My Jenn-eration

This has been the year of Hamilton for my family. Phil and I went to see it in the Fall and came home playing the music from the show. Our kids have been downright obsessed ever since. They always go in phases with this stuff but the Hamilton phase has stuck around for longer than I might have expected for a couple of little kids who haven't seen the show. Every meal, every trip to every store, every moment of everywhere somehow involves them singing and rapping. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised really. The show is positively extraordinary and both Phil and I agreed that it had been years since we had been so humbled by anything. I read a blog post the other day by Mike Schur who was going on, as most of us Hamilton obsessed fans do, about the genius of the whole thing. In the post, Mike talks about how there are these different moments in the show that just sneak up on you. Where the sheer genius of the whole thing and how you've probably never experienced anything...

On the day I went to vote in the 2016 election, I had Rachel Platten’s Fight Song on repeat. I played it so many times just before breakfast that Ruby nearly begged me in tears to at least mute it while she ate her cereal. But I couldn’t help it. I was amped. I was energetic. I was emotional. I had adrenaline pulsing through me. This time, after all of the lies and the insults and the petty shots that women had to take again and again, the physical intimidation – just all of it. This time, this time we were going to go to the polls. And we were going to fight. Of course, it didn’t happen like that. Who knows why really. Jill Stein, Russian bots, Wisconsin, Bill Clinton. Who knows why it wasn’t our time. It just wasn’t. I lay awake that whole night wracked with sickness. I could handle the results of the election I suppose. But what I just didn’t know was how to explain what the moral of all of this was to my kids. As parents, I think we do that a lot. We go through good times a...