When I Die

When I die
I hope I pass the way fall passes into winter,
in a burst
of smokeless forest fire
that leaves only hallowed skeletons behind--
reaching heavenward, in their
haunted nakedness--
Saving my glory and my beauty
for the final days before I rest,
I will briefly know greatness
Before God brings me to the ultimate humility.

I will pass on into the unending
fullness of life
Where I will become a writer of psalms
And I will know what twelve part 
harmony sounds like.

I do not know what heaven looks like,
But I know that those who are closer,
when you measure by wrinkles
and years,
are small treasures,
to be admired and listened to--
if only for their rarity.

To Bear With

Psalm

Watercolor, pencil, & ink pen on paper/ "Psalm" poem text by Alysia Harris

study of hand #1

graphite & watercolor, 6" x 9"

watercolor

Not Dalton's Kids

My contributions to the Not Dalton's Kids blog are below. This blog was a challenge to artists to create a work of art daily in the month of April on the subject of race. The result was a collection of deeply personal, very raw pieces.

I. Faceless

II. On Fear

III. How to Make Value Judgments

IV. Four Sisters

I have three sisters

that came after me

raised and re-raised by my mother.

We are five women taking on the world,

because my mother knows how to raise a girl 

to take on the world.

'If I ran the world,' she'd always say,

when a restaurant waiter gave bad service,

or a road wasn't properly constructed,

or an article was poorly written...

my mom did run our world,

a breadwinning soccer mom

in her Saks Fifth Avenue suits and Nine West black pumps,

Seeing her without makeup-- or an opinion-- was always strange to me.

My mother's whiteness is etched into the military brat memories 

that reflect outward when she looks at me from her father's eyes,

her clear perception of his World War II fears,

colored a harsh yellow,

stained racist by years of being bombed by an 'enemy'

before he turned twenty five.

He would point to photos of me and my friends and ask, "Who's that little jap girl?",

thinly veiled bitterness grating against the harsh apathy of his despair,

can't i have compassion for the ways my own flesh and blood self-justified?

She told me when i was young not to mind him,

while her anger and frustration with his intolerance bled through her unguarded words,

and he died without me ever asking him to reconsider, or to explain

because the older generations are meant to give us wisdom,

or maybe just all the brokenness of history,

'here is your inheritance' they offer,

'and all the ways we stubbornly clung to our fears, 

digging our heels in against the changes around us,'

as if their fears would protect them from hurting any more.

no, keep your wisdom, Grandpa,

and rest in peace.

death conquers all fears

and all hurts.

I too am white

once blonde and still blue-eyed,

pale skin that burns the raw pink of old salmon

after tasting just twenty minutes of the Very Very Hot Florida sun,

and curly hair that dries quickly, and springs into bouncy tendrils with a bug for dancing, 

twisting and shaking themselves into frizz after only a few hours in our humidity.

I was raised on broadway musicals and piano lessons and the Beach Boys,

trips to Europe and dinners at the Society,

in a white world rarely punctuated by any cultural difference,

until race, ethnicity, and immigration marched into my life with all the passion of undergraduate energy--

and gospel music that undid the very foundations of my heart--

but still after five years of listening and sixty-five pages of academic writing,

my grandfather's blood runs too in my veins,

systematic advantage that will ever keep me blind--

'friends, will you be my eyes?'

i keep asking, for

i am too white to see.

L---- inherited my car and stamped it with her Costa Rican flag three years after she moved in,

two years after I left her to pursue that Latin-etched paper:

a whirlwind of words, a gift for persuasion, 

and a knack for finding perfect Christmas gifts that I never return.

Her skin is caramel colored, and darkens to mocha in the summers,

complexion smooth and clear like thick fine linen, 

and dark hair once wavy that now lies in an abrupt and uneasy flatness,

exhausted and beaten by years of dyes and dryers.

She can understand la lengua español cuando escucha,

pero never speaks the words because she cannot measure up to all the expectations 

of the Latino blood that runs in her veins--

this is where her family gets lost in translation-- 

language barriers and country borders,

Alcoholic mom and undocumented dad,

half-siblings in too many places in the western hemisphere

and my very white mother who picked her up by her Cs and Ds and failed seventh grade math

and taught her how to drive.

B----'s hair is always ironed-- no time for braids, no money for relaxers, 

and who knows how she'd ask my mom anyhow? 

So she wears a small bun every day, tied at the base of her neck.

Her skin is the dark chocolate of Ghirardelli brownies,

her African-American family tree ending in a question mark stripped forcibly from memory,

eyes black as the time the electricity first got cut off when the recession hit her family

so hard,

She works with a stolid diligence, 

harboring a secret allegiance to Team Jacob and a hidden penchant 

for hand-drawn margin masterpieces,

once mute, when L-- brought her home to us,

she now speaks with grace

and 'broader horizons', as my mom puts it,

she is the last one left to mentor the final sister,

K---, wire thin like the rest of the white Florida girls,

and brick violet-red hair that dyes her into the pool of her Irish roots,

she is still quiet

and unsure of herself,

teenage negativity permeating the dwelling places of her thoughts.

She prefers animals to people, or numbers, or spelling,

the wilderness of zoos a refuge

from the couches she surfed when her birth parents turned their backs--

I barely know her yet,

as she barely knows the world,

but she too now,

is mama's baby,

nineteen and learning to read.

We are my mom's kids,

all her girls,

and when we go places and when we tell stories

and in Christmas photos that Mom never sends out 'til February,

and when we go get pedicures together at the mall,

we know who we are,

never mind the funny looks: some people don't know 

what a family is, four sisters,

taking on the world.

V. Liz Finishes a Poem 

VI. Race/ism

Sometimes I feel like seeing racism is like a knot
being tied at the base of my esophagus,
braiding upward,
writhing snake-like to my throat
until it starts to press the back of my tongue,
making me want to vomit my wordlessness,
sickened into a screaming silence
by the way our unseen evils multiply,
multiply like mold
in the dank dark corners of the spare closet in my mother's hallway.

Sometimes I feel like seeing racism is like pennies
being glued to my skin,
until I am suffocated by that metallic taste of too many dirty hands,
until the weight stuck to me is too much to carry
and I realize that my rose-colored blinders
and all the white western wisdom i'd been sown with and grown with
made me but a weed, too weak
to even see the world.

Sometimes I think that seeing racism
is my cross to bear,
my Good Friday for good,
my God-given grief,
a shared heartbeat that carries extra gravity
to pull me to my knees,
and pray,
 God set us free.

Sometimes I forget that hope
is at the end
of grief.

VII.  black men and cops

4 brown bodies
and 1 white girl
in a car,
and red blue and white on my heels
no sirens,
no broken law,
just the fear of black men, 
who can taste the vicinity of remembered violence.
   uncle sam's angels don't protect them.

'damn, i hate the police' he observed,
they gave him my grandma's heebie-jeebies,
and i checked all the seatbelts and drove extra slow at the yellow light because i knew too.

and once i asked a black man if my presence in the car
made it better or worse
he wasn't sure
what the memory of tom robinson and mayella ewell would bode for us,
so just drive careful.

when i was eight the police came to my school
just to say hi,
and they told me 'the police are always there
to protect you,
not out to get you,'
and i think i still believe what they said to me,
if only i had known sooner that the you they offered was demographically specific:
wealthy, pretty, white girl,
worth our taxes and time.

4 brown bodies 
and me
in a car,
we've tensed up,
and i wonder if i'd be enough whiteness to keep bullets at bay,
and i want to loan out my privilege, the protection i've been unjustly given--
simple like land redistribution--
if it wouldn't skin the very flesh off our souls,
steal the color from our eyes.

VIII. Study of Beauty, Part I

IX. on (black) music

your musical taste
is not objective
truth.

an over-simplified
history of black music, thoughts and 
a vocabulary list:
cross-over success.
lupe fiasco. tupac. nas. common.
moses hogan.
boyz ii men. take six.
erykah. talib. lauryn. india.
race music. 
black. Black. African-American.
R&B.
rap. hip hop.
soul.
stevie wonder
riffing.
whitney houston. sam cooke. mavis staples.
a change is gonna come.
gospel.
mahalia jackson.
quartets. choirs.
lining out.
rock n' roll.


do not underestimate
the generational curse.
the battle over past brokenness
is still being waged,
beauty sometimes wins.

the beach boys stole music in 1963,
and slavetraders stole people
back in 1619.


the guitar. the electric guitar.
muddy waters.
syncopation.
michael jackson.
big band. jazz. swing.
the horns. the 2 and 4.
satchmo. duke. miles. 
blues.
belting.
ma rainey. bessie smith.


i have a friend who loves gospel music
and she says that once,
her church did a joint service
with a white church
(the remnants of a segregation
of which my people
--if they knew they were a people--
should be ashamed),
and they sang a song they both knew,
and half the building was clapping on 2 and 4,
and half the building was clapping on 1 and 3.

and in our mixed gospel choir at school
a lot of us had to concentrate
on following jeania ree.


did you know bluegrass began 
black?
the fiddle was first
mastered by
slaves,
as their masters exoticized
their rhythmic prowess,
their harmonies were 
too heart-wrenching for a cognitively dissonant existence to hear
without justification:
exoticize and admire from afar,
or listen 
to how the spirituals cried out
what truths they were forbidden to say.
oh freedom. oh freedom.


never bring up india arie
around white people.
never voice an opinion about a DJ,
never ask about hair.


fisk jubilee choir. howard. morehouse. HBCUs.
blackface. minstrelsy.
ring shout. 
negro spirituals.
call and response.
work songs.
underground railroad. wade in the water.
follow the drinking gourd.
to the other side.
canada- heaven- the north- the difference is secondary, says,
W.E.B. DuBois. double consciousness.
sorrow songs. sorrows.
slavery.
Africa. djembe. griot.

griot,
tell this story.
tell this story,
over and over again, 
so we know the truth
of music.

X. On Black Music, Part II: A Punctuated Haiku Series

When I read James Cone,
I first felt silenced, oppressed,
invalidated.


[blindness is always ironic.]


The second time through
I realized I was grieving
for a privilege.


[no one deserves to opine, or to be heard,
or to get an award.]


The third time, occurred
to me that forced silence was
how you lived, unheard.


[anger invalidated only multiplies,
what sin have we committed by calling it crazy that your hurts
should be heard?]


Would I sacrifice
validity in my words
to love another?


[perhaps to fight is to listen and let my thoughts lie still.
to speak only in service of a truth i submit to
in order to invert my privilege…
to not know
that which i have not lived.]


"Black music must be
lived," James Cone said, "before it
can be understood."


[He said many other things too.]


Do I seek justice?
Or do I just want to wash
my hands like Pilate?

XI. On Black Music, Part III

XII. Captured

XIII. Tina

i always thought you were beautiful,
and everyone else
always thought
you were one of them.
brown travels well,
i suppose,
or maybe Puerto Rico is the cradle
of womankind,
its offspring but deep water mirrors for Pakistanis and American Black ladies
and Israelis and Egyptians and Afghanis
where the light of hope of finding a like soul
splits and refracts
into one's likeness,
an optical illusion like Dali,
who always painted only the truth---
though i do believe
that, like Alexei Karamazov,
your kindness
and listening ear
and gentle, laughing, singing, trilingual tongue,
could lend you to all the world,
safe and sound,
without a dime in your pocket--
and i would not try to sift out the color of your soul
or cheapen you: it would be as false
as if the very earth, grainy and gritty between our toes,
the dust from which we were formed,
were simply
crayola brown. 

XIV. Atonement

Rosh Hashana felt long
like counting the threads of his blue and white woven prayer shawl,
and losing count, and starting over,
and turning to timelessness
like seeing the ends of the tassels begin to fray
by the very slow passing of generations--
there is something precious about the reverence handed
across more generations
than can be counted on a hand,
more generations than could be remembered,
but God is our rememberer, the prayer book said in its margin that remembrance is Godly and
we the people always seem to forget.

the cantor continues without loss of tongue,
her melody thick and simple and unconcerned
reading right to left to give honor to justice,
      that scepter which the Lord wields in his right hand,
or perhaps to follow ancient custom-- my vernacular
seems absent of its poetry the more I read Hebrew,
I wonder if that is why the Lord chose Abraham,
because he picked the language with most depth of heart-- or was it lev?--with which he could weave and spin his stories?
I keep losing focus because I have never spent so much time
praising the Lord, my cheap grace
bores me of this sanctity,
or maybe I am not the poet I thought
to name sacred the very dust, the dishes, the toothbrushing,
the crevices in my skin, the lint upon your shoulders…
who knows what other memories we forget we carry?
and we are somewhere in this prayer mapped out by the cantor's unwavering words
and the Lord is mighty above the heavens and the earth
and i, i feel small, and weak--
i have no respect for my fathers,
i have no forefathers,
i have no songs.

Hebrew incantations done for duty, sung by rule,
children tasting them for the first time,
old men muttering them
there is a hurriedness to their honor
a sincerity to the humming, a hive of holy work on a Thursday,
in a different tongue than they worked in on Wednesday
and I think they are discovering heritage, or birthright, or what it is to be a people--
to be a people after the end of a people:
It is the day of atonement so we remember
and we mourn
and the honey will crawl down like a cool asperity catching at back of my throat
     asperity like a child not allowed in a playground
     caught like a child in a gas chamber…
but the apple crunches like slightly melted new snow,
and the sweetness feels strangely modern, a promise land of anachronisms,
sugarcoating the bitterness of horrors,
the sanctity of survivors
they are almost gone, the last ones are leaving us,
and i'm not sure if the Ebenezers they've left will be enough,
what if we forget? God is our rememberer,
God, help us remember.

Hear, O Israel,
the Lord thy God,
the Lord thy God is one,
is won,
this repetition might help me remember,
if i were attentive;
but Moses won battles by raising his hands till sundown,
and i can barely stand,
O Israel, Hear O Israel,
let us pray
that after seven million sacrificed,
memory would be burned into our minds and the preciousness
of the chosen children of God, of Israel,
would never be questioned again,
Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu,
though I am not sure if I have ever met a Jew who thinks God is
more than an abstract idea,
anymore.

XV. Study of Beauty, Part II

I've stolen
glances at you
among other misdemeanors.
All of you, us, we, women.
It seems I cannot decide if I want to protect you
in your weakness or envy you
in your weakness,
so I've resorted to a harmless pickpocketing,
nabbing the curves from your body,
the slimness off your arms,
the perfect architecture of your derriere-
I've stolen the salt from your eyes
and suckled the beauty off your lips
till you too
taste this silence- forgive me.
I am too strong to be a woman
and we are all too something to be beautiful.


Growing up was
our mothers teaching us how to do our hair;
separate like Sunday mornings,
we shed blood to prove we could break water,
and then we were told to walk onto the waves--
If God's son could do the impossible, what of his daughters
speaking forth their own Genesis?
let
there
be…
let there be cheap, harsh, fluorescent light
under which we are
to shave and to wax and to tweeze and to twist,
to braid and to comb,

to iron and to cut and to dye,

we are dying,

losing our bodies to save our asses

lest no man declare us worthy of being watched,

for besides pain in childbirth, this must be women's lot in life,

our beauty is being held hostage by the beholder

and the beholder is an old white academic man writing a monotonous analytical textbook no one will read

but everyone will trust,

and when no one is watching,

we will all shift a little on our pedestals,

our crumbling statues, sepulchers filled with the hope

that the tourist group will be carried to our placard

today,

if only our gothic sway

is convincing enough.

I am not my hair

but mom always said that my hair betrayed

my free spirit: the hairdresser saw it was good,

but it didn't always do what it was told,

and it took me years to wake up on a Friday

and realize that beauty was on the other side

of cutting it off.

On other Fridays,

I let the powder aside

in whose dishonesty we all are complicit

(powder number 2, for

not quite the fairest one of all)

and I find myself at the mirror out of curiosity,

as if the mirror itself had forgotten to reflect me, as if it had forgotten who

I am, so I reach into the glass

and start painting myself like vermeer

and I think his clouds have more grey

but I too see pinks and greens and golds in between the browns

of my white skin.

I didn't always think I was beautiful,

for beauty is not quite white,

but it is not quite brown or Black or Asian or Latina or mulatto or Native or mixed or you either,

and your beauty is a demon to my breasts,

and my beauty a devil to your hair,

and her beauty a pain in my ass…

so I dip my brush into every stolen glance,

and I'm painting us again with all these pickpocketed goods,

and when I am done with the canvases

of our skins, our bodies,

our hairs,

my graffiti will paint itself onto the walls,

it will bleed out where our stilettos stab the floor,

and it will say in every color for every people that I found Beauty

and she was in truth

and she was in our naked, just-washed bodies,

in the hair on our arms and the weariness under our eyes,

in our hips and our thighs and the breasts upon which our babies might someday lay,

Beauty was in the eyes of the beheld,

and the Lord said that the eyes of a woman

is the lamp unto her soul,

for what she sees will fill her whole body with light and make her shine--

so the graffiti I tag will be a great red arrow

twisting around the naked body of Eve,

streaking across her cheeks and pointing at her eyes, saying

START here by looking to those windows of her soul--

precious souls of black onyx and gold and the very brown earth and green-blue oceantide,

and the beautiful bodies that have been our homes for all our lives--

do you not find us beautiful at least for us that,

that this body is wondrously and fearfully mine?

do you not love, as i do,

the legs with which I run to you, the hands with which I write to you, the arms with which I hold you,

the place where I sit and the toes onto which I rise, the hair that crowns me queen,

the lips from which my words burst forth,

the eyes through which I see?

and what woman

doesn't, honestly,

have stunningly beautiful eyes?

XVI. The Origin of Miscommunication 

 

XVII. White (three poems)

I.
The creases in my hands
are dried up rivulets,
formed long ago by the tears
of a palm-reader who told me
that the pale earth that became my flesh
was a stolen good
I could not return.

II.
at some point white privilege (which is ignorance)
gives way to white guilt (which is self-centered)
gives way to grief,
and silence
and submission.

thus are the humble raised up,
thus shall the meek inherit the earth.

III.
ink and light
make black and white
of all colors,
respectively.

XVIII.  Tanya McDowell

homeless mother who
sent six-year-old son to
better school
in the wrong town
jailed
for five years.

"was she black?"

did you
really have to ask?

what would have been the right town
for a black woman
trying to get her
black son
a better education,
her black child
to a better school?

i have heard that thieves
look like small children with skin
the color of an owl's eyes,
they are so wise
they steal the very air we share,
though small, they sneak away chairs
twice their size,
schooldesks,
and grab teachers by the hands,
and graffiti our children's vision
with some strange memory
of playmates, sun-browned.

so let this mother plead guilty to the law.
like lady macbeth
her hands are bloody, with hope
for her child,
let us punish her for kneeling into the mud
so that a little boy
might stand on her shoulders,
and dream the blue sky ahead--

let us punish her for seeing the drug-ridden dungeon gate
closing on them both
and risking the anointing of her own stigmata to
thrust her son through the bars
that he might fall into the moat and float into Pharaoh's hands, where he will
one day carry Moses' staff of miracles and be heard
crying, "let my people go!"
to the promised land--

let us punish her,
for sacrificial love
is against the law,
and hope,
it turns out,
is
illegal.

let us punish her,
friends,
let us punish her.

XIX. Open Letter to a Middle-Aged Black Man with a Record, who is probably in jail again

I met Richard while volunteering at Agape Church for the Homeless in New Haven, CT. During the several years since I met him, he has struggled with homelessness, alcoholism, joblessness, violence, depression, and run-ins with the police. He has been in and out of jail since I've known him, often--at this point-- because he is the easiest person to (re-)arrest in the room, and there is no public defender who would think Rich was worth his time. He last disappeared several months ago. Curse the fact that this submission is about race.

XX. Funny Questions

When I was in seventh grade,
and had only spoken to 6 black people in my life--
    Justin, the chubby kid whose last name I can't remember, who
       I had a crush on in kindergarten,
    Cynthia, the Nigerian who moved to the states
       from England when we were in 3rd grade,
    and Stefani, Renee, and their mom and dad,
       Ivy-league educated Ba'hai family
       who ran my basketball team,
I asked my mom if I could marry a black man.
She looked at me funny
and said two things:
Of course,
but it would be very hard
for you and your children.

It was a funny thing for a seventh-grader to ask.

A friend in college was in the passenger seat
as we drove home from the mall
and we were talking about interracial dating
and she paused and looked at me,
she said
   that she could see me marrying a black man.
I never told her about asking my mom that question,
but since she was a black woman,
I felt some sort of internal validation;
but I spoke only my continued reservation: maybe.
I no longer romanticize intercultural interaction.
Shit is hard.

I've had crushes on more black men than white men,
but they have never liked me back,
and I've never asked
if it's because I'm white.
Feels a bit callous,
and some things
sound better unsaid.

In high school, on the basketball team,
the other girls teased me
for liking chocolate. I shrugged-
deciding beauty feels very objective.

In college, I stopped crushing altogether.
2 broken hearts
and the weight of sociological analysis
on my head:
racist, exoticizing, superficial...
if I can't trust my own eyes,
I'll have to trust his,
whatever their color,
wherever he is,
to find me,
and to find me beautiful.

XXI. The Definition of Whiteness

http://notdaltonskids.blogspot.com/2012/04/definition-of-whiteness-juliet-buesing.html

XXII. For Bongi

This one's for my college roomie,
who sat next to me in Econ freshman year,
and joked that our Polish teacher
had it out for all the Zimbabweans like her,
because all of the class examples seemed to contrast
the two countries' economies.


This one's for my college roomie,
who never fails to make me laugh,
who likes listening to books on tape and Freakonomics podcasts,
and runs urban farms for a living,
who writes intense and beautiful and very serious literature
that will one day win her a Pulitzer.


This one's for my college roomie,
who calls family her best friend Leilah:
there is an identical picture of the two of them for nearly every year of their lives,
they're sisters to the deepest degree,
holidays, home, and naked baby pictures,
Zimbabwean-American girl and a Jewish-American girl.


This one's for my college roomie,
who didn't do did the "Black" things in college
and never seemed particularly concerned or political or angry,
and found it hilarious that based on our resumes
I would appear to be the Black one and she could just have easily
been white.


This one's for my college roomie,
who goes to bed early, the bright and smiling girl
who reminds me not to take life so seriously,
who I miss every day…
And-- honestly-- this post
has very little to do
with race.

XXIII. De-Imagining Black Men

XXIV. A Letter to My Best Friend's Future Children

Dear little Williamses,

You are beautiful. Adorable, incredible, brilliant, talented, joy-bringing, wonderful. I see you, and I feel immense wonder for the goodness of the world. Half-Puerto-Rican, half-Black, with daddy's eyes and mama's voice and a love for reading and learning that your parents share. You are full of promise, and I am proud of you and love you.

I pray that each time you look in the mirror and every time you encounter someone on the street or at the grocery store or in class, that you will feel proud of your roots, of your skin color, of your eyes and your hair. That you will know deeply inside of you that you are strikingly beautiful, that you are the children of beautiful parents, and the truth that you know is that their love tied together your bones and then covered them with grace and with your beautiful and beloved Black skin. There are many good questions to ask in life, but your beauty is not one of them. Trust me, you are truly beautiful. Anyone who thinks otherwise is too ugly to be worth your time.

I pray that you will love God and books and music and justice, like your parents do, and that you too will dance unashamedly when Michael Jackson comes on the playlist, that you too will engage thoughtfully in the culture around you, that you too will speak all the languages of love and grace and cross-cultural friendship.

I pray protection over you, and send you some of my angels, so that you will never have to fear that you are alone, unprotected, just waiting to be wronged in a violent and unjust world. You should live freely. You are not alone, and though I wish that we had done more to change the world and make it better for you before you got here, I think that Justice is on her way. We hope, each time we walk home, that she is sitting around the corner, on your front porch, laughing as you play hopscotch out front with all the kids in your neighborhood. Justice always liked kids, come to think of it.

I hope that you grow up thankful for the people who came before you. The theologians your dad talks about, the court cases your mom can recite, the people who wrote out their stories and their hurts and their declarations of independent ideas on race and ethnicity and beauty and life, for the artists who spent their lives reminding us to see the world for all its beauty, to hope for justice, to live fully and carry ourselves well every step of the way. Not as a command that you ought to be grateful, but a hope that you will feel grateful and live your lives as part of a bigger story than your own. The stories with which you are painted are beautiful and meaningful. I too am thankful for these people for the ways they changed my life and changed my eyes, and if you ever want to come chat with me about it, tell your mama you're coming to see me and hear some more good stories. I've been storing them up my sleeve for you guys all these years. I've got plenty of heroes and heroines to go around, and delicious oatmeal and my aunt's apple pie and another round of taboo will be waiting when you come.

And here's a hug, in advance, for any time life is hurtful, or hard, or seems too full of lies and difficulties. Don't read this paragraph until that happens, because I can hope that it wont. But if it does: I am sorry for the fears my generation has left you for an inheritance, for the awkward moments when you don't know what to say, for the loneliness, the confusion, the unjust wrongs that still exist, the assumptions, the stereotypes, the broken friendships, the way that love isn't always straightforward. I am sorry if we have failed you as parents of your generation, trying to raise you, if we have betrayed you or abandoned you in any way. I am sorry for the things we didn't speak up about, the ways we didn't fight hard enough to make things as best as possible for you. I'm sorry when you hurt.

If you ever need anything, please come find me. If you ever need help, just call. If you don't know what to do, I'll do my best to hold your hand. I love you, remember. I'll even love you when you make mistakes and get things wrong, when you mess up and do things you aren't always proud of. Don't you ever worry about losing my love. I'm still so proud of you. So are your mom and dad.

Hold your heads high, carry yourselves with grace, and remember to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. This, I think, is how we live… God is working on the rest for us.

Dare to be hopeful, every day. And never mind worrying if people think you're foolish. They think I am too-- isn't it fun?!

Take care!


hugs, kisses, & goofy faces (xo:P),
    juliet