I grew up involved in theatre and its associates – drama classes, plays and musicals, dance and dance recitals, chorus and choral concerts. I attended improv shows, student and professional performances of all kinds, and sought out live music in cafés and on street corners. I grew up in a town with an annual, famous, phenomenal jazz festival, which I still miss attending.
I was a young teenager when my guitar teacher and I started playing around with jazz, which did not captivate me then like it would when I was a bit older. Far too uncertain and afraid of making mistakes to just give it a try, I looked for the right notes, something that would undoubtedly work, and missed the opportunity to enter the unknown and see where it would take me. Nowadays, I go through phases of playing the guitar and am immensely grateful to have brought it with me all over the world. Rather a lot of guitar improv has taken place since I asked my teacher if we could do something else.
Considering this, I had to laugh at myself when, in response to a friend’s query about how my little family and I are doing, I answered “We have something like a jazz rhythm going on – not a routine but rather patterns, and some more predictable than others.”
I don’t think I’ve ever compared life to jazz before, but I’m certainly not the first one to do it. And upon reflection, I find that’s not a bad way to think about parenting in the stage where we are right now. There’s a general flow to the day, lots of twists, turns, bumps, and happenings, and a general flow to the evenings and nights. Anything and everything can happen in between and it does. Plans are in quotation marks because little goes according to plan, but appointments are kept and meet-ups occur. As soon as we think we’ve figured something out, our sweet baby grows and changes and we start all over again.
And just like a good rhythm, jazz or otherwise, there’s an undercurrent, a steadiness holding it all together, that one can always find and fall back on. In the case of being a parent, it’s the purest form of love.
I grew up in a society with a dangerous myth, one that suggests that everyone has the same chances in life, that one can pick themselves up from any circumstances and become something better. I’d like to think that myth has become less pervasive in recent years, but the dearth of social policy to help people who need it suggests otherwise.
Because we don’t all have the same chances in life.
Because chances for some of us are handed over on a silver platter, or otherwise lovingly passed from parent to child, while chances for others need to be scratched out of concrete with nothing more than one’s own fingernails.
In the society I grew up in, the former is upheld as the way things “should be.” The latter is celebrated as confirmation that the myth is reality; it should be celebrated because of its improbability.
More often than I had expected, I find myself thinking of the baby boy born to my hospital roommate the day before my daughter came into the world. I remember how the nurses pointed out to her that the baby needs her attention and physical contact. I remember how she called her partner to tell him that the baby needs a sleep sack and his own little bed. Her eyes rarely left her phone during the days we shared a room, but she cooed lovingly at the baby when changing his diaper and clothes. The phone was somewhere else at those moments. But for the distractions of the media world, she might have been there for him.
I’ve run into her a few times in town, the baby always on her chest. Maybe she has had a change of heart or mind and realized the choice she made by having a baby. Or maybe the tiny moments I have seen are simply tiny moments.
I wonder how the baby is doing. When I imagine his home life, I wonder how his chances in life will look. Our two babies were born in the same hospital with the same team of midwives and doctors, one day apart. On paper, they are equal. In a fair world, they would have the same chances in life. But then I think about his first days and her first days and I know: there is a difference between fairness and equality. In the real world, despite efforts by different societies, people fall through the cracks. I grew up in a society that refused to see the cracks, or blamed the cracks on the individuals needing help. I am living in a society that sees the cracks and has imperfect systems that attempt, however clumsily, to address them.
My students have recently finished exams and will soon celebrate the completion of their schooling. While I was not there for the critical last months, I have spent a great deal of time with this group of young people, teaching some of them since arriving in Germany nearly five years ago. I have watched them mature, become more confident, make mistakes, pick themselves up. They may have gotten to the end in different ways, but they all got there.
Some of them took their exams in separate rooms. Some of them were allowed to type rather than write their answers. This is not equal, but it is fair. In order to be able to do what exams want them to do – demonstrate a certain type of knowledge – some students need different starting points. In the end, they will be evaluated equally, but the way they get to the end is not always the same.
On a larger scale, however, nothing about this is fair. My students attended private school and have completed the exams that will allow them to attend universities around the world if they choose to do so. That puts them in a very different position than young people who do not have these advantages. Regardless of the community we live in, we expect everyone to play a productive role in society. It is the responsibility of the society to build communities in which there is space for each of us, in our own ways, to do so. We might not all contribute equally, that is, in the same way, but we should all be set up to contribute in the ways that we can, which is fair.
I think about my hospital roommate’s baby boy. I look at my daughter and imagine the future that my partner and I are working to set up for her. In the event that these two babies do not have equal opportunities in life, I hope they grow up in a society that provides them with fair chances and is there to catch them before they fall through any cracks. I hope that my students, with the opportunities they have been given, will help to create that society.
Time seems to be passing extraordinarily quickly. Maybe it’s that my baby changes every day and is growing out of her clothes. Just a couple days ago I thought a pair of pajamas would soon be too small and then, changing her in the middle of the night, determined that they were, as of that moment, too small.
Or maybe it’s the nature of spring, how it feels like it will never arrive and then is suddenly here in full bloom. I’ve just packed away my heavier between-the-seasons jacket and am fairly confident I won’t need to take it out again (have I now jinxed it?).
People say that time speeds up as you get older, which makes sense – there’s more life and experience to look back on. People also say that babyhood and childhood are gone in the blink of an eye. It ruffles my feathers a little to admit that many of the things people say about infants, specifically in terms of the first feelings and weeks and moments (I’m not yet at a point where I can attest to anything else), have turned out to be accurate.
Spring is a lovely time and I find it even more special now. A new person is blossoming as nature comes back to life. I will cherish both, rush neither, and try to gracefully accept what we all know to be true: To every thing, there is a season.
By Rebecca Michelle 