02 Jun Mothers, Let Them See You Cry

Words have always been my business, even from the very beginning. “Stop writing on the couch,” my mother would say when I was very young. “Stop writing on my important papers,” she would say when I was older.

But I have had no words lately. I’ve sat down to write something to express my outrage at the continued acts of racial violence and injustice in our country. To express empathy and solidarity with my black brothers and sisters. But I feel choked for words and have settled into groans in the Spirit instead.

Friday afternoon, when my daughter came into my bedroom to tell me she had finished practicing her violin, she was startled to see tears streaming down my face. “Mama, why are you crying?”

She had caught me in my groaning.

“Mama?” she asked again. I spoke slowly. “I’m so grieved at all the racial injustice and pain and sorrow that our nation is experiencing right now. I am praying and I’m looking to God to direct my steps.”

Her sister came in. We began to talk. I have kept them informed, these warrior princesses. Just because they aren’t grown doesn’t mean they can’t groan in prayer over injustice. Just because they are small doesn’t mean they can’t do mighty things.

I tell them about George Floyd like I told them about Ahmaud Arbery. We say their names together and pray for their families. I don’t show them horrific videos that even I cannot bear to watch. I just tell them the facts and we pray.

We try to create an environment in our home where we can talk about anything. We value life in every context. I’ve never questioned whether or not my kids can handle the truth about history and about present day reality. I use age appropriate language, but I don’t hide the truth from them.

When my second daughter was just six, we went to hear a survivor speak at the Holocaust Museum. I didn’t know what the survivor, in her 80s, might say. But I figured, “If this woman can live through the suffering she did when she was a child, my daughter can at least hear her story when she’s a child.”

I used to wonder, “Should I break down like this in front of my kids?” I still pray for discernment often about what to share and how much to share with them. But I have vowed that they will not be ignorant of injustice in their youth. “Let kids just have their innocence, many say. Let them just roam free without any worries and cares of the adult world around them.”

And in so many ways, I agree with that. We shouldn’t put adult burdens on children’s backs. But we also shouldn’t shield them completely from a world full of pains and problems that they will most certainly face in what seems like a blink of time from now.

It is our choice whether our children enter the painful realities that come with adulthood in a jolting, rude awakening or in a gently-graded upward slope. They will either be slowly and age-appropriately prepared step by step or they will be thrust blindly into creation’s groanings.

I know this post is a hard one. I usually write here about redemption and beauty and how truth comes at us from places and people unexpected. But this, too, is about redemption for me.

I grew up in a white sub-culture. My schools, church, and neighbors were predominantly white. We were not overtly racist people. Yet as I have reflected over many years, I see now that I was ignorant of the systemic covert patterns and ripples of racism that were present in my community and still are present in similar communities around our country.

One day when I was jogging, age 40, the words finally came to me to describe the cultural/racial context of my childhood. It was a life of segregation by choice.

I did not meet many black people until I went to college. There, I made my first black friends and they opened my eyes to all that my colorless world had been missing out on. Then I spent a summer in Ghana and experienced the cultural depth and richness of the Ghanaian people.

My husband and I chose when buying our first (and only) home to live in a county that is not majority white, but predominantly black. Our neighborhood is also very diverse racially and culturally. Our family has experienced the formative impact of reading books about the history of racism in our country and in the church, studying about the significant contributions of the black community to our country, and listening to firsthand accounts from black friends and neighbors. And we talk about all the hard stuff and give it to God again and again and we wrestle together as a family with what we can do.

But what God showed me today is that perhaps, just as important as the conversations we have, the prayers we pray, the books we read, and the first person stories we hear, are the tears they see me cry.

For this, this horrific, murderous stealing of life from beautiful, image-bearing reflections of God, is worthy of our tears and laments.

Mothers, if your heart is grieved with God’s heart, its okay to let your children see you cry. May their generation witness both our tears and our toil in actions of repentance, justice, and reconciliation.