Letter to my descendants 2024
Talk, talk, talk. So much talk <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I was in high school and in my first years of college (before your grandmother died), my parents would sit me down to have these meetings. We\u2019d look at my painful report card and talk about strategies I was going to use to do better. I remember sitting in the living room feeling as though I wanted to itch my skin right off. I couldn\u2019t wait to get up, to get away, to end the conversation, to say or do whatever it took to leave that room. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I already felt bad. I knew I wasn\u2019t doing the work. I couldn\u2019t even explain why. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the two of you were in high school, we would sit down to have these meetings. We\u2019d look at your report cards or discuss a recent decision you\u2019d made, and we\u2019d talk about strategies you were going to use to do better. I remember sitting at the dining room table feeling as though I wanted to itch my skin right off. You couldn\u2019t wait to get up, to get away, to end the conversation, to say or do whatever it took to leave that room. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I knew you felt bad and you were infinitely better students than I was. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were all manner of factors beyond our control. There were things in my life I couldn\u2019t do anything about just as there were those things for you. Some came from the world \u2014 COVID \u2014 and some came from the private messes every family has. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
For me, somewhere late in college, it finally clicked in \u2014 just do the things you need to do to move forward. I stopped having semesters where I just checked out. I started caring or bringing enough energy to do the things that I cared about as well as the things I didn\u2019t necessarily care about but had to get done. Did these conversations help? Did the ideas, approaches, shame, pride, love, anger, all the emotions \u2014 did they change me and my behavior? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unclear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Did these conversations help either of you? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also unclear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,<\/em> What I\u2019m trying to get at, children, is some advice, some kernel of knowledge that I might share with you about how people change, about how you might parent better than I did, about how to initiate conversations or interactions that help rather than hurt. Maybe these conversations are necessary, maybe they did help, maybe as bad as they made me feel in that moment, they helped shape me into the adult I am now. Maybe our conversations will help you, did help you, and remain with you, one way or another. Maybe they form a kind of script that plays in your head that you sometimes acknowledge and sometimes reject. I hope the positive elements stick with you and the cruddy parts fade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I say it with students all the time: I\u2019m trying to create a classroom so that they figure things out with themselves as early as possible. There are things I wish I\u2019d figured out when I was twenty-five instead of thirty, things I wish I\u2019d figured out at sixteen rather than fifty-six. I feel the same thing as a parent: I know you\u2019ll make mistakes, but I hope they\u2019re new mistakes, not the dumb ones I\u2019ve made. If some of what we\u2019re saying ends up on a cassette that you play later in life, I\u2019ll take it, but only if that recording offers you some solace, some peace, not pain or shame. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Are these regrets? On blue days, to be sure. If only I had ____, then I would have ____. (Worked harder at guitar, I would have been a rock star!) But I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s true. While I do not and have never agreed with the idea that everything happens for a reason, I do believe that all of the experiences you have lead you to where you are right now. And these conversations mattered, they did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We live in an age where therapy is an accepted norm, where people are encouraged to talk to therapists, to physicians, an age where two things are widely accepted: one, if you talk to people, it helps, and, two, you can get to a root problem if you work hard enough at it. (There\u2019s a third option, now, that involves prescriptions and chemicals, but that\u2019s a harder conversation and beyond what I am trying to say here.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember talking to your Aunt J as we were both struggling with various things and she said, \u201cTalk, talk, talk\u2026so much talk.\u201d\u00a0 And I knew exactly what she meant: you feel blue or bad, and you\u2019re supposed to talk it out, to work it out, to break it down, with a friend or a therapist.\u00a0 Talking sometimes helps you get into the middle of an issue. And, in our verbal household where few things haven\u2019t been said, talking is a great way to make sense of stuff.\u00a0 But talking is just talking, and must end with next steps that you\u2019ll actually follow through on.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,<\/em> Maybe talking helps. Or maybe it helps sometimes. Being there does help. I don\u2019t remember much of these discussions with my parents but I knew that they were there, as much as they could be, with their damaged selves. I wonder if you\u2019ll remember the conversations you had with us, with our damaged selves. But we were there, we were at the table, we were trying. We\u2019re here. We\u2019re still here. Whether it\u2019s the Bananagram games that always seem to add badly, the walks that you still take with me to one library or another, or the moments you have with mom in the car having convinced her to drive you somewhere, we\u2019re here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The second thing I would say about these moments when you are struggling, when things are going well, and you both seem to have this already: you\u2019re not always going to think your way out of the issue. Thinking as talking, talking as thinking. I like this one podcast with a polarizing political figure who says this a lot: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Thinking won\u2019t get you out of trouble. Thinking is what got you into trouble. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Talking<\/em> won\u2019t get you out of trouble. Talking <\/em>is what got you into trouble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It has taken me a long time to realize that I can\u2019t think my way out of things, that I can\u2019t talk my way out of things. I think you both get this already, but I\u2019ll say it again. You can talk about how you\u2019re struggling with your statistics class or your ___, but you\u2019re almost always better served sitting down and working at it for forty five minutes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, Thanksgiving break just ended and I loved talking with both of you. Most of the time those conversations happened by accident \u2014 I was reading and you came into the room. Or we were waiting for a game to start. I\u2019m not saying that talking isn\u2019t the answer; maybe it\u2019s about the accident of having the right timing. And I don\u2019t know how to reconcile this emotion of how much I look forward to talking to both of you with the fear that it\u2019s all just talk. It\u2019s all just talk. What isn\u2019t, though, is how proud I am of both of you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Love, <\/p>\n\n\n\n Dad <\/p>\n\n\n\n I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain\u2019d,<\/em> As part of this assignment, we were asked to include section breaks from Walt Whitman\u2019s poem, Song of Myself. <\/em>\u00a0My first section break came from section three.\u00a0 My second break came from section forty-three. My third break came from section thirty-two. Reading Whitman alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates as a kind of outline for this project was once again quite helpful.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Letter to my descendants 2024 Talk, talk, talk. So much talk When I was in high school and in my first years of college (before your grandmother died), my parents would sit me down to have these meetings. We\u2019d look at my painful report card and talk about strategies I was going to use to do … Continue reading English Benchmark, Q2<\/span>
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
I take my place among you as much as among any,<\/em>
The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,<\/em>
And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
I stand and look at them long and long.<\/em>
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,<\/em>
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,<\/em>
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,<\/em>
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,<\/em>
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,<\/em>
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself<\/em>.\u00a0 Dover Publications, 2001.<\/p>\n\n\n\n