Widen The Path

Widen The Path

John Paul Derryberry

I remember a client of mine talking about how the world wasn’t set up for them to be successful. Through tears in their eyes, they explained the abuse they had endured, and the string of people who said they would help them but never really wanted to help. They ended their plea with, why is the path to acceptance so narrow? It was a moment in my life when I put into perspective what I was trying to accomplish as a storyteller, a public speaker, and a social worker. I was not here to save anybody but to do my best to make the road wider, easier to access, and more acceptable for many to travel. The road was narrow and that was unfair to so many people.

So imagine my disgust when a member of our Congress stated this week something along the lines of, you have to be a "biological mom" to have an opinion about how to interact with educators and make recommendations to schools about the learning environment. It was a leader of this country who proposed the path of narrowing many mother’s abilities to have an opinion and being able to voice that opinion. It was dismissive because there are many women who don't fit this leader's "correct definition" of motherhood. There are lots of reasons I can take umbrage with this line of thinking:

1 I’m not a biological father; my two kids are mine through adoption. 

2. My whole professional career is based on making paths to acceptance as wide as possible. 

3. As a leader, I believe the job is doing our best to care for as many people as possible, even folks that do not look like us, act like us, and or agree with us. 

4. I genuinely have this belief that knowledge and wisdom come from many places. When we start excluding knowledge and wisdom because we don’t like the source, we are in a bad place. 

And, after years of expanding acceptance to different groups, we seem to be at a time in history where narrowing acceptance is back in style. The people narrowing what’s acceptable are happy to trim the ground beneath other folks, to make it less stable. All this is an effort to make themselves feel superior, feel like their actions should not be questioned, and they will only converse with people who look, act, and believe lik they do. That last part brings on great sadness within me. I know from experience and stories from so many others, what it feels like to think you have to walk a balance beam to find success; living every moment of what feels like disaster. That is not where we want society to be. It leads to desperate people, taking desperate measures that lead to painful outcomes. 

Narrowing views, access, accountability all lead to dark paths, where the only people who can feel any sense of pride, accomplishment, or sense of belonging, adhere to increasingly stringent and unattainable standards. While it probably won't be easy for the next couple of years; those of us in the path-building business are going to have to double and triple our efforts to expand the paths people can take to belong. We must continue to expand the definitions of acceptability, including listening to those we don’t agree with, or we will end up like this leader, attempting to shrink the definition of "mother", when we all know so many great mothers that don’t fit the traditional definition.

Honestly though, keeping things traditional is often the narrow thing to do. It comes from a fear that the more we allow for others, the less there is for ourselves. I have found just the opposite to be true. The more I have created space for others, the more my life has felt better. The famous saying about building a bigger table should apply to roads. Build them wide as possible, narrow is too difficult. I can't imagine thinking I have to walk a balance beam to feel like I belong. No one should have to walk a path that narrow.