Harry Potter, My Daughter, and Me

It may seem a little late to write about this, but well, see the previous post. I’d like to bid a fond farewell full of gratitude to Harry Potter and the rest of the Hogwarts gang. I actually took the day off from work to go see the final Harry Potter movie with Tall Daughter E on opening day and I am glad I did. I don’t know how she felt, but the whole event was tinged with bittersweetness (if that is a word). Some moments are heavy with all the other moments that led to them and this was one of them for me. At this point, either you are a Potter fan or you aren’t, so I am not going to write here about the movie itself. I loved it and wept like a baby. Either you cried your eyes out, or you don’t care; that’s fine.

Much has been written about the “Harry Potter Generation” and E falls right into this category. This series neatly brackets her childhood. I read the first book to her when she was in kindergarten on the advice of her teacher, and we watched the final film together on the verge of her senior year in high school. She and I have attended all eight HP movies together on the opening day. No one else in the family likes the series – no, I don’t know why not either. It is Our Thing.

So I was really emotional heading into this movie. I took the day off, made arrangements for Tiny Daughter M, and splurged on IMAX tickets. So. Worth. It. I was eager for this movie since I had loved the final HP book, but I was also just so grateful. Thanks to J.K. Rowling, E and I have this Thing to share. While we talk alike, we have really different interests and personalities. Ever since she took her first steps towards independence in school we have had this Thing to bond over. It is hard to find activities that we both want to do, but this was something we could share. This was not just a film for me, but the culmination of all of the moments we spent together reading, and watching, and wondering what would happen next.

So thank you Ms. Rowling for Hermione Granger, and Molly and Ginny Weasley. Thank you for Professors MacGonagall and Snape. Thank you for the last twelve years of magic.

Great Post on the Goddess & Chaos

I always get excited when someone else sees a connection between chaos theory and spirituality so I loved this post by Carolyn Boyd on the goddess and chaos. It especially reverberated with me because I was just reading the myth of Tiamat and Marduk. Thanks to Medusa Coils for the link.

Of Beautiful Brides and Broken Mothers

Life got pretty crazy around here last week. I am hoping to catch up on a couple of blog posts I wanted to write, but we will see what my chaos level is by the end of the week. Last week was a big mishmash of joy and frustration. My BFF got married this weekend and that has kept me very busy, but very happy.

On a similar note, congratulations to all the same sex couple in New York state who can now make themselves as stressed out, and crazy, and ridiculously happy at their own weddings as the one we just had up here.

I knew the week was going to be busy, but I didn’t expect the week’s other complication – my mother broke her ankle while my dad was out of town. This part has not been fun. If you have been reading this blog for a while you know that things between my mother and I are loving, but strained. Neither one of us is really real around the other. Since both of my sisters live in the Lower 48, I am the only child around to help her. Mom is a very smart woman who is very good at many things – accepting help and feeling powerless are not among them. Her frustration manifests as irrational stubbornness. I believe this week is referred to as “character building.”

One afternoon I was at her house, vacuuming for her and helping her to make her home a little more wheelchair-friendly and it struck me that I was looking at my future. There I was, vacuuming the same hall where I had done so many times growing up and I realized that dealing with her while she deals with her diminishing physical capability is around the corner. My sisters and their kids all live a plane-ride away and my father has serious health problems. Mom is going to get older and angry at her aging, and I will be taking care of her. This future scares the shit out of me.

My most awesome and wonderful Husband S deserves a special note of appreciation. He dealt with a nervous bride, a cranky mother-in-law, his visiting mother, and me while I was stressed out with all of them. He never complained or batted an eye. He is my rock and I don’t know what I would do without his support.

A Social Media Story

Last week Husband S and I went to an unusual wedding reception. Other than the families of the bride and groom, almost everyone there had met each other through Twitter. There were a few people who knew each other before, which is what allowed to connections to grow in the first place, but I have known most of these folks for about two years and have gotten to know them 140 characters at a time.

The Anchorage Twitter community is very close-knit, more so than other places from what I have heard. In the time I have participated real friendship have emerged. Anchorage Tweeps babysit each other’s kids & dogs, they housesit for each other. They bring medicine and food to people when they are sick and offer moral support when times are tough. Frequent “tweet-ups” bring us together in “meat space” and just this month there was a memorial service and the aforementioned wedding for members of this unofficial community with no rules whatsoever for belonging. Last year, a favorite local musician’s car broke down right before leaving on her self-supported tour. We responded with a fundraiser and many of us chipped in a few bucks to help her get on her way. A few people even started an Alaska Tweets Kiva team. While non-traditional and leaderless, this is a community. Tweetup events are some of the only places where I can talk to both conservative Christian librarians and openly gay IT professionals who are both treating each other civilly.

Why can’t we have a spiritual community that operates in the same way? I’ve been on Twitter with my personal account for about two years, which is just about the same amount of time I have been involved with AUUF. Both of these new communities are of roughly equal importance to me. There is something really important going on with social media that most religious organizations are missing out on. Social media should be more than a tool to let people know about official events; it should be a way for people to make community outside the church walls. It should be more than just ministers using it, too.

I love the UU blogosphere. I value being able to learn so much about Unitarian Universalism and about all of you, but this loose network is dominated by ministers and seminarians. What I would like to see is a social media tool where lay people can reach out both to clergy and each other for ministry. Not all of us live on the east coast. Alaska probably has fewer than 1,000 official UU church members, and other western states also have small numbers of UU’s. What if we could connect people and enable them to enhance the spiritual community they find at church? I do not believe that social media should replace real life church, but it can have a role in building relationships and retaining young adults. We have many tools to inform people, but not necessarily to engage them. Speaking for myself, when I am engaged in something I am much more likely to be committed.

With a structure halfway between Twitter and Facebook, I am interested to see what role Google+ could play in creating such a community once it goes live. There is a lot of talk in the UU blogosphere about how to attract and retain members to prevent UU-extinction. I believe that for most people, relationships trump theology. Anything that helps people find each other and minister to each other can only be a good thing.

On Friendship - Connection & Reconnection

This was a great weekend for connecting with friends. Friday night was spent at a party with new friends, and Sunday and Monday were spent at parties reconnecting with an old friend, the Math Teacher and her family. One was a girls' night, and one was a 4th of July barbeque. Our friendship has a strange arc; we were friends as children, and again as young adults*, and we are re-connecting now as we each approach middle age. Who knows, maybe we will lose touch again and bump into each other in an old folks home.

Sunday night I hung out with the Math Teacher and her friend Goldilocks. We had a great time, but the conversations were a little surreal. On the one hand, we know each other so well and have so much history, but I have seen the two of them only sporadically over the last 15 years. We each know parts of the other’s lives intimately, but we are each totally ignorant about whole other swaths of our own personal history. Each conversation feels like the past is sitting there with us. We have tried to reconnect before, but we always let busy lives get in the way. I have to thank Facebook for helping us to start our friendship back up for a third time.

One of the best parts of hanging out with her is seeing what an awesome person she has become. She is still her, but it is like she has become her best self. Life has taught her how to be a strong and centered person that I really admire instead of the person who doubted everything about herself. I really wish I could take her back in a time machine and introduce her to her 20-year old self. I want to tell her younger version that this is who she will become.

I read somewhere once that as we get older those who knew us when we were young become more and more important. I have loved meeting all the new friends I have made over the last two years and I am grateful for them, but having people who knew you as you were and see you as you are is really grounding.

*The Math Teacher’s father was the first UU I ever met. I thought he was crazy when he tried to describe his church to me – the church I now attend.