Spirit in Action
Walk With Us: Triplet boys, their teen parents & 2 white women who tagged along - Elizabeth Gordon
Elizabeth Gordon recounts the spiritual & cultural odyssey in her newly released book, Walk With Us. When she and her female partner take into their home a 14-year old expecting triplets, it is a learning experience on multiple levels, mixing as it did Black Muslims and white Quakers, straight and gay, not to mention the generational differences. Elizabeth recounts the deeply emotional and powerfully spiritual twists and turns of helping raise 3 beautiful baby boys in trying circumstances.
- Broadcast on:
- 28 Oct 2007
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] Let us sing there's song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice of every song We will move this world home And our lives will feel the echo of our healing Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots, and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing there's song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice of every song We will move this world home One of the persistent problems of American society today is racism. Although things have improved dramatically since the days of slavery and segregation There continues de facto segregation in many places And inherited and ingrained prejudice and racism in, on some level, most of us. My guest for today's Spirit in Action program is Elizabeth Gordon. She has just released a memoir which is a learning opportunity for all of us. It's called Walk with Us, Triplet Boys, their teen parents, and two white women who tagged along. Elizabeth wrestles with a leading to head from the country into inner city in Philadelphia Taking on guardianship for a pregnant 15 year old black Muslim girl. Soon her triplets are born and Elizabeth and her female partner are living on the frontier between very different cultures Exploring love across the differences. Elizabeth, it's so good to hear you again and to have you join me for Spirit in Action. Thank you Mark, it's great to be here. You've got your book coming out very soon. What is the date and what are you doing to get the word out to the world? Well, the date is yesterday. It actually arrived from the printer to my publisher and he phoned me and told me about it. I haven't seen the book yet, but it's been born and it seems like way is opening to promote it. The first email that I received after my publisher called me moments later was from FGC Books talking about reading groups, quicker reading groups, and I sort of took that as a little nudge. You know, that might be one place where my book would find an audience that would listen in a deep way. I've noticed from your walkwithus.info website that you have reading group questions. Did you put that on right there because you got that contact from the next general conference? No, no, no. I did that when we first made the website in anticipation of possible reading groups because I think that's an important word of mouth way to spread the book and its message. Amazon is very glamorous in those ways, but really if it's going to reach people deeply, I think they should be reading it and talking about it in a quicker setting. So tell us about the overview of the book, what it's about, and why you chose to write it. I'm not sure I can say I chose to write it. It sort of grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. It tells the story of a peace ministry I sort of stumbled into was part of in inner-city north Philadelphia. I felt led to move there. I in fact was living in the Catskill Mountains, a very beautiful part of New York. And I applied for membership to the meeting I'd been attending for a few years, New Paltz meeting. And as part of the queerness process, I discerned that I was led to move to inner-city Philadelphia. The intro explains how I had lived there once in my late teens and once in my late 20s and now in my late 30s. My clearest committee helped me see that really I had a call to live in multiracial community and be changed by it and perhaps witness to something. So I went and lived there. The book tells the story of these teenagers who were in need of a place for the mother to lay her head as she carried to term triplet boys. She was homeless, going from friend's house to aunt's house. So she moved in with my partner and I. We lived together for two years. I became the triplets nanny caregiver and got to know four generations of the family. And then a few years later really felt led to write about it, to describe the people. I met my neighbors and this young couple. They were black Muslim teenagers and the triplets boys. And also the experience of opening to this leading, trying to be faithful to it, trying to follow it, and all of the fears and resistances that came up in me. So it's kind of an unlayering of someone trying to follow a leading. Part of what turns it into an odyssey is they're black, you're white, they're black Muslim, you're Quaker. Your relationship is with another woman and they're heterosexual. So all along it's three different, four different universes colliding. Yeah, generations, sexual preferences, religions, ethnicities, and eating habits, which is bigger than you would think. And a lot of attitudes and beliefs and just ways of being in the world. So it was sort of a graduate degree in cross-cultural studies for me who had lived mostly in, you know, monocultural places, college, towns, or rural areas where I didn't get exposed to all those different sorts of people. One thing I want to clear up before we go on to Elizabeth is that I don't know if it's in the book. You refer to yourself this way, but at one point your name is Catherine and at one point you name Elizabeth. Explain to me where this came from and what it's about. Right, thanks for asking. When I was down there living, I was Catherine and that's the name I was given at birth. The winter before last I was in prayer, really, if not a dark night of the soul, then a gloomy one. I was in deep prayer and I was reflecting on my life and seeing how often I hadn't followed what in retrospect I could see as guidance. And I hadn't accepted help, although I expressed the willingness. I hadn't always done things that I felt Spirit was asking me to do or go places or make changes. And I was just praying, perhaps in a kind of immature way, saying, "Okay, give me something now. You know, give me something very difficult, you know, walking across the continent in bare feet or just something. Then I'll do it. You'll see. You'll see." So I heard the still small voice saying, "You are Elizabeth." Are you sure it didn't just come? It's like, "Hello, Elizabeth. Oh, do I have the wrong phone number?" No, I hope not. Well, Elizabeth is, I was raised Catholic and that's the confirmation name I chose at ten years old or so. So, in a sense, I was Elizabeth, but I took the voice to be asking me to be Elizabeth. Perhaps, literally, a friend I was discerning with this about later, sort of a spiritual companion, said, "Well, maybe it wasn't literal, but symbolic. You know, be as Elizabeth in the Bible who bears the one who prepares the way for the Lord, John the Baptist." And I think all writers and artists, those with some spiritual outlook on life, hope to create something that prepares the way for the Lord, for openness, for light, for healing. So it may have been that symbolic meaning. But because of my prayer, my request, I took it to me, "Okay, here's a hard thing for you. Tell everyone you're Elizabeth now. Go by that." And I didn't think it would be that hard, but it was harder than I thought. Because people asked why, and I had to tell this story, sometimes in abbreviated form, to people who would then think I was insane, deluded, inflated. And I had to consistently tell the story and be that person, which came to me to mean a more peaceful person than I was as Catherine. But I still have the "K" in my name on the book. I moved it to the middle, so I'm Elizabeth K. Gordon now. But it might be a little confusing to readers, because I'm Catherine in the book, and it seemed odd to change that, because that's what the triplets called me as they began to be able to talk. They're nine years old now. They've shifted to Elizabeth, but sometimes they do Catherine, or they'll say, "Catherine and every member." So I'm Catherine Elizabeth, which is a lot of syllables for a little kid. But they try, and they understand, because their own mother changed her name when she converted to Islam in sixth grade. She changed it from the name her parents had given her to Tahija, which is the name in the book. You're up somewhere near New Paul's meeting up in New York, and you're about to become a member of the Quaker meeting up there. You go through a clearness process for membership, as we do, and poof. You're clear to not live there anymore. Does that mean you're not a member up there? Are you a member so journey down in Philadelphia or what? I did not become a member there, although later I thought I might have, and then I could sejourn elsewhere, but we didn't finish the membership process, because I was pretty clear then I was moving. So I attended down in Philadelphia, meetings near where we lived in the inner city, and sometimes Kaki and I went to downtown, and the big Quaker meetings that the William Penn era Quakers founded, so we had an abundance of meetings. But I continued to attend and didn't find one that's my home. I'm now in the process of becoming a member at Binghamton meeting, monthly meeting, which is in Binghamton, New York, not far from where I live now. I don't live in Philadelphia anymore, and I live in the country again, and the boys visit me a lot. This has become their country home. So give me some idea. You're just going to the inner city in a very mixed or predominantly African-American neighborhood. What was this place you were moving to? What was calling you? I think what was calling me was spirits desire to heal us around the issue of race, us Americans, white and black Americans. I think we're called to work in the world, and we're always given when we do that work. It requires, and we're also given, it's a blessing in our healing. So I think Spirit was calling me there so I could live in community, a small spiritual community of three other friends who lived in that neighborhood, and we worshiped together regularly. And the larger community of my neighborhood, my immediate block, which was very multicultural. People from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Central Americans, and African Americans who had lived there usually longer than most of those folks. And also there were Muslims from Albania, there were refugees from the war, and not many white folks. I joke in the book that when I go to the clinic with Tahaia, a young white man comes in and he seems kind of strange to me, and I realized I hadn't seen a white man except a policeman who didn't come to our neighborhood much. I hadn't seen a white man in a month or two. You would sometimes see them waiting early in the morning outside the Metadone clinic near us, waiting for a Metadone treatment. Was this a real culture shock for you? I wouldn't say a culture shock because like a lot of people in my college years, I lived on the edges of all black neighborhoods because it was cheaper, and it was exciting, and there was lots of art and culture, but I wasn't a part of that neighborhood. I was sampling it several times in my life. But my earliest childhood was in Queens, New York, but we moved when I was about two to the country of New York, which was very white. I think I had one black child in my elementary school. When I was about 10, we moved to South Florida into the culture of forced desegregation, busing, white folk, protesting the busing, and then in about eighth grade, our schools became integrated. As I recall, much help from the adults about how to handle this. A lot of our parents were angry and racist and making us fearful, and in school, of course, as kids do, we talked and got to know each other and became friends and just really enjoyed the differences, but there was still much not talked about violence on television and race riots without much context given about why people might be rioting. So I had a lot of interactivity around race, but not a lot of clarity at that age when I moved, which is my late thirties when I moved to North Philly. When you say a lot of our parents are racist, are those values you felt like you got growing up also? Yes, the kind of racism that says my insecurities, I am allowed to project out onto this other group. My fears, I'm allowed to project out, and all that I have is white privilege. Or most of what I have, my family was working class. One thing I think my father, especially who was a policeman on an all white police force in a town that had two habs. I think he had a lot of insecurities and fears, and he got the message that at least he could have white privilege. He could feel that he was automatically superior to this whole other group of people, just by virtue of the accident of his skin color. And you said you were Catholic growing up, as was I, and by the way, my confirmation name was Peter. Okay. Part of what I experienced from my root Catholicism is a lot of good motivation. Motivation to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount, and that kind of thing. How did that transition go for you? Did you stay Catholic all along, or what's in Quaker now, but how did that transition happen, and why? Well, when we moved to South Florida, there weren't Catholics around, and I guess it was harder for my mother to get us to church. She didn't drive, and my father didn't take us much, so at the age of about 10, having been confirmed, I kind of lost track of Catholicism once we moved South, and had really nothing until college, and then being exposed to different kinds of people, and the idea is there. I guess in my late 20s, a good friend brought me to a Quaker meeting, and I began attending New Pulse soon after that. I need to get some idea what this experience is like. I mean, you become a nanny for a black family with teenage parents that are involved in this, and you've got triplets, which is a trip in any case. Give me some idea what it was like. Well, it was very intense. It was very wonderful. The teen mom, she was 14 when she moved in, and full of life, she was immediately put on bed rest. Once we got to the clinic, and the doctor saw her blood pressure, and she hadn't gained much weight. So she was on bed rest. Boy, that was hard to keep her wheat. I joke in the book that for her bed rest was walking up the stairs instead of running. So it was wonderful to have her in the house, and her boyfriend, the father of the triplets, all but lived with us. He kept us some of his stuff at his sisters, but he was with us most of the time. So she had an interlude of adolescence, where we set her and bought her things, and she liked to sew her own outer garments, which is what she called the robes she wears. So she had a lot of attention from two middle-aged ladies who didn't have kids themselves, and really enjoyed her. Then the babies came, and suddenly we weren't giving positive attention. We and the rest of the world was giving a lot of negative attention about how she should care for them. So while it was still wonderful, because we had these three beautiful babies in the house, difficulties began to arise. And it was a very small house. One bedroom, one of those skinny row houses that they had in Philly, so it became very intense. That was when I needed more and more to open to spirits, to lean on and rely on spirit. And sometimes I did, and too often I just plowed forward on my own. And the book talks about trying to be faithful to the leading to accompany her, to assist her and his family, and then what made it harder for me, and how sometimes I wanted to run away from that. Can you give me some specifics? Why was this so difficult? I just had a sense of how easy it was to love her, because she needed to be loved, but also she had been abandoned by both her parents. So she had a lot of things to work out, and once we became parental figures, I think resistance to us, anger and hurt came up. And I had a sense of, okay, it's okay for it to come up, we're going to work on it, but also just difficult to deal with. You know, there were social service agencies trying to assist her, and trying to get her to agree to, say, daycare, try to get her a placement in a residential community. You know, for young mothers, she was very, very resistant to authority, and here we were the authority figures. And that didn't kick in too much until after the boys were born, but we saw the early stages of it, even before the triplets were born. You know, there was a sense of a lot of emotional energy in the house, you know, teenager, but also sobbing into the phone for hours, you know, our phones. Showing that she was in some ways not prepared, you know, immature, some ways not prepared, but insisting that she was prepared, that she could handle this, that she'd taken care of, a young sister and twin brothers that she'd been left with to watch for long periods. So there was just a lot going on. I had just moved to the city. It was very noisy. Really, there were nights when you couldn't sleep, you couldn't even have a conversation with the amount of music and engine sounds going on if it was warm weather and the windows were open. Is there a passage of your book that could give us some flavor of how you thought about it? Yeah, I think there is. It's early on when she's just been in the house a few weeks, so this is from the first chapter. When did I start loving Tahija? I'm not sure. I remember to the hour, laughter in the bath, a nap in the sun, a 2 a.m. bottle, when I started loving each of her children, and when my love for Lamar, their dad became independent of my love for the brother he so reminded me of. But with Tahija, love offered was always too much and never enough. It was a promise you could never keep because it fell directly into a pit of broken promises, melded there in the heat of her anger into the two-edged sword that would cut her and the offer of both. But I don't put it all on her, the difficulty of loving her. I had a hard time knowing when to give and when to pull back, what was her need and what was my need. I was meeting regularly at that time with a spiritual director named Marcel Martin. Marcel was a longtime friend of mine who lived about a mile away, having moved to North Philly at nearly the same time I did and independently of me. We had been surprised to find that not only were we moving to the same city and the same neighborhood at the same time, but that the respective love interests we were moving in with were Quakers who had known each other for years. This synchronicity made me value all the more the chance to work with Marcel, who was helping me see the difficulty I had setting healthy boundaries. I was a sand castle and the kids on the block were waves, rushing, lapping, crashing, persistent, ever present. Too many of them had only one parent or grandparent and that one living either in the extreme want of welfare or the sometimes less extreme want of low paid work. Hardly anyone in my neighborhood who worked it seemed worked just 40 hours, whether it was cooking, waitressing, lawn service, telemarketing, retail or the healthcare industry. The standard work week seemed to be more like 60 hours, 6, 10 hour days or nights with many people working more and long commutes in the mix. So many adults working from can't see to can't see or depressed or drugged out legally or illegally or sick or in prison and then welfare reform forcing the more stable mothers out of the neighborhood, it made a famine for the children. So many kids needing stimulation, encouragement, tutoring, organized sports, hugs, a safe place to play, computer skills and me with the white face, they ask me posture so she can't say no sign stuck to my back. When Tahija moved in, need that had been a lockable door away was now down the hall brushing her teeth or sobbing into the phone. It was a dwarf star with the gravity of a thousand suns. How could I come near without being absorbed entirely? How could I ever say no, but if I couldn't say no, what was my yes worth? Then I go in and tell a little story about a big cooking expedition we tried to undertake and I'm not at all a cook, but I couldn't say no. So I said, "Yeah, sure, we can cook." And as I was reading that, I was thinking of George Fox's "Let your nay be nay and let your yay be yay." You know, be grounded in a yes and be grounded in a no and I don't think I was going into the experience. So you were forced to cook? I wasn't forced to, but that was something she wanted to do, so I said, "Okay, let's do it." And you know, I'm thinking maybe it would have been better to say, "Well actually I don't like cooking, let's play scrabble." Or, you know, but I was just saying yes because she was so needy. She needed everything. Most of the things she needed, I couldn't give her, but I felt like I had to give her everything I could. You know, I think that all opportunities of birth and taking something in like that, it could be a heartwarming story. It could be every parenting situation is a learning situation. But you're doing it with all these cultural differences, Elizabeth. And so I'm trying to figure out where the rub really landed for you. You know, was it because you wanted to eat broccoli and she wanted to eat? What kind of differences practically were hitting between you in terms of lifestyle? Well, the big one once the boys came was holding nurturance. I just had the idea that I'd never examined, felt like anything telling me, "Babies need to be held as much as possible." And if you've got three, you better use anyone around who's willing to serve as a lap. You know, you just better be dropping those babies in people's laps because they need to be held a lot, especially when they're being fed. And he just view, and her grandmother's view, her grandmother was in the picture at this point and her grandmother had run a daycare center. And her grandmother's pronouncement when the first boy came home was, "These babies will not be held unless they're sick. You never hold a baby unless it's sick or else you spoil it." And spoiling, we found out, was kind of a communicable disease and I was a spreader. I was a carrier. That became the rub as you've absolutely put it. The highest philosophy was, "Well, if you pick them up, they stop crying." So that proves that picking them up is bad because it spoils them, right? What do they need? I fed them, I changed them, and they're crying. And so it was like a real, just a different paradigm, a different way of seeing the world, but we both adapted somewhat. There's this scene where we're all Tahijian, Kaki, and I are in the living room reading. We like to get a book and, you know, pass it around and read out loud. And we're reading Jonathan Livingston Segal, which Tahijia loved and she actually read it straight through out loud, standing up, walking around the living room. It's a short book, but still, there was a lot of reading. So she's reading it. The mirror is upstairs crying, and he was the only one who was breastfed. So they came home staggered every two weeks, so when the second one came home, he suddenly got much less attention, and he did not like it. So he was basically being weaned very early, and he's raising a lot of racket over it. So the mirror started crying. He'd been weaned for some time, but still seemed not quite to have given up. So he just stopped her pacing at the foot of the stairs. The mirror, louder crying. Maybe he needs something, Kaki suggested. I fed them, changed them. Once he got to be all fallen out about, he's playing me. She read on over his crying, then finally marched up the stairs, coming down a moment later with the mirror, wrapped and quiet in a blanket. See, she said, "As soon as I picked him up, he stopped crying." Means he spoiled. He didn't need a thing, not one thing. Maybe he needed to be held, I suggested, and now that he has it, he stopped crying, Kaki finished for me. He got comfortable in the rocker. His eyes reflecting the lamplight, the mirror gazed out at us from the billows of his mother's t-shirt, not the least interested in Kaki or me. "Got her all to yourself now, don't you?" I said. He smiled, the tears of a moment before still wet on his cheeks. Spoiled rotten, to he just said, but gently this time. Finding her page, she went on reading and read straight through to the end of the book, stopping only to threaten to write the author and complain about a plot turn that simply made no sense. Fighting flint as long as he could, the mirror listened to her voice as if to the music of the sphere. That captures her face off, huh? Yeah, and I had a similar way to heger there, seemed to learn something and compromise. There's a scene that follows that where I learned something and compromised. When the dad, who's now big Lamar, because there's a little Lamar now, he and I are at the doctors waiting with two of them, and he's holding one, I'm holding one, and feeding time comes around. Dad takes the bottle out of the bag, right, and he's got one of the babies asleep on his lap, and I'm holding the other baby, little Lamar. So dad takes the bottle out, little Lamar begins to whine and reach for the bottle in my lap. And I'm thinking, "Of course he's going to just give him the bottle, because that's what you do." And he says, "That won't work." You know, dad says, "So you might as well stop." He says to this, you know, eight-month-old, and I'm thinking, "Oh no, now we're going to have a big crying fit because that's what a baby in my family would do, right?" You scream until you get the bottle, but little Lamar just hits there. You know, he's concentrating totally, you know, a zen thing on this bottle, while his dad keeps reading a car magazine. And big Lamar says, "Saturn's getting to be a good buy." Yeah, I say concentrating on the bottle too. Engines made by Toyota, I didn't know that. I thought an extraordinary baby in my family would have been screaming bloody murder by then. But little Lamar just sat looking at the bottle, glancing from time to time at his dad's face. When he started to let out a little wine, Lamar said, "Ah, ah, ah," and he stopped. A spoiled baby in me was screamed, thinking, "Oh, give it to him for God's sake." In a few minutes, he did. Little Lamar accepted the bottle, examined it, then leaned back against me with a sigh and drank. See, he said, "Dad, waiting works, crying doesn't." And they learned that lesson, you know, and they were able to wait. You know, we'd wait in waiting rooms at the doctor's office and all kinds of places, and they were just so good. You know, they knew they had to sit and wait. So I began to appreciate this kind of spoiling his bad philosophy. Especially important. If you're living in a country where, no matter much noise you make, you're not going to get your needs met as an adult. Just to learn early on that you want to have people bowing down to you. If you don't have power and privilege, you don't have anything, so a necessary lesson, although it was painful, poor me to see it. You believe in freedom and I rest. We believe in freedom and I rest until the rest is. Until the killing of black men, black mother's sons, is as important as the killing of white men, white mother's sons. We believe in freedom and I rest. We believe in freedom and freedom and I rest. That which touches me most is that I had a chance to work with people, passing on to others, that which was passed on to me. We believe in freedom and I rest. We believe in freedom and freedom and freedom. To me young people come first, they have the courage where we fail. And if I can but share some lies as they carry us through the game. We believe in freedom and I rest. We believe in freedom and I rest until the rest is. The older I get, the better I know, like a secret of my going on. It's when the rains are in the hands of a young who gets around against the storm. We believe in freedom and I rest. We believe in freedom and I rest until the rest is. Not needing to touch for power, not needing the light, just a shine on me. I need to be one in a number as we stand against. We believe in freedom and I rest. We believe in freedom and I rest. We believe in freedom and I rest until the rest is. We believe in freedom and I rest until the rest is. We believe in freedom and I rest until the rest is. We believe in freedom and I rest. We believe in freedom and I rest until the rest is. I'm a woman who speaks in a voice and I must be heard at times. I can be quite difficult about to know man's world. We believe in freedom and I rest. We believe in freedom and I rest until the rest is. (Music) Those wonderful harmonies are courtesy of Sweet Honey in the Rock doing Ela's song. I'm visiting today with Elizabeth Gordon, author of Walk With Us, Triple Boys, 13 Parents, and two white women who tagged along. This is a northern spirit radio production called Spirit in Action, an effort to raise up the work of those laboring to heal the world as we explore religious and spiritual roots and fruits of their work. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and Elizabeth Gordon has a lot more to share of her faith journey in walking with two teenage parents and three precious newborns in inner city Philadelphia. Were there religious issues that also came in between you? I don't think so. We were respectful of each other's issues and I got the sense in many conversations with Tahija especially in Lamar 2 that they had chosen Islam. They felt it was right for them. They'd had a lot of negative feedback from their family about that and that negative feedback didn't seem to change their minds. In fact, they dug in more, so I decided pretty early on that I was going to live my own right as best I could, not do any sermonizing. I wasn't going to deny what I believed and attend anything, but neither was I going to encourage her to convert back to Christianity, which she'd had a very bad experience with being drug off to church. I'll dress up and drug off two or more days a week and lecture two by people who she sometimes perceived to be hypocritical. I thought the best I could do is just live the sermon on the mount and try to stay grounded in my own spirituality. How did she react to you, Elizabeth, given that I don't know widespread what Muslim opinion of homosexuality is? But just a couple weeks ago, we had the president of Iran saying that there are no gays in Iran. How did she react to you and your partner? Tahija and Jamar didn't have much dogma. They weren't going regularly to a mosque and studying much later. Tahija did begin to study Arabic, so if they had any prejudice, it's more likely they absorbed it from their own families and childhood. I didn't feel they had any prejudice. We didn't have arguments. We had some real shouting matches and twice almost got physical, once got physical and once almost got physical. And there was never any attacks, you know, you dikes or anything like that, and there was never any racial attacks either between us. And I think it was a small house. I think we all knew we had to be respectful. And, you know, these two young people had grown up in a war zone. And one thing you do when you're in a war zone is you establish affinities early to defend yourself. You find other people and you can call it a gang mentality or you can call it a survival strategy. But we had opened our house. We were sharing our food. We were going with our two social workers who wanted to take the babies away and we were standing beside her and saying no, we'll be there. We will help them. Let them keep the children. So we were allies. And I think that went a long way. Can you mention at one point that food was a big issue? Why was food some kind of issue between you? It was bigger than you might think. It wasn't huge, but both these young people now have diabetes. I think Lamar was not yet diagnosed then, but their diets looked like it was going to head them toward ill health. And it was the diet of the poor, you know, a lot of sugar, a lot of carbohydrates, processed food. So I was always trying to model and push fruits and vegetables, fruits and vegetables, you know, I still do. Sometimes they ate with us to eat you more than Lamar. I think we did inculcate some of our eating habits and also they cooked things that we liked and that are now something I eat regularly. So there was some overlap, but I just felt like they both came from families with a lot of addiction. I worried that their eating habits were not coming out of a healthy place. What did you discover about yourself in terms of racism? Did you find out you look inside and you say oh no, Elizabeth has this discrimination attitude? Did you end up rooting out major things that way? I think, Mark, there might be a passage that addresses that and it's from after the family moves out. We had a lot of conflict about care of the boys mainly and some other things and they did move out. They felt like they were able to do it on their own now. The mother had become an emancipated minor, which the state needed for her to become in order to live on their own otherwise they would take the children. So after they moved out, it was so intense having them there as you can imagine. There wasn't a lot of time for reflection. Things were coming up. We were reacting. I sometimes felt spikes of anger, especially at Lamar, that I see now came from a racist base. Meaning the thing I was talking about earlier where as a white person I felt somehow I was given the privilege, the right to project my feelings out. My own shadow out onto black folks and it seemed a young black male drew that more than a girl or woman. So I feel very angry at him. Sometimes I would think he had stolen something when he had not. We did have folks in and out of the house, some of whom were in recovery or were active addicts. We didn't know it at the time. We didn't know it right away. They just recognized our handyman, for example, had sticky fingers, but I would blame Jamar. I would just feel this irrational anger, this huge anger. I think what is this? Where is it coming from? I think it was programmed in pretty early. It was my own shadow. It wasn't him. It was my own shadow surging up and glomming onto him. So that was pretty scary to feel that. So after they move out, we get a chance Kaki and I to reflect and I'm really heartbroken had in addition to this horrible shadow that I felt it was okay to toss at people. I had a good dose of white guilt, knowing all of American history and just feeling all of the crimes and the violence and the injustices and just feeling white guilt. Which, you know, I met people in that neighborhood who were happy to stimulate my white guilt if it served their purposes. So when they move out, my big question is, did we have all this conflict because I'm a racist? Did I blow it? Was I led to help and they just couldn't stand to live here anymore because of my anger and all of that? So there's a short passage I'll read from late in the book. Was I a racist? Had my racism caused to heed you to feel she had to move out? Were there different kinds of racism? How did you know when you were done, free, clear, clean? What were my deepest motives? What were Kaki's? Were hers different from mine? Had we done too much or too little, exercised too much authority, too little or the wrong sort? Had I damaged the boys? Were Tahija always be harder on Demir? Would I ever see them again? Would they remember me? In the days that followed, these and other questions weighed upon me. I didn't like walking in Fishtown anymore. That's a mostly white neighborhood across the L tracks from us. I felt angry at the way some there might treat the triplets. I remembered the Rite Aid lady and her, well I hope she's done, but I didn't like walking in our neighborhood either. Too many mean or suspicious looks from strangers mainly, but there were many strangers. One day two men I thought might be from the Dominican Republic abruptly stopped talking when I neared. Then one of them spit on the sidewalk inches from my shoes. Is that what the white race had earned for me and mine? I felt ashamed to be white. I had felt ashamed I realized since I was a child first witnessing racism. Had that shame motivated me to move here, to give of my time and labor, only to find now in the quiet house, the yellow walls of the nursery gleaming like a sun whenever I passed, that the shame stung as much, more in fact, or perhaps it was just nearer the surface. I could not love myself or forgive myself and of course in many small ways the world collaborated in confirming that I was unlovable and unforgivable and perfectly correct in assuming the worst about myself. For example, one day while driving I nosed out into a busy street trying to turn left with the light. When the light changed I tried to back out of the crosswalk. I couldn't because the car had pulled up behind me. An older black man trying to cross was forced to walk around the front of my car dangerously close to traffic. He glared at me with such hatred that I rolled down the window and said, "I'm sorry I couldn't back up there's a, he cut me off, think they own the whole street and the whole world," his scorn implied. "You and your kind." As he stepped up onto the curb and strolled on his day wound I feared, I began to cry. I wanted to run after him, tell him about the triplets, all the diapers I'd changed, the prayers I'd prayed, the inner changes I tried to make. I wished I had the boys in the car or the king sisters, black faces to show him, to testify to him, to prove what that I was not a racist. But I could never prove it finally, totally to anyone but myself and my maker. It would always be heard and bitter people who would see only my white face, and cynical others who would see and try to make use of my guilt. That was on them. But what was on me, my responsibility, was not to use people in some confused subconscious drive to redeem myself. Wasn't that just another form of racism? Well it's a lot of heavy feelings you went through. Do you feel in a more subtle place about that now or what do you feel? I mean you've got this book out there in part so that we can learn about our racism and confront it and learn go forward. I do feel in a more subtle place as you say. It's unsettling again that the book is out and is being read and talked about because I exposed myself. But I felt led to expose myself writing it and I think it will be useful and people who've read it tell me they've had similar feelings. You know white folks who've read it have gone through similar feelings. So I don't think I'm a horrible person but I do think I had that pattern of projecting my own negativity out onto others. Sometimes in a crisis under pressure which is when that stuff comes up. And I had a lot of white guilt that was paralyzing at times and also as I say here might have motivated me to prove to redeem myself quote unquote you know the prune that I wasn't and when you're doing that you're kind of using people in a different way. You're really not there serving them and following Spirit's Guide because the guilt is in the way. It's blocking what you should be doing which might be the tough luck thing and it might be to confront someone. You know I asked that question did we exert too much authority, too little or the wrong sort. And really looking back I think with this young couple Tahija especially who we became her legal guardian more authority was called for. We should have laid down some rules and said you know if you're going to live here and have the boys here there's certain behaviors that we can't live with. And we think they're bad for you and they're bad for the triplets so here they are. But we're afraid to do that because we might be racist it might be cultural domination. And we were doing cultural domination sometimes so it was confusing you know to discern what's a cultural difference and what's a basic human right for these boys in the house because they were with us and they were with the parents because of choices we made. So we had a responsibility to them as well as to their parents. And I think that this is all more complex because you've not been a parent before. Parenting brings out something special. But also I was wondering if maybe you were more tuned more ready to understand discrimination and the way the world puts you down because you're in a relationship that in many areas of society earns you scorn and gives you a sense of what it's like to be a second class citizen. Yeah that's an interesting way to look at it. Probably my allyship, my being an ally came more easy to me because of that. I really was bothered when people acted as if this young man and young woman were inferior, defacto inferior. I knew that was wrong and perhaps my sense of injustice came from being treated as a second class citizen as a girl growing up and as a girl who didn't neatly fit the gender role. As a different girl and then later as an out lesbian. Yeah probably that prepared me. I'm talking it that way. Are Tejiccha and Lamar now married? They began the process with an imam when they were living with us to marry and it was a long process of discernment and they didn't take the final step then and they haven't taken it now. So they're living together still and I guess it's been ten years so they're common law married and they call each other wife and husband and the triplets have their dad's last name but they haven't done a ceremony. What did the three nine year olds call you by your name or are you an auntie? What are you? I have been aunt Elizabeth or aunt Elizabeth Catherine or Catherine Elizabeth whichever comes out first. They were up here for an extended day during the summer and when they went back I was being called grandma Elizabeth which is undiplomatic because they have living grandmothers and great grandmothers so I need to talk to them about that but we're family. You know we're all family. Three children I triplets in any case it's got to be a challenge in doing that while living on the street you know with all that she must be an amazing young woman. I think she is an amazing young woman and I feel I saw the light in her the first time we met. I just saw well there's a little passage it's another it's this journey led me to inner experiences that I will always remember and that shaped me and kept me on the journey. When she was in the hospital on bed rest I actually changed my mind I didn't think we could handle having the boys come home to the house. We had friends who were in social work or family therapy saying you can't handle it you shouldn't do this you should encourage them you know to use public services. So I changed my mind for a little while and I had a very intense experience that brought me back to it and maybe if I could read one more passage of please go ahead. I changed my mind I'm at work at this point I have a job at a department store and I'm on a break and I'm sitting up in a balcony drinking a very overpriced hot chocolate at the gallery the mall strawberries and cold the earth anyone knows Philly is actually founded by Quakers. So I'm sitting up there drinking the hot chocolate in this group of preschoolers or kindergartners comes in a long line of them snakes through the department store. Here I'll read when the rear of the line passed beneath the balcony and I've noticed that there's only one white child in this line and I'm just kind of watching them they come under me and this one little boy looks up. He just gives me this angelic smile and I say that smile stayed with me I start in the bottom of my coffin in the windows of the subway I rode home. Late that night on the third floor as I sat writing in my journal it came back to me the peaceful smile his oneness with the line. I turned off the light and pulled my chair up to the window in the park lamp light lay like frost on the branches of the bear trees. From a telephone wire near the window a pair of white leather sneakers hung by their laces the lower one turning slowly the upper still as if poised midstep. A pigeon perched on the wire and began to groom itself setting the sneaker swaying. They lulled me like a hypnotist pendulum and I found myself remembering a Quaker meeting in New Paul's New York 20 or so silent people on plain wooden benches facing the unornamented center of a plain room. The silence ran unbroken for a time and then deepened suddenly as a stream opening into a pool and I had at that meeting for worship and experience of seeing the history of the United States sort of as a series of failed attempts to right the wrong of slavery. You know like in a hypnagogic image but a conceptual message to I just kind of saw it and there's a page to hear of trying to recreate that message. And I did stand I think was only the second message I ever gave in meeting for worship I stood and tried to recreate the message so I'm remembering this now this night when I'm wavering in my commitment to help this family stay together. Sitting eyes closed at that meeting I had prayed as one washed ashore let me do something let no new harm be done let the wounds be healed let us not miss the next opportunity let me not miss my opportunity. If the underground railroad was shut down too soon if this nation conceived in liberty what love I felt then for my country and dedicated dedicated to the proposition. In the silence that day sitting on the hard bench beside a white woman who'd moved her small children into Mississippi's freedom of summer and a man who tried to live the Sermon on the Mount I was blessed with a clear perception and responded with a clear prayer to which that boy looking up was an answer missed not your opportunity. In Philadelphia I opened my eyes the pigeon was gone the sneakers were turning like a wind vein in the wind walk with her I heard she is a queen of my people. I heard that boy very clearly but intimately and I knew however hard it got I was led to walk with her accompany her not as a social worker which I had no skills in but as another human being walking beside someone through difficulties. Quite a walk that you took on I thought of that quote because of the walk with her she is a queen of my people you know she has a queenliness some people see it as arrogance you know in the system but others see it as an inner strength and inner light that's shining brighter than many around her so you know now she's in her in her new neighborhood she's a force for stability people are drawn to her especially people in crisis she now walks with others. Its an amazing journey you've gone through Elizabeth people first of all where should they go to find out about your book where should they go buy it where should they learn about your study aid guides all that stuff. We have the website walk with us all one word dot info walk with us dot info not com or you know org info last night I just checked in at that Amazon and there's even a few reviews of people who read the pre-publication galleys and borders you know the big stores have it. I mean they have it on their website and I think if you go in and ask them to order it they will order it and you'll have it shortly or you can just you know get it right from the website. So you're also going off and doing some readings of this and different places including you're coming to Wisconsin very shortly. Yeah I'm looking forward to getting back to Wisconsin I was there this summer reading as part of the Wisconsin Book Festival the annual big book festival and I'll be this Friday the 11th at a room of one's own bookstore and I don't know probably this won't be aired before then. Okay I will have been there then on the website is the reading tour and I'm just now making arrangements so if anyone hearing this would like me to come to their meeting or to your independent bookstore or anything please contact us and we'll make it happen. Thanks so much for stretching yourself every time you see someone performing an act of love not out of duty but out of leading. It's a great thing for the world and for you to reach out the way you did and continue to do is a blessing for the word so thank you very much for doing that. Thank you Mark thanks for asking me all these great questions and prompting reflection I thought I had reflected it to death but I hadn't. You've been listening to a spirit in action interview with Elizabeth Gordon author of walk with us triplet boys their teen parents and two white women who tagged along. The theme music for this program is turning of the world performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern spirit radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark helps me and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is spirit in action. With every voice with every song we will know this world alone. With every voice with every song we will know this world alone and our lives will feel the echo of our healing.