Remnants of Shamings Past

Posted: 27th October 2013 by admin in Blog
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I drove around the block three times, each time getting a little more nervous. I wasn’t nervous that I’d be late. I was nervous that I was there at all. “Out of my element” didn’t begin to describe it. Put me in front of a couple hundred people for a presentation. That was more comfortable. I found a parking place about a block from my destination and sat in the car for a few extra minutes, breathing deep and wrestling with an urge just to put the car back in drive and get out of there. Before it was too late.

Too late for what?

Before I embarrassed myself. Before I was visible.

I locked the car and walked the block back toward the storefront, now on speaking terms with the butterflies in my stomach. They had big feet, those butterflies.

Not too late to turn around and get back in the car!

But it was. I had reached the store and someone else was meeting me here. I couldn’t leave now. She was probably parking her own car somewhere nearby and would expect to see me when she arrived. I opened the door and stepped inside, ears burning, eyes roving, waiting for the initial blow. Not sure how it would fall. The first employee who approached me smiled and asked if I needed any help.

“Uuuuuhhhh…no, thanks, not yet. Waiting for someone else.”

A few moments later, a second employee approached. This was going to be it. This guy was going to be the one who asked why I was here. I braced for the laugh. What I got was a friendly smile and a nod, accompanied by, “Is there anything I can help you with?”

I repeated that I was just waiting for a friend…a friend who belonged here. I was the invader. Maybe if I put it out there right away, I would just be forgiven for the invasion in the tone of the old commercial, “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.” I pulled out my phone and texted her. I’m here. So far, so good. No one has asked yet why the fat boi is here.

I glanced around the store again, noting the thin, athletic people trying on their new running sneakers. A combination of culinary school and normal aging piled on top of my inherent lack of interest in most sports and I had never felt more out of place. What was I doing? I couldn’t pull this off!

Before I could decide to leave, the door opened and the friend I’d been waiting for—the one who loved running and belonged in this store–came in. I was instantly relieved to see M. and overwhelmed with that sense that I would be shortly be identified as a hopeless case.

(“You fat, stupid fuck!”)

And there it was, unbidden. And unforgettable. It cut to the core. I wanted to hide behind M. and I fought that off.

The young sales guy circled back around and smiled at me again. “Ready now? What can I help you with?”

When we got seated and he measured my feet, he asked what I was training for.

I was tempted to tell him, “For the roundest executive director in the world competition.”

M. offered, “She’s training for her first 5K.”

My head snapped around. “I am?”

She laughed. “You are.”

The sales guy grinned again. “You’re gonna love this.”

(“You dumb, useless fuck!”)

Really?

I sized him up again. He clearly was not making fun of me. There was no hint of judgment in his voice or his expression. On the contrary, he looked…what was that??? Enthusiasm?

(“You fat, stupid bitch!”)

I cringed and looked down at the new sneakers he had tied to my feet, getting up to walk around and test them out on his suggestion. When I paid for them, I made it a point to thank him for being so patient with me and told him I’d been a little nervous. I think he understood, even if he didn’t know why.

Those verbal attacks (and the physical assaults that accompanied them) are more than 30 years behind me. The source of them has been gone since 1997, dying, I was told, alone and probably terrified in puddle of his own blood.  And still those words touch my life, even today, in the oddest places and at the most unexpected times. Still, they interfere. I point out in Urban Tidepool in one dark scene where this same brother who did his level best to dismantle my sense of self turned his attention on our father that my athleticism was at best questionable. In my effort to help the father that day, I threw a small figurine at this brother—the first thing I could get my hand on. I was not the world’s most athletic child. I missed my target and then I grew up to be not the world’s most athletic adult.

My lack of athletic ability is less the issue here, though. I wasn’t nervous going into that running store because I’m not a jock. It took me a minute or so to place it, but I was nervous because, as I pointed out in an earlier post, sometimes the words take a long time to heal.

For many years, I knew those things that were said to me were right. I knew I was the fattest, dumbest, and probably the ugliest person on the planet. We believe what our families tell us, and when they tell it to us over and over again, over the course of years, those words etch themselves into our view our own bodies. It’s kind of the opposite of the Harry Potter effect. (“It lives in your very skin, Harry….Love.”) How many times can you call a little kid a fat, stupid fuck before he or she begins to believe that he or she really just is a fat, stupid fuck? And when it’s over, when those words are done or that person is gone, how long does it take to reverse that impression and rub away those etched words from our view in the mirror?

Apparently now, 30 years after the last beating, after the last humiliating verbal attack, those words can reappear in a heartbeat and I wait for total strangers to join in, all while I am attempting to do something good for myself by starting to exercise more. Because we believe what our families tell us. And words take a long time to heal.

Thank you, M. I couldn’t have—I wouldn’t have—done it without you.

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15 Years In and Still Daring to Dream

Posted: 20th October 2013 by admin in Blog
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Taken in part from my address to the 200 attendees at Dare to Dream, October 18, 2013.

Last week I joined one of our volunteers to help with the GSA group at the middle school.  It was their open house day and the students had invited other people to come get know them and get involved in their GSA. I got to meet seven amazing 8th graders and one amazing 7th grader, including one guy who had dyed his hair pink for breast cancer awareness month.

Afterward, I had some time to think about those kids and the shifting world in which they are starting to find their adult footing. I do a lot of presentations on developmental issues, so I love this kind of compare and contrast exploration. I don’t mind admitting–it was a little depressing to realize that those students were mostly born in the year 2000—they’re Y2K babies. When I considered the many things that have changed in the past few years and how old they would have been when those changes happened, it was mind-bending.

Think about the enormous milestones we’ve passed. Y2K kids were 4 years old when Massachusetts defied conservative groups across the country and passed their same sex marriage bill. They were 8 when we elected our first black president and if they remember any president before him, there is only one other guy to remember. Imagine how different the political landscape might look having only seen two presidents in action—one white and the other black where women have always been front-running candidates. They were 10 when Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed, 11 when IL passed its civil union bill, 13 when parts of DOMA were struck down and they have gone through middle school watching the debate about same sex marriage in IL play out. They were born after we lost Matthew Shepard, and HIV has always been a chronic, long-term, treatable disease. Can you picture this?

They have a different world than we did, and their world is shifting-still—a lot. But there’s one thing that has not shifted as much as we need to see. While I was there last week, we did a short survey with the attendees to find out what they’d like to use their time for during their GSA meetings.  On nearly every page, they asked for help with how to deal with bullying.

I cannot tell you how many conversations we have had with gay adults in the last two years where we are asked why this agency even still exists. I can’t tell you because I’ve lost track. The impression held by so many adults, adults who themselves endured year after year of trauma in schools and in homes, that our world has shifted SO much that the kids are fine now and why even do we need a Youth Outlook (www.youth-outlook.org) …let me tell you, those folks have never been more off base and the lack of awareness is frightening.

Y2K kids need LGBT adults more than ever before. As they come out younger and younger, it is imperative that we create a safety net to support them. The problems that my agency came together to address in 1998 have not disappeared—they have merely migrated to a younger group of kids with fewer resources. The fact that nearly every survey we got back asked us how to handle being bullied—questions coming from kids in the most progressive, LGBT-friendly school in our 5 county service area, where the entire district received training on the issues faced by LGBT kids tells you –it isn’t over yet and our kids are not safe.

Y2K kids are not typically in a position to decide to go to another school or to demand to move to a more supportive community. They don’t have choices. But we do.

We have the choice to acknowledge that we are still needed. We have the choice to believe that we can make a difference by showing up to help run a drop in center or supporting a GSA. We have the choice to open our minds to the risks they face- –not so different from those that many of us faced, and given the cyber attacks that some of our kids have described, in some ways worse. When you get right down to it, we have the choice to believe that those risks still exist and let it determine our behavior. We all have the choice to be supportive of LGBT kids, to be their safety net. Our collective world is shifting and they need us to get through this shift. If I could ask you anything, I’d ask you not to kid yourself that things are all better and take this message into YOUR world. I dare you –I double dog dare you–to be the ally our kids need.

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Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are!

Posted: 12th October 2013 by admin in Blog
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National Coming Out Day is always a great day for reflection, given that I run an agency for LGBT kids for my job. This week found me wandering memory lane, taking a moment for my own coming out, which (if you’ve caught my previous comments) is always a big question for people who start to read Urban Tidepool and expect it to be a coming out story.

I was 25 when I came out, long past the ending point that is written for the current draft of Urban Tidepool. I had come out to a few very close friends but coming out to my family felt different, bigger, more ominous. Not that it should have, as I was already an adult, living in another state from my remaining family members, but I can still recall the sense of dread as I contemplated what words I might use to make myself understood. I felt I needed to explain…at the time, even I believed an explanation of my very being was required. Or maybe I hoped if I talked enough, they would not find time to hate me for becoming this person.

I had been considering it for months when the chance appeared in a phone conversation with one of my siblings.

“I wanted to tell you, I’m seeing someone!”

“That’s great! What’s his name?”

I took a deep breath and made the leap. “Well, her name is…”

My heart was pounding so hard and I was so sure the phone was going to squirt right out of my hand, I almost missed what was said next. It ended in, “…but I love you.”

I think about doing that at 25 and the trepidation I had over that conversation, the stress, tears and sleepless nights it caused for months leading up to it. And then I think about what LGBT kids now are facing, when they take the same risk.

LGBT kids represent up to 40% of the kids who are homeless annually. A 2010 report from the Center for American Progress (http://tinyurl.com/lmarxnh and http://tinyurl.com/lbshqa7)  noted that the average age of a gay kid becoming homeless in NY City is 14 years, 4 months old. The average age of a transgender kid becoming homeless in NY City is 13 1/2 years old. Those are some very small human beings to face the streets on their own. But this is their reality. There are no phone calls that end in “I love you”, there are no siblings who blush mightily upon the suggestion (as another way of coming out) that after finishing Thanksgiving dinner, you drive over to Blockbuster and scope out some girls together.  Yes, I did that, thank you for asking—that’s how I came out to the Major. It got very quiet at the table for about thirty seconds, and then my sister-in-law got really busy clearing plates. Loudly. The blood started to creep up the Major’s neck into his face as he looked anywhere in the room except at me. My nephew, Ours as I call him in Urban Tidepool, was 15 at the time. He snorted milk through his nose. It was a true bonding moment for our family.

That nephew, sitting there mopping up the milk he just snorted out his nose, was exactly the age of the kids I’m talking about who end up homeless. He was a goofy kid, reaching for dry napkins and looking to find his path through adolescence, who –under NO circumstances should ever have been expected to find a way to survive on the streets of a metropolitan area.

But our kids do, all the time. They go through that stage of fear that I still experienced at 25, for weeks. Or months. Or even years. And then they take the leap, hoping or maybe praying for acceptance, only to be met with the most brutal of reactions—“Get out.”  Get out, when we know you have no skills to support yourself. Get out, when we know it is the middle of winter and you will risk freezing to death. Get out, where panhandling is maybe your best option as opposed to trafficking and/or survival sex to get through this. Get out, until you are …what? Less gay? More like us, the parents? More like the accessory we wanted when we had you?

The point of National Coming Out Day, to make communities safer because LGBT people and their allies are more visible, can get lost in this kind of family brutality. When our kids are no longer considered accessories, when they are seen as people in their own right, with their own goals and expectations and identities, when they can come out to their families and still be the goofy 13 or 14 or 15 year old snorting milk through their nose at the dinner table, will we even need it anymore?

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A Letter Home

Posted: 6th October 2013 by admin in Blog
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This post is inspired by Domestic Violence Awareness month and based on a scene described in Urban Tidepool. In keeping with the Urban Tidepool theme and with previous posts, let us take a look at those places in systems where kids sometimes get lost. As parents and service providers, we all stand on the theory that if a kid is being hurt, they should run and tell some adult that they trust who can help them. Should we be more specific? “Go and talk to THAT person!”  Should we only encourage them to talk to their parents? How does that work in families where the parents are involved in the violence? How do we go about determining who is that safe person that they can run to? And what can we do if it goes wrong?

Dear Father M.,

Do you remember that Saturday in February, 1978? I do. It was brutally cold that day. Did you find it odd that I showed up at church without a jacket? Did you find it odd that I met you at the doors as you were opening them for confession? Had I been you, I might have found both of those things odd.

I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on the jacket. Maybe you thought I lived close enough to the church that I just ran across the street without thinking about it. People did that. Maybe you thought it was merely a matter of a few seconds that I was outside in that frigid weather and then I’d be welcomed into the warmth of the vestibule.

I’m even willing to give you the benefit of the doubt about me meeting you at the door…almost as if I was desperate to get inside. Maybe you thought I had some dark, scary secret to tell you in the confessional. People did that too.

You know what I’m not willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on? Come on, think about. I’ll bet you can guess. No? Maybe you don’t remember.

I wish I could forget.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…”

No matter what else happened that day, I’m not able to give you the benefit of the doubt over me telling you what was happening in my house and you ignoring it. (Yeah, that kind of explains why I showed up in the middle of February not wearing a jacket, doesn’t it? Sometimes we have to do that.) I’m not willing to overlook the fact that when I told you I was being hurt, the best you could offer me was the directive to pray harder so the person who was hurting me would stop.

Is that really what they taught you in seminary? When a kid comes to you—and let’s be honest, Father, I was 12 years old…I was just a kid…and discloses being hurt, that you should suggest that the power of prayer can make battering stop? That a kid has input into an abusive situation? What kind of help was that to suggest that I had control over a volatile situation through the vehemence of my pleas to your god? Was it the influence of the neighborhood? Was it the era? Or was it just easier?

I’ve spent more than 25 years in the social work field and I’ve had my share of days when kids came to me and said something similar to what I said to you. And you know how those conversations go. There is never an easy way through those and the most important thing we have to stress is that being hurt is not the kid’s fault. I hope with everything in me that I have not failed them with whatever action I took, that nothing I said or did implied to them that they were responsible for their situation, that they, in fact, could control it if only…  If only what? The single acceptable answer in those situations is always, “This is not your fault.”

I came to you, Father, cold and shivering and beaten and all I wanted to hear you say was, “This is not your fault.” But you turned your back and looked away.

Catholicism is far behind me but I still hope that new priests are coached in how to handle such situations, to be supportive and maybe a little kinder to the developing, small human being sitting in front of them. We have a responsibility to those developing, small humans to treat them kindly and with some dignity. You know, like people. Someday maybe I’ll be able to give you the benefit of the doubt on this point too, that perhaps you gave me such a sad and hurtful answer because that was all you’d been taught. I really want to believe you didn’t turn away because it was easier that way. But out of my doubt, what I’m left with now is simply, “Bless you, Father, for you too have sinned…” And I hope that when you utter those words, you are met with  more compassion than you offered in 1978.

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Coming Full Circle

Posted: 29th September 2013 by admin in Blog
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I spent yesterday morning walking the AIDS Walk in Chicago. It was a wonderful morning to walk the lakefront with thousands of other like-minded souls out there giving their time and money to a cause about which they feel strongly. I bear in mind that there are no such things as coincidences when I can see so clearly, yesterday and every other day, how stepping off the trajectory of being a mental health therapist to step into the trajectory of working in HIV prevention brought me to this amazing place where I work with LGBT kids.

In the early 90s, I served as the program manager for housing programs in upstate NY for people living with HIV and AIDS. While hardly new, the disease was still impacting significantly on the gay men’s community and beginning its double duty of impacting heavily on communities of color. The cocktail drugs were just getting positioned to hit the market. The guys in the house got sick. Very sick. Very quickly.

There was nothing in my training to become a therapist that prepared me for what we did in that program. I was accustomed to people confronting inner demons around abuse, sexual assault, divorcing parents, and other issues of loss. I was accustomed to sitting quietly while people blotted tears and tried to put puzzle pieces together. But nothing got me ready for running a residential program with men who were so sick, some who were actively dying. This was not about confronting inner demons and healing. This was about kangaroo feeding pumps for guys who could no longer swallow. It was about bringing food to people who couldn’t get out of bed because of the neuropathy in their feet. It was about following naked men around the house with a towel, asking them not to urinate down the heat registers, offering to cover them, to afford them some dignity and some privacy, when AIDS dementia was eating holes in their brains and it no longer occurred to them that they weren’t wearing clothes. It was about physically picking up a body experiencing wasting syndrome out of a wheelchair so someone could sit on couch cushions and be in somewhat less agony. It was about cleaning bathrooms and wiping bloody, fecal covered handprints off the walls when bodies eroded from the inside out. It was about bleach and AZT and tears in the office when no one was looking.

I learned a lot in that job. I learned how to respectfully navigate a conversation with someone who was actively considering physician assisted suicide. I learned about race relations when one of the guys who greeted me at the door with coffee every morning and would sit with me in the office to tell me about his evening eventually told me that he thought of me as an honorary black woman. And when he grew sicker, I learned about joy when I would watch the Oh Happy Day scene from Sister Act 2 with him over and over again when he could no longer walk and his days were spent on the couch in the living room. It was the only thing that made him smile. He was beautiful when he smiled. I learned how to sit death watch with men who had no families, who were utterly alone in the world. And I learned that our grief, as a staff team, was as real as any family’s when we went to memorial service after memorial service and were forced to lay some of those men to rest in Potter’s Field because no one could afford to bury them.

It was a difficult job to leave, even when it was clear to me that I needed to go. I wrestled with the option to move to the Midwest to take a job running an agency for LGBT kids. Could I really let go and move away?

“What a wonderful way to come full circle,” one of my friends said over dinner. “Instead of helping people die with dignity, you will be able to help people live celebrating who they are.”

I like to think that I did that a little bit too, for the NY guys. For some of them, moments of acceptance and respect had come few and far between. Living that with them for several years…seeing it so clearly when they were laid to rest alone with only my staff team and their medical providers there to say goodbye was the perfect springboard to create a whole new agency where that was always the underlying principle.

I believe this—there are no coincidences.

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I Misunderstood You Perfectly!

Posted: 23rd September 2013 by admin in Blog
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I like to leave the shopping list on the front of the fridge. It’s part of that homey feeling that comes with sharing your nest with someone you love. I also find it quite convenient, until the time comes that one of two things happen. One—I find myself at the store and the list is still stuck to the fridge, or two—one of us finds ourselves at the store, unable to read the other person’s writing. Then there’s the third combination of possible events: I find myself at the store and the list is at home, and when I call home to have it read to me, my spouse can’t read my writing on the list.  Now, you just KNOW how that conversation goes…

“The shopping list is on the fridge. Can you read it to me?”

“Sure. Got a pen? Here’s what you wanted. Eggs. Roasted red peppers. Olive oil. Lulumate.”

“What?”

“Lulumate.”

“What the hell is lulumate?”

“I don’t know. You wrote it down. Apparently, we’re out of it and you wanted some more.”

Big sigh. That required a special trip back to the store just for kalamata olives. Then, a few weeks later, my spouse hands me a sheet of paper in the car and says, “Read that back to me so I can add to it.”

Wanting very much to be helpful, I began to read to her what was listed on the paper.  “Milk, bread, Diet Coke and cabbage puppies.”

There was silence.

Trying not laugh, I asked innocently, “In what aisle do they stock the cabbage puppies?”

“Oh, give me that! It says peppers! Cabbage and peppers!”

This whole shopping list arena is an unending source of comedic material at our house. Over time, I have shopped not only for lulumate and cabbage puppies (go ahead and try to find those babies!), but for half a dog house, cat livers and cream of Sharon soup. From this angle, it doesn’t matter whom you live with or whom you love. Shopping lists are the great playing-field-leveler for everyone.

 

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Shy and Retiring

Posted: 15th September 2013 by admin in Blog
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This week I was interviewed by the nice folks at Zen Parenting Radio (http://zenparentingradio.com/), Cathy and Todd, and they’ll let me know when the show will air. We spent about half our time together talking about my work with LGBT kids and the other half talking about Urban Tidepool, both the book and this blog.

It went better than most conversations in which I disclose being a social worker. You know the ones—where the person you’re talking to looks at you as if you’ve just said you have an infectious disease and responds with, “Oh, you must find that sooo rewarding!” because it’s nicer than saying, “Oh, I’m sorry you drive a rusted out old clunker with Flintstone brakes. What were you thinking when you picked a major?”

Social work as a profession is a curious experience. It’s the only profession I can think of where the people involved put themselves tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes up to $100,000, into debt to get a degree in order to get a job that doesn’t pay enough to allow one to live AND pay off the student loans needed to get the degree needed to get the job he or she just took. Do you see the dilemma there? Social work as a profession is so undervalued that sometimes people in the early stages of their career can’t afford to take job within the profession—or have to take two or three jobs to be able to meet their expenses.

In my last job in NY, my supervisor once asked if I’d heard of the social worker’s investment club. I laughed at her. I thought she was joking. When I realized she was serious, I walked out of the room thinking it was the best example of an oxymoron ever invented. Investment club? So we could retire? Most social workers I know don’t labor along the delusion that they’ll ever be able to retire. They plan to die at their desk, at which time they will be promptly filed in the manila case folder of whichever case they happened to be working on the time. It saves on funeral expenses.

That said, I have given some thought to options for my retirement, even before I got the brilliant idea to invest every free moment in writing a book. Occasionally, I go to meetings and share some of my strokes of genius with the other attendees. To date, no one has chased me out of the room with a butterfly net. I think, though, that secretly they may be jealous that they haven’t thought of these things.

My first inspired plan for retirement was the Chihuahua dairy farm. Picture that. It would be a low level of investment, because it wouldn’t need a lot of room— a herd of Chihuahuas shouldn’t take up a lot of space. My goal: produce Chihuahua cheese. I could envision lots of little stools where we would sit to milk the Chihuahuas and thimble-sized buckets for collecting it. It wasn’t until a friend was kind enough to point out that Chihuahua cheese doesn’t really come from Chihuahuas that I realized I probably needed Plan B.

When I finished grieving the loss of my faithful herd of Chihuahuas, I decided to try to tie my retirement plans to the few business trends I could see overtaking the human services profession. With all of this talk that the 90s brought us of one-stop shopping for all of one’s physical and mental health needs (what the hell happened to consumer choice?), I began to contemplate how professional women are forced to waste time on mundane appointments. Surely we could combine some of those appointment services into the one-stop model. I decided on the spot to go to medical school to become a gynecologist. When I was through with medical school, I would go through auto mechanic school. Another vision came to me—a women’s clinic where people could get their annual GYN exam done while at the same time, the oil was being changed in their car. I even had a name for it: Safety Smear.

The time commitment seemed a little daunting, all that med school and auto mechanic stuff. I kept exploring. When I enrolled in culinary school, I thought I had hit on the answer. My pastry chef training was about being creative and making beautiful things. Unfortunately, it also made me about as round as I am high, so that really wasn’t going to work. I had to ask my fabulous spouse if we could let a few things out, so I’d be more comfortable. She asked me which pants I wanted done. I told her I was thinking more about the doors of my car. That’s where we drew the line on the culinary retirement plans.

So here I am. I have a book written and I’m shopping for an agent. It hasn’t put me thousands of dollars into debt or forced us to let out the doors on my car. As retirement plans go, it seems more appealing than falling over at my desk and being filed with a copy of our annual audit. Just between us, though, I do miss the Chihuahuas.

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Creating Community

Posted: 11th September 2013 by admin in Blog
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The goal of my work at Youth Outlook is to create safe space for LGBT youth. Presently, we do that in a number of ways, primarily through running drop-in centers in various communities, and also through our community education and youth leadership development work. But in 2001, our community education and youth leadership were just getting started and our focus went into the drop-in centers. Our Tuesday night in Naperville has been our biggest and busiest group since 2000. Again for comparison, in 2001 Gay Straight Alliances were few and far between and the Naperville group provided a “home base” for the thirty-plus kids who came in every week, most seeking refuge from still-hostile high schools. Coming to group in our borrowed church space meant family. It meant comfort. It meant, for the first time for many of them, safety.

By the time the chilling silence filled the skies over my apartment just a stone’s throw from O’Hare airport—the second busiest airport in the country–the message came through. “We are doing a special service tonight at church. You can’t meet here.”

I understood completely. The church needed to be a church. But where was I going to find another space to meet with thirty-some kids? Or even twenty-some kids, if some were not permitted to attend? I came up empty. After a couple of hours of searching, I was still empty handed.  Filled with the dark sense that I was disappointing the kids, I notified the staff that we would have to cancel group. We had to cancel safe space on the most dangerous and emotionally stunning day any of us had ever lived through.

Not all of the kids got the message. Arriving at our usual location that evening and expecting to find us there, they found a note on the door that we had had to cancel and we’d be back next week. Alone in our individual homes and towns, the staff and I ducked our heads, overflowing regret that we’d let our kids down, and tried to shut out the repeated images of planes exploding against skyscrapers that kept looping on TV.

But you know…that’s the thing about finding community. Once you have it, you don’t want to let go. The kids who showed up for a drop-in center night only to find a sanctuary full of people they didn’t know walked a few blocks away and held their own impromptu group at a local coffee shop. This was their Tuesday night. This was their group time. This was the comfort they sought all week, and nothing—not even planes exploding against skyscrapers—was going to take this away from them.

Our agency is forged out of memories like this. Less than three years earlier, when we were only a few months old and the signature had not even been set to our 501 C 3 paperwork, Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten and hung on a fence post in Laramie, Wyoming, setting a tone for our commitment to safety and community that will never be undermined. The events of 9/11 highlighted for us the need for that safety and community was undeniable.

As we have continued to build upon those two factors as our foundation, we realized that our work has taken on a third aspect, paralleling the same path that our entire nation had to take following that horrific day. We cannot stagnate. We must heal. We must grow. Our kids find healing from the caustic words thrown at them in their homes, in their schools and in their neighborhoods. They must heal sometimes from the physical attacks to which they are subjected. Safety and community give them some of the tools they need to get started. My wish for the Urban Tidepool readers tonight as our country continues its steps in this monumental healing process– if you have endured loss, if you have had to witness or endure violence…Let this be YOUR Tuesday night. Let this be YOUR group time and may you, too, find the safety and community you need to speed your healing. 

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Words Haunt

Posted: 8th September 2013 by admin in Blog
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“The punches stop hurting. The words take longer to heal.”

I’ve been pondering this since an interviewee said it to me last week. Yesterday I ran training for new volunteers and we spent a fair amount of time on current trends in working with LGBT youth, during which we focus on different factors that can combine to drive kids to desperation. We talk about a lack of family support, homelessness, unsupportive communities, unsafe schools, a political climate that allows for open attacks on LGBT people just as a matter of getting through a normal business day. We talk about the shoving, the tripping, the outright beatings that some LGBT kids endure.

Can we talk for a moment about the less dramatic incidents? The moments that, over time, add up to drain our kids’ spirits? That drain our spirits? Let’s talk microaggressions. I did a post on this on the Facebook page a couple of weeks ago and I noticed that only one person spoke out in response. I couldn’t tell if that was because people didn’t know what to say or people didn’t find the topic all that appealing.

That comment during the interview cut right to the chase. For our kids who have come out of unsafe schools or unsupportive and/or violent homes, the punches do stop when they no longer have to navigate that space. But it doesn’t end the endurance test, so to speak. The words, as the interviewee pointed out, may haunt us for weeks. Or months. Sometimes years.

Y’all know what I mean by microaggressions, right? Those little comments that wear on you, force you to explain or defend yourself, or leave you feeling insulted or as if you suddenly need to defend yourself. Sometimes they come from people we love and trust, sometimes from total strangers. They call out our differences in a way that makes it very clear that there is judgment attached to whatever we’ve done or said…or whatever we are…and it’s not pleasant or positive. It’s moments of tiny, demeaning jabs that can have a disastrous cumulative effect.

Not long ago, as I exited a local restaurant with my partner and two friends, we walked by a table where a man in (probably) his late 50s or early 60s sat with a woman, presumably his wife. I was far enough ahead that when he spoke, I didn’t hear him but the last of us in our queue did. As we walked by, this man looked up at us, then looked at his wife and said, “What? Are they fags?”

When the friends who heard him repeated this to me in the parking lot, my sarcastic streak kicked in. I wanted to return to the restaurant and explain to him that flocks of lesbians are generally not referred to with derogatory gay male terminology and that if he insisted on insulting us, he might want to consult Urban Dictionary for the correct vile names. I didn’t and his comment bothered me for days. Have we not evolved even enough that a group of middle aged women out for dinner cannot get through an evening without being forced to explain or justify or defend ourselves?

“The punches stop hurting. The words take longer to heal.”

Admittedly, the man didn’t direct that comment AT us. He didn’t swear at us, shout at us or make us feel threatened. But we heard the judgment. We heard the contempt. And if we, in our 30s, 40s and 50s, came away from that experience feeling demeaned and dehumanized, I cannot help but wonder how kids in their teens (or even pre-teens) are dealing with these situations, and more importantly what the long term impact is going to be. I can go home with my partner after a nasty experience. We can proceed with our boring queer lives and rebuild our safe space, hug the dogs and feel connected. LGBT youth—kids growing up in volatile homes or more broadly, any youth who is being verbally harassed– often do not have that option. They must take those ongoing dehumanizing comments and try to make sense of them, try not to take them so personally, and try to go through the demands of adolescent development without those ninety or one hundred or one thousand comments they hear per day eroding the sense of adult identity that they are trying to forge. That they need to survive. That’s a Herculean task…attempting to grow into a healthy human while being systematically dehumanized on a daily basis.

In training the adults with whom the kids spend time and in offering education to parents this past year, this is emerging as one of the most important things we can do to care for those kids, when we’re looking for the reason for the depression or the anxiety or the desperation. Microaggressions accumulate—and apparently, even at 48, worlds past middle school and high school, one cannot consider oneself safe from hostility and judgment. Thankfully, I’m past the point of trying to forge my identity. But what of our kids who are not?

“The punches stop hurting. The words take longer to heal.”

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A Slippery Slope, Indeed

Posted: 31st August 2013 by admin in Blog
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In grad school, I took a course on working with clients with substance abuse diagnoses and did some side research on the impact of the addiction on the family members. My dabbling led me eventually to what was considered THE handbook on ACOA issues, Janet Woititz’s Adult Children of Alcoholics. Intrigued, fascinated even, I went on to Robert Ackerman’s work, then Claudia Black’s, all the buzz names of the 80s and 90s for working with families dealing with addictions.

I feared for a short time, as is the nature of all MSW students, that I might end up the poster child for ACOAs but it didn’t take long to realize that I was breaking one of the cardinal traits in Woititz’s book:  characteristic number six, ACOAs take themselves very seriously. Ummmm, perhaps not.  If you’ve read any part of Urban Tidepool  or watch my Facebook posts you already know this is not a characteristic that I can be accused of with any sincerity.

It wasn’t conscious when I was a kid. It was just there. Now I look back and think, “Thankfully!”, although I’m not sure that my family members would be so grateful.  On the first night of my visit to my brother and sister-in-law’s house the summer I turned sixteen, he fell asleep in his chair, watching TV. It was June, in Florida. It was hot. The Major was wearing shorts and nothing on his feet. I took it as the perfect opportunity to create a little brother-sister bonding. I painted his toenails pink.I don’t think he felt particularly bonded and I guarantee you, “Thankfully!” was not the first thing he said when he woke up.

When I tell about failing a class in high school in Urban Tidepool, I observed: In the comment section, the teacher had indicated that I had been careless with my assignments.  Above that, a nun had commented that I handled her class, in which I had an A, with great care and responsibility. I almost laughed.  Well, I guess if you have to be careless and not do your assignments, the least you can do is to do it responsibly.  In fact, I had gone from an A to an F in that class. Can’t be more responsible at failing something than that!  I dropped like a responsible rock. I just couldn’t decide if I was carelessly responsible or responsibly careless.

But it’s hard to hang onto humor, no matter how strong the innate tendency, when a parent dies or a sibling grows increasingly violent. So to rediscover that streak of humor is a life altering moment, because it arrives with its ability to heal, to move you forward, to make space for forgiveness even if you aren’t totally aware of it at the time.

I remember the precise moment of the rediscovery. In Niagara Falls for the weekend with my college roommate and her family, I had to hike back to the car to retrieve something. To catch up to everyone, I took a short cut across the grass on an incline above the traffic circle. I slid on the wet grass and fell, with probably no less than twelve lanes of traffic circling just below me. I might have gotten angry. I might have been embarrassed. I don’t remember any of that. What I remember is a split second realization that I was soaked to the skin, and that hundreds of cars were driving by just feet away, with passengers pointing at me and laughing. And I lay back in the wet grass and I started to laugh. The harder I laughed, the more the passengers in the cars below laughed, and the more they laughed at me, the harder I laughed, wearing wet pants and rolling around on some strange Canadian hillside.

It’s not that those people in the cars were suddenly my friends. But every one of them shared a moment with me that redefined who I was becoming, that gave me back something I lost. They have no idea. They all drove on their ways, had their holiday weekends, went back to their lives without ever realizing that they shared an intimate, healing moment with a scarred warrior who had never chosen to go into battle, but for whom battle had never been a choice.

Urban Tidepool has moments of very dark humor, and those of you aware of your own scars (whether around family addiction or another issue) might appreciate that. I suspect you’ll understand it. More than that, I hope you might find moments of cars winding around your own traffic circles as you’re trying very hard to take yourself seriously, and maybe you’ll get a glimpse of the passengers in them, sharing a profound moment with you without ever meaning to, and being a witness to that space being born out of humor where forgiveness comes to live.

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