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1:45 p.m. - 2003-10-19
Sunlight
Well, dear diary, I didn't write last evening because my youngest son and I talked long into the night. By the time we were done, I had too much to process to feel I could do justice to an entry. Our topic finally ended up being - family; the past and why do they make the choices they do. It was triggered last night by a series of events during the day yesterday, but something had been brewing under the suface for my guy for a while. His behaviour showed the struggle. So: to begin at the beginning.

First thing that morning I received an e-mail from my friend who is still in the Middle East. She was describing her Thanksgiving dinner for a party of 13 homesick Canadians. They are all ex-pats working at various tasks in that country, from what I can gather. In some of our conversations both face to face and by e-mail, S has described the difficulty they have obtaining foodstuffs that are very basic to the average North American diet. Especially difficult are the ones that are seasonal. In one case, three of us here in Calgary received an urgent request for recipes for a cake, when she was able to acquire a prized ingredient that is somewhat unique. I know I e-mailed back three recipes within an hour of receiving the request, having culled my favorite cookbooks. From her response, she received equal options from my friends here. She said she had enough material to try all the recipes out. For this Thanksgiving the prized ingredients she found were turkeys, pumpkin, and cranberry sauce. She said the most touching moment was when one of the guests pulled out their flute and played our national anthem - "you don't know what you've got til its gone" from the song "Big Yellow Taxi" by Calgarian Joni Mitchell.

This was running through my mind when my Dad, my youngest, and I went to visit number two son and his partner later on. We had been invited for lunch - won ton soup made the proper Chinese way. We got lost because neither my youngest nor I have ever seen their home from the front. We've come through the garage late in the day as the house was a-building. Since our last visits, more buildings have been constructed, so the landmarks we thought we could use were gone. A very kind neighbour on their street took pity on us after we asked for help. He lent us his phone and we found we were only about a block away. Even with the delay, we arrived in time so that I could watch my daughter-in-law make the won tons from scratch. She wouldn't let me help - I think because she knew I'd likely struggle with the won ton wraps. She wanted her first meal cooked for us to have a perfect presentation - and it did! But now I have a new recipe. I love making (and eating) homemade soups. I can practice at home and make all the mistakes I want later.

With about 40% of my community comprised of new Canadians, our local supermarket carries "specialty" foods from all over the world. I've been fortunate enough to have shared meals with people from all cultures, but that doesn't help when you pick up a raw ingredient in the store and try to figure out what was done with it to create that wonderful dish you had a while back. You need someone who has grown up in the culture to provide the insights. For a number of years, one of my suggestions for fundraising for our junior high was to create an international cookbook with recipes and detailed instructions from the moms of the students to sell outside the community. I still think it would be a great seller. I know that our community social worker has held classes for new Canadian moms so that they could also work with local foodstuffs that are readily available and less expensive. Surprisingly, that sometimes causes great conflict in the family - as the traditional dishes are all that are acceptable to some of the older family members. Yesterdays' two incidents together explained that issue a little more clearly to me.

When we got home, Miss Kitty was waiting for us. She was really angry that I had included her human - my youngest - in the outing. Normally when my Dad and I go out, my son stays home with her. When she saw me heading for my bedroom, she raced ahead. By the time I arrived, she had wrapped a pair of my freshly laundered pantyhose around her - claws entwined. Challenge in her green eyes, seeming to just dare me to try and take them without having them ripped up in the process. I ignored her, changed into house clothes, opened the curtains, and played with the babies as they sunned themselves by my window. She eventually joined us, but pointedly ignored my presence even when I tried to scratch her behind the ears. Fair enough.

Later though, when I crawled under my sheets for a power nap it was just to realize that some cat - Miss Kitty - had at some point later, crawled under the sheets, two layers of blankets, and a heavy comforter and peed exactly where I usually lay when I sleep. Not heavily - just enough so that the bottom sheet - and just the sheet - was decidedly and unmistakably wet. How precise was it? The mattress beneath was not wet, nor were the blankets or sheet above. It wasn't an issue of one of the kittens losing bladder control because they were too busy playing, or too scared being that deep in the bedding. That would have elicited an uncontrolled mess, soaking everything and probably loud cat wails of distress to boot. Miss Kitty was sitting on the floor watching the process carefully. In the period in between our arrival and my nap, we had also caught all of the kittens suddenly not using the litterbox - depositing their little "presents" in strategic main traffic areas of the house, always with Miss Kitty nearby as it happened. The bed was the last straw. I let my youngest know about the final transgression and that's what finally set the stage for our long past midnight discussion.

Why? Well, you see he wanted to take really strong measures to discipline the kittens for their part in the up-rising and it was obvious that the "war" was about to escalate. I was trying to explain that often with human bullying, the leader will have the group of children or adults under their sway carry out their tactics - sitting safely back, never being revealed as the source and never, therefore, being held to account for their behaviour. One key recruitment tactic common to them is to ensure their target member finds themself in a lot of trouble - set up by the leader without the recruit realizing it. The head bully then magically comes to the rescue, or at the very least, reinforces with their intended victim that "see the only person who cares about you or who will look after you is me - no one else loves/understands you". The leader then isolates their new recruit from all their previous support networks such as family, friends, teachers, and team members by constantly creating that friction over and over again. Why do bullies go to so much trouble? Power and immunity both, plus after they've got two or three people under their sway, they have them do the dirty work. Corporate management or team-building 101 - the dark side. I've already described that phenomenon in my posts of some of my work experiences but that's another entry.

Since all my son had witnessed was the kittens' bad behaviour, Miss Kitty being very careful not to be visible to him, he only focussed on disciplining the babies - strongly both with spraying them with water and raising his voice. I explained that that would just reinforce Miss Kitty's influence over the babies, since the fear they would feel for him would block any messages of guidance coming from him in the future. Well then, they had to learn their behaviour wasn't acceptable, how was that to be done?

Try explaining co-dependent behaviour to a young teen when they are upset anyway. The bare bones description - covering for, explaining away, cleaning up after, or punishing others for the culprits' behaviour, really doesn't make sense if they haven't seen the pattern enacted. I stopped that with respect to my ex's addictions 20 years ago, long before my youngest was born, when I finally figured out what was really going on. I wasn't making much headway with the explanation, and describing it to my son in terms of the dynamics that have included him in a school setting, was too confusing for him. What to do?

I finally pulled out a police report I had written nearly seven years to the day about a public "riot" I had witnessed as I arrived home from work on the train. As the train pulled into the station I realized that the berm on the east side of the street was filled with teens from 13 to 19 - all of one particular race. I estimated it must have been every available child of that race, knowing the population breakdown by culture in the area after 17 years of residence here. The second group of people I noticed was a long line of police officers. There was stunned silence as the packed rush hour travellers detrained from our commute home. A lot of us moved from the west side of the platform to the east trying to figure out what was going on. Children in our community choose to hang out together based on common interests and activities. Very few cluster based on race or culture - usually just the newest kids who still can't speak English well enough to mingle. None of us on the platform could figure out why or what was happening. Most of us were parents and wanted to be certain that children we knew and cared about weren't caught in what appeared to be a dangerous and volatile situation. A lot of the new Canadians travelling from work came here as refugees and it was obvious a lot of them were having flashbacks to traumatic incidents that drove them, eventually, from their own countries. Some of them were crying or shaking; some seemed almost in a trance-like state. Can't blame them. Sheltered as I've been, I was afraid too. Our family was in LA when the Watts riots occurred after Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder. We got lost and ended up driving through there a few days after the worst of it - it wasn't something you forget,no matter how young. We didn't see any of the violence, but it was still flaring up all over LA. Kind of a surreal vacation it was.

Anyway, because I was very involved with volunteering both for the local civil liberties organization run out of our university and Amnesty International at the time, my first concern was to observe our police force when faced with such a challenging situtation. I was very concerned that a whole segment of our youth population not experience brutal or exccessive force from the very people they need to respect and trust, if our city was to retain it's relatively peace-oriented lifestyle. I stood on the platform and watched the events unfold.

What became apparent firstly, was that the police were intent on dispersing the crowd. For the most part, they were herding the students away from the center of the action telling them - I could only see the gestures not hear the words - to go home. Most of the youth were complying. A number of parents on the platform who had children in the mess, were reinforcing the polices' direction by yelling at their children to come join them on the other side of the street. You could see how confused a lot of the kids were. I recognized a lot of them from work I had done in the schools - they were good kids.

There were about half a dozen youth whom the police seemed to recognize and those were the only ones they sought to detain. When they approached those young adults, they walked slowly with their arms by their sides - palms out, obviously trying to reduce the sense of threat anyone would feel in that situation. One young women reacted with physical violence toward one officer. Another officer came up behind her, wrapped his arms around her arms and waist, and with the first officer's assistance, laid her one the ground face down and cuffed her. She screamed loudly continuously, but there was no undue force used nor could she have been hurt by the treatment she was receiving. Another young man went to assist that young woman, but was restrained by a third officer - again with the least force necessary. A photographer was continuously photographing every action undertaken, with no interference from either group. I was really impressed with the way the police defused the problem and dealt with the people they obviously felt were the instigators.

I later found out from one of my friends, who was riding the train a lot that day doing errands, that she had seen a group of older people of the same race using cell phones calling people and directing them to meet at that berm at the time I'm describing. She is street smart enough that she made certain she wasn't anywhere near the place when the "event" was scheduled. When she told me that, I realized that it fit with information I had learned while volunteering in the junior high and in community meetings about one gang from Toronto and one from Winnipeg trying to infiltrate and recruit young people from the schools in our city. With the highest youth population in the city - about three times the average - our communites were especially targetted. The gangs were ones known for their involvement in the drugs, prostitution, and illegal arms trades. Going back to how a bully will recruit, the gangs obviously were trying to create a very public incident that would cause a serious rift between one targetted racial group of youths and the citizens, police, and media of our city. Isolate and create a sense of grievance or persecution.

When I spoke with the police about my report, I explained what I knew from my long residence and experience in the community, and my observations of activities at that time, with respect to recruitment tactics I and the parents and principals in the community had been observing for about a year. I expressed concern that that drive of the gang leaders to alienate be addressed, rather than the single incident itself. It seemed the police already had brought in an expert from Toronto who had been dealing with the gang problem there and I was very pleased with the way they dealt with the aftermath. Of course, the first public accusation was of racism and police brutality from the young people who were arrested. The police countered by calling together the leaders in the community/culture and explaining what they had been told by witnesses and school officials/social workers. Together they seemed to create a plan of action to protect their children from the predators. In otherwords, the real perpetrators were exposed to their intended victims for what they were and the community that was attacked by them held them to account themselves. Really good work all around.

My son read my report and we discussed it for a long time, focussing on why some actions to discipline the kittens he wanted to do might cause harm, while other techniques would have to be employed if Miss Kitty's behaviour was going to be stopped - both that which she undertook herself and what she encouraged her babies to do in her stead. Somehow, from there the real questions that had been eating at my son for the past couple of weeks came out around behaviour in the human family members not now living with us and so it was about 4 am before we ended. Good discussion but emotionally tiring. I'm always careful not to diss other people, but I don't explain away or enable their actions by covering up for them either. I answered only what my son asked and tried to just stick to their actions - not my feelings about them. My son has to work out his own feelings and work through the confusion he feels on his own, if he is to feel that he hasn't been coerced or manipulated by my emotional reactions. Tough balancing act all together, but a good thing. Sunlight disinfects.

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