Because of my involvement in some community organizations, I realized recently just how odd it is that my family actually gathers around the table for dinner. EVERY NIGHT. Yes, it’s true. I already knew that my practice of cooking homemade meals for my family was more than a little unusual, that many people don’t cook…
Read more My family dinner time is sacred
So I read another article that just made my jaw drop. It said that while international adoptions are becoming more difficult, and thus are dropping in numbers, would-be parents from other countries are finding it fairly easy to adopt babies from here in the U.S. — and many of those are black babies, because there are…
Read more American black babies being adopted outside the U.S.
They say that when you have a child with a disability, you must grieve the loss of the “normal” child you expected to have. I did this for a few days when I first found out through amniocentesis that my unborn baby would have Down syndrome. After that, I was as eager as any mother…
Read more Re-grieving
So I saw this Yahoo news item about a little black girl whose parents withdrew her from a charter school whose dress and grooming policy forbids dreadlocks. Here’s what happened: Tiana, age 7, sometimes wears her hair styled in short, skinny dreadlocks. The school told her she didn’t look “presentable.” She cried on camera about…
Read more Hair-raising school policies
What to say about 20 years of happy married life? If it’s true that all happy families are alike, as Tolstoy put it, perhaps all happy marriages are alike and I have nothing to write about. Perhaps I’ll write about what our marriage isn’t, to start. I hear so many people saying they are so…
Read more 20 years and counting
So Amazon (aka the Book Behemoth) has announced a plan to offer cheaper Kindle versions of physical books customers have already bought. Seems pretty fair. If I’ve already paid $15 or more for a hard copy of a book, for instance, it does seem only right that I should get the ebook version for a…
Read more Amazon ‘Kindle MatchBook’: great idea that more publishers need to support
I wrote recently about dreams and that sometimes it’s just impossible to reach certain dreams and goals. Well, that’s tied in to other conclusions I have drawn about my own life. I’m in my 40s now and still have plenty of good years ahead, very likely, but I’m not 20 anymore. And I’m really generally…
Read more It’s OK to close doors in life