All good-good

The news reached out and hit me like a fist:

bell hooks, the author, poet, professor, activist, and social critic who helped push feminism away from its white, middle-class worldview toward a more inclusive movement, died this past week. She was only 69.

The loss felt especially poignant to me as I steeled myself to celebrate the 18th birthday of my firstborn, who, on the eve of her coming of age, will come of age in a new, more unsettling time for women. She will be "Ittybit" no longer.

It seems like only a blink since this soon-to-woman joined our world. We remember how she came into it standing up. Asserting herself. How I didn't know her the way I thought I would just from having her swimming around in me for so long.

I'm not sure why, but the notion came as a surprise. As if such a thing weren't possible. That, somehow, this baby of mine wouldn't be a person separate from me starting on Day One. Or that intuition could only take me so far.  I didn't quite understand that the work of getting to know this new person would be the most laborious part of parenthood, but also the most gratifying.   

So we turned to books to help guide us on this journey. We thumbed through Spock and Sears as if they contain the perfect recipe for child-rearing. Indexed alphabetically for convenience. 

It was about this time that a gift arrived containing some of the most instructive examples of the kind of parents we wanted to be:

hooks' lyrical children's book "Homemade Love," introduced us to "Girlpie," and the trust parents can build around their families with unconditional love and forgiveness. With love, there was no hurt that could not be healed. It turned out to be one of the most comforting book we owned. The way her words came off the page and into the room helped soften the hard edges of our day. It soothed tears, lulled her to sleep, and invited pondering.


We read that book so often the pages became raggedly at the edges and the paper thinned where I'd traced the words. I knew all of them by heart. "Homemade Love" turned out to be my first and best field guide to parenthood. It was also an introduction to hooks' extensive work on the radical possibilities of feminism, race, and self-determinism and how it all interconnects through love.

For sure, her words comforted me in their artful and gentle reminders that transformation isn't all of a sudden like a bolt of lightning. It isn't delineated by things at all. It is a process of doing. A good life, while not free of suffering, has its basis in love.

"To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending."

"True resistance begins with people confronting pain ... and wanting to do something to change it."

All these years later, it occurs to me that “Homemade Love” was the parenting lesson that stuck with me best and made me seek out more. Though hooks' passing is most certainly a terrible loss, it is also a reminder that her life's work is an enduring treasure … one we can take with us wherever we go. One that new mothers will find and pass on to their children through the act of love.

She will always make you understand that it's never too late.