I take my job as a mother very seriously. I want my daughter to grow up in a world better than the one I grew up in.
Alexis turned 13 the other day and I realized this could never be so.

I grew up in suburbia. I went to good schools in good neighborhoods with the sons and daughters of good, hard working people. My daughter’s world looks much the same. I park my mid-sized car, in front of my middle class home in my middle class neighborhood where my daughter plays with the sons and daughters of good hard working people. Our worlds look so very much alike, but there is something in her world I can never see, touch or reach, no matter how much I want to.

I grew up white in white America. My daughter is growing up brown. To those who know her casually, this may seem a misstatement. She is as fair skinned as any of my red-haired ancestors, but her delicate features, wide almond eyes and sheen of straight black hair speak her father’s Asian heritage. To the casual observer, she is a beautiful physical amalgamate of two worlds. Look more deeply into those dark eyes and you will see. In her soul, she is brown. Brown like her daddy. Brown like her grandma. Brown like her many aunts and uncles and cousins… her people, who bear her same features, carved in caramel skin.

When she was born, pale as a fish’s belly, her paternal grandmother patted my arm and said “She is mestiza. Fair Asian beauty”, sounding slightly surprised that her family’s dark skinned, Pilipino genes had been overwhelmed by my pasty Anglo ones.

For many years, her racial identification was not something I ever gave a thought to. She was simply my daughter. There were a few awkward moments for strangers who assumed her exotic features counter-pointing my own white bread ones meant she was adopted, but those were quickly resolved with an icy “No, she’s mine. Wanna see the stretch marks?” to anyone rude enough to ask. Starting her in school gave a brief moment of pause when filling out forms that insisted I make an ethnic selection. ‘Other’ sounded like she was an alien, there was no choice to describe her, and so I went with “Asian”. It wasn’t something I gave a lot of thought to. She was simply my daughter.

The last few years, this subject … the subject of color, race, ethnicity has forced itself into my consciousness, from my daughters world, into mine. As she began to explore the world and bring home stories of her day, I realized that although our worlds looked the same, they were not. I realized that even though our worlds looked the same, the way the world looked at us was as different as night and day. That my daughter has experiences with the world that I cannot empathize with or even truly understand. I worried about this.

There are things my child understood too soon. The subtle underpinnings of being different. The blessing and burden of not being homogenized. The reality that sometimes, different is seen as less than.
She bears this knowledge with as much grace and style as a 13 year old can muster. Painfully, (for me) she must bear it alone.

I can never know what she knows. I can never feel what it is like when classmates call her chink or gook. I have no real explanation why that grown man at the restaurant snarled at her to ‘get back on the boat she came here on’ when she accidentally bumped into him.

I cannot deny the racist tone of a teacher who suggested that she should be better at math, because “she is Asian.” These experiences are a foreign land whose borders I cannot cross.

I worried about how she would steer herself through these treacherous lands without me.

Today we went shopping for the Halloween costume she has coveted since seeing it in the mall last week. She had finally nagged and worn me down enough to convince me that this was as good a time as any to break my ‘I hate the mall and will only go there at gunpoint’ rule.

She was so excited, she chattered the entire way there describing every minute detail of this beautiful costume. We arrived at the store and she pounced on it immediately, excitedly pointing out every detail just as she had described. It was adorable and I knew she would be adorable in it.
I handed her the cash and she went to make her purchase while I absentmindedly browsed (ok, maybe I don’t hate shopping, but I still hate the mall)

As the clerk was ringing up her purchases, I heard her say “A Chinese Alice In Wonderland?” the sarcasm dripping from her words.
I was about to step in, irate and ready to fling demands to see the manager, when I heard my daughter sweetly say “yeah, isn’t it great? Here in America, you can be anything you wanna be.”
She then leaned in and looking the girl straight in the eye, in an icy tone I didn't know she had, said, “Of course that probably doesn’t apply to the truly ignorant… get used to being a cashier.”

With that she collected her change and her purchase, smiled sweetly and literally skipped out of the store… leaving both the clerk and myself in shocked, jaw dropped silence.

Today I learned what else my daughter got from me besides fair skin.
Today I learned to worry a little less.

Sunday.
Seems as good a day as any to slip into melancholy.

I’m suffering the malady known as writers block…if there is such a thing. Generally when I have nothing to write, I try other creative outlets to help spark …something.

Today, I woke early, snatched up my cameras and headed out to shoot some pictures of the turning leaves. Not my usual subject matter….I prefer faces, close, tight shots, stolen through a telephoto lens… the subject unaware. I’m a voyeur at heart.

I drove in what I thought was a random direction, no specific destination in mind…well…not conscious mind.

I found myself at the dirt road that led to Delaney’s cabin. A small A- frame tucked back in a thicket of trees by the river. Funny, when I loosely planned this photo session, I had pictured myself at the lake by the park, trees reflecting in bright sunshine.

Yet here I was, at this place. A place now so overgrown with trees the sun couldn’t slice its way through. A dark, quiet, brooding place. I got out of my car without the cameras and began the long walk to the cabin. What used to be a well- worn path, now overgrown and barely visible.

The cabin.
We used to come here, all of us. Friends, artists and writers bubbling with the sweet nectar and bile of creativity. No matter the weather, someone would feel the need to gather forces and we would all find the time, the food, the sleeping bags and the wine.

As I walked along today, my mind drifted, remembering a weekend spent here four years ago.

Always the last to arrive, (clever timing on my part to avoid the initial chores of gathering wood for the fireplace or cleaning the remnants of our last communal visit) my appearance at the clearing that led to the cabin was greeted with shouts and cheers as they ran toward me. I dropped everything I had lugged up that path and bowed deeply with a flourish, signaling that the queen had finally arrived. They all gathered round… rummaging through my bags for the bottles of wine they knew I always brought. Treasures found, they carried it gleefully back to the cabin; leaving me to repack the remnants of my pillaged belongings and drag them the rest of the way myself.

That was the first of what I knew from experience would be many loving nudges to my ego. I would nudge the occasional ego in return. This was who we were…what we did. We would eat and drink and share our latest masterpieces and lovingly kill one another’s babies.

"To be a writer, you must be able to kill your babies."

Ron was one of the most gifted writers in our small group. He was well educated and well published, but that wasn’t what mattered in this group, most of us were well educated and many more frequently published than Ron. His writing mattered. His gift was obvious to anyone who was able to read and fortunate enough to read him.

We all knew. Even in this wildly talented group, he was the one with the real gift.

"The clever use of words, the cute phrases that you are so proud and smug about?
Kill them.
Rip them out.
Hefty bag them and drag them to the curb.
Like your real babies nobody is going to love them or think they are as cute and clever as you do. Kill your babies."

So we would gather in this place, to eat and drink and commit infanticide in the name of art.

We would discuss writing and art theory, share new books and authors we had discovered. We would brutally critique and edit one another’s work and become better writers in the process.

Today, walking toward the cabin along the river I remembered all of this.

I remembered the wine, the conversations, the laughter… the critiques. I remembered the bodies of my own ‘babies’, floating like confetti in this river.
I remembered that this was where I learned to write.

Two years ago we gathered here for the last time… to scatter Ron’s ashes in this place he loved so well.

Today I climbed the stairs to the small A-frame and wrote above the door:

Kill your babies.

i want biology
the integrity of pulse & sinew & bone
history
photography
documents of vision, fingertips & tongue