Unlike the last time I blogged, I’ve kept these posts away from election campaigns. But reading Obama’s speech today, a passage struck me that could have been written for my entire family:

I can no more disown [Rev. Wright] than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

As an ex-boyfriend once told me about my family, it’s people like that who teach you to live in the space between who someone is and who you want them to be. And that, my friend, is what we call maturity.

(p.s. I swore I would post daily from Winter Soldier: but I have severe illness in my family, and could barely get away to do my job.)