Just another day

The playground is for families of color; the pea patch is for childless white women.  It's not an official rule, not posted anywhere, it's the reality called "social segregation", and I think of it every time we go to the low income playground and pea patch.

I think of it today, as I have tottered out holding my three year old's hand for balance.  I am still in recovery from the food poisoning that has had me on my back for two days and kept him trapped in our apartment.

The other children from two or three families are fresh from some profoundly special occasion; they are in satin and chiffon, embroidery and sequins.  I managed to get my son in a bath this morning, but the co-ordination it takes to untangle his long hair is days away.  He shuffles past in football-shaped slippers he picked out when I told him he had to choose footwear that he could put on himself because I did not have the balance to bend.  His ragged clumped hair looks exactly like that of the classmate I had in first grade, who used to grin and shrug as our teacher would publicly rail at her for her unkempt state.  I am sharply, painfully aware of how my neighbors-- multi-generational poor blacks, immigrants, outright refugees-- do not think of allowing their children to step outside in less than immaculate condition, lest they be judged.   I am more embarrassed than I can say.

My son watches wide-eyed as an older girl turns flips on the rings, her hijab magically falling into perfect position as she comes upright each time.  My son clambers on to the teeter-totter with her younger sister; she plays with him until she realizes he is a "him".  The girls swarm around to stare in my son's face; he has a girl's skin, a girl's eyebrows, they tell me, seeking to rationalize the irrational cultural lens in which they have interpreted all he does as feminine.  They scatter and fly to process their experience, and my boy is left alone on the teeter-totter.  "Why did it stop working?" he wonders out loud.  Like so much of life, it takes someone to do it with you.

The baby of the bunch has stumbled trying to follow her sisters up the slide.  She wails.  They run to her and their faces turn to me.  Suddenly I am not the stranger, I am merely the nearest mother.  "She's bleeding, do you have a tissue?"
"I have a skirt," I say simply, and drop to my knees in their midst.  The baby stares at me uncertainly but does not move away as I wipe her chin with the hem of the red-brown dress that has hidden stains for ten years now.  A barely-split lip, I think, the bleeding has already stopped.  "Smile for us," I ask her, to check the damage, and she shows a thin slice of teeth and toddles off to play more, content that she was hurt and a grown-up came to fix things.

That's what grown-ups are for.