The next day as I sat drinking coffee, I hoped that spending time with Bill would cure Nikki of her curiosity. I had made it a point never to put him down so I guess in her mind he was bigger than life and it was my fault he wasn’t present in her life. It was natural, after all, to wonder about the other part of you, to try to put together all the pieces of who you are. Maybe he could help her feel better about herself, find herself—things I was obviously failing to do. Maybe during the summer he could help turn the light back on so that her last year in high school would be more successful than the other three. My maybes were interrupted by the ringing phone.
“I want to come home. Can you come and get me?” On the other end of the line was Nikki.
“What? What are you talking about? You just got there yesterday. What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” she replied. “He’s all right I guess but I just don’t like it here. He lives in the basement and it’s dark and I just don’t want to be here. I just want to come home.”
I was so glad she couldn’t see the huge grin on my face.
Sounding as empathetic as I could, I replied, “I’m sorry things didn’t work out but I won’t be able to get back down there for a couple of days. If you really don’t want to stay there until the weekend I’ll see if you can go over to Grandma Gwen’s until I can come and pick you up.”
As I replaced the phone in the cradle, my sigh of relief filled the morning air. I’d hoped Nikki’s time away would suspend the fantasy that had gripped and paralyzed her over the past few years. I’d hoped in some small way she’d understand why my marriage to her father had ended and that he would never fill the void that Wes’s death had created. I’d hoped she’d realize the life she had in New York wasn’t as bad as the script she’d written in her mind. It had been really difficult, and I had been afraid to let her go, but I realized that I needed to trust my daughter’s need to learn for herself whether she was in the right place. As I prepared to make the arrangements for her next couple of days with Wes’s mom in DC, I envisioned my new hope—that I could help Nikki use this moment to see her own beauty, brains, and strength.
Though it wasn’t immediate or dramatic, Nikki’s trip to Maryland did turn out to be a pivotal moment in her life. Her last year in high school went much smoother, and that fall Nikki enrolled in a nearby junior college and did very well. Her grades there helped transition her to a four-year college. Not only did she reach her goal, but her success helped motivate her brother and sister along the way.
Because I had the courage to hug my daughter goodbye, she eventually returned to me and, most important, to herself.
LESSON FROM A LIONESS: Sometimes you must look back to move forward.
There is a bit of wisdom that’s made it into pop culture. It’s called the Tester Pancake Parenting Theory. The Urban Dictionary asserts that the firstborn child is like the first pancake on the griddle on a Sunday morning. “It usually gets temperature neglected, and often undergoes premature flipping.” In many ways, Nikki was my first pancake! I didn’t know what I was doing, and circumstances in our lives—the divorce, my venturing out as a single mom, my remarriage, and then the sudden death of her beloved daddy—added to a recipe for confusion, anger, guilt, and rebellion in Nikki’s formative years. She was suffering from childhood trauma, and until I could recognize that, and understand how important it was to help her heal even if going back to those wounds was scary for both of us, there was no way we could move forward.
Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, says in an article for Scholastic, “Parents, often coping with the same loss, may underestimate the impact of the separation, move, or death on a child, thinking ‘children are resilient.’ Underestimating the vulnerability of the grieving child actually prolongs the child’s pain and increases the probability that the effects of the loss will persist.” Some of these persistent symptoms are emotional numbing, anger, irritability, episodic rage, and regressive behaviors—all things that I saw in Nikki but failed to respond to earlier.
Inspired by the Dougy Center, the National Center for Grieving Children & Families, here are some suggestions for helping children deal with loss:
Answer the questions they ask, even the hard ones. Parents need to let kids know it is okay to ask questions; it’s parents’ responsibility to answer as truthfully and age-appropriately as possible. Use concrete words like died or killed instead of passed away. If you use vague phrases like passed away, the child will ask the next logical question: “Passed away where? And when is that person coming back?” This so resonated with me because this is exactly what Wes had said: “I was still in the wind tunnel. I heard that my father had ‘passed on’ but had no idea where he’d gone… when I looked into the casket and asked my father, ‘Daddy, are you going to come with us?’”
Don’t be afraid to talk about the person who died or who no longer lives in the house. Bringing up the person’s name gives the child permission to recall happy memories too.
Keep pictures of the person around the house. Share memories, and if there is a special keepsake that brings fond memories to the child, make that a special gift.
Respect differences in grieving styles. Watching and listening to what is said and how a child is reacting will provide you with the cues on how best to help him or her cope with the loss.
Listen without judgment. We as parents often choose to say things like “I know just how you feel” or, worse, “It is time to get over it,” or the person is “in a better place,” or “We are better off without so-and-so.” The Dougy Center says, “Using such responses negates the child’s own experiences and feelings. If a child says, ‘I miss my dad who died’ simply reflect back what you’ve heard, using her words so she knows her words are being heard. Use open-ended questions such as ‘what’s that been like?’ or ‘How is that?’” Children then feel more comfortable responding without pressure to respond in a certain way.
Hold a private memorial service and allow kids to say goodbye and express their feelings in their own way.
Take a break and do something or go somewhere fun. Having fun or laughing is not disrespectful. It is a necessary part of grieving and moving forward.
Courage Is a Choice: The Allessandra Bradley-Burns Story
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
—e. e. cummings
While most of the women profiled in this book I’ve known and admired for many years, there are some whose stories I heard about and whom I couldn’t wait to meet. One recommendation came from my good friend Lisa. Not knowing quite what to expect, I left Baltimore and drove the fifty miles or so to the rolling hills of western Maryland. Seeing horse paths kissing the long driveway leading up to the majestic gray stone English manor house, I felt like I was traveling into a different time. And then walking into the oversize kitchen and seeing two ovens, two refrigerators, and two sinks, my diversity IQ kicked in and I knew I was standing in the midst of a kosher kitchen. I immediately started to make assumptions about who I was about to meet. Boy, was I wrong.
The seeds of Allessandra Bradley-Burns’s story were planted long ago by her own single mother, Patricia, who was divorced and living in Boston in the throes of its desegregation plan for public schools. Raised Catholic, Patricia was determined to provide her two daughters, Allessandra, six, and Monique, four, with the best possible education where they didn’t have to travel hours away from home, sometimes through hostile neighborhoods, every day.
On her lunch break from her job as a lab technician, Patricia would get on the train and ride twenty minutes in every possible direction to see if she could find someplace to live that was close, affordable, safe, and had great schools. She found a town called Brookline and negotiated her way into living in a building that was built and intended strictly for Orthodox Jews.
So here comes my mom, who is white with two half-black daughters. Even though the community knew Mom wasn’t Jewish, seeing her biracial children came as quite a shoc
k. But my mother had agreed that she would be very respectful, learn, understand, and become engaged with their faith, and we did. She never converted but we lived fully in the Way. We truly had an idealistic childhood because we lived in a community with lots of moms around us who were very protective and always kept an eye on us.
Allessandra’s mother had assembled her own pride in the midst of Brookline. Her goals were to give her daughters access to the best education she could find, and instill a sense of survival and adventure as well as values of tolerance, compromise, compassion, perseverance, self-esteem, and courage. Armed with these values and aspirations, Allessandra’s sister went off to Dartmouth and Allessandra traveled south to Georgetown in DC. There, Allessandra continued to openly practice her adopted faith, though it somewhat isolated her from other students. And because she also self-identified as African American, she was particularly at odds with the black student union leader, who was totally confused by this half-white, half-black practicing Jew. But Allessandra didn’t let anyone’s disdain or opinion derail her from her pursuit of international studies, and following her sophomore year she was off to study abroad in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Her planned semester away turned into a life-altering adventure to say the least. She survived a month of linguistic isolation, a six-month university strike, poisonous snakes, fire ants, and panther-like animals roaming freely around the campus.
But she also found love with a State Department diplomat, whom she eventually married. Her one semester abroad turned into three years. This is where her journey into motherhood, and eventually single motherhood, began, thanks to a Muslim woman who became a good friend.
Muslims are required on Fridays to give homage to the poor. So as we were leaving to go to lunch she asked if we could make one stop first. “I’m delivering this firewood to a Mother Teresa orphanage on the outskirts of the city.”
We pulled in, and four Sisters of Charity, in their recognizable white-with-blue-stripe habits, came out and greeted her, and she introduced me. We unloaded the wood. I said, “What is this place?” They took me on a tour.
We walked into orphanage, a room with fifty beds and cribs. I was just mesmerized.
I told my friend, “I don’t want to go.”
We went back and forth like this for a few more minutes and I finally said, “I have to stay. I don’t know why, but I know that this is where I’m supposed to be.”
We finally saw the Mother Superior walking up the road and in Swahili, which I now spoke very well, I told her that I was drawn here and I wanted to do something to help.
She said, “Show up tomorrow at 6 AM.”
The next morning they sat me in this teeny, tiny chair and placed into my arms this baby that was maybe two pounds at best, and a little cup of milk and a medicine dropper. Mother Superior said, “If that baby is still alive at the end of the day, you can come back tomorrow.”
I held him, fed him, walked around with him while he slept. I did a few things that I don’t even know how I knew to do, like at one point I could tell he was cold, even though it was 120 degrees in the shade in Tanzania. I took off his little outfit and I put him down the front of my dress. I must have done something right because he was alive at the end of the day.
I ended up spending eight months there. But that first baby they put in my arms ended up being the baby I adopted before I went back to finish my last year at Georgetown.
With her husband reassigned to another African consulate, Allessandra, still a student and now a mother, ventured back to the United States with their son, Kitu. Because of his critical condition when she’d first held him, she was warned that Kitu might have special needs as he grew up. Allessandra didn’t care. Kitu had captured her heart and she had the courage to take on whatever the future held for them.
Her immediate goal was to finish the few semesters standing between her and graduation. Allessandra created a pride of student babysitters around her that helped her go to class confident that her son would be properly taken care of. As she struggled to achieve a state of presence in her new role of student-mother, the constant refrain in her ear was her mother’s challenge to determine what it was that she wanted to accomplish and then figure out how she would achieve it.
Anxious to reconnect with her husband, after graduation Allessandra and Kitu flew back to Africa. They were there three weeks before an escalating civil war forced them to leave in a US military plane under cover of night while her husband had to remain. The stress on the relationship would mark the end of their marriage and the beginning of her life as an official single working mother.
Within the next few years, Allessandra co-founded a nonprofit organization in Washington, DC, got a green card for her son, formalized Kitu’s adoption, and found love again with Tony. Out of this marriage came a daughter and a set of twins. Tony traveled often for work so even though she was married, Allessandra often felt like a single mom with four kids when he was gone—which was most of the time. Each day was a carbon copy of the day before. A daunting schedule of city buses, multiple caretakers, different schools, and a demanding job, yes, but thanks to her mother’s emphasis on time management and multitasking a workable one. For the most part, the family thrived, but her husband’s absence for so much of the time began to reveal conflicts within Allessandra. She needed a large amount of courage to not only acknowledge this but also do something about it.
It was a confusing time, because I loved Tony very much. We had a great marriage, we had a great family. We were leaders in a community of people. But about six years into our marriage, I said, “I think it’s a disservice to you… to think that I would be… fully satisfied if I lived the rest of my life married to you.” I just felt unsettled, and that feeling was likely to grow. It wasn’t right for him, it wasn’t right for the kids. We very painfully separated and then divorced.
The late feminist author and founder of NOW Betty Friedan was quoted as saying: “It is not possible to preserve one’s identity by adjusting for any length of time to a frame of reference that is in itself destructive to it. It is very hard indeed for a human being to sustain such an ‘inner’ split—conforming outwardly to one reality, while trying to maintain inwardly the value it denies.” Without realizing it, this inner conflict had been Allessandra’s companion throughout her two marriages, preventing her from experiencing the true joy of authenticity. So with the end of her marriage to Tony, Allessandra resolved that to be truly present to her children, she had to be true to herself.
Once again in official single-mom status, but now in full awareness of her sexual identity, Allessandra became even more determined to be the most present mom possible for her four children. This got easier when she became a consultant, which meant her schedule was more flexible and accommodating to her children’s needs. Some years later, she became a candidate to be a transitional head of a nonprofit that was changing direction. As fate would have it, the chairman of the board making the decision was the very same head of the black student union at Georgetown who’d once questioned Allessandra’s authenticity!
Melissa and I were like oil and water in college. She thought I wasn’t black enough and I thought she was too busy being black and we couldn’t quite come to terms around that. She thought I was stuck up and I thought she was bossy. I was convinced this job interview was not going to end well.
Much to her surprise, whatever differences existed in college were inconsequential next to the job that needed to be done, and Allessandra was offered the position. As time went on, the onetime adversaries became allies and eventually partners of the heart. With her temporary position drawing to a close, Alessandra was able to leave the organization, avoiding any conflict-of-interest issues and allowing the new romance to fully bloom.
They eventually married fifteen years ago, and using Melissa’s eggs, Allessandra gave birth to another set of twins. Now, surrounded by love and their parents’ unconditional dedication to be present, all six teens and young adu
lts are thriving. It’s a family much like the United Colors of Benetton—diverse, colorful, innovative, quirky, and full of love. On the first day of sixth grade, one of the kids came home and said, “I told everyone today that I’m black. I told everybody that I have gay moms. Can I wait until tomorrow to tell them I’m Jewish?” Allessandra proves that being fully present with your children only comes once you are first fully present with yourself. Author and politician Roy T. Bennett says that having courage means being brave enough to “Live the life of your dreams according to your vision and purpose instead of the expectations and opinions of others.” Throughout her life Allessandra Bradley-Burns has cast off the mask of conformity and lived her best life. Her mother’s embrace of all religions, races, and ethnicities provided the framework for how Allessandra would orchestrate her own life with the choices she would ultimately make.
Mom always said that being yourself will not always make everyone happy but if you are a good person who has integrity and who is honest and loving, good things will follow. The courage to follow my heart and marry Melissa has made my life bigger. I am able to influence more people because she challenges me to be my best self professionally. I live in my magic and that would not have happened to the same degree had I not acknowledged my authentic self.
The Power of Presence Page 15