This morning at Reading Circle we will conclude our discussion of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In this autobiography of her youth, Maya delivers wisdom niblet after wisdom niblet. The kind of wisdom only gleaned by a young mind with keen observation skills. With poetic clarity she reminds readers again and again what it’s like to navigate the world with only so many years’ experience to draw upon. She paints a vivid picture of the world as she interpreted it as a child, and she does so with such brilliance, insight, poetry and humor that I practically have the entire book underlined.
In the final chapter she describes her mother’s compassionate understanding and ability to allow her baby to struggle and work for what she wants — to become the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Maya explains that Mother understood the perversity of life.
Mother understood, and more importantly, she allowed Maya to discover it too— in her own time and her own way. The comfort with discomfort that Mother displayed (both her own discomfort and that of others) demonstrates her intimate relationship with struggle and hardship as well as her faith in her daughter’s ability to navigate the complex world. Maya learned not to sugar coat life’s hardships, nor succumb to any victimhood thinking.
Unlike Maya, I didn’t grow up black in a world made for whites, nor did I grow up in an age pre-civil and pre-women’s rights. Instead, I grew up a member of the majority in the comfortable suburbs of a small town, in the age of Baby Sitters Club books and the Brady Bunch. I grew up with the Huxtables, the Sievers and the Cleavers. I grew up thinking that all of life’s difficulties could be sorted out in a hundred pages or a half an hour. I grew up thinking that the struggling that comes with being human was an option, and I was failing miserably. I spent my time not observing the people and situations around me like Maya, but instead studying the habits and social norms of actors on television or cookie-cutter characters in children’s books. And I tried my damnedest to emulate perfection. Is it any wonder that I thought there was something inherently wrong with me and my family? We were nothing like what I saw on the tube.
My grown-up attraction to Maya’s tell-it-like-it-is honesty and vulnerability touches the same sweet spot that lit up three years ago at my first appointment with my hairdresser. I can’t remember how I responded to her greeting and “how are you?”, but whatever I said set her off to clucking and repeating,
Life is hard. Oh, life is hard. Honey, life is hard!
No one had ever said that to me before, and in the matter of a moment I felt like I’d landed in a lap I’d always wanted to inhabit. I felt understood. I felt the presence of a truth speaker. I felt connection and the openness that comes with honesty and accepting struggle. With not pretending to have my shit together. There was no judgement of the “you should just be grateful sort”. There was no advice. There was no rescue. Just solidarity. I recall this moment as one of the prominent notches in my personal timeline. I see it as a shifting point for how I want to view the world hard and inhabit spaces.
Like Maya, her mother and my hairdresser, I want to acknowledge that life is hard (maybe the Buddha said something along these lines too?). Like them, I want to offer compassionate empathy while not distracting from or pretending the pain is not there. Most importantly, as Maya demonstrates page after page, no matter how hard life is, it’s also magical and painstakingly beautiful if you’re paying attention, and as humans, we can do hard things.
