I know—certainly at the very least in my bluest of corners in the formerly true blue state of Massachusetts (pre-Scott Brown, that is)—I am not alone in feeling disappointed in Barack Obama’s response (Tuesday night, the past sixty days) to the BP Oil Disaster. The spill: that wasn’t his fault. The speech on Tuesday night was. I waited for a much tougher Obama not only to hold BP accountable but also to place this disaster much more squarely into the larger context and to announce a much stiffer set of standards and more ambitious plans to change our course in terms of planetary stewardship. When he ended with the idea that prayer could help us, my jaw dropped to the floor.
Next morning though, as I was walking my seven year-old to camp, I ended up reminding myself again that so much of what makes this particular President appear ineffective isn’t simply his lack of tough response, it’s the house of cards he moved into, imagining—as perhaps we all did a little more than we should have, naïve and hopeful us—the house had some more solid bits here and there. One link between BP and banking and health care and housing and military-related industry is this: the deregulation by the previous administration, the wink-wink-nod-nod moving of industry people into governmental positions and so often back out that predates the younger Mister Bush’s eight-year bent on destruction of the Government, all of this contributes so overwhelmingly to this President’s appearance of everything falling apart on his watch. He got the cardboard box about to split open with the 5,000-piece puzzle inside. What a freaking mess the guy was left.
It didn’t take much explaining for a seven year-old to get this: when you don’t have rules about how to run things fairly, corporations make greedy choices and pay no attention to the possible consequences and then… well, you have everything fall apart (examples I used with him, the oil spill and financial institutions’ collapse).
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I was glad for the reminder—made to myself by trying to explain to my son that the story isn’t simply one of Barack Obama* good President or bad President—that stories have complex narratives.
Writers who write about their own lives—in blogs, essays or memoirs—think about the complexity of narratives, of our lives, on a regular basis. So much of what happens within a family, for example, isn’t really a single person’s story or event.
The question of how to tell a story—one’s own—with sensitivity to how that story is simply one person’s perspective is difficult and often sets people off. Just this week, I had one of those comments on my blog that always stops me with steal-my-breath sudden panic. The commenter felt uncomfortable that I shared too many details about our adoption, a story the commenter believes is the child’s story. I’ve been reading about adoption from adoptive mother’s viewpoint, adoptee’s viewpoint and birth/first mother’s perspective, both before adopting ourselves and since. It’s a question other parents who write face about any number of parenting-related writing: drug addiction, illness, and on.
It’s something I’ve thought a great deal about in terms of my family—of origin and extended.
People come up with different answers for themselves. And answers evolve. In writing about our adoption, I find myself feeling 1) vulnerable, 2) determined to share my experiences because I want the imperfection of the adoption construct to be made clearer along with the incredible joys and 3) of the belief—one that could be dead wrong—that as we all muddle through our lives openness won’t be shocking or disturbing for our daughter, who will have grown up with similar candidness in her daily life. That said there are hard parts adults wrestle with that kids should not have to. Writing about one’s life makes it possible that a child will read something a parent wishes s/he did not. That’s a risk and one to take seriously. We are all evolving and as we do, so, too do our stories unfold. In our family, I trust we’ll find our way. Because ours has fallen on the side of openness—mantra about our now large in many ways family: more love is more love—I feel, perhaps naively, that we’ll handle or children’s increased awareness of complexity the way we handle what arises all the way through, in essence, as integral to our lives.
*Portrait featured by Remy Baskin, age seven
