September Grateful List: Okay it's all good.

This last couple of months have been one huge up and down transitional time. I have 2 major things that I am grateful for this month.

1. "Sabidee" in Royal Oak, MI:

A Thai restaurant run by a Laotian family. What do you know, I had to go looking for a Laotian family to find authentic Thai food...they make their Tom Yum soup OUT OF SCRATCH. Do you know how hard that is? They boil the REAL spices, w/ huge pieces floating around proclaiming authenticity. The reason this is so amazing is b/c almost every popular Thai dish can be found in a jar or container, which takes away the necessity of making these labouring spice pastes from scratch every time. BUT THEY LABOURED. And their shit is GOOOD.

I have to say seeing these galangal and kafir leaves floating around in an orangey broth excited me. Like, wow, is this for real? Am I in America? Are my taste buds messing with me? Do I have wings?

Side note: There are 2 reasons I think that this Laotian family makes authentic Thai that I have yet to find at a Thai restaurant in Michigan: 1. There is a lot of immigration into Thailand by neighboring borders. Thailand, when you look at it on a map, is surrounded by Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Malaysia. We're up in everybody's face. The last time I visited I remember absorbing a sense of the country that made sense to me- I noticed a national atittude empitomized in a a popular Thai phrase "mi pen a-lie" (translated as "that's okay," "it's cool, "whatever," "don't worry"). It is a laid-back attitude that I think has allowed the Thais to be centrally located on mainland Southeast Asia. HOWEVER, that is not to say that the country is a utopian and fully accepting place...lots of Muslims that live near the Malaysian border are not happy with how they are being treated by a government proud of their Buddhist nationalism.... Getting back to the owners of the restaurant, I think the reason they make such authentic Thai is b/c they lived in Thailand....(Oh, by the way, the class you're taking right now is called: TyiaTheory.) (Another Oh, my grandmother is a Laos immigrant who moved to Thailand! My mom understands the language...mixed blood baby, we're all muts.)
2. They appreciate the food and understand that Americanizing the food, or dumbing it down by adding sugar for profit, is not a good strategy to gain a strong customer base, since they can easily choose the Thai or Chinese restaurant down the street with the really bad decor.

(They'll be a quiz on this next week...)


2. The Woman Who Forgot Her Baby In the Car for 8 Hours:

Why? If anyone saw the Oprah special on this they will know who I'm talking about. An assistant principal left her baby in the car in the morning in late August only to find her after the school day ended. The baby died of a heat stroke.

This is one of the most horrific things I have heard of in a long time. And I have heard and experienced some crazy stuff. What makes this horrific is the simple fact that this WAS a GOOD MOTHER. She was a RESPONSIBLE citizen. She is an AVERAGE, REGULAR woman. She LOVED her child as much as any mother. Like most mothers, she was trying to juggle her life.

Yet, in this fast-pace lifestyle, her MIND got in the way of her INTUITION and overrided her maternal instincts of safety, protection. SHE KILLED HER OWN CHILD. And it could have been ANYBODY.

I am always moved by Oprah and the grace in which she handles her guests and topics. But today the way she wrapped up this incident gave me even more respect for her. Do you know that she doesn't have any children of her own? She said that when she heard of this story, the first thing she said was that "This child has become an angel for everyone to realize that they need to slow down." And for me it is true. This baby became a messenger. And Oprah did not judge this mom. This also made this story more powerful. Instead of crucifying her as some might, alienating this mom to be "one of that careless bad moms" (something we are always so willing to label on others), she humanized this mom's mistake, which actually allows people to see themselves in her shoes, AND allow oneself to see that one can prevent such a sad accident to take place. THIS IS the MOST IMPORTANT lesson in her story. That we can also SLOW down our lives. That I can slow down and must slow down. That the fears we have as mothers of something evil or bad happening to our children by evil or bad people are just as fatal as trying to be supermom and juggling a life in a fast-pace world.

As a mother myself, absorbing our modern-day cultural messages is an intellectual overload which is not always a consciously acknowledged (even scarier still). Seeing celebrity professional millionaire moms juggling their new movies and glamourized for their "post-baby" body, I ask myself why I am still playing with my belly flab scarred with stretch marks 2 years after the birth of my child. Watching crappy Rachel Ray recipes and reading about pesticides and animal cruelty while trying to make fresh organic exotic recipes every night, I ask how can I make fast and good food for my baby when most of our ingredients are already contaminated. Listening to other women in their twenties make voyages to India, China, or jumping from NYC from SF, I wonder when I get to be that "free woman" again as I find new ways to stimulate an almost 2-year old's mind with free resources.

What this adds up to is a huge amount of pressure on moms. Not only are moms moms, they are wives, teachers, professionals, cooks, therapists, dreamers of their futures, watchers of politics who also want change, affected by the beauty, weight, and age pressures that every other woman deals with. So how can we judge mothers? The worst judge of my mothering abilities, I have learned, is ourselves, is me. And the next person we judge the harshest: our own mothers for their mistakes and for what they COULDN'T do. If you know my mom, you know that this is an internal journey for peace that I am still on. (It's been going good lately.)

So I thank this baby and her mother for telling this story. I saw this baby in the car when she told her story. And when you can see this in your mind, oh it is so sad because this little thing suffered. She was 3 years old. And I am grateful for her for being a lesson about stopping and slowing down. And I thank her mom because all she was trying to do was be the best mom and woman she could be.


******
The bed doesn't always have to be done. Fast food can be okay. Everything is just fine. As long as that baby is in your arms. As long as my baby girl is in my arms.