Shifting Seats with my Tween

I am not sure whether my ten year-old is an aberration from the species of tweenus humanas but she has become a creature that is largely incomprehensible.

Something Changed this past year and by that I mean Everything Changed.

Although the years prior had been rife with giggles and craftmaking, curiosity and general chumminess, the Tween who now lives with me is an unpredictable force of nature.

The field research, as I understand it, runs long on this species.

The Tween, it appears, is not a creature that evolves in a way that is linear or even progressive. The Tween can be inexplicably mercurial in temperament. Sometimes she is fully independent and categorically dismisses the wearing of pink or frills, and other times she is not sure why I would deduce she’s too old for “My Little Ponies” and really-- why would I think that? Tween does not often offer clues as to how her needs can be met. For example, when I say The Wrong Thing on Monday, I am not confronted about The Wrong Thing until several Mondays henceforth at which point I have blithely been thinking everything had been forgiven, all the while a large fortress had been under construction around The Threat of the Wrong Thing Being Said Again, and the fortress is now fully armed with emotional explosives that can detonate at any time.

Dear God, it’s me, Kendra. Can you hear me? Because I need you to translate some things down here on the earth plain.

In fact, Tween terrain has felt to me like utter displacement. Much like waking up one day and learning that the house you had been living in for the last ten years had been transported right in the middle of a busy intersection. The rooms and furniture in your house were still all the same, everything inside was just as you had left it, but now you would have to get used to horns blaring and sirens wailing just outside your window, and the fun daily escapade of playing frogger just to get to your front door. The vessel is the same. But the traffic pattern and the sights and sounds have changed radically. You can’t go back to your old address. You can’t move to a new house. You have to learn to live within the familiar confines in unfamiliar territory.

Instead of leaning in to my own feelings of displacement, though, I have found a more helpful posture to be that of shape shifting. I cannot expect the evolving vessel that is my Tween to explain to me what is happening with her since, hello? She is going through it. But I can try to understand what it must be like to have your feelings and hormones and body and mind all learning a new tango at once.

Recently I put Tween in charge of decorations at our church VBS. Friends, I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t prepared for the staggering creativity and ingenuity she infused into everything. I wasn’t prepared for the feelings I unintentionally stepped on when I rearranged the fluffing of plastic bags on the waterfall. But swtiching roles, making her the boss of me in a sense was just the Freaky Friday role-reversal I needed to help me see this complex world through Tween’s eyes. It’s a prescription --and a privilege--I hope not to ever lose.

Nerding out about America's First Ladies

When nightmares plague me about college, they usually involve some fearsome failure of mine to alphabetize my bibliographic entries. (I am still in rehabilitation from serial citation offenses. I hope we can still be friends.) I wake from those dreams drenched in sweat and pleading for grading mercies from a phantom professor. When I daydream about college, I am usually transported to a beach blanket someone had laid out in order for us to “study for finals” where I remember promptly studying the back of my eyelids for a few hours. It is rare that I can recall anything of substance from my classes; the memory of what it was that I majored in is all but dissolving into a hazy solution of all the Mountain Dew and cheap beer I drank (and inexplicably somehow never gained weight).

There was one class, though, from which I derived something memorable, a pocket full of trivia and a new set of lenses for viewing women in history. I think we all have that class, no? Or that teacher or job that helps us to adjust the prescription to rightly view our privilege or prejudice? I regret that students can no longer take America's First Ladies from the great Dr. Treckel who wisely retired before the students who refused to alphabetize their bibliographies forced her into an early grave.

The course covered the lives and passions of the then forty women whose important causes and presidential pillow talk shaped our nation. My classmates and I were also a bunch of women, most of us still fighting teenage acne and learning how to correctly pronounce “segue” (NOT SEGGGG, turns out) whenever we wanted to pivot from a salient point.

It’s a job, being a First Lady, we learned over and over throughout the course, as was evident in every account from Abigail Adams to Lady Bird Johnson, from Mamie Eisenhower to Hillary Clinton. The basic thrust of the class was basically the same premise of “Hamilton” without Lin-Manuel Miranda’s rhymes: women matter, women endure, women are changemakers even if they don’t always get the limelight or the credit. Instead, history has been hard on First Ladies, scrutinizing what they wore, how they coiffed their hair, and occasionally taking issue with their issues. So the verbiage of Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign wasn’t the finest moment in public health. There are worse messages to come out of the 80s, than “Just Say No,” people. Clearly the elastic chokehold from wearing double socks and pegging our pants has blocked our remembrance of how bad people with AIDS were treated, how ineffective the stranger danger caution has been, how problematic the character of Long Duk Dong is in “Sixteen Candles.” The mix of aerosol hairspray and second hand smoke must have been killing off the rest of the brain cells the pegged pants didn’t quite get.

Just say no to trashing First Ladies. We should listen more to them rather than examining the hem of their pantsuits and the hue of their lipsticks. They have been the eyes and ears of a nation in ways that their husbands could not be. Someday soon, I’m hoping we’ll get to call a woman President and her husband a First Gentleman. (Or maybe she’ll be married to a woman. Hurrah! More women in the West Wing!)

President Obama lovingly paid tribute to the job for which his wife Michelle Obama wasn’t elected but fully accepted, “You took on a role you didn’t ask for, and you made it your own--with grace and with grit and style and good humor. You made the White House a place that belongs to everybody….you have made me proud and you have made the country proud.” Everyone got misty-eyed including Sasha who was supposedly at home studying for her exam the next day but--c’mon. She just didn’t want to do the ugly cry on national television and I cannot blame her.

We didn’t get to build an altar to Michelle Obama when I took Dr. Treckel’s class because we were only up to the Clinton years when I started college in the last millennium. Oh but what a time it was to be alive and studying First Ladies when Monica Lewinsky was the name of a soap opera that unfolded with more salaciousness each day: a blue dress and a cigar and impeachment, oh my! Hillary Clinton was a resoundingly sympathetic character in America at the time, having to live with that dog Bill when she was eminently qualified to do a better job than he. The humanity and the ignominy of those who worked and dwelt in the White House were all a part of our learning lab. Just a couple years later, I took the semester off to intern in DC, just a couple of blocks from the White House as it was ushering in a new administration. I still think it’s hilarious that Clinton’s staff removed all the “W” keys from the keyboards as they simultaneously handed the proverbial White House keys over to the George W. Bush administration. I like pranks where nobody gets hurt and people are just inconvenienced enough to get a little bothered under their starched collars. I love a good public servant who can take a joke, but it never seemed as though the leading ladies of the White House were given any grace, any margin for error. If they had a bad hair day or weren’t hyper aware of optics at all times, they were swimming in scandal. America’s First Ladies class just served to reinforce how it’s always been a damn hard business being a woman in the United States, especially during the years when dying in childbirth was common and grocery delivery was uncommon. Being married to the President of the Free World? No plum assignment, but marginally better now than it used to be when Abigail Adams had to write to remind her husband to remember the ladies. And how they exist and don’t like being their husband’s property and stuff.

When I toured the White House with a bunch of other interns, we got a peak of Laura Bush taking Barney the First Dog for his evening constitutional. We even got to pet him. Laura was wearing casual slacks and a blouse and it was such a lovely sight to see her letting her hair hang down, as it were. I wondered if she and her girls ever did cartwheels and ran barefoot in the Rose Kennedy rose garden just because they could.

During my internship semester, I also took a journalism class in which Bob McNeely, the official photographer of the Clinton administration was invited to be a guest speaker. His stories were fascinating but one still sticks with me since it was so surprisingly editorial. He described a wonderful tableau of the White House preparations for Christmas. He recalled Hillary sweeping through one of the rooms and noticing a particular tree with an ornament just askew. She paused and straightened it before proceeding off to other, more pressing matters. The way I remember McNeely describing it was as though he had just witnessed someone yanking a bottle out of a baby’s mouth. He recalled that this was Hillary’s modus operandi--that this sort of rectifying the work of others perfectly encapsulated her. She may not have decorated the tree herself, but she knew the way it was supposed to look.

I hate to toss a bad pun in here to criticize a photographer but I think Mr. McNeely may have been short-sighted. The condemnation seemed unfair, especially given Hillary’s storied experience as a dynamite litigator. I’m sure her attention to detail was legendary. Further, that Hillary had to worry about optics during her tour of duty in the White House is an understatement. She was fighting for her family while America sat back and popped popcorn and waited for the trainwreck. So she wanted the glitterball ornament to sit a bit more upright. Her husband was being impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice. But ol’ Hill just couldn’t cope with the wonky partridge in the pear tree. Burn her at the stake why don’t you!

In addition to the fairly sexist description of OrnamentGate, McNeely’s story is also memorable to me as it was one of the first times I got to see pictures of the White House in all its holiday splendor. It seemed that the decking of the White House halls was a First Ladies detail since before electricity’s invention. They appear to have embraced the holiday decorator role with relish. Betty Ford went with a folksy craft theme for her Christmas tree. Barbara Bush carried a family literacy motif through her tree and I do not know how you can get credit for activism and interior decorating at the same time on the same plant but Babs pwned it.

I had not known until McNeely, though, that the public had often been invited to visit the White House and judge its ornament placement for itself. Teddy and Edith Roosevelt, for example, hosted a Christmas carnival and invited 500 children. Can you imagine a time where the President invited 500 kids who probably weren’t entitled punks and who didn’t try to steal the soundbar and actually lost their minds at the presentation of...wait for it...ice cream shaped like Santa Claus? What was it even like when a major event occurred for which there wasn’t an official hashtag nor any helicopter parents to humblebrag their Santa-shaped ice creams on their InstaStories? It all must have been so quaint. Please believe this does not in any way diminish my burning desire to receive an invite to a big holiday open house at Casa Blanca so I can humblebrag it on my InstaStories.

My friend Rory, on the other hand. He’s always got the hottest tickets in town. I will not begrudge him the time he got invited by the Obamas to their Christmas open house. Rory is a mega-talented Broadway star and non-profiteer and still answers my text messages. I’ve known him since high school when he starred in every high school musical and I was the sweaty girl behind the concession stand eating selling the popcorn during intermission. He charms the pants off of everyone he meets with his self-deprecating humor and I’m confident he pretty much single-handedly overturned the Defense of Marriage Act so that he could marry his boyfriend Gerald. I’ve only ever overturned a jello mold when it wasn’t yet firm so Rory impresses me.

Rory also impressed the Obamas enough to get an invite to their holiday shindig in 2014. Rory posted pictures of himself on Facebook ambling around the many White House rooms, festooned with ribbons and holly. He captioned the photo of himself in the Lincoln Room, “Me at the buffet by myself. A common sight. Abe Lincoln isn't usually there though.” See? Impossibly charming, that Rory.

Since the changing of the guards at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, though, I’ve not been as keen to receive an invite to any function within its gates. I doubt Rory has either.

Oh, but my interest was surely piqued when the official YouTube of the White House released its “Christmas Decorations at the White House,” video, a title that is only befitting under this Trump administration that sees your inclusive Holiday Decor and raises you a We will Christmas if We Want to Here. Within the first 12 seconds of the video, First Lady Melania Trump is seen ::gasp:: pulling a Hillary and examining one of the ornaments on a tree that she presumably did not decorate herself. Where are the First Lady decorating police? We’ve found another offender! High crimes and misdemeanors!

But by far, the very best part of the video is when the film crew, wanting to really bring home the message that Melania had her hands alllllll over this decorating business, has dragged a big-ass wreath into some back cabinet office and Melania is seen rearranging the fronds of said wreath with a staff member looking on approvingly. See Melania the Model using her hands! See the staff member, possibly Latina, helping her! Look at Santa’s styley elves at work!

Hold on one second. Literally, please press pause when the video reaches 27 seconds. Because within this scene is some kindly woman in the background sitting at her cubicle just trying to eat her pear. She probably just broke up with her boyfriend in the Secret Service and doesn’t want to run into him in the White House cafeteria. So she’s trying to have a nice desk lunch except the campaign to show Melania Loves Mexicans (unlike her husband whose affection seems restricted to Mexican food) has hijacked the office. But by jove, she’s not moving! Surely they’ll be done soon and she can go back to her power lunch in peace.

I know I told you that the First Ladies class helped me to adjust my historical focus on women in the White House and this is perhaps the greatest exhibit A I could offer you. Women are contending for their rightful spots in every corner office in the country, but they continue to operate behind the scenes of history unfolding. Most of the time, we should recognize their efforts and call them into the spotlight for their meaningful contributions.

And other times, we should let them eat their pear. In peace. The Christmas wreath already has a partridge. We don’t need a pear tree, too. And if we do, you can bet a First Lady will find one.

On my experience as an LGBTQ ally at SAU

“Love keeps no record of wrong.” Since my departure from Southern Adventist University in 2016, I have pondered the words of Paul to the Corinthians as I worked through my feelings of sadness, hurt, and confusion, knowing that the kind of love Jesus offers us is liberating, and that liberation comes through reconciliation.

However, I have also pondered the Golden Rule. To treat others as I would want to be treated. I have resolved to tell my story, even though it records wrongs, as I would not wish for others to have had the same experiences I had as an employee of SAU.

I should first establish that I voluntarily left Southern after five years of full-time employment as a professor. I was not “invited to resign” nor did I depart on the grounds explained by other euphemisms. I left to take a job at another school because I was tired of fighting the same battles at Southern, tired of constantly feeling frustrated and that my job would be placed in jeopardy because of the marginalized students for whom I cared and advocated.

I would also like to establish that I did not grow up in the Adventist church. I was raised Catholic, attended primarily Catholic Schools and converted to Seventh-day Adventism when I was 23 years-old after attending an Adventist Church and feeling convicted at GYC in 2003 that a biblical faith was what I wanted to pursue for the rest of my life. I received my master’s degree from Harvard University and taught at a community college prior to joining the faculty of Southern in 2011.

For five years, I worked hard and taught students who were bright and generally hardworking and mission-minded. I adored so many of my colleagues and was inspired by their interesting research and their total dedication to student success. I was promoted to associate professor after submitting my portfolio for review. However, because I did not have a terminal degree, I would need to pursue one in order to be able to be eligible for promotion or apply for sabbatical. As fewer and fewer of my colleagues were being released of coursework to pursue terminal degrees, I began to consider different prospects for myself and my family. 

More importantly, though, I was finding the culture at SAU toward LGBTQ students deeply troubling on campus. I would estimate having at least one student per semester in one of my classes who self-identified as LGBTQ. These students were active in Campus Ministries and community service, were excellent students earning high marks.

And they often sat in my office weeping.

They were consistently harassed in the dorms, they said. They were maligned on social media. They did not feel safe engaging in campus-wide or in class dialogues or even in seeking counseling on campus for fear of being reported to their deans or their parents (were their concerns unfounded? I would like to believe so).

I could list a great many upsetting incidents to which I was privy as a faculty member on Southern’s campus, but these would not be productive and may only make me seem embittered. I did find the leadership of Former President of SAU Gordon Bietz to have a loving posture toward LGBTQ students. He welcomed them into his office and did not discourage them from meeting as group as he understood the need to be in solidarity with one another, although he made it clear to the LGBTQ group SHIELD that they would not be eligible for funding through the Student Association budget. (My time with current president David Smith did not overlap more than a couple of months.) I did not, however, find the leadership of some others on SAU’s Administration to be as loving toward LGBTQ students. I and another of my colleagues were warned not to invite the SHIELD students to gather for worship in our homes because of the message that might signal to the community.

Wrap your mind around that message for a moment. Replace LGBTQ with "struggling with disordered eating" or "homesick" or “sexually promiscuous” or “substance abusing” students and you will see the hypocrisy of the messaging around those to whom Southern’s faculty were encouraged to minister. It’s inconvenient when the tendencies, behaviors, or even the sexuality of people in a community do not align with one’s branding. I’m sure Jesus felt this profoundly true to his leading of the Twelve Apostles. But he loved and led and invested in and died for them anyway. 

One incident that highlights this hypocrisy most prominently was when I was departing Southern. As I was preparing to depart from my position (I had already cleaned out my office), a current student reached out to me and told me a story of an LGBTQ student who had just arrived on campus as a new student during the Smart Start summer session. This student had been so harassed by students he’d never met in the dining hall, blocked from moving through the cafeteria line and called “fag” tauntingly to his face, he was in a state of shock. He did not know a soul on campus and was already being harassed. I decided to make the faculty body aware of the terms of this incident, because, from my view, there didn’t seem to be any reason to hold it under my hat. If it was true, the community had a responsibility to respond. It if were falsely reported, the community needed to take stock of what the response should be if it ever did occur.

In sharing the alleged incident with the faculty via an online listserv, the response was overwhelmingly kind. Prayers and offers of support swelled via e-mail for the student and the faculty body was unilaterally sad to learn that a student had been mistreated. Then an elder male colleague (whom, I should disclose, I had never had a poor interaction with and who appeared to never know my name when I introduced myself to him, even after giving his daughter rides and working in the same building for five years) shot back. He said that reporting an allegation of this nature was patently wrong and that I was, “Unfit for higher education.” This was not the parting gift I had hoped for in leaving Southern. Nor was his complete lack of apology for excoriating me among my colleagues as “unfit.” Yet, I am grateful for the experience as it allowed me to experience what our LGBTQ students experience on Adventist campuses every day: being made to feel “unfit” by some administrators, faculty members, and peers who lack the compassion and wherewithal to love them well. In five years, I never heard a single LGBTQ student ask for any sexual promiscuity to be condoned. I never heard them asking for a change of biblical language or policy. I only ever heard them want to be loved: by their teachers, peers, and even by their parents. Sometimes they just wanted to meet as a body of students to discuss their lives on campus. Sometimes they were only asking for a forum.

There is signage in the Hulsey Wellness Center on Southern’s campus that greets all who enter. It says, “Fit for Eternity.” It has often struck me as clever, though egregiously inaccurate. We are all -- regardless of sexual orientation, diet, language or creed -- abysmally unfit for Eternity. It is only through the matchless love of Christ that we can be made whole, that we can be made well, that we can be deemed fit to share in the bounty of his riches. I cannot wait for the day when he would only speak the word to make us - you, me, and all my former students - fit to share in his glory.

I am wishing the current graduating class a happy graduation weekend and want to encourage them to continue to go forth as lightbearers, and to never be afraid to love others well.