Have you read 6 Year Med?

She’s a new doctor and she works in a hospital with the sickest of the sick — kids, mostly.

Last week she posted about a sweet little girl awaiting organ transplants.

Today, the devastating news of what happened next.

***

When my father died, he passed in such a way that most of his organs were suitable for donation, so that’s what we did. He was fascinated with Zen Buddhism when he died and I can’t put my finger on exactly how, but something about that whispered in my ear about restoring balance, and I knew that we were making the right call.

A few months later we received an anonymous letter from the person who got his heart, and this person wrote of a life that had been without hope, of a life in twilight and suddenly of joyous preparations, and finally of a life back fully in the light. It was the polar opposite of what we experienced that day. Her words (I think maybe she was a woman based on her handwriting, but I don’t know) restored balance; they turned my grief.

We gave her a heart, she gave me life. I remain awed by the grace of it all.

First, a story:

Eliza’s afternoon-school teacher gives her a ride to my office about once a week now. Eliza is fitting in nicely with the teenagers who are the rest of the carpool gang, and Teacher has gotten fully on board with the “ask the girl offbeat questions and see what happens” game that Jim and I like to play.

To wit: Herbivores and carnivores continue to be a favorite subject among all of the occupants of the vehicle including the teenagers, and so last week, when a new teenager joined the proceedings, Teacher asked Eliza whether she thought the kid was a carnivore, herbivore or omnivore.

Teacher reported to me with great delight that Eliza mulled the question over, then announced that since the kid had sharp teeth, he was probably a carnivore.

***

One of the best things my parents did for me was make me an outsider.

When I was a kid, in Belgium, I was the girl with the German mom. By the time we moved here I was trilingual, the girl who talked funny and had a funny name and ate funny food. We were culturally Christian but even two northern European countries interpret that culture differently (bonus: more gift-giving occasions!).

This had its disadvantages. (Hello over there, bully who used to pin me against the wall and make me say words with Rs in them because I said the letter funny!)

But what I continue to take from it to this day is what these experiences gave me: a visceral understanding that people are different in ways both broad and specific.

I am stubborn, hotheaded and prone to snap judgements, and I think that this understanding is my single biggest defense against these flaws in my character. I am not naturally a see-both-sides kind of person, but when I force myself to take the count of ten and remember what my life has taught me, I can almost always, if not see the other side, come to an honest acknowledgement that there IS another side. (Of course, the problem is that I frequently prefer to rage intolerantly about other people’s stupidity, which is why I have not yet been nominated for the sainthood. Also: conceited.)

You can never know exactly how things could’ve turned out “if only…” but I suspect being used to the whole freak thing helped me on those occasions when I had to make tough calls vis-a-vis peer pressure. I don’t know that going against the stream on any given peer pressure-type occasion was so much of a profile in courage as a just another drop in the Already Giant Bucket of Weird Girl.

Eliza’s two school experiences are very different. The morning kids are all non-Latino whites, so far as I can tell. They are all able-bodied and they all speak English. There are a lot of blondes. Eliza blends right in. She loves it so far, and so do Jim and I. We were lucky to find an excellent program to pick up the daycare slack for the price we did at the short notice we had.

Compare this to her nearly 18 months and counting in afternoon school, where she is the only non-Latino, some her friends don’t speak English at all much less as a first language, several kids have profound intellectual and other disabilities, and where no one has blond hair and blue eyes, to a degree that the class photo makes her look, hilariously, like some kind of albino. She loves it and so do we.

There’s a part of me that wonders if constructing an experience like this renders it meaningless. I worry that I am treating her classmates as object lessons in my kid’s diversity education, that I am abusing my position of privilege, that compassion equals condescension, and that there are whole reams of issues I am on the wrong side of that I am not even aware of in my ignorant little first-world-problem bubble.

Still, I like that she has both school experiences now and that they are equally normal to her.

Short of moving to a different country, it was the best way I could think of to replicate what my parents gave me. I want her brain hard-wired to accommodate difference; to be as comfortable being the odd one out as being one in the crowd. I want Eliza to feel at ease negotiating between worlds, for reasons both kumbaya-ish and practical. I want the idea of difference stripped of connotation for her, so that it is the specifics of her character and her actions, and not whether they stand out or blend in with the crowd, to matter to her, and so that she interacts with others on the same basis.

***

Obligatory Statement of Whatever Floats Your Boat: With this post, I in no way mean to judge those who choose to stress different values with their kids or who choose to teach these or other values through different means; I am simply reflecting on something that is of value to me and how I am trying to instill it in my kid. You are welcome to disagree, ignore, call me out and/or tell me my slip is showing.

AM is holding Barney around the torso. His front legs are out straight, and claws are extended.

“Hey! Look!” she says, “I can use Barney to comb my hair!” drawing the cat’s paws through her hair.

Jim looks, makes a face. “Yeah, and putting cat litter and poop on your head.”

“Am not!” says AM, doublechecking Barney’s claws just to be sure.

Pause.

AM bends over, rubs top of head on the back of his shirt.

“There! Now there’s cat poop on your shirt!”

1. I am in a state of amused chargrin that my plans to run the Ragnar relay, New Haven to Boston edition, have been preempted by a commitment to get my ass kicked. Translation: A number of people in our dojo are being promoted to new black belt ranks and as a senior black belt and instructor, I have to be a witness/participant in the proceedings, which have been scheduled for that day. I am looking for some other crazy-running-type situation on a subsequent weekend instead. Suggestions welcome.

2. I got my Okinawan nunchaku in the mail the other day. It is a thing of beauty. What is most assuredly not a thing of beauty is the knuckle I whapped while insouciantly (read, flailingly) whipping the damn thing around. Did you know it’s possible to turn your knuckles purple? Well, now you do!

3. A person with whom I have recently had dealings, and whom I quite like, made reference to former frat brothers the other day. I have been snickering ever since over my internal reaction, which was, “Ohhhhhhhhhh! He would so have been my ENEMY in high school and college!” When I speak of my trepidation vis-a-vis teenagers, I am mostly speaking from a position of PTSD over my own behavior at that age. I have NO IDEA how my paranoid, judgmental little self was not strangled in my sleep by my parents, friends, relatives, teachers, etc.

4. Because we did not have time to do so yesterday before it got dark, I promised the Small Person that we would get up early this morning and build a snowman. Once we got ourselves outdoors we realized the snow was too cold to stick together and so instead we hid the carrot we were going to use as a nose. And then we went back inside. Ratio of time getting dressed : actual outside time = 3:1

I don’t know what is the deal with that bizarro expression, and also please ignore the fact that she was obviously wearing her pants backward again. (I don’t know why I never notice these things until she has gone out in public, although frankly, I’m just thrilled she has finally consented to dress herself instead of just imperiously pointing at the items in which she wishes to be arrayed.)

This week, they have been studying bears at New School (as we call the daycare program she now attends in the mornings) and THEY HIBERNATE, MOMMY! IN A LOG! and so this morning the monologue that fell out of her mouth as soon as she woke up was about how she felt she needed to dress like a bear.

I was commanded to produce black pants. She had already worn her only pair three or four times this week but I dug them out of the laundry because I did not feel like experiencing Angry Bear Child. Then, she needed black shoes, and black socks. We did not have the latter but she was appeased with creme socks because that is the color of polar bears. Then she dug out this ratty old hand-me-down Christmas sweatshirt because it has a bear on it, obviously.

At this point the story becomes a cautionary tale because dude, if you are going to go all METHOD, I am going to be right there to egg you on, and so I told her that what the outfit needed was for her hair to be done up like bear ears. She enthusiastically agreed, so we rigged the above hairstyle, and then for reasons that remain obscure to me the bear needed a pink headband, also.

Finally, she declared herself done and dubbed herself Icing (because she was a winter bear, as opposed to Honeybear, who is a summer bear, Jesus people, don’t question, just go with it!) and off we went to school.