Who Wants a "Normal" Childhood?

My darling daughter surprised us by busting out the whole ABC song the other day. All of a sudden, she knows the alphabet. It is one of the those moments when you are thrilled and amazed at what your offspring is capable of. And, I have to say, it was a bit of a relief to have such positive evidence that she is growing and learning, even flourishing, in the midst of all the post-Katrina chaos.

One of our main concerns as we struggled with our decision about whether to stay or move away was what would be the best environment for her to grow up in. Of course, it seems obvious that life in a small Midwestern city would be healthier and safer. The schools are better, crime is lower, the environment is cleaner, and natural disasters are infrequent and more isolated. Plus, life is pretty damn “normal” up there compared to down here, and isn’t that what any parent wants for his/her child? But maybe “normal” is not what she needs most.

Right now she is falling in love with Mardi Gras. We have been to two parades, and she is hankering for more, which she will get this weekend. The parades start Thursday and don’t end until Fat Tuesday. Every time someone walks up to her and hands her a stuffed animal or throws a string of glittering beads from the top of a passing float, we get caught up in the magic of the moment. The whole bead-begging mania seemed pretty pointless to me before, but now the three of us glory in the whole event—the horses, the drums and horns, and the bright colors (but not so much the pre-pubescent girls thrusting their hips in tiny skirts).

New Orleans’ racial diversity (and tension), art and music and parades, architecture, and history, all make this such a unique place. I grew up feeling like I was not really a native of any particular place or culture. But my daughter could grow up as part of an authentic culture here. Is that enough of a benefit to risk her experiencing another hurricane? Of course, the thing about hurricanes is that you have the chance to get out of their way. So I don’t fear for our lives. But I do worry about my daughter having to experience all of this as an older child.

Right now, at two years old, she has been remarkably unaware of the turmoil. The seven-week evacuation and separation from her father was the hard part. Since we have been back together, and especially since she has been back in school, she is a happy little girl. She has never asked about the house or the cats, although she has missed one special friend. (And so do I. Her mom was fast becoming a very dear friend, and their absence is one of the saddest parts of this whole thing to me. They have since moved on to the D.C. area.) But she is making new friends and adapting quite well to the post-Katrina environment.

Although I have worried about her seeing so much destruction, what she seems to notice most are the rebuilding efforts. She is fascinated by all of the construction equipment we encounter every time we hit the road and the men she sees laying bricks or repairing roofs. Although I sometimes say, “women can fix things too,” when she talks about all of the “men working,” we very rarely see women in the work crews. Nevertheless, I hope she will one day be proud of her residency here and the fact that she was part of the rebirth of this one-of-kind city.

Mommyblogging

I just read an interesting article on “mommybloggers” at Austinmama.com. Marrit Ingman addresses the issue of whether women should write (and publish) their thoughts and experiences as mothers. While writing can be therapy and help process the amazingly complex life mothers lead, blogging is also about community. And the community of women writing thoughtfully about motherhood out there is vibrant and empowering. It is wonderful to see so many women connecting and feeling emboldened in their analyses of how we raise children and how we treat mothers. What is the quote from Socrates? “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And why would motherhood be any less worthy of examination than any other life? It has been the most widely lived experience, but, sadly, the least examined. The time has come to look carefully and closely, and you simply can’t do that unless you take the time and care to craft the language to convey what you find. To say that mothers shouldn’t write about their experiences is to say they shouldn’t think or look. You might as well say they shouldn’t breathe.

A New Home

I’m not quite sure how to say this, or how to explain it, but my family and I are buying a house—in New Orleans. It is a huge relief to have the weight of a decision off our shoulders. The limbo was killing us. And in a few quick hours on Monday, everything just fell into place and there we were, making a bid on a house and deciding to stay, despite the risk of another Katrina.

After months of going back and forth, sometimes changing our mind one day and then going back the next, we found ourselves last weekend thinking again about staying. We had been leaning towards leaving when an afternoon with friends and an evening at the first parade of the Mardi Gras season left us yearning to unpack our bags. Sunday we drove around and looked at a few houses (from the outside) and walked in Audubon Park and fed ducks while couples danced to swing music in a great gazebo built sometime in the early part of the last century. One house in particular caught our eye. It was a true New Orleans Victorian (a double shotgun converted to a single) a block away from the shops and restaurants on Magazine Street. It was priced right and, most importantly, is only a few blocks from the river, the highest point in the city. It was “high and dry” during Katrina and, presumably, would be again in another hurricane.

So we saw it on Monday at noon and knew instantly that if we were going to stay, we should not pass up this deal. It has loads of New Orleans charm—high ceilings, wood floors, painted medallions on the ceilings, exposed brick fireplaces—and was much cheaper than all of the other post-Katrina-priced houses we had seen. But were we ready to make the leap? Just that morning I had an interview with a school via video-conferencing and realized the job was not for me (it is a very small school, a freshman-sophomore campus, and I would be teaching almost all composition), plus my husband’s job prospects in the smallish city would be slim. But we still had hopes of returning to the Midwestern college town where we had lived before moving to New Orleans. So my husband made a quick call to the paper where he had worked and was hoping he could be rehired only to find out the region is in financial crisis and the paper might have to let people go. We suddenly realized, all viable prospects had been exhausted. In the space of a few hours, we had become New Orleanians again.

Now comes the fun and hard part of telling everyone we know. It is fun to tell people here. They are delighted we are staying. I suppose it is a sign of hope for them as well, that friends are restarting their lives here instead of pulling up stakes and moving on. But telling everyone “out there” is harder. How can we explain that after this most traumatic event and the seemingly grim prospects for the region we are reinvesting our money and our emotions, putting down roots in sinking soil, so to speak? I could say it is the magical pull of New Orleans—the music, the food, the culture, the parades, the revelry, the architecture, the friendliness of strangers, the scent of magnolias and jasmine, the beautiful weather in the winter. Or I could say it is our friends who have made this place home, and that the thought of starting all over somewhere else is daunting. But it is just as true that our jobs, as I have said all along, are holding us here. We may be risk-takers by staying and confronting future hurricanes, but we are not brave enough to risk un- or under-employment. We’ll take our chances with Mother Nature. And if she does hit us again, our new house will be insured against wind and flood (at reasonable rates, I am surprised to say, because the elevation is so high near the river).

So now, while I am sure I will continue to write about life in post-Katrina New Orleans and will rail at federal officials who are short-changing the region and local officials who are standing in the way of recovery, I hope that I can also move on to the kinds of issues that also affect me as a professor and a mother. It would be nice to reflect on other aspects of my life and let all of this take a back seat, to really get on with my life. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a more “normal” existence, at least until the next hurricane forms in the Gulf.

Off the Map

A good friend of mine, who has been living with relatives in three different states for five long months, finally has a new home. She has landed with her husband and daughter in the D.C. area, where, she says, people don’t even bat an eye when she tells them they are from New Orleans. Not that they want attention or sympathy—they have had plenty of that—but they are surprised to see, even in our nation’s capitol, how completely people have moved on from Katrina.

I am heartened every time I hear a story on NPR or a cable news program about New Orleans. But it seems as if the stories are falling on deaf ears. Here, you cannot escape news of the recovery (or lack of one)--the catastrophically inadequate government response from the landfall of the storm up to the present, and the seemingly insurmountable hurdles that people here are facing as they rebuild their homes and their lives. I was surprised when we first came back at the end of October to see that every day the Times-Picayune’s front page and editorial page are almost all Katrina-related, every local television newscast is at least 75% about the aftermath of the storm, and even on the radio every other ad is about how “we are here to help you rebuild your lives.” And it is still like that. Here it is still all recovery all of the time. And you get so used to it that you can’t believe that everywhere else in the country people hear almost nothing about what is going on here. And Bush’s speech did nothing to change that.

A heartening message from a Massachusetts man appeared in the letters to the editors yesterday. He wrote: “Last weekend I visited the city. I was shocked to see how much has yet to be done. . . . It saddens me to see your city, so broken and so forgotten by the rest of the country. I implore you to keep New Orleans in the spotlight. Residents should jump in front of cameras, rush to talk to reporters and pressure those in charge not to forget you. I will continue to do what I can by writing to my senators. I want my tax money to go to the people of New Orleans and surrounding areas. Let's take care of our own."

I published an op-ed in the Times-Picayune in late November. It is sad to see how little we have progressed since then. The feeling we had then of being abandoned has only increased. And now as we approach Mardi Gras, the cameras will roll here. But will they show the suffering and desperation behind the revelry? I have written to all of the key Congressmen and Senators as well as President Bush, and have urged my friends and family to do the same. But that was months ago. Now where do we go from here? As the New York Times wrote today, “The sad fact is that New Orleans has all but dropped off the map of national priorities. Listening to President Bush's State of the Union address, one would be hard pressed to guess that one of America's greatest cities and the region around it had been laid to waste only five months earlier.”

After I published my op-ed, some people wrote to tell me that in this great country of ours, we have to learn to fend for ourselves. We can’t look to government to solve our problems. So the culture of right-wing aversion to public programs has come to this! We are so afraid of government that we will send a check to the Red Cross (which can provide only temporary assistance) but we won’t demand that our tax dollars help to rebuild one of the nation’s greatest cultural and historical treasures after the most destructive natural disaster and engineering blunder in our nation’s history.

As I write this, I can’t stop thinking about my dear colleague, a poet from Nigeria, who related his harrowing tale of escaping the floodwaters after Katrina. After being herded with thousands of others in various locations over a five-day period with no food, water, toilets, shoes, or medical care, he kept thinking, “I can’t believe this is happening here, in America. This is what leaders do [abandon you] in third world countries. And I have plenty of experience with third world countries,” he said. And he couldn’t believe that five months later, the city is still in the state of utter devastation that it is in—and this is America.

The State of Our Union

Our house hunting in New Orleans came to a rather abrupt standstill about two weeks ago. I receive the occasional new listing via e-mail from our realtor, but we have decided not to make any sudden moves. All of our latent fears and worries came rushing to the surface the night we asked a friend visiting from Boston if we were crazy to be looking at a house that had come about an inch away from flooding. It looked like a cute little Arts-and-Crafts cottage with lots of exposed woodwork. But the water lines in the neighborhood were a good foot and a half high.

Our friend, who lived in New Orleans until last summer, asked us the question that put everything into perspective. “Aren’t you afraid it could happen again?” “Well, yeah.” “Because if this city floods again, it’s all over. New Orleans won’t get a dime from the government and the businesses will all be gone for good.” He was right. If the worst happens again anytime soon, it won’t matter how high the ground is under our new house. It will be an albatross around our neck.

The clincher for my husband came with the Sunday paper. Tax assessors have devalued properties that didn’t even flood from 15-50%! But if you buy a new house, you pay taxes on the sales price, which will be well above pre-Katrina prices. So you are carrying the tax burden for a city that is on the verge of financial ruin. Meanwhile, Uptown blue bloods with homes worth 1 million dollars are getting off scott free! Business as usual is only getting worse down here. If the slate is not going to be wiped clean, why should we put up with the crazy corruption here?

So we have decided to wait and see a while longer. I’m teaching again and life is taking on its own new rhythms. There is no emergency. We can stay put for a couple more months. But it amazes me how, five months after the storm, I still feel like we are on vacation, as if we’ll be home again soon. This isn’t real life, just a vacation from it. We still have only four plates and four bowls in the cupboard. I have only two bottles of spices in the pantry, and there is no bedspread on the bed or dressers to put our clothes in. Books are piled on the floor or in bags. So many things are just on hold until we are settled again. Like when you are on vacation, just getting by with the minimum for now.

A colleague of mine and I joked yesterday about how the constant refrain in New Orleans right now is “it could be worse.” When things are this bad, all you can really say to keep going is, “it could be worse.” And one of the secretaries told me she was surprised how calm things had been at the start of the semester. Usually the main office is a madhouse for the first week of classes. But it seems that we are all taking the myriad complications in stride, as if we didn’t expect anything to run smoothly. What is a scheduling snafu to a city-leveling hurricane? What is one more inconvenience piled onto the mountain of nuisance that characterizes our post-Katrina lives?

I’m sitting in Borders and a man walking by just said, “Not after the president’s speech last night. They don’t care about us.” Ouch! The front page of the paper said about the same this morning. I hope the rest of the country recognizes the glaring absence of Katrina in the State of the Union that was otherwise so laden with talk of compassion. Where is Bush’s compassion for the victims here? 1,500 people died in the greatest natural disaster of recent memory, and he barely said a word about it. Thankfully, I just heard Newsweek’s Howard Fineman say as much on Al Franken’s radio show. Bush has rejected the Baker plan, around which politicians and citizens of all stripes united as the most promising plan for getting New Orleans back on its feet. (It would help homeowner’s pay off their loans and move to higher ground.) But he has offered no alternative. He has already done enough, he seems to be saying.

The New York Times published an amazingly sympathetic and astute editorial on Monday that points out how Bush has failed New Orleans: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/opinion/30mon1.html?th&emc=th

My freshman composition class will have a Katrina theme this semester. I am looking forward to discussing the issues with students and encouraging them to contribute to the conversation.