An Invincible Summer - A Woman's Journey

My #3 child is still working abroad. She and her partner live in England somewhere near Manchester. The company she works for is an Oregon based company that provides medical and dental insurance for the citizens of this and 3 other states. When she started at this company about 6 years ago she worked with an older gent who left within the first year of her employment. They did not have a ton of interaction but they were on friendly terms. The other day, quite out of the blue, my daughter received an email from this person. They reached out, wishing her well, and letting her know how very sorry he is for how the LGBTQIA+ community is being treated by the current government. Letting her know he is on her side.  I think we are going to need to do a lot of that from this point on. For the brown skinned people in our communities, who must be living in fear, for the LGBTQIA+ community, who has no idea what is in store for them in regards to passports, bathrooms, their names, their posit...

  Isn’t it odd how we end our teen years and start our adult lives thinking we have to plan things out, plotting our futures using either the excellent tools our parents supplied us with or the complete for-shit set of tools we acquired because they themselves didn’t have any to begin with.  Off we go with dreams of how it “our lives” will turn out with the ever so careful choices we made. At some point comes the awareness that it really didn’t matter, those choices we made, because, in reality, we were never driving the bus. And some of us, we didn’t even get a seat. We were hanging on to the bumper wondering if we were going to have the strength to keep holding on.  Finally, if we’re lucky, we get off, we let go. But it hurts to let go, to surrender, to realize that our choices really don’t drive, affect maybe, but not drive.  There’s an ache and so much damn fear that comes with the letting go. Perhaps because all the energy we put into hanging on to the bumpe...