red, stripes and books

Constantly remember how full of choices life is and how if you let your guilt or shame lead you instead of joy you truly will have no one to blame but yourself when you are living a life that feels heavy and constrained instead of happy and free

For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, then, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that middle-class home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies”’ dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.