Because I Said So (28 page)

My son was talking about the urban preying of the so-called

“groomed male” on the opposite sex.

The specifics were the following and I put them to you, reader, now: Should I not have been somewhat wide-eyed and speechless, at least momentarily, in response?

As I said, there we were, in the kitchen, when he shared with me how the girl he was “kicking it with” lately had stopped talking to him. We had been away for a weekend—one of those “family trips”

on which I had successfully coerced my son into accompanying me to an event related to my public life. During this particular weekend he had intentionally not notified the girl he was seeing of his where-abouts. “I wasn’t that interested in her, I guess,” he admitted.

Ah. To have had the vantage point of a nineteen-year-old guy’s honesty when I was a girl! How many hours on the phone with my girlfriends would that have spared me? “I thought you liked her!” I said, remembering the conversation when he said how beautifully she played the cello, the same instrument he had studied in high school. They seemed to have something in common, at least.

“I like her all right,” he said, standing next to me like a poplar tree. (I got over the height disparity in relation to power
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dynamics between us when he was twelve and had passed me by.

It took a few months, but I was determined.) You can’t push. You can’t say too much. You mustn’t show your eagerness to right their world, to fight off the dragons, to show them that the thirty years you have on them is worth something even if you lived those years way back in the Garden of Eden. I went about my business. All ears, I relentlessly wiped the counter like an obsessive-compulsive. I may have begun to whistle a little tune to really feign only the most casual interest in his big, fat, mysterious, juicy life outside the paltry world of my half-abandoned and orderly apartment.

He shrugged his bony shoulders. “I just wasn’t into her, you know? Once she showed she was interested.”

The blood left my brain. Would I faint or grab the nearest blunt instrument at this news, which was in such opposition to all the feminist principles I had ever tried to instill in him? Not by words. Not by lesson plans. I never said, “This is what a decent guy does and this is what a jerk does.” Not outright. Not even to other members of the male gender when within his hearing range.

Still one hopes, against the monolithic onslaught of society, that a mother gets her message across on an impressionable young mind.

Stay calm, I told myself, rubbing the sides of my pulsing temples.

“You getting a headache?” he asked.

“You mean to say,” I asked, “that it’s all about the thrill of the chase or else you lose interest?”

He nodded. Proudly. Confidently. Standing there with his hip-hop baggy pants and paint-stained hands from nocturnal graffiti activities, T-shirt with photos of Che, Subcomandante Marcos, and Malcolm X, with block letters underneath reading: WE ARE

NOT A MINORITY.

“In other words”—I needed to paraphrase what he’d just confirmed to give myself a little time to absorb it—“if a girl goes after you, you are automatically not interested in her on principle.”

“Oh, without a doubt. I’m a hunter.”

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“Okay, Bambi,” I said. “As you go off to join the thundering herd, what do you expect from the girl now? You blew her off.

You were rude. What do you want from her anyway?

People say my son has my eyes. They are very dark. When he was a child, after someone made such an observation, he’d answer, not quite comprehending but already defiant, “No, I don’t. I have my own eyes.” I don’t know about mine, but his get even darker when he gets pensive, like a mood ring, with black raven eyebrow wings-in-flight above them, set against the wind.

“I’d still like us to be friends,” he said, sounding a tad remorseful, this confession maybe something he wouldn’t admit to his crew. “I mean, it’s awkward when we run into each other now. It would be nice to talk like we used to at least.”

I don’t think we ever discuss our sons losing their virginity the way the world observes the loss of sexual innocence in a girl. But I suspect I know at what point in his life and with whom it happened in the case of my son.

How quickly we learn, after that first rush of carnal passion, that sex isn’t everything. He was going on twenty soon, on the autumn solstice; his teenage years about to disperse like countless memory motes floating around him for the rest of his life. To plague him. To cheer him in more complex times, perhaps, with their simplicity.

“So why don’t you talk to her about it?” I asked.

“Whenever I see her, she’s with her girlfriends and ignores me,” he said. Perhaps as much as she knew, now, that he was a hunter, she knew she needed the protection of her pack.

“Call her then,
Mi’jo
,” I urged. “Ask her to meet you somewhere for a cup of coffee so that you can explain things to her.

More than anything, bottom line, women want to be respected as people. They’re not pillage.”

In the next few seconds, as this simple statement began to sink in and the racket of innumerable influences from all around that had been delivering the very opposite message was pushed aside, at least for the present, the black thunderbolts of his expressive eyebrows relaxed, as if a storm had just passed. His
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slightly slanted eyes brightened. He pulled out his cell phone, went to the living room to call her, and left a message. He was all smiles when he came back into the kitchen.

Now I remember what we were doing that day in the kitchen.

We were having tacos, the kind we Mexicans enjoy, especially on Sunday—where you get meat already cooked at your local
car-nicería
and you put each taco together yourself. A warm corn tortilla, chunks of
carnitas
or
barbacoa
, add on
salsita
, sour cream and avocado slices—it’s a cholesterol fest for the arteries. For some reason, both
Mi’jo
and I insist on eating standing up, just like at the taco stands in Mexico.

“You’re great, Mom. I’m so glad I talked it over with you.” He grinned, reaching for a tortilla to start on another taco, thereby proving to me that he hadn’t been bitten by a vampire after all.

“It’s what a mother lives for.” I smiled back, although, for sure, once he moved back in I would miss the prancing around in the last summer days in my undies, like Jill Clayburgh in
An Unmarried
Woman
. But, then, there is no such thing as an “unmothered woman,” which doesn’t even make sense. Or maybe it could, if you really gave it some deep thought and were open to the concept. But not for me. Any feminist of my day worth her salt knows: The re-evolution starts with one man at a time.

Wolves at the Door

K a r i n L . S t a n f o r d

My grandmother’s house
always smelled of gingerbread.

After the spicy scent made its escape from the kitchen, it ran wild and seeped into anything that would hold its sweetness—the curtains, the couch, the sheets and pillowcases. Even the paint on the walls was soaked with it. Entering my grandmother’s house was like walking into a fairy tale, full of magic and music, safety and promise. My grandmother’s house was a place where little girls could wear bright red coats and ribbons tied in bows at the ends of their pigtails, a place where the wolves would not enter, where the world could be kept at bay. My grandmother’s house was, if nothing else, a refuge.

Inside the comfort and protection of my grandmother’s house there was a beauty that I claimed—or perhaps it claimed me.

When I was in my grandmother’s presence, I was told that I was beautiful, that I was talented, that not only would I grow up to be successful but I would also marry a wonderful, sensitive, and successful man. My husband would shield me from harm and pain; he would take care of our family’s financial and emotional needs.

We would have wonderful children. “Are you sure about that?” I would ask my grandmother, trying to mask my doubt and insecurity with playfulness.

“Yes, Karin, I am sure,” my grandmother would always say as she pulled me into her embrace, into her challenge to prevail.

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“You’re gonna make us all proud.” And during those times I dared to believe, if only for a few precious moments, that she was right, that I could be anything—whoever or whatever I chose to be.

But outside of all that—outside of the house, the fairy tale, the dream—there was another reality: a world of joblessness and hopelessness, of broken-down, dilapidated schools and drunken men on street corners. It was a truth that belonged to the world, not to me, but I felt forced to own it. I was an ordinary black girl living in South Central Los Angeles, a place where fantasies of glass slippers and princes, piggies who went to market, bread crumbs and hot porridge could not survive for long. I was not special and, chances were, my life would never be charmed. I was—and most likely would always remain—a nobody.

But I became somebody. Several experiences during my childhood inspired a tremendous sense of belonging in me. I grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the eye of a mighty storm. I lived in the center of a city whose residents spoke their minds, a city in the midst of a moment in history—one plagued by fights for civil rights and inner-city rebellion. It was a time when black people in America were struggling to attain a new level of pride and dignity. Images of strong race women were commonplace in my neighborhood. Storefront windows, magazines, and newspapers, and the walls of neighbors’ home were adorned with images of activists such as Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, and Kathleen Cleaver.

I was raised in a family of women who were determined to see me succeed. In 1944 my grandparents had moved their family from Mississippi to California in search of a better life. My mother and aunts established their careers early as beauticians, grocery store checkers, and secretaries—the kinds of careers that were available to black women during the civil rights era. They demonstrated a strong work ethic for my siblings, cousins, and me, but they also understood the importance of community involvement. My grandmother volunteered her home as a polling station for local and national elec-tions. Our entire family helped prepare her home for those special days. I have fond memories of watching the voters line up to cast
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their ballots, of greeting our guests and playing with the children who accompanied their parents.

I wanted so desperately to emulate my elders and those strong race women I had come to admire. I was the first person in my family to get a college degree. I went on to earn a Ph.D. in political science, and my dissertation was published as a book.

I became a college professor. Then one year, while on sabbati-cal, I went to work in Washington, D.C., for an African American leader who had become an inspiration in my life. He championed the causes of the oppressed and advocated tolerance between the races. Our work was intellectually stimulating and professionally exciting. We had so much in common. I admired him, and he respected me. Our work relationship turned into friendship, then a romantic partnership, with the trappings of the enchanting fairy tales my grandmother had once described to me.

But my life was not a fairy tale. My Prince Charming was not single, and I was his employee. He assured me that his marriage was nontraditional. And in the myopic world of Washington politics, our “open secret” was quite common. Our colleagues, friends, and even some of his family members knew of our relationship. Still, I was not totally comfortable with it.

My discomfort was soon overshadowed by a more critical event in my life—I was diagnosed with breast cancer at age thirty-five. As a young African American woman, I knew that my prog-nosis was not good. Breast cancer is usually more aggressive in younger women, and even with equal care, African Americans are more likely to die from it than women of any other race.

Throughout my treatment, I was dazed and often depressed about the unexpected turn my life had taken. Although several family members traveled to be at my side, it was difficult to live so far away from home. But through the surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, I was never alone—my partner was always physically and spiritually with me. As I struggled for my life, I temporarily cast aside my reservations about our relationship and counted on his support. I know that cancer destroys some relationships, but ours only grew stronger.

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My treatments were successful, and my cancer went into remission. But then I was faced with another potential loss that cancer and chemotherapy can bring on: infertility. I had always hoped to become a mother, but I was told to bury that hope, to place it in my past. Even if my body returned to its regular hormonal rhythms, pregnancy could trigger a recurrence of cancer. Though I mourned the fact that I might never have a child of my own, I felt lucky just to have my own life. I didn’t want to tempt fate.

It seemed, however, that I had already done so. I discovered in August 1998 that, against all odds, I was pregnant.

My doctor advised me to terminate the pregnancy. I understood all the reasons why—all the scientific evidence, the facts, and the figures. He was most concerned that the increase in estro-gen that accompanies pregnancy might lead to a return of the cancer, and possibly death. But what I understood most was that I had been given a chance, one chance, to have a child. Yes, there was a risk that the cancer would return; there was also a possibility that it would not.

“If you have this baby,” my doctor warned, “you might not be here in five years.”