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Strollerderby
When I first started making the rounds of Music Together classes and library playgroups, I’d hear these questions all the time: “Is that your baby?” “How often do you care for her?” “Do you do any evening babysitting?”
People asked because I was young. Ten years younger than any other mom in the room, but about the same age as the nannies who attended these events in the posh suburb we lived in.
For me, this was always a painful moment, but one easily solved. We moved into an urban neighborhood with younger parents, and I got older. Even though I’m still ten years younger than most of the moms on the playground, I don’t look like a kid with a borrowed baby anymore.
For moms whose skin doesn’t match their babies’, the questions never stop. Laden with bias about race and privilege, they rankle deeper and longer. Finding an answer that educates rather than strikes back is a delicate balancing act. Today’s Motherlode explores two mom’s search for the right words.
Sometimes, the only way to combat ignorant people is to just confront them with the reality of their wrongheadedness. You can do it violently or aggressively — or you can simply and gracefully show them the beauty of the truth.
That’s what Suzy Richardson is doing. She’s a happily married mother of four married to her firefighter husband, with whom she is raising their four children ranging in age from one year to 11 years old. She’s also a white woman married to a black man, and those four children are biracial. So she took a good bit of issue with former Lousiana Justice of the peace Keith Bardwell’s much-publicized refusal to marry an interracial couple. Continue reading »
Do you remember that Justice of the Peace from Louisiana that refused to marry an interracial couple on the grounds that their kids wouldn’t be readily accepted into society? (Yeah, that poor Barack Obama….will he ever feel the love?) Seems he’s got backup.
Falcon Heene, aka Balloon Boy, was not in the balloon that looks like a Jiffy-Pop container (as Joy Behar put it). He was hiding in the attic the whole time.
His father, Richard Heene, got annoyed when Falcon told his pop “You guys said we did this for the show.” Huh? Continue reading »
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