PT-LawMom

I really enjoy the articles The Nation puts out, but two from its latest issue really struck me.

The first is a story by Ellen Bravo on the growing trend of children not telling their parents about illness because they are afraid that missing work will cause their parent to lose their job.

First I stopped by the group from Wisconsin and heard Robbie Bickerstaff describe how her son Eric, then age 7, got hit by a car on the way home from school but chose not to tell her for fear she’d lose her second-shift job if she didn’t go in to work. Later an older sibling called her to say that Eric was crying because his arm hurt from being hit by the car and she had to take him to the hospital. When Robbie informed her boss, he was adamant: “Leave and you’re fired.” Her pleas didn’t move him. She did leave; she was fired. Eric turned out to have a broken arm.

I moved on to the 9to5 members from Pennsylvania and shared Robbie’s story. Carissa Peppard, the 21-year-old daughter of activist Kiki Peppard, was sitting next to her mom. “I’ve never told my mother this before,” she said, “but when you’re a kid, you know everything. Whenever I was sick, I’d ask myself, ‘Should I tell Mom? Will we have groceries this week if she stays home with me?’ If I could, I just dragged myself to school.”

This is horrible! As I mentioned in my Father’s Day piece, my very busy Dad always came to pick me up when I was sick (and I was sick a LOT). Looking back, I can see how hard it must have been for him to get away. However, thank God his job wasn’t threatened my my illnesses!! I encourage all of you to visit Working America and sign their various petitions to effect change on behalf of working families.

The second article is by Ellen Chesler and highlights some recent immigrant college graduates’ good works.

Natalya Berezovskaya, the class salutatorian with a 3.99 GPA, was just seven years old when her family escaped political unrest and a resurgence of anti-Semitism in post-Soviet Moscow. When she arrived in New York, Natalya spoke no English, and her father, a chemical engineer, was forced to take odd jobs as a waiter and a delivery man. But Natalya was determined to get ahead. She learned English and graduated from high school as the class valedictorian. As a biochemistry major at Hunter, she volunteered in city hospitals and developed a passion to become a doctor. This fall, she will attend medical school at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on a prestigious Jonas Salk scholarship, which she won for her outstanding research on DNA and cellular disfunctions leading to cancer.

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So there you have it. Each one of these extraordinary young people is likely to bring distinction to his or her family, city, and adoptive country. Not a likely subversive among them. Each one deserves to be treated with basic human dignity and accorded full benefits of citizenship. But never mind.

These are the immigrants more people need to see. This unresolved fight causes so much harm.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 5:53 am and is filed under Immigration, Mommy stuff . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.