There is a song in the Broadway Musical South Pacific called “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught”. It goes like this:

“You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught”

The same is true for all the ways we learn to treat differently others whom we (learn to) perceive to be different from ourselves: people of a different gender, different class, different age.

Where it begins is with ourselves, with the ways in which we are treated by our parents and other adults in our lives. Or rather it begins with the ways in which we are mistreated, in the ways we are treated as less than or lacking or wrong or ugly or in any way other than the beautiful unique people we are.

The perspective that all the cruelty in the world can be linked to early trauma is almost universally accepted. When most people think of trauma however, they think of physical and/or sexual abuse and neglect. But, just as the microaggressions that people of people of color experience have a profoundly negative impact on their lives, the same is true for the microabuses we experience as children. In this series of posts, I would like to present examples of such mistreatment.

I am sharing them so they can be seen for in my experience they are invisible to most people. I want them to be seen so that, once seen, once understood to be responsible for creating the fertile ground within which all our adult irrationalities (from racism to being a “control freak”) take root and grow, that we will be inspired to both strive to refrain from these microabuses in our interactions with children and to heal from having experienced them ourselves when we were children. (Indeed this latter work is essential to being able to succeed at the former.)

I am not sharing these thoughts to attack, blame or shame parents. We have an impossible job, particularly in the industrialized world where parenting can hardly be said be a job so little support is it given. We are all doing our very, very best. And, there are things we do, that we have been taught to do, that nearly everyone around us does, that were done to us, that hurt our children and, through them, hurt others. We need to notice and acknowledge these things not only in order to heal ourselves and our children but also, I believe, to heal our world.

I started collecting examples of these microabuses decades ago when my daughter was an infant. I have been reluctant to share my thoughts about them because I feared that doing so would only result in anger and alienation. This remains a concern but my greater concern is that we bring an end to these early teachings of being less than, of being powerless, of being stupid, of being worthless. We have been carefully, carefully taught and are carefully carefully teaching our children to endure, perpetuate and be complicit in a society that treats human beings as a commodity. I would like to help change the lessons we are teaching and, thereby, the world in which we live.

So, here, in this series of posts, are my thoughts about the connection between parenting and oppressions of all kinds. I hope they will be received as a gift rather than an attack.

This is a game I designed for brainstorming ideas when you and a friend are trying to decide what to do with the time you have together.

Equipment needed

• A few sheets of blank or lined paper (this is a good use for scrap paper)
• Two pens or pencils

Directions

1. Tear up one of the sheets of paper into 8 (or more) small equally-sized pieces.
2. Give half of these small pieces of paper (we will call them tabs) to each person
3. Without sharing them, both “players” write down ideas for what they would like to do: one per tab.
4. When both players have completed step #3, read out loud all ideas. If both players have written the same idea, it is now considered to be one idea, one choice.
5. Using another two sheets of paper, both players make lists of all ideas.
6. Without sharing, both players rank the ideas from 1 – 8 (this number will be lower if any of the ideas were duplicates) with the favorite idea receiving the most points.
7. Both players share their ratings with one player recording the results and adding up the points for each item.
8. Have fun engaging in the activity that earned the most points! *

* This last step is a suggestion: what the players decide to do with the results of this game is up to their combined inspiration.

Variations (created by my friend Alex)

1. Rather than writing the ideas in a list, you may simply order them using the little pieces of paper. To facilitate this, both players begin by writing out two sets of tabs of their ideas. After reading the ideas out loud (and discarding duplicate tabs as needed), the players give each other a full set of their idea tabs. Out of sight of each other, the players order the tabs and then write their rankings directly on the tabs themselves. Steps #7 and 8 would remain the same with the total points being recorded on one (or both) set(s) of tabs.
2. The players write their ideas on both sides of their sets of idea tabs. When it is time to rank the ideas, the players would take turns with one player writing her scores on one side of the tabs and then handing the set of tabs to the other player who would then write his scores on the other side.

The other night, riding my bike home from a movie, I noticed that I didn’t want to go home. In fact, when I thought of home, it didn’t even feel like home. Home felt like…

Home felt like all the other homes that I had had. The apartment I grew up in. My grandmother’s house. My parents’ house in Connecticut. Every home aside from the one I was returning to.

So, I slowed down and sank down into the feelings of longing for those homes of the past sitting there right next to the numb coldness when I thought of my home of the present. The closer I got to home, the slower I pedaled. I told myself, “I won’t go home until I want to go home.

I arrived at the intersection just before my house. I approached the house on the other side of the street from it, looked through the living room window, saw my partner sitting at the dining room table in front of his computer and rode on by.

I spent the next half hour riding my bike round and round the block grieving all the homes that I had lived in and left and all the people I had known in all those homes whom I had loved and lost. I cried and cried giving myself over to the grief and to the feeling that “home” was in the past, that what I had now was just a house that would never feel like home.

Round and round the block I went, looking through the window at Jeff each time, waiting to want to be with him. Every trip brought new memories and more tears. I was beginning to get quite cold (it was well past ten on a wintry night) but I was determined to stick with the tears until my house felt like home, like a place I wanted to go home to.

The shift began with a memory of Jeff, with a moment we had shared together, not in our house but somewhere else in our life together. In that memory, he felt like home. I still didn’t want to go back to our house but I knew I would soon. I rode around the block a few more times letting the last bits of grieving find their way into my mind.

And then, I was done. I had grieved all the places that had been home and was ready to return to the house and the life and the partner who are home.

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.