Kelly Poe Wilson

When I was a sophomore in high school, I decided to stop standing for the pledge of allegiance. There was no single reason for me to come to this decision—while there were plenty of things our government was doing that I did not agree with (these were the Reagan years, after all), it was more of a matter of slowly realizing that not only did the words in the pledge make me uncomfortable (as an atheist I found the “under god” part particularly irksome), but also that the very sentiment behind it gave me pause. At that point I had only taken one class in world history, but that had been enough to let me know that nationalism never ended well for anyone.

So I stopped. I stopped because once I really thought about what the pledge meant to me I knew that to continue to say it would be dishonest. This decision, of course, did not go over well with my fellow students, and went over even less well with some of the teachers and administrators. Finally, after one class had devolved into chaos, with half the room saying the pledge and half the room not saying the pledge because they were too busy yelling at me to “Stand up! Stand up! Stand up already!” I was called in to speak to the principal about “causing a distraction.” (The irony of the people who were actually doing the yelling not being called in for being “distracting” was not lost on me.)

We spoke at length about why I wasn’t standing and reciting the pledge. And then, after hearing me out, he sent me back to class. And that was that. I never said the pledge again. The shouting continued for the rest of the year, but less and less each time, until finally, by the time I graduated, it was hardly remarked upon at all. And in my mind I thought that that had meant I had won.

For over thirty years now I thought that meant that I had won. Me. Personally. That my arguments were so compelling, my belief so sincere, my demeanor so calm and righteous that the obstacles before me had simply fallen away in shame.

Watching what is now happening on sports fields around the world has caused to me re-evaluate that belief, much to my chagrin.

What if the truth was that the best argument I made sitting there in my principal’s office was one that never came out of my mouth? What if the best argument against me getting into trouble for asserting my rights was simply the fact that me having (and exercising) those same rights didn’t really make anyone uncomfortable? After all, the idea that my people—young, white bookish females—were rising up and calling for change was probably not that intimidating. I mean, yeah, it was a little intimidating (hence the yelling), but really, to older and wiser heads, to the ones who actually had the power (like my principal), it was probably just an anomaly.

A blip.

It is, without a doubt, humbling and kind of depressing when you finally realize that you weren’t quite as “all that” as you’d like to remember. But it is also empowering. It’s like the first time you ever realized that the only reason you had won all those games of Hearts with your grandmother back when you were a kid was because she was letting you. At first you were shocked—your reality was upended. Then you were angry and defensive—surely it wasn’t all of the games? I mean, you must have won some of them, right? And then, finally, you were determined. Determined that, from now on, all games would be on the level. Meaning that, from now on, you would compete as equals.

It is probably the height of irony that now, after all of these years, it is only in watching the hysteria surrounding people protesting against an unequal system that I finally understand just how much I myself have benefitted from that system, but then again, that’s just irony doing its job.

Because really, if there’s anything in this world that truly qualifies as “equal opportunity,” than surely it is irony.

Well, it finally happened. My son, Clyde, just asked me if I would be willing to take fifty percent of the things I was about to say and just…not. Considering the fact that we have known each other for sixteen years now (his whole life), the truth is in that taking sixteen years to finally say this to me he has actually set a new record—no one else has ever made it past ten. (And even then that ten year mark was set by his sister, Clementine—most adults only make it three or four years before they make this request.)

The incident that caused Clyde to break his streak involved me going to his high school Open House, a refused handshake, and some pus. Okay, here’s the whole story. As it happens so often in Flagstaff (especially among us clumsy people), I slipped on some cinders and ended up getting some of them lodged in the palm of my hand. Deep. They weren’t really painful—more annoying than anything, but I kept my eye on them nonetheless, watching for signs of infection. (To be clear, I was watching not out of fear of infection, but rather hope: I knew that the only way I would be able to dislodge those deeply set cinders would be to squeeze them out on a wave of pus. What? Go to the doctor? For cinders in my hand? Okay Mrs. Munchausen.)

Anyway, the night of the Open House the Blessed Event finally occurred, and I was able to get the last, deepest cinder out of my hand. Being the thoughtful sort, and knowing that other people generally don’t like to touch another person’s pus, I decided to decline all handshakes that came my way that night. Also, so as not to appear rude and standoffish, I accompanied each decline with a regretful, “Sorry, I can’t shake your hand right now: I just squeezed a bunch of pus out of mine.”

True, in retrospect the added “Want to see?” was probably a bit much, but that last cinder had been percolating in there for well over a week, and I was feeling giddy with triumph.

All of this made perfect sense to me. And no sense at all to Clyde. Hence his request to just…not.

Of course, what Clyde (and everyone else) doesn’t understand is that I am already editing out half of my comments. Heck, truth be told I’m editing out more like seventy-five percent. And at that Open House? Closer to ninety for sure. I was like the Terminator at that Open House, scrolling down a list of comments in my mind until I got to the “appropriate” one. Clyde had no idea how many comments about the color and texture of the pus I kept to myself, nor how many comments reminiscing about how, “this one time, I got a splinter—more like a miniature stake, actually—to shoot halfway across the room.” And it probably hadn’t even occurred to him the number of stigmata jokes I graciously kept to myself, all out of respect for him.

Fortunately, thanks to Clementine, I know that there is still hope for him to one day be able to recognize my true tongue-biting skills. After all, she was the one who was appalled by the things I said out loud when she was ten, and yet now, at the age of twenty, often finds herself biting her own tongue just as hard. (Although she is not entirely happy about this: whenever she tells me about trying hard not to say something—and failing—she says, “Oh my God—I think I’m turning into you.”)

So, if the pattern holds true, Clyde should be reaching this same epiphany by the time he is thirty. At which point it won’t really matter what I say anymore, because by then I should be old enough that I can finally play my “senile old lady” card.

I can hardly wait. In fact, maybe I won’t. Open Houses will never be the same again.

My kids are both unquestionably Millennials, not only in age, but in attitude. This is both a good and a bad thing. It is bad in that they think that “Starbucks” is one of the five food groups. Good, though, in that that chastise me when I get my own Starbucks in a disposable cup. Good in that they are more likely to “swipe right” based on how cute the cat is that is being held in the profile picture than on how closely the cat holder’s skin tone matches their own. Bad in that they are swiping at all. But really, the thing that most defines them as true Millennials is that there are drawers and drawers in my house that are absolutely full of participation trophies. Or rather, participation medals, since medals were the compromise we somehow reached between the space-hogging (and expensive) trophies of legend and the flimsy green “Participant” ribbons of our own youth. Yes, my children are of the generation that perfected getting a prize just for showing up. Or rather, as they were only children then, they are of the generation that had the practice perfected upon them.

They are the generation sneeringly referred to as “Snowflakes”—the kids who supposedly have been conditioned from birth to melt at the first sign of adversity. The ones who are derided for wanting all of the spoils of victory without doing any of the actual fighting. And yet, ironically, as the events of the last few weeks have shown, they are not the ones who truly deserve that title. They are not the ones who are holding the Ultimate Participation Trophy. Because they are not the ones marching through the streets carrying torches.

If Charlottesville has taught us anything, it has taught us that white privilege is the ultimate participation trophy. And the people who refuse to acknowledge this truly are the ultimate snowflakes. Or rather, as one internet meme but it, the “broflakes.”

Think about it: the very definition of privilege is receiving benefits for something that you did not earn. It’s getting into a school because your father went there. It’s getting the chance to rifle through your glove box looking for your car registration unharmed because your age and/or gender is considered “unthreatening.” It’s even something as simple as getting to be first in line because your last name starts with the letter “A.”

There’s nothing wrong with having privilege. And there’s nothing wrong with resenting people who have privileges you don’t. (Yeah, that’s right all of you Andersons out there—as a Wilson, I resent the hell out of your privilege.) And, really, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying your privilege. After all, who among us doesn’t enjoy finding a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk? Unearned, undeserved, but still, it feels like a triumph. Like, for once, everything is coming up you.

Here’s the thing, though: what do you do with that unearned twenty? Do you look around to see if someone else is looking for it, or do you slyly pocket it? Or, if you already have a wallet full of twenties, do you give it to the next needy person you see? What you do with that unearned twenty (or your privilege) defines you. The Charlottesville nazis? Pocketers, every last one of them. Worse, pocketers who, as soon as that twenty was safely tucked into their wallets, rewrote the story in their own heads so that they had somehow earned it. “I was the only person smart enough to look down at that moment, so…”

I’m not saying that Millennials are perfect. I’m not even saying that there aren’t plenty of pocketers among their own ranks. But it seems to me that they have learned at least one very important lesson that the rest of us still seem to be a little bit behind on: if you’re going to hand out medals to everyone just for showing up, then you had better make sure you have enough medals to go around. Even if you have to pull a few out of your own drawers to do it.

 Logging on to my computer the other day, I couldn’t help but notice the headline blaring across the top of the page: “Is Yelling Worse Than Hitting?” My response to this was both immediate and visceral: Dear god, I certainly hope so—there’s no way I could hit as hard as I can yell. It was with a bit of trepidation, then, that I finally clicked open the link, where I saw, to my immense relief, that I needn’t have worried at all: according to the article in question yelling is indeed much worse than hitting. Imagine my confusion then when the very same article went on to suggest several ways that parents could avoid yelling, my favorite two being 1) Try not to be around stressful people and situations (like, perhaps, your children?), and 2) whenever the urge to yell overtakes you try retreating to a quiet room and lighting a soothing candle instead. (Since the urge to yell usually overtakes me when one of my children is doing something like chasing the other one around the living room with a steak knife, suggestion number two would probably not be in anyone’s best interest, and in fact would undoubtably lead to a spate of articles with headlines like: “Are Puncture Wounds Worse Than Mental Scars?”)

When did yelling get such a bad rap, anyway? As far as I’m concerned, yelling has it all over spanking. For one thing, with yelling you don’t even have to be within arm’s reach for it to be effective; on the contrary, the farther away the yell-ee is from the yell-or, the more effective it seems to be. (Nothing says I’m serious like a reprimand delivered from two houses away.) And then there’s the fact that yelling gives you a much broader range of nuances to choose from: from the casual stop riding on the dog yell, to the more strident stop peeing on the dog yell, all the way up to the frantic don’t put that in your mouth–it came out of the dog yell.

In fact, one of the best things about yelling is that you don’t even have to raise your voice to do it: every child knows that the most frightening yell of all is the silent one, the one where your mother simply mouths just you wait at you while she is on the phone.

Of course, to give the authors of the article credit, I’m sure that there are plenty of households out there where the parents don’t really yell at all, just like I am sure that there are plenty where they never watch anything but educational TV, never eat any food that is not triple-certified organic, and never make any decisions without first holding a family meeting. And I’m sure that these families are very, very happy—even if it is in a Stepford kind of way. My question for them, though, is this: what happens when all those poor un-yelled at children finally go and live in the real world? How do they deal with their first boss, their first room-mate—even their first spouse? Do they just dissolve into a puddle of tears at the first raised decibel?

At least with my children I know that whatever unreasonable boss, psycho room-mate, or Jerry Springer-worthy spouse the world throws at them, they’ll be O.K. Even now, at the tender ages of four and eight, they could probably go to a PETA convention wearing full-length fur coats and emerge completely unscathed. Heck, they could probably wear PETA t-shirts to a cockfight and be none the worse for wear.

Now if only I could find a way to make them immune to siblings and steak knives they’d be set for life.

Today is my son, Clyde’s, 16th birthday.  This is a column I originally published when he was five.  (Note the dated jokes about George Bush and Dell computers.)  Spoiler alert: neither of my predictions for Clementine and Clyde’s future career paths came true.  Thank god.

I’ve always wondered if the little tics you have when you are a child give any indication as to what kind of career you will have when you grow up. Take my stepfather, for example: from a very young age he showed an unusual interest in both sweeping and making secret recordings of people using the toilet, and he grew up to be crazy. Okay, so maybe that’s not such a good example, but just imagine a five-year-old Thomas Edison driving his parents absolutely crazy with all of his early inventions, or Mademoiselle Curie’s favorite toy being her junior chemistry set. Who knows, maybe even George Bush made a habit of invading neighboring kids’ yards and liberating their unusually large toy reserves. It’s possible.

Of course, the real reason for me having such a strong interest in this question is none other than my very own five-year old son, Clyde, and the rather “interesting” personal habits that are are all his own. When he was younger these habits involved things like wiping his butt and blowing his nose with the same piece of toilet paper—in that order. Naturally, this made me think that any future career he had would involve him saying things like “would you like fries with that?” and “I’d like to tell you about a special offer from Dell.” Lately, however, he has begun to show talents of another sort, talents that I hope may yet lead him down an entirely different, albeit not quite as respectable, career path: fight promoter.

Everything Clyde touches starts a fight. His silverware at dinnertime, the pair of socks he has been told to put on, even the worms he finds when I am planting in the yard. Nothing is safe from his Don King-like machinations; when it comes to organizing a throw down he is Tina Turner in Beyond the Thunderdome, except that he is also that creepy little guy who’s always saying, “who rules Bartertown?”

With Clyde, though, it’s not just the fights themselves, but rather the nature of the fights that makes me think he has a future in the sports world. Like all the best fight promoters, Clyde knows that there is more to orchestrating a fight than just throwing a couple of combatants into a ring: instinctively he seems to understand that the best fights involve not just man against man (or, in Clyde’s case, fork against spoon), but rather are little Morality plays where Good can finally triumph over Evil. That’s why, in Clyde’s rumbles, the potato masher (Good) always wins out over the ice cream scoop (Evil), and even the lowly (but still Good) butter knife can carry the day against the supremely Evil corkscrew.

Of course, the thing that really makes me think that Clyde will grow up to be a fight promoter, and not just a fight instigator, are his audiences. Who can forget the big showdown between the slotted serving spoon (Good) and the melon-baller (Evil)? Certainly not all the soupspoons and teaspoons, who turned out en masse to cheer their brethren on. (And certainly not the rest of us, who ate our cereal with forks for days and days.)

You’d think then, what with Clyde’s career path seemingly laid out before him, that I’d be entirely sold on the idea of your childhood interests determining your future career–-but actually, I’m not. I can’t be, because that would then mean that my nine-year old daughter, Clementine, whose current favorite hobby is cutting out little tiny pieces of paper and leaving them in piles all over the house, will someday grow up to be a performance artist. Or, like my stepfather, crazy. Although, I have to say that, of the two choices, I’m definitely hoping for the latter.

There was one summer when I was in college that I worked as a painter for the university. For the most part this meant repainting and patching over a bajillion thumbtack holes in dorm rooms, but occasionally we would also paint a common area like a hallway or stairwell. When that happened there was one guy on our crew who always liked to be the one to write and hang up the “Wet Paint” signs—and the rest of us would let him, because his “Wet Paint” signs were always way more successful than ours. This was probably due to the fact that our signs simply said “Wet Paint,” whereas his signs said, “Tell a man that there are billions of stars in the Universe and he will believe you without question. Tell the same man there is wet paint and he has to touch it and find out for himself. WET PAINT.” Yeah, our paint got touched a lot less with the wordier sign.

Of course, I don’t know if those longer signs really worked better just because they were long. I’d like to think that was the reason, though, because if long signs really can cause someone to stop and think then I’m going to start plastering my house with them. Or at least every part of my house that contains a teenager. (The washing machine and dishwasher are safe, obviously.) My signs will say things along the lines of, “Why would you believe, unquestioningly, that GMOs are bad for you, but will not accept the notion that milk left out on the counter overnight will go bad?”

Or better yet: “Why do you believe there is a worldwide conspiracy afoot to control the internet, but cannot understand that you can go online and check your grades at any time?” Also, “So Bigfoot and Slenderman are real, but skunks (the kind that come into the house and eat the cat food when you leave the back door open), are not?”

Who knows? Perhaps we are all just hard-wired to make things more complicated than they need to be, and like with every other emotion, teenagers are just the same as us, but more so. Or perhaps belief in the things we can’t change (the government is watching our every move) is easier to accept than belief in the things we can (if you keep smoking it will kill you.) Whatever the reason is, I wish there was a way to harness a teenager’s complete and unquestioning belief in absolute utter nonsense into a similar belief in things that are actually true. Things like, “doing your homework will improve your grades” and “the best way to find something that is lost is to get out of bed and look for it.”

Maybe, though, it’s not the message that is the problem—it’s the delivery. A wise man once said, “A lie will travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its pants on;” a more modern retelling would be, “A lie will have three different subreddits while the truth still has a myspace.” Maybe I just need to find a way give “Wet towels will mildew under your bed” the same following as “Drinking Mountain Dew Red will turn you into an alpha male.”

Of course, there is always the possibility that if I train myself to start thinking like a teenager—if I train myself to communicate only in memes, for instance—that I will then become the thing I’m trying to study, and no longer remember (or believe) whatever wisdom I originally wanted to impart. (Maybe memes are like a really slow version of The Ring: watch enough of them and you acquire the curse. Only, instead of dying, you become incredibly gullible.)

In the end I’m sure that what will actually happen is that I’ll just do it the same way my parents did when I was a teenager—and as I’m sure their parents did as well: give it time. After all, adolescence isn’t a permanent condition. And, to tell the truth, sometimes it’s kind of fun watching people touching the wet paint.

“Really?” my son, Clyde, asked me, his voice thick with disbelief, “you’re reading that now?”

I glanced down at the book in question: Violent Ends, a novel about a school shooting written from seventeen different perspectives. “What?” I replied. “It’s an interesting subject.”

“It’s only interesting because there’s been like five threatening notes about it at my school! You’re not supposed to be interested; you’re supposed to be worried.”

“Can’t I be both?”

“Are you?” he asked with a glare.

“Well,” I hedged. “I could be. You wouldn’t know.”

“Except I do. Because it’s you.” And then he shook his head and walked away, not in the I-hate-you-and-you’re-ruining-my life kind of way, but rather in the what-am-I-supposed-to-do-with-a-mom-like-you kind of way. (And yes, I can tell the difference.)

The thing is, he was right. I wasn’t worried. But then again neither was he: he just wanted to tease me about my potentially insensitive choice of reading material. How do I know he wasn’t worried? Because this is the same kid who once texted me on his walk home from elementary school to tell me that “a man just gave me some candy and now I’m all sleeeeepy.” (I laughed when I got it, and then ran outside to look down the street: he was waiting for me with a huge smile on his face.)

Am I saying that I never had a moment’s worry about him being abducted when he was younger? No. The same way I am not now saying I never worry about him being caught in violence at school (or anywhere else, for that matter.) Being a parent means that you are in a constant state of worry: about school shootings, global warming, the collapse of the economy, the gradual erosion of civil rights. It is, as someone once described it, like having a horror movie playing in your head all of the time: that’s how much and how often you think about all the terrible things that can happen to your child. It is such a constant that, at the end of the day, the only real wish you have remaining is that somehow everything will work out in such a way that you are lucky enough to be the one who dies first.

So yeah, I worry.

But I’m not a worrier. My worry doesn’t define me, and it doesn’t define my relationship with my kids. And it doesn’t define my relationship with your kids, either. Meaning that, just as I’m convinced that my kids are generally pretty awesome people, I think yours probably are, too. And for that matter, so are you. Yep: call me Pollyanna, but I genuinely believe that most people are good. And, after nearly fifty years of boots-on-the-ground style research, I’m happy to report that my theory has held up admirably well. (Remember: I said most, not all.)

Which explains why I have felt comfortable sending Clyde to school despite the notes: I know that, overwhelmingly, the people he is sitting next to in class are good. (I would even venture to say that the person or persons who are writing the notes are good, too—just confused and a little sad.)

It is entirely possible, of course, that I am wrong about this. It is entirely possible that there is a sociopath in out midst, someone who is not at all good (or, for that matter, evil, because they do not have the capacity to tell the difference between the two), and that person is waiting out there, biding their time before they cause serious harm. But in that case there is nothing I can do about it anyway, and so worrying about such an event happening is even less helpful.

So yeah, I’m going to keep sending my kid to school. Where he will (hopefully) be sitting next to your kids. And in the meantime, I’m not going to worry about anything—other than which annoying book I’m going to read in front of him next, that is.

When my children were younger, I didn’t really mind so much when they would lie to me. After all, lying is a skill just like anything else, and the only way we get better at the things that require skill is the same way we get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. I think that (if we’re being honest about lying), most people feel the same way. It’s the reason why we find all those YouTube videos of toddlers blaming the cat for their misadventures with the Sharpie to be adorable rather than infuriating. Aw look, we all say, they’re so little they can’t even lie properly. How cute.

Of course, I (and every other parent) becomes significantly less amused when, ten years down the road that mischievous toddler turns into a surly teenager, and their lies remain just as inept. Because at that point their lies are no longer bad because they lack the skills to do it well (years and years of sometimes successful lying have finally given them those talents), but rather because they lack the desire. A toddler lies poorly because they are too ignorant to do it well; a teenager lies poorly because they think you are too ignorant to be worth the trouble to do it better. And that, even more than the lie itself, is what is so infuriating.

And also explains why our country’s current administration is so infuriating to so many usually apolitical people.

The great Judge Judy once famously said, “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining,” meaning that the lie itself was insult enough: don’t insult me a second time by not even bothering to make it a good lie. Over the years the plaintiffs that appeared in her court (or at least the viewers watching them) learned that lying to Judge Judy was the quickest way you could lose a case: she trained her courtroom to know that about her. Just as we, as parents, hopefully trained our children to understand that the lie was always going to be punished worse than the crime—I’m sure I’m not the only parent who has ever choked back a bitter lecture about drinking simply because I got the midnight call for rescue from the offending party, and not the police.

The question then becomes, how do we train the President (and the President’s surrogates) not to lie—or rather, not to lie so badly? Because every time we get distracted by just how bad some of them are at lying, we are taking our eyes off of the big picture (what they’re lying about), and being distracted (yet again) by the darting red laser pointer of the lie itself.

I propose that we train them the same way we train our children: we ignore it. Not that we ignore the transgression, but rather, that we ignore the lie that accompanies it. When your toddler insists that “the cat” was the one who drew all over the walls with marker, you don’t fire up Wikipedia to prove to them that, lacking opposable thumbs, a cat would never have been able to open the marker, let alone wield it. You don’t “fact-check” their conspiracy theories about who might have “stolen” their homework. (Or at least you shouldn’t.)You proceed as if the lie had never happened. And you work to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

Because it’s important that it doesn’t happen again. (Change “cat” to “Obama” and “marker” to “Russia” and I think you’ll see where I’m going here.)

Look, to be honest, I don’t know if it’s even possible, at this point, to change the behavior of a septuagenarian. In all likelihood, it isn’t. But it is still possible to change our reaction. It is still possible to punish the crime, and ignore the feeble attempt at a cover-up that accompanies it. All we have to do is keep our eyes on that prize.

And away from that oh-so-infuriating laser pointer.

Scrolling through the news recently, I came across a picture of a man at a town hall meeting. He was in the audience, but turned away from the speaker so that he could shout at an unseen person behind him. You could tell he was shouting because his mouth was open wide, as were his eyes and even his nostrils: everything about his posture screamed anger. The caption simply read, “Man shouts ‘whore’ at town hall.”

What immediately struck me about this picture was how eerily similar it was to a picture I had grown up seeing in history books: that of Hazel Bryan screaming at Elizabeth Eckford as Elizabeth is escorted away from Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. Elizabeth was one of the Little Rock Nine, the group of students who first integrated Central High in 1957. Hazel was also a student there. They were both very young, although in the picture they both look much older, a combination of the seriousness of the situation and the fact that they are dressed very nicely. In that picture, Hazel is frozen in time. We look at the 1950s fashions and we assume, correctly, that everyone else in the photo has grown and changed—some have even died, given that the picture will be sixty years old come this September—but as for Hazel, she stays the same in our minds. S he is the embodiment of an evil, repressive system. Cold. Unfeeling. Unchanging.

It’s not true, of course. She was only fifteen at the time, and within five years she would go behind her family’s back to track down Elizabeth and apologize to her, but that apology wasn’t recorded the way the insult was: it disappeared as soon as the words were said. The photograph still outranks it, and always will. And that is something that Hazel will always have to live with.

As will the man in the town hall photo.

I wonder, sometimes, about the people who are caught out like that, whether in a photograph or a screen shot of hateful comments they’ve spewed via text or social media. I’d like to think that those moments represented them at their very worst, and, like Hazel, they will spend the rest of their lives trying to atone. But then again, I’d like to believe that people, by nature, are basically good.

And maybe they are. Maybe that man yelling “Whore!” so loudly that you could almost feel the spittle was just letting the local brothel keeper (a lovely lady whose name slipped his mind at that moment) know that it was her turn to speak on the issue of local businesses donating to the yearly holiday decorations budget. Or maybe he has Tourette’s.

Or maybe he was just using the word he knew best, the word that has been historically used to silence women when they have had the temerity to speak out, especially when they speak out for themselves. The same way that Hazel was using the word she knew best to silence Elizabeth.

Are the two situations really that similar? Intersectionality would suggest that they both are, and are not (a sort of of a Schrodinger’s Cat of discrimination). And anyway, the point is not so much how much the victims suffered, but rather how much damage the perpetrators ended up doing to themselves.

When they were younger I tried to impress upon my children that a word spoken could never be recalled: “You can’t unring a bell,” I’d tell them. That even if the person you offend ends up forgiving you, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll ever manage to forgive yourself. Some weapons hurt the wielder more than the intended victim. And sometimes, the scars they leave are permanent.

Just ask Hazel Bryan.

There is an old saying that describes war as “long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror.” Replace the word “boredom” with “fundraising” and you will also have the perfect description of nearly every after school activity ever invented. I realize, of course, that this is news to no one—no one but me, that is. You’d think that after twenty years of being a mother this would not be the case, but apparently having my daughter, Clementine, as a first child has given me a false impression of what I was in for when it came to school and school events.

Clementine never participated in after school activities, probably because her favorite thing to do after school was to leave it. And so the fundraising requests from her school stopped about the same time she left kindergarten. (Or maybe she just helpfully “lost” all of them the same way she “lost” every other piece of paper that was ever supposed to come home with her, including school pictures, field trip permission forms, and notices that her school lunch account was horrendously overdrawn. The only way I ever found out about that last one was after she mentioned being served a cheese sandwich for the fifth day in a row.)

But then along came her brother Clyde.

Clyde participates. In everything. He is the first to raise his hand in answer to the question of “what did you do this summer?” (And as he gets older, he is often the only person to raise his hand at that question.) He will read his thesis statement out loud when the teacher asks for volunteers. And he will willingly (and happily) join every extracurricular activity that comes his way. And then just as happily offer up my services when it comes to the fundraising. And, of course, it always comes to the fundraising.

Look, I know that schools are terribly underfunded, and that they really do need the money we raise for them just to buy the basics. And I also know that even though my family in particular might not need the financial help, by participating in the fundraising activity along with everyone else we are helping to remove the stigma for those who do. I get that. But still, even knowing those things, and even after fully understanding the various forces at work, I am always left with one thought: please, not another fundraiser.

It gets to the point that after a while I don’t even know—or care—what the money is being raised for. New shoes for the basketball team? Fine. New wing for the library? Great. Rainy day fund in case the entire band gets kidnapped by a drug cartel and we need to pay their ransom demands? Awesome.

Even worse, though, is that not only do I not know where the money is going, I also don’t know how much was even raised. Because it’s not like all fundraising is created equal. That frozen cookie dough fundraiser probably pulls in a pittance next to the homemade tamale one, the same way “kiss the pig” day probably runs circles around “hat day” (at least until they figure out a way to incorporate a screen and a netflix account into a hat).

One day, I know, there will come a time when all of this fundraising is a thing of the past, and I will look back fondly on all of those hours spent at car washes, and yard sales, and tamale parties, and trying to sell people the Worst Wrapping Paper in the World®. But then again, probably not, because the reason it will all be a thing of the past for me is that my kids will have outgrown it—your kids will still be hitting me up on the reg.

Because, just like that other old saying goes: death, taxes, and fundraising are nothing if not inevitable.