Vaboomer -- Baby Boomer Views & News

Winter Holidays of Light and Love

In these days of increasing winter darkness Vaboomer wants to make your days lighter by cooking up some new things for December--in addition to bringing you some slow cooker recipes http://www.delish.com/recipes/cooking-recipes/12-slow-cooker-recipes?gt1=47005 to help you manage the fast season. We'll be bringing you music, arts, cooking tips, dealing with loneliness and stress, free gifts and more to help you celebrate, cope with and manage the holiday season--winter solstice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_solstice#Mean_Geimrech_.28Celtic.29, Kwanza, Hannukah, Christmas, Bhodi Day and more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhi_Day.

Winter Solstice: Giving Thanks for Longtime Friends

Dark Days - Warm Spirits

We' re going towards the darkest time of the year Solstice and yet my spirits are rising and I feel the light of love returning to my soul.

How can this be?  December 22 will be the longest and darkest day of the year and the official beginning of the deepening of cold cold winter Winter Darkness.  When winter is the time we huddle indoors, seperately and more isolated.

Yet, I feel my inner flame beginning to increase.

My creativity grow and my future look ever brighter. I think there are many reasons this is happening--not the least of which is that less than a month after Winter Solstice we will install a new administration with a smart unflappable and friendly president. While some are cashing in on the event with huge scalper fares, others are intent on providing inexpensive ways to get to DC Obama Inauguration/.

Attending the Inauguration

I hope to go to the inauguration with my daughter, my ex and my good friend, Jane. President Elect Obama will be my daughter's president and while we all have the highest hopes for his ability to bring us back from the brink of disaster and chart a new national route, we are also sanguine that he is only human and that it will take all of us to change our national course and change ourselves and our relationships. So this historic event is to me as much a referendum on us as a nation of more friendly and connected citizens as it is the installation of a new president and a new administration.

 And that brings me back to my friend, Jane. We were ardent (and still are) workers for and supporters of a better life for women and girls. And as we marched, lobbied and organized together over the years we became closer and closer friends. Now we are 30 years older than our then 30s-40s, and still growing closer as friends and still growing as humans. Indeed our friendship has strengthened over the years and been a sustaining force during the slings and arrows of of our lives.

So here's to long time friends and the love that flows from those deepening relationships. And here's to the possibility of our nation becoming a more accepting, more understanding, more connected family of friends. I am so thankful for my old friends and as my mom always said--"a stranger is just a friend you do not yet know".

Give Thanks for the REAL American Family

They rarely grasp that they are stabbing you or your kid in the heart when they ask, "Oh, who are her REAL parents?" sometimes pointing directly at your child and speaking as if she or he or they are not present. With this question questioning your authenticity, the questioner is effectively demoting you to the category of fake place holder, just serving instead of and until the "real" parents show up. (I always think and not charitably, I can assure you--what am I: Chopped liver?") What they do not realize is that they have just simultaneously questioned the authenticity of and then roundly denied your family.

If you have learned to control your temper, which I can do sometimes, you reply in a tight polite hiss...."I am", or "We are"  depending on your life configuration. If you are not in a forgiving mood, or you are just fed up with these ignorant, bullying and intrusive questions, you just do the erace gesture--waving your hands in the air rubbing out the poison darts flying your and your child's way. And then you walk away, commenting loudly to your kid(s) while flinging your words over your shoulder at the offending person, "Can you believe how dumb and rude some people are?" Or if you sense there  is something genuine, something they are yearning to reveal, or some underlying message your questioner is posing in the guise of this question, and it takes some doing to intuit what might be the real thing going on here, you answer with straight information. More than likely in this case, you will find that there is an adoption related connection here. Either the person herself had been adopted, or as in the case of one of my favorite librarians, it turned out that his dad had been adopted. Bill adores his father and we have grown closer since our converstion: a whole new communication opened.

At the heart of this real parent question is do you fit the stereotype of the REAL AMERICAN FAMILY? And if you are not look-alike parent and child, if you have age differences, if you are interethnic, your authenticity and validity as a real family--real parent and real daughter or son--is in question and put on trial in the court of public opinion and challenged in the arena of the heart.

The question of The Real American Family was a constant if mostly implicit issue in the recent electoral season.

President Elect Obama had rumors flying about him because his father was African, his white American born mother single, then remarried. He was raised by his white grandparents. He was grew up in Hawaii and then Indonesia. Could he be a real American if he had not grown up in a real American family? Can we trust him? Is he a secret terrorist? and on and on...

Senator McCain was rumored to have fathered his own daughter who was born in India!! Because he and Cindy McCain and their daughter were not look alike parents and child, people made up a really insulting explanation for their own confusion.

Even Gov. Palin was subject to rumors that she was the real parent of her teen daughter's child.

Vice President Elect Biden most closely conformed to the Real American Family stereotype, but even he was somewhat suspect as a "softy " due to his single dad years.

When we look at these national leaders and their complicated families, what we see IS the REAL AMERICA FAMILY--diverse, interethnic, international, interage, adoptive, and biological, headed by two mommies or two daddies, large, small, single parented, multimarraiged, grandparent headed and loving--all. We are a complicated nation. And we have complicated families. One of my colleagues in Beijing did her doctoral work in Rochester, NY determining, that yes, indeedy, Americans did have families--just complex ones. If my Chinese colleague could figure out that our families are as diverse as our population, then surely we individuals can as well.

President Elect Obama has invited us to climb out of our little separate canoes, where we are all fighting each other and paddling as hard as we can not to tip over the edge of the waterfall and crash on the economic rocks below. He has asked us all to climb into a big ship of state and all of us in all our varied families paddle together to bring our nation back from the brink and find a new channel and new understanding of what it means to be American.

We could do better on this day of giving thanks while we break cornbread, lasagna, pita, rice, spring rolls, noodle pudding, kasha varnishkas, chapattis, tortillas, bagels, pickled herring, rice and beans, mealie meal and fufu, than to give thanks for our REAL American Family in all its lovely varieties and colors.

So, yes, to your question of who are her real parents--my answer is an unequivocal and forthright and PROUD, "I AM." Maybe soon we won't be asking or asked that question anymore.