American Indians, those with disabilities, those who are GLBQT, etc.  

So, let’s take a look, for just a minute, at this basketball video and decide which stage it belongs in (inspiration porn or no, although I’m not convinced that it is). First, I think we can easily say that it doesn’t fit in stage one. If it were in stage one, there wouldn’t have been a video.

I think it’s also safe to say that this video doesn’t fit in stage two. The young man is not being ridiculed, is he? He’s not the subject of mockery. He’s not depicted as silly, lazy or irrational.

So, what about stage three? Does this video fit into stage three? I would argue yes. Here is the story of a young man and an act that attempts to move us to feel empathetic, bring happiness, and, to put it bluntly—demonstrate a compassionate way to treat someone, according to the dominant group. While he himself is not the person in the role of administrator, per se, he has the same desires as his peers without disabilities, and he is given the chance to play on the court with them. It reinforces the dominant group’s current belief that those individuals with disabilities should be included in activities they desire whenever possible, even when that includes additional help. This is, in my opinion, where our dominant belief resides right now.

I think it goes without saying that we are not at stage four. In fact, we can easily say that we’re not solidly in stage four for any minority group.  Again, I could bore you to death by quoting study after study to this effect, or I can simply ask you: can you think of a single television show with a gay couple that doesn’t point out they’re gay? Do you ever see a news story that doesn’t point out a ‘black man’ when the accused is African American? Do you routinely see American Indians depicted on television without their ethnicity being mentioned? How about Max on Parenthood? How many episodes have dealt with his diagnosis? 

So, while I understand that there are significant problems with the portrayal of individuals with disabilities in this country, and yes, I understand that an individual with a disability doesn’t need to be pigeonholed into the role of ‘looking for a cure’, or ‘hero’ or ‘charity-case’, I am actually pretty darn happy that those with disabilities are at stage three. It’s not perfect, and I get that. We should continue to strive for stage four, but let’s not forget that stage three is a whole helluva lot better than stages one or two. It means we’re making progress. It means that we can be at a stage four at some point in time. It means that we are setting the stage for respect and recognition—no different than anyone else—because we are distinctly making efforts to change the dominant groups’ perceptions.