Category Archives: Life reflections

Overbooked but not Overburdened

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Thank you for the many responses, both via the blog and privately, about the American Association of University Women having Don to speak here in Wytheville. The response was 9:2 that I should go to the meeting and confront him on being a part of the problem, not the solution.

As it turns out, I am overbooked that day. In the morning I’m speaking to a non-profit attempting to build an in-patient facility where people can work on overcoming substance abuse disorder. They want to talk about my book Fall or Fly, which details how the opioid crisis is crashing the foster care system, because it was never designed to take in kids with living parents. And has not been sustainably updated. Of 500 children in the foster care system, 496 had living parents court-ordered to be separated. We need this in-patient facility. I can be one small piece of them getting that done? Yes please!

Then it is up to the Governor’s Summit on Rural Prosperity, where we will listen to the great and good make promises they have no interest in keeping. But hey, we also get to network with some people who can actually make things happen because they work for them, so it’s totally a good thing to do, and we will get info to help us further our advocacy. This might make life better for some; we shall see.

But at 8 pm I will leave the schmoozefest reception to tuck up in my hotel room and run the Grandmothers Collective Storytelling Circle. Which makes the world brighter.

The storytelling circle is a monthly gathering of those who have dedicated their lives to beating down that stone wall Don and people like him represent, the back room discussions that don’t match the front facing smile, that upholding of the old order because it’s better for everyone—where everyone is defined as people like them. The Grandmothers Collective makes space for elders now in their eighties, who marched for votes, marched for access to birth control, lobbied for women to own property after divorces, staffed campaigns for Black women to get elected, matched climate change to domestic violence in developing countries and wrote about it, and otherwise hold the world together.

That is the difference I was looking to help make when I joined AAUW, the feminine genteel ferociousness of women who weren’t gonna take it anymore, but small towns run on their own ecosystems. It’s not that I want to whistle blow so much as jump the tracks. If we keep doing what we’ve always done, we keeping getting what we’ve always got. Truth, justice, and democracy aren’t lost in one big swoop so much as every small slide where we say “not today; it’s not worth it.”

When will it be worth it? When does “we can let this chance go by” turn into not getting more chances?

Many small town guys make small deals and live small lives of pretense. These other events, they might help, while small guys don’t tend to grow from self-reflection brought on against their will. I can’t be there to challenge the wrongness, so onward to honor those elders who really did live up to the sacrifices and joys of changing the world by their decisions, actions, and integrity.

If anyone wants to join the storytelling circle (you don’t have to be female, elderly, or a grandparent) you can register here: https://www.grandmothercollective.org/what-we-do/storytelling-circle

And I am done wrestling with this. Thank you for helping me work it out. It may seem like a small thing, but aren’t big changes made up of small things?

What Would You Do?

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So what would you do?

I joined the American Association of University Women to meet other educated women. They fact that they wanted to change the world for the better for future women was a bonus.

The group recently decided to book a DEI speaker; when I found out who it was, my heart sank. Don was on the board of a local theater and held a terrible conversation with me about being unwilling to pay a black female storyteller the same as a white male teller. During the conversation, he said the festival was already diverse because it had a performer from the LGBTQ+ community. I was the one causing trouble by making a false claim in the first place.

I left that committee; Don then denied he’d said most of that. In my opinion, this man has as much business talking DEI as the pope does birth control. I took my concerns to the AAUW person overseeing that program, who said she hadn’t booked him and shared my belief that he was inappropriate, not least because a man would talk to women about DEI. She asked me to line up an alternate. I did, but Don was then left in place. “What’s done is done,” she emailed me, when I asked what happened.

So here’s my question: do I go to the meeting and confront this DEI champion of the old school upholding he is benefiting from, or do I walk away? An org that says it intends to make the world better for successive generations of women but doesn’t want to start now isn’t a good bet for a future plan. But is it worth going to the talk, sitting with a fixed smile, and then asking him why he supported not paying the white male and black female storytellers (of equal national standing) the same amount?

Because, you know, if women want to change the world, we need to do so politely. Raising our voices, challenging questions, breaking a sweat: do we really need to do those? Won’t I just be seen as a woman being rude, perhaps even personal?

Every chance to make the world better is a rare one these days. If I don’t confront this situation, am I doing what I am accusing the AAUW group of: taking the easy way rather than challenging the old order in favor of stronger voices with better representation? Or will I be the bitch who yelled?

Accepting advice now, thanks.