I doubt the following will generate discussion, but I'm still posting it. Just because:

While mulling Obama's speech yesterday afternoon, I was able to understand and therefore forgive my mother. She died in the late 1990s.

My mother and I always had an adversarial relationship. As a child I found her bossy, as a teenager embarrassing, as a young adult nosy, and for the last thirty years of her life, horribly judgmental. (Like I'm not?) Not surprisingly, when I came down in 1981 with MS, our relationship worsened. In my eyes she was labeling me defective.

After my father died in the 1980s, visits to see my mother became less frequent and more troubling. While I was scooter-confined but could still drive, I visited her once-a-year-ish. During the years between my no longer being able to drive and her death, friends drove me to Virginia's Eastern Shore to see her. (As I've remarked elsewhere, I'm lucky to have some really good friends.) At the time of my last visit, she was living in a retirement home—half independent living, half nursing home. She lived in her own apartment, and one afternoon while we were talking, she mentioned that the management was letting anyone move in, regardless of condition.

"Why, that Mrs. Belote, who lives down the hall" my mother said, "can barely walk. She uses a walker all the time."
"Oh?" I said, probably more than a bit testily.
She defended her position. "Now there are even wheelchairs in the dining room."
"And that's a problem?" Teeth clenched.
"They used not to allow them."
Snap! "Oh, Mommy, you're such a snob!"
Silence, then: "Thank you for pointing that out to me."

She usually won arguments, often in ways I didn't consider totally fair. But anyway, there I was—insulting my mother and being called on it. Bad cripple! Bad Martha!

Yesterday Obama described his white grandmother who loved him but said racial epithets that made him cringe, and I thought, but to her you weren't a scary black man, you were the grandson she loved. And I remembered that conversation with my mother. I wasn't a cripple, a person in a wheelchair who shouldn't be allowed in the dining room. I was still her daughter. How simple is it. And I never realized it before.

Thank you, Senator Obama.

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Currently reading: Best American Mystery Stories edited by Lee Child and Otto Penzler. AARGH!