Sunday, June 27, 2010
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Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Essay on Motherhood
(Author photo by Douglas Mott)
SOUTHERN ITALY
It was when I was at my most flustered, my most embarrassed, just after my four-year-old son, Kevin, had pooped in his shorts in the middle of a restaurant in Southern Italy when I received some words of wisdom from a fellow traveler.
In a rush to get out of our hotel room to go to lunch, I had put shorts on Kevin but no underwear. We had no other thought than getting the hungry kids to a restaurant. Blame it on change in diet or the excitement of being in a new locale, but just after our food arrived, Kevin, without warning, got up, suddenly started running toward a bathroom whose location wasn’t immediately obvious and, long story short, pooped in his shorts. This would have been bad enough if the poop had stayed in his shorts or if we had been near an exit, but it fell out in two successive piles on the floor right in the middle of this crowded and quaint restaurant.
If only my fellow diners had chosen this collective moment to look outside at the cobbled Italian street and take in the scenery or fall deep into conversation instead of glancing up. If only no one had noticed, but, of course, they did. The couple seated right across from us who was clearly on a romantic getaway stopped eating. Another woman who was just about to sit down literally shrieked and ran to the other side of the restaurant. I was so stunned that I didn’t know what to do first. I ineffectually grabbed at some napkins but thought better of it--they were cloth. “Don’t move an inch,” I cautioned Kevin, fearing that more of his load would drop out.
At that moment, just when I was hoping I might somehow disappear, a woman approached me and, with an understanding smile, handed me a package of pocket tissues. “My dear,” she said with a British accent, “childhood is a canal we must all cross.” That was all she said before I whisked Kevin off to the bathroom, cleaning up the trail of turd as I went. Looking back, I have no idea what this phrase meant, but it seemed so compassionate and so British.
I spent the next twenty minutes with Kevin and Avery locked into the tiny bathroom (European bathrooms are so very small) while Ethan ran back to the hotel to get a change of clothes for Kevin. At first I attempted to wash Kevin’s shorts out. All this succeeded in doing was clogging the sink. (European plumbing also can’t hold a candle to the force of an American industrial toilet or the water pressure of an American sink.) I watched with dismay as the sink filled up with brown water. Though I stuck my arm down--at this point, pride was nonexistent--and tried to perform some miracle drainage, it was to no avail. Meanwhile Avery (then two years old) who was obsessed with anything having to do with the toilet and who also was a great imitator, kept trying help me wipe his brother’s butt which he saw me doing, while I frantically tried to swat his hands out of the way. Kevin, who was completely undaunted by the whole event, kept chattering on about something, while I frantically grabbed for yet another handful of paper towels. Since Avery saw that Kevin had his shoes and socks off, he too tried to follow suit. Meanwhile, I kept muttering, like some whacked-out person, “This is a bad situation, a bad situation.”
When Ethan finally arrived with a change of clothes, he walked into the bathroom into the midst of what must have been the most gruesome clean up effort imaginable. I quickly brought Ethan up to speed and, in reference to the restaurant, added, “I can’t go back up there. Please, don‘t make me go back up there.” Though I often find the humor in a situation, in this case, I was completely mortified and saw none.
“We have to go up and pay for the check. The kids haven’t eaten yet, and you have to tell the manager that you clogged their sink,” Ethan said calmly.
Now it was my turn to feel like the errant child. I had secretly hoped that Ethan would not make me go up and report the clogged sink, that somehow we could agree to just throw money on the table and run out, like fugitives or cohorts, but now, much to my chagrin, he was forcing me to be an adult.
Grudgingly, I trudged up to the manager of the restaurant and, while I didn’t go into the details about what it was that had clogged the sink, I did manage to explain in the five plus words of Italian that I knew, along with lots of hand gestures, that the sink “no longer worked.”
We then proceeded to sit down and eat our meal as if nothing had happened: “Nothing to see here, folks.” Needless to say, we ate hurriedly--(“Let‘s see who can eat the most noodles the fastest,”) and left a big tip in a lame attempt at reparations. (After all, we had left a pair of poop-covered shorts in the trash can of the bathroom--some things are clearly not worth saving--and a sink full of poop water.) To this day, I wonder how many health violations we committed in this otherwise very charming little restaurant now dubbed by us “the poop place”.
Somehow this restaurant experience summed up for us travel with children. On the airplane trip to England, a night flight, when I had to take Avery to the back of the plane after he woke up screaming his head off for no apparent reason, people seemed to sprout fangs and glare at us as they roused from their sleep domino-style as we walked by them. And perhaps I would have subconsciously glared too before I had children, but I can’t even remember back that far. Actually, that’s a lie. I do remember my life before children quite clearly, but it seems like someone else’s life at this point.
As we traveled with our brood in tow, among the sighing and groaning crowd, there were always those people who gave me a sympathetic or knowing smile--sympathetic because they had a soft spot for children, they were secretly glad that it was me and not them this time around, or because, as the British woman with the tissues stated, they knew that childhood is a canal that has to be crossed. Afterwards, I considered this saying particularly apt. After all, it is through a canal that a baby first enters the world; as travelers it is a big canal (or ocean) that we must fly across, and then, indeed, childhood is a canal we ourselves have all bridged. And isn’t having children the greatest connector of all, the universal truth, the common thread across different cultures and humanity? The shrieker who darted across the restaurant at the sight of Kevin’s poop probably didn’t think so. Ah, well.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Women's Magazine article by Leah Bassoff and Laura Deluca
Click twice on the article to enlarge it.
Written by Leah Bassoff and Laura Deluca
Excerpt from www.babycenter.com
Excerpts from Blog published on www.Babycenter.com from 2006-2007
By Leah Bassoff
July 9, 2006
"The Naked Truth"
It has been raining for a whole week straight. The rain streaks away the kids' chalk drawings and causes mushrooms to grow around our front porch. We feel as though we are living in a suburban rain forest.
Rather than feeling gloomy on account of the rain, Kevin and Avery seem energized. As the rain slaps against our driveway, Kevin puts a wool cap on his head, strips off all his clothes, and runs outside to dance like a racy version of Gene Kelly. When I chase after him and implore him to put on a bathing suit, he looks at me with his rain-drop blue eyes and asks, "Why can't I just be naked?"
"You're getting too old to be naked in public," I tell him. I do not tell him about the times when, back in college, my friends and I went skinny dipping in the nearby chigger-filled lake or went streaking. How glorious it felt to be that illicit and that uninhibited.
"So just because I'm five and three quarters I can't be naked anymore?" Kevin asks, and I feel as though I am a grumpy God giving Adam and Eve the boot from The Garden.
I ponder Kevin's half-question, half-accusation as rain drips off of my nose. Looking at the soggy and disappointed Kevin, I ask him, "Is it that important to dance naked in the rain?" Somehow I am secretly pleased when Kevin nods and says that yes it is. "Then go," I tell him and send him back into the rain. I am releasing a captive animal back into the wild. Kevin runs off unabashed and shining. Watching him I feel almost jealous. He is the essence of freedom.
As appeared in www.mothering.com
Cold Memories
By Leah Bassoff
Web Exclusive - January 1, 2007
One of the biggest changes I experienced after having children is that it ended my sense of chronological time as I'd once known it. As I watch my children playing, I find myself cast back to my own childhood, find myself reliving my own childhood memories of the snow and the cold in a sensory, visceral way.
Watching my son Kevin tunnel his mitten-clad fist into the snow, I can remember what it was like to eat snow off of my mittens, that delectable taste of crushed ice, dirt, and wooly mitten fuzz. As Kevin's mittens get tossed aside, and I see his turnip-red, frozen finger tips, I can remember the agonizing, but exhilarating, pin-needle pain of my own exposed digits when, just like my son, I was too stubborn to keep my hat and mittens on.
When I am with my three-year-old and five-year-old son and we have no plans for the morning, time turns into a piece of taffy, getting stretched almost endlessly. I am invited into my children's world where their morning consists of dragging a stick through the snow or fervently kicking chunks of ice, loosing them from their surrounding piles of snow.
As a child, I remember analyzing the quality of the snow like it was a fine pastry; using the toe of my boot, I could tell whether the snow was light and fluffy or, better yet, was that thrilling hard crusty snow that would let me magically walk on top of it for just a moment before my feet crashed through. On mornings where the snow reflected the sun glinting off of it, I used to imagine that those glimmers of light were actual diamonds but ones that somehow constantly eluded my grasping fingers. Ice that cracked under my feet used to give me shivers of pleasure. Snow so wet and slushy that it soaked right through my boots felt illicit and irresistible. Later, I knew I would get chastised for my wet socks, but oh the glorious feeling of the cold that seeped across my toes.
Perhaps I find myself entertaining past memories, reliving these childhood sensations, because life is slow now, because I am outside hunching my shoulders against the chilly air simply watching two little boys play. Perhaps the cold awakens in me memories long dead, like frozen fingers that, once you run them under cold water, come back to life.
It is because I have time on my hands that my mind starts wandering, sometimes inappropriately, sometimes bizarrely, so that all of a sudden I am thinking about an old boyfriend, about a cold evening in the mountains where we sat on a rock and made-out by the headlights of the car, convinced we needed to stay outside but shivering so hard, our hands so icy, that we could hardly bear to touch each other. Then, just as quickly, I'm remembering standing at the bus stop as my mother came running down the block—her hair flying wildly out from under her cap—to tell me that school had been cancelled because of the snow. "Come back home," she called out to me, her voice half-swallowed by the wind.
Yet just as I am cast back into my past, I find myself simultaneously trying to glance into the future, like I'm standing on tip toes trying to peek over a tall fence. I am trying to imagine my sons, these two little bundles of coats and hats with just a little circle of face poking through—their noses crusty from winter snot and dirt—as grown men with jobs, responsibilities or even wives of their own. This imagined thought seems painful, thrilling and unbelievable all at the same time, especially since right now they are both small enough that they occasionally get stuck in the shin-high snow drifts, heartbreakingly vulnerable and unable to move until I haul them out of the thick snow onto higher grounds, sending them off and running again.
With my hands stuck halfway into my coat pockets—halfway because the zippers on both pockets are stuck and only my fingertips will fit into them and because, after trying to find matches for little mittens, I was too lazy to find some for myself—I stand in the cold, a passive spectator watching my two boys play as my life spins forward and backwards—my past and my sons' futures mixing together in a strange soupy mélange.
Then, for no apparent reason, I find my eyes zooming in on my son Kevin, like a camera going in for a close-up. I watch as he reaches up and breaks off one long, perfect icicle from a bush; I see how the ice hangs out of his bare hand, cold and promising, see the eagerness on his face as he slowly lifts it towards his mouth, and suddenly time stops spinning around, standing--like the icicle itself—perfectly still and frozen.
Life is this moment of pure anticipation, of cold delight, and my son's whole world is the here and now: an icicle and a tongue about to lick it.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
From March 2008 Denver Voice
"Leader in a New Village"
By Leah Bassoff
Micklina Iboi Pia Peter talks into her cell phone and
balances a plate of warm samosas on her head while shewalks toward a group of more than 50 people gathered
together in Chautauqua Park in Boulder. As she enters the
sheltered area where the party is being held, volunteers,
who had been arranging plates of watermelon, rice and
mangoes, drop what they are doing and swarm around
Peter. They are curious to know how she had time to cook
anything, much less 100 samosas—each one assembled
by hand, filled with vegetables and fried. They are well
aware that the night before, Peter had been studying for
school, finishing up last minute details for the Sudanese
celebration she was organizing, and making multiple trips
to the airport to pick up her sister and other visitors from
Sudan. Peter responds to their inquiry with a full-bodied
laugh.
The first group of Southern Sudanese to arrive in
the Boulder/Denver area, in 2000, was a group of Lost
Boys, boys left orphaned or displaced during the civil
war between Northern and Southern Sudan. Peter was
the first female Southern Sudanese refugee to settle in
Boulder, in 2004, living proof that some of the girls also
survived the war. Despite the oppressive circumstances
Peter endured—a victim of war; a woman in the maledominated
Sudanese culture; a refugee—she has become a
community leader in Boulder and has helped other women
refugees from Sudan transition to a new life in the United
States. Community for Sudanese and American Women
and Men (CSAW), an organization she founded and cochairs,
supports the 15 girls who have come to Boulder
since Peter’s arrival. In May, Peter, 29, will graduate from
the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“My first impression of Micklina was that she was so
vibrant, so focused and so enthusiastic. In light of all she
had been through, it was amazing….She was the first girl
we met [from Southern Sudan]. Her being in Boulder has
made an enormous difference for the Boulder community
and Sudanese community,” says Alice Levine, a volunteer
for CSAW.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees defines
a refugee as “a person who has fled his/her country of
nationality and who is unable or unwilling to return to that
country because of a well-founded fear of persecution.”
The Catholic Diocese of Arlington Office of Migration and
Refugee Services estimates that less than half a percent
of those who apply for refugee status are actually given
approval while the U.N. Refugee Agency estimates that
out of 505,000 refugee applications filed in 2006, roughly
two-thirds of these asylum-seekers were rejected. Peter is
acutely aware she is a fortunate one.
Peter’s house in Boulder is filled with objects such
as carved wooden statues and cloths she embroidered.
The smell of sweet incense drifts through the rooms—a
reminder of the land she left.
“My childhood was really the best for me,” says
Peter. “Sometimes my mom would go very early in the
morning, buy some liver, and then she would come and
make really fast breakfast before we would go to school.
We go to school and come back home, eat and play all the
time.” Peter claps her hands as she describes the magical
mango tree of her childhood, a tree she used to play in.
“This mango tree was very special…the mangoes were big
and round like this.”
That was before the civil war. The war was North
vs. South—a war over oil, resources, land and religion—
Muslims vs. Christians or those who followed indigenous
religions. Within the larger umbrella of the war, there
Leader in a
New Village
The first Lost Girl from Sudan
to settle in Boulder graduates
from CU in May
by Leah Bassoff
photos by Natalie Covert
March 2008 denver VOICE 9
was also ethnic conflict. The civil war came to a head in
1984 when the Sudanese government and the Sudanese
People’s Liberation Army started bombing villages at the
same time.
“People were running everywhere, kids crying,
houses burned. It’s just like confusion. You don’t know
where to run,” says Peter. The light drains from her eyes
as she recalls the bombing of her village, Kapoeta. In the
commotion, Peter and her parents were separated. To this
day, she doesn’t know what became of her father—the
chief of their village.
Peter ended up in a refugee camp in Kakuma,
Kenya—a mini-hell. Within the camp, thousands of
displaced persons resided in makeshift tents and tried
to survive. Camp residents waited in endless lines to get
paltry food rations. Peter describes a pregnant woman
who, acting out of desperation, stepped ahead of others in
the line. As a result she was beaten, possibly to death, by
security. Death was a part of daily life within the camp—
death from violence; death from malnutrition; death from
disease.
Like many refugees, Peter finds herself racked with
survivor’s guilt. “You have the stress of school, work, bills,
and the other stress is when people call from Africa. I feel
so guilty when someone is in need, and I cannot give,”
she says. At any hour of the day—morning or night—
someone may call from the refugee camp in Kakuma or
from Southern Sudan asking for money or aid.
Psychiatrist Jed Shapiro says survivor’s guilt is not
uncommon among refugees. According to Dr. Shapiro,
survivor’s guilt was first written about in connection with
Holocaust survivors, but the term can be applied to anyone
who has experienced good fortune and whose good fortune
stands in stark contrast to someone else’s suffering. “It is
hard for people who leave the scene, as is the case with
refugees who leave their country. They might ask, ‘Should
I just take care of myself or should I take care of my fellow
man? Should I go back?’” says Shapiro. “The more you
feel that someone else sacrificed for you, the more you feel
a sense of burden.”
Peter’s survival is due, in no small part, to a Dominican
nun, Sister Luise Radlmeier. Sister Radlmeier lives in Juja,
Nairobi, and is well-known for helping thousands of
refugees, including Peter. In order to be accepted into her
compound, Peter had to fill out an application and had
to make it clear that she was serious about obtaining an
education. Sister Radlmeier’s compound includes several
orphanages and houses where the young men and young
women live. It was here where Peter learned to cook for
large groups of people using limited resources and clever
tricks. When she cooked for orphan children, she cut the
food up into small pieces to make them feel as though
they had more to eat. Although the compound is a joyous
place, it is also a place of limbo. The residents seemed
to be asking, ‘What next?’ In exchange for Peter’s care,
Sister Radlmeier taught her English, helped her fill out
her refugee application and prepared her for a future in
America.
When Peter arrived in Denver she found the airport
so confusing and overwhelming that she sat down on a
bench and prayed for guidance. She eventually found
her way out of the airport and, since then, has gracefully
overcome many difficult challenges and obstacles that are
common for refugees.
“[In Southern Sudan] most of the girls are so shy. They
can’t look you in the eye,” says Elizabeth Wondu, whose
husband is the Sudanese ambassador to Japan and who
often speaks publicly on the plight of Southern Sudanese
women. Wondu adds that in Southern Sudan, where
the literacy rate is only 12.5 percent, women are often
discouraged from getting an education or speaking out.
Not Peter. Soon after she arrived in the U.S., she enrolled
as a student at CU.
“She is in a class of 500 students with maybe three
other African-Americans. She sits right in the middle,”
says Lindsay Eppich, a classmate and friend of Peter. “I
know that she has a thousand other things on her plate,
but she is there for school. She inspires me every day. I
have never known anyone like her.”
Peter enjoys feminist women’s studies classes, gives
public speeches, heads several grassroots organizations,
and has most recently organized the first Women and Youth
Conference through the Equatorial Sudanese Women’s
Association—a conference she hopes to hold annually and
expand to include women from all over Southern Sudan.
When she is not in class or studying, she spends her
time helping the other Southern Sudanese women who
have settled in the Boulder/Denver area. Rebecca Chaan,
one of the newest young women to arrive from Sudan,
says in Africa and in the U.S., Peter has always been kind
and helpful. Peter checks in on all the girls and pays them
visits whenever she has free time. “She’s so friendly. She’s
really encouraging if you have personal problems,” says
Rebecca. In keeping with her culture, Peter acts on the
notion that if you have a piece of bread you break it in two
to share with another.
“Ms. Peter was awarded an undergraduate research
opportunity grant to work with me on research related to
female refugees. She provided much insight on women’s
refugee issues. Her agile mind and forceful personality are
a formidable combination,” says Dr. Laura Deluca, adjunct
assistant professor of anthropology.
Peter’s activism is her way of not forgetting those she
left behind, those who still continue to languish in the
refugee camps or are displaced from their villages.
While attending a conference in Iowa, Peter met an old
neighbor from her village in Kapoeta. She informed Peter
that her mother, whom she had presumed to be dead, was
actually alive in Egypt. Peter said her whole body went
cold. The neighbor gave her a phone number, where her
mother waited on the other end. When they spoke on the
phone for the first time, tears of joy streamed down their
faces. Today, mother and daughter sit together in Peter’s
living room in Boulder. They have the same full-bodied
laugh. “Every day she prays,” Peter explains. “She has
never missed a day. In Africa, my mother cared for me.
Now I will take care of her.”
Peter greets all the guests at the party at Chautauqua
Park—the American volunteers, the Southern Sudanese
guests, the children. She makes sure her mother, whom
everyone calls Mama Rose, has a place to sit in the shade.
One of the volunteers has set up an art table for the kids,
and the Southern Sudanese women are passing babies
around, clicking their tongues at them and snapping their
fingers to make them smile.
Peter dreams that she, or women like her, will one
day be able to end the violence in Sudan. Graduating from
the university is a step toward this goal. For now, she will
continue to try to bring other young girls from Sudan to
the U.S. so that they, too, can become leaders. •
To learn more about CSAW, visit www.csawcolorado.
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