Open Letter to Perfectionist Parents, South Africa

Dear fellow Perfectionist Parents:

            I have a fear of failure. It is one of the reasons I didn’t think I ever wanted to be a mother. I knew I could never meet my own expectations in the paramount job called parenting, and besides, I like to be in control. The task sounded too big, the deck too stacked against me in making sure my kid turned out just how I dreamed, flawlessly reflecting me and my values.  

            All that said, my son just turned nine.

            Many years ago, when I was still single and planning on never-parenting, I saw an acquaintance in the lobby of the theatre. She was a young, beautiful mother. Her son, about two years old, ran up to us with a flower. He handed it to her and said, “I love you.” Then he ran back to his dad.

            She watched him go and said to me, “I get to be his mom.”

            I get to be his mom.

            I’ve turned this phrase over and over in my head in the years since this tiny moment. It is how I found peace in becoming a parent, how I still find it in the long collection of days called being one.

            Her words stuck with me, and there’s a simple truth in them that people like me need to hear. Most parents say, “That’s my son,” or “I am his mom.” This difference in verb is significant. In her mind, her child was not a direct extension of her. Even when he did something sweet, she didn’t take credit. She simply enjoyed that she had the chance live alongside him in a special way. Even referring to a two-year-old, her verb choice implied that he was his whole own person. She didn’t look at him as if there were eighteen years to mold him out of clay, to then put on display to the world. She just got to be his mom, to help fill his life with aweseomeness and love in the time it took him to become the person he already was on the inside.

            Enter my child. He seemed to be the lens through which the world now looked at me, the final dissertation I wrote to justify who I was. I inevitably put too much pressure on myself to make sure he turned out cool in the ways that I deemed cool. I gave him the look when I didn’t like what he was doing, and I worried. What if my kid grew to be all kinds of things I didn’t particularly like? What if he turned on me and just wanted to play video games or shoot people or say racist things? Would that not be all my fault?

Photo by Jake Cross

            In these early years as a mom I got another reminder. I had an Irish colleague named Joe, who was a great parent. When I’d ask Joe how his son was doing, he’d smile and say, “Ah, naughtier by the day.” (In an Irish accent. Just imagine.)

            I found such comfort in the way Joe seemed totally fine with his kid being an imperfect, unpredictable person, not under a parent’s puppeteering control. Meanwhile, I was afraid some Parenting Gods were ever-grading me.

            I’ve slowly come around to believe that kids are largely themselves from Day One. Whether the baby has colic, sensitive skin, hates being startled, loves hanging upside down, or sleeps better all swaddled up, parents can’t choose or control these things, right out of the gate. We can try to shape these characteristics, encourage or discourage all kinds of behaviors, but we are each born a whole being unto ourselves. Each step along the way, the tiny person (whose parent you get to be) is following his or her gut. Following some mysterious light clenched inside at the beginning of his or her world.

            This borders on a nature versus nurture debate that we will probably never untangle. What I will say, given my tendency to want to be in control, is that it helps me, whether true or not, to lean back into the nature side a bit. It makes me a better parent to not think the entire future of my child is riding on my every motherly move.

            Of course there are a million ways to help guide kids, teach them right from wrong, provide opportunities to help them find and thrive at things they love. The trick, for those like me, is to not hang my identity on each milestone they correctly pass, on each word they utter or hobby they choose. Sometimes I try to look at my child as this crazy person that came to live with me, instead of an audition piece I am setting out there in the world. Because when I let my perfectionist tendencies rule, I become a mother full of critiques. I am a mother full of disappointed looks. I am a mother I don’t want to be.

            It is hard for me to not try and control who my kid is. I’m constantly learning to let go. As a perfectionist, what I need whispered in my ear, as often as possible, is “You get to be his mom.” Period.

Photo by Jake Cross

            I aspire to be someone that could say that my kid is naughtier by the day and feel unjudged and confident that we’re all just doing our best. Everyone says that parents can’t do everything right, and the bummer is that this is so true. We can’t. Or maybe it’s not a bummer, maybe it is exactly what we perfectionists need in order to stretch ourselves in healthy ways. The best that we control freaks can do (and the hardest thing of all, for me) is to raise kids that are truly allowed to explore and be their own people, instead of a pressure-cooked new version of their parents.

            I’m not exaggerating when I say that I have to remind myself every day to let go of the details. I try to hold my tongue about what he wants to wear or how he does his hair or what hangs on his backpack, or the annoying voices he uses, or the stupid plastic toys he wants to buy with his allowance. My kid is being himself. And when I think about it, that’s actually what I ultimately most want for him in this lifetime.

           And me? It's not about me. I just get to be his mom.

Photo by Jake Cross

Photo by Jake Cross

Thursday afternoon, South Africa

            I arrive at school and go to my wife’s office. Deb comes in to tell her that a student at the school just had her house robbed. Men had held her father up at gunpoint at the petrol station, made him drive the back to his house, where they loaded up his valuables in his car and left with it. You hear stories like this everyday lately, she says.

            I go to play rehearsal where middle schoolers are learning to waltz. When asked if they want to move on and learn the dance to their chosen song, “Uptown Funk,” they say they’d rather keep on and perfect the waltz.

            I drive home, on my guard. I move into the other lane gently to give pedestrians space. I notice the black woman driving behind me gives them a wider berth and I wonder if people will think I’m disrespectful or racist based on how much I move over for walkers. There are hundreds of people walking between Fourways and Diepsloot. Buses honk at them, but no one is willing to fork over money for a ride. It is a long walk. I see a man begging on the road, which is not unusual. They are at most intersections. One of them is wearing a shirt and tie and his sign says, “I need money for college.” My heart goes out to him, and I feel manipulated, all in the same breath.

            I stop to get pizza. Most patrons in the restaurant are white. A white woman takes my takeout order, asking a black man named Simba to help her with the computer on multiple occasions. Even though he clearly knows more than she does, she proceeds to boss him around, asking him to get her things, criticizing the way he cuts a cake. While I wait, two white men come in from the Montecasino Tactile Response Team. I see it written on their truck. They each have a machine gun, a hand gun, and a knife.

            Tomorrow I will have lunch with a black friend, Joseph. I try to think of an appropriate restaurant I could take him to, that wouldn’t feel pretentious or offensive somehow. I can’t think of any.

            I leave and see people pulling out of the busy parking lots, directed by black men wearing vests. I see no one tip them, though tips are their entire livelihood.

            I drive home into an African sunset. The sun sets on this continent in its own glorious way. There is a fire burning in the distance, as there always is. There is always a fire burning somewhere. 

Maybe this time, South Africa

I think most of us start out with a bit of idealism in us. We enter adulthood open-eyed, wondering how we will make it, what we will find, and who life might have in store. We inherit, develop, or adopt some sort of belief system, a moral code that will help guide decisions. We start by wanting create the kind of world that we want to be a part of, yet in the end most of us just try to work out the best way to be part of the world we’ve already got.

We all make compromises along the way. We say that the idealist in us grew up into a realist, and stop seeking ways to break down the systems. Instead of Ani Difranco and Hope for the Flowers, we go to church and pray for God to take care of His people and we buy fair trade coffee and resign ourselves to doing our own small part. I am told that all the small parts add up. From where I sit, they don’t seem to be adding up very quickly.

My revolutionary spirit lasted longer than most, I think, which therefore earned me the label of a “hippie” in present-day America. I lived on volunteer stipends, learned to farm organically, sometimes considered a tent as my home, traveled to developing nations, didn’t own a cell phone. I spent a decade living like this, always grasping for the coattails of the revolution I knew must be really brewing somewhere. Wanting my one little life to be part of the answer, even if I could not exactly define the question.

One problem is that there are so many ways to satiate those of us that want to do good, by doing a small good, that the larger system actually remains unchanged. We offer a homeless person food, donate to a non-profit, then keep paying our taxes and spending our incomes in a capitalist society designed to perpetuate itself, not create a just world.

I once heard a story of a girl who is throwing back starfish from a beach where hundreds of them have washed ashore. She is told she can’t make a difference, there are too many to save. She throws another back and says, “I made a difference to that one!” In the same place I heard this story is a sign on the wall: Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.

I struggle in the tension between saving that one starfish, and finding a lever long enough (or a place to stand). For all the time I have spent with starfish in mentoring programs and the like, I fear that just excuses and perpetuates the defunct system. It distracts those of us who want a better world from looking for a place to stand.

After years of searching for a different way to live, I came to join an Intentional Community (formerly known as a commune). In a fairly small but fantastic way, there is in fact a model for creating a society that is structured around the ways people actually want to live, work, eat, enjoy, and find fulfillment. They redefine how much influence power and money have over daily life, and how much community and sharing do. It is the only time in America that I have seen people successfully create a new system, instead of chipping away at the old iceberg of culture to make it a few inches more shapely.

I did not stay there, though I miss it sometimes grievously and still dream of it. Back out here in mainstream Babylon, I grasp for ways to do more than change my light bulb. Is there nothing in between? What does it mean to grow up, to leave the commune, but to still be a hippie on the inside?

I just moved to South Africa. Here on this continent, it is expected to hire someone to work in your home. I don’t want to hire someone to work in my home. I know that it provides someone with a job... but it doesn’t feel right. Others here feel a little uncomfortable at first, then find themselves grateful to never wash their own dishes anymore. It goes against some internal grain of mine. Like having someone give me a pedicure. But bigger. Reinforcing those sorts of job opportunities and socio-economic (not to mention racial) dynamics is counter-intuitive to me in the bigger picture. It is helping in a small way, at the expense of the wider view. Instead of a job scrubbing my toilet, I think people everywhere need to live in a world based on more equality in the first place. Not knowing how to find a reset button that big, most of us (including us former hippies) opt for the starfish with the toilet brush. Determined that this is better than nothing.

There is a pessimism in this kind of optimism that I must rage against. Maybe because I’ve seen another way. Yet I don’t know how to bring that way crashing into the rest of the world, all going about daily life. I don’t even know how to bring it crashing into my own life. By most measurable standards, it seems I’ve sold out. A wife, a kid, a lawn, a car. I am far from the commune; I am afraid to even ask my seemingly straight-laced neighbor to borrow his vacuum, instead of buying my own. If I buy my own vacuum, it will sit around the house, like all the other stuff I own, getting use about 10 minutes a week. Which doesn’t even take into account where the vacuum might have been made, under what conditions, and what kind of economies and systems I support by making this purchase. Is it really necessary for us all to own private vacuum cleaners?

Perhaps here is where we find the intersection of doing small things that are working toward a better world, instead of doing small things to try to patch over the fact that the world is crappy. I know that the most revolutionary things have to be broken down to be small as well. A friend of mine once told me that when making a decision, he wonders, “what would the world be like if a million people made this same choice right now?” Sometimes I do find it helpful to imagine my impact magnified in this way. Yet now I think I am starting to see the next level to that question. The step further is asking, “if a million people did this, would the world actually function in a more just way, or would there be really awesome band-aids covering up the enduring systemic flaws?” The difference is subtle, but real. I don’t want a society with huge nonprofits cleaning up the endless messes, or a fat and happy homeless population. I want a world where we don’t need nonprofits, and people are not homeless (unless by choice).

Today for me that balance is not hiring a maid, and asking to borrow the vacuum. Which oddly is much harder, because that is the counter-cultural choice here. However, deep down, I know that systems of sharing are a bigger picture answer, and systems of oppression are not. Let me be clear, I do not advocate for leaving the starfish out to dry. I just want to be the girl in the story who also figures out why hundreds of starfish are on the beach in the first place, and then gets out to fix that. The girl who shops at the Farmers Market and advocates for the needed overhaul of the Farm Bill.

By understanding how the broken systems exist around us, we can maybe start imagining a way out. Not a way around the systems, but out of them. I will keep caring and believing, more than is reasonable, for longer than is fashionable. We have to have an end goal in mind, a better world we want to live in, and even if it is uncomfortable, dare.

Buen camino, Spain

The Camino de Santiago is a footpath across northern Spain, a pilgrimage route to pay respects to the remains of St James. Or, for many, a pilgrimage route to something deep inside oneself, a place hard to find in the scuffle of everyday life. We come from all edges of the world, and we come year after year for searching, personal reasons.

Today I paused in a small town, set down my bag and had a drink of water. I reminded myself this wasn’t a race, that there was value in lingering. Just as I was thinking this, a small, gray-haired man approached me. He wore a brown sweater and had very few teeth. His Spanish was hard to understand, maybe because he didn’t have teeth, maybe because he was about three hundred years old. I gathered that he wanted me to come to his house, promising me a stamp. Pilgrims have a special passport that is stamped along the way, to document where you’ve been by the time you reach the end. He was so old that I felt confident he was harmless. Besides, I had been advised on my first day walking to take what the camino brings me. So I followed him.

We walked toward his house, and he recruited a few other pilgrims that were just arriving to town. I shrugged at them, and they shrugged back and we all followed down the cobblestone alley. The old man told us that his name was Pablito.

In the backyard of his small house Pablito showed us a round stone, high as my waist, which he had found buried in the ground while tilling his land. He told us to walk around it. He was beaming, awaiting our response. One side was carved the symbol from Santiago, the other side with the symbol of the Knights Templar.

Knights Templar? The scope of the history and importance of the camino crashed down on me for the first time. Pablito said that this holy and ancient discovery propelled him to immediately walk the camino, and now spend his days sharing it with pilgrims and wishing them well on their way.

He then took us around to a little shed behind his house. (What? Like a Pilgrim Shed?) He smiled and handed out scallop shells, the symbol of a person on pilgrimage, and walking sticks. He kissed each of us as he distributed his gifts. He seemed so proud and excited, like we were all his grandchildren. I felt anointed.

Someone asked a question I didn’t hear. He thought for a second, and said, Cosas hacen porque tienen que hacer. Things happen because they have to happen.

Back in his little house, I felt a tremendous new purpose and gratitude, journeying forward with his blessing. It seemed as though now someone was watching over me on this yellow-arrowed path. The ceilings in his home were low, nearly everything a shade of muted brown. The clutter and uneven floors gazed at each other in recognition. Pablito’s wife appeared on the periphery, in the kitchen sticking her finger into a steaming pan. Meanwhile, he rooted around a messy desk, finding his stamp for our books.

I handed him my Pilgrim’s Passport, and he took it carefully. He looked inside, examining it as if reading my fortune. There were stamps from where I’d been so far, dirt smudges and creases, and mostly empty space for the journey ahead. Most passports are fairly empty at this stage, yet he cocked his head like he could see something in the blank space. Then he nodded and smiled, affirming with a tremendous toothless authority that I would be okay.

I bid him goodbye, then walked very slowly back to the center of town.

I usually think of a “calling” as something huge—to be a priest or a doctor or a scientist curing some terrible disease. Yet this average man, doling out shells and encouragement to strangers everyday, had filled my heart with such light and gratitude that I felt he was changing the world more than anyone I’d ever met. Pablito was living proof that a life purpose can be simple and small, specific to the individual, yet still add unparalleled goodness to the world.

We talked about him the rest of the day. What did it really mean that cosas hacen porque tienen que hacer?

Planting onions, ZJ Farm

One of my favorite moments of every day was when I finished milking, had cleaned the milk buckets and cheesecloth in the kitchen, and headed out the back door. As I walked down those three cement stairs, in the last coolness Iowa would offer that day, I always felt this sensation that I was in the right place. Those few steps felt like the rhythm of my pulse, when my legs and skin and lungs screamed that I belonged here. I’d go look for Susan and the work of the day, and my mind would return to the bottom of another steep learning curve.

I found her in the garden, eight rows already tilled and marked that morning. I helped unload boxes from the bucket of the tractor.

“David’s coming,” she said. I looked around, and he was nowhere in sight. “We’ve got to get these onions in the ground. The first three rows are Walla Walla, and then one row of Candy,” she continued.

“Okay…” I responded. She organized the boxes at the head of the rows. They were filled with onion plants, rubber banded into groups.  

“About the length of your finger between them,” she said, showing me. “Just stuff them in. Don’t worry about being gentle; they’ll survive anything. Just get ‘em in the ground, because we have 10,000 to plant.”

“10,000. Right. What are you going to do?”

“What, you think I’m not working?” she said, smiling. We had this ongoing banter because I never knew what she actually did after giving me my tasks.

“Exactly,” I tease. “We should trade jobs sometime. Especially at a harvest when you just sit in the packing shed doing nothing all morning.”

“Doing nothing!” she said, laughing. I loved when I could be so absurd that it brought her joy. In my mind, it was worth way more than my fulltime labor. “How about you run the harvest sometime?” she offered. “You can send me to the field.”

This was probably a bad idea. “You can’t handle it in the field,” I joked.

“Oh yeah right,” she said, still smiling. She climbed onto the tractor, the dog jumping into her lap. “I’ve got to till and mark the rest of the onion rows to keep ahead of you guys. I need to get as much work out of David as I can, once he gets here. He’s going to pace you. Keep up with him.”

I was about twenty feet down the row when David came out. “Good morning. Happy onion day,” I said.

“Yeah right.” He threw some bundles ahead of him in the row, and started stuffing the plants in the ground at twice my speed.

“Geez, your fast.”

He shrugged. “Just wanna get done.”

“You’re like, burying the stem and everything.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

I tried to reign in my perfectionist ways, since he was rapidly catching up to me. I tried to mimic his style, on his knees, not squatting like me. “Do you do this every year?”

“Mom always makes me because I’m fast.”

We worked on in silence, and he caught up to me.

“Damn, I should’a brought some music,” he said.  

“Don’t worry, I’ll sing to you,” I said, in that deliberate embarrass-the-teenager voice.

He looked at me, shaking his head, half smiling. “Nah, that’s okay. I’m good.”

I sang, “Ten thousand bundles of onions to plant, ten thousand bundles of onions… You take one out, put it in the ground, nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine bundles of onions to plant…” I kept singing as he talked over me.

“You’re so weird.” And then, “Are you really going to keep singing?” He shook his head and chuckled again. “You’re slow.”

I stopped singing. “I’m not slow. You’re the one that’s trying to kill them.”

“You’re supposed to go faster.”

“I’ll go faster if you sing with me.”

 “No thanks.” He was past me now.

“Are there any jobs on the farm that you actually like?”

“Not really. Well, the ones I get paid for. But they’re still stupid.”

“Are you getting paid for this?”

“Yeah.”

“See how lucky you are? I’m not getting paid jack,” I said. As if this proved something.

“Sucks to be you.”

“What do you need money for?”

“Whatever I want that my mom won’t buy me. Playstation games. Mountain Dew. New trucks for my skateboard.”

“She won’t buy you new trucks?” He was so far ahead of me I was practically yelling.

“The ones I want are hella expensive.”

“Gottcha.”

He looked back at me. “You’re frickin slow, dude.”

“Oh, yeah? Watch this. I got mad onion skills.” I went as fast and carelessly as I possibly could. “Pow, pow, pow, pow.”

We worked on in silence again. I concentrated to keep up with him as we eventually settled into something of a rhythm. It was quiet, one of those times that farming seemed like meditation.

“Aren’t you gonna sing?” he asked.  

Photo by Patricia Black McCauley

Driving the tractor, ZJ Farm

Photo by Patricia Black McCauley

I found Susan outside the barn after I finished milking. She wore the same clothes as yesterday, ripped shorts and a tank top that began its life as pink. One desperate bobby pin held her unruly curls. ““LK wants her tomato seedlings today.” And then, “You haven’t learned to drive the tractor yet, have you?” she said.

“No, but I can,” I said, feigning confidence.

“Okay. Hop on. I’ll get David to show you while I get her trays organized.”

I walked to the dark and dusty barn. From the outside, it was that old farm version of the color white. Not white, but dirty, lived-in once-white. The building itself stood so proud and necessary. There was a set of massive sliding wooden doors at the front and back. The back doors were always open for the lambs, and this provided the only light. I pushed with all my weight to slide the front doors open, one at a time. The far end of the barn was filled with the remaining straw, dust, and fencing from last season’s lambing. The Kubota was parked among huge orange metal trailers packed with soybeans, oats, or corn. Each had a scattering of plastic jugs around them, in various levels of disrepair. I sat in the squishy black seat of the small orange tractor and waited. All I needed was a straw hat and a lifetime worth of grit and I’d blend right in.

I heard David’s skateboarding in the garage, and then it stopped. He came to meet me, not wearing yesterday’s clothes. Rather, he wore sagging jeans, a Blink 182 shirt, and had a comb stuck in his mini-fro.

Susan headed up the path on foot. “We’ll fill the bucket at the hoop house, and then you can drive her trays down here to load them in the truck.”

Whatever that meant.

I got off the seat and David sat down. He turned the key halfway, holding it. I wondered where to sit. I settled on the edge of the seat, half a butt cheek on the rim, the rest balancing in space.

“What are you doing?” I asked, as we just sat there, awkward.

“Counting to thirty.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, you just do it,” he replied. “Or it won’t start.” A red light came on, with an oil can symbol. I pointed to it, and David just shrugged. “I don’t know what it means. Doesn’t matter.” At last he turned the key fully, and with a rumble and eruption of smoke, it was running.

He drove first along the path parallel to the barn, showing me the front and back pedals, one for moving in each respective direction. They seemed to have nothing do with speed. Acceleration, I gathered, came from a hand lever. He then reversed without looking behind him, nearly hitting the dog. I shooed Martin around the tractor and up the path to the garden. I watched him go, longingly.

David did a three-point turn and headed around the silo and driveway, immediately at full speed. It felt like riding in a combination of a convertible and a little red wagon. As we sped up, the vibrations were replaced by bumps and jolts on my increasingly sore butt. I didn’t want him to think I was trying to sit on his lap or something, so I was mostly doing a prolonged squat.

“How do you stop?” I hollered, over the roaring engine and the bumps.

He turned the acceleration lever back down, and we slowed, rolling to an unsure neutral-ish pause.

“But what about a brake? What if I need to stop fast?”

He shrugged.

“You can use this to put the bucket down,” he said pulling another lever on the side. The big front scoop on the tractor went down and rested on the ground. “If that’s down, you won’t roll.”

Slow down and not roll were not exactly the same thing to me as brakes, but it seemed that was all I was going to get.

“Don’t touch this side,” he said. “That’s the PTO.”

“I don’t know what that means, but okay,” I answered, obediently.

It was my turn. I slid into the comfy driving position and David climbed behind me, standing and holding the back of my seat. Forward pedal, and I gently turned the accelerator by hand. I looked over my shoulder, worried he would fall, but he only teased me for going too slow. I tried going faster, but was too scared. We returned full circle to the start, David thoroughly bored. I slowed down and took my foot off the gas. We inched toward the barn and I breathed out, relieved.

Except, we were on a slight decline, and weren’t fully stopping.

“David! It’s still rolling!” I frantically pushed my foot in space of an absent car brake. My heart pounded. Should I try to turn sharply? Put the bucket thing down?

“You can’t try to stop it on a hill…” he was saying, laughing. He tried to reach over me, and I pulled the side lever. The front scoop went up, not down, and there was a crunch and a crack as we ran into the huge, old, beautiful barn door.

I looked up to see a long vertical split in the wood, and a hole where my big front shovel ripped its way to a stop.

“Oh shit!” I said. David found this even more funny, since I never swore. I got out of the driver’s seat and looked at my destruction. David backed the tractor up, shut it down, and then joined me.

“Nice,” he laughed, gazing at my wreckage. I reached up and touched the spot, frantic, wracked with guilt.

Susan returned from the hoop house, carrying a tray of seedlings.

“What are you two doing? I’m waiting for you up there.”

“Yeah… Kelsey totally crashed into the barn,” David said almost proudly, no help in my defense. I would give him the stink eye for tossing me under the bus, but I was about to cry.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” was all I could get out. David looked and me and started laughing again. Then, amazingly, Susan started laughing too. They were both laughing. Hard. Which… I’d never actually seen before.

“Well, you’ve left your mark,” said Susan, in no hurry to recover her composure. “We’re always going to remember you now.”

My wedding, years later, with the tractor hole remaining on right hand door of the barn. Photo by Patricia Black McCauley

Worming the lambs, ZJ Farm

            “Put on different shoes, you and George are worming the lambs today,” Susan said the next morning, almost in passing. Approximately a quarter of the things she said to me were in this type of foreign language. Worming the lambs. I thought about what this might mean as I walked to the house.

I went in the back door with the missing lower right windowpane. The door stuck and squeaked. Going into the house mid-morning meant I could sneak a snack. I cut a hunk of bread from the fresh loaf sitting on the cutting board, the knife ripping through the homemade crispy crust. I covered it with my first batch of goat cheese I’d made a few days ago. It smelled goaty, but tasted creamy and delicious. Then again, I’d never had goat cheese before so perhaps I wasn’t the best critic. I got my shoes and glanced at the wall next to the door jam. “You owe me $5,” written in pencil. This little note, in David’s handwriting, always reminded me of something I was trying to grasp about this place. Where I came from, a teenager doesn’t write stuff like that on the wall. But here, the buildings and furniture and tools and dishes and walls are really intended for living in, not just inhabiting and upkeep. Which isn’t to say that things aren’t clean—the old farmhouse was beyond beautiful. It was just that the farmhouse was also a scarred and authentic and unembarrassed member of the family.

I obediently laced up my shoes, feeling like the human sheep. I rarely fully understood what was going on, but people pointed me in the right direction, spoke some language I didn’t know, and I did my best. My college degree meant nothing in this real world. Luckily, I had full faith that George, age seventeen, would know exactly what to do with the lambs.

Martin whined to come out with me. He was some sort of herding dog, so I decided to bring him. I found George arranging wooden fence pieces to make a sort of small enclosure at the end of the sheep paddock. I climbed over the orange gate to get in, and Martin squeezed through below me.

“I’m going to get the syringes and the marker,” he said. “Can you bring the lambs over here?”

“Sure,” I responded, trying not to reveal that I had no idea what was going on. George thinks I know how to herd sheep, I thought. What a compliment. I’m like a real farmer. I walked to the back edge of the flock. They didn’t look like cute storybook lambs, but bigger, with matted dirty wool embedded with burrs. I looked for the one I named Valencia, with a black patch on her eye, but they all looked the same. At least to me.

I started clapping, waving, and hollering. Martin got excited with me and was crouching, running and barking. The lambs moved like giant squirrels in the middle of a road: quick and anxious on their toes, but only in a non-productive zigzag confusion.  I thought herding sheep was supposed to be easy, I thought. I went to the back of the paddock again, stepping through their piles of round poo. I tried again with lots more hand waving, like I must’ve seen in a movie somewhere. Martin added some ankle-biting. As soon as I got the whole group running away from me, a handful would sprint back around behind me. It was like playing Red Rover, but with sixty lambs versus me and a dog. 

George came back. “Sorry, Martin’s no help. He gets too excited.” I pretended that Martin was the problem and brought him back to the house. When I returned, George was quietly walking behind the lambs, which were now calmly moving as a group. He was all subtlety and experience. That is, the opposite of me. I held the gate where he told me, and quietly and calmly they were all cooped up in his tiny pen. A hundred times a day that kid was my hero.

The next phase of this operation was sort of a blur. My job was basically that of lamb-wrestler. I caught one at a time and held it while George squirted something into its mouth and drew an orange line down its head with the fat crayon. Then he marked his count on the barn wall with the orange crayon, and I let go. All this within the dense, thigh-high sea of wiggling, wooly panic. How could it be so hard to catch them when they were all squished together?

As usual on this land, I wanted to prove myself, and prove I was strong enough. Some lambs outweighed me, and many stepped on my feet. My adrenaline rose with theirs each time George went to refill his medicine and I scrambled to headlock the next unmarked animal within reach. I was definitely sweating, bruised, and possibly bleeding. Yet something about farming made me not notice those things. Like the house, and the marked barn walls, my body was there to be lived in. 

Photo by Patricia Black McCauley

Shortcut, Tanzania

I try to make a list of things I see on the shortcut. This is an absolutely impossible task. Rather than nothing, I suppose I’ll settle on a small, partial list for today, for just the block between my house and the store:

• a horse grazing
• a line of bajajs, with drivers sprawled behind them on the grass
• four guinea fowl along a cement wall
• kids playing soccer, barefoot on the rocky earth
• a young boy collecting discarded used phone cards and stacking them in his hand
• men sitting on wood benches, drinking out of white teacups, playing checkers with bottle caps
• a series of small empty holes in the ground, the shape of an abandoned game of bao
• boards hammered roughly in the shape of a shack, empty, advertising cold drinks
• a child in school uniform, staring at me (x 15)
• chickens chickens chickens
• men putting up a cement wall who want to practice their English
• a small shop with plastic plumbing tubes of many sizes and colors
• Maasai man, traditional clothes, knife, stick, shoes made of tires, big holes in his ears and circles burned onto his cheeks, talking on a cell phone
• truck that is too big for this road, heavy with crates of Coca-Cola products
• a man unloading his bicycle with a bag of charcoal, a bag of potatoes, and a branch of green bananas—each of these things as big and as heavy as me
• the tailor shop, two foot-pedal sewing machines mounted on tables
• seats from inside a car
• someone carrying large pieces of foam
• a mostly white cat, caught in a cloud of dust from someone sweeping in front of their shop
• many outdoor kitchens, including flames blazing under large pots
• a tree trunk speed bump, mostly worn away into the dirt road
• women carrying babies on their backs, dressed in every color and pattern
• many little concrete rooms, with people hanging in and around, are they shops?
• fresh pineapple stand
• an Ultimate Security employee, with the black and red striped necktie
• a woman making chapatti, a delicious sort of flatbread

As for sounds, I heard the Muslim call to prayer, roosters, motorcycles, numerous Kiswahili greetings, and someone playing the song, “Walking In Memphis” from their shop.

            My parents are on a trip out west. They visit the canyons, and they ask locals, “Do you ever get used to seeing this?”

            When I visited the American west, I also found the landscape to be unbelievably beautiful, although I admit I am not a mountain person. I say that I am a water person, and this is true. My soul is connected to Lake Michigan, and I long for the sea. Yet even more than this, I think I am a people person. A culture person. I could walk down that shortcut every single day (actually, I nearly do) and never grow tired of it, or any less amazed by the lives I get to witness a mere five minutes from my home. I make lists in my head of the people I wish could join me on just this tiny stretch of real life. I feel humbled, connected, in awe, baffled, speechless at the beauty, inspired, touched, lucky, respectful, quiet, simpler, grateful, and on a good day, a small part of it all.

            In many ways, I am “used to” Tanzania. When I wake up in the morning, this is exactly where I expect to be. I am not surprised when we run out of water, or when a generator kicks on because we lost power again. I know that bananas grow on trees, and that today will be hot. Walking outside my gate, however, is always an assault on my sense of perspective. I’ve grown adept at acting normal and playing it cool, but on the inside I am just like my parents, ogling at the canyons.

No Tribe, Tanzania

            Another business trip to Posta: a promising cultural experience. This time we go to get a criminal background check for you, as we start the visa process for our move to South Africa. We have a vague idea where we are going, and are advised to just ask around.

            We wander the street, crowded with people sending packages, newspaper stands, men with baskets of miraculously cold water on their heads, and the busiest bus stop in all of downtown. We stop at the post office to send two identical packages, to people who live in the same zip code. One of these costs 7,700tsh and the other 8,800tsh.

            We start asking around for the stesheni polici, and get a series of people that point us towards the ocean, and then south. It is about three thousand degrees outside, and we are no longer on the street listed in the address. We keep asking, people pointing us onward, and walking. At last, Polici, on the right and the left.

            Many people are hanging around and there are no helpful signs, but we finally make it to a desk where a man beckons us. You explain you need a background check.

            “Why, are you a criminal?”

            “No no! I just need to show my new employer that I am not.”

            “How do I know that you are not?”

            “Well… I’m not. I came here to get that proof on paper.”

            “Why should I believe you? You come in here and want me to say this, but how do I know? Is there a warrant out for your arrest?”

            “What? No! You know, you take my fingerprints and then you check them.” We are trying not to panic. This plan is backfiring entirely.

            Eventually, he breaks into a smile. “Okay. We do not do that here. You have to go back to Posta to the Ministry of Home Affairs. Here, I will write you down the directions.”

            His name is Schubert. He asks where we are from, and is please because he says he does not yet have friends in America, and now he does. He gets out a piece of paper to take all my contact information so we can be friends. He also gives me his.

            So, back to Posta we go, buying a drink along the way that tastes like a caramel apple sucker. We find the building, complete with a retirement ceremony taking place in the courtyard. You sign in at the front desk and get a visitor badge, but I apparently don’t need one. We head to the second floor (which is actually the third) and in the stairwell there are boxes and boxes of old records and files, spilling out in a tan, disorganized heap.

            There are windows and doors and rooms and a man who seems to be waiting in line. We stand near him. Suddenly, he turns to us, acting like he works here and leads us into one of the rooms. You repeat your request. He tells us we will need a copy of your passport, and a letter written to the Director of Forensic Services. He gives you the address.

            “I have to write him a letter?” you clarify.

            He nods.

            “Can I write it now?” you ask.

            He slides his notebook of lined paper over to you, and goes to make copies.

            Through another windowed-doored passageway is a place to pay, and then back to another small fishbowl room for the fingerprinting. There are black inky fingerprints covering all the walls, most densely around hand-height. There is also a poster with a cartoon of two donkeys talking about teamwork. A huge tube of black ink sits on the table, by a plank of wood and a roller. There is a sink next to the door.

            The kind man asks a couple of questions. Your surname? Date of birth? Your tribe?

            You pause. “No tribe.” The moment hangs in our hearts, as we each think of what this means. I suddenly feel sorry for us, somehow adrift in space and time. While I’m grateful for my endless opportunities, I’m also adrift in space and time. I wonder what it feels like to have a tribe.

            He takes your fingerprints onto a piece of paper, telling you that you should not leave Tanzania, you are a good teacher and are needed here.

            While I’m sure you will receive a clean record report from Tanzania, I don’t think there is even the smallest chance that your fingerprints will be cross-referenced with anything in the next 7-10 days. There are no computers, nor likely a system in place to support this demand of the developed world. You might as well be putting your inky fingers on the wall with all the rest.

Mister So Much Better

            Kariakoo is a bustling chaos-fest of a market, sprawling many blocks in every direction. When I stand still, it all seems orchestrated, humming like a machine with a million parts. Diving into the fray, I am whisked through rooms and shouts and colors and piles of tomatoes and tiny fishes and sacks of mystery pods and powders and people shelling peas in baskets and towers of buckets and strange tools and giant umbrellas and fabrics and clinking coins.

      “Mister So Much Better!”

      For reasons unbeknownst to me, this is the call sign for me here. I was given this name by Athmani, the fruit vendor I frequent. His friends caught on, and is now hollered all over the market as a sign of greeting me. My mother becomes Mama So Much Better, my son, Mtoto So Much Better. It is this name, and the familiarity and kindness with it, that I am perhaps most proud of in my Dar experience.

            When people talk to us, a common question is, unatoka wapi? You come from where? It’s a reasonable question. We sometimes hesitate, wanting people to know that we actually live here now, that we choose to call this place home. It is part wanting to affirm that we admire and desire to live here, and part wanting to be treated like a regular person instead of a tourist. We often answer with, Tunakaa Dar es Salaam. Changing the verb, not claiming we are from here, but that we stay here. Sometimes this satisfies people, sometimes it does not.

            The cries of, “Mister So Much Better,” continue to widen when I go to Kariakoo. People I don’t even recognize will say it to me, happily seeming to join some sort of inner circle I didn’t know I was creating.

            Today someone I don’t think I’ve met before greeted me familiarly and started talking to me as I passed. He asked that question, Unatoka wapi? I come from where? Today I answer straight: Marikani. America.

            Marikani? He seems surprised. He gives me examples of what he means. Ilala, Msasani… He names the districts around Dar. Somehow in my weekly visits to the market, this man I have never met has grown to consider me “from” here.

         Mikocheni, I say. He shakes my hand.