un/rest

Saturday night, when the wind was blowing the curtains around the girls’ room, when both girls woke with stomach pain a couple times over the course of the night, I felt the unrest. I felt it blowing down from Barclays, from the Brooklyn Bridge and beyond, into our beds, into my body. It’s living there now. I think I need an 11pm curfew for myself. To stop looking at the screen, stop bouncing from Instagram, to Twitter, to Facebook, looking, looking for a place to put this particular energy, wired and tired and full of sorrow and anger for the way people’s bodies are being treated.

There are many folks writing, sharing, directing our attention to where it needs to be. There is a very necessary fury in our hearts, a rush to help, to educate, to learn, to unlearn, to fix, to push forward, to elevate, to amplify. I want to be out in the streets, but I’m not. That’s my privilege right there. And I know it.

Here’s what I’m doing instead:

Donating to jail support funds nightly (every little bit helps — imagine eating a hot pizza after sitting in a jail cell for hours upon hours).

Connecting fellow white friends to useable resources that help to begin the lifelong work of dismantling systems of racism.

Finding ways to connect folks to existing black-owned business and/or organizations they can help support, rather than starting from scratch. More on this later, watch my friend Erin’s blog for an update later this week.

Checking in with friends; asking for help on keeping ourselves on task and accountable.

I am talking to my kids in an age-appropriate way about racism and our own privilege. This afternoon, we continued our conversation about the protests. About “good trouble.” That was about when Maewyn grabbed a piece of paper, a few crayons and quietly, quickly made a drawing. She ran to the window (maybe the fastest I’d ever seen her move) and opened the screen, tossing the paper out the window and down the three stories below. Pia and I were surprised at her decisive action. When our neighbor Daniel happened to be on the street, he yelled my name up. “LAUREN!,” I heard, went back to the window. “Did you drop this?” Maewyn told him yeah, we meant to. Guerilla art by a 6-year-old. I asked him to put it to the side near the pots of flowers.

Afterwards, I told them the story of this video. Once again, they were magnetized to the story. Stories are power. Truth is power. They can feel it.

I never saw the art she threw into the world, but Maewyn said it was “a circle of peach, a circle of brown, and then it had a heart and then a circle around and red in it.”