When the Icon of Us Transitioned to ‘Normal’ our Family Got Lost

Rollerskiing on the Mineral Belt

I dance through the crowded kitchen, many years of practice guiding my steps and I casually collide with Evelyn, Christi’s mom, as she pours crepes onto the grill and simultaneously makes tea. I hug Ava, one of our alums - and now an assistant District Attorney - as I retrieve the boiling water from the counter and pour it into my French press which contains a mixture of Jackie’s Java Hazelnut medium roast mixed with extra dark French roast. My heart trills between heavy and light as I oscillate between thoughts of my mother, beginning her fight against breast cancer, and thoughts of the rest of my family that I now dance around.

My sister, bursting through the old blue accordion door proclaims her good morning. She wears a beautiful sparkly top with checkers in shades of blue and black. It’s lined with lace on the top and bottom and has thin spaghetti straps that Becca is sure to tell us are particularly affirming since she is not allowed to wear them in the elementary school where she teaches.

“Wow,” I proclaim,

“Woooo,” Kyle purrs with the kind of attraction that most men reserve for the woman in the clothing and not the clothing itself. His hand runs over the fabric as Becca does her ‘turn on the catwalk’ and I allow myself a decadent moment to ponder and then refuse to name the intimacy that I feel for him.

Meghan – often lovingly termed ‘little Megs’ by the team – says, “Yeah, I’d buy a car from you if you were wearing that shirt.” The queen of one-liners, Meghan never fails to evoke laughs and, simultaneously, a slightly edgy feeling that she both adores and keeps recipients of her semantics feeling humble.

I momentarily wonder what the maximum capacity of this small kitchen really is? I imagine we’ve packed as many as twenty athletes into it at points in the past.

Elise sits across from me. She is contemplating the kombucha in front of her in a way that only a student of microbiology can. It appears to be a bit more ‘gassy’ than usual, a state that is affirmed by one turn of the cap and the ensuing lines of bubbles that coil in erratic paths around the chia seeds. While still keeping an eye on her crepe and tea making, Evelyn notices a disaster about to happen and grabs a large glass pitcher. She places the bottle into the pitcher and tells Elise to open the bucha upside down in the pitcher. Skeptical and now the center of attention, Elise begins to turn the lid again, slowly and then faster.

“It’s gonna blow,” says Christi’s dad, Dick

Still skeptical, Elise makes one more turn.

To say that the Buch blew would be an understatement. Evelyn will find chia seeds on the ceiling for years to come.

“Every time you find a chia seed, it will remind you of Elise,” says Christi with fondness

Ben – recently nicknamed SIMBA (acronym Sexy Intellectual Metro Bad Ass) - bursts through the front door. He is returning from his favorite downtown Leadville Haunt called City on the Hill where he has retrieved his signature drink: two shots of espresso over with chocolate over ice.

“Did you sleep well,” I ask him

“Rachel, Oh My God, you have no idea, I sleep the best EVER under the stars on the porch.”

Whenever we visit Leadville in the summer, all of the athletes lug large pads, sleeping bags and pillows out to the edge of the upstairs porch where they sleep in a huge puppy pile. They call Dick and Evelyn’s mountain house, “The (Weasley) Burrow” and by all rights, it is. A late turn of the century Victorian, it was, like many of the Leadville homes, built without a foundation. It sits at the top of 7^th street and overlooks the streets of downtown in the foreground and if these colorful streets fail to reward one’s gaze a tilt of the head brings the bald mountains of the Mosquito range into focus.

“Did you have good dreams,” I ask Ben.

“I dreamed about us all night,” he replies. “You had decided to buy a Ferrari for the team and you and I and Elise were all raging up a twisted mountain pass in this red Ferrari. You were loving the speed and Elise was telling us we should slow down. And then we got to the top of this mountain where we had built this huge ski team mansion. But there was no place to park the Ferrari…. It was so realistic. Did you dream?”

I hum Ingrid Michelson’s, You and I in response to Ben’s dream before telling him about my dream. I had freed a tiny poodle terrier dog that was living with an old alcoholic man in a dilapidated apartment building. I vividly remember the feel of stroking the happy wiggling body and brushing all of the dirt and excess hair from its back. I had run and run with this dog but I had no leash and eventually, in a sea of people, it had disappeared.

“That sounds symbolic,” says Ben.

“Indeed,” I say, “I wonder if it is representative of a conversation that I shared with a prior student, Andrej, yesterday in which I had expressed my desire to liberate minds, to allow learners to pursue their inquiry, to solve problems rather than to be domesticated, to be trapped by the traditional reductionist educational approaches. Andrej had countered that if we were to realize this vision, if all young minds were freed, than wouldn’t this simply become the dominant paradigm and wouldn’t, then, we be the oppressors?”

“Oh I see,” says Ben, “So you freed the dog only to then be troubled by loosing it.”

“Yes, I think that might be…”

Deep in this thought, I realize that Evelyn’s hands are on my shoulders, “I couldn’t sleep a wink last night; I was so worried about your mom.”

Yesterday I had accompanied my mom to the oncologist and we had found, despite our earlier optimism that her cancer could be treated with radiation alone, a short course of chemo would be needed. The 3+ cancer despite the tumor having been fully removed was HER2+. This growth-promoting protein (Human Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor 2) indicates that the cancer is the type that can aggressively spread. This had been a huge blow for both my mother and I and despite the large, gold and orange aura of the incredible buxom black female oncologist reassuring us that in her estimation my mom was, “cancer free – we just want to keep it that way!”, we had left the hospital with our hearts on the floor and our memories trapped twenty-four years in the past when Eric, one of our beloved daycare children, had lost his battle to leukemia. 

But in the moment I cannot muster tears, I just say, “Cancer is a fucking bitch.”

I tell Ev that she should call my mom on Skype and as I say so my mind recalls the day before when a co-worker had mistaken my mom for Evelyn. My mom just laughed and said, “People are always mistaking us so now we just say that we are sisters. We just love each other!” The power of this single statement had nearly knocked me off my feet. Explaining the evolution of a relationship between the mothers of two queers who were lovers before it was trendy is difficult.

Warmth… my family brings me warmth…

And with this feeling I recall that only two days ago when Shwa (short for Joshua), one of my advisees who is spending the summer helping me enter knowledge survey data for an education research project, burst through my office door and said, “You know that saying, Blood is thicker than water, so, that’s not a thing. The original saying was actually, The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, meaning that “battle-forged” bonds are more important than those you are just born into.” Elated with this realization about an expression that I had always loathed, I had run to ski team practice and immediately shared this with my athletes, my family.

In January of this year I had been contacted by the Wyoming Democratic Party. They were seeking pictures of LGBT couples and families to assist in passing non-discrimination legislation and wanted one from me. I immediately replied with a photograph of my family and the following explanation (Jan 9, 11:57 am):

Christi and I would love to share a photo of our family. The Men’s and Women’s Nordic Ski Team is most certainly our family. We have lots of photos and certainly some professional UW ones. I am preferential to the one that we took in Trentino, Italy last year but let me know if it doesn’t ‘fit the bill’. Oh and Christi and I are the ones in the red coaching bib.

UW Nordic AKA Team USA at the World University Games in Trentino, Italy.

I received this reply immediately:

Thank you! I love this picture, I’ll pass it along to our digi experts and see if it is what they’re looking for or if we can try for another one. I appreciate your help so much!!

However, at 12:53 pm, I received another reply:

Hmmm it seems [name of powers that be] are wondering if you have a picture of just the two of you and one that is in Wyoming? I still love this picture and I’m going to see if I can get the to use both together.

At 4:11 pm, I replied with two pictures of Christi and I alone (I would later regret sending any other photos):

…the first picture is one that Christi and I like. The second is a more quintessential ‘couples’ photo. This may be what [the powers that be are] looking for. However, of course, if it’s our family you want than that’s the ski team.

My depth of my sadness that night was unbearable. An image that reflected the norm, one that showed Christi and I with the Snowy Range in the background, a 6-month old blonde baby in a Gerry Carrier, probably best with our Subaru and our Golden Retriever. The picture must show that we are just like you with only one difference: we happen to both be women. With the transition of the icon of lesbian couple to the norm, our real family was lost. On that note, a clarification is needed: We have neither a Subaru nor a Golden Retriever. Oh, and that 6-month old blonde baby, that’s not a thing. Instead, try two queers who believe in the power of variable intimacies and have raised one hell of a ski team over the last seventeen years!

Perhaps my moment of stubborn rejection of the norm allows me to slowly reenter my actual space of the kitchen. Sindre’s hands literally leap into the air seemingly disembodied from his core and he says, “No WAY!” He has been telling Christi about his most recently beloved economics book, Think Like a Freak.

“Oh my gosh Sindre,” I say, “You sound just like Kyle! You are picking up all of his expressions!”

Kyle and Sindre are roomies this summer in the house on Bradley.

“Wait What?” Kyle says. This is the most cliché Kyle expression and the irony leaves the entire room laughing.

“Soon,” I say to Sindre, “You will be saying ‘Wait What?” too”!

MY FAMILY ROCKS MY WORLD!

~Rachel Watson

Seeking Freedom with Huckleberry Finn: Realizing that True Compassion Often Feels “so Miserable”

 It was sunny and warm when we pulled into the parking lot of the Country Grocer in Hannibal, Missouri. Making our way home from Canada, we had detoured from the northern route to avoid extreme weather in the Great Plains. Groggy from hours in the car, it wasn’t until we had filled containers with fresh salad, berries and cottage cheese, that we realized where we were. Christi bubbled up with excitement that this was the very place that Mark Twain had grown up. Elated with her realization and utterly disappointed with Becca for saying that she had never read the book, Christi insisted that we all spend the remainder of the trip listening to the new audio book in which Elijah Wood reads Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

            Quotes by Mark Twain had colored our entire journey and we had begun to rediscover his brilliance through our adult eyes. Contrasted with the childhood memory of his adventure tails, we now connected with his social commentary, his sometimes cynical way of calling attention to injustice, to the way in which ‘progress’ leaves so many disenfranchised. Thus, as we drove for the next twelve hours, we fell in love again with the tail of Huckleberry and Jim as they float along the Mississippi, Jim searching for his freedom from slavery. For Huckleberry, the discovery of characters along the river is transformational but his introspective discovery of his own potential for compassion was, for me, the most powerful. As an educator I often seek stories that exemplify difficult concepts in a meaningful way and I realized that Huckleberry’s internal dialogue perfectly communicated the way in which we internalize society’s norms and with time, society needn’t even shame and punish us, we do it all by ourselves! Perhaps, the following passage was most powerful. It describes the point at which Huckleberry and Jim think they are near the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi where Jim may be able to get passage on a steamboat and make his way to the free states. I could not listen to this passage without replacing ‘conscience’ with ‘society’s internalized norms’: [*please note that I transcribed this from the audio book so please excuse any differences between this and the written text.]

Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well, I could tell you, it made me all over trembly and feverish too, to hear it, I began to get it through my head that he was most free and who was to blame for it? Why me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest. I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing, but now it did and it stayed with me and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I weren’t to blame because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner, but it weren’t no use, conscience up and says everytime, but you know he was running for his freedom, you coulda paddled ashore and told somebody. That was so. I couldn’t get around that, no way. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me, what had poor Ms. Watson done to you that you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did that poor old woman do to you, that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book. She tried to learn you your manners. She tried to be good to you everyway she knowed how. That’s what she done. I got to feeling so mean and so miserable. I almost wished I was dead. I fidgeted up and down the raft abusing myself to myself. 

Perhaps the message in this passage needs no commentary to gain evidence. And thus, perhaps I write simply for my own freedom. Huckleberry, despite being less than poor, imprisoned by an abusive father and outside the Norm in so many ways, has internalized the values of the Norm. He had been taught that everything that is ‘right’ and ‘good’ included ownership of another person. By even considering allowing himself to help a slave gain freedom, he was behaving counter to what was right. So much so that he punishes himself to the point of wishing to be dead.

This so acutely reminds us that being in a place of privilege (Huckleberry is white and he is not a slave) and acting for the freedom of someone outside of that place often feels so terrible that one would rather be dead. In Huckleberry’s recounting that Ms. Watson, “tried to be good to you in everyway she knowed how,” we are forced to consider that a ‘good’ woman is also an oppressor [*Please check out the writings of Peggy Macintosh for more sexy-minded consideration of this subject.]

Queer theory asks us to notice that things that we now treat as simple facts (that slavery is wrong), were / are not simple facts. Many, like Huckleberry, had to act outside of society’s standards, they had to feel sometimes unbearable self shaming in order to eventually allow this to be something that the Norm now considers a simple fact. The more ways in which one aligns with the Norm, the more punishment one may have to endure in order to truly act with compassion. That is, living with compassion may mean living counter to everything that you have been taught is ‘right’ and ‘good’. As it did for Huckleberry, it may get you feeling allover ‘mean’ and ‘miserable’. Perhaps this is why, when we act in such a way that we feel is benevolent, when our actions evoke in us a feeling of self-congratulations, we may need to ask whether we are truly acting with compassion. Instead, acting with true compassion is acting such that we somehow free the person whom is the most controlled or owned by others, the person whose very existence is evidence to the Norm that they have power, that they have advantage, that they have it better than someone else. If one can say, “I am just so sad for that person’s suffering,” than none of us are truly free.

             
Rachel Watson