Break open, not apart

One of Stella’s favorite books is Frida Kahlo and her Animalitos. It’s a perfect book—full of Frida’s fierce resiliency and her menagerie of wild animals. We’ve read it approximately a million times. Yesterday, we read it for our millionth and one, and Stella, 4, paused and then said, with a casual tone, “I’d really like to meet Frida sometime soon.”

This book is so good.

I hated to break it to her that Frida, is in fact, dead.

“Why is everyone dead lately?” she asked with exasperation.

So many people are these days. Her teacher died. Then our dear friend’s grandma died—at happy hour, no less (a death I deeply admire). Then last week, Stella’s great grandmother—our beloved GG—died, too.

And then, of course, so many people have died of COVID despite all the “hanatizer” we put on and all the birthday party accommodations we’ve made.

Her exasperation is really understandable.

All of our exasperation is understandable. Our exhaustion. Our profoundly awkward social behavior. Our heartbreak. All very understandable.

But I’m starting to wonder, if it’s not making us show up in public in a way that we will one day regret. I see this in so many places, but perhaps no more acutely than the school re-opening conversations, where it seems we’ve completely lost sight of our common ground. We all care about kids. We all care about teachers. We want everyone to feel safe and in love with learning.

So if that’s our shared territory, why are you screaming at teachers to HURRY UP AND FEEL SAFE! while also calling their labor of love this year (the Plan B that is distance learning) an unmitigated disaster? (Here’s a more nuanced take.) And why are you screaming at the public on behalf of children that are not even your own when you haven’t even talked to those children’s parents? (Here’s someone at the same paper who actually talked to them.)

None of that screaming seems wise or worthy of our tattered humanity. I’m reminded of my mentor' Parker Palmer’s* words that I love so much:

Suffering breaks our hearts, but the heart can break in two different ways. There’s the brittle heart that breaks into shards, shattering the one who suffers as it explodes, and sometimes taking others down when it's thrown like a grenade at the ostensible source of its pain. Then there's the supple heart, the one that breaks open, not apart, the one that can grow into greater capacity for the many forms of love. Only the supple heart can hold suffering in a way that opens to new life.

We’ve suffered this year. Some more than others. And people we love are dead. And institutions we believed in have proven themselves extremely fragile (some of us never believed in them in the first place, and this has been affirming, but worrying). And we haven’t had a good night’s sleep or a pinch of solitude in weeks. But we have to focus on breaking open, not apart. We have to focus on letting our suffering make us supple, not brittle, especially towards teachers, other parents, those who have dealt with the most profound fallout of this endless winter.

And you know what nourishes a supple heart? Community and honest confusion. A group of people who can say to one another— “Wow, isn’t being a person in the world a terribly hard and wonderful thing? Have you figured out how to do it?”

Last week, a group of Oakland parents and I gathered for a Zoom call where we tried not to debate, but just to reflect on what and who we don’t know, how we are trying to know more and different things, all the questions we have about de-centering our own kids (who are fine, will be fine) and looking out for our neighbors who don’t have as much of a safety net or launching pad. The air felt so different on that call. I almost felt like I had to turn the sound up on my computer; the hot volume of righteousness and blame so common to these kinds of conversations was absent.

So who are we when we’re not so damn sure? Turns out: we’re confused and authentically sad. Which might sound disempowering, but the call actually ended with us realizing we wanted to do more than scream about reopening. We wanted to be good partners and stewards of a longer term movement for the education all kids deserve in our city. I felt my broken heart pumping in my chest.

I’m soothed by the idea that maybe all the women I’ve loved who died this year are together, drinking cocktails, laughing their asses off at their impeccable timing. Maybe Frida is there, too—that rascally monkey on her shoulder. If there’s anything they taught me in life it was that, come what may, (and wow, does a lot come) humble curiosity and a supple heart are key to survival.

Even if everyone is dead lately, my sweet Stella, we’re still here and we’ve got that legacy to live up to.

*Stella is, in fact, Stella Parker Martin Cary. Pictured here with her namesake (and her sister and momma) when we still did things like get on planes and go to our beloved Wisconsin.