Category — Lifestyle

While surfing the cable stations, a familiar figure flashed on the screen and brought an instant smile to my face. He was dressed in his usual robes, sitting on a chair with his legs folded beneath him, smiling and laughing often. I felt like a child having a sweet frozen treat on a hot summer day as his words were refreshing and delightful. He is the Dalai Lama.

The name of the show was “Seeds of Compassion” on the University of California at Davis station. I had missed the introduction of the other four panel members whom the Dalai Lama called “scientists.” He also alluded to the fact that, unlike him, they were not “spiritual” leaders.

There have been few people I have trusted to be authentic and the Dalai Lama is one of them. He speaks with simplicity, clarity and confidence, and his words bring instant understanding without muddling my brain. The subject he was discussing was compassion which I believe to be among the highest attributes of humanity.

According to the Dalai Lama, there are two kinds of compassion. The first is limited and closed. This type we are all born with, and it’s only after we reach a certain level of maturity that arrogance gets involved and we change. Sometimes we become terrorists like Hitler, Bin Laden or the violent spouse next door. The second type of compassion is broad and open. This type comes with understanding that there is no difference between me and you. We are all equal.

When asked how to maintain the broad level of compassion, the Dalai Lama said the answer was in education, the “duty of the scientists” to figure out. But I believe we can all teach compassion. It is neither a spiritual or scientific issue only, but one that requires a holistic approach.

We should recognize that each individual is unique in many aspects and should be allowed to express that uniqueness in whatever facet of their life’s journey that does not conflict with another. For it is only in the diversity of opinion that conflicts lie, and compassion can define and equalize that multiplicity.

Sometimes I take public transportation in my travels, and yesterday was one of those days. I live in Sacramento, California and it was a perfect day; not too hot for July. The bus was crowded, particularly with mothers and their babies. Some of them were struggling with two or three toddlers, diapers bags, folding strollers, purchases and their surroundings. I watched with gratitude now that my children are grown, how far removed I am from all that multi-tasking to the extreme. And I wondered if all of those children were expressions of love.

An older woman in my building married a much younger man about a year ago. She had lived there for some years before the marriage, and all the neighbors were familiar and friendly. When her new husband moved in, everything changed. Seems that his lifestyle is incompatible with what the neighbors had established with her and a conflict ensued. Her expression of love has resulted in a legal separation and a restraining order she was encouraged very strongly to obtain in order for peace to return with her neighbors.

A very dear friend is 86 and her husband of six years is 103. They are a delightful couple who are very devoted to each other, and until recently, both have been very active. They walk everywhere together or alone, shopping, visiting, even going to the local pub to have a beer or two. He fell a few weeks ago and severely injured his back and neck. It is heartbreaking to see her in such emotional pain as she watches her expression of love in such a fragile state.

All of these expressions of love are different, but the same. What we expect from love should be wonderful, and it often is; but it can also be overwhelming, devastating and tragic. How we express love and how love is returned is unpredictable once we set it in motion. Even when we are watchful, love can cause our lives to spin out of control or make us retreat temporarily into a dark shell or cause us to want to escape from life all together. Love and our expressions of love are merely life, and life, like love, just happens to be another four-letter word.

It’s Sunday morning. I hear many voices  and step out onto my patio to see hundreds of marchers coming from the Capitol building up the street. I live in Sacramento, the capitol city of California. The marchers are wearing colorful tees emblazoned with captions and names…Ed and Sue, etc. They are marching to raise money for cancer research. Having recently been diagnosed with breast and bone cancer, their symbolic walking for a hopeful cure took my mind back, as I have a tendency to do lately, to other Sundays before all this.  

I was born in 1943 in Shreveport, Louisiana and Sundays were always days buzzing with activity. We lived in a small “shotgun” house. Its three rooms lined up one behind the other. Mama and Daddy slept in the front room. 

Mama was always the first to arise. She would pass through our room, my two sisters’ and mine, hastily putting on her apron headed to the kitchen, where brother slept, to start the coffee. Soon the strong aroma and Mama’s persistent urgings would pull us from our beds, wiping sleep from our eyes. 

Without indoor plumbing, running hot water, or the privacy and convenience of a bathroom, we were nevertheless soon washed, combed and dressed. Breakfast  was served and eaten, and Daddy’s putting on his hat was  the signal to proceed from the comfort of our home to walk the several blocks to Shiloh Baptist Church to hear Rev. James bring the sermon. 

With a smile, my mind returns to my patio and I think how so long ago that was, and how everything is so much different today. Mama and Daddy are long gone, and my siblings are grandparents and I’m a great-grandparent. When we talk on the phone, because now we live distances apart, we discuss our health issues mostly. But sometimes we go back into the vaults of our memories and take out a precious event like my Sunday morning remembrance and share a laugh or two. As we remember it, despite our circumstances, life was good then; and even with all the changes, we end up agreeing that life is also still pretty good now.

I wish I had the ability to express the wave of powerful emotions that washed over me and brought scalding tears to my eyes when I thought about writing this article. My mind flashed on my grandmother wearing her long white apron in Louisiana who was born in 1865, the year the slaves were “freed.” I saw the fields of cotton my fiance took me to see in 2003 in California because I had never seen similar places down south where my people had labored during slavery. 

In my mind’s eye I saw pictures of my sisters and brothers being attacked with water hoses, dogs, Billy clubs and savagery. Then like fast forward, my mind brought me back to sitting in my bed and a blank sheet of paper, but the pain lingered. 

I am a person who does not like black rhetoric, in fact I hate it; particularly when we linger and wallow in our ex-slave misery, using it as an excuse not to perform on the level we are capable of; we meaning black folks. But then I remember those who were left behind when the flight to white neighborhoods and a “better life” took away our teachers, doctors, business people, ministers, and others of higher status and education after civil rights were mandated. 

I don’t blame them. When my ex-husband and I bought our first home in 1976, it was in a new development with only one other black family. So I can relate to the desire to live the “American dream,” but what about all those who couldn’t leave and were left behind? What about all those who had menial jobs, but were decent, God-fearing folks who marched, and were beaten and spat on, but were left behind? 

Those are whose shoulders and graves so many of us stand on today, and the generations they spawned are the people we now call the black Underclass. They are that group of low-income, barely educated, unsophisticated, crude people that many of us now avert our eyes from rather than notice or acknowledge. The ones many of us are employed to serve because we are teachers, social workers, government employees, preachers, doctors, lawyers, police officers, prison staff, counselors, etc. etc. They are also the ones we can’t stand as fellow human beings. We denigrate them to cases and files, numbers without faces or souls, but characters who are certainly not like us. 

To us they are welfare mothers, drug-addicted or incarcerated or absent fathers, low-lifers, irresponsible, criminal, stupid, crazy, less-than-human wastes of time. And we wonder where they came from, or call them “refugees” as they were labeled in New Orleans after Katrina. We can take their children because they are poor and give them to others without a look back or a thought about their feelings. We can make them wait for hours while we take breaks or talk on the phone, thinking they have nothing else to do, and they need us to give them food, clothing and shelter. 

But they are none of these things, and without them we wouldn’t have jobs, or be able to live in our comfort zones. But primarily, we should consider that they are the products of the same stock of people from which we all have come. They are the descendants of the bridges over which many of us have crossed, and they only want what we all want…to be loved and understood. But primarily, we should consider that they are simply the offspring of the people who were left behind.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about the black Underclass…those who were left behind after the civil rights movement and black flight to white suburbs; but there is another greater, more inclusive Underclass in America, “a social class consisting of people so underprivileged that they are seen as being excluded from mainstream society.” This Underclass consists of people from all ethnic groups who are at or below the poverty line. 

In this Underclass are those who are working poor, parents on welfare or men and women on government assistance, the unemployed, and the disabled. They may or may not be un- or under-educated, but are often thought by the middle and upper classes to be mentally challenged, or have some “problem” which has put and kept them in their situation. 

The Underclass of America are fodder for our prison systems, foster care systems, inadequate school systems, poor medical and dental systems, mental health systems, and any other systems into which the lowest class of citizens are shuffled for attention to their needs. 

The primary causes of the growth and maintenance of the numbers of the American Underclass is a lack of education and support. These citizens are generally reduced to files and numbers; stripped of their dignity and humanity, except when used to fuel “government programs” set up to appear to be compassionate and care-taking, but which are often closed or shut-down when they seem to be working or making on effective change. 

If one would look closely, how can a disabled person or a single parent living on less than $1,000 a month compete or advance in a country where men and women are paid millions to play sports and act or role play, while their entitlements are periodically being whittled down by $5 or $10 to shore up a failing economy?

Is there a solution to solving the plight of the Underclass? Perhaps, but it seems the Bible’s self-fulfilling prophecy has come true in America. The one I paraphrase that says “the poor will be with us always.” I can relate to that premise, but I ask you, does it have to be a deliberate act?

From September, 1988 to May, 1991, I was involved in a civil child abuse case. I was never arrested, nor were my children proven to be other than “endangered” by me because I believed in spanking, but they were placed in shelter for the majority of that time nonetheless. I present the full details in my book, By Hope Alone: The Making of a Parent; The story of a mother’s journey through life, love and a child-abuse case, so I won’t relate it too closely here. The purpose of this writing is to give you some idea of the changes my life has taken since that experience.

When I wrote the book, I was trying to figure out how I had gotten to that place…a child-abuse case. I grew up in a loving home, with both parents who were married nearly 50 years. My father was never abusive, verbally or physically to my mother, me or my siblings. There was no drug or alcohol use or abuse, and I was well taken care of.

We went to church every Sunday. I attended private school until high school. And although we were poor, I never realized our poverty until I look back now. I had loving grandparents, aunts, cousins, friends and neighbors for the most part. But what happened? Where did my life take the wrong road that led to a child-abuse case?

We read in the scriptures of the Bible the parable about the foundation on which we build our house; whether it is sand or rock. Without a firm foundation the house will not stand in a storm. The fairytale of the three little pigs is about change, adaptation and triumph. One pig had a house of sticks and one straw, which the wolf was able to blow down. But when they all escaped to the brother’s brick house, the wolf’s hot air had no effect.

Those two stories illustrate my premise for this writing. To my dismay, as I sat down to write my book, I discovered how my life had been built on a foundation of sand in a house of straw. The life my parents gave me, with all its protection and secrets failed to provide me with the tools I needed to survive in the “real” world…the world I was destined to enter and brave after they encouraged me to marry someone not for love but for security’s sake.

The marriage I was too young and totally unprepared for turned out to be unlike my parents’ idyllic portrayal of wedded bliss. Mine set in motion changes which affect me until today; changes which led me completely astray from what once was my innocence. I went from being my parents’ child, to starting out as a dutiful wife, but a tremendous heartbreak of infidelity by my husband led me to a near breakdown of my moral code which ended in another dysfunctional relationship, two additional children and a child-abuse case.

Sitting in the courtroom during the “trial,” I cried out and the desperation in my heart was heard. A voice whispered, “Pay attention,” and from that response to my prayer, everything was transformed. I made a conscious decision to change, to build my life on a firm foundation out of the bricks of self control, introspection and most of all the love I needed to restore my family and become someone I am proud to be now. Change can happen. I’m a living witness and an avid advocate for it.

http://www.createspace.com/3428567

In the Sacramento Bee, on January 24, 2010, there was a story written about a 4-1/2 year old little girl, Amariana, who died while in the “protective custody” of foster care. The story broke my heart and made me angry, as it stirred up once again my own feelings of the pain and anguish of a mother caught in the grips of CPS. 

Although my case happened in 1988 and ended in 1991, in San Francisco rather than Sacramento, the similarities of shoddy caretaking between the social services systems of the two counties are both frightening and apparently persistent. 

From the story of Amariana, both my case and her parents’ were not criminal. No one was apparently arrested according to the very thorough report written by Bee Reporter, Marjie Lundstrom. Instead, my children and Amariana and her siblings were removed due to parental dysfunction. But unlike the circumstances in my situation, Amariana’s parents’ rights were taken away and at least one of their children has been adopted by the foster mother. 

The tragedies of both cases are that lives were lost and the families were completely torn apart, never to be restored. The father of my sons suffered a fatal heart attack and died at the age of 39, while little Amariana died from a suspicious fire bombing. All too often this is the legacy of CPS, death and destruction of families. 

In addition, too frequently, the victims of CPS are members of the so-called Underclass; people who are disenfranchised, too poor or too undereducated to fight against the courts, social workers, counselors, attorneys and foster care parents who receive for one child what the parents may receive for 4 or 5 children if they’re on AFDC or welfare. 

Having gone through the system, but having regained and retained my parental rights and full custody of my children, I thank God every day to have survived the experience. For seven years after my ordeal I worked with families to help them wage their own battles against CPS and primarily stood alone as a gatekeeper crying for a shift in the focus toward child-abuse prevention rather than “restoration” or “preservation” which still entails removal of the kids.

Until and unless services are put in place to provide a means for parents to receive mandatory drug testing and treatment when necessary, parenting classes and counseling prior to removal of the children, we will continue to see stories like these. If there is evidence of physical or sexual abuse by the parents, children should be removed. But despite their “dysfunction” many parents still love their children who are often safer left in their homes. 

There are stories written about other Amariana’s who are killed by their parents, but we would suppose that stories of children who lose their lives in foster care should never have occasion to be written. 

The details of my case can soon be read in my autobiography, By Hope Alone: The making of a parent–The story of a mother’s journey through life, love, and a child-abuse case.