A "strange mama" and the freight train of racism
/A few years ago, I was interviewed by a parenting magazine in the Czech Republic where we live most of the time. You might think that this would be an honor, and it was… sort of.
The topic of the article was “unusual parents.”
That’s me. The strange mama. I merited an interview because my children are trans-racially adopted… and bilingual… and I’m an American living in the Czech Republic… and I’m legally blind.
That was quite enough to be going on with. I didn’t actually even mention that we partially homeschool, I make our own medicines out of herbs and we’re wild, tree-hugging Pagans.
That was the year we started what has become an annual celebration of our oddballness as a family. We went on a litter collecting expedition.
Okay, a bit of background is necessary here. The Czech Republic is a nice, quiet little country with a good standard of living, great universal health care, free university education and lots of other reasons to rejoice and relax. It does have a few knotholes, however.
One is litter. Czechs hate litter and they are extraordinarily judgmental about other nations who litter, which is ironic because they are champion litterers themselves. There is also a little, low-level ethnic conflict in this country between the Czechs and the tiny (three percent) Romani minority, sometimes called Gypsies.
For one thing the Roma get blamed for lots of things, including the country’s litter problem. In reality, there are no Roma in our town, and its a litter disaster. Roma have also been, until very recently, systematically channeled into sub-standard, segregated schools. The school segregation issue is slowly and painfully improving by inches. Romani people in the Czech Republic remain among the most marginalized groups in a developed country with unemployment as high as 90 percent and racist remarks against them common in the media and among the country’s leading politicians.
That was one reason the magazine considered me to be a unique parent. My husband and I adopted children and refused the prolific advice of social workers who advocate that adoptive families restrict their adoption applications to non-Romani children only. The choices on the official, state adoption application form are “Majority ethnicity only” “Non-Romani only” and “No restriction of ethnicity.” It’s that overt.
My husband and I didn’t necessarily want to be activist about it but we had no reason to limit which children we might adopt by ethnicity, despite the pleas of our case workers on both the local and regional levels. Fate being what it is our kids are of Romani background but they don’t look stereotypically Roma, so we’re still “flying under the radar” in terms of small town racist politics. A few people in town know the “dreadful secret” that there actually are Roma in our quiet bedroom community but most don’t make the connection.
So, the ironies are multiple when my kids bug me to pack rubber gloves and garbage sacks on the way to preschool. I promised them that we could pick up trash on the way back. Yup, my kids want to pick up trash so bad that they pester me about it.
They aren’t really perfect angels. Far from it. They can be brats to each other and their friends, and they throw tantrums with the best of ‘em.
But they do have this one angelic trait. They seriously don’t like to see litter and when the snow melts and the ground is bare and muddy in the early spring the litter is extra visible. So this is the time of year that it comes up and ever since I taught them about picking up litter, we have our early spring pick-up sessions.
This is the kind of town where you will be stared at for being the slightest bit out of the ordinary. So, when my two preschoolers and I pick up trash, people a block away tap each other on the shoulder and walk backwards they stare so hard. What they see is the woman with the long white cane holding the garbage sack while the tiny children with rubber gloves pick up trash. I have no idea what they think but I know they’re perplexed.
My daughter once asked, “Mama, why are those people looking at us so much?”
I told her, “They’re probably surprised that someone is picking up the trash.”
“But why are their mouths open like that?” she continued.
“Possibly because of Mama’s stick, honey.”
People are weird. My kids have proof.
My daughter’s six now and she knows she’s Romani. She loves Romani music and dance. She says Romani girls are the classic princesses. The teacher at our Romani culture camp is her real live hero, second only her choir teacher.
The day is coming when she will learn that Romani people aren’t treated as equals in this society. I can feel it coming like a freight train bearing down on us. I can’t stop it.
Up until now, my daughter has always thought we were “just like everyone.” She loves it when she discovers that she has the same color jacket as another kid or the same cartoon character on her toothbrush. She isn’t going to like our oddball status all that much, when she finally learns what all those open mouths and staring eyes really mean.
For now, I don’t tell her every gruesome detail.
“Mama, are you laughing or crying?” she asked as we walked away from the Pedagogical Psychological Advisory Office after she was tested for “attention problems” and “motor immaturity.”
“Mostly laughing,” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
“That I’ll have to tell you later, honey, when you’re bigger.”
The official at the meeting had tried to have my daughter sent to a segregated, inferior “special school.” She hadn’t even been mean about it. The special schools aren’t officially only for the racial segregation of Romani children. They are supposed to be for kids with developmental delays and disorders.
My daughter’s in kindergarten. She does appear to have some difficulty with attention and anxiety, and like many left-handed kids, she struggles with clutching her crayons too tightly. She’s also the only kid in her class who can read, and yet they tried to send her to “special school.”
Why was I laughing then?
Because I’m not a Romani mother living in poverty who can barely read, facing a phalanx of overconfident bureaucrats steeped in prejudice. I know my rights and, given the civil rights struggle that is going on here, this isn’t even a hard fight to win. There will be no segregated schools for my kids. The law has taken the teeth away from the officials at the pedagogical psychological office.
But I was also crying a little.
Because this is still happening. Because my daughter doesn’t want to homeschool and I can hear that freight train coming. I’ve seen the crushing force of racism break many a kid’s spirit, especially those who are sensitive to issues of “being just like everyone else.”
I don’t want that freight train to flatten my brave, bright daughter. I want to show her that different isn’t bad and when society calls something “strange,” it’s their problem not ours. I hope I can… but it feels an awful lot like standing up to a freight train.
