Stalking the wild medicinal called adulthood

I spend a lot of time thinking about protracted adolescence, about adulthood, and about the shifting sands of maturity and stability that have been my 20s and the 20s of so many of my friends. 

I am a teacher of high school kids now, not the boundaries-confused 20-year-old I was when I started working with a teenage youth group. I feel further away from the experience of teenage intensity that I remember, and have a hard time understanding it somethings. I've got a decade on most of these kids. 

When I introduced myself as "Angelina, the teacher" several times to surprised looks on our recent school service trip, it touched  a nerve I didn't know I had: I no longer want to be mistaken for being younger than I am, let alone for a high schooler or college kid. I respect those age groups, but that's not where I'm at.  "Do I need a haircut?" I wondered. "Is it that I'm short?" "What about my doesn't say 'grown up'"? (One friend claims it's because I dress "cool" - by which she means "not conservative." Casual might be the most accurate.) 

And I've found myself oddly perturbed by the number of early 20 somethings I work with. They outnumber us older folk (I am marginally one of the older folk), and though I like them all individually, en masse they freak me out a little. It's totally an irrational response - but I think some part of me was ready to leave that energy behind. 

So I wonder what the state of adulthood is - what is it that I'm wanting to move towards? Is it a steady well-paying job? A car? A home you own, or pay regular rent on? Is adulthood having a partner? Babies? It's hard to sort out the messages I get from society, from the media. 

Or maybe it's not the state of "having" anything at all, not a constellation of responsibility or ownership.  I know I perceive and respect connections between people better now, can hold and appreciate complex human relationships - step families, ex-partners, adopted grandmothers - as the nuance in people's lives. I'm fairly certain I'm a better friend than I've ever been before. I know to pace myself; I have a better sense of my energy. I'm better at trusting, generally need less control, am not determined to have a plan than I was only a year or two ago. I have a sense of vocation - a new concept when I applied to seminary - which is enough of a sense that I leave room for change, have not applied the reigns too tight. 

Still, adulthood feels elusive - sought after, healing, quenching - but elusive. 

It's times like this I think I should have been an English major

Excited to be teaching one of my favorite books, Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, I had to admit to my students I didn't know what the deal was with this mythological, fantastical book being called a memoir. 

What was even more curious was that my 1977 edition had "Autobiography" as the subject on the back, while their 1989 editions said "Nonfiction/Literature" and also "Fiction/Literature." It made me think of all the bruhaha around A Million Little Pieces and Rigoberta Manchu Tum's work - the seeming rage that comes from autobiographies that have supposedly been faked. 

But I guess with Woman Warrior, it's obvious that some part of it isn't "true" in the legal or journalistic sense - I mean there are hairy boulder ghosts, older-than-time men and women who train mythical warriors, and other fantastical events. Maxine Hong Kingston is being pretty open with us that something else is going on here. 

So I tried to tell my students about the Hero(ine) Cycle, emphasized the idea of "talk story" that occurs throughout the book, and suggested that maybe things that aren't factually true can still be emotionally true, or possess some inner truth. That fiction and traditional storytelling can tell truth too. 

I hope it sticks. And maybe they'll encounter the book again - after all, if Wikipedia is telling the truth, it is one of the most widely taught books on college campuses in the United States.

 I wonder if it is often used as an opportunity to have conversations about the power of storytelling? Or if the engagement is generally more superficial? 

Woolman queries

 “If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

–      Lilla Watson, (Australian aboriginal educator, artist, and activist) 

“No one is free when others are oppressed” – Author unknown

“Work is love made visible.” – Khalil Gibran

Query

1. When you see oppression and inequality, what do you feel? How do you respond? We all respond in different ways, and though our actions may seem large are small, they are often powerful.

Oppressor and Oppressed

"What has drawn me most strongly to nonviolence is its capacity for encompassing a complexity necessarily denied by violent strategies. By complexity I mean the sort faced by feminists who rage against the system of male supremacy but, at the same time, love their fathers, sons, husbands, brothers, and male friends. I mean the complexity which requires us to name an underpaid working man who beats his wife both as someone who is oppressed and as an oppressor. Violent tactics and strategies rely on polarization and dualistic thinking and require us to divide ourselves into the good and the bad, assume neat, rigid little categories easily answered from the barrel of a gun. Nonviolence allows for the complexity inherent in our struggles and requires a reasonable acceptance of diversity and an appreciation for our common ground." - Pam McAllister, You Can't Kill the Spirit 

Loving Pam McAllister this week. 

And loving that I get to use her work in class. 

Consequences

The thing with teaching Peace Studies to teenagers is that discussions about power - who has it, why, and what they do with it - always hit close to home. Even if they don't see the other kinds of power they might have - racial privilege, educational privilege, class privilege - they are usually keenly aware of power in their relationships with adults. And since we strive to be a relatively egalitarian teaching and learning community here, the kids are quick to  point out when they think we get a little too authoritarian. 

Recently when we reminded them that sneaking out at night is grounds for getting kicked out, they identified that reminder for what it was: threat power. They pulled the concept from a Kenneth Boulding reading in my class that nobody, including me, really liked but which has stayed with us for weeks. If you do or don't do this thing, this other awful thing will happen. That's threat power. 

When we talk about "consequences" in discipline situations,  to some degree that's threat power too. And in the past my style with kids has been to be clear - to be clear about expectations and rules, and to be clear about consequences, so that when something is broken nobody is surprised by what happens next. I used to, and still do, think of clarity as one way of decreasing the hierarchical power in a situation between teens and adults. At least when you're clear it lays the structure bare, nobody is manipulating surprise, obfuscation or unknown awfulness. When you're clear it takes away "because I say so" - which is about as hierarchical as you can get.  Which is a step in the right direction, right? 

But the thing with teenagers is that they are often finely tuned to test boundaries, and sort of geniuses, be in conscious or not, at manipulating power. Being clear about the power doesn't always appease them. 

So when it's 10:15 and I'm tired and having an honest to goodness altercation with a kid about bed time - when we're halfway through the semester and bedtime has always been 10:00 pm on weeknights - and I'm suddenly turning into a shrill ninny that I barely recognize, I have to wonder where I went wrong. 

Part of it is the kid, and all those, teens and adults, who have gone before her and just want to do what they want to do and don't care. But part of it is that it is so easy to step into the role of enforcer, of consequence reminder, of threatener. And it is especially easy to step into that role when your power is threatened. With simple body language and minimal speech - tactics I would have been proud of had she been protesting something besides bedtime - she managed to make the rule look absurd and me look like an asshole. And part of it is the pain and confusion of the quick sea change - one minute you're the teacher they like and respect, the next minute you're the enforcer they loath. 

Since starting work as a high school teacher I've thought things about teenagers that I never would have thought before comings here.  Really jerky, overly general, old people things. Things cool young teachers shouldn't think. Things too harsh and embarrassing to write here. 

But I always catch myself with a realization: Individual kids may be jerks, or behave jerkily, and that's valid. (And sometimes I wish I could say "You are really being an asshole right now, you know that??" and not risk getting in serious trouble.) But when that turns into a"Teenagers are so..." thought I've stepped outside of myself and into the Enforcer. When things become general the power plays are easy to fall into. 

I'm still figuring out how to transform  those bedtime moments, how to both call out the kid but do it in a way that calls them, calls us both, into another kind of relationship where we're both pulling at the power and renegotiating it. Where the power is both laid bare and owned by all parties involved. I think it starts by owning the pain and naming the situation - "I'm feeling really disrespected in this moment, and confused that you are making an issue out of this" - and goes from there. 

And where we go to bed on time. 

Maybe I can't have both.