Parents, Teachers & Friends
by Darla Kashian
On my daughter’s second birthday, our friend Christina captured Noa on film flushing a dollar down the toilet. To her, it was paper, no different than a tissue. To me, as a parent and a financial consultant, it was a sign of things to come.
It is funny, I’ll grant you that, but as I’ve built a consulting practice based on values and transmitting social justice and economic responsibility to one’s children, I have to say that I do feel I may have failed out of the gate. But let’s cut me a little slack—I have at least a year or two before her habits are etched in stone.
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by Peter S. Scholtes
Despite the success of “I Like to Move It” from the Madagascar movie soundtracks as the dance anthem for a generation, funky beats don’t figure prominently in most children’s music. Enter Minneapolis singer and multi-instrumentalist Adam Levy and his family project, Bunny Clogs, who cover the Jackson Five’s “ABC” and anthropomorphize foodstuffs on goofy jams such as “Confessions of a Teenage Lima Bean,” which Levy belts out in a Prince-like falsetto.
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by Laura Matanah
“I didn’t know my parents were lesbians, and I was totally caught by surprise when I got to middle school and people teased me about it,” said one of the participants in a COLAGE panel at the Rainbow Families conference.
“Did you call them both mom?” asked an audience member, clearly confused as to how someone raised by two moms could be caught by surprise in this way.
“Yes, but they never said they were lesbians, and I didn’t know.”
I had heard people talk about the importance of coming out to your kids, but until hearing this woman’s story, I hadn’t truly understood. I mean, if we’re same-sex parents raising kids, aren’t we out? But if we’re single, bi, or trans, how does our orientation affect our children?
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(Edie, age 3, and her uncle)
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Rainbow Families Conference
April 18 marked Rainbow Rumpus’s fifth Rainbow Families conference. We are very excited to reach this milestone and appreciate all of you who have helped us get here. This year’s Rainbow Families conference was held at Anwatin Middle School in Minneapolis. We had a booth at the resource fair and also ran some of the children’s programming, working with children between the ages of eight and eleven and doing activities that explored the topic of identity. The activities included a “Who Am I?” game, making identity maps, listening to a Rainbow Rumpus story, and making bookmarks. It was great to see the kids having fun and being able to talk with them and see what they created. If you would like to see some of the identity maps, check them out in the Kids section. Also, you can read the two stories we shared at the conference: “Pick-a-Pair-o’-Parents” and “Mo and Flo in the Gryphon Library.” We look forward to seeing many of you again next year and hope to see new friends in the coming years.
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