What's going on here? I remember exclusive behavior. I remember "I don't like you," and "you can't play with us," and of course, later, cool and uncool, invited and not-invited...but I don't remember it in preschool. I thought about how hard my husband and I work to teach Avery the "right" way to behave, the "right" things to say and do, and realized with a flash that she may be learning something very different from her school community. Whose fault is that? The possibilities raced through my mind. Is it the little girl's fault? Her parents' fault? The teacher's fault? My fault for leaving her there, for having a career which means she's in full-time daycare? I spent the day embracing each of these possibilities in turn, getting angry in a way I think only a parent can, utterly unable to focus on anything else.
Then, last night, I went back to Ceremony, and to the idea of the web of community. After talking to old man Ku'oosh, Tayo becomes "certain of something he had feared all along, something in the old stories. It only took one person to tear away the delicate strands of the web, spilling the rays of the sun into the sand, and the fragile world would be injured."
Later in the evening I spoke to a friend who is a child psychologist. "It's happening more and more," she said of the kind of behavior I'd witnessed, "and with younger and younger kids. Mostly girls." What I had seen, I realized, was evidence of a tear in the web. A community problem. And to address it I'd have to start thinking about bigger issues than "whose fault?"
I can't help thinking that Silko's right -- that the Western (and, as Cassandra's presentation so effectively illustrated, Christian) tradition of morality, in which we're taught to be moral individuals, to mind our individual souls, to do the "right thing" out of a sort of Kantian or biblical sense of duty, is part of the problem. What we somehow need to absorb is that our actions -- all of them -- affect the web of community that is our very life-support system. As Silko's novel so beautifully illustrates, the dangers of thinking we're disconnected, that our actions affect only ourselves, is the source of not only ecological but also ethical disaster.
I don't know what to do about girls being mean at younger and younger ages, any more than I know what to do about the factory farm system, or poverty, or global warming. But I do know, now, that I live in a community, that its problems are my problems, and its health, my health. So tonight, we'll go though the closets and find some old coats to bring to the school's coat-drive, and Avery and I will bring a loaf of homemade bread to my neighbor with the broken ankle, and we'll pick up a couple of strands in our tiny little corner, and start mending.
I think it's horrible what happened with your daughter. We find the harsh realization that as a country, or better yet, as a community we are at some place or point failing each other not only in the realm of what it means to be a "community" but what it means to be human. We tear each other down with these words such as "your not cool" and "we don't like you" and although some may be unaffected by it, some are greatly hurt and loose a sense of their self worth (Tayo reference here). This lost sense of self worth was what drove me to focus my presentation on identity. When violence or even "mean girls" break down who we are and a piece of ourselves is lost, our identity is broken. We question ourselves, who we are, where we come from, and soon enough we begin to start searching, much like Tayo, for "wholeness".
ReplyDeleteIn Tayo's case, an even more important piece of the puzzle is that he is already broken down from the violence of the war, his "half breed" heritage, pressures from the Laguna culture as well as the Western. Identity is important not just on an individual level but for community. When the members of our community slowly fade away, loosing themselves, what does this do to the whole? More and more people find themselves lost, the community is broken here, and the whole is affected. But where does this leave us if our community is breaking and the people have lost themselves? It leaves us right where Tayo is, on a journey to discovery and recovery. I believe, that through this journey, although I would never want my future children to experience hurt or pain, sometimes the ugliest path is the most rewarding. Through experience, this journey or "ceremony" of becoming whole again leads us back to our self, our identity. I think your daughter, will be strong willed, as shown by her lack of interest with "mean girls", and will carry on all the more strong because of these experiences. Almost all of us have been hurt at some point, and although it is unwanted, it is the feeling of pain that lets us appreciate joy. It is the hard questions in life, those moments that give us answers, the understanding of who we really are.
ps. your daughter is adorable lol