About Osaka lighting the Olympic flame.

[Jilly_in_VA]

4. I'm good with that

My family of origin is so WASP it would make your teeth hurt, though I recently discovered that I have Black cousins thanks to Ancestry DNA (not clear about the degree, I think they're about third cousins, doesn't really matter but I'm delighted). My children's father's family is about the same, mostly German on one side, Scottish and English on the other with some mysteries about his mother's dad (she was born out of wedlock). His sister's first husband was a native of Guam, though, so he did have two pretty nieces with that racial mixture.

Which brings me to my grandkids. My first grandson (not the oldest, which I will explain in a moment) is as WASP as the rest of us, blonde, blue-eyed, and all that. Then my daughter had a liaison with a Black man who she chose, for reasons of her own, not to marry, which produced a son. Later on she married a Puerto Rican guy with whom she had another son. Here's where it gets interesting. He was wild in his younger days and had two sons with an Anglo woman who he did not marry, and then he married a Black woman who he got pregnant and had 4 more kids, two of each. (This was before he even met my daughter.) They divorced and he kind of ran wild for awhile before meeting my daughter, settling down with her, and producing the aforementioned youngest grandson with her. About 4 years ago he learned that during that wild spell between his divorce and meeting my daughter he had fathered another son with a woman in another county so he set out looking for that boy. (He's always been responsible about his kids and supported them so I can't fuss about it.) It took him awhile but he finally located him under some pretty rough circumstances. The boy's mother is not responsible, he was in foster care and he had run away. Once he was found, his father went to court and got guardianship. In the last 5 years, because of a variety of circumstances, he and my daughter had gotten custody of all of his minor children, so this one was one more of "yours, mine, and ours". They are a great bunch of kids who really all look like they belong in the same family....as his sister says, the various shades of Puerto Rico. They all call me Grandma and their dad's mom "Lita" (short for "abuelita&quot . My daughter is a green-eyed brunette who jokes that she can "pass" too! And that brings me to the last grandchild, who isn't really "blood". I adopted her mother informally after she had lost both of her parents. She was then a young adult and was going through some awful stuff. She'd been a friend of my daughter's and had been in and out of my house forever. When she got pregnant unexpectedly it was my kid who helped her figure out how to deal with it and who went down to Florida where she lives now and was effectively her doula. So naturally I am Grandma J to baby P (well, "Grandy J" is what she calls me and I like that better!). P"s mom calls herself "the whitest Black person you ever met" (she is!) and her dad is an enrolled member of the Muscokee Creek nation but his dad is white. Baby P is a brown-eyed blonde. One of my grandsons is about to make me a great-grandma to a little girl whose dad is Black and Puerto Rican and whose mom is blonde. So here we are in one little family, all shades and colors.

And meanwhile, one of my brother's boys is married to a lovely lady who is Ukrainian. They live in Kyiv and have a baby girl who is already babbling in two languages. The other married a woman from Mexico but they don't have children. Yet anyway.

The next generation could be anything. Anything at all. I just want them to love each other.