being special

I’ve been thinking about my friend and co-worker, Max, whose seven year old daughter came home with her face wet because the kids on the school bus were making fun of her.  Her class had been discussing Abraham Lincoln and she brought in a resin bust of Lincoln that Max had made.  On the bus, the other girls in her class insisted that her daddy hadn’t made it because it was plastic and then they called her a liar, which made her cry.   

I started thinking about the day children make fun of our kid for being black, or acting white, or for being too short or too tall or too happy.   I hope to teach our child that he or she is a royal child of Ethiopia, a descendent of Solomon, a prince or princess with an invisible cape of stars. 

We are a family of special people, I will say, and if we aren’t like anyone else, that’s because it took ten thousand years for the world to make us and we are special and made for something new.  We are airplanes in a world of bicycles, clouds in a world of mountains.   I have blood made of the Yangtze and the Ohio Rivers, I’ll tell our child, and Shasta is the smallest and warmest mountain of New Hampshire.  And our child is made of love and Africa.  We three have original maps and books inside and we are writing stories that have never been heard before. 

    

  

 Also: I was looking at a really great blog the other day and saw a beautiful little sketch that Jana had done of herself and the future.  I did a similar one; Shasta added the flowers.