The woman in his apartment was approvingly looking from room to room. Her daughter, about twelve, dragged a heavy foot five steps behind her, this probably being normal, but unsettling.

He’d met Marley in the grocery store standing before the community bulletin board. She was looking for a cheap place to stay and he lied, saying his previous boarder had moved out and he was there to post the vacancy. If she’d mentioned the daughter at all while in the store, she’d probably been drowned out by the perfection of her breasts screaming to be let loose from her t-shirt, and he’d heard nothing of it.

She stood now in the middle of his two-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, “dream view, great neighborhood” apartment for which he had no authority to take in a roommate without approval from the leasing office. Deep in the ground, he kept digging.

“You say all utilities are included?”

Lie.

“And the room is available immediately?”

Another.

Marley felt genuine relief, treading lightly with her next question. Kendall. My daughter. You’re sure? She’s a good, quiet kid.

Straight ahead. Look straight ahead. Do not turn toward the kid. Do not turn toward her and feel any sympathy. Look straight ahead and do not listen to Marley’s breasts screaming oh Adam. Look straight ahead and answer with the truth.

Annnnd another.

Kendall needed help with her math, her weakest subject, and it wasn’t made any easier by some asshole kid Tyler who entertained himself and others by imitating the sound of Kendall’s foot dragging on the tile floor of their math classroom. Marley worked odd hours, so it kind of fell to Adam to pick up the slack and, he felt, handle this Tyler shit. Six months of being roommates—and Kendall really was a good, quiet kid like her mother had promised—made them a family. Adam made his way to the school, waited throughout dismissal for Kendall to point toward Tyler as she climbed into the truck, no real need since he’d memorized Tyler’s crazy from Facebook.

A few laughable Tyler-threats to sue and call the police over Adam’s infringing his personal space. More than a couple Adam-threats to Tyler’s personal space if he ever again breathed in Kendall’s direction without niceties. Some grow ups, some be a mans flying in both directions. A well-meaning teacher asking if he could help, everything explained away as Adam’s being Kendall’s father who was finally, permanently home after seven U.S. Marine deployments and who just wanted to meet a few of Kendall’s friends. Something about the boy triggered his PTSD. You know how it is. Then it was over.

In their house fire, of which Marley rarely spoke, Kendall had lost a life’s worth of ticket stubs, celebrity autographs, photos. The one thing she really wanted—to start again—was the card Adam had been planning to post on the community board the day he’d run into her mother. Would he have kept something like that? As he started the truck’s engine, she asked if she could have it.

I’m not one of those (black) women who clings to long, straight hair as an important self-image. I’ve worn my hair different lengths, various textures, sleek and corporate, wacky and bohemian. I’m one of the lucky ones of any race or culture who can say with confidence “it’s just hair.” Not everyone can be so cavalier about it, and I acknowledge that. Too thin, too kinky, too fragile, too uncontrollable for such a dismissive attitude. If you erase the entire 1980s when dark-skinned black girls living in the American deep south were the opposite of standard beauty, I’ve had a pretty good life on behalf of attractive people everywhere.  Well, there was that period in the ’90s that could have shown me a little more respect, but I’ll take responsibility for not understanding how some people could be such assholes.

This current cut comes courtesy of my now-failed effort to switch careers. The last time I was able to completely change what I did for a living was in 2001 when I went from not-for-profit marketing communication to oil and gas technical writing. I wasn’t trying to leave not-for-profit, I was trying to leave the poverty level set by the U.S. government. I bullied a creative agency into taking me on (I had nothing resembling a portfolio or what one may call “experience”) then my agent was supernaturally convinced I had the talent to translate technical documents into plain English for her engineering superpower client. That began a very long, very boring career of arguing with engineers over comma placement, but I could now afford food and trips to Target. I had the means to boycott Walmart on moral grounds. I bought a real car instead of one that pretended to be a car, mainly on Wednesdays.

Once I was laid off nearly four years ago now, I figured that was a good time to get back into marketing communication for some exciting corporation or small firm that concerned itself not with micromanagement and low wages, but coffee quality in its marble-columned break room. Mother-of-pearl inlay break room coffee cups, people. Wait, no, a golden coffee cart wheeled past my office.

It never happened. And that’s okay. If all goes as planned, in a few weeks, I shall return to the oil and gas industry with a new corporate, non-bohemian haircut and a renewed spirit. A much-needed income with a new goal of getting out of debt. A long ass commute when, four years ago, I would have turned down the gig based on it being too far from my house. My very own cubicle on a cubicle farm among product managers. Use your speakerphone for personal medical conversations about your mysterious mole, I will help you Web MD that shit from my desk and email you probable causes.

I will open up my project management schedule and get started on my day, running a hand through my silky, chemically relaxed pixie cut. Hell, I may even take a photo of it for you after grabbing my coffee that tastes gloriously like Styrofoam and paychecks.

Coming to your senses in comments…

I’d moved my kids out of our house and, while we were waiting out the school year, it was a no-brainer to move in, as full-time caretaker, with my beloved grandmother who was in what we thought was early Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t early. It was full-on, Mach 5, all systems go ‘head on with your bad self Alzheimer’s, but we didn’t find that out until much later.

Grandmother hated Vanna White with a passion that has gone unexplained to this day. Even before her illness, she admitted she didn’t know why, she just did. But for 36 years, I watched Wheel of Fortune with her like we were being paid. The phone would ring from some random church member and she’d brag how her granddaughter had “solved another one” with only three tiles showing. We laughed and laughed the day some prudish lady lost a large sum of money because she refused to say the “damn” in a FRANKLY MY DEAR SCARLETT I DON’T GIVE A DAMN puzzle. Grandmother never used profanity, but she must have said damn 10 times that day just to trash talk that poor woman.

Grandmother knew who I was. I was her first granddaughter Erica. Around 12 years old. Who’d been dropped off for the day by my father.

My then-10-year-old daughter Jordan was, of course, my younger sister Kara who had also started spending several days with her for some odd reason. Who was my grandma to judge?

The problem became my then-4-year-old son Jon Alex. Because my actual brother is older than I am, my grandmother had no place for Jon Alex in her memories. He was, to her, some kid my sister and I kept bringing over every single time my father dropped us off to visit. Always unusually generous, Grandmother began to complain she didn’t have enough food to feed this boy y’all keep bringing. It was her way of saying my son didn’t belong.

It got dark and confusing when my father never picked us up. She was angry and resentful how we were sleeping there every night in her late husband’s bedroom. I learned to stay away from the house with the kids all day, including Saturdays, until Wheel of Fortune was about to start. She was expecting us, having not seen us in months (hours) and she was glad to entertain.

This day, Jordan and I arrived without Jon Alex. He was away at a football game in San Antonio with my parents.

Grandmother (as we walk in the front door): Hey! Where’s Jon Alex?

Jordan (excited her great-grandmother knows who she is that day, and who also suffers from short-term memory loss from her traumatic brain injury): He’s at a football game in San Antonio!

Grandmother (after some considerable Vanna hate once the show starts): Hey! Where’s Jon Alex?

Jordan (probably just as unaware she’d just answered that question as Grandmother was unaware she’d just asked it): He’s at a football game in San Antonio!

Grandmother (back on her grandma game passing out cookies and soda cans during a commercial break): Hey! Where’s Jon Alex?

Me (stepping into the madness because it’s what I do): He’s at a football game, Grandmother.

Jordan: He is?? Where?

That’s my favorite Grandmother/Jordan memory loss anecdote, y’all. Among many. No, I never married that guy, we never moved to California. My grandmother died peacefully at home the next year and Jordan’s less-affected long-term memory does the heavy lifting with help from family and friends.

Solving the puzzle in comments…

As a girl, I had three important things on my grocery list: children, husband, writing career. I sat at my mother’s kitchen table reading the back of the Kellogg’s packaging and thinking: somebody has to write the words on the back of this box. Why can’t it be me? Of course, I was too young to know the person writing those words on the back of that box had been likely plotting for years his fiery escape from a copywriter’s cubicle with a complicated scheme to take Martha from payroll down with him as payback for the great vacation day mishap of ’78. I know now his name was Jim.

Because I am American, it’s not enough that I eventually checked each item off my girlhood list. Simply checking off is for Scandinavians and a few indigenous Turks. Pure Americans like me are constantly weighing and measuring themselves against another American’s idea of personal success. Eh, my kids are good kids, but how is my parenting? On a scale of one to eleven, I give myself a two. Wait, a three. Points on because none of them is the class bully. Points on because they all own toothbrushes. An extra point for not making them forage for dinner behind the local office park.

Subjecting my poor husband to me as his life partner: points off, points off, points off. Points on for love, though. You hear me, Jeffrey? Points on for love.

A writing career, the third item of my list, is all points off. I went from dreaming on the back of a cereal box to later losing confidence as a fiction writer. In my teens, John Steinbeck encouraged me to pick up a pen. In my twenties, Gabriel Garcia Marquez knocked the pen from my hand with a deft left hook and some trash talk. My thirties watched in horror as Oprah—Oprah!— crowned kings and queens of literature cheered on by a Greek chorus of housewives. My writer’s suicide note was found written in blue ink on the proper side of a job application.

From our work cubicles, Jim the Kellogg’s copywriter and I fight over the serial comma. We offer oil executives trivia lessons on typography. We know the exact moment people stop caring about what we know and just want their goddamned report edited by five on Thursday. My success as a writer is no longer measured against dreams, but against my willingness to adhere to an overly strict policy of font usage. With eyes dead from arguing how many spaces go after a period (one, just one) Jim gestures toward the break room. The coffee’s done.

________________________

Reprinted from my hacked free fringes blog. Originally published January 9, 2012

His wife, who was not my mother, was inside the cabin, packing boxes. They’d sold everything, I’d read in one paper, on their way to a new start. A brand new start claimed the writer of the article, sympathetic to a man and his wife who’d been attacked in their home on a quiet suburban street by the man’s oldest son, a “mentally ill” teenager who’d spent most of his life living in the streets full of resentment for those who had all the good things.

First, I’m not mentally ill. Second, there is no second, that entire article was bullshit. What would you do if you found out your father who’d abandoned your family was living in some mini-mansion with his two new children and owned fucking lakefront property with some woman they called Mom? Mom.

I never got to call anybody Mom because I never had any parents, just two cokeheads too busy for open house and PTA. Cokehead One dies, all five of us get put in foster care. Cokehead Two is no where to be found until I happened to see him just driving by one day with this look on his face that said “I have never been anybody’s cokehead or ruined anybody’s life or sent my five sons to school in raggedy-ass brown leather shoes covered in dog shit and now I am on my way to soccer practice with my fat and happy toddler.”

I don’t know what you would do, but I followed him. First, in this chick’s car, to the goddamn soccer fields. Then to his house where I watched through the windows everybody inside get all excited about leaving that night for the lake. The what, you’re now saying with me? The lake.

Me and the girl—and no I did not steal her car or force her to go with me to the lake that night, no matter what the paper said—we just wanted to see the lake everybody was so excited about. The judge even said if she were me, she’d have been a little curious, too. So me and the girl spent that weekend watching my father come and go as somebody’s dad. Me and the girl consensually fucked in the back seat whenever somebody’s dad was doing something boring.

That Tuesday, I entered the mini-mansion through an unlocked side door and, while the family slept, punched somebody’s dad in the face and head until he lost consciousness.

I was arrested, counseled, tried by judge, counseled some more, put on probation and got issued a few restraining orders. Though understanding, the judge was serious: “You can never go back there.”

After this time, I won’t.
 

 

Q’s comment: I think I’m in love with you.

Erica’s reply: um, security.

We eventually met and liked each other very much.

Right after, I tried several times to push him away because, seriously, who could love me, amirite? I live inside my head, I’m grumpy, I just wanna be left alone most days. No disrespect to the African diaspora or the Trail of Tears, but my dating life before Q stumbled over my blog had killed far more spirits, deferred many more dreams. In my former dating life, when people died from dysentery and exposure, it was called Tuesday afternoon.

So by the time Q fell off the cabbage truck, a wide-eyed 26-year-old who’d never lived more than three feet from his parents, and into the apartment of a 38-year-old mother of two who had, let’s say, a few abandonment issues, it became a simple matter of who would win this battle of wills we’d set up for ourselves.

Sometimes silly:

Erica: I need you to drive those pesky 325 miles to my apartment because my brother is having a few people over and I don’t wanna go by myself.

Q: Tonight??

Erica: Yes.

Q: Not gonna happen.

He would then show up three hours later at my door because he’d been on the road on his way to me two hours before I’d even called.

Sometimes serious:

Q: You are the love of my life.

Erica: You’ve known me two weeks (okay, months).

Q: You are the love of my life.

Erica: I have a date tonight.

Q broke up with me after that one. I was sad. And not just because the guy I had plans with stood me up. Q was sad. I called Q the next day, and got his voicemail, so that was that until he called back and said he’d been in a meeting and I said let’s do it but take it slow and he said okay, let’s totally take it slow will you marry me?

I do not think you understand what it means to take it slow, I said.

Jordan tried to kill him a few times, Jon Alex has always adored him, oh look, hey, okay, let’s have a baby, why not because we don’t have anything else going on. My uncle married us with Ehren in my belly at the house he shares with my aunt, one of my favorite people in the world, and we told no one else. Not my parents, not his parents, just the HR department at my job. We’ve tried to get rid of one another a few more times since getting married, but whether we’re being silly or serious, one always reminds the other: I’m not going anywhere. I am unflushable.

On the days we feel the most unloved, that is good to know.

_________________

Topic prompted by The Scintilla Project. Adding it to the grid of my people over at the yeah write #101 weekly writing challenge.

My toddler Ehren hits the road to visit his grandparents, who live five hours north of us, quite regularly. We are a blended family. Although my children all technically share three sets of grandparents, Ehren’s grandparents, the newest set, inherited my two older children and me when I married their son. It’s not as complicated as it sounds, and it’s a very nice arrangement.

The two original sets of grandparents are local, the third set is not. There is a stretch of I-45, the freeway connecting Houston and Dallas, containing all my trip milestones: the tiny town of Willis, Texas, that I call the armpit of north Houston, but signifies when I can start driving about 80 mph. The little 1970s tract house just 100 yards shy of a tractor trailer truck weigh station that I call the halfway house because when I pass it, it means I am exactly halfway through the two-and-a-half hour trip. Hey, there, Sam Houston, the largest statue in the world of a Texan, nay, American, hero. Hey, there, Hunstville, home of the Target I’m not stopping at for anything.

Hey, there, Buc-cee’s and your cleanest bathrooms in the Western hemisphere. We do  not stop there, either.

We do not stop until we are at our destination, a small Texas town the midpoint between my suburb south of Houston and the rural Texas ranch north of Dallas that raised my husband. It has two gas stations, a chain barbeque restaurant, a passable Mexican food place, a Subway and some cows. Even though my in-laws would gladly let me choose where to eat, I let them choose instead. They are treating me to lunch and taking my toddler off my hands for anywhere between three days and two weeks, so who am I to be making demands?

On my trip home, the backseat silent and no longer requesting the Muppets’ Mah Na Mah Na on repeat, the trip milestones fly past. Hey, there, Buc-cee’s and your 1,000 Icee flavors. Looking good, Sam Houston! Stay classy, Willis. The entire way, I’m listening to whatever comes up on shuffle on my iPod through my car stereo. Whatever I want. There’s not a single kid in the car asking me to skip Angelique Kidjoe or asking me who’s better—Prince or Michael Jackson—or getting increasingly impatient when I can’t figure out toddler-speak for “Hit the Road, Jack.”

The drive is only 150 minutes, so I never get through my entire selected playlist. On some trips, I am pleasantly surprised to wholly excited when certain songs I’d forgotten I’d even owned start to play. And once, just once, one of those songs was “When I Need You” by Leo Sayer. I was driving under the overpass just south of the exit to Target when the opening chords began and there became nothing between me and ninth grade, years after the song’s debut, but the time in my life when I could first listen to music uninterrupted through headphones on the school bus with my Walkman.

I must have put it on repeat five times before reluctantly moving on to whatever was next in queue. Sang to no one, sang to everyone. Glad I had a family, glad my family wasn’t with me. Thinking of my husband, though, because how could I not with those lyrics? We’ve been living apart for years now.

The lyrics are too sappy to paste into this space, so I leave you, once again, with the video. Leo and me? We’re there.

]]> http://purplepatch.org/leo-sayer-again/feed/ 4 http://purplepatch.org/panic-attacks/ http://purplepatch.org/panic-attacks/#comments Thu, 14 Mar 2013 18:53:33 +0000 Erica M http://purplepatch.org/?p=598 When traveling, I never stay in hotels (motels, really) that have doors to my room leading directly to the parking lot. Before moving into some condo/townhouse-type structures, I never had an apartment accessible from the first floor. My bedroom, in any house I’ve ever lived in, has always been in the back of the house away from street noise and activity.

Until this current house. My bedroom is practically in the driveway, and noise belonging to every engine, squirrel or neighbor, and light installed on every truck, garage or emergency vehicle is transmitted into my room constantly. Relentlessly. I’ve come to realize over the past three years, I’ve been living in Motel 6 without the benefit of drugs, prostitution and dudes cheerfully headed out on beer runs.

Combine this with my current state of underemployment and my life companion living it up in his east coast bachelor pad with what we call in these parts an actual career, I can get a little antsy. I actually have a diagnosed anxiety disorder, but I live in Texas, you know. With Rick Perry. Who doesn’t really care if my family needs health insurance or mental health coverage, so here I am: peeking through my mini-blinds at the slightest deviation in suburban street traffic.

Only because The Scintilla Project asked, here is the guide to Erica M’s panic attacks:

1

noise happens

2

Erica looks up from laptop toward bedroom windows facing front yard

3

sees squirrel climbing overgrown shrubbery onto the roof

4

solves mystery of what she’d previously thought to be rats and wolves chewing their way in through the ceiling

5

noise happens

6

this time with a light

7

and voices

8

Erica glances at digital clock on chest of drawers placed there specifically for establishing work and social schedule of neighbors

9

based on the time, Erica understands it’s the across-the-street neighbors leaving at dawn for work

10

caffeine happens

11

Erica is and always has been allergic to caffeine

12

caffeine causes cold-like symptoms and hyperactivity and exacerbates the anxiety disorder

13

more caffeine happens and the mail being delivered sounds like someone is whacking Erica’s mailbox into tiny pieces for an unknown, yet surely nefarious motive

14

Erica retrieves the mail and throws away, unopened, bills she’s already paid online

15

Erica can be a bit of a hoarder, so she’s proud of herself for throwing away the mail in the outside trash bin before going back inside the house

16

but what if one of those unopened bills said something like “we never got your online payment?”

17

to distract herself from the new possibility of getting her car repossessed over one missed payment that wasn’t actually missed, but what if it was, Erica reads on the Internet about a guy swallowed whole in his street-facing, front bedroom by a sinkhole in Florida

18

Erica sends the link to the article to her husband by email who replies “I’mma need you to stop Internetting right now.”

19

Erica does not stop Internetting. In fact, she emails a few friends to see what they are up to and gets no replies

20

for hours

21

and hours

22

so now half her friends are dead and the other half refusing to reply because Erica has offended them in some way

23

it’s time to get the kids from school

24

the preschool is six miles up the main road connecting the two neighborhoods, and Erica must find the safest route to avoid getting T-boned by a drunk suburban kid in the middle of the afternoon

25

now that the preschooler is in the car, Erica contemplates picking up the middle schooler an hour early since she’s passing right by anyway and crazed gunmen, right?

26

all three kids make it home

27

noise happens, but it’s noisy in the house, too, so Erica barely notices

28

kids go to bed for the night and Erica barely remembers that article she read in 1989 about a father who awoke to strange noises coming from his daughter’s room and found an intruder attacking his daughter, so the father beat the guy to death with a baseball bat

29

Erica wonders if she should bring inside the baseball bats from the garage since her neighborhood has a two percent crime rate and a violent crime rate so negligible no one ever speaks of it

30

noise happens

31

lights happen

32

Erica checks for her car being repossessed

33

Erica waits for her home to be raided by police smashing down the wrong door in her negligible crime rate neighborhood

34

Erica waits to be arrested on a warrant enclosed in one of those envelopes she threw away

35

oh, look, email says her friends are all still alive

36

after half a Xanax, Erica awakes to her car still in the driveway

37

her neighbors leaving for work

38

her kids in various stages of getting ready for school

39

the preschooler still asleep

40

wolves chewing their way in through the ceiling

I was an anchor for a children’s television program called “2-Country Kidsworld”, the 2 standing for the local channel broadcasting it, the country standing for Texan tradition of reminding everyone Texas is just one big country store. There were six of us who would sit on wicker stools with wooden bases and read that week’s script from tele-prompters. I was in sixth grade when I started and aged out as a nearly 16-year-old high school junior. For five years, I’d get stopped in the grocery store or at our local Six Flags park called Astroworld when kids my age swore they knew me from swim meets or summer camp.

I never revealed how it was they actually “knew” me unless they finally figured it out on their own. One: it was kind of embarrassing because I got teased about it all the time. Two: was I supposed to go the full Troy McClure—you may recognize me from several features such as “junior high cheerleading squad makes it to state finals” or “teenager runs his own party clown business”.

The day I was moving into my freshman dorm at Howard, about a jillion miles away from the 2-Country Kidsworld viewing area, another incoming freshman, a guy from St. Louis, stopped me at the welcome table. “I know you from somewhere,” he says. And, since I was a jillion miles away from the 2-Country Kidsworld viewing area, I said jokingly: you probably know me from the television.

This guy. From St. Louis. As we’re standing on Howard’s campus in Washington, DC: Holy shit, that’s it.

His grandmother lived in Houston, and every summer he would visit her and every Saturday morning, he would watch 2-Country Kidsworld for the cute black girl who was on it. Who was now standing in front of him outside the Quad on freshmen move-in day. We stayed friends the whole time we were in school together, each of us eventually forgetting how we met in the first place.

At least W. couldn’t take that away from me.

What I should have done: ask her if she’d ever heard the word, find out how it made her feel, talk through those feelings.

What I did instead: substitute the word for one of our more playful words when describing how crazy our super-curly hair can get especially when it goes uncombed for the day, then stood by helplessly as her reaction to the word crushed us both like a 100-lb. rock.

From the original post which I am too ashamed to link here:

Friends of friends, she said, use that word to describe her as casually as if they were describing her hair color. She’ll be meeting friends in the school cafeteria for lunch, her arrival slightly delayed by her left-side hemiparesis, and girls will ask those waiting for her, “Which Jordan? Red-headed Jordan or Retarded Jordan?”

It is from that conversation I realized how far my head had been buried in the sand for 16 years about how my brain-injured daughter is treated when she’s not around me, not around adult caretakers who have her best interests in mind. Her brother, though a typical kid, is six-and-a-half years younger than she is, and it will be more than a few years before he’s mature enough to jump in when the word retarded is used as a common description for his sister. What he was able to tell me that day: yes, she’s called that all the time. We just ignore it.

From the beginning of Jordan’s life as a brain-injured kid (she was 11 weeks old the day she was shaken by one of her babysitters into a cerebral hemorrhage, hemorrhagic stroke and resultant coma), I placed her around typical kids. One reason was I was taking the advice of the headmaster of a private preschool for autistic children. “On top of all her other obstacles and issues, the last thing you want is Jordan picking up the self-stimulation habits of some my autistic kids,” he said.

But our brief stint in regular private schools was a disaster. The teachers weren’t equipped for special needs instruction and my being stopped in the hallway on my way to observe Jordan’s class and being told they were concerned she didn’t know her residential address and most four-year-olds can provide that information and we’re concerned her handwriting is behind benchmarked expectations and sometimes, while we’re teaching the other kids, we just let her sit in the corner at the baby-washing station washing fucking baby dolls over and over…ludicrous and heartbreaking. Did they not understand brain injuries? No. Because, no matter how small the class size, they weren’t trained how to teach to them.

So I enrolled her into special education resource classes in public school and found a special needs athletic program where she became the tenor who was applauded every single day for clearing her throat.

Do you see the problem?

We are always caught in the middle. Jordan, in my opinion, could not win.

Don’t misunderstand: she loves the attention. Who wouldn’t? After being on the sidelines for years washing plastic baby dolls in a basin while other children were being educated 10 feet away from her, here she now was with loving teachers and coaches who were impressed by her work ethic and enthusiasm for being the team’s power hitter. My problem is this: she’s too functional to stay sheltered in resource classes so she’s actually in inclusion classes most of the day. And those inclusion classes contain typical kids who have, at times, become my worst enemy. The teasing, the name-calling, the whispers—none of which I ever hear about firsthand from Jordan. Sometimes the information comes from a concerned teacher, one particularly egregious incident where two typical kids put their hands on my daughter teasing her about her hair that day was revealed to me by a school counselor.

And it’s not just around typical kids where Jordan can be marginalized. Her special needs kids baseball team was one of two special needs teams invited to play an exhibition game at the 2010 Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. That’s a big deal. Top teams from all over the world earn their way into the tournament, and Jordan’s team was one of them. Various local and national news crews covered Jordan’s team before the trip, and it was disheartening that Jordan’s high-functioning, low visibility of a disability wasn’t a draw for the cameras. She and one other boy who didn’t appear to have “anything wrong” with them were left out of the coverage. Viewers understand wheelchairs. Viewers get the struggles of Down syndrome kids. Hustling down the first base line in leg braces? Jackpot.

We waited in excitement in front of the TV waiting for her team’s story to be broadcast, and she was barely in it. We saw a quick glimpse of her pink baseball cap, and once again, my baby was left out. The loneliness and disappointment she must have felt in that moment.

The same loneliness and isolation she feels around her typical kid cousins who are talking fast and loud with their words swirling around, Jordan catching barely ten percent of the conversation unless someone is looking her in the eye talking directly to her. The loneliness she feels—as she insists on joining extra-curricular activities at her high school run by other students—with the high school upperclassman club president talking 100 mph updating the members on bake sales, parade floats and upcoming CPR classes.

“How did the meeting go, Jordan?”

“I have no idea. Wow, that girl talks fast.”

Advocates attempting to remove the hatred from the clinical term “retardation” and eradicate altogether the pejorative “retard” are on the right track. They are launching and perpetuating a much-needed dialogue about how we tend to throw those words around without thinking twice about those who are hurt the most by them. As a black person, I admit to rolling my eyes when people call them the “r-word” as though writing out retardation and using the term retardation is remotely the same evil as writing out and using the word nigger, but their hearts are in the right place. While we’re getting rid of the word, let’s also educate people on how to better integrate into typical activities those who fit that clinical definition.

What worse feeling can there be to be in a room full of people with no one understanding how to make you feel as welcome as anyone else?

Loneliness and isolation even with your perfectly functioning brain in comments. No one is immune.