On Silver Linings

Earlier this month, Jessica Lahey (@jesslahey) posed the following question on Twitter: 

I responded that we have more family dinners in our home and are enjoying the gift of time. I also added that there have been more opportunities for in-depth conversations. While I understand there's a trade-off given the physical and social isolation, that this gift of time is something I'm not going to get back when this virus is finally under control. 

These family conversations have been on my mind a lot lately. One of the reasons has nothing to do with the pandemic at all. Twenty-five years ago this coming May, I graduated from one of my all-time favorite places in the world: The College of the Holy Cross. It was a life-changing experience for me, as one book (Savage Inequalities, by Jonathan Kozol), in one education class inspired me to go into teaching. More than that, though, I fell deeply into the Jesuit mission of the school and have tried to live my life as a "man for others." It wasn't that I just wanted to teach. I wanted to teach where I was needed. 

That commitment took me to the Near Westside of Chicago, to a neighborhood where people rarely went unless there was a Bulls or a Blackhawks home game. Three years later, a young woman from Vermont joined our staff through the same volunteer program. One year later, we had the last first date of our lives, and the Ricca Family began. My Wife is the reason that I have a chance to have family dinners. My Wife is the reason that I have two wonderful children. My Wife gave me the gift of family. 

As I thought about all these ideas' confluence, I discovered something even more remarkable about the conversations we are having as a family. They are happening for my children much earlier in their lives than they happened for me. 

I did not start thinking about systemic racism until I was at Holy Cross. I didn't contemplate what social justice was until it was brought up in a class I was taking. I didn't begin to think about my contribution to systemic racism, as a male, full of white privilege, until my sophomore year. I remember that day clearly. I was sitting on the dirt floor of a one-room hut on the side of a mountain in Tlamacazapa, Mexico. As part of an immersion program from Holy Cross, I listened to an indigenous Mexican woman tell us her life story. The joy she shared with us was contrasted so starkly by the poverty she lived in. And her one message to us, the white, privileged college students, was this: tell our story. 

If my memory is accurate, that was the summer of 1994, when I was still nineteen years old. When this pandemic began, My Children were eleven and thirteen years old, eight and six years before I started grappling with issues of race, equity, and justice. Now, I will be honest, we have not handled all these family conversations well. I have tripped over my words and made my own children feel bad about their white privilege. There are conversations I wish I could take back. 

And still, we struggle through them as a family. We have the time to, given all the restrictions we are living through. I don't know how many of the seeds we are planting will take root, which is parenting's reality. We are discussing what we value as a family, and it is up to Our Boys to choose what they do with those values in the coming years of their own lives. 

No, we're not ignoring the hardships. But we're trying to embrace this opportunity as a family.