...is it shakes us awake.

I took a walk this morning around my neighborhood; I do this when things get loud and confusing in my mind. I had just finished typing up the final version of our script for the Empowerment performance on Saturday. It's a sweet and rich story, with many opportunities for intervention, but something was bugging me about it.

How come it still seems like the kid's fault? No matter how many ways we swung the story, our antagonist character, the father, always seemed to come off kind, confused, doing his best, hardly to blame. For whatever reason, we kept crafting scenes where the teenage daughter was petulant, irritable and rude. Again and again, the story seemed to say it was her fault for being treated badly. She was asking for it.

At first, I thought nothing of it. Teenagers are petulant, irritable and rude. We were being honest in our storytelling. But something was still wrong.

Why are we protecting the parents here?

There had been some anxiety throughout the process that the play would be too edgy for the parents to watch. "We don't want to alienate them," many of the youth said. So we created a sweet, "realistic" parent who, for some reason, kicks his teenage daughter out of the house for having a girlfriend.

It hit me when I rounded the bend on my walk today, under the reaching arms of a flowering tree--oh.

We are protecting the parents here, because a large part of us as a group (and me as a facilitator) still feel our bad treatment by overwhelmed or confused parents is mostly our fault.

Click.

I realized also, in that same instant, that the images of the father dying alone, of the daughter estranged from her misunderstanding parent, had touched me on a personal level. I worry about that stuff. I live about a thousand miles away from my parents. They're getting older. Something about watching the enactment in class yesterday had shaken awake some deep fears in me, and made it hard to keep facilitating.

But, as insights usually do, this one has cleared the noise in my mind. Now I know why I was feeling so strange yesterday, and how I can direct the youth on Saturday to portray a stronger antagonist.

I am excited for our performance on Saturday. I hope to see you all there.

With love,

C