Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 27: A Retrospective in the Face of Doing it All Over Again (or The Exhaustion of Being Good)

Four years ago this month, I wrote my first blog entry in this series, Diary of a Fat Girl. I was pushing 200 pounds and profoundly unhappy about it ("it" being my weight, my size, my poor health, my lack of fitness, my habits, and the way I felt about myself). I had been big since puberty really, but hadn't become significantly overweight until several years of working across the street from a McDonald's and, most brutally, going to grad school half-time while still teaching. For a while, I had convinced myself that I'd rather be fat and happy than skinny and sad. I honestly believed that those were the two choices. For a while it was true, but eventually my weight got to a point where I felt totally out of control. I hated my body and no amount of positive thinking was going to overcome that feeling.

Over the next two years, I developed an array of better habits. I exercised most days, counted calories, became aware of portion sizes, stopped drinking full-calorie soda constantly, acknowledged and confronted my own emotional overeating, learned a ton about fitness and nutrition, and generally became very focused on health and fitness. I lost over 60 pounds, going from a size 16 to a size 6. I deadlifted my own body weight and ran a marathon. I got very into accomplishments, whether relatively small (moving from 20 lb dumbbells to 25 lbs in my bench press) or more significant (running a 5k without stopping for the first time ever). The accomplishments and their little endorphin boosts filled the void that was left after I stopped binge eating and, generally, lazing about like a sack of shit.

Then, over the summer of 2013, a lot of things changed that ended up being an unfortunate turning point for my health and fitness. After the marathon in May of that year, I ran an obstacle course 5k in June during which I either severely bruised or possibly fractured my tailbone (with no treatment other than pain meds and an inflatable donut seat, I didn't bother to get it checked out). In July, thankfully after my tailbone felt much better, I got married and went on a honeymoon to Mexico. In late August, I started a new job teaching at a large urban public school, a big shift from my previous seven years in a small alternative program.

I often jokingly blame my new teaching job, now two years in and counting, for my recent weight gain and poor fitness level. I say, "you know, before I started working here, I ran four days a week and fit into all my clothes." Har har, yadda yadda. And that's true...ish. What is more accurate is to say that before that summer I ran four days a week and fit into all my clothes. But that summer did me in. Wedding planning and preparation is relatively time-consuming, especially the week before the event. Then the Monday after the wedding, we went to Mexico where we stayed at an all-inclusive resort for a week. My food options there were limited and I drank probably 3-4 Cokes a day on top of eating french fries at nearly every meal. When we got back, it was the dead of summer and I was in the midst of a structure-less and routine-less vacation. I hadn't counted calories, purposefully exercised, logged meals online, or generally cared about fitness for weeks. According to MyFitnessPal, the website I used religiously to log all my food, I logged my meals on June 30th of that year, and then didn't do a damned thing until July 30th, a full month later.

It may take weeks and weeks to develop good habits, but it didn't take much time for me to shed them. I stopped counting calories, I exercised every so often more to maintain a bit of cardiovascular fitness than as any part of a larger plan, and I de-prioritized my health in order to free up time and energy for my upcoming new job. When the job began, it was just as hard as I imagined, and I spent many more hours at work and grading at home than I used to. Leaving on time to go to the gym every day was a beautiful fantasy, but it never happened. It also didn't help that I was going home every day via a bus and two trains, meaning that even if I did leave by 3 o'clock, I wouldn't make the gym until 4 at the earliest. Changing clothes and exercising would take an hour, then the commute home was another 20 minutes or more. All told, I would leave at 3 and not get home until 5:30, at which point I still had to feed and walk the dogs, worry about dinner, and then do the grading and planning I had brought home (an inevitability of the 3 o'clock exit). If I wanted to get eight hours of sleep, I had to be asleep by 9:45. Although exercise had been an important part of my stress relief and self-care for two years, I shed it in the interest of spending more time at work and maintaining my sanity.

Here is a graph of my weight beginning shortly after I ran a marathon and ending today. The overall trend is self-evident, but I find the various dips and peaks to be more interesting. I steadily gained weight over the summer of 2013 and continued this at a consistent rate (1-2 pounds per month) until the following spring, at which point I evidently decided to eat basically everything. By the last day of school, I was more than 15 pounds heavier than the first day. Half of my clothes no longer fit. Over that summer, however, I did manage to make some progress to get back to my healthier and happier state from a year earlier. I had dipped below 150 pounds again (a demarcation I arbitrarily consider to be important). Even while balancing my job and personal life and endless professional development (thanks RETELL!) and everything else, I was getting somewhere. Then I broke my foot.

I think I actually would have gained substantially more weight during my 6 weeks of immobility had it been easier to get to/from the kitchen. Honestly, it was such a pain to get food, cook it as needed, and retreat back to the couch with a plate...I just didn't bother half the time. I still ate, of course, but it was nutrition bars half the time, something that could go in a pocket and didn't need to be prepared. There was plenty of take-out, but mostly just snacks that were easy to carry. Still, I did little besides lay around during that period, and hence gained back the weight I had fought to lose over the previous summer.

I don't really know why, after recovering from my broken foot and getting my shit back together in general, I just decided to eat everything I got my hands on. It's a behavior that's been evident and pervasive for me for about six months now, something I recognize but struggle to curb. It's as though my pre-fitness psychology saw a window of opportunity and it possessed me like a demon.

For whatever reason, I kept measuring everything. When I decided to fill the largest cereal bowl in the house with Cap'n Crunch, I would always measure it. I knew I was eating four cups of cereal with two cups of milk. I knew that to the gram. But it didn't change my behavior and I never logged it either. I'm sure my husband had more than one instance of wondering why I would carefully measure a bowl teeming with three ounces of Doritos. I honestly have NO idea why I kept measuring. Maybe it was satisfying in a ritualistic way. Maybe I thought that measuring meant I would kick myself back into good habits. Maybe I was afraid that if I stopped measuring, I had really given up.

Over the past few weeks, I've been feeling the same way I did all the way back in 2011 when I finally decided not to be a piece of shit. I'm 40 pounds lighter than I was then, but I don't feel -40 pounds, I feel +20 relative to my lowest weight. I got very used to being smaller, and it's not something I'm willing to let go of. Much of it is vanity: I like to look good, I like to wear smaller clothes, I like to fit into smaller things. A little of it is also practical: I am *not* going to go buy a bunch of bigger clothes after having given all of mine away to Good Will. I refuse to go in that direction. There is also a fair bit of ego and pride. A lot of my identity over the past several years has been based around being the girl who used to be fat. When the topic arose in conversation, I would say anecdotally, "well, I used to be like 200 pounds" and people (especially my students) would respond with very satisfying "shut up"s an "no way"s. Now, I don't say that, or at least not while still expecting the shock. It's no longer that difficult to imagine me at 200 pounds.

A month or two ago, two things happened. First, Dan bought me a FitBit Charge HR, a fitness tracker that I wear on my wrist. It was a long-delayed birthday present, and I kept telling myself that this was the thing that would get my butt in gear. That didn't exactly happen, but something did: I signed up for a few road races. There was a 10k at the end of May, which I completed, and there's a half marathon in September (at Salem Willows! Goddammit I love Salem Willows). Now, with only about 10 weeks until the half marathon, I have real work to do. Even with all my breaks (figurative and literal), and falling off the wagon that I already fell off of, I have still been able to run 2 or 3 miles at a go without too much trouble. But there's a big difference between a weekend 5k for charity and a half marathon. I haven't run anything close to that distance since the marathon in 2013, it it requires real training.

My hope is that this is the thing that helps me find the motivation I've been lacking. My training is going to be far less effective if I don't bother with any sort of nutrition. I also will need to make sure I do my best to increase strength and try to maintain muscle mass, so I'll need to hit the gym 1-2 times a week between runs. I hope that, by deciding to do one thing properly, I reactivate the attitudes and habits that I had so carefully groomed over the two years during which I was actually healthy and fit. The funny thing is that I don't enjoy running as much as I enjoy weightlifting, but since I'm not looking to compete in weightlifting, there are no dates and deadlines. I can say, "I want to do a chin-up by October" until I'm blue in the face, but it's totally made up and I know it. At least with road races, the parameters of the event, including the date, are outside my control. And I paid an entry fee. That's real money, dammit.

So here I sit, having gone to the gym this morning and logged all my food for the first time in ages. There is Buncha Crunch in the cabinet and I want to eat it. I'm not hungry. Like, at all. I had lunch two hours ago and it was perfectly filling. In fact, it was super fatty and should leave me feeling plenty satisfied for another couple of hours. But I know that goddamned Buncha Crunch is there and I know how good it feels to eat it. Especially without caring how much I eat. Indifference can be very tasty.

But I'm not going to eat that fucking Buncha Crunch because I have real fucking work to do. And it's more than fitting into a dress or hitting my macros or coming in under a calorie goal for the day. This is about taking control of my life and my body; it's about deciding that disordered eating is not the defining facet of my life. Tomorrow, I'm going to go for a run. And the next day I'm going to go to the gym. And the next day I'm going to run again. And the next day I'm going to rest because those days are also important. But then, goddammit, the next day I'm going to go for another run.

Although I am anxious about diving back into my healthy habits whole-hog, going from total apathy to maximum focus in a single day, I worry much more about what this means in the long term. Sure, I can do this for a week, or a month, or maybe even the whole summer. But what about in September, when I have brand new students and a brand new curriculum (to me) and I'm back to bringing home grading most nights? What happens when I have to jam my exercise into smaller and smaller available blocks of time? What happens when I decide that stress-eating isn't a terrible alternative to staying stressed? Can I really maintain my motivation and determination indefinitely, when being good forever is so exhausting?

I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know how this will go. But I went to the gym today. And I've eaten sensible food so far with the intention of doing so all day. Four years ago, it was immensely helpful for me to consider my relationship with food to be akin to a drug addiction. One day at a time, just make the decision not to use right now, worry about tomorrow tomorrow. I'm even rereading the book that put me on the right psychological path. Maybe, just maybe, if I can get my mind right, I can get back to work. I guess we'll see.

Glory, Glory

Sometimes things that happen in the world make me upset. I get angry or sad or frustrated or confused or irritated. I read a lot, ask questions, talk to people, argue and debate, and shout for justice at the top of my lungs whether or not anyone is listening. Sometimes I get sad enough that it's hard for me to see the hope underneath all of the jaded exhaustion.

These experiences are all typical for me. I am a passionate person, and I react very strongly to things, even things that have nothing to do with me in particular. It matters to me if other people, even total strangers half a world away, are suffering. It's impossible to care about seven billion people all at once, but in general, the lives of others matter to me, so I tend to feel something when something horrible happens.

I think, however, I am now experiencing what I would call a crisis of faith. It's not that I'm questioning God or having trouble turning to my religion, since I don't think He exists and I haven't got a religion. I'd be happy to be wrong about that, but I've just never had whatever the thing is that makes people believe in a religion.

The faith I'm talking about is my faith in humanity and in the future of our world. Normally, it's easy to compartmentalize my pessimism or balance it with optimism. If I'm feeling down about the environment and climate change, I'm hopeful about marriage equality. If I'm bummed about racism and discrimination, I'm pleased about strides in net neutrality or that FIFA guy resigning. Even if a lot of bad things are happening, I can find comfort in my work or my husband or my dogs. Or I can detach myself from more global concerns and just be self-centered and watch a superhero movie to give my brain and heart a rest.

When I first heard the news about the shooting at the church in Charleston, I didn't get viscerally upset the way I would have expected. I didn't think about my reaction critically at the time, but in retrospect, my feelings were unusually subdued. I thought, in a rather calm way, "oh no." The way you would respond to forgetting to bring a coupon to the supermarket or maybe if you drop something on the floor because you're carrying too much and now you have to figure out how to pick it up again.

I figured I would get angrier later, maybe I was just tired or the cold medicine was making me process more slowly. I figured that once I knew more about the shooting, that information would be kindling for the fire that would rage inside my heart. I figured it was just a slow start. I'd get riled up any minute now.

That was yesterday afternoon.

After a while, I became aware of my lack of reaction. I realized how odd it was because the shooting was objectively awful and tragic and deeply upsetting. My friends on social media all seemed to be talking about it with strong feelings and bombastic reactions. Usually, I would be doing the same thing, but for some reason, I wasn't. I thought about how I had been reacting to other things since I heard about the shooting. I noticed that I hadn't really gotten my hackles up about anything, which is unusual. With all that's been going on in the realm of social justice alone, there are opportunities to become irate and passionate every ten minutes.

I felt sad, but in a very numb and even way, calm like the surface of a lake on a windless day. I thought maybe I just needed to process it more, learn more, interact with the information more. I read some more news coverage. I looked at the pictures and stories of the nine victims. I even read some think pieces by journalists with whom I consistently disagree, thinking that I would get riled up about injustice or bad journalism or hypocrisy or SOMETHING. It was like I just kept cutting myself a little at a time, waiting to see blood so that I remembered I was alive.

I still couldn't manage to excite my emotions. I did feel something, though. With every picture of the victims - smiling faces, loved ones embracing each other, happiness in their eyes - I had the impression that something in my gut was being scooped out a tiny bit at a time. Each headline took another little chunk. But the pictures...the pictures were the worst. I could almost hear my insides being scraped like the dregs in a pint of ice cream.

This morning, I tried to listen to Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On". I made it through about a minute of the song before I turned it off. I didn't want to cry in my car on the way to work.

Usually, even when I'm feeling very down and pessimistic in general, there is hope at the bottom of all of it. It might take a while to find it again, or it might feel sort of contaminated or qualified, like "Things will get better, I mean, at least a little, maybe, in a while, I think." Still overall hopeful but not quite so sure as usual. But my hopefulness tends to be pretty resilient. Over the course of my life, I've become more optimistic and positive, rather than more jaded and negative as I had assumed would happen. I have come to believe in the power of the human spirit and the possibilities that exist when people act with love in their hearts.

Right now, I feel like that part of me has been scraped away. Although I'm suspect the feeling will go away, I'm not sure that my world view will be left unscathed. At this moment, I'm genuinely doubtful that things will get better. I don't think that next year will necessarily be better than this year. I don't think that politics and civics are going to shape this country into something better. I don't think racism is going to peter out just because the older generations are dying. I don't think people are becoming less bigoted and hateful. I don't think economic inequality and oppressive systems and social injustice are going to be solved by a bunch of white people patting each other on the backs on Facebook for how open-minded and tolerant they are because they have a couple of black friends.

Things feel worse than ever. And trust me, I've heard it all before. It's always darkest before the dawn. It's going to get worse before it gets better. "The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." I know all of that. A few days ago, I believed it. Very strongly.

But the part of my soul that is willing to take those things on faith, the part that is responsible for inserting hope into dreary circumstances...that part is missing. It's just gone. And although I suppose it's likely to spring back, probably very soon, right now it feels like it's gone forever.
 -----------------------------------------------------------
You know, today is Juneteenth. It's the 150th anniversary of the ending of slavery in the South. I thought maybe that recognizing the importance of this day in history would help me redirect some of my negativity, but it just made it worse. It's been 150 years since the slaves in Texas were freed. According to the Population Reference Bureau, over 13 billion people have been born since then. Yet with so many of those people working towards a better future, we are still just so shitty to one another. We hate each other, we oppress everyone we can, we hurt people. Hatred and violence and exploitation, these are the most resilient aspects of the human spirit.

I don't know if I really believe that. And maybe this spiritual struggle is just another instance of nothing, in a whole sea of nothingness. I post to social media and talk to my friends and argue with my students about justice, but I eat privilege for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I believe myself to be so enlightened and so progressive and so awake, but I'm still just someone who complains about mortgage rates or her favorite soda getting discontinued. I buy clothing from companies that use child labor in abhorrent conditions. I buy food from stores that don't pay their workers a living wage. I know this and I still do it. My own actions deepen my doubts about the future.

Earlier, I was reading the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, a song written at the beginning of the Civil War. It seemed appropriate, after all, given the date. The song is basically about how God is awesome. One lyric in a later verse reads, "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." The song is at once triumphant and determined. It speaks of an absolutely unshakeable assurance that the righteous will prevail.

And while it's true that the Union was victorious and the slaves were freed, the Confederate flag still flies over Charleston tonight. I don't see much reason to cry, "Glory, glory, hallelujah!"

A Meandering Commentary: The Problem with "Both sides did wrong."

I'm a white woman. I grew up in a white family, in a (mostly) white town with (mostly) white friends. The various schools I attended have never been particularly diverse, and my circle of friends has a pretty high budget for sunscreen, if you get what I'm saying. I have spent the last nine years teaching predominantly not-white students, but aside from that, my culture and my associates are about as white as it gets.

My mom grew up during the 60s, when the Civil Rights movement was in full swing and racism was more outspoken and expected/accepted compared to America today. Although she lived in Massachusetts, a state that is about as blue as can be, she saw a lot of crazy shit first hand. When she happily and purposefully maintained friendships with the few black kids in her neighborhood, her white peers called her a race traitor and threw rocks at her just like they threw rocks at her black friends. She was a passionate, vocal supporters of the Civil Rights movement and was not afraid to walk the walk. Raising my brother and me in the 80s and 90s, my mother never shied away from talking about race and social justice, and was always very clear that all people were just people, no matter what skin color they had.

There were limits to the scope and content of her teachings, though. Limits that I only became aware of as I started bumping into issues of social justice in the 21st century. I found myself getting defensive in conversations about race. I found myself feeling very torn between aligning with my race and aligning with an aggrieved party. My gut reactions and my intellectual beliefs were not always in agreement. I did a lot of reading and listening, had a lot of conversation, and did my best to understand things and people better.

Finally, the thing that broke it open for me was learning about white privilege. It wasn't something that had ever occurred to me, but as soon as I read a few sentences about it, I immediately got it. This was the missing link. This was the piece of the puzzle I needed to connect my experiences with what I had been taught and what I had witnessed out in the world. It helped me understand why my childhood, throughout which I was varying levels of poor, was not exactly the same as the childhood of a person of color with the same economic background. It helped me understand why my relationship with authority figures and especially law enforcement was not the same as the relationship between, say, my students and their local cops. I stopped questioning practices like affirmative action. And so on and so on. I began to understand so much more, and perhaps most importantly, I began to understand how much I really didn't know.

Cut to July 13, 2013. My wedding day. It was also the day that George Zimmerman was acquitted after shooting Trayvon Martin. I purposefully avoided the news until the next day because I knew how it was going to go and I didn't want to be that angry going into what is, ideally, the most romantic day of one's life. Relative to my own awareness of current events, this was the first in what seems to be an endless wave of black people getting beaten or killed by police or, in Zimmerman's case, people who took on authority without actually having the responsibility or imperative to apprehend anyone. Of course, police brutality isn't new, but it just seems like things have really taken a turn over the last two years. I suspect, as others have posited, that this is more because of ubiquitous cameras, social media, and the concept of viral videos rather than an actual increase in incidents. Which is terrifying, because if these things have been happening at least this much for decades, that is, to quote the last chapter of 1984, "disquieting in the extreme."

As a white person, my relationship to these incidents and my role in discussing them is tricky. I teach high schools students of many different races. I feel responsible for helping them understand the larger world in context, for giving them information but also guiding them through their own understanding of it. I try to avoid "programming" them, and if something is my personal opinion, I say that, but I also feel a duty to help them be good citizens and good people. I am not afraid to tell them if something is right or wrong.

Last summer, in 2014, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. That September, I began my first (and it would appear, only) year of teaching AP Language, a course that studies rhetoric and argument. I used the media portrayals of Mike Brown and all of the events in Ferguson to teach rhetoric on the very first day of class. Besides using current events and difficult subject matter to teach something about language, bias, and the media, my main focus was to push my students to question how things were portrayed on the news. I wanted them to understand that narratives were being consciously constructed and, for better or for worse, those pre-fab narratives were what they were getting on social media and through CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and so on.

Through my conversations with my students, my discussions with my friends and co-workers, my many arguments and debates on social media, and my endless reading on current events and various interpretations of those events, I have begun to see common tropes and trends in how people respond to events like the killing of Mike Brown. Some people are very ready to be angry at the police and the government and anyone else with authority, so much so that they don't care what actually happened and just react. Others are the hardline police supporters, who won't budge from their "police officers are saints" position no matter what the personal testimonies, videos, and even physical evidence all indicate.

One recurring attitude I see among my fellow white people is the desperate need to justify the actions of the police. Although many people who feel this way are capable of critiquing the behavior of individuals (they sure do love talking about "bad apples"), they stop short of talking about systems of oppression or large socioeconomic issues at play. With Mike Brown, the fact that he was suspected of stealing cigars was a relief -- a relief -- for some people. They may not have expressed their reactions aloud, but the general sense from some was, "Oh, thank god he was actually a criminal. Now this isn't racist and the cop's actions make sense." Any wrongdoing on the part of Mike Brown meant that his fate, while perhaps "excessive", wasn't exactly wrong. It was more unfortunate or sad than anything else.

The same logic has been applied, even more insanely, to riots and protests (two different things, if you weren't sure) after incidents of police brutality. If a single window is broken or a fire is set, the reason for the initial protest is forgotten. It doesn't matter if the police did wrong; if someone got angry and broke something, then the victim deserved what he got. Some people are bold enough to say things like, "If these people want equal rights, they should act like they deserve them." Most people don't say it, but it doesn't mean it never occurs to them.'

When the video of the police officers at the pool party in Texas surfaced, I didn't watch the whole thing. I had read descriptions of what happened, seen some stills, and scrolled through some reactions on social media. Honestly, this seemed pretty cut and dry: a police officer escalated a minor incident in a way that was violent and completely inappropriate. The whole thing was caught on tape. The victims were kids. The primary subject of the video, after the police officer in question, was a 14-year-old girl. Say what you want about chivalry versus feminism, but many people still feel very strongly that men should not use violence against women, and that's doubly true if he is an adult but she is a child.

Then I posted an article about the issue of age in the pool party incident to my Facebook wall. As is the case with most social media, my Facebook friends mostly represent an echo chamber of like-minded individuals who may often disagree on tricky topics (freedom of speech, especially in comedy, for example) but who are generally very closely aligned on social justice (don't do this). But when I posted the article referencing the McKinney pool party incident, things went straight to Wackyland. The main debate centered around the culpability of the kids (specifically the aforementioned 14-year-old girl) for what happened when the police arrived. The issue being so multifaceted and complicated, and me being reluctant to side with one friend over another, I let the thing play out without any commentary or mediation from me. I had already said my piece by posting the article and pulling the quote that I found relevant. I was fine letting people duke it out.

Then my mom said this: "I am pretty sure there is plenty of blame to go around.One thing I do know for sure is that if you had mouthed off to me at that age I would not have grabbed your hair, or thrown you to the ground, or put my knee on your back because I was the adult and THAT is child abuse."

I found her comment interesting, and very indicative of the strange crossroads that her beliefs inhabit. Her viewpoint and her attitude about race was radical in the 60s, even the 70s and 80s. She was always extremely progressive. That being said, the first sentence is something I have heard her express many times before, and a reaction I've heard echoed throughout many conversations on incidents in Ferguson, Ohio, California, Staten Island, Baltimore, and a dozen other places. "There is plenty of blame to go around." The rest of my mom's comment seems very clearly to side with the girl and those who would see the officer fired for his actions. But that first sentence suggests a reluctance to commit fully to a side. My mother has always been the great negotiator. She excels in teamwork and collaboration, is adept at helping others sort through their problems, and has always been eerily good at empathy and understanding. Her desire to spread out the blame for McKinney is part of a larger instinct for her, where she would much rather keep the peace than start some shit. She has a profound and rock-solid respect for police officers, something clearly at odds with her feelings about the treatment of the girl in the video.

She was not the only one who felt this way in the comment on my wall. The culpability of the teenagers kept coming up. They were trespassing. They disrespected the officers. They weren't supposed to be there.

Here is the problem with that argument.

By pointing out the (extremely minor) wrongdoings of the party who is clearly the victim in this scenario, it lessens the scrutiny placed on the perpetrator (in this case, the police officer). The unsaid correlation is that the teens attending a pool party that was too large according to the neighborhood by-laws justifies all the police officer's actions. Some may argue that this is NOT what they intended to suggest by pointing out the trespassing. My question then is this: what is the point of bringing up the trespassing or the back-talking? If the goal is not to excuse the officer's actions, what purpose could it serve? Likewise, why would it matter if Mike Brown stole cigars? The only reason to bring it up would be to suggest that the theft meant that Darren Wilson was justified in his actions that day in Ferguson.

On top of that, this whole argument ignores the larger issue of race and policing. Studies have repeatedly revealed racial bias in policing in multiple areas across multiple types of police interactions. Black people get stopped more often and pulled over more often, handcuffed more often and taken to the station more often, have charged pressed against them more often, are convicted more often, and get harsher punishments than their white counterparts. Controlled for socioeconomic status, criminal history, geographic location, and gender, black people are simply treated worse by the entire criminal justice system than white people. It's not a theory or a possibility; it's a fact. From neighborhood policing to sentencing, the justice system is a meat grinder for black people.

This doesn't mean that cops are automatically racist, that white cops are bad, that no black person has ever committed a crime, or that cops shouldn't be allowed to arrest black people. If you think I'm arguing any of those things, I don't know why you bothered reading this far, because you're obviously not willing to listen or think right now.

What it does mean, however, is that a white person's reaction to an interaction between police and black people is not always going to be couched in the context necessary to understand it. Let me explain what I mean. I'm white, so I experience the criminal justice system as a relatively fair and predictable machine. Cops are on my side, courts are on my side, and it's basically all there to protect me. I smile at police officers when I pass them. They usually smile back. My encounters with police officers are NOT the same as the encounters of, for example, black teens growing up in Texas. We experience two different criminal justice systems.

So if I bring my uniformly-white perspective on police officers to a conversation about McKinney, I may not really be able to understand the full scope of the issue. I might wonder why the kids didn't just sit down and stay quiet as they were told. I might wonder why some of them fled when they saw the police car pull up. I might wonder why they felt the need to record the incident on a cell phone. I might wonder why, when the police officer had the 14-year-old girl smashed into the ground with his full body weight on her spine, some of her friends and relatives tried to intervene. Seeing a police officer clearly upset, swearing at children and running around like a maniac, I might automatically assume that his actions are justified and correct, and therefore wonder why the kids were making him panic so much.

Before starting this blog post, I made myself watch the full video of the McKinney incident. To me, it was clear as day: the children were innocent. I don't mean that they were angels or that every single thing they did that day was lawful and good. I mean that they intended no harm, were having fun, and did not pose a threat to anyone. They were kids at a rowdy party.

They were kids.

When white kids misbehave and the cops intervene, the dominant narrative is not police brutality. Warnings, rides home, calls to parents, maybe a night in jail if the offense is really that serious and the kids is older. It is very important for the punishment to fit the crime. Fairness is a real concern.

Then white people see white cops brutalize black children at a party and we think, "those thugs must have done something to deserve it."  They didn't. They didn't. They didn't.

Harry Potter and the Uterine Urgency Graph

I recently read an article on Slate.com about how parents talk about parenting. It struck a chord with me throughout, but this quote in particular practically had me jumping up and down: "If becoming a parent 'changes everything,' as everyone says, then what is its promise to those of us who are already happy?"

I like my life. Currently, not hypothetically. All I keep reading are these satirical or tongue-in-cheek or painfully earnest blogs and articles about sniffing butts to check for poop and never sleeping again and having no life/friends/hobbies/time/sanity..."but it's so wonderful, I wouldn't trade it for anything" yadda yadda. My friends on social networks post these articles alongside winky faces and LOLs and 48 tagged friends who “will totally get this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” As a 31-year-old woman, I see these things every single goddamned day. “I haven’t eaten a meal with two available hands since 2013, but life is great!”

You're not selling me. I like sleep. I like free time. I like the fact that I am beholden to only myself and some dogs. I can stay late at school as needed, sleep in on weekends and school vacations, take a dump in peace, imbibe infinite quantities of caffeine, put caustic chemicals in unlocked cabinets, go to the grocery store with an exhaustive list and leisurely stroll the aisles reading labels and comparing products without regard to naptimes or boredom levels or a little one's propensity for removing all bottom-shelf merchandise. Away from work, I don't have to watch my language or think about what behavior I'm modeling all the time. I can play video games for 14 hours. I can watch TV shows with violence, language, and sexual situations no matter what time of day it is or who is in the room. I can say things like "snack" and "cookie" and "ice cream" and "park" and "nap" without having to spell them. (Our dogs are very stupid.) I don't have to choose between making just enough money to cover the daycare that I need because I’m working or bringing in no income but not needing daycare. I can spend a great deal of time and energy and money taking care of my wonderful and pathetic students who always need EVERYTHING and who aren't going to get it from most of their other teachers (or families, for that matter). Dan can take trips to Vegas with friends or go to Orlando for work and be gone for four days and my response is "okay, have fun!"

Everyone I know who has kids speaks very fondly of their lives as parents. Then again, I don't know anyone who would be like "you know, if I had to do it all over again, I might have just gotten a vasectomy/tubal ligation and gotten on with my life." Some people probably THINK that, but it seems there's some sort of contract you sign in the Labor and Delivery ward that prevents you from ever saying it, except through Post Secret. Even parents who were not trying to have kids speak lovingly of their lives as parents.

Which is fine. But all I keep hearing about are all of the objectively terrible things that happen when A Wild Offspring appears, and isn't it so humorous and vexing to have everything you once loved ripped from your life in a procedure not unlike antebellum battlefield amputation. And I completely understand the need to commiserate and reflect and find humor in parenthood, which seems to be most accurately characterized as "a mixed bag."

In fact, I do the same thing with teaching - I frequently share both positive and negative things about my job, with most of my commentary being far from the "I want to save all the children" mantra that we carry with us to various schools of education and our first teaching jobs. The difference is that I don't try to sell other people on becoming teachers. I love it. I think that if you believe you'd love it too, you probably would. But it's hard as hell, and it's NOT for everyone. Not by a long shot. Teaching in America, specifically, has a lot of systemic problems right now that make the job worse than it should be. So if someone said, "hey, should I go into teaching?" I would give them a lengthy answer, the gist of which would be "maybe. If you want to."

But from parents, all I hear is "god, this kid is driving me crazy and I haven't washed my hair in four days. BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY HAVE KIDS THOUGH." Which seriously besmirches their credibility, as far as I'm concerned. It's like when you find something gross-smelling and your response to your friend is "EW! Hey, smell this." No, bro, I don't need to smell it. Your reaction was very clear. I trust you.

I was told my biological clock would be ticking...?

This is part of why it’s so infuriating to have people telling me, directly and with no uncertainty, that I should have kids right now. Although the most vocal individuals are my female elder relatives, this refrain comes from a wide variety of sources, same-age peers included. They cancel plans over and over again because of the kids, but then lobby for you to join the Procreation Army, the cult-like shadowy organization that shall not rest until all child-bearing age humans are among its ranks. Sure, the conversation always starts as a question – “Are you guys thinking about having kids?” But when my answer isn’t either “yes, we’re fornicating regularly solely for this reason, thank you for inquiring about my uterus” or “NEVER!” then they turn on the hard sell. “Well, there’s no good time to have children,” they say. Yes, that’s true, I think, but also NOT a good reason to have a kid. Something being accurate does not automatically make it convincing. 

We live in a condo that doesn’t even have enough room for my possessions, and THOSE can be shoved into a closet. There is literally no room for a baby. The baby would sleep on the couch. Or we’d watch TV from the crib. Either way, we don’t have room. Are we planning to move? Yes, probably in the next 6 months to a year. Do we feel the need to get pregnant as a precursor to that move? No. To this line of reasoning, they reply, “You know, it’s hard, but you find a way to make it work.” This is how I would describe an adequate response to an emergency.

Parenting should not be an emergency. Yet that is probably the closest word to what parents on these blogs and websites consider parenting to be. Your kid is always about to die, about to kill the dog, about to be killed by the dog, about to burn the house down, about to die in the aforementioned house fire, or, perhaps most insidiously, slowly killing you through a calculated program of sleep deprivation and starvation. Basic hygiene and self-care go out the window, social engagements get missed so often that the opportunities stop presenting themselves, husbands and wives find all sorts of things to argue about, and

For all my talk of 14-hour video game marathons and leisurely strolls through the grocery store, I do actually find myself quite busy most of the time. I always have papers and things to grade, I struggle to find time to make it to the gym, and chores get pushed back for days or weeks at a time. Could I power through all of those things on a regular basis and leave myself almost no free time in the process? Yes. If I once trained for a marathon while simultaneously job-hunting and planning a wedding (and honeymoon), then yes, almost anything is possible. But adding a kid to the mix? A kid who lives with you, like, all the time? And relies on you for every single one of its needs? That sort of commitment is beyond what I’m willing to make right now, whether or not I would technically be able to handle it.

I think one of the things that makes me so resentful about other people pressuring me to have kids (immediately!) is that they don’t seem to have a lot of respect for or trust in my own personal decisions. Either my preference to wait comes from a place of gross ignorance or my thoughts are simply irrelevant. “I would love to see what kind of mom you’d be! I think you’d be great!” Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I’m not going to procreate so you can settle a bet. “Once you have a kid, you’ll understand.” Yes, I’m sure that’s true. But given my talents for rational thought and extreme empathy, I bet I have a pretty good handle on most of it. I’m not saying I have experience and knowledge equivalent to parents, but rather that I have a pretty solid imagination. I can imagine that being in a concentration camp was bad. I can imagine that being a gazillionaire with a large staff to care for my mansion would be pretty sweet. I can imagine that splitting my pants in the middle of the street would be embarrassing. I don’t need to have these experiences myself to wrap my head around them, and I don’t need to have a kid to wrap my head around the general experience of parenting. If anything, I’m over-informed. Maybe if I didn’t know about episiotomies and liquid infant poops and terrible twos and the stage when your kid wants to examine and discuss and utilize his/her genitals all the time, I wouldn’t be so hesitant to embark on the journey that everyone has decided is next for me.

To be honest, though, there are a million reasons I’m not ready. Sometimes when I get frustrated with the dogs on a walk, I pull their leashes harder than I have to. Certainly not hard enough to hurt them (or, it would seem, inconvenience them), but I don’t like that I have that reaction. I worry that I would be that way with a kid.

When my life gets busy or difficult outside of work, I tend to be less creative and productive at work. I get behind on grading and I don’t put a ton of effort into innovating and making cool lessons. When I broke my foot last fall, the combination of my mobility problems and my dark-as-midnight depression meant that I was almost no better than a substitute teacher would have been. I worry that I would have to choose between phoning it in as a teacher and phoning it in as a mom (and I would choose the former, obviously).

After losing more than 60 pounds and getting down to a size 6 or so (from a size 16), I have struggled to keep the weight off since I started teaching at my current job in September 2013. The added workload of a public school job (as opposed to the alternative school, where the children did almost no work and therefore required very little grading, comparatively) meant that my gym routine suffered dramatically – I went months at a time between gym visits and even runs around my own neighborhood. Earlier that year I had been running 6 miles a day 3 times a week with a longer run every Saturday. I ran almost 100 miles over the course of April 2013. In October 2013, I ran 1.7 miles. Total.

Not pictured: Chicken Fingers Consumed Per Month

I did a little better over last summer, doing at least a couple of runs per month, but I never got back into the habit fully, and then the combination of the school year starting back up and a lovely foot fracture this past October was the death knell for my exercise life. With almost no time and/or ability to exercise, I found it hard to keep up my food habits as well, and my motivation was inconsistent at best. Since the summer of 2013, I’ve put about 20 pounds back on (roughly one pound per month), not nearly the full amount I lost, but enough to make a significant portion of my clothes no longer wearable. And that’s just because I went from one teaching job to another. I worry – not unreasonably – that I would not be able to maintain healthy food and exercise habits with a kid. I know that many people do, but I don’t know that I would. The endless posts about not being able to lose baby weight and having one's own body betray one in unimaginable ways are not helping.

So although I enjoy my life, it's certainly not perfect. I struggle to find a balance between all of the areas that I wish to give my attention. My greatest complaint about my life right now is that I don't have enough time for all the things I want to do. If that's my main problem, why would I add a kid to that? That seems like the exact opposite of a good idea.

Of course, I also worry that I am going to wait too long, that my eggs will be made of silly string and that horrible chocolate with air pumped into it for some reason. I worry that if and when we eventually try to have kids, we will find out that we can't. Or we'll have a bunch of miscarriages, or kids with disabilities because my eggs are all jacked up. Or we'll spend $25,000 on fertility treatments and IVF only to have it fail again and again. Or that if we can't have biological children then we'll happily adopt, only to have to fight to urge to murder everyone who asks us if we have any "real" children. Or parenthood will be amazing and we'll regret having waited so long because we'll be "old parents". Or we will realize we want to have like a bajillion babies but we won't be able to because we waited too long. But I don't share these concerns with the Procreation Army because they don't need my help fighting their side of the battle. They have already perfected the significant glances that accompany the whispered dire warning of "just don't wait too long."

For all my dismissive talk of the practical and horrible sides of parenting, I am absolutely positive that, in addition to the fecal and various other nightmares, it is actually as wonderful and mind-blowing as they say. I can imagine the Grinch-heart-expanding feeling when your small child accosts you with affection with their newly-discovered gross motor control. I can imagine the pride and satisfaction and bittersweet joy of first words or first steps. I can imagine the secret, foolish-feeling tears shed in the car after dropping your kid off for the first day of school. I can imagine the gut-wrenching conversations with your spouse about what your child is or is not ready for, and how much trust to place in someone who, just a few years ago, ate a button battery and made you go to the emergency room for four hours (only to be told by the doctor that everything was fine but you'd have to go through the stool later...and you did. You went through poop just to be safe.) I can imagine the frustration and heartache and confusion the first time your kid, no longer little, talks back to you with genuine, fully-realized anger.

I have absolutely no doubt that these experiences are part of a realm that is difficult to fathom before you have kids. But I also don't think I'm ready for them, financially or emotionally or in any other realm, and I'm not suffering from their absence the way I was always told I would. The dogs woke me up this morning, a Sunday, with horrible whining at 6:30am. The only reason it didn't ruin my day was that I knew I could take a nap later, or just go to bed extra early tonight. If it were a kid waking me up, rather than the dogs? To paraphrase a Seinfeld legend, no sleep for you.

For all of the anticipated joys and delights that come with parenthood, the blogs and articles that populate the web reveal to me what I've always suspected - a lot of a parent's life is just abject misery. It's misery that's worth it of course, misery that you would absolutely suffer again and again for the protection or happiness of your child, but misery nonetheless. Parenthood eats your money, your free time, your sanity, your willpower, your friendships, and sometimes your marriage. These hyper-honest Mommy Blogs make no pretense about that.

I share my concerns, openly and without guile, but the Procreation Army is still not satisfied. “Yes,” they admit, face full of concern and understanding, “it’s true that a lot of stuff changes when you have a kid. Some things will always be different. But it’s amazing, you’ll see.” As with the smelly item proffered for communal suffering, I put my hand up and say, “No, bro, I’m all set. Your reaction was very clear. I trust you.”