So this week on French class, we reached that special time on the learning of any language where we’re expected to learn how to talk about families. Our textbook brought up familles recomposées, that is, family outside the father-mother-children standards, which the teacher saw as an opportunity to debate same-sex marriage. There’s something about teachers that makes me always expect them to be re... »
I have no idea how I missed this story, which came out in The New York Times’ Opinionator blog on February 28th. More than a decade ago, a man called Danny found an abandoned baby in a subway station. He frantically phoned his partner, Peter, saying that the police hadn’t believed his story. Eventually the baby was taken into protective care and the processing began. When Danny went to... »
December and January are months when I usually spend a lot more time around my parents. Mostly, it’s a nice experience, I love them and miss living with them a lot. But while this extra time spent together brought me a wonderful surprise in my mother’s behavior, my dad’s hasn’t changed at all. »
This holiday season, a 14-year-old cousin of mine had to have an emergency appendectomy and spent New Year’s eve hospitalized. She had the surgery on Dec. 29th, but she’d been showing symptoms (unbearable pain that refrained her from even walking and inability to keep anything in her stomach among them) since the 22nd. The reason it took her seven days of suffering from a ruptured appendix before ... »
Coming from a deeply Catholic family, Christmas has been a big deal since I can remember. Even though I have never ever been particularly fond of religious traditions, I’ve always cherished it, the one day a year when the whole approximately 40-components-big family gets together with an spectacular amount of good food and good will. That has always been what Christmas meant: family, food, n... »
So my parents arrived in town last week to spend the holidays with me and the rest of the family. Every time they come, I spend at least two weeks prior to their arrival preparing myself for all kinds of slightly offensive comments spread out during the day – triggers to constant fighting when we used to live together, and that I have accepted as just a part of them I am going to have to live it f... »
This week, I headed out to the country side to join the whole family for a cousin’s birthday. At a certain point, one of mhy cousins who has recently accepted Jesus as her savior, but previously intended to be a biologist like me, started an argument with me with the sole point of convincing me that the bible was perfect and science was not. I usually don’t engage in such things, speci... »
For a while now, my family has been subtly bringing up the fact that I don’t have a boyfriend. It started up on Valentine’s day, and culminated on them almost harassing my friends for information (which they were kind enough not to give out). While I can understand where their concern comes from – because I am twenty and haven’t brought up any romantic interesting for the p... »
