So my name is Reenie O'Brien King. And I have two children. My son is Tiernan King, and he is three, he will be for next month. And my daughter is Adeline King, and Adeline just turned two and they're 21 months apart.
For me, I grew up in Chicago in Old Town and I'm an urban kid. We worked in our family's business, we were exposed to urbaness and I couldn't imagine not living that way with our children. And I think the big draw was all my family was here in Chicago. And because I wanted my kids to be raised around a network of family as well, not to mention like, it's nice, if I can get a shower and someone comes over and helps with the kids like and that's what family is for. And I guess the awareness of Chicago is I am fully aware of the blessings and the just inherent privileges that I've grown up with. I know that it's not the case for everyone. I know that my race, I'm a white woman, and that is a big privilege ticket. And I know that Chicago has pockets of neighborhoods, and every neighborhood is so different. So I think people can come from a big city like this, and if you grow up in one little pocket of a neighborhood, it can be so different than another, just the way it's set up and socio and economics also.
But for me, Chicago feels very Midwestern. And I liked the East Coast and I never felt more Midwestern than I did when I lived on the east coast. There's a friendliness, there's a saltiness to Midwesterners, and I like that, and so much of the Midwest is sort of sprawling, except Chicago is a big city.
I'm a very fortunate person and Chicago is expensive. So I think we're a household of educators and we're not struggling by any means but Chicago is not a cheap place to live. So that was something that sort of lingered in our minds in our conversation as a married couple, as moves were coming. And I don't know, I don't think those go away. I think people are always thinking about, how am I going to get this for my kid or where are we going to live, and how do we pay for this? And while we can have those thoughts, we also know that there are people way less fortunate than us that think about the cost of living, and the cost of food, and the cost of growing children and needing clothes and Chicago is an expensive city.
I think even before some of the... I don't even know, just some of the incidences most recently in Chicago. And it's my husband and I, we've taught at a number of schools, and we get our continuing education our race relation exposures as teachers and we get experience in the classroom for how to best teach so many diverse families. And I teach little kids, he teaches big kids, sometimes I don't think there's much of a difference between a teenage boy and a kindergarten boy, but they just wear deodorant then. But we, we think about it, we think about it as people, we think about it as educators and as parents. I think it's hard to not have our minds full of the constant like, "Am I doing everything right?" And it's from everything. It's, "Oh, did they get the vitamins? Are they eating? Did we talk about this enough? Oh, did I answer this question correctly? Am I talking to them about diversity in an age appropriate way? Does it make sense? Do I even bring it up?"
And there's something about little children at this phase that, at least I find in my professional experience, and especially as a mom, that they're really accepting. Children, what they're told, they begin to understand, and they believe, and I think it's really important, especially as a white family in Chicago to help children understand diversity, race diversity, gender diversity, sexual orientation. And I say all this, and my kids are two and three. So I can't say like, "Let's sit down and talk about race relations." At least, I haven't found a successful way to say it so pointedly to toddlers.
And I am someone who can go to the library. And when I get the princess books, I make sure I get... I can't remember who it's by. But we just recently got a book called Princess Hair. And it's all about little girls, and African American hair. And I think that matters. I didn't have books like that in my school growing up or in my household. Not by any fault of my parents, but it just wasn't thought about, it wasn't readily available, or encouraged. And it's important to me to sit down and read a book like that with my kids on my lap because they just learn it. They learn diversity and they can come up with their own questions. And there were even in my own ignorance comes up because names of hairstyles I don't know. Of course, I know what, I've seen them, but I don't know the names of them. So it's almost joyous, that I'm like, "Oh, I didn't know that had a name," or when they ask you about it and I can say like, "What do you think of that?" Sometimes my son's like, "Nothing." And Adeline is like, "It's pretty." And that is so simple. It's a very simplified way that I'm approaching race relations and racial diversity and tensions and my kids are two and three. But I think that if you expose children and you talk about things in an accepting way, at least it's my hope as an educator and as a mom that you plant the seeds of appreciating diversity and also recognizing where you come in that spectrum like where they will be as young white children. So I'm getting emotional.
