I’m a parent. I’m an artist. I’m an activist. I’m working on many projects and am trying to streamline, so I’m going to start brainstorming.  The weather is strange today. Windy, rainy, late May. Cold, suprisingly cold. I want to be a creative activist. I have several areas of focus. My medium is visual art, I want to develop collaborative projects that talk about my experience raising a daughter who is Deaf and her experience as she gets older. I was reading an article this morning about the color of sound. How soundwaves do not have a true color, but sound has been represented in colors of our Chakras, musical notes, piano chords, and others ways. It made me think about how if someone is Deaf they hear sound in a different way than someone who can hear. I wondered if they would match different colors with different sounds? I was trying to come up with an art project that had to do with sound and different experiences people have with sound depending on your level of hearing and your own life experience.

I am working on starting a Deaf/HH kids/parents playdate/ meet up in Marin county. I’ve never organized like this before. I am thinking about a monthly playdate at a park or somewhere fun for the little kids, mainly the Kindergartners and their siblings. Then having a big meet up every two Months? maybe three? This would be a multi age one, kindergartners to twelfth grade. We could have something educational for the parents, like going over IEP’s, an ASL or SEE sign workshop, or other things people were interested in learning about.

I  had another experience lately that prompted me to do a bunch more research on the topic of school segregation in the Bay Area. A parent I met at a birthday party who lives in a diverse nieghborhood in the east bay said she was not sending her soon to be kindergartner to her neighborhood school because it had a low score. She is instead, sending her kid to a charter school. When I did my school tours I noticed the schools in Marin were very segregated, there’s white schools and Latino schools. I looked at the demographics of our neighborhood and our neighborhood school. My neighborhood is  half  white, one fourth mixed races, one fourth Hispanic. Our neighborhood school is 84% Hispanic and 11% White. It said on-line that 36% of people in my neighborhood send their kids to private school. I realized that it was white parents that are perpetuating the segregation in our public schools. I suppose that’s not so shocking to most people, but I am surprised how bad it is. I am surprised that the people I talk to and see, they are liberals and did not vote for Trump, and seem cool, but they are perpetuating racism.  I would like to do collaborative art projects in my community about my community. I would like to change the way people think. I would like to end institutional racism and promote strong communities where people care about each other, and their public schools. I was never a private school person.

I still have to finish writing my second book, but with this flux it’s hard to know exactly what I want to write, my ideas about being a parent and how I became a parent keep changing.

My solo art practice always needs time as well. That’s why I’m trying to figure out can I combine any of these projects together? That’s why I want to be a creative activist. I just need to come up with the project.

I feel like since the kids are going into Kindergarten I want to do something with my passions and my talents. I want to contribute and use my time to do something beneficial.