Aside from a myriad of facial features, I have inherited from my mother several things, including a willingness to talk to strangers, wonky dance moves, and a never-ending delight in “small world moments”.
Fifteen years ago, we were walking through Muir Woods on vacation several thousand miles from home. We passed another tourist family of similar make-up to ours. Ten feet past the group, my mother stopped short. “Jan?” she called. Except it came out more like “Jaaaayuuuuun?” The blonde mother who, moments before passed us on the boardwalk, turned. “Michele?” she called? Except it came out like “Micheeeelllle?” They had been college roommates and hadn’t seen each other in decades.
A few years after that, we bumped into our state senator and his family under the Eiffel Tower. In a bar in Chicago, we met a guy who had been taught by my first-grade teacher in Lexington, MA twenty years earlier.
These are moments that my mother adores, and that I, too, find reassuring. I saw a girl I’d traveled with in Israel on a plane from New York to Chicago last week. I bumped into a high school classmate on a summer night in London, a city neither of us inhabit. I could go on, but I think the point is made.
Yesterday, I got an email from Role/Reboot, a non-profit “created to navigate a world built on outdated assumptions about men’s and women’s roles and to advocate ways to understand and embrace the changing reality of our day-to-day lives.” They wanted to run the story I wrote about splitting checks on first dates.
Who founded Role/Reboot? Fran Rodgers. Who did my mom work for fifteen years ago at a pioneer company that addressed work/life balances of a new generation of female workers? Fran Rodgers. And there it is.
Note: The splitting-checks piece is up and running today, so stop by and see what other fun content they have.
Related Post: More relationship advice that got republished on The Frisky. How to respond when your partner doesn’t orgasm?
Related Post: Dating in the digital age: we’ve lost the awkward and I wish we could get it back.
