A good home is a place that you’re proud to be in, which can help you be a better parent, a better employee, and a better person.
Many of us know that this is true, but for those of us who work in the home, we know that this is also true. We feel guilty for not being proud of our homes; we feel ashamed for not living up to our own high expectations. Our homes make us feel like were somehow less valuable and less special. If youre like me, youre probably feeling a bit like a failure.
In our own homes, we try not to feel like failures – or if we do we try to hide it, because we know that our homes are important to us. We try to be proud that we have a comfortable place to live and a loving family. But with our work lives, too many of us make our homes our work places. And most of the time, we do it without really thinking about it.
So what do we do? We often avoid thinking about how our homes are important and valuable, and we look for excuses to avoid thinking about them. The reality is that our work lives are not important to us. And even if they were, we’d probably not have the energy to think about them.
I’m getting close. We do what we have to-the work we love- and we try to do it without thinking about the importance of our homes. We don’t give them a lot of thought. We don’t care. They’re not our lives, so we don’t have to think about them. We just want to do our work, and then we move on.
We don’t give our homes much thought, because we’re so busy caring about our work that we don’t have much time to think about the things that matter to our families. But that’s because we think our homes matter too much to us.
In Newport News, the people who live there are not of the same race, creed, or gender as everyone else. This makes it much easier for them to get along and to feel safe. This is because they have a shared history, culture, language, and faith that makes them feel connected to one another.
The city, in fact, is a melting pot of cultures. The people of Newport News are a diverse group of people, ranging from the French and African American to the Italian, Welsh, and German, to the Jewish and the Muslim, to the Chinese, the Spanish, the African American, and the Puerto Rican.
For anyone who has lived in the past two years, you know that the city of Newport News has not always been so diverse. In the 1960s the city was largely white, and then, in the 1970s, it was largely Hispanic. Then, in the 1990s, the city voted to become the second largest black city in the country. It was a cultural and racial melting pot that was never the same again.
It’s been a slow creep. With that last statement, I am referring to a process that has been taking place for the past twenty years. By the way, I am not referring to the city’s racial makeup. Yes, Newport News is now the second largest black city in America, but that is not all that different from when Newport News was first established as a place with black residents.