Writing Challenge: Pride

Pride

If I was shouting out answers for “Human Brain Cloud” (or the old fashioned, non-techie version of “what comes to mind?”) my gut punch response to “pride” would likely be “boast”.

Maybe the oozing ball discomfort I feel when I hear “pride” is due to my church background’s ingrained association with the idea of bragging as sinful? Or maybe it’s the be-sweet-and-kind-and-never-brag-about-what-you-can-do-especially-if-it-is-better-than-what-some-boy-can-do expectations of what’s gifted to you when you arrive in the world with a vagina? Forwhatever reason it is as though a demon swims through my veins, stirring up an ache associated with a word that should instead be one commemorating achievements and enabling exuberant pats on the back. Why shouldn’t I be proud of what I have done? Why do the framed certificates from my B.A., B.Ed and M.Ed hang in a dark corner of the basement where no one but Daddy Long Legs, and the occasional arm brushing against them as they reach to twist and turn a fuse in the nearby panel, see them? Why did I debate back and forth for days about whether to hang my marathon bib on my classroom wall?

But then again I have to ask: would I have been able to accomplish these things were it not for my white, middle class parents who, although they had meager incomes meaning my student loans grew into sums larger than my first house mortgage, never stop assuming I would go on to postsecondary education? Would I have been able to forge my way through if my Dad had ducked out of our lives, or my Mom had substance abuse issues? If I had been kicked out of apartment after apartment, been made to choose scrapings of meals over bars of soap and toothpaste, where might I be now?

How much can — and should — I take credit for, and how much is just pure born at the “right” time and place? Yes, I know my pastor would be shivering in his Hawaiian patterned shirts, and no, I don’t discredit God for it. Yet I know I am lucky. Fortunate. And somehow the link between that fortune and pride seems to provoke an uneasy gag reflex (which then forces me to reconsider the ridiculous choice of a butter tart for breakfast).

The next, more positive, thought association involves a rainbow flag flying deliciously upright in a cloudless sky. These are lives — and — battles worthy of flying flags. When I draw my sister and her wife into my family tree examples for my primary students I am proud. Not of what I have done, but what she, and so many others, have overcome to be where they are (which is still not far enough, still not equal enough). My pride more freely extends, and seems easily more permissible, when unfurled on others.

And of course a third shout out in the “What Comes to Mind?” game we appear to be playing would have to be Creedence Clearwater Revival. Shout out to Proud Mary…although now pity wells up for poor Proud Mary and all that dirty water work she steamboated through…Poor Proud Mary and that damn pride of hers…