My older children attended school in the Vacaville Unified School District while I was a Juvenile Justice Commissioner.  I had the opportunity to participate in the Vacaville Youth Master Plan, the Diversity Fair, and once one of my children was old enough, we volunteered at Bingo Night together.  Those are very pleasant memories of watching my children grown and share the importance of community service and volunteering in the community.  Before I was a parent in a blended family, I was a single mom.  Organizations like the Glen Cove Parent Teach Association and the Napa Solano Girls Scouts provided excellent opportunities for my children and her friends to build skills, learn to read, jump rope, and plan small businesses selling cookies.  My professional career during that time was as a medical claims examiner and data processor.  I worked at some of the largest health insurers in the world including five years at Aetna USHealthcare, NYLCare, and my last year, 2005, I worked for Kaiser Health Plan Claims.  I tried as a parent to encourage everyone to be involved in sports and emphasizing community service in a blended family was difficult especially with young adults and a newborn.  Participation in projects in the community and church were essential. I became more interested in the juvenile justice system as my children entered into high school.  I noticed that there was a communication gap between the expectations of high school and the responsibility that elementary school taught. That was then with the millenials, who are now twenty somethings. The most frightening thing was one day, while my youngest had the same teacher as one of the elders, greater than ten years apart, the eldest child became frightened that the teacher had adapted the books to Wonder, an young adult book but the teacher used the same spelling lists from when he had the class.  While family communication is important it can become fragmented due to social media fragmentation and fake news.  This is especially true when there are large age differences in multi-ethnic blended families. 

How do my gardens grow? With my younger and elder children share my same political philosophy, Rosa Parks sat on a bus, and we are thankful.  I had the opportunity to sit with a young woman, who is a victim of human trafficking.  I said to her that when Martin Luther King, Jr went to France he sent a card to Rosa Parks just to say, 'he was thinking of her.'  That postcard and a whole bunch of other civil rights memos, agenda's and minutes are now sitting in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.  One day our journey will be there or maybe just for Vacaville California.