Inventing My Life

2014 is Journey, Practice, Thrive

2014-01-03T10:33:00.000-05:00

One of the reasons that I've started blogging again - and intend to keep at it through the year - is that I've realized I need the structure and discipline of writing in order to get my life back on track. I need the accountability of putting goals out into the universe in order to achieve them.

I didn't choose a theme for 2013 or any of the months in the year, didn't set any goals, didn't announce any big plans...and predictably, I ended up with nothing at the end of the year.

So this year, I am back on the blogging wagon and I am going to use blogging as a way to reach my goals.

With that in mind, I hereby announce three words for 2014:

Journey. Practice. Thrive.

Journey is to remind me that it takes time to get wherever you are going. I am someone who not only doesn't enjoy the journey, I think there shouldn't have to be a journey in the first place. I want to have a clean and orderly house without picking up a mop or broom or sponge; I want to have a fit and strong body without doing a single sit-up or putting down a single spoonful of ice cream; I want to have a full bank account without waking up and going to work for even one day. In 2014, I am going to focus on the journey toward my goals and remind myself that journeys are necessary and can even be enjoyable.

Practice is a similar word for me this year...if I am going to reach my goals, I'm going to have to put some good habits in place to get there. Practice, practice, practice makes perfect. But I also need to remember that part of practicing is failing and trying again. I've gotten too used to giving up easily lately, or not even trying because I don't want to fail, and this year I intend to keep practicing no matter what.

Finally, 2014 is the year I am going to thrive. For too long I've been simply trying to survive, and now it's time to finally focus on thriving.

Journey. Practice. Thrive.

What are your word(s) for 2014?

Let's Say Goodbye to 2013

2014-01-01T14:24:00.002-05:00

Most nights at bedtime, Elfe and I have a little ritual we call "let's say goodbye to {insert day of the week here}." It's sort of our version of not ever going to bed angry, and it goes like this...

I start by asking if we have any questions about the day. Usually there aren't any questions, but sometimes Elfe will ask me something about my day at work or I'll ask her about something from her day at school. I figure it's good for her to get in the habit of telling me about her day now, before she hits the secretive teen years.

Then I ask if there's anything sad from the day. The idea is to get rid of the sad stuff so it doesn't linger around and get carried over into the next day.

Then I ask if there's anything happy from the day. Sometimes there are no questions and sometimes there's nothing sad to get rid of, but I always insist that we each come up with at least one happy thing from the day. I want us to go to sleep with happy thoughts on our minds, and I firmly believe that even on the saddest day there is at least one bright spot to be thankful for.

Then I say "Goodbye {insert day of the week here}, get ready for {insert next day of the week here}." And we go to sleep.

Now, let's say goodbye to 2013...

Any questions? Ask them in the comments section and I will try to answer.

Sad things...boy, I could go on and on and on here...let's just say 2013 was pretty depressing in general. My financial situation is at a low point - two credit cards maxed out, my credit rating in the toilet (which I discovered when I tried to refinance my mortgage at the end of the year), no savings at all, overdue bills and bounced checks and late fees galore, and my Barefoot Books business did not bring in as much extra income this year as I was counting on. Things are pretty sad on the domestic front as well...my house is cluttered, disorganized, in desperate need of a thorough cleaning, and several things need to be repaired but I have no idea when I will have the money to take care of them. I'm pretty sure I should be sad about my physical health as well, but since I haven't been to a doctor in at least three years I can't tell you exactly how sad the situation might be. I do know that my stress level is through the roof and I've done entirely too much yelling this year, which also makes me sad.

But, there are also some happy things...I got a new job in April and even though the salary is much lower than I was making before (in the job I hated), this job has fantastic benefits and my supervisor gives me as much freedom and flexibility as I need - I can arrange my hours to bring Elfe to her dance class once a week, leave early on the days when school lets out early, take vacation time when school is out, work from home if I need to wait for a delivery or a repair person, and just in general fit my life into my job and vice versa. I'm extremely happy at this job and feel lucky to have found it. And while my financial situation is stressful right now, it looks like I AM going to be able to refinance my mortgage despite my abysmal credit score and my monthly payments will be almost $200 lower as soon as the paperwork goes through (keep your fingers crossed that this happens soon!).

Another thing that makes me happy about 2013 is an idea I found on Pinterest over a year ago that really worked! Starting last January, Elfe and I would write down good things that happened to us on little scraps of paper and put them in an empty mason jar. We did this all year, and last night before we went to bed we opened up the mason jar and read all the notes. There were all sorts of happy memories in there, from special play dates with friends; to fun days out together; to events where we had great Barefoot sales; to the day I found out about my new job; to our annual trip to see the Urban Nutcracker at the end of the year. It was a fantastic way to remember that even during a "bad" year, there are always bright spots to be found.

So now, let's say goodbye to 2013 and get ready for 2014! I, for one, am looking forward to a great year - how about you?

Bah and Humbug

2013-12-30T09:58:00.001-05:00

In a year that has been mostly miserable (more to come on that in a later post), I guess it's fitting that Christmas this year was just about the most miserable I ever remember a holiday being.

How miserable was my Christmas?

So miserable that I'm blogging about it.

The highlight of our trip to NY for the holiday was a stomach bug that swept through my parents' house all week, hitting a different person every day. It arrived with my niece from the West Coast the weekend before Christmas, then hit my father and my sister, who then passed it on to my mother, who was sick with it all day Christmas Eve (right after she had recovered from the flu which she had caught while in the hospital the week before to remove a melanoma from her leg).

The bug got to me on Christmas Day...I made it through unwrapping the presents in the morning, but before breakfast hit the table I was already puking in the bathroom. I spent the rest of the day either asleep or puking, until I finally felt the tiniest bit better around 5PM and ventured downstairs to see if I might be able to keep a glass of water down.

The water stayed down, but not long after I finished it my father started yelling - poor Tinker-the-dog had an accident on the rug and apparently my status as the latest plague victim wasn't going to get me out of cleaning up after her.

(I found out from my brother the next day that my father had given Tinker a bowl full of turkey leftovers - skin, fat, bits of gristle - which he does every year, and in all fairness I had not had a chance to warn him that Tinker's senior citizen stomach probably wouldn't be able to handle it this year, but which makes all the yelling he did about "the damn dog crapping on my rug" just a tad harder to swallow.)

My Christmas dinner? In fact, the only thing I ate that day? A bowl of cereal before I went back to bed.

We were there for another few days, spent mostly in the house as another few people came down with the stomach bug in their turn. The worst of the bug seemed to last just one day for most of us, though everyone still felt a little queasy for a while afterwards, which is why no one much felt like doing anything outside of the house for most of the week.

Oh, and did I mention that the downstairs bathroom in my parents' house was out of commission with a toilet that kept clogging for most of the week? Which meant that aside from the private bathroom in my parents' bedroom, there was one bathroom in the house for everyone to use whether they were sick or well. At one point we had eleven adults and eight kids in the house, in various stages of contagion...you can imagine just how miserable that was.

My father and my brother-in-law tried to fix the broken toilet on Friday, and all seemed well until Saturday afternoon when we discovered that the source of the toilet problem was the septic tank, which started backing up into the basement. My father and my brother spent two hours trying to fix it themselves until my father finally admitted defeat; when Elfe and I left to return to Boston, my father was on the phone calling in a professional to deal with it.

There was plenty of minor misery mixed into the week as well, your run-of-the-mill spending extended periods of time with extended family in tight quarters type of misery, plus a little travel drama thrown in for good measure...and while it was good to come home and sleep in my own bed Saturday night, some of the misery seems to have followed us home and settled in for the dregs of 2013.

Peek-a-boo, I See You!

2013-07-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

Samurai at the MFA!

2013-05-01T10:51:00.003-04:00

We Didn't Go

2013-04-16T19:45:00.000-04:00

On Monday morning, Elfe and I got up bright and early to go to a free children's musical event at the New England Conservatory, near Symphony Hall in Boston. While we were there, we ran into a little boy Elfe played soccer with two years ago, with his mom and younger sister. After the event was over we grabbed an early lunch, and then on our way back to the train station to go home we ran into the boy and his family again, also coming from an early lunch at another restaurant in the area. We took the kids over to the reflecting pool at the Christian Science center, to run off some energy on the grass and the giant plaza around the pool. It was a gorgeous day, and the boy's mom suggested that we walk the short distance over to the Boston Marathon finish line to see the later waves of runners coming in. I was tired from waking up early, and I don't like crowds, and I knew the elite Ethiopian runners would already be long gone at that point, and all I really wanted to do was go home and take a nap...

We didn't go.

This week I am very thankful that my borderline anti-social tendencies and extreme dislike of crowds kept us away from the scene of a tragedy.
I am also very thankful that as far as I can tell right now, no one I know personally was among the victims.
Finally, I am thankful that last year I overcame my aversion to crowds to watch S run the marathon for the very first time in the 20 years I've lived in Boston. Having seen it last year, I now understand why so many people consider the Boston Marathon so special...and why no one will take that away from the city and the people who are devoted to the Marathon. I predict 2014 will be the biggest Boston marathon ever!

Hope you and all your loved ones are safe.

Lighten Up, Take Two

2013-04-11T09:40:00.003-04:00

Less than half way through April, and I've already let some darkness back into the month...

This week it has been SO hard to motivate myself to get anything done, and so far this month I've done absolutely nothing to de-clutter or to lose weight. I think it may have something to do with not opening up the curtains during the day like I said I would...

So, back to work. The curtains are open, I'm sitting down to get some work done, and I'm ready to feel light, light, light as a feather!

How are you letting the light in today?

Hello, Little Bee!

2013-04-10T06:33:00.000-04:00

Loss, Early Rather than Later

2013-04-05T11:21:00.001-04:00

The conversation started, innocently enough, in the car.

Elfe and I were driving around doing Saturday morning errands when she spotted a giant red, white, and blue sign on someone's lawn. She asked me what it said.

I told her that it had a name on it, the name of a man who wanted us to vote for him.

She got all indignant - "We already voted for Barack Obama, the voting time is over!"

I explained that this voting was for something else, that the man whose name was on the sign wanted to be a Senator, to represent Massachusetts in Washington, DC.

Then I explained more that the reason we were having this special election is because when Barack Obama became President for the second time, he asked one of our Senators from Massachusetts to do a special job for him called Secretary of State, so now we needed to pick a new Senator.

Then of course, she wanted to know what the Secretary of State job was all about.

So I told her that the Secretary of State makes sure that the United States has good relationships with all the other countries in the world, that the person in that job goes around meeting with other important government people from other countries.

And then I had what seemed at the time like the brilliant idea of giving her a concrete example of another part of the job of Secretary of State...

Remember when I came to Ethiopia and there was the day that all the kids and all the new mommies and daddies went together in Mulat's big van to the special building, and we waited for a long time in the room with the little play area where you played, and then they finally called our name and we went up the stairs with Sr. Tirhas and talked to the lady at the window and then we all went back to Horizon House?

Yes, she remembered that.

Well, that's called the US Embassy and there are embassies like that in lots of countries all over the world and the Secretary of State is the boss of all the embassies.

So then she wanted to know what else happens at an embassy.

Well, when Ethiopian people want to come to the United States, they have to go to the embassy and get the special stamp in their passport - just like after we talked to the lady at the window, you got that special stamp in your passport so you could come with me to the United States, and I had to get a special stamp in my passport from the Ethiopian embassy here in the US so I could go to Ethiopia.

Then she wanted to know why we hadn't used our passports for anything recently, even though we go to lots of different places, so I explained that we didn't need a passport to go to any of the places we've been to since we got back from Ethiopia.

And then, who knows why, I said "But if we did go somewhere that we need a passport for, I would get you a new passport because now you're a United States citizen and you need a United States passport."

"Wait...what?"

So I said it again, a little more slowly and a little more carefully.

"I'm not an Ethiopian citizen any more? I'm a United States citizen? Why?"

She wasn't angry or upset about it, just caught off-guard by this new piece of information...this new revelation of something she didn't really know she had had until she understood that she had lost it.

Just like I was caught off-guard by watching, in the rear-view mirror, as my five-year-old demonstrated that she was perfectly capable of understanding the concept of citizenship as well as understanding that it was something that could be lost.

I'm not sure why I was caught off-guard...I've spent enough time reading and learning from adult adoptees to know that many of them experience the change in their citizenship that comes with adoption as a loss...and it's not like I haven't had conversations like this before with Elfe. There was the time when a conversation about all the different religions in the world led to her understanding that what we've always called "your special day at the church" meant that she was now a different religion than the one she was born into - or as she pretty succinctly put it "You changed my religion?!?!?!"

So, yeah...I shouldn't have been surprised. But it still always amazes me how much she can understand at such a young age.

At least the religion conversation happened in our living room, not in the car.

The citizenship conversation took up most of the rest of our driving-around time...I explained to her that the change in her citizenship was the rule in this situation; that if she was going to live here in the United States with me, it was better for her to be a US citizen so she could vote herself when she grew up and have access to all sorts of other benefits that she wouldn't have if she weren't a citizen; and I told her that when she grew up, if she wanted to change back to being an Ethiopian citizen, that I would help her any way I could to do that if it was possible.

I know that sounds like a lot to explain to a five-year-old, but the truth is that these types of conversations are actually one of the adoptive parenting jobs that I feel I'm good at. I think Elfe is good at them too, and I'm glad we're having these conversations sooner rather than later. I think that the earlier she can process these losses and include them in her understanding of what it means to be adopted, the easier things will be for her as she gets older.

Anyone with older kids want to give me a heads-up about what the next conversation will be about?

Moving toward Spring

2013-04-02T10:30:00.000-04:00

Things seem to be moving in the right direction this week...

This week I am very thankful that we've been seeing some movement in the direction of Spring...today is cold, but we had a glorious weekend here and I can see little green shoots coming up everywhere!

I am also thankful that I'm seeing movement in other areas too...last week I sent out three resumes and yesterday two of the places contacted me. I had a phone interview with one place this morning, with a follow-up interview in person now scheduled for Thursday morning; I'm waiting to hear back from the second place with an interview time either this week or next.

Even if these two job leads don't work out, I am thankful for the reminder that I do in fact have a pretty impressive resume and one or two marketable skills!

What are you thankful for this week?

April is Lighten Up

2013-04-01T12:16:00.003-04:00

The next step in getting back into the blogging groove - also known as getting my life together again - is a return to monthly themes.

April's theme - Lighten Up!

As usual, I mean this in all sorts of ways...and most of them fall into the "cheaper than therapy and probably just about as effective" category...

Lighten up the house by opening the curtains during the day. I spend a fair bit of time inside the house while Elfe is at school, and more and more lately it occurs to me that it's kind of gloomy in here. I think the simple act of opening the curtains in the morning will make a huge difference.

Lighten up our space. The clutter in our house has reached an all-time high, and there are so many times when I feel like I have NO space to move around in at all. We just plain have TOO MUCH stuff, and it's disorganized on top of that. I often get the urge to clean up and de-clutter in the spring, but this year it feels imperative - urgent, even - to really purge and purge and purge some more.

Lighten up my body. I'm a lot heavier than I would like, eating a lot more junk food than I should, and just generally not as healthy as I want to be. Time to shed some pounds and get lighter!

Lighten up my attitude. I've been grumpy, I've been cranky, I've been serious and no fun. For quite a while now. No fun for me, and especially no fun for Elfe. There are certainly times when I should be serious, when there are serious grown-up issues on the table, but I could definitely lighten up a lot the rest of the time.

What your theme for April? What areas of your life could you lighten up on?

Reading List 3-31-13

2013-03-31T11:55:00.002-04:00

Happy Easter to those who are celebrating today!

This reading list has nothing to do with Easter at all...

Two related posts, one from Harlow's Monkey - Adoption is both/and, not either/or - and one from I Will Pull This Blog Over - There is Actually a Third Option.

My Brown Baby has Black Children and Black History: The Importance of Teaching Our Children the Complexity of Us.

From Mother Jones, The US Capitol is Full of White Supremacists.

From Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Ghetto is Public Policy.

Happy reading!

Reading List 3-24-13

2013-03-24T19:28:00.003-04:00

A weekly reading list, hooray! I think I'm on a roll...

From Adam Pertman at Adoption Nation, My Family Is Not a 'Second-Best Option'

Here's something I think every adoptive parent should read, sooner rather than later: Hey mom, they don't see your little girl, they see an Asian woman... from Lost Daughters.

A great post at Sprout's Bookshelf, Of Missed Opportunities in children's picture books.

An excellent question from The Ways of a River - Is the Harlem Shake Racist? And then she sort of answers her own question - Maybe it is, Maybe it isn't . And here's another response from Melissa Harris-Perry - 'Harlem Shake' craze needs historical, cultural context.

From Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic, Good People, Racist People.

Enjoy!

Let Us Begin Again with Thankfulness

2013-03-19T17:01:00.000-04:00

So I've attempted to get back into blogging...but it's been an erratic start so far.

If I'm going to really get this blog going again...or, more accurately, get my life going again...I think I need to go back to basics. And here on the blog - and in life - back to basics means getting back to a regular thankfulness routine.

Here goes...

A couple of weeks ago, I had to attend a seminar at a Career Center as a condition of continuing to receive unemployment benefits. As I got little snippets of information about other people in the room, I became really aware that most of them had a lot less going for them in terms of education, experience, resources, etc., than I did. Women who spoke no English (yet still had to sit through the hour-long presentation, without translation services, in order to meet the requirement), a couple of guys in their early twenties who asked about how they could get a GED. Being unemployed is hard, and for a lot of reasons it is particularly hard right now, but I know it could be a lot worse. This week, I am thankful that I have a lot more than most when it comes to getting through this difficult period in my life.

On a somewhat related note, if I have to be unemployed, this seems like a pretty darn good time for it. I cannot remember the last time Elfe went to school for a full five-day week, what with her being sick more often than usual this winter and school being cancelled for snow and random school holidays that were not holidays for me when I was working. This week, I am thankful that I haven't had to worry about juggling child care and working during this very unusual winter season.

Finally, I am really thankful for friends and family and community...not really anything specific with this one, just some general thankfulness for the people in my life.

What are you thankful for this week?

Cheaper than Therapy

2013-03-08T09:44:00.001-05:00

Things I have done in the past year that were cheaper, and arguably more effective, than therapy:

Got a sassy new haircut
Started a walking club with other parents from Elfe's school
Cleaned my kitchen
Started doing yoga in the morning

I gave therapy a shot last year, I really did...maybe I didn't stick with it long enough, or maybe I didn't find the right therapist, or the right kind of therapy...but for whatever reason, it just didn't seem to help. I cried a lot during the sessions, which sometimes had a short-term positive effect in a cathartic sort of way but mostly just made me frustrated. I'm an action-oriented kind of person, and I kept waiting for the therapist to give me a list of things to do that might help me feel better, but the list never came...and then I lost my job and my health insurance and stopped going to therapy.

So I tried a few other things, and they did kind of help...but my hair is getting a little long and shaggy again, the walking club went on hiatus for the winter, my kitchen is still pretty clean but the rest of the house is an utter disaster, and my morning yoga lasts for at most 10 minutes.

Eventually I'll get another job with benefits and maybe look into a new therapist, but in the meantime I think I'm going to schedule another haircut, start a coffee-drinking club with some other moms until the weather is good enough for walking again, make an attempt to clean the rest of my house, and find some ways to get a little more exercise.

All cheaper than therapy (except maybe the haircut), and arguably more effective.

My Family is not Special

2013-03-07T07:00:00.000-05:00

I am thrilled to be contributing to "Share a Story-Shape a Future" as part of their week-long annual event celebrating literacy for children. Be sure to click on over to the main site for lots of additional resources and stories.
Today I'm responding to the writing prompt: How do you bring books to life? Ages 4 to 5

If you are joining us here for the first time, a little context...my 5-year-old daughter Elfe was born in Ethiopia and we are a family through adoption. I'm a single mom by choice through international trans-racial adoption...but my family isn't special.

Those of you who have been here before know that there are several books about adoption that I've read and recommended in the past...reading How I was Adopted led to our first real conversations about Elfe's adoption story, and Star of the Week has helped us talk about all the complex emotions that go along with adoption.

But the problem with books about adoption is...they're books about adoption. Yes, our family was formed through adoption, but our daily lives are not all about adoption. We walk our dog, we go grocery shopping, we try to hit the library after school on Tuesdays, dance classes on Wednesdays, ice skating on Saturdays in the winter, swimming in the summer, I'm planning to teach Elfe how to ride a bike this spring...all just normal family stuff.

I don't want to read books about how families like ours are special...we're not special. And honestly, it's a very short hop from special to different, and from there it's just a skip and a jump to weird and not normal. I don't want my child to feel like her family is "special," and I especially don't want her friends and classmates to be reading books about "special" families like ours.

Instead, I want books that show families like ours doing our normal everyday family stuff without any fanfare. I work hard to find books like that, and share them as widely as possible when I do find them...but more and more lately I'm realizing that it may not be as hard to find families like mine in children's books as I've been thinking it is.

Multi-racial families and families through adoption are everywhere, if you know how to see them...

I first had a little ah-ha moment about this while reading a sweet little book called Thesaurus Rex.

Thesaurus Rex is a little dinosaur who goes through his day..."Thesaurus Rex starts his day, stretching, reaching, extending, bending...uh oh, his clothes need mending!" "Thesaurus Rex drinks his milk, sip, sup, swallow, swill...whoops! He's had a messy spill!"

Later in the book he needs his mom to help him out of a muddy pool, and then she cleans him up and puts him to bed.

I don't know how many times I had read Thesaurus Rex to Elfe before I finally noticed what should have been obvious to me right away..."Hey look! Thesaurus Rex and his mom are different colors!"

Elfe's response was along the lines of "Yeah Mom, I know!" Of course she noticed it right away, being a different color than your mom has been her reality for about half of her short life...but I'm glad I pointed out that I noticed it so she could hear me say "They're just like us!"

I was a little quicker on the uptake with another book I like to recommend to multi-racial families...Bear's Busy Family.

This book is great for teaching family words to kids who are just learning English, and there's a beautiful picture of a family tree in the back to help with the learning. And look - all the bears have different fur colors but they're still a family! I noticed that right away...

But recently I've been thinking about this book in a different way...I've heard lots of people describing it as a book about a family preparing for a baby's first birthday party, and I've read the book over and over again to figure out why they think that. Sure, there's a picture of a party and a baby and a cake with a candle on it...but nowhere in the book does it actually say what the party is for.

Why can't it be a book about a family preparing a party to welcome their newly adopted child? How do we know that isn't what's going on in this book? It's only our own assumptions about who's in a family and how families are formed that create the context "book about baby's first birthday party" in our own minds.

Now that my eyes have been opened, I can see families like mine everywhere in children's books! Try it yourself...next time you're reading a book to your child, notice your own assumptions about what is going on and see if you can let them go long enough to create a new context for the book. You might be surprised to find out that families you used to think of as "special" are really not that special after all.

My Brave Girl

2013-03-06T06:19:00.000-05:00

Weekly Reading 3-3-13

2013-03-03T19:33:00.000-05:00

Just a few things to share today...I can feel myself getting ready to jump back in to some regular blogging and a weekly reading list seems like an easy way to start!

Meet the new Miss Israel - Yiytish Aynaw, who left Ethiopia with her family when she was twelve!

I dare you to get all the way through this post without crying... The Thing About Being A Little Black Girl in the World: For Quvenzhane Wallis...which I found at the end of this post from another great blog I have discovered recently, Black Girl in Maine.

Elfe and I have recently been spending a lot of time at the Museum of Fine Arts, and it's been fun to see art through her eyes...here's a nice post on Five Easy Steps for Talking with Children about Art.

I really loved this post from They're All My Own - Practical Love.

Finally, you really, really, really need to watch this documentary about an Ethiopian adoption that includes both sides - birth parents as well as adoptive parents. Mercy, Mercy.

That's it for this week!

Striking a Pose

2012-08-15T19:49:00.000-04:00

(Alternate title: "yes, I am already worried about the teen years")

Weekly Reading 8-12-12

2012-08-12T21:35:00.001-04:00

Rough day today...sent Elfe to bed two hours earlier than usual, and I'm going to join her soon...here's a little reading before I go...

Two posts that I originally found via AdoptionTalk: from the Huffington Post, My Daughter's Baby Picture, and a response to that article from an adult adoptee at Matthew Salesses has a Tumblr.

Lisa at Three Cats and a Baby has So Much to Celebrate.

Hey look - it's me, in the Ambassador Spotlight at the Living Barefoot blog!

From a new blog I am loving lately, The Minimalist Mom - Thinner, Richer, Smarter: The Magic Bullet.

From the Huffington Post, "The Olympian": A Story of the First Black Gold Medalist.

And with that, I bid you goodnight...

Book Lover

2012-08-08T08:56:00.001-04:00

Weekly Reading 8-5-12

2012-08-05T22:35:00.001-04:00

Weekly reading, Olympics version...

From Racialicious, On the Olympics & Being Indigenous.

From The Crunk Feminist Collective, Olympics Oppression?: Gabby Douglas and Smile Politics.

From My BrownBaby, As America Celebrates Gabby Douglas Historic Gymnastics Gold, We Salute Her Mom.

From The Huffington Post, Why Are Some Olympic Sports Whiter Than Others?

This clip from the Melissa Harris-Perry show aired before the Olympics, but it's worth a look:
(click through to the blog if you can't see the video)

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Celebrity Chef

2012-08-01T07:14:00.000-04:00

Weekly Reading List 7-29-12

2012-07-29T08:51:00.000-04:00

So, now that I suddenly have all this extra free time on my hands, I guess I'll get back to posting a weekly reading list...

From The Adoption Counselor: A new model of family
(and thanks to AdoptionTalk for the link)

From Racialicious: New York Magazine Deems Naturally Curly Hair a Bad Investment for No Good Reason

From Los Angelista: Forget What You Learned in That Hair Documentary, Black Women are Not Terrified of Water and Where are the Modern-Day George Jeffersons on TV?

From Love Isn't Enough: Oh No, Not The TV!

Finally, have I pointed you in the direction of Sprout's Bookshelf yet? Sprout is from Ethiopia, and his mom Mary is "a librarian-in-training and a lifelong children's book addict." Mary reviews children's books at Sprout's Bookshelf, and I appreciate her commitment to finding high-quality books that feature children of color, transracial families, and diversity of all sorts. Her latest post is a review of the Barefoot Book Shopping with Dad - and she'll also be giving away a copy of the book to one lucky winner. Enter before Sunday August 5th for your chance to win!

At Last...

2012-07-27T16:20:00.001-04:00

Those of you who've been around for awhile know that from time to time I allude to unbloggable stuff...over time I've told several people privately what I mean when I use the code word "unbloggable," and I've been amused to find out what people thought I meant before I told them. When I finally met S. in person back in April, for example, she told me that she had been imagining all sorts of juicy scenarios every time I mentioned unbloggable stuff.

Alas, it's been nothing juicy at all. I can finally tell you that my unbloggable crap has been the fact that I've been completely miserable in my job for a very long time now.

The job misery has been unbloggable because back before the great blog migration of 2009 (anybody here now who remembers that?), someone made an anonymous complaint to my boss about some things I had written here about my job. They seemed like fairly innocuous things to me, and I thought I had been blogging fairly anonymously up until that point - had an old picture of myself on the blog instead of a recent one, never used my last name here, never mentioned the name or the exact location of where I worked - but still someone figured out who I was and took offense, and my boss agreed with them. I had to delete or edit all posts that made any reference whatsoever to my job, move my blog to a new address, and never mention anything having to do with work ever again. Unbloggable.

Things never really got better at work after that, and I had already been pretty bored with the work I was doing. The more bored I got, the less motivated I felt to do a good job, until things just spiraled completely downward. Add in the fact that once Elfe came along, I had very little desire to work a full-time job, and it won't be hard to guess what came next.

Why is this all suddenly bloggable today? Because today I got laid off from my job.

I'm feeling somewhat emotionally drained by the whole thing, but it's not like the lay-off was completely unexpected or even unwelcome. I am already looking forward to bigger and better things now that I'm free from the day-to-day misery that this job has put me through for the past three years.

I'll be able to collect unemployment benefits, and I can spend the rest of the summer with Elfe without paying for childcare (which has been a whole nother source of stress in my life for the past several weeks). Maybe I'll finally get back into a blogging routine, and my house will probably get a whole lot cleaner over the next few weeks. More importantly though, I'm going to use the next few months as an opportunity to turn my Barefoot Books business into as close to a full-time income as possible.

So, there you have it. At last.

Wish me luck on this next stage of Inventing My Life!