Rhythm? No. Rhyme and reason ... some.

I thought I would develop some rhythm in the writing of this dissertation, and the blog that (sometimes) reflects it. Well, no. Real life keeps getting in the way. I recall with some humor the concluding words from the acknowledgments in a text written recently by someone on the faculty of my institution:

"Finally, I'm grateful to my family, who gladly leave me to my intellectual pursuits without complaint."

Okay, yes, it is a man who wrote that, white, of a certain generation. This sentence conjures up a whole (imaginary) world for me, of a person for whom laundry is done, food is acquired and cooked, a house is kept, children are raised ... and all that goes on outside the door of a closed office, in which this man has the leisure to cogitate, reflect, and write. For long stretches of time. In peace.

I don't live in that world.

In my world, there are the teenagers, the widowed mother with significant health issues who just moved closer by, and my beloved M., who has been slowly but surely moving into our house and winding deeper into our hearts, and who unintentionally tugs at the strings of my wanting-to-be-with.

I am grateful to my family, too ... though they do not typically leave me to my intellectual pursuits. Pursuit of laundry, shopping, and transportation, yes. Intellectual pursuits ... well, when we do talk about my work, I usually learn more than they do. So, it's a good thing I am not completely left to my own devices.

It is hard to write a bit here, think a bit there, edit and reorganize and try to hold onto a train of thought until my mind gets to the station. And yet, I can't stop with reflecting on the lack of male privilege in my life. Because there is plenty of white privilege, and the difficulties I have being a sandwich-generation full-time mom and lot-of-the-time daughter and part-time instructor while attempting to write a dissertation do not change that.

I sit in a house acquired through one of those they-had-no-right-give-her-a-mortgage loans; and I have been supported not only by my own efforts and employment but also by gifts and inheritances flowing through the gates of a white world. My mother has moved into an assisted living center where the nurses and administrators (in higher paying jobs) are for the most part white women, and the nurses' aides and housekeepers and hands-on care providers (in lower-paying jobs) are all women of color. The cost for this is paid for with money my dad made, profits generated in part by using underpaid Latino labor.

White privilege plays into all of my environment ... and I do see my complicity. But I can't stop with noticing. It's like housekeeping; you know you are going to keep making messes, just by living, and so you keep cleaning up, and you try to make a little less mess than you clean up.

I have been working for 15 years now on accepting that what I can do is good enough; becoming a working mother -- even with white privilege -- took a big bite out of my perfectionism right off the bat. I had to accept that I could not be the employee I wanted to be or the mother I wanted to be, if I was being both, and so if I wanted to be both, I had to accept the notion of "good enough." (I had some help in that department from Bonnie Miller-McLemore's Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma, which I picked up for working mother tips, not realizing it would trick me into quitting my job and eventually going to seminary.)

Beginning to (try to) live into an anti-racist identity took a few more big bites out of the perfectionist cookie. You realize the original sin of whiteness: i.e., you are born into and grow up in systems that teach you (and help you internalize) your superiority, such that you think it's natural and inevitable. You realize that it is sheer grace that causes God and people of color to love you anyway, despite the ways you keep acting white (see Macon D's excellent and prolific blog at http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/ and everything Tim Wise every wrote). You learn to forgive yourself so you don't get paralyzed with guilt, and you learn to be willing to risk being wrong -- even as you try your darnedest to do the right things right -- so you don't get paralyzed with fear.

You learn that partial and imperfect progress is better than no progress at all. And so you set yourself to write an anti-racist theology, even knowing that you will be making a part-time and imperfect effort that will not be the best, not even the best you could do, but it will be the best you can do, and that whatever you can do is worth doing.

My committee probably won't want the dissertation cover to read "Best That Could Be Done Under the Circumstances."

So, maybe I'll just acknowledge on my acknowledgments page my gratitude for everything that gets in the way of this project -- because every distraction reminds me what it's really about.

Having the courage to see the world, name what's not right, and take responsibility for doing something about it.