Mind Body Mama: Arrogance, Innocence

My child’s arrogance is breathtaking and it pushes all my buttons. At her recent physical, she told the doctor she plans to be Ruler of the Universe when she grows up. When Dr. Elizabeth suggested that she start with something smaller, like Mayor, and work her way up, Small balked. She’s starting at the top.

At Dr. I’s birthday party yesterday, a friend recounted Small telling her,

“I’m in Kindergarten, but I should be in second grade.”

“Why is that?” Kate wanted to know. “Were you homeschooled or something?”

“No,” said Small. “I’m just smart.”

It’s not untrue: she is really smart, and she could do most of the second grade work. But announcing it in public? I cringe. According to Small, she’s number one at any potential competition: karate, reading, taking eye tests. It’s relentless and it goes against all my good blue-collar Yankee upbringing of modesty and humility.

If I had time to read child development books I’m sure I’d be reminded that narcissism is an important stage of development leading to a strong sense of self or something equally heady and valuable. But day to day, I find the out placed arrogance of six really hard to stomach.

I try hard not to squash it, having been raised by a family who responded to any self-praise with snark like, “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back.” I try to avoid undermining sarcasm in general because I want my girl to wear her self confidence well. So when Small walked directly into a sign-post on the way to karate last week, I did not roll my eyes at her and mutter under my breath, “They tell me this is a gifted child,” as my parents might have.

At least, I did not do that within her earshot.

I try to accept Small’s unwarranted assurance in her own abilities—her belief that she is the fastest, smartest, and most magical child who ever lived—as her way of discovering her strengths and her place in the order of things.

It is nothing if not genuine, Small’s overwhelming love of herself and all things like her. That doesn’t make it any less stomach-churning for her mama.

Case in point: Back in the day when Hillary and Barack started running for the democratic nomination, Sweetiebabyhoneylicious and I had lots of conversations about which candidate we would support. It seems hard to believe now, having drunk the Obama kool-aid with tremendous enthusiasm, but at the beginning of that campaign he was almost completely unknown to me, while Hillary Clinton was someone I felt I knew and respected. This was long before we all knew the names of Obama’s daughters, dog, mother-in-law, and wife’s biceps.

Even before I made my decision of which candidate to support, I was profoundly moved by the fact that I would be voting for either a female or African-American as a major party candidate for President of the United States. Independent of the particulars, it felt like a privilege to participate in this historic vote. I tried to explain the portent to Small at breakfast one morning.

“In the whole history of our country, we’ve never had a president who was not a man with skin the same color as ours. That is really unfair, because so many Americans are women and people who have dark skin. That’s why it’s so exciting that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton might be the next president. What do you think of that?”

Small’s determination was swift. “I want Hillary Clinton to be president because I think someone with skin like ours should be president.”

It is fortunate that the primary aspect of my spiritual practice is breathing because that means I get to practice it a lot. Sometimes I even remember to do it when it would be most helpful. So I did not shout at my child, “What a horribly racist thing to say! Don’t ever let anyone hear you saying something like that ever again!”

Because that’s what immediately jumped into my mind: shame. I felt ashamed that my perfect, beautiful child could harbor such a hateful and prejudicial preference. I felt embarrassed that she did not know better, that I had failed to school her in anti-racism. Or that I had not shamed her into knowing that she could not say things like that, even if she thought them.

That last brought me a second wave of shame. Of course our goal should not be the suppression of racist utterings but the eradication of racist outlooks. In that split second I was knocked back a generation; appearance outpaced substance in my order of priorities. If Small’s tactless pride in her academic prowess makes me cringe, her xenophobic preference for her own kind left me horrified.

But I took a deep breath first. That breath gave me a moment to remember the other things Small liked about Hillary Clinton at the time—the number of mellifluous “el” sounds in her name, and the fact that she was female—like Small herself, and both her parents. I remembered that liking one’s own white skin is not the problem; expecting the spoils of white skin privilege and discounting the value of those with other skin colors is.

I remembered that arrogance is Small’s stock-in-trade this year. Her preference for a pale skinned, golden haired female might be just another instance of her belief that she herself is the best thing since sliced bread. I didn’t have to let this attitude stand unchallenged, but I didn’t have to shame it out of her either.

Sweetie was there at the breakfast table and we cobbled together a response to cover the issue, something along the lines of this:

“We don’t think it’s right to choose who’s best based on their skin color, or because they are like us. People with light skin have been doing that for a long time, and that’s how they make sure that people with other skin colors don’t get a fair chance at things. We don’t agree with that in our house.”

“Mmm-hmmm.” Here’s a thing about Small I really appreciate. She is an unpredictable six-year-old wacko, it is true. But when I get serious and attempt to explain something important to her, she usually attends to it with a very deep focus.

We talked about our values around race and how it can be challenging to understand people who are different from ourselves but how we believe it is very important. Small took in our little teaching with wide eyes, great thoughtfulness, and few comments.

Only a few short months later—months during which the media’s relentless sexism, covert racism, and Sarah Palin pageantry caused my brain to bleed on a daily basis—we walked to school singing Will I. Am’s Obama Song. Small voted for Obama in the Kindergarten election and Sweetie and I voted at the high school, and in January we all packed into our local restored 1890s opera house with the rest of our little valley to see Barack Obama, our 44th President and the first of African descent, sworn into office.

This whole episode came to mind this week as I read Lisa Belkin’s recap at The Motherlode of the online kerfuffle over white mother Jackie Morgan MacDougall’s 2008 momlogic post entitled "Mommy, Why Is Her Face Brown?" I can’t possibly recap the whole discussion here, but I encourage you to follow the links and check it out.

Suffice it to say that Jackie did not meet the original question with her best self. What got in the way of her better instincts? Shame, embarrassment, and valuing appearance over substance. Her deep breath came after the blogosphere discovered this post this month—better late than never, I guess—and pilloried her for it.

I’m glad that Jackie—and I—transcended our initial lame responses and committed to doing better in teaching our children about white skin privilege and racism. It’s really the very least that we could do. That said, I wish folks had been a little less awful to her about her initial misstep. I know I risk pillory in making any parallels between racism and homophobia, which is not my intent, but I would like to note that, as a queer, I know something about the phenomenon of allies. In my experience, some of the things that come out of the mouths of supposedly supportive straight people are truly cringe-worthy. The snarky family saying that comes to mind here is, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

But that’s not true. I’d rather have a fumbling friend than a hostile adversary any day. Someone who makes a well meaning gaffe can be taken aside quietly—or publically humiliated on the internet—and corrected, and she’ll do better next time. It took a lot of well meaning people making a lot of stupid mistakes for our country to get to the point where we could handle the essential fairness of considering—and electing—someone who’s not a white man for president. I wish that wasn’t the case, but good change moves at glacial speed.

It’s possible that I’m about to learn about my own blind spots when I make this post and the comments start coming in. Maybe I’m in for a smack-down of my own, one that will take a lot of deep breaths and soul searching to get through. That’s OK. I don’t want to be so afraid of getting it wrong that I stop trying to get it right in teaching my kid about her own privilege and responsibility as a white person. I don’t want GLBT allies to be so afraid of getting it wrong that they stop fighting for my rights.

We’re tripping over ourselves here. We’re hampered by our individual and collective histories of injustice and psychology; we’re about the least efficient army of change that could possibly be imagined. But we’re heading in the right direction. The spirit of the Obama campaign is not over: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. It is still time to step up; it is always time to step up. We can change ourselves, and we can change the world.