Welcome and What I'm Up To

I recently read Barbara Katz Rothman’s book Weaving a Family: Untanging Race and Adoption, in which she writes both as a sociologist and as the white mother of a black daughter. So far, this is the best book I have read on race and adoption; Rothman seems to understand the many threads that snake out from the act of making a family in this way, and she follows them fruitfully. It’s not that I agree with everything Rothman says, but that she raises questions I think are worth considering.

As I read, I put a tape flag in the book every time something struck me as thought-provoking or especially well-put, and ended up with several dozen. Not sure what to do next, I let the book sit around for awhile, and then it occurred to me to blog my tape flags, as a way of “thinking out loud” about Rothman’s observations and arguments.

This blog is called “Tape Flags and First Thoughts” because that’s what my posts are going to be: first thoughts in reaction to bits of the book. Please read them accordingly; nothing here is my final word on anything. It’s just my next step in thinking about my family and the choices we’ve made.

Comments will be welcome, but moderated, so if yours doesn’t show up right away, it’s because I haven’t approved it yet. I will not accept comments from anonymous posters; if you prefer to post anonymously or under a screen name, I’ll do that for you—but you need to tell me who you are. I’m not interested in arguing, and while I look forward to hearing comments as food for thought, I probably won’t participate in comment threads, and I reserve the right not to approve comments that strike me as argumentative. In the manner of Quaker worship-sharing, I invite people to speak from their own experiences and insight; think of the Rothman quotes I’ll begin each entry with as a prompt or query and my post as simply the first comment on it. To discourage argumentation, I probably won’t approve more than one comment per person per thread. If anyone other than me reads this, I want this to be a place for thoughtful, open-hearted listening, not persuasion or argumentation.

Also, of course, I reserve the right to post about other things, like my cute children. When I finish with Weaving a Family, I plan to continue with another book on my shelf where the tape flags almost outnumber the pages: Liz Oppenheimer's collection of Quaker blog posts, Writing Cheerfully on the Web.