One personal story, powerfully told, awakens another, and another. I feel so many of my own personal stories rising to the surface as I experience the ripples of the terrible story of George Floyd’s death. He called and called for his mother as he was dying. I hear his cry. And I think about my own mother, and the fiercely protective role she played in our family. Perhaps wanting our mother in a time of crisis and distress, is a primitive need we all share.
A fierce mother is forever protective of her offspring. My mother exhibited the energy of the fierce mother goddess archetype in regard to my sister. This image of fierce mother goddesses appears in several mythologies––including ancient India, Greece, and Egypt. And, in my own family stories as well. The story I want to share with you in this blog is about the time when my father’s racist attitudes threatened my sister’s survival. And my mother’s fierce resolve was summoned.
From the beginning, my sister, Anne Marie was only supposed to live for three days, then three months, then three years. Anne Marie was born with a birth defect, spina bifida, also resulting in hydrocephalus. Her spine was not closed at birth, which caused excess spinal fluid to back up into her brain. She would never walk. In fact, when my sister was born, another baby girl was born in the same hospital with the same diagnosis, and that little girl did not survive. Perhaps this other mother’s terrible loss helped to fuel my mother’s willingness to turn the world around to save her daughter’s life, over and over again.
Despite all the risks, challenges, and disabilities Anne Marie faced, and because of my mother’s care, my sister kept surviving. She had her first wheelchair when she was three years old. My mother was on call to go to school to take her to the bathroom. My sister would even grow up and get married.
My father, certainly, was my mother’s partner in the care of my sister. Together, they provided in every way they could for their daughter. By the time she died, in her early fifties, she had experienced over sixty medical procedures. It was my mother, also a registered nurse, who stayed in the hospital with her during decades of hospitalizations.
My parents worked well as a team in regard to Anne Marie’s care, until the time when she needed critical brain surgery to save her life. The shunt, a valve inserted in the fourth ventricle of her brain and attached to her jugular vein when she was an infant, was failing. Its purpose was to prevent excess spinal fluid from damaging her brain. My sister completely trusted my mother’s medical opinions. Of course, my mother sought the best neurosurgeon available to operate on her daughter.
The best neurosurgeon happened to be Black. My mother and Anne Marie wanted him, of course, to do the surgery. It seems shockingly racist to me today, that my father protested having a Black surgeon. He was unwilling to accept anything but a white surgeon to operate on his daughter––but why?
My father loved to argue and so I don’t know to what degree he believed some of his racist comments. Sometimes I think he liked to get a rise out of me and to “get my goat”. He would say, “Blacks are closer to apes. They even look like apes.” I would try and argue him out of these awful ideas. But, of course, I would never win. Obviously, Dad believed Blacks were not as smart as whites. So, how could a Black doctor know how to “heal” or fix a white person’s brain?
I think my father’s racism was also connected to status. To support a Black professional would have forced him to acknowledge that this person was as smart and professional as a white doctor. The social status of the neurosurgeon was superior to my father’s status, thus upsetting his supposed belief that white people should always have a higher status.
My father, who grew up in a small rural, white community, likely never questioned why he believed the white race was superior. “What will the neighbors think?” was his big concern. A neighbor reported years later that Dad had said, “What will people think if I have a colored doctor operating on my daughter? They’ll say I’m really a failure. After all, we can only get a colored doctor to take care of our little girl?”
Although Dad protested, my mother insisted. The turning point was when my mother had my father meet the surgeon in a hospital conference room. Meeting the surgeon and seeing him in person must have allowed my father to quiet those prejudicial notions swarming in his head. He was impressed with the way the doctor clearly explained in layman’s terms, without being condescending, exactly what he would do and why. I doubt this experience changed my father’s mind about his attitudes regarding race. However, it certainly changed how he thought of this surgeon. In the future, he only spoke of the surgeon in the most glowing terms.
I am inspired by the fierceness of my mother in not allowing my father’s racism to stand in her way. This energy, of the mother archetype, is what I also carry, and allows me to care. It is what calls me to question what is right, what is just and prompts my desire to speak up against bias.
I find myself reviewing my own responses to racism over the years. And at times, I have felt inadequate. Remembering and reflecting on this story of the fierce mother archetype is what the Ageless Goddess wants for me. The Ageless Goddess wants me to remember how necessary it is to let the voice of the Fierce Mother rise in confronting racism, personally and universally.
Today, I am taking a Bystander Training workshop on how to respond to incidents of racism and biased remarks. My intention is to become sensitive to racial blind spots both my own and others. I would like to improve my skills at intervening and thus, making a difference. I am taking an ongoing workshop that is teaching me the skills to have more satisfying interventions with racist arguments.
How in my life today can I deal more effectively with blatant examples of racism? All the characters in this story of my family life are gone. But my encounters with questions of whiteness, and racism are still a part of my life today. A future blog will explore some of the training I am taking on how to be an “upstander” about race. I will be learning and sharing some of my own patterns when it comes to confronting issues of race in personal conversations and out in the community.
This is cross-posted from Jane Knox’s blog The Ageless Goddess