How to explain racially-charged interactions (and gentrification) to my daughter
As a born and bred New Yorker, I expect an occasional terrible experience with a stranger. My worst stranger story involves a White man who spit in my on 5th avenue. So it isn’t always about race…but sometimes it is.
Last winter, I was sitting on the steps in the lobby of an apartment building in my neighborhood, trying to get my one-and-a-half-year-old to put on her shoes. I had just gotten her to sit down and was forcing her feet into the shoes and fastening the Velcro when a Black man entered the building and commented “Stairs are not for sitting.”
My son’s Jewish and Guatemalan identity
Celebrations are a big part of our family: the Jewish holidays, the anniversaries of the day we met and the day we became a family, Guatemalan Independence Day, and National Adoption Day. Each of these celebrations helps us reaffirm our multiple identities.
Just when I thought my daughter wasn’t listening…
Last month I had a stomach flu and succumbed to my daughter’s request for more minutes than usual of watching videos. First, we watched “Los pollitos dicen,”, a song about chicks and a mama hen.
A Passover story for my three-year-old
There was once a little baby boy named Moses. Moses was Jewish and he lived in Egypt where the king, who was called the Pharaoh, did not like Jewish babies.
“If they’re both straight” and other thoughts
by Sachi Feris When my daughter was an infant, a fellow new mom once joked that my daughter and her son (also an infant) were on their first “date.” “If they’re both straight,” I countered, and she laughed. With race,…