Asking Eric: My husband smells
Dear Eric: I've been married for a few decades to someone who lacks self-awareness about the impact of his choice not to shower for several days, sometimes more than a week. He doesn't even shower after he works out/runs. He also wears the same underwear for days at a time.
When I tell him he smells he says he can't smell anything. Believe me, he smells.
He seems not to care or believe what I tell him about good hygiene practices. Maybe if he hears your opinion on the matter of good hygiene for men it might crack open a willingness to change.
– Keeping the Windows Open
Dear Windows: If he doesn't heed your comments about his body odor, as someone who loves him and lives with him, I doubt he cares what I think. But here's the facts: personal hygiene is personal, but one's personal hygiene practices impact those around them. This is true of people who don't bathe and also people who are fastidious about bathing and douse themselves in cologne, and everyone else in between. We don't live in bubbles (metaphorically, or in your husband's case, perhaps literally).
Beyond the odor issue, is there a communication problem here? Because if you're telling him about an aspect of your shared life that's causing you problems (and, frankly, a health concern), and he's dismissing it, what else is he dismissing? Are there other concerns of yours that he doesn't take seriously?
I'm not trying to problematize your marriage. I hope this is the only issue you two have. However, when a spouse brings up an issue, it's always best for the couple to work together to find a solution. There's got to be a way for both of you to be happy and happily share a space.
Dear Eric: The letter from 'Burning Questions, Not Hillsides', who was trying to keep a friend from smoking in their backyard, reminded me of a little decorative plaque I made and used to display in my home years ago. I was a young adult and mother in the 1970s and 1980s when smoking was still common. I do not recall if I created this little verse or if I read it somewhere. (My apologies to the author if I inadvertently plagiarized.) It read:
'Welcome to our non-smoking home. If you are seen smoking, we will assume that you are on fire and treat you accordingly.'
I probably still have it packed away somewhere but thankfully would not need to display it in 2025.
– Sign of the Times
Dear Sign: I love a cheeky sign that also helpfully lets friends know how to be good guests.
Dear Eric: I have a distant relationship with my brother as I am a gay man with a 'new thought' religion, both of which he says will send me to Hell.
We communicate, mostly by email on birthdays and Christmas, but did get along well more than 10 years ago when our father passed and the estate was settled. I sent my nieces gifts on their birthdays and Christmas until they turned 18 and stopped thanking me.
I've seen one niece in person in the last 20 years. Two of the nieces send Christmas wishes at times.
I was invited to the wedding of a grandniece I've never met, probably at the urging of my sister-in-law, who would like to see my brother and I closer. My husband was not included in the invitation. I declined the invitation, stating we had booked a cruise at the time of the wedding. I will send a card.
Of course, I lied about the cruise. Should I have attended as a way to get back into the family? They are my only living family save three cousins, two of which are fundamental Christians. I feel much closer to my husband's family who are welcoming and available. How do I handle another invitation?
– Estranged Guest
Dear Guest: Wedding invites are sometimes olive branches, but at other times they're simply social gestures that can take on outsized influence. While the invitation you received was kind, accepting it or future invites that feel more obligatory rather than genuine, may not serve you as well as reaching out to your family in a way that is safe for you.
Let's talk about this practically: would you really have enjoyed this wedding, knowing few people and feeling that your husband had been excluded? I suspect you wouldn't have, which would have made it hard to have reconnecting conversations with your brother. Weddings are also not ideal times for those kinds of conversations.
A card is the right move here. But if you want to be closer to your family, first figure out what your boundaries are (ideally in conversation with your husband), and then reach out.
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Chicago Tribune
11 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Asking Eric: My husband smells
Dear Eric: I've been married for a few decades to someone who lacks self-awareness about the impact of his choice not to shower for several days, sometimes more than a week. He doesn't even shower after he works out/runs. He also wears the same underwear for days at a time. When I tell him he smells he says he can't smell anything. Believe me, he smells. He seems not to care or believe what I tell him about good hygiene practices. Maybe if he hears your opinion on the matter of good hygiene for men it might crack open a willingness to change. – Keeping the Windows Open Dear Windows: If he doesn't heed your comments about his body odor, as someone who loves him and lives with him, I doubt he cares what I think. But here's the facts: personal hygiene is personal, but one's personal hygiene practices impact those around them. This is true of people who don't bathe and also people who are fastidious about bathing and douse themselves in cologne, and everyone else in between. We don't live in bubbles (metaphorically, or in your husband's case, perhaps literally). Beyond the odor issue, is there a communication problem here? Because if you're telling him about an aspect of your shared life that's causing you problems (and, frankly, a health concern), and he's dismissing it, what else is he dismissing? Are there other concerns of yours that he doesn't take seriously? I'm not trying to problematize your marriage. I hope this is the only issue you two have. However, when a spouse brings up an issue, it's always best for the couple to work together to find a solution. There's got to be a way for both of you to be happy and happily share a space. Dear Eric: The letter from 'Burning Questions, Not Hillsides', who was trying to keep a friend from smoking in their backyard, reminded me of a little decorative plaque I made and used to display in my home years ago. I was a young adult and mother in the 1970s and 1980s when smoking was still common. I do not recall if I created this little verse or if I read it somewhere. (My apologies to the author if I inadvertently plagiarized.) It read: 'Welcome to our non-smoking home. If you are seen smoking, we will assume that you are on fire and treat you accordingly.' I probably still have it packed away somewhere but thankfully would not need to display it in 2025. – Sign of the Times Dear Sign: I love a cheeky sign that also helpfully lets friends know how to be good guests. Dear Eric: I have a distant relationship with my brother as I am a gay man with a 'new thought' religion, both of which he says will send me to Hell. We communicate, mostly by email on birthdays and Christmas, but did get along well more than 10 years ago when our father passed and the estate was settled. I sent my nieces gifts on their birthdays and Christmas until they turned 18 and stopped thanking me. I've seen one niece in person in the last 20 years. Two of the nieces send Christmas wishes at times. I was invited to the wedding of a grandniece I've never met, probably at the urging of my sister-in-law, who would like to see my brother and I closer. My husband was not included in the invitation. I declined the invitation, stating we had booked a cruise at the time of the wedding. I will send a card. Of course, I lied about the cruise. Should I have attended as a way to get back into the family? They are my only living family save three cousins, two of which are fundamental Christians. I feel much closer to my husband's family who are welcoming and available. How do I handle another invitation? – Estranged Guest Dear Guest: Wedding invites are sometimes olive branches, but at other times they're simply social gestures that can take on outsized influence. While the invitation you received was kind, accepting it or future invites that feel more obligatory rather than genuine, may not serve you as well as reaching out to your family in a way that is safe for you. Let's talk about this practically: would you really have enjoyed this wedding, knowing few people and feeling that your husband had been excluded? I suspect you wouldn't have, which would have made it hard to have reconnecting conversations with your brother. Weddings are also not ideal times for those kinds of conversations. A card is the right move here. But if you want to be closer to your family, first figure out what your boundaries are (ideally in conversation with your husband), and then reach out.
Buzz Feed
15 hours ago
- Buzz Feed
Old Photo Reveals Truth About Missing Mom
I tried not to stare when I first saw her. Her gaunt, heavily lined face made her look older than I expected. She wore a dingy pumpkin-orange thrift-store turtleneck that swallowed her 5-foot-7, 98-pound frame. But her ice-blue eyes sparkled like a kid's on Christmas morning. 'Oh boy! Oh boy,' she said, walking toward me with outstretched arms. 'It's so good to see you!' That was the first of many visits. Most followed the same script: her astonished joy upon my arrival, my mechanical hug, and then sitting on her couch to talk about her favorite topic, classic torch love songs from the 1950s and early '60s. 'Who's the better singer?' I'd ask. 'Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole?' She'd close her eyes to ponder. 'Nat King Cole,' she'd announce, nodding in reverence. After about an hour, I'd stand to leave. Her smile would evaporate. Another awkward hug. As I left, she'd call out, 'Don't take any wooden nickels.' On the surface, we had nothing in common. She was a white Irish Catholic woman who grew up in a famil y that freely used the N-word, thought that Black people were lazy, and believed that Black and white people should live apart. I was a young Black man who grew up primarily in foster homes in a Black inner-city neighborhood where just about everyone — including me — regarded white people with distrust or contempt. Yet she was my mother. And, as the years have passed, she's become something else. She's the person I find myself turning to when I struggle with the mixture of emotions that so many Americans are experiencing right now. Many of us are exhausted, demoralized, and drained by constant political and racial divisions. Countless Americans have become, as author David Brooks put it in a recent essay, 'passive, discouraged. … They've lost the confidence to wish for more.' I've been swimming in this grim national mood for years. As a journalist at CNN and elsewhere, I've covered virtually every so-called racially transformative event in America during the past 32 years, from the Rodney King riots in 1992 to the George Floyd 'racial reckoning.' All of them generated massive hope for transformational change; all were followed by a massive letdown. At my lowest moments, I've wondered whether human beings are too susceptible to racism and tribalism to make democracy work. But my mother offered another way to look at the future, without ever intending to do so. She was a person who seemed to have no power or reason to hope. Still she, and others like her, gave me the confidence to wish for more. *** In the beginning, I thought I'd never know her. When I was born in the mid-1960s, interracial marriage and intimate interracial relationships were illegal in Maryland, as in much of the country. My mother vanished from my life not long after I was born, and so did her family. No one told me why. I didn't know what she looked like. My father's name was on my birth certificate, but hers was not. All he told me and my younger brother, Patrick, was this: 'Your mother's name is Shirley, she's white, and her family hates Black people.' Their hatred did not surprise me. I grew up in a West Baltimore neighborhood that served as the setting for the HBO series ,, a crime drama that depicted a Black inner-city community ravaged by racism and drug violence. I routinely heard my friends and neighbors refer to white people as 'honkies' and 'crackers.' I heard white people yell 'Nigger!' when I strayed into their neighborhoods. During my entire time in Baltimore's public schools — from Head Start to high school graduation — I saw only one white student. It wasn't the time or place to be biracial. There were no biracial public figures like former President Barack Obama or former Vice President Kamala Harris when I grew up in the 1970s and early '80s. I was too ashamed to tell anyone my mother was white. I marked her race as 'Black' on school forms. I became a closeted biracial person. At 17, though, I discovered that there was one place worse than my neighborhood: where I first met my mom. There was another reason why I tried not to stare when I first saw her. I was trying to hide my emotions because I was in shock. I was standing in the waiting room of a psychiatric facility called Crownsville Hospital Center in rural Maryland. My mother had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, a severe mental illness. I didn't make that discovery until I met her in Crownsville. No one in my family, including my father, had told me — not even on the car ride to the hospital. They didn't know how. My father had waited until I had graduated from high school to suddenly ask me one day if I wanted to meet my mom. He didn't think I could handle knowing about her illness until I became a young man. Many people didn't talk openly about mental illness in their families when I met my mother in the early 1980s. For over 30 years, I blocked out most of the memories from that first meeting, but one detail lingered. Before I left, my mother looked at me and made a request. 'Will you send me a St. Jude prayer book?' she asked. 'Ah, yeah, I will,' I said, not knowing at the time that St. Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes. Outwardly, I didn't skip a beat after that meeting. I attended and graduated from Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris was a classmate. I became a journalist at several newspapers before joining CNN. But I had stepped out of one closet into another. Now, I was ashamed that my mother had a mental illness. I didn't even tell my closest friends. It took two years to tell the woman I would date and marry about my mom's illness — and another two into our marriage before allowing them to meet. In the life I hid from others, I tried to build a relationship with my mom. I wrote her a flood of letters, telling her about myself, my dreams and my hope that we could get to know each other. There would be no reply for months, and then a letter would finally arrive. I'd tear it open to find a single sheet from a yellow legal pad, with large cursive letters spilling over the margins: ' Dear John! I could use some money and to see you in person. Could you send a picture of yourself and Pat for Mother's Day? I need another St. Jude prayer book. Love, Shirley. ' Personal visits were no better. She would drift away in the middle of conversations. She'd forget what we talked about two minutes earlier. Her lips would tremble, and she'd lapse into silence if I asked too many questions about her past. At times, she'd sense my frustration, turn to me and say with a rueful smile, 'Don't mind me. I'm crazy.' Each visit left me more depressed. My mother had been a mystery when I had no contact with her — and even more so once she was in my life. Her mental illness was like a thick fog; I didn't know how to navigate around it to see her. All I could see was schizophrenia. In my 30s, I gave up. I stopped writing her letters and trying to reach her through conversations. I kept visiting her and mailing her St. Jude trinkets, but I was just checking a box. Our visits were filled with awkward silences. I didn't expect our relationship to change. One day, when my wife, Terry, asked me why I didn't talk more about my mother, I cut her off. 'All I do is send her money,' I said with a heavy sigh. 'I can't really communicate with her. There's nothing left to tell.' *** But there was so much to her story that had not been told. One night, when I was about 19, my father reached into a Ziploc bag and pulled out a sepia-stained black-and-white photo. In the photo, a young white woman with a beehive hairdo looked at the camera with a wide, dimpled smile. She was holding a cigarette in her right hand and looked like she was about to burst into laughter. She looked confident, and her eyes sparkled with intelligence and mischief. It was my mother. The photo was taken when she was 20, the same year she gave birth to me. I couldn't stop staring at the photo. It bore little resemblance to the fragile woman I knew. I set out to learn about the woman in that photo. I pressed relatives to talk about my parents' relationship. I knew the outline: They met in 1963 at a hospital in downtown Baltimore. My mother was a nurse's assistant, and my father, Clifton Sr., was in the Merchant Marines. Their first date was a disaster. My father couldn't persuade a Black cabdriver to take him to my mom's house because she lived in a white working-class neighborhood where no Blacks dared venture. When my father finally did knock on her door, her father answered. He tried to shove my father off the doorstep and called the police. 'This nigger is trying to see my daughter,' my mother's father told the arriving officers. They arrested my father for disturbing the peace. My mother decided that she would visit my father instead. She started taking walks toward my father's house in West Baltimore, which was the central meeting place for my father's extended family. My relatives described her as 'quick-witted,' 'chatty' and driven to help people in need. She sat on my father's front steps, smoking Marlboro cigarettes with my uncles, and hung out in the kitchen to watch my paternal grandmother, Daisy, sing Negro spirituals while baking sweet potato pies. My father's family didn't know what to make of her. In the early 1960s, white politicians routinely warned against the evils of 'race-mixing.' Psychiatrists declared in scholarly journals that whites who married or 'mated' with Blacks had a death wish or sought an outlet for 'deviant' sexual urges. Baltimore passed the nation's first racially restrictive housing law in 1910, which banned Black people from buying homes in white neighborhoods and vice versa, and was heavily segregated when my parents met. My father's relatives chuckled as they recalled a 20-year-old white woman walking alone into an all-Black neighborhood to see a Black man. 'It was like a breakthrough,' my cousin Reese recalled. 'She was a white woman on the block, not scared, not worried about being attacked, not looking over her shoulder. She didn't seem to be conscious of her color. She was like one of the family.' I then heard stories that filled a hole in my heart that I didn't even know was there. Unprompted, relatives recounted memories of a doting young mom who took her two children on walks in the park, rubbed her nose against their bellies while they giggled and sang Patsy Cline and Tony Bennett songs to them. My mom loved to sing one song in particular to me, Doris Day's ' Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).' Try as I might, though, I have no memories of those moments. Mercifully, I also have no memory of what happened next. My mother's illness became apparent after she gave birth to Patrick, nine months after I was born. She started drifting away during conversations, chain-smoking and disappearing for long solitary walks. She couldn't keep a job. When my parents moved into an apartment together, she'd leave with the gas stove on or the front door ajar. My parents never married. 'She tried, but she didn't have the capacity to do normal things,' my father told me. 'She wanted to be accepted like normal people.' And then one day, my relatives said, she disappeared. Years later, Patrick accidentally discovered the reason why while consulting her Social Security records. Her father had placed her in a psychiatric facility, a not uncommon fate in the 1950s and early 1960s for white women in interracial relationships. Hearing how my parents' relationship ended left me emotionally numb. I no longer wanted to know more about my mother — every story seemed to end in tragedy. I thought I would never meet any semblance of the vibrant woman in that old photograph. But there was another side to those stories about my mom that I had overlooked. It was her 'marvelous victory.' *** Part of that victory can be seen in a viral photograph from last year that is now forgotten because the news cycle has moved on. It's a snapshot of Kamala Harris taken last summer during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was shot from the point of view of a brown biracial girl in a pink pantsuit and pigtails, transfixed as she gazes upward at Harris from the front row at the United Center in Chicago. The girl is Amara, Harris' great-niece, age 8. It's easy to see why the photo went viral. It was a sneak preview of a Brown New America. The U.S. is projected to become a majority-minority country (the majority of citizens will be non-white) by 2044. The number of people who identify as multiracial increased by 276% over the past decade. Advertisements today routinely depict interracial couples, straight and gay, along with their children. And some of our most prominent public figures — Obama, Harris, film director Jordan Peele and NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes — are biracial. The acceptance of interracial marriage cuts across racial and partisan lines. Harris and Doug Emhoff, her Jewish husband, were the first interracial couple to reach the highest levels of the executive branch, but they were immediately followed by another interracial couple, GOP Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants. Some white supremacists objected to Usha Vance's race but even within the MAGA universe there is widespread acceptance of the Vances' interracial marriage. Someday, perhaps soon, an interracial couple will occupy the White House. It's easy to miss, but Usha Vance's ascension and Harris' groundbreaking run for the White House represents one of the greatest victories of the Civil Rights Movement: the normalization of interracial marriage and biracial people throughout America. When Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice in 2022, few if any news stories dwelled on the fact that her husband is white. The casual acceptance of interracial couples at even the highest echelon of American life demonstrates something that's so important to remember today: how quickly people's attitudes on seemingly intractable issues can shift. When a Gallup poll asked Americans about their views on marriage between Black and white people in 1958, only 4% approved. Gallup asked the same question in 2021, and 94% approved — an all-time high. Public opinion about one of the most entrenched racial taboos in American history went from near-universal disapproval to virtual universal approval within a lifetime. How did this happen? The quick answer is that in June 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down 'anti-miscegenation' laws in the Loving v. Virginia case. But something else also made it happen. It was a choice that certain people made and a type of courage they all displayed. One of them was my mom. I only saw my mom as this fragile flower, but my brother, Patrick, was the first to notice another side to her. One morning, he took her to a hair salon that served women in a group home where our mom lived. She had been transferred to the home with other women with severe mental illnesses after Crownsville was shut down, in part, for mistreating patients. While they were waiting, our mom watched a hairdresser berate and throw hair products at a woman sitting in her chair. 'She's a bitch,' my mom said, her eyes narrowed on the hairdresser. Patrick had never heard our mother speak in such an indignant tone before. He suppressed a smile. 'Mom, do you know you just said a bad word?' 'I'm sorry, Pat.' Our mom briefly paused, then added, 'But she is a bitch.' As I dug deeper into old family stories, I discovered that my mom had long been infuriated by any display of injustice. She glared back at white people who stared at her while she walked in public with my father in the early 1960s. Sometimes she'd say, 'You act like you ain't never seen people before.' She and my father trashed a bar when the bartender refused to serve them. Once, I heard my mom say she had been arrested as a young woman. For what, I inquired. 'For opening my big fat mouth,' she said with a wide grin. Even her illness couldn't erase her spirit of defiance. I hated visiting her group homes. Some were run by good people who treated my mom with compassion, but many seemed designed to crush whatever humanity was left of those consigned there. Unscrupulous caretakers stole from or bullied people in their care. Some confined them to squalid, roach-infested rooms. When I came in to greet my mom, I'd often see heavily medicated residents sitting on couches, staring zombie-like at soap operas on television. Most of them hadn't received a visitor in years. There were few smiles or genuine laughter in these environments. But my mom could somehow bring light into the most desolate places. Patrick sneaked into a group home to surprise our mom one morning, only to be shocked by what he saw: our mother bopping and weaving down a 'Soul Train' dance line as the group home staff and residents cheered her on. Any gifts we sent her quickly disappeared because, we discovered, she gave most of them away to other group home members who she said needed them more. And when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, her caretaker had to buy a separate living room chair for my mom to enforce social distancing rules. All of the group home members wanted to sit near her. I didn't appreciate the depth of her defiance until I was in my mid-50s, when I did something that I had never done: I traveled to her childhood home in Baltimore. On an overcast summer morning, I drove to Mill Hill, my mother's childhood community. She lived on Wilkins Avenue, on a quintessential Baltimore block of gleaming marble steps, neat row houses and a still-stately St. Benedict Church, where my mom was confirmed. I parked my rental car and walked to the spot where my father had been assaulted and arrested for trying to date my mother over 50 years ago. I scanned the street to see white, Black and brown neighbors talking to one another from their front steps and hanging out together at a corner tavern. I was surprised by something other than the racial mix. When I looked at my smartphone's app, I was stunned to discover that my father's former home was only 4.1 miles away. I had no idea that my estranged white and Black relatives had lived so close to one another. Racial segregation was so entrenched when my parents met that their families might as well have lived in separate solar systems. Baltimore's segregation wasn't just racial; it was also ethnic. Jews, Italians and Poles kept to their neighborhoods. Outsiders, particularly those who had the 'wrong' color, risked getting hurt walking into the wrong area. As I stood in front of my mom's childhood home, I imagined for the first time what it must have been like for her. The contemporary Wilkins Avenue landscape dissolved, and the circa early 1960s Wilkins Avenue appeared. I saw her — a thin, young white woman with a beehive hairdo — close the front door and walk toward a neighborhood to meet people her family and community had told her to hate. I paused outside my car and shook my head in admiration, and confusion. Damn, I thought. Why would she take such a risk? I'm still not quite sure. Was my mother's relationship with my father driven by youthful rebellion, the allure of a taboo relationship, or was it an early symptom of the illness that would engulf her? Or was it truly love? I learned through others that my parents remained close after she was institutionalized. My father routinely visited my mother and continued to take care of her even when his health began to fail late in his life. What I do know is that she did something that remains so important: She refused to accept the status quo. My mother was part of a vanguard of Black, brown and white people who would smash a taboo against interracial relationships that had been enshrined as law for centuries. They didn't wait for the Supreme Court or politicians to tell them whom to love. I was born four years before the Loving decision. Like most big changes, it started small, with countless acts of invisible courage from everyday people. My mother's decision to walk from Wilkins Avenue to my father's house ' sent forth a tiny ripple of hope.' That ripple fed into another, emboldening others to do the same. Those ripples eventually turned into a tsunami that gave us the Loving decision and a New America — one where a brown girl in a pink pantsuit could look at a biracial woman making a credible run for the White House or another brown woman at the White House today and think, 'That could be me one day.' This was the same dynamic that gave us marriage equality. Everyday people acted first, coming out to their parents, friends and co-workers; the politicians and courts followed later. As I returned to my car and drove away from Wilkins Avenue, I smiled. I felt a warm sensation well up in my chest, and something else that I'd never felt before about my mom: pride. Pride that I was her son. She was no hopeless cause. She was more powerful than she realized. She, and others like her, helped make Usha Vance and Kamala Harris possible. The historian and activist Howard Zinn said there is a tendency among people 'to think that what we see in the present moment will continue.' He said people often forget how often throughout history people have been astonished by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, and 'by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.' He said that if people only look at the worst in the past and present, it destroys their capacity to act. 'And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future,' Zinn wrote. 'The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.' *** After Wilkins Avenue, my visits to my mom changed. I painted her fingernails. I asked her to sing 'Que Sera Sera.' I asked her to show me some dance moves. And I laughed along with her as she did a little shimmy of her hips. I stopped dwelling on what I had lost; I became grateful for what remained. My wife noticed. 'You used to hug your mom like she was an eggshell and get frustrated when you couldn't talk to her the way you wanted,' Terry told me one night. 'And now?' I asked her. 'You hug her tighter now, and you're not afraid of the silence when you talk to her.' During one of my last visits with my mom, Terry took a photo that I treasure. We stopped by my mother's group home in Baltimore on a luminous summer day with oak trees in full bloom. That visit followed the same script: a ring of the doorbell, the scurrying of footsteps behind the front door, and my mom gleefully shouting, 'Oh my Lord, Oh my Lord!' Terry's smartphone camera snapped what happened after the front door swung open. I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around my mother as she pillowed her face on my shoulder, a contented smile on her face. If I could have written a caption for that photo, it would be the final words I wrote to her not long after that visit — words that she never saw. It's what I wished I could have said to her so many years earlier. ' Now I see you, Mom. I finally see you.' John Blake is an award-winning journalist for He is the author of 'More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.' Blake's memoir has won five book awards, including the 2024 Christopher Awards, which celebrates books that 'affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Blake has spoken at colleges, symposiums and in documentaries on race, religion and politics. He is a graduate of Howard University and a native of Baltimore. For more info, visit his website. This story originally ran on HuffPost in February 2025 and was re-published on June 12, 2025 — the 58th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, as part of HuffPost Personal's 'Best Of' series today.
Chicago Tribune
a day ago
- Chicago Tribune
Asking Eric: Friends didn't send my daughter a wedding gift
Dear Eric: My daughter got married a year ago and decided to have a wedding with immediate family members only due to the huge family on the groom's side (the wedding was still about 100 people). It was planned on the West Coast (we are on the East Coast). Some of my friends sent them a gift, knowing why they were not invited but three of my close friends didn't send anything (even a card would have been thoughtful). I've sent their kids very generous gifts. One, I couldn't attend (it was during Covid and the other was far away and very expensive to get to). One of the other ones, we traveled to her daughter's wedding, spent a fortune to stay in a hotel and gave her a generous cash gift. I mean, really, nothing from her? She wouldn't have gone to the wedding if she had been invited. I'm so disappointed. I feel like even a small gift would have been nice. They have known my daughter since she was little. I'm having trouble letting it go. It just feels cheap. Some of my friends are shocked that they didn't do anything. – Giftless Dear Giftless: You're right, it would have been nice if they'd sent a gift. When it comes to children and grandchildren of friends, wedding gifts and other gestures for special occasions can become extensions of the central friendship. A gift to your kid is also (perhaps, primarily) a gift to you. So, I can see why this stings. The answers to two questions might help de-escalate this situation. First, did your daughter send out wedding announcements? Even if other people know about a wedding or other special event, it simply may not occur to them to send a gift without the trigger of a piece of cardstock in the mail. It's a weird system, perhaps, but an announcement can serve as an indication that the couple is open to gifts, and help guests figure out where to send them. Without it, life can get in the way and gifts can fall to the wayside. So, if your friends didn't receive announcements, this may not be a one-to-one comparison with the weddings to which you were invited. The second question is, does your daughter have any feelings about this? Often, in life's biggest events, the gifts you get feel so thoughtful and generous that one doesn't really think about the gifts that one didn't get. Is it possible that your daughter doesn't have the same expectations of your friends? If so, you're still perfectly within your right to hold them to a different standard. But, for the sake of peace of mind, it's important to remember that everyone's expectations of themselves and of others are different. Dear Eric: This is not an earth-shattering question, yet I'd appreciate an opinion. We call our firstborn son by his middle name because his first is the same as his father's middle, who also goes by his middle name. This practice goes back generations on my husband's father's side. Imagine my confusion, years ago, when I learned of the tradition and discovered that our as-yet-unconceived son had already been given a first name (but we could choose the middle). I've made my peace with the tradition despite its oddness (personal opinion). Now our son is going on four, ripe for learning and spelling his entire name and I'm worried he'll be confused and in turn confuse others when we try to explain that his real first name is actually his daddy's. I'm already cringing. I may or may not have noticed your name as an example of an elegant solution, but is it? – Name Game Dear Name: Well, the elegance of my nomenclature is up for debate. In high school, when I first started using my first initial, a teacher told me, 'Eric, there's a thin line between class and pretension.' Can you believe that? The audacity still makes me laugh and laugh. Suffice it to say, your son will have plenty of opportunity to choose class, pretension or something else on his journey of self-expression. If you call him by his middle name, he may eventually choose to use his first. If you call him by his first name, he may choose his middle name. If he becomes a pop star later in life, he may choose a whole new name. All of those are just fine. But, for now, he'll be able to understand the concept of a full name and that some parts of the name are used conversationally and others aren't. A name is an offering from a parent. And like all the myriad offerings of parenthood, one hopes that it is of use. But even if that use changes, it doesn't make it less valuable.
