It happened.

Yesterday, I received a phone call from work informing me that I would no longer be picking up one of the kids on my van route, and that our other driver would be taking her instead. Her mother had called in and informed my boss that she wasn't comfortable having her daughter picked up by a man.

I can't say I'm surprised. In fact, if anything about the situation surprises me it's that it's taken eight weeks since the start of the school year for someone to make a call like that.

This incident (the first of many, I fear) really helps explain why I was a bit apprehensive about accepting the shift in my work responsibilities. I work at a small nonprofit arts school, and in September I was asked to switch from doing mainly front desk and office work to running our after-school childcare program. It sounds like something that would be right up my alley, right? I love kids, I'm great with kids, kids love me and look up to me, and I have the skill set necessary to provide high-quality care to children and have been doing so most of my life. But I knew, in the back of my mind, that I was born with a penis, and people just don't want people with penises watching their children.

Now you may say that it's nothing personal - that people want to look out for their children, and in that regard it's often much safer to assume the worst than assume the best - and certainly I shouldn't take it personally. But I've seen friends' careers get destroyed by mere rumors and discomfort, and it is more than reasonable to fear the same. Plus, when you have impostor's anxiety, a little call like that can really worry you.

To be fair, a disproportionate percentage of employee-involved daycare facility child abuse cases (whew, say that ten times fast) involve a male employee. But I'd be willing to put down a pretty substantial bet at fairly good odds that if you pulled a random case file out of a list of all reported child abuse cases, the perpetrator would not be a daycare worker. It would be a family member.

Hell, even back in the mid-80s during the male childcare worker witch hunt that spread through the country - back before background checks, and trainings, and bathroom improvements, and mandatory reporting, and all that good preventative stuff - nationwide studies still showed it was much more likely that a family member would abuse a child than a daycare worker. Believe it or not, a third of abuse incidents that took place in daycare settings were also perpetrated by a family member, not an employee.

Oh, and another thing that studies show, is that while abusers are disproportionately male, the proportion isn't that skewed, and your child could still absolutely be abused by a female employee. It might even be easier, seeing as how female employees - and even women who want to enter the field - are treated with less scrutiny.

Bottom line is you have to trust someone. I'm a well-vetted professional who has passed thorough background checks. I would trust me long before uncle so and so.

Yesterday I turned in my last paper as an undergraduate student. It was an 8-pager on the tensions between individual and communal readings of identity in Nitozake Shange's For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf and ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. I just barely managed to squeak it in under the length limit, and I turned it in to the amazingly brilliant and talented professor Bahareh Lampert.

The paper's fine and I'm not too worried about talking about it today. Were there things wrong with it? Sure. I don't think that any piece of writing is ever "done". Hopefully you get to a point where you decide it's publishable and you convince yourself you're finished, but I think that even the greatest works of literature the world has ever seen could stand another revision or two ;) Suffice it to say I am fairly proud of it and I have done my very best to overcome a lot of the common errors that have plagued my writing since high school, and this paper definitely looks better than the stuff i wrote five years ago, so I would say that I have learned something at least.

Turning that paper in drove the point home more than I thought it would, though. This is it. This is the end of my time as an undergrad. After this, or rather after my final exams next week, I will be able to walk and receive my diploma. I will be educated. I have tried not to think of my education in the same way people tend to think about birthdays, that they are one age for 364 days and then on the 365th they suddenly become one year older, but at least for a moment yesterday education wasn't an incremental, lifelong process that I was simply directly facilitating by going to a university. It was something specific, something measurable, that I have put 20 years of my life into (counting preschool) and that will soon be completed. And when it's over, I'm going to take a brief break, and continue on into the "real world". It's all very exciting!

It has become apparent to me that in a modern, global world, one's identity cannot be considered fixed at any point in one's life. Where once there were few choices available in the makeup of a personality, when people rarely traveled far beyond their village, and sons grew up to take their father's place and daughters to be married off, now there are seemingly endless combinations of disparate cultural backgrounds, educational opportunities, music preferences, religious affiliations, media bombardments, and any one of a thousand other factors that shape a person at every moment. Even physical attributes that could at one time have been considered fixed determinants of at least a portion of a person's identity, such as his or her skin color, sex, hair and eye color, can be changed to fit the will of the individual with varying degrees of safety and success. How much more, then, do the less tangible components of the identity ebb and flow with the tide of life? 

I have thought a bit about my own "roots", so to speak, and how my origin combines with my individual experience to form an identity. I cannot say the I have ever been privy to the small-town mentality that I was born in one place, one culture, grew up there, will work there, and will die there. However, I do seem to have a connection to my family that others consider unusually (even some have had the audacity to say unnaturally) prevalent and strong, and I have had to mentally prepare myself for a long time for the prospect of being transplanted away from them into new soil. In some sense I know the value in leaving home, in taking risks that may allow me to grow and change and become the person that God is calling me to be, but in another sense I fear losing the foundation that I have and being set adrift on an ocean that I cannot navigate.

In a sermon he delivered at the Integrity Eucharist during the 2012 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson talked about the necessity of reorienting ourselves in life, and the anxiety that accompanies that feeling. He spoke of Abraham, and his experience of always moving from place to place, and trusting that God would lead him in the right direction. Like Abraham, bishop Robinson said of the people of God that we are "meant to live in tents"; that we long for a city with foundations, but every time we think we have everything safely figured out God pulls us in a different direction to a new issue or idea that we have been ignoring. His words, in that time, and in that place, comforted me as I listened, as do the words of an old hymn that my grandfather sings when he's out on the tractor in our family farm in Washington, which my family got to sing together on our recent gospel album, and which I find myself singing often when I am alone and unsure:

My very first church service, which my mother brought me to as a newborn infant even before I'd been baptized, was a service for Ash Wednesday. In an Ash Wednesday service, one of the most solemn in the Church calendar, a priest makes the sign of the cross on each person's forehead using ashes from the palms of the previous year's Palm Sunday service, a triumphant celebration, and bids each individual to, "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." My mother tells the story of the priest putting a cross upon my tiny head, and speaking the words gently as she held me in her arms, and realizing there that I did not belong to her, and that I was God's alone. When I turned 18, the anniversary of my birth fell on Ash Wednesday, and I was reminded then, right as I stepped from my identity as an adolescent into my identity as an adult, that my only sure foundation, my only real root, was that I was raised from the dust of the Earth, and that I will one day die, and return to it. I am the Lord's creation, His to keep, and best I be reminded of that regularly.

The benefits of living, as bishop Robinson says, in tents far outweigh these anxieties, however, as well as the the securities of a life with unshaken foundations. Without fluidity in our own identities we could not change our minds, nor come to comprehend our errors in thinking and move toward truth. It is this fluidity that ended institutional slavery in the United States, that extended democratic principles and equality under the law to women and minority populations, and that even now is working, by the grace of God. to change hearts and minds to offer equitable opportunity to the poor and equal treatment to sexual minorities. We are meant to live in tents. Amen.


To hear bishop Robinson's sermon, visit: 

http://gc12.integrityusa.org/Home/announcments/integritvday5-integrityeucharistwithbishopgenerobinsonpreaching