It Ain't Over (20 page)

“Supposedly he was saying a prayer,” Liz recalls, “but he was yelling and shaking his fists. We were worried that he was saying ‘Death to America!’ But after he finished, the translator told us that he had blessed us for coming all the way to Africa, and that he had said a prayer for my child. I started to cry. This is the result that we had wanted—this was the mark we wanted to leave. Here was a Muslim imam from the other side of the world—the side of the world that had brought terror to the World Trade Center that awful day—saying a prayer for my child. That was incredibly uplifting.”

Julie Lythcott-Haims, 46

Palo Alto, California

J
ulie Lythcott-Haims was nervous. Just what exactly could this young white guy in the audience have to say to the older black woman up on stage?

It was September 2007 and Julie, as Stanford University’s dean of freshmen, was in charge of this welcome-to-college event, in which first-year students, assigned three books to read over the summer, listened to the authors speak about their works and then asked them questions. This year, the books had included
Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980,
by Lucille Clifton.

Ugh,
Julie had thought when she’d picked up a copy a few weeks earlier.
I hate poetry.
“I just didn’t get it,” she says, but her office was hosting the event, so “I read the book because I had to.”

Twenty minutes in, she was hooked. “The poems were about race, intimacy, mothering, childbearing, sexuality, sensuality, longing, and struggle—they were about life. I devoured them.”

The poet, Lucille Clifton, was an African American woman, so it made sense to Julie—a 39-year-old married, biracial mother of two—that she felt the poems so deeply. But how would this audience of rowdy 17- and 18-year-old college newbies possibly relate?

Then the boy in the balcony raised his hand. “Ms. Clifton,” he began, “your poetry speaks to me in ways I can barely understand.” And he read aloud the first stanza of one of her poems:

“if i stand in my window

naked in my own house

and press my breasts

against the windowpane

like black birds pushing against glass

because i am somebody

in a New Thing . . .”

There wasn’t a single snicker from the 1,700 students assembled—just respectful silence. “In that moment,” Julie recalls, “I realized that poetry speaks to people for all kinds of reasons. We make meaning of poetry as a way of interpreting our
own
lives.”

Julie had never considered herself a writer; in fact, in her first couple of years at college, she’d been told her writing needed work.

“But Lucille Clifton’s poetry loosened a spigot inside of me,” Julie says. “I had stories that I had to get out.”

Within weeks, Julie started piecing together stories and poems of her own. One was about being a biracial teen, the daughter of a white mother and black father, in the all-white, middle-class suburb of Middleton, Wisconsin. It was the early eighties, and Julie’s light brown skin, kinky hair, and wide nose
all defined her as black—the only one out of 1,200 students in her high school. With her dad often on the road for work and no black relatives or families nearby, Julie felt no connection to her African American roots.

“I wasn’t going to events that black people attended, I wasn’t participating in rituals that matter in the black community, I wasn’t exposed to black history in America. My racial and ethnic identity was thin, brittle, fragile. It was a label only, and it didn’t do much toward helping me understand how to feel about myself or my ancestry.”

So she conformed, becoming Middleton’s Miss Everything: an academic standout, a choir member, a pom-pom girl, senior class president. “My goal was to be what I perceived white people wanted me to be in order to gain their approval—talking in ways that made me seem familiar to them, behaving in ways that made them feel safe around me.”

Even so, there were harsh reminders that she was different. People would ask:
What are you? Why are you so tan?
A friend, thinking she was giving Julie a compliment, said: “I don’t think of you as black. I think of you as normal.”

“But I
am
black so I wish you
would
think of me that way,” Julie countered.

For Julie’s seventeenth birthday, her best friend crafted a friendship collage of words and pictures cut out of magazines and hung it on her locker. But by midday, someone had scrawled
Nigger
on it. “I felt like I had been spit on,” Julie recalls. “When no one was looking, I took a pair of scissors and cut the word out. I didn’t tell anyone, not even my parents. I felt shame. The vandal was telling me what I already knew: I was the nigger of my school and my town. And I didn’t want anyone’s pity.”

In 1985, Julie set out for Stanford, where she was surrounded by other black kids. But she shied away from them, choosing white friends and dating a white guy named Dan.

“Being the daughter of an interracial couple, it was a very familiar
construct for me. I never worried about dating someone white. White people were my milieu.”

Julie was too intimidated to join a black sorority or hang out in the black community center. “I felt I lacked the cultural savvy to belong. I perceived there was a way to be black—a handshake, a walk, a talk, an attitude. It was like a secret club and I didn’t know the password. There was no depth to my blackness. No soul. And I feared that black people could tell instantly, by looking at me, that I was an imposter.”

Still, from the moment she stepped on campus, Julie loved Stanford, so much so that, after attending Harvard Law School, marrying Dan, and having a brief career as a corporate lawyer, she returned to the Stanford campus as associate dean of its law school.

“At the law firm, I had been successful and well-regarded, but the job sucked the life out of me one billable hour at a time. At Stanford, my job was to help law students on their path, to be that visible, relevant, credible resource in their life. It clicked in every way possible.” Julie moved up to become assistant to Stanford’s president and then created a new position: dean of freshmen.

It wasn’t long before she became the hugely popular “Dean Julie.” Every year on Orientation Day, she’d take the podium and lead the freshmen through a rowdy call-and-response ritual designed to build a sense of belonging to the place.

It was at one such orientation that Lucille Clifton visited Stanford and completely spun Julie’s world. She cranked out nearly 80 poems, many sparked by the conflicted emotions buried in her since adolescence about her place among blacks and whites.

She had been actively trying to work through those feelings since two years earlier, when, headed to a Stanford event for African American staff,
she felt self-conscious bringing her daughter, who has very light skin and was four at the time.

“That’s when I really knew I was screwed up,” Julie says. “Of course it was never about her. It was about my own shame at not feeling black enough, and the visible result of having chosen to marry a white guy. My beautiful girl seemed to represent my own ethnic fragility. I knew that for her sake, I needed to figure this out.”

By the beginning of 2007, Julie had found a role model in Barack Obama, whose biracial background mirrored her own. But during his first presidential campaign, when she was approached about a position aimed at bringing out the black female vote, she turned it down, saying, “I’m not an authentic voice.”

“I had moved from a place of self-loathing toward a more neutral place of acceptance,” Julie recalls. “But to be a spokeswoman for the black woman? I knew I still had a long way to go.”

That’s where her poetry came in. “I realized that writing down my thoughts helped me to heal. It’s like a gear was stuck in my psyche; writing was like adding oil to that gear to loosen it up, making the whole psychological me run more smoothly. I felt more whole, more healthy, more self-loving, and when I finally loved myself as a black woman, I found the black community waiting to embrace me; they had been there all along.”

Julie had toyed with prose in the past but loved the freedom of poetry. “It was just about the words. I could arrange them on the page however I wanted. I didn’t have to worry about punctuation or sentence structure. I could literally fill the page with the essence of my fear, my love, and my thoughts.”

In January 2012, after more than a decade at Stanford, Julie had a talk with Dan: What if she went back to school to study poetry?

“After years spent encouraging young people to follow their hearts, I
realized that this was my one life and if there were other things I wanted to do, I’d better do ’em,” she says.

That winter, Julie applied to the two-year master’s in fine arts program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, submitting a portfolio of 20 poems. When the acceptance letter came, “I was full of fire,” she says.

“After I enrolled, I realized I was older than my classmates by 20 years—the biggest difference was that I didn’t have tattoos, body piercings, or hair dyed turquoise. But it doesn’t matter. I’m the best student I’ve ever been. And I’ve squeezed every drop from it.”

And as Julie’s poetry has matured, so has her understanding of race. Although she cannot change her own childhood, she knows she can help her kids, now 12 and 14, avoid the pain and confusion she felt. But most important, she has a deeper understanding of who she is. Her first published poem centers on the theme of biracial identity in a culturally white landscape and is told in seven voices.

“I’m no longer somebody who wants to check boxes. I now know I lie at the intersection of boxes. I’ve come to appreciate that identity is in some small part about how others see us, but mostly it’s about how we see ourselves. We can’t live our lives worrying about what someone else does or doesn’t expect of us.”

Kara Gorski, 38

Alexandria, Virginia

Kristin Gembala, 43

Overland Park, Kansas

F
rom the outside, Kara Gorski seemed to have the perfect life. A vice president at an economic consulting firm, she had just landed her dream job giving expert testimony in legal cases. She was a mom to two gorgeous boys, three years and fifteen months old, and was ready to try for another baby. Between her career and her husband’s landscaping business, they could now afford to move from their Washington, D.C., neighborhood to an acre-sized property in Virginia.

But on the inside, she felt lost. As she and her husband took a Sunday drive in August 2010 to see the property where they were to build their new home, she made a confession: She was overwhelmed. Stretched too thin. Completely frazzled.

On a typical day, she’d leave the house by seven a.m., work through lunch, and stay at the office until at least seven p.m.; during extrabusy stretches, she was slammed until the early-morning hours. “I loved everything about my career, but it was very high stress,” she says. “I was managing clients, managing experts, and managing people underneath me. There were lots of deadlines. And I had these two little boys and a husband. I was getting pulled in so many directions and I never had time to take care of myself. I couldn’t keep going like this. Something had to give.”

What should she change? What
could
she change? A spiritual person, she had asked the heavens on her thirty-fifth birthday, three days earlier, to send her a sign pointing her in the right direction. Now, returning home from her Sunday drive, she went upstairs to change clothes, pulled off her shirt and sports bra, and her hand brushed a small, hard-as-rock lump on the side of her right breast.

Was this her sign?

Kara flashed back to second grade. She was just seven years old, standing at the side of a hospital bed, staring at the lifeless body of her 39-year-old mother, who has just died of breast cancer. She lightly touched her mom’s fingers for a split second—afraid and, at the same time, ashamed of her fear. During all the years since, Kara had tried to push away the pain and confusion of losing her mother when she needed her most.

“After my mom died, my grandmother hugged me and said, ‘We’ll always be here for you,’ ” Kara says. “But there was not a lot of conversation to help me understand what had happened and to remember her. So I never really dealt with her death. Honestly, I don’t know how you
can
when you’re that young.”

As an adult, she coped by keeping up such a frenetic pace she didn’t have time to worry about getting sick herself. She’d had mammograms but was worried about radiation exposure, so with her doctor’s okay had skipped her
most recent one. And now, without any warning, a lump.
This is bad, this is so bad
played over and over in her head.

Kara’s sister, Kristin Gembala, was having Sunday dinner with her in-laws at her home in Overland Park, Kansas, when the phone rang. She picked up on the distress in Kara’s voice right away. Older by five years, Kristin had initially taken on a mothering role after their mom died, leaving just the two of them and their dad. That maternal role still fit: Whereas Kara left home to pursue two Fulbright fellowships and graduate work in Latin America, Kristin married the guy she’d dated since ninth grade, had four babies in ten years, and became a stay-at-home mom and busy school and community volunteer.