I’m not sure that as a white, educated, comparably wealthy woman, that I know much about privilege, so all I have to add, all anyone has to add really, is what I know from my life, from the things I used to believe to the truths I can see now. So this is what I now know.
I was 24 in Okinawa, childless, first time living in a foreign country, and all of Joe’s battalion was deployed. Because everyone was gone, when there were problems in the families of the deployed active duty Marines, we were the fall back. We didn’t realize this was the case until it happened. But one day we got a call, and we were the temporary rescue for a family of five whose husband was deployed.
The wife had fallen into deep depression. The house was filthy, her children were hungry. She spent every waking minute trying to repair herself and had nothing left to repair her life, and when the children came to our house for respite, in a moment I will never forget, the little boy exclaimed, “Wow! You have food at your house!” For us, going from no children to three unknown children, even for a few days, was a rough shock, but as we spent more time with them, I got little windows into their lives. They craved affection. They were so excited about meals. They were a lot of things that I didn’t quite realize wasn’t normal.
But I never understood her until I got depression, I spent a few minutes, a few years, pitying her, thinking how sad and unnecessary that whole situation was. But when I was buried so far down inside myself and Joe was miserable at work and we had two young boys and everything was hard I started to remember her, the look on her face when we brought her kids back; it wasn’t until then that I started to understand what her nights must have been. But then I started to understand it, I started to understand her, day by day, bit by bit.
There were two parts of it especially that smacked me in the face again and again, that I ran into whichever way I turned. The first was the lowering of standards that is required when you are in that mental state. That when you are exhausted, you have to lower your standards, and then lower them again, and then lower them again until you start to run into problems. Like that mother, who probably one day needed a bit of food from the store, but was too tired that day, and then two days later she was still tired but she needed more food, which meant a store trip would have been even harder, which meant she needed to have even more energy, until the day came when the amount of work she had to do and the amount of energy she had were so disproportionate that it just never got done, and her children went hungry.
Like how so many nights I would fall into bed at night at about 9pm, too exhausted to do the dishes, probably in tears. In the morning I would wake up early, with the boys, and have to get them ready for the day, and not be able to do the dishes. This would go on for days. It’s all very well and good for women to glibly say to other women, “Just let the dishes be! Snuggle your babies!”, except, you know, it’s not well and good. Because when it goes on for days it can attract serious problems.
It took everything out of me to keep my boys alive and there was nothing left for the dishes. (Or lots of things.) So then, the repercussions started to come. All houses in Hawaii have cockroaches, but ours got more. Pretty soon there were never any dishes, so we would eat out, which cost money. Which wasn’t as healthy. Which meant everyone wasn’t quite as happy. Which means I was always just a bit more exhausted then I was the day before.
See, this is the truth that we don’t always like admitting to ourselves and it’s something that I didn’t know until a few years ago: doing things right the first time is a privilege. Not needing to go back and fix the mistakes that you made, the ones you KNEW you were making but couldn’t fix at that time, is a privilege. Being able to have the money, time and energy to do the preemptive things that keep you well, instead of always being a hole you have to climb out of, is not a given.
And just like all the motivational speakers in the world say that good things compound, the opposite is also true. Bad things compound. If you are unable to do basic things to keep yourself functional, you slowly stop being functional. Even if you were barely functional before. Going longer between doing the things that keep you well means it becomes harder to recover. Eventually, the gap becomes too much to make up. Weeks, years, go by without you getting ahead enough to make up that gap.
The second thing I became very aware of was having no fall back. This is best shown by our new house here in Florida, because here are the things that have happened since we moved:
Our dryer broke. My computer broke. We had a hurricane. We had a 100 foot tree fall on our carport. We had a brand new car totaled. We had our claim rejected by insurance. We had our chainsaw break. We found a leak in the house. An electrical problem that was supposed to be no big deal turned into a very big, expensive deal. We had to live in two rooms for three weeks while the floors were being done. We all got sick. Our lawnmower broke. Our chainsaw got stolen.
This was in all in five weeks.
But I’m here to tell you that all of us (except that tree) are still standing. We aren’t snapping at each other (except for an especially fiery fight in the car the other morning!) we aren’t depressed, we aren’t melting down into piles of tears (most days!).
Do you know what the difference is? We have a fall back. We had people to come in and bridge those gaps. I’m not talking about casual friends, who always do their best but who have their own lives and are people you could never actually ask to come and do your dishes every night before the cockroaches explode like ripples in a pond.
My parents came to help us paint the whole house. My sister in law came to help us move furniture. My mother in law came and essentially watched the boys for a week while we gathered ourselves (and put up all the curtains too!)
And each time they’ve put us back on solid ground.
The fall back doesn’t always have to be people. It can be money. It can be anything that takes one hard thing about life away. Free food, someone who mows the yard, someone who watched your kids after school.
But it’s something that bridges those gaps in between what you are able to accomplish and what actually needs to be done. And it’s a privilege.
Do you know the difference between that woman in Okinawa and me? I had only one baby at that point. I had strong friends who were not too good to come to scrape dirty food off my dishes. My husband was getting paid more and we could eat out if we couldn’t make it to the grocery store that day.
So when we come here, and even when everything seems to go wrong, when things are stolen and acts of God destroy parts of our house, when things break and electrical fixes are three times what they were estimated to be, we can still recognize the solid ground of privilege, of fall backs and of doing things right the first time.
And this right here, is the essence for me of recognizing privilege, after a little bit more life and a little bit more wisdom, being able to look back on that woman in Okinawa and say, and know for sure, “There, but for the grace of God (and some good friends, a big family, and a little more money) go I.”
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