Would we learn to love more and give more and be more, all the while needing less?

My grandfather says we’re Americans, that we have to worry about ourselves and no one else. I wonder if that comes from a generation that didn’t have much or if it’s because he’s older and needs to be careful with his health and general well being.

Either way, I have to believe that, as humans, we’re capable of positive change. I have to believe that the next thirty years of my life won’t be filled with debt and a recession that pounds my do-what-you-love-most attitude to the ground.

I can’t sit around a kitchen table and believe that we are just Americans. That we should worry only about being Americans and feeding our economy and pushing onwards and upwards until we’re knee high in domestic spending.

I have to believe in third world countries and the power of a single pair of shoes or bowl of rice or pound of flour because I can see clearly in my head the world that would ensue if people like me didn’t. If people like me gave up.

Bodies would be lined up like dead soldiers on the side of the road, flies swarming over them in the dry heat. Distended stomachs would ache. Bellies would never feel full and beds would never be warm enough to keep out the night’s breeze passing through the hole in the wall that serves as a window.

Heartbeats would slow and life-giving hands would hold cold hands by the bedside. Mothers would cry that they loved their children too much yet they couldn’t save them. They could never be enough. Do enough. Love enough.

via weheartit.com

I don’t need to see it to know. Stringing together small gifts and sending them away to the depths of poverty is not going to end it all. Tomorrow will begin anew for children who will never know the feeling of fullness. Tomorrow will bring emotional battles for the parents who just want more for their children.

Don’t all parents want more?

Aren’t we all supposed to be each others’ parents?

Shouldn’t I look out for those with less, regardless of where they are or what they need?

I wonder if we shipped off, those of us who are too self-aware for our own good. Left them stranded in the middle of an African village for a few months.

Would their skin wrinkle and brown beneath the hot sun in the middle of the afternoon? Would they learn the skills necessary to stay alive? Or would it be other lessons?

Like the feel of sweaty palms clasped together in the middle of the night when disease kicks in and the medicine won’t help.  Or the hole in their stomach when the food supply runs short. Or the sense of community that builds up when no one has much but everyone still finds a way to have enough.

Would we learn to love more and give more and be more, all the while needing less?

Or would the sound of a slowed heartbeat scare us into submission, until we tell ourselves on sleepless nights in air conditioned rooms that we can never be enough? That we have our own problems. That the government is messed up and there is nothing we can do.

Let me tell you something: there is always, always something we can do. We just so often don’t like the answer.

I’m an equal-opportunity lover.

My mother didn’t teach me how to love suburban-style or warn me about falling in love with a boy for whom English was a second language.

Oops.

I’m concerned we’ve watched one too many movies set in the 1950s where everyone’s skin is the color of Wonderbread.

Is racism is now a chemical additive in our Skippy and Welch’s jars so that when we make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, all that bad stuff sticks to the inside of our mouths and lines our stomachs and eats away the acid?

I go to college in the south, where 80% of last year’s freshman class was white. My roommates don’t know about diversity. They never had the option to fall in love with a boy whose skin glows golden in the summer. Tanned arms wrapped around them on a breezy summer night like a blanket.

They might not think twice about cutting someone down because of the color of his skin or the love threaded into his mother’s cooking.

For the record, she made some of the best lasagna I’ve ever had in my life.

We’re not together anymore. Me and him. It had nothing to do with the way his mother says his name, a breath of air easing off her tongue in a way I could never master. Nor did it have to do with conversations between the two of them, while I stood on the other side of the staircase while they fought—her yelling in Spanish and him in English, just to drive her crazy.

It’s called code-switching.

And it doesn’t matter that he answers her in English, because she retorts back in Spanish.

That’s how love works, too. It happens to each of us differently, but we all know what it is. We all know the other person’s falling even if it feels like they’re speaking a different language.

I’ve been living with my grandparents for a month now. We don’t see much of each other except at dinner, and we generally get along. But sometimes, the generational gap creeps up on me from behind and pulls a sack over my head. Leaves me stuck in the middle of their kitchen with no words to defend someone else’s story.

My grandparents believe everyone in America should speak English. I never met my ex-boyfriend’s grandmother, even though she visited that whole first summer we dated. She doesn’t speak English, but I don’t think she needs to.

Because it doesn’t matter.

“If you live in the country, you should learn to speak the language,” my grandfather says to me. I try to find the words to tell him about the Hispanic families I drive by on the way to work in New Brunswick each morning. The mothers who push strollers and walk their antsy sons and daughters to the front steps of the elementary schools lining the road.

No words come. We are speaking different languages—me, the advocate for those with less money and more love, and him, the consummate logic-abider who does not budge for anyone.

I wonder how he would’ve reacted if my ex-boyfriend didn’t speak English. If my grandfather knew he isn’t technically an American citizen; that his mother sometimes stumbles over words and his cousins will probably always speak Spanish.

“Castilian Spanish,” my grandfather says to me. “That’s real Spanish.”

As if the rest of the dialects are fake imposters lined up in a county jail, waiting to be identified. Slapped on the wrist for trying to be a language. For trying to communicate amongst people, and share life and love and compassion.

If he weren’t from Madrid, should I have loved him any less? Should we cut someone else down because they came to America and didn’t have the resources or the brain capacity left to start learning all over again?

I wonder, if my grandfather moved to Spain, what he would do. I wonder if he knows that you cannot choose how you fall in love, but that you simply wake up, well after you’ve said your goodbyes, and realize the song “Forever Love (Digame)” by Anna Nalick will always freak you out.

Because my mother never taught me about the proper way to fall in love. For that, I can only thank her.