Dear W,

Today we went to the playground after the grocery store, a carefully negotiated stop that involved postponing dinner and eating straight from the jar of kalamata olives.

I was trying not to break the dozen eggs in the back bucket of your tricycle.  A long plastic-encased English cucumber took a few spills from the front basket, but otherwise we arrived unscathed.  At the park a small group of children on a bench surrounded a boy of perhaps eight years old who was consuming some kind of frozen dessert.

Yellow caution tape encircled a recently repaired playground bridge, and I found it impossible to help you understand that the tape meant we should leave it alone.  For you, the tape was an invitation, an obstacle to be overcome, and you showed me plenty of well-crafted work arounds.  After the tape, the children on the bench were the next point of interest.

I can’t describe what it was like to watch you facing down that pack of older children, all afire with their dramas, oblivious to the innocent charms of your uncut blond curls and chubby hands.  With berry stains on your mouth, you leaned in from your hips and told them with great two-year-old confidence: “I is using the blue slide and it is very slow.  My jeans is making the slide slow.”

There was a brief silence.  Your little voice had been loud, articulate, clear as day. Then, no response whatsoever from the other children.  They went back to sloppily removing the felt tube inserts from a new box of colored markers, throwing them on the ground, and yelling at one another.

You waited, and moved closer, and watched the group, but still they paid you no attention.  And I began to feel a great wrenching, a horrible ache in my heart.

I know that you will suffer rejection in your life, because all people do, but I wasn’t prepared for the effect it would have on me, to see my only son be passed over by the crowd.  I saw a vision of you slightly older: smart, excited about the ways things work, assuming that everyone else is thrilled with learning and conversing, facing the hard moment of truth that everyone is not interested in the things that fascinate you, to the extent that they may mock what you value and you will not understand why.

You are my beloved and these playground children behaved as if you did not exist.  I had expected eye rolling, even a rude comment, but absolute nothingness was unbearable for me.  When the blessed one watched the beauty of her son, despised and rejected in front of all men, oh, the extent of her suffering!  Is this what all merciful mothers must endure?

I tried to distract you with playground equipment but a few moments later two of the more sophisticated girls had taken up residence at the mouth of the other slide and you wanted to talk to them.  They were discussing whether or not so and so had “called her a b” and you meant nothing to them, not even enough to move and let you pass.  I could not extricate you before the whole clan had come up, and then I realized with horror that you were watching the two youngest carefully paint over the image on one of the rotating play pieces with a new bottle of white-out from the same backpack as the ill fated markers.

This was a moment of understanding – that children who don’t know how to respect beauty or property easily choose destruction, probably because they’ve never owned anything beautiful that wasn’t disposable or immediately broken by someone else.  But the shocking thing for me is that I did absolutely nothing.  It was as if my sensibilities had been thoroughly numbed by the rejection you had unwittingly experienced.  I was no longer the adult on the platform.  Essentially, I was terrified of these children, behaving as though you and I were non persons, and their erasure of our person hoods caused me to cease functioning.  Only later did I ponder the layered nuances of feeling, essentially, whited out by a group of children at a neighborhood park.  It must surely pale in comparison to the ways and frequency that my black neighbors feel blacked out by much of white culture, particularly during this current political season.

The children eventually left, a wake of snack wrappers and marker casings behind them.   Like a small horde of locust, they had landed, consumed, stripped bare their resources, and left useless garbage in their wake.

You and I tried not to step on toes, so we were unseen.  Perhaps next visit we will insert ourselves into their lives, not to teach, or correct, or save, but just to be known for who we are.  Maybe no one ever has.

I’m a stranger in a strange land with you, my gentle articulate child, you who have never seen a moment of television or heard a harsh word.  Your blue eyed life is filled with the luxuries of love and the gifts of simplicity.  I have chosen to reject much of what my culture tells me is important to own so that my family can live a certain way.  I don’t expect it of those around me but neither do I want to live in apology for my choices.

Your father said, upon the telling of my paralysis to prevent damage to the playground, “But it’s your park too!”  He is technically correct, but we are the new family on the block and there are too many things I don’t yet understand. One thing is clear: I want to be known, I want my child to be known, and it probably starts with trying to know the others who live across racial and economic lines.  God give us the grace to figure out how.

I remain,

your Mom