These hands.
These women shared a stage with me on Saturday night, and shared their hearts with an audience who cried and laughed and gasped with us.
We are a band of mothers connected by the act of being vulnerable and hearing one another. We are each forever changed because we offered our stories to one another and accepted the gift of someone else’s story.
That’s what these red bracelets are about. Connection. These were a gift from our LTYM directors, naming that we are forever connected to each other.
I am awed with the privelege of wearing this bracelet. It is a realization of how this group of diverse women matters to me and that I matter to them. It will remind me how I am connected to women who are just like me and women who have very little in common with me.
And I wore this bracelet last night when I watched the news.
The problem with bright moments of realization is that they can light up the nice, cozy lamp-lit corners of your comfortable spaces. The corners with your cozy chair, in your quiet suburban house, with your dishwasher humming sweetly in the background, and your child fast asleep tucked into his pottery barn bedding.
No one wants the glaring light of realization to come barging in and pointing out the harsh truths. But there they are.
There are people hurting today. There are voices reminding us that things are not okay. There is a nation weeping for their losses.
I am connected to them.
It would be so easy if I weren’t. I could ignore the streets of Baltimore and the streets of Nepal. I confess that I have ignored streets like these too many times before.
But their stories are being plastered over every media outlet that can produce them, slant them, and serve them up in whatever flavor their customers eat up as the daily special. Their stories come to us tiny sound bytes and well-articulated interviews. Their stories enter our homes in images, tweets and news commentaries. I can’t help but wonder, what about the mothers?
What if we gave motherhood a microphone in these communities?
What is it like to explain the noise and fear and anger in your neighborhood streets to your school-age son? What does it feel like to want to raise your voice and yet whisper to your daughter that everything is going to be okay?
What does it mean to feel the fierce surge of a mother’s protective instinct and also feel powerless against the powers that be? How does a mob mentality look through the eyes of a mother? What do shouts of protest sound like in your ears?
How do you make sense of a spinal cord injury? How do you make sense of a city in chaos and ministers linked arm in arm with gang members?
I don’t know. But there are women who do.
We must listen to their stories. We were forever changed last week because we offered our stories to one another and accepted the gift of someone else’s story. And that may be the best thing we’ve got here, too.
The act of being vulnerable can take us by the hand into someone else’s home – the street they walk, the bus they take to work, the fears they walk through each day. It’s not easy to hear these stories, especially when they call out the thinly veiled racism or judgement or systems in my own neighborhood.
But, if it were my neighborhood, I would want to be heard. If I’m honest, I know this could easily be my neighborhood. I would want my story accepted by hands like these, marked with a bracelet that claims we are more connected than we even realize.
We matter to each other.
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Watch the Clouds
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I Brave
Deep waters, flames, and fears have come before. They will probably come again. But the narrative I want my child to have, and the narrative I hope to voice continually for myself and for my family is this: Fear doesn’t win. We are strong. And just in case we’re not brave enough, we will be brave for each other.
This is absolutely beautiful, my friend. I shall remember to consider, “What is his story? What is her story?” Because we all have a story, don’t we? And even if I cannot hear their stories, simply by considering the pain, the struggle, and the uncertainty they carry, it will allow me to extend love & understanding where it is most needed.
Beautiful… Truth. You remind me to always consider everyone’s story. We all have one and those very stories from who we are and how we act and perseve the world around us. Thank you for you words…
Thank you so much for this, and for sharing you story with LTYM! You’ll be glad to do we DO have a Baltimore show coming up next week!! You’ve articulated in this post that LTYM’s mission is working–we are expanding perspectives and bring communities together. Thank you!