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In 2012 I published a blog post titled “Stop Modeling Murder Instead of Literacy and Peace.” Why has so little changed in over a decade?

Yesterday I spent the day in Southwest Chicago holding writing workshops with 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students who had come to another school on a Saturday to help them get a jump on applying to selective high schools in the city. The room where I was teaching was identified as the library but the shelves were empty of books. Overall, the students were wonderful. We worked on a simple poetry exercise "I was" and "I am" to help them see themselves in the present and find strong words to describe themselves. Some of the "I was" sections were heartbreaking. "I was…" hurt, alone, afraid, angry.." They were good about getting up and reading and their poems were wonderful, full of hope and self-esteem.

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When Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June fifth and died on June sixth, I was eleven and we were living in London for the year on my father’s sabbatical from Rutgers. It was my mother’s birthday and she put her arms around myself and my two older sisters and said we would never go back to America. My parents had loved John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. who had been assassinated that April. The Vietnam War was raging, and the United States looked like a place you would willingly leave. But my father turned to my weeping mother and said, “Of course we’re going back. We have to go back. We’re Americans.” I was surprised by this. I thought of my parents as rebels, they protested the war, they supported all liberal causes, they were vocal and active in their beliefs. But they were also staunchly patriotic.

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Denial: “An unconscious thought process whereby one allays anxiety by refusing to acknowledge certain unpleasant facts, feelings, etc.” Uh huh. I got that. I was finishing the triathlon, the Olympic length, which I had not trained for, an activity my ex-husband had suggested as a means to bring us closer, never mind he was scarfing a free pirogi as I crossed the finish line. I denied what my body was telling me which was, “This is impossible.” Same message I received after 72 hours of back labor, after submitting a novel, after getting sober, after surviving the death of my sister. What did I do? I denied. I kept going. Denial isn’t gaslighting. You aren’t pretending one thing is true in place of another. You are simply postponing, rejecting, refusing so you can survive. My mother did it around my father’s drinking.

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