ZOOM
"At the Cub Scout banquets and the Freshman Orientations, I never imagined this marvel. Adult children can give what I call 'Stage 3' parents all sorts and sizes of powerful delights."
This is Radical Joy, a column curated by Tracey Michae'l Lewis-Giggetts.
“In a world that often demands way too much of our labor, joy can feel like a radical act. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to edit the Radical Joy series for Raising Mothers and I’m excited to celebrate the boundless joy of BIPOC mothers through the curation of essays and stories that uplift, heal, and sustain us. My hope is, through storytelling, we can collectively sit with all the nuanced ways joy shows up in our lives and explore how we can nurture it, despite the burdens we carry. Consider this series an invitation to and for mothers of every background to tap into the energy of joy and become its witness.” - Tracey Michae'l Lewis-Giggetts
The Zoom started promptly. I—the host—logged on to find the consultants as close as two clicks of the blue “waiting room” box. Once I opened the meeting, our greetings were short and direct. Their faces conveyed the remote calm of people who were caffeinated and trained on an agenda. Following their cues, I stuffed down my expectation that we could ramp up with an opening few minutes of chat. I did not want to waste their time or draw attention away from the subject of this business meeting: how I might best craft a grant application that would ultimately end with this response from the agency: “Yes, we will allocate $50,000 for your creative project.”
One of the consultants, the grant specialist, slouched on a divan with his eyes half-obscured by a black hoodie. He launched with a blunt question that belied his utterly casual presentation: “What’s the central idea behind your LOA?” Great, I thought. Jargon I didn’t understand was going to have me looking foolish straight off. With a quick side-eye, he deigned to translate: Letter of Agreement.
The other face onscreen, an animator who was my creative partner in this quest, was blinking but expressionless. He held his tongue, waiting for me—the ‘idea person’ –to bring language to the poetry video project plan we’d hatched in excitement over the months of Covid Lockdown. The two of them sat expectantly.
I stuttered. I rambled. I started over. Finally, that same creative partner leaned in to put my fragments into a few crisp sentences, rendered authoritatively and sprinkled with the jargon of his profession.
Looking the idiot in front of other adults is rarely funny, cool, or comfortable. Certainly not in a professional consultation. If those two men had been anyone else, I would have been embarrassed. But I knew these people: From two positive pregnancy tests, crowning heads, and butt swipes to study strategies, Yu-Gi-Oh, and T-ball; from No-McDonald’s-I-said and Cub Scouts to prom support; from failed Rights of Passage programs to arm-wrestling disguised as college essay drafts. Facing the two who reshaped my existence took a little of the punch out of my embarrassment.
Instead, I catapulted. Dazzlelation (new word) overtook my face. If they were paying attention (and they might have been), they may have noticed Mom looking extra goofy. Inside me, personal fireworks skittered and sang. Inside, I boomed with the feeling of my real life responding to dream-prayers I clutched so long. Those two men, talking goal-setting strategy and narrative structure while I sat back, note-taking? Their journeys to centeredness in adult lives had touched down. What a payback! What a massive ROI for ideas and ideals I had curated, in collaboration and communion with their father and the Higher Powers, for 39 years.
I've noticed that when our kids grow up, we seem to grow insecure about expressing any wish for joy-sharing with adult children. Once they're self-supporting, the tendency seems to be limiting joy talk to the notion of grandchildren. To me, that's both understandable and also knee-jerk reductive.
Burrowing into the work I call ‘deep parenting’ can blur time. The arcs of observing, feeding, nudging, storytelling, crying, coaching, funding for study abroads (funding, period), and advocating, run long. You take the midnight calls. You frame the diplomas. You roleplay the job interviews. You ask the wrong questions or the right ones, too late. You scuff your mind on their apparent disregard. You crack your heart reciting the cautious nuances of “the talk” for Black men. You trigger silent chains of family gossip, all in the course of believing the process. On and on, always tuning for the right tone. You dare to struggle. If the Universe smiles and Divine Order prevails, you live to throw your hands up and shout victory. But once they grow up and out, what comes of it all?
In this case, you soar.
I felt the jolt and sparkle of Level 1 dazzlelation over a year before as I learned about animation from my younger son. Now, on this call, the brothers took it to Level 2. Knowledge, brightness, and respect energized their tone and their exchange. I was asking questions but mostly, listening to their wisdom and insight. I was listening to communications experts who just happen to sound like my sons, immersed in their realms of authority. Apparently, they had read some of my work pretty closely and had opinions. They traded ways to hold my creative practice up. These grown folks were not only impressing me; I discovered that they saw me. Until my collaboration with “Number Two” took off, I had assumed my writing life was backdrop to them. Just part of Mom being Mom.
That day on Zoom with my beauties, I savored so much. Their depth as thinkers. The already buoyant evidence of validation that unfolded in the word-and-imagery work my second-born and I were building. The absolute treat of witnessing my firstborn operating from the inside of what I’d only understood via his resume. I watched him trade commentary with his brother on our project outline, applying the professional acumen he gained and cultivated as a veteran of what he calls “the nonprofit industrial complex.” At five years old, “Number One” met “Number Two” as a newborn baby boy. He would soon shake up the family with consistently irreverent hilarity. But on that Zoom call, we also met another facet of him. Calmly plunging us into the visual details of how animators use texture and transitions to enrich stories, he unfolded a revelation. The trajectory of bad, worse, ugly, and better gigs that marked his earlier years had yielded a boon of expertise. We found ourselves at a strangely new, satisfying intersection, capable of relating both as family and colleagues.
Burrowing into the work I call 'deep parenting' can blur time. The arcs of observing, feeding, nudging, storytelling, crying, coaching, funding for study abroads (funding, period), and advocating, run long.
To their credit, “Number One” and “Number Two” maintained business boundaries. Until we had established an action plan with prioritized steps and due dates, they were tamped down and on point. No personal updates, sidebars, or snort-laughing ensued. Someone may have even used the word “adjourned.”
I suspect that when our kids are young, we tend to pre-determine what joys we’ll receive from parenting. After health and safety, we envision the usual big-picture evidence: grades, graduations, sports trophies, and spelling bee wins. Woven through it all, we yearn for them to find the radiance of love, happy relationships, and connections. Later, we imagine other results, like good partners/spouses, graduate or professional school acceptances, and the jobs that help us sleep at night. I’ve noticed that when our kids grow up, we seem to grow insecure about expressing any wish for joy-sharing with adult children. Once they’re self-supporting, the tendency seems to be limiting joy talk to the notion of grandchildren. To me, that’s both understandable and also knee-jerk reductive.
For me, those big wins and transitions consumed so much short-term energy that they blinded me to the endgame. Or maybe I was scared. Maybe those earlier efforts had more tangible results, less tenuous than thinking about who would say yes to my kind, intelligent, atypical Black men in the real world? Which doors would open to them?
Yet here I was, opening my eyes from that scary parental rollercoaster to double dazzlelation. Here we were, working through the LOA questions together. Talking about how the answers reflected the seven principles of Kwanzaa we had instilled. Introducing our shared past to the intersection of our more recently-developed journeys. At the Cub Scout banquets and the Freshman Orientations, I never imagined this marvel. Adult children can give what I call “Stage 3” parents all sorts and sizes of powerful delights.
That work on Zoom, it turned out, didn’t buy us $50,000 worth of delight. But we gained a break into new territory, ripe for seeds. New ways of knowing each other. New conversations. New ways of being together, being us.
M. Nzadi Keita’s poetry collection, Migration Letters, reflects on Black working-class identity and culture in Philadelphia. In her second book, Brief Evidence of Heaven: Poems from the life of Anna Murray Douglass, Keita used persona to unveil Frederick Douglass’s first wife and was cited in David Blight ‘s prize-winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Her writing appears in anthologies and journals such as A Face to Meet the Faces: A Persona Poetry Anthology, Killens Review of Arts and Letters, and About Place. Keita won a Pew Fellow in Poetry, a Leeway Foundation Transformation Award, and served as an adviser to the documentary BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez. For many years, she taught creative writing, American literature, and Africana Studies at Ursinus College. www.zeekeita.com
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