Why I Started This Newsletter
I’ve been reading substack newsletters for a while now, and I have found a lot of insight and wisdom in them. However, I haven’t found anyone who reports what it’s like in my niche — so I decided to try my hand at writing about my niche.
I realized I had to identify and then describe my niche so I would know what to write about. So here are some things that make up my niche:
I am a white cisgender married female baby-boomer; pronouns are she/her. I am a mother to two adult children and grandmother to two teenagers. I grew up in the post-WW-II suburbs of Washington, DC, went to college, and married my college sweetheart. We are still married 52 years later, and I don’t see that changing until one of us dies.
I went to grad school — a lot. I have an MA and Ph.D. in political science and an MA in American History.
I taught high school history and government for 25 years until I retired in 2012.
Since retirement I have been busy doing things that I think are important:
I tutor at a local literacy center; for the past four years I’ve taught a weekly current events class to English language learners.
I take classes at our local Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. I call this “school for old people.” I also teach classes in this program; I’m currently developing a class on Benjamin Franklin that I’ll teach in March of 2022.
I have been a member of our local Indivisible Group — Williamsburg Indivisible Group or WIG — since 2017. Since 2019 I’ve been co-leader of this group. Saving the Republic is serious business.
I have become a serious student of genealogy. I work on my family history almost every day and have published a dozen books summarizing what I have learned.
In addition, I have all of the family/health concerns everyone else has.
My husband and I are aging, and that brings problems along with it.
My children are both doing well, personally and professionally, for which I am profoundly grateful. I am also all too aware that this could change with one phone call.
My sister (my only remaining sibling, since our brother died in 2014) is facing the same challenges I am. We are reasonably close, although we have not lived near one another since I went away to college in 1965. We are finding our way into “being there” for each other as we both navigate these years of our lives.
COVID has changed my life in ways I never predicted (and probably in ways I don’t know about yet)
Having written this out, I am proposing to write every day, Monday-Friday, focusing on a different aspect of my “niche” each day. Here’s my plan:
Monday — Tutoring at the Literacy Center
Tuesday — Teaching and taking classes at the Osher Program
Wednesday — Williamsburg Indivisible Group (WIG) and other political things
Thursday — Genealogy
Friday — Family