I know I’m not alone in the experience of loving
my children so much that it scares the shit out of me. This started, of course,
before they were even born. I was scared for them when I had the prenatal tests
done. I worried about what I was eating and what I was (or, more to the point,
was not) drinking. And it only got scarier from there. I went through a phase
when I was sincerely worried that one of them would fall into a pit toilet in a
campground, and I never settled in my mind what I would do if one of them fell
in. If I jumped in after, would I land on them? Then how would we both get out?
Should we camp with a rope ladder? I am thankful that now that the smaller of
the two is almost my size, this is unlikely to happen. But it doesn’t mean they
are safe. It doesn’t mean I worry less. There are car accidents. There are
school shootings. There is meningitis. There are bad people and bad choices.
There are things they are missing out on and things they aren’t doing but
should.
Today we exercised a bit of the worry and then
let go drill that is parenting. Because of the pandemic, the traditional cross
country camp was canceled. For reasons based mostly on his own personality, my
son, whose high school identity is a member of the cross country and track
team, didn’t run when the team was not an option. I was happy, then, when two
other boys initiated a three-person run. My son just turned 16 but--partly due
to the pandemic and partly to his laid-back personality--he hasn’t yet gotten
his driver’s license. So when he proposed that he bike to the trailhead so that
he could be responsible for bringing himself home, a part of me admitted that
this is the natural evolution of parenting. He should be allowed to take on
that responsibility. I confess, though, that I worried. I talked to him about a
safe biking route. I was worried about him getting hit by a careless driver. I
worried he wouldn’t actually wear his helmet. I worried that he wouldn’t lock
up his bike. And here’s where my particular privilege comes into the story: I didn’t
worry that the police would see him biking or running and assume he was a
criminal. The riots happening across the country, including in my area, did
cross my mind, but he wasn’t going to a protest. He was going running on a
trail with two other guys. He is a skinny white teen on a bike (with a helmet,
I hope.)
God, or whatever you want to call Her, has a
funny way of pointing out our weaknesses. I’ve been praying to be different. To
be who the world needs me to be. Ha. Over lunch, I asked my son how his run
was. “Really weird” was his answer. It turns out he arrived before his friends
and was waiting for them at the pavilion at the trailhead. As he stood there,
half a dozen police cars arrived in the parking lot. The police got out of
their cars and came up to him. They asked him what he was doing there. He told
them he was waiting for his friends to go for a run. They asked where he had
come from. He showed them his bike. They asked him for identification. He
doesn’t, as I mentioned earlier, have a license, but he did (thank goodness)
have his school ID in his phone case. He showed it to the officers. They nodded
and backed off. They said he matched the description of someone they were
looking for, but it wasn’t him. Later, they asked him and his friends to call
911 if they saw a guy of around 30 with a beard and a broken foot. My son is
amused that he might be mistaken for such a person--a kid of 16, with no facial
hair yet, running. How did they mistake him for that?
And this is where my mother’s heart and my
trying-to-be-antiracist heart collided: if my son wasn’t a white student at a
well-funded all-white high school, that might have ended differently. My son
asked the police what the guy was wanted for and was bummed that they wouldn’t
tell him. My son has never been taught to be nervous around cops. My son stood
there, amused at the oddity of the situation. My son has never seen a friend, a
brother, an uncle, a father, or a neighbor stopped or treated suspiciously by
the police. He didn’t act nervous. He didn’t try to run away. He tried to
engage the police officers in conversation. He was curious, not afraid. I have
never had to have a talk with him about how to act around the police, how to
not get shot or kneeled on or beaten by the people he knows are there to
protect him. The only time he’s ever seen a family member have an encounter
with the police was during an ice storm when I backed into a delivery truck and
the delivery man called the police. The policeman told off the delivery guy for
being rude and called me “ma’am” and assured me that everything was OK and that
people make mistakes, especially in ice storms.
If my son was a black man, all of those things
would probably be different, starting with what I worried about when I watched
him ride away. No, starting with how he felt about police before he rode away.
My heart pains me in imagining the different
reality of every mother of color in America today. And last year. And for the
last 300 years.
I am not sorry that the
interaction between my son and the dozen police officers who accosted him this
morning in a forest preserve turned out the way it did. I love my son too much
to wish otherwise. The point of all of this is that I want to live in a world
where every mother can carry on worrying about bike helmets (and maybe pit
toilets) and not that should her son slightly resemble someone accused of a
crime, he might not come home at all.
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