A Moment's Rant

Just read a blog by a young woman, barely old enough to drink who says she hates mommy blogs because she's a feminist.

Let me see. Why is this irritating me.

Many years, I considered myself feminist. I believed and worked for equal pay, I was just about the first woman in New Orleans who was on the payroll of a major car dealer to do body work (as a helper, learning the job, but still on the payroll, and I worked on a lot of cars while I was there.).

Yet some things are incredibly important.

Passing on the torch to the next generation is probably the most important thing we do in life. It's been my role in life to care for other people's children. When they were little I helped raise both of my nieces. I fostered my best friend's child the year after her death, until the family decided to take over. I am the stepmother of two children, who had a horrible trauma and many problems.

There's something about being intimately involved with another's life that tells you, if you are listening, truly, and not wrapped too much up into yourself, what really matters.

The niece I helped give her first bath to, who I rocked, and fed and played with, who I carried on my shoulders one day when she was almost two to go to college registration because I needed to care for her and get registered, who I told endless stories to and put up with watching endless repeats of the Great Ewok adventure, is getting married next week. One torch passed down.

I gave up my career as a college English instructor to care for my mother her last three years of life. I wouldn't trade those three years for anything.

My alienated, angry eldest stepson is now still dealing with some issues, but he likes his family again, and knows who's there for him, and who cares enough to let him fly. A torch nearly there.

My youngest son, the day I met him for the first time, laid his head in my lap and asked me if I was going to be his mommy. He has deep wounds about the death of his birth mother. Another day, he walked up to me, and asked me what happens if you overdose on Tylenol. I remember how bad my hand shook as I called 911, and how he needed to hold my hand as they pumped his stomach. He is the one I grieve most for, because I cannot really heal his wounds, only lead him to the medicine that can help.

What is really important? I have been many things in life already - a short order cook, a typist, a body and fender mechanic, an instructor of reading and English, a wife, a mother, a writer, a poet, an historian.

Which role will count most when I am gone?

Being an average Joe who will leave few ripples on the fabric of time, I like to think that my taking time to rescue these boys, to be there for my nieces when my brother's marriage fell apart and for being the type of person who knows that kindness and understanding have more value to the world as a whole and to the future before us than what type of money I made, what type of car I drive, what clothes I wear.

What matters isn't the things you have. It's the people's lives you touch. Mommies and daddies are the ones who touch us most intimately, and it's a HARD job, and one we wonder about, and grieve over and despair of - and one that matters most to the world in the long run.

Without mommies and daddies and their sacrifices, and griefs and struggles, and willingness to do what has to be done, tomorrow wouldn't come. This is the bedrock, and we ought to celebrate those who care enough not to run away from the future.

Enough said. Rant over.