Disagree With Your Parents - And Know They Love You

The day I graduated from high school I stood outside the side door of the school gym with my classmates. Just before it was time to go inside, I kicked off my shoes, a Carolina Friends School tradition, born from the school’s culture of independence, reverence for the natural world, and most importantly to me, a symbol of our rejection of conformity.

I walked into the gym through the “tunnel of love,” a pathway lined with teachers, coaches, faculty, and staff members from all of our years at CFS - for some of us (“lifers”) our entire school careers. I walked in line with my peers, moved through the graduation exercises, and was handed a diploma by my Dad. The greatest gift my parents ever gave me was my Friends School education, and it was an indescribable gift for us both to end that chapter in such a way.

Prior to graduation, my Dad gave each member of my class his business card. This was a tradition to mark our moving beyond our roles as students to the alumni community. On the back of the business card was a list of 6 pieces of advice. “Disagree with your parents - and know they love you,” was one particularly poignant piece of advice. I took this advice to heart as I moved on to my undergraduate years at Smith, where I truly started to question my own, and by association, my parents worldview. It was during these years that I started to deepen my understanding of systemic oppression, my own identity, the implicit bias and problematic assumptions I, and many others, had been raised with regarding race, gender, sexuality, many other aspects of identity and the privilege associated with many of my own.

Four years later, after I’d graduated from Smith, I was dealing with White Guilt, Queer Fear, Feminist Anger, and hopelessness that many in my position and in my community felt after the 2016 election. I was deeply angry at any and everyone who didn’t seem to feel quite as strongly as I did. That feeling was born of the realization that I myself was part of the problem. One of the people I turned to was my best friend, the person whose advice I’ve valued above all, one of the only cis, straight, white, middle class, able bodied men in my life. In essence, I told him that he wasn’t doing enough. He listened, and took my statement to heart.

“Disagree with your parents.” Did I really say that? Damn. Guilty. And no regrets. That’s not to say that it’s been easy to hear from my daughter that I’m not doing enough, and rest assured, please, I’ve heard it more than once. It seems to me there are few harder things to hear than disappointment, thoughtfully and articulately shared, by a child. Disappointing my daughter sucks.

And what a gift! Her uses of those lessons of independence, reverence for what matters, and rejection of conformity include being my teacher (then and now.) In its simplest and best form, I think what we teach one another is how to lean into conversation, the conversation we don’t want to have, in response to the question we don’t want to answer, with the person who makes us feel most vulnerable because we care so much. Kyle asks the questions that David Whyte, in a poem called “Sometimes,” describes as “ Questions that can make or unmake a life . . . questions that have no right, no right, to go away.”

I wish I could explain what makes it possible for me to be pained by the question and not respond defensively, even want to be asked. I’m typing my reply to Kyle’s reflections on Father’s Day 2020, and I consider that ability or orientation one of the great gifts of my mother, Kyle’s Grandmother Anne. She, too, liked to ask the kind of question, about how something or someone made me feel, that I didn’t want to answer . . . at first. But she had this way, often aided by food, of creating a space safe enough for me to go ahead. I like to think I’ve been able to create that kind of space from time to time. I know Kyle has . . . and does.

Even today, as I savor this Father’s Day with Kyle, her brother Matt, and my wife Sue, I’m thinking about what to do next, not only to support my community as it navigates the COVID crisis, but also to meet more fully the intersecting injustices of racism, poverty, brutality, and more in response to which I’m not doing enough. Kyle’s question does not force me to pretend I’ve done nothing, but it begs questions like “What now?” or, as one of my favorite fictional characters, Jed Bartlett of The West Wing, would ask, “What’s next?”

I don’t like to think of myself as someone who has power, but I do. In spite of the best of intentions, I am a racist, perhaps too focused on striving not to be to use my power fully; I am a privileged, old, tall, white man, the inheritor of white supremacy that has -- in so, so many ways -- made my life easier. So inspired by my teacher, co-conspirator, questioner, daughter, today I am asking both: What policies and practices can I change in order to make ours a more anti-racist community? and How might I share my power, my influence, more fully with my black colleagues?

So let me add to what I’m savoring on this Father's Day my daughter disagreeing with me, telling me I’m not doing enough, leaning into the kind of conversation I’d rather not have, and inspiring me to ask, “What now? What’s next?” And to know I’ll be in her good company as I -- and we -- ask and answer those questions together, even while I wonder what other advice I included on that business card.