What If The White House Needed a Crib: Barack and Michelle Obama

I don’t want to start anything negative, or crazy-rumorish, especially after the debacle of non-news shuttle-cocking all over the place regarding Governor Palin’s newborn child supposedly not having been born from her own body. (Leaving further commentary and analysis on that news-ganglia for another time when I’ve had too many Turkish coffees thick as mud.)

But, tonight I watched some films of Michelle inside the train today, (film taken from outside the train,) and another, an introduction to Barack, Michelle and their two children, by a lady from Parker, Colorado…

And, I noticed, just ever so minutely, that Michelle hugged the woman from Parker, and as she does, Michelle puts the palm of her hand on her own belly, then turns away from the woman and puts her hand on her belly again.

It’s a gesture that might just be a gesture. Except she’s wearing a shift, and there are no buttons or ties or anything to be checking to see if all is secure. But still, sometimes a man smoking a cigar is only smoking a cigar… and a woman putting her hand on her belly repeatedly might be just that and no more.

But that gesture is also one that many a mother knows from her time of being pregnant, a kind of reflexive and protective gesture, as if to say: You dear one in there, you ok? Everything alright? That kind of gesture.

On the other hand (this is the third hand) we ladies sometimes call our bellies ‘poochey’ or other terms, not exactly terms of endearment, when we’ve eaten something disagreeable, and the alimentary canal in those parts tend to react and makes the belly stick out. Other times it’s because ‘Aunt Reddy’ is visiting.

Perhaps either of those are the case of the ‘little belly pooch’ going on in the films I looked at. (which of course I promptly lost track of in the hollow woods of YouTube and cannot find to give you a link so you can go see for yourself. I’ll keep looking.)

Surely you must be thinking if I am writing about this, it must be a really slow news day. Lol. But, that’s not it.
I was struck by the gesture… and was just musing here at 2 in the morning about … wouldn’t that be something for a child to be born in the White House… and if it were so, that what some call the ‘late in life blessing,’ would also signify, as in mythos…

‘a child born in a new land’ who symbolically is considered a clarion who is neither of the past or the present, but solely of the future.

I am probably mistaken about the poochiness of it all. But the thought of the White House needing a crib was a nice thought there for a moment, nonetheless.

Mostly because the only black children born at/for the White House ever, were born in the outlying property in rude wooden slave quarters.

I saw those ‘reconstructed’ rambling structures, when I was only thirteen years old. Coming from a ‘low-class’ rural background, I at first thought these were chicken coops until I was told these were ‘slave quarters.’ I, who grew up in a tiny saltbox with 20 refugees and one bathroom, was incredulous that humans were given ‘homes’ less than those we’d build for animals.

It’s only a musing… but a black child born in the White House in our time? Not poetic justice so much, but rather poetic joy.

Joyfulness is a medicine for heart and soul, that’s for sure.

Crib or no crib, watch for that joy-as-medicine in coming days. May all joyousness about a hopefully wise and realistic man rising to lead, and by virtue of that, seating the first black family IN the White House rather than black family born, stolen, and sold to be used BY the White House… may it all be a good medicine, a balancing one for all citizens.

There are many ways to mend the past; anger is one of the least, but a turn toward new life carried with some part joy, is still one of the most potent.