dynamic elf

If ever I had any doubt about whether switching schools this year was the right move for my kid, I no longer do.

Last night, at bedtime, she whispered to me about a plan she had. This happens a lot. But last night's plan was a SECRET FRENCH PROJECT! Here's what she reported:

"I want to write a letter to my teacher last year - in French - and say that I am going to New York this weekend on a trip and I hope she's happy. And I would like to put another smaller envelope in that envelope for her class, for all the students in her class, and it will be filled with pieces of paper that say in ENGLISH: 'I love you, and you are great in school.' Or maybe just 'XOXOXO You're great.' Then I want to sneak into the school and leave it in front of her door and sneak away."

This breaks my heart, basically. She continues to work through her difficult experience last year with bursts of insight and grace -- this step is clearly her trying to think about what would have made life better for her, and trying to fix the problem for other people.

That kid. I hope she changes the whole world.

Happy halloween!

Looking over school photo packages in preparation for picture day tomorrow, I discovered the following items I could get my kid's mug on:

• Fake magazine covers (fashion, sports, science, art)
  
• Strange thematic cardboard items
  
• temporary tattoos (I bet those are a really unpleasant hit in middle school)
  
• Fake IDs
  
• ...as well as magnets, wall decals, doorhangers (?!), and more! (though not, in fact, a mug)
  
  Seriously, temporary tattoos? Who does that?

So, I've been watching the annual International Blog Against Racism Week come and go for a few years. I read posts, check out links, follow various Fail discussions, and mostly just stand silently trying to listen and learn. I never really have anything to post. I grew up a white kid in a white state, married a white guy, and had a white kid; now I live in a rambly house with other white people, have mostly white friends, and work in a middle-class university office that is 90% white. I'm not a unique snowflake or anything. I love reading and thinking about class and race and gender issues, but for the most part I'm allergic to Internet Discussions. I talk about things with people and just leave it all alone online.

But, so, okay, here's Natalie's preschool class:



Her bestest friends at school are Sophia (second row, far left, red shirt, denim jumper) and Natavia (third row, far right, purple shirt, pompom pigtails). Sophia's mom is white (from Malden), and her dad is from the Dominican Republic (he's fairly dark but I have no idea of his race or ideas about race or anything). I think Natavia's mom's accent is Haitian, but I wouldn't swear to it, and I've never run into her dad. Many of the kids in this class speak Spanish at home -- her 'graduation' last week had a Spanish translator for her classroom's ceremony and a Haitian creole translater for the other classroom. It's kinda cool.

There are a lot of things that are important to me in raising a kid, but one of them was that I didn't want my kid to only know kids who look and talk and act just like she does. When the time came to send her to preschool, we wound up sending her to the preschool at the end of our block; we walk back and forth to school every day and see her classmates at our neighborhood park and run into her teachers when we walk up and down the street. In many ways it's a wonderful setup. I like her teachers. Her classmates come from all kinds of cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds. She usually likes it there. It's right next to a bus stop where the 89 bus stops, a bus which she can pick out from blocks away because it is the bus which takes us to her favorite coffeeshop.

( A couple of race-related anecdotes I still don't quite understand )

ANYway, even though it's pretty important to me to have N grow up in some kind of diversity, I never post about it and rarely talk about it. I don't want to seem like I want a cookie and a pat on the head for taking a really minimal step toward ensuring a diverse environment for my kid.

BUT SO. So, this fall, she will be starting in a fancy spendy private French-language immersion school. Spendy enough that I'm job-hunting to be able to afford it. And while there is a lot of cultural diversity, somehow I think that two or three upper-class black Haitian families in a sea of white French/Quebecois/Americans is going to be a different environment for her to be in. I can't pretend I don't worry about that, or think about it; I believe right now that it's the right choice for her educationally, but what else will happen? What will she learn that she doesn't know now, and what will she unlearn? What conversations am I going to have to step up and have with her directly, and when? She will still be in a culturally very diverse environment; that's not nothing. I don't know what it all amounts to, and I might never know.

The perennial question of parenting: oh god, what if I get it all wrong?