Someone’s

"Daddy, what's the difference between a march and a parade?" He swung his little feet from where he was sitting on the edge of the kitchen island. He had just barely started reading his new birthday present.

"Well, a parade is more like a show and it's meant to be watched. It has performances, costumes, props, and a lot of things to see and hear. You can stand in one spot the whole time and never move." Dad was over the sink pouring starchy, hot water from the pasta into the drain. "A march is meant to be participated in. You're supposed to join more than watch, and usually, there's more to listen to or do than to see. Both of them are pretty similar though, you do a lot of walking and standing." The drained pasta went back to the stove where it met some mangled vegetable pieces.

"Have you ever been to one?"

Bits and pieces of that decade brought a bitter curve at the corner of his mouth. Easily some of the proudest choices of his life, but also the most traumatizing to be relived. "Yeah, I have. Lots of them. I've been to the Electric Parade at Disneyland, and it was really cool to see how they made moving lights into a show. When we go to Pride with your Auntie and Mommy, that's a parade too. When you were small, we would just watch on the side, but when you started walking a lot, we walked with them and dressed up too." He turned on the overhead exhaust and started sprinkling various spices.

"What about the marches? Are those less fun?"

"Sometimes."

Behind the corner in the hallway, Mom listened to her baby boy ask the questions she wished she asked when she was a kid. Asking about how family participated in history, if the textbooks were really accurate, and how they should feel about it. Purely curious.

"Did you go to any parades or marches with Mommy before I was born?" There was a stall.

"I didn't know your Mommy yet. I stopped going as often ever since you. I had to be here, at home, with you. Because I wanted to take care of you."

"Do you know if she went to any?" By now the food was ready. He spooned each portion into a shallow bowl and lined them up on the counter like Goldilocks bowls.

"She didn't want to go to any. After you were born and you could come with us, we started going to a few. What marches and parades are you reading about? What book did Mommy get you?"

"It's called 2020 Vision. You guys were alive back then, right?"

She turned away and slipped through the garage door to get to work. Maybe she shouldn't have given an eight-year old a poetry book of history like that, but after the police were called on him last week for playing fetch with the dogs outside, he had to know from family before the world told him anything else.

And it sucked that he could only really ask his dad about it, about that part of where he comes from; because Mommy, Auntie, Grams and Gramps and cousins couldn't tell him anything that made him feel important. And it makes her feel guilty. Guilty to know she can't really, truly be part of that conversation, and that that responsibility has to fall solely on Daddy. And while Mommy is a different person now with different morals, different knowledge, different priorities, the past is the past and it happened the way it did. And she was a part of the problem that plagued their people over centuries.

There's nothing she can do to fix her ignorance in the past and to erase herself from the textbooks and the press that she was once so highlighted and vocal in. No longer the face of a hypocritical message, no longer cornered and barred by peer pressure and money, by religion and guilt. And perhaps one day she can have conversations with her child about how she came to meet, become friends, and eventually love their father. Because her presence and prevalence in the propaganda against the justice movements combatting the hypocrisy and premeditated crime of her own community is the root of her strength now as a mother and as an advocate.

As a Black woman, where was she during the 21st century civil rights movements? As an Indigenous man, why was he more active and supportive of her community than she was? Why had she taken so long to break free of the prejudice she not only witnessed but lived every day? And how old does he have to turn before she can have that conversation with him? How old, how mature, how traumatized will he be before he learns the lessons his mother has to teach?

Will he have to learn it from the poetry of her sisters and the bible verses that were left out of her speeches? Will he have to see the journalism that surrounded her proud advocacy for the system and society that is inherently against her genetics? Does he have to see his mother's comments and internet arguments to understand that his very existence would have never happened without violence, without listening, without compassion, without some sort of force? And when that day comes, will it be because she chose to confront it, or will it be because he had to ask her? Will other people identify him as her son before he understands what that means? And will she be ready for that conversation when it's time to have it? Will she have the conversation as she hopes, or will she cower back to comfort and deflect like she had in the past. And will he one day understand that she knows there's nothing she can do to apologize or make up for being on the wrong side of history.