(R)evolution
You can't spell revolution without evolution.
The space between my mother and me, the space between her and her mother.
Each evolution rooted in a new form of care, role modeling, hardship, disappointment, expression, protection, and love.
Evolution is an organic process explained, in hindsight, by just-so stories:
We turned out this way because....
There is no one because. You can't draw a line between my Nana and me without missing a million variables lost to time.
Many social scientists study things they can make definitive claims about using causal inference. This rules out nearly all the interesting questions.
We are messy, embedded, constantly changing. We change the world as we interact with it. Very little can be held constant.
Isn't that beautiful?
It doesn't mean we can't identify patterns, or hypothesize, or even act on those hypotheses.
But they are just that: guesses in the dark as we grope towards a more caring, more just world.
__________
Some days, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for my mom. Born to a Catholic mother of six and an atheist father shaped by war, raised in Ohio near a sacred Indian mound, she has forged a path unthinkable to her grandmother.
Finally individuating after all these years -- a rough, too-long transition that nearly wrenched the two of us apart -- we rejoin as adult women who have experienced great pain, great love, and great trust from communities who have seen us as teachers and mentors and guides.
I am thankful for things that embarrassed me growing up:
The thoughtful birthday celebrations with homemade food instead of the Chuck E. Cheese celebrations of my peers
The coming-of-age ritual she created when I was 12 to pass wisdom from her female friends to me where they all painted a shield for me to wield as I grew
The refusal to buy me trendy plastic garbage that killed the planet
I get it, now.
To hold that boundary against your own daughter's insistence that she knows better is true bravery.
__________
To this day, my mom insists that I use feeling words: mad, sad, glad, she says.
You cannot think a feeling. You can just be a feeling.
You cannot think the revolution into being. You can just be the revolution.
You cannot think evolution into being. You just evolve.
