Doctors these days

By -

Yesterday I was sitting with a group of moms and aunties while the babies and little kids bumped into each other, stole each others' toys and pulverized gummy crackers into the rug. My friend Renee brought her 6 year old niece Nawea, who has recently become a big sister. I asked "how's your new baby, Nawea?" She said fine but her aunt started laughing

Renee said when the new baby was born, brown-skinned Nawea took one look at her new lily-white sister and said in a panic, "Are we going to paint her?" Her mom told "oh, the doctors will do that!"

Luckily for Nawea, the baby is now turning nicely browned. Phew-- no baby painting necessary.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fresh Grief: How to Help When People are Grieving

By -
The other night I got a text at 2:30 am. "Jeff just passed away." I couldn't believe it. I still can't. My friend Bridget -- the one who carried me through the worst work of dismantling our lives in Kauai, who has been there for me for nearly a decade of raising babies, nursing, potty training, parenting, homeschooling, working-- her husband Jeff died suddenly of the flu. He was a beautiful man. A hard and lean Portuguese Hawaiian Paniolo-- soft spoken, bright eyes, long white ponytail. Thick pidgin, soft voice, gentle with all the babies, gathering the children into his lap. How can he be gone? He wouldn't show up to a party, but he'd show up to build you a fence or move your house or brand your cattle. He'd work harder and longer than anybody. Life is a little surreal-- the last time I saw him was when he and Bridget had packed up my container with our whole battered dusty lives inside after my own crusty Hawaiian cowboy died, leaving his stunned and b
Read more

Sex & Power, Gender &Transgression: LGBT+ Diversity in the 15th and 16th Centuries

By -
Image
  Sex and Power, Gender and Transgression: Lessons for Today from LGBT+ Diversity in the 15th and 16th Centuries Rebecca Stevenson (As presented at the Dorothy Dunnett Society Centenary Conference in Edinburgh, with some added notes in smaller font) April 12, 2023 Good afternoon, my name is Rebecca Stevenson. It is a pleasure to be here, speaking about Sexuality, Gender, Power, and Queerness in the 15th and 16th century World.  Cut Sleeves and Bitten Peaches Is it possible to understand the inner worlds of people we’d call LGBT+ from 600 years ago? Or to understand how they defined themselves, how they accessed or lost social power? Or how social systems shaped the meaning of sexual and gender behavior? Stories and poetry are decoder rings for queer interiorities of the past. Writings from queer points of view allow for self-definition in context, and reveal eddies of social power and transgression. And stories illuminate the rainbow palate of diverse sexualities, identities, intimacie
Read more

Trip to Edinburgh!

By -
So I did a crazy thing, and left my kids for 11 days and went to Scotland to the Dorothy Dunnett Centenary where I gave a paper and met up with my sister Katie because life is short and mortality is looming and we’re alive, briefly, gorgeously, so why not.  Wait, back up. So Katie has fucking cancer and she is okay for the moment but it’s fucking ocular melanoma and that fucking kills people fast once it metastasizes. And it hasn’t metastasized yet, but it will, that’s what it does. Fucking CANCER, she’s 38, Jesus FUCK-- Wait, back up further.  So my mom had cancer, breast cancer, that she found when she was 29 or 30, and she battled it off thru metastasis for years, and died at 41 when I was 17 and Katie was 12 and Liz was 10. And she got cancer that early because of a fucking BRCA mutation that Katie inherited, along with a bunch of other cousins in the Pratt family.  So, fuck cancer. Also, the world shifted and Katie is-- we can’t count on her being here next year, or next time, or
Read more