Dear Solitaire,

I have a lovely 5YO son, a great husband, a fabulous sister and her fiance, some terrific extended family on the husband's side (my own people are pretty sucky, so I avoid them), and we are on the verge of adopting a baby and possibly bringing her home on Christmas Day itself...so my holidays are filled with people, and I'm grateful for it. However, I completely understand your solitary contentment and applaud you for not succumbing to the kind of self-pity and fear so many people would harbor in your place. Forget your mother and her needling! Don't try to explain yourself or convince her you're okay, just keep saying, "Uh huh, uh huh, sure, right, I'm just so miserable, whatever." You're right to point out that she is merely projecting her own fears of solitude. Pity her quietly, and enjoy your Christmas. It sounds like a terrific day and frankly, those of us with tons of noise and activity around us might even be a bit jealous! (I would pay good money to have 12 daytime hours of nothing to do but watch movies alone and drink cocoa in my pjs...)

~Sandy Asirvatham, would-be hermit ;-)

With each passing year I find it harder and harder to use the label "feminist" for myself, even though I maintain all the same beliefs about equal work for equal pay, reproductive freedom, etc. that I did in my 20s. Rebecca Traister reminds me of myself when I was younger, stupider, and more prone to (I'll use the loaded word) hysteria. Hillary was asked a ludicrous question that was already pre-loaded with all sorts of gender connotations. "How do you DO it?!?!?" is, IMHO, the kind of question only a woman would ask another woman. It is practically an estrogen-bearing dart, aimed precisely to incur the kind of weepy, self-involved, self-pitying response Hillary Clinton produced on cue. John Edwards shot back with a cliched and faintly patriarchal-sounding response. Who needs those striking Hollywood writers when you've got a bunch of politico-celebrities who can improvise their lines so perfectly to fit expectations? I agree with another comment here, neither the question, the answer, or the response was fit to be news. It's all just part of the theater of campaign politics. Only the young and/or foolish would bother taking such crap so seriously.

LW, if you already deeply identify yourself "as" something else, you don't need to worry. There is a vast difference between having hobbies or a moderately satisfying career that'll get shelved for some time during the early hard years, on the one hand, and having a profound passion to [compose chamber music] [cure diseases] [defend the powerless] [paint murals] etc etc, on the other. You WILL have to concede a large amount of time to childrearing, but with any luck you will enjoy the enjoyable parts fully, while suffering patiently and lovingly through the challenges. With any luck, you will find small pockets of time to "Be" something else--at the gym, at the movies with a friend, heck, even at the grocery store if you're as into food and cooking as I am.

But if you already strongly identify with some other role you play in life, you don't need to worry so much about what you call yourself or how other people see you. At the end of the day, we are each of us a myriad of intentions, possibilities, and projects. The labels we use or others use for us just don't matter at all.

Good luck. When it isn't hard as hell, having a kid is also unbelievably fun and deeply rewarding.

~Sandy Asirvatham, musician, writer, and mother

People, we are talking about politicians. They are a certain breed, even the best of them. They may be terrifically idealistic but this idealism coexists with the harsh reality that people with money and power will try, and in many cases succeed, to manipulate them. That's just life. For your own sanity and integrity, it's probably best not to be too carried away in your enthusiasm for any one politician, or you will find yourself having to rationalize their less savory votes and their occasionally egregious policy mistakes and their out-and-out corruptions.

That said, I think our country is desperate right now for even a highly imperfect Democratic presidency. I'm with all those who say that no matter who the Democratic candidate is, it's important for us to vote for that person and try to end this prolonged Republican nightmare we've been living under.

An early poster provided a link to this terrific Ken Silverstein article from Harpers. Silverstein, by the way, is one of the most experienced, smartest, and rational reporters in Washington, D.C. I'm reposting this link as a person who voted for Obama here in Maryland but did so with a fairly lukewarm attitude. I think he is very smart and has more genuinely progressive plans and views than Clinton but is, like all major politicians today, beholden to corporate masters. So in my mind it remains to be seen whether his genuine progressive/reformist impulses can weather the reality of our pay-to-play political culture.

Those who really do hold highly idealistic views of Obama will be offended by the article. Those who understand and accept the big-money-driven reality of politics may actually admire Obama for being extremely savvy and smooth, for linking the ideals of young progressives with the horsetrading/kickbacking requirements of our American corporate oligarchy in an almost seamless way. In any case, it's a very, very good read:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/11/0081275