I haven’t heard much from the relative lately. I suspect there are more frequent communications on her Facebook page. But I haven’t looked. Suppose I “friend” her? Will the writers’ organization I belong to then be treated to discussions of our extended family’s baby pictures?

Can I count on Facebook to keep these currents flowing separately?

Facebook pages are free and they are available worldwide. At a convention, I met Pakistani journalists, also using Facebook. It’s great to have international colleagues, but I suspect we have very different feelings about a woman’s role in society. Should I share my history as a feminist editor-a history well-known to my friends? Or should I seek out some professional common ground without giving out quite so much information?

Facebook has privacy standards, but they are still evolving. And so am I. I am still pondering which way to face in a world where all our faces are increasingly public ones. And as Facebook and other social media continue to grow, I am wondering whether that choice will even continue to be mine.

A friend tells this second-hand tale of a student seeking an internship: The organization the student applied to requested to see her Facebook page, then instructed her which entries to delete. Is some boundary being crossed here? Should it be?

As a woman writer, will I pay an extra price when work and family mingle in public? Do I want family pictures, with children’s names and personal information, available on the Internet? What do I do about the college students I taught, who now want to “friend” me? Would they enjoy a funny snapshot of my dog Porschy fleeing the buzzing vacuum cleaner? Would the Pakistani colleagues?

The “whole world” may have been watching at sixties anti-war demonstrations, but back then it was usually possible to go home afterwards. Which face do I face the world with nowadays, when the scrutiny can be 24/7?

Meanwhile, my high school held a reunion. And yes, I got more Facebook requests.

Perhaps I should grow a separate set of names to greet the faces that I meet. Maybe avatars are the solution. I feel a twinge of atavism. I wonder if Currer, Acton, and Ellis are pseudonyms that can be taken.

While I’m still deciding, I’ve tweaked my privacy settings again. Don’t look for me on Facebook. If you do, you won’t find me …um … I hope.

Many of us who after 30 “got serious,” raised our children, bought a house, and worked at jobs we may not always have loved to try to hang onto it, get another chance. Those of us who at 18 or 20 roamed the world but later stopped because we were busy being  “grown up,” get another chance at roving. Those of us who wrote plays or poetry,  get another chance at creating. Those of us who sat in, or perhaps campaigned for women’s rights or peace,  get another chance at seeking justice.

People are living longer now. We made history as kids, and we still have a dream or two. So it’s time to make some new life’s resolutions. Right now. Here are some suggested ones:

Finish that book. If some corporate New York publisher won’t run with it, publish  independently, using the nifty new online tools.

Share. We are about to get a break on medical bills. Insist that our younger sisters and brothers, our neighbors, and our children get one too.

Travel, but stay in a village. Do something about what you learn there.

Add to the list. Make some resolutions of your own.

We are not used up; we are pent up. And we’re back!

The cookie is delicious, as I expected, but that is not the point. I hesitated. I could have skipped it entirely. Once more, in my willingness to be agreeable, I have nibbled away at my own resolve to protect my health.

We read a lot about corporate efforts to exploit our hungers with nutrition-poor fast foods. We read a lot about diets and self-discipline. But less is written about the conflicted nexus of holiday tradition and eating. My hostess does not see herself as tempting or controlling me; her hospitality is on the line. She works hard to provide an ambiance of comfort in which food ranks paramount. If I reject the food, I reject her culture, her labor, and her striving for a perfect Christmas in spite of bad times. Acknowledging these efforts, accepting the spirit of nurturing and comfort, accepting her wish to see me eat, I give in. Later, I wish I hadn’t.

Although she never urged food on me, my mother might have urged me to be gracious. That is, she might have done so back before her own cholesterol count shot up and her resolve toughened. Before the stroke devoured chunks of her vocabulary like chocolate chips, leaving her to signal her word retrieval failures with a finger motion across
her throat.

No longer young myself, I think of my mother as I stand facing the Christmas platter. I squirm. I wish the economy were better. I wish my friend had found a grander arena for showcasing her culinary excellence–as chef in a fine restaurant, perhaps. But few cooks are launching restaurants these days.

“Delicious,” I tell her honestly. “Perfect texture”–all the while wishing that the wagons of tradition had not circled, in these hard times, around a cookie platter. Wondering if I am dying to be sociable, I take another bite.

As women in America, we have still not achieved equality on a lot of fronts. Anyone who disagrees need only look at her Social Security benefits statement. We can vote, we can mobilize, we can run for office. A majority of the population, we still do the majority of the housework and the low-paying jobs. We still bear the children. And some of these—the poorer ones especially—still go to war.

My husband served in Vietnam. He, like many who experienced that war, is left chilled by Republican John McCain’s joking response to a student’s question about his age. The 70-something candidate is quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 16th as responding in part: “Thanks for the question you little jerk …You’re drafted.” I, too, am chilled by this.

A woman could do better, I always told myself. A woman would prize community over its destruction. A woman would understand that it takes a peaceful village to raise children. A woman would not see war as the solution. A woman would make the connection between excessive spending on war and the squeeze on household budgets.

But perhaps that understanding is no longer a shared feminist one. While initially elated by Hillary Clinton’s spirited run for the White House, I was still troubled by the fact that her vote was among those which enabled George Bush to launch a war on Iraq based on fraudulent information. I did not like Saddam Hussein. I do not like the situation now. On the Internet, I see women mourning their dead children in the street. I see figures indicating millions of refugees–families, children.

I voted for John Kerry in 2004, despite severe discomfort with his own vote authorizing the war. Despite his lengthy clarifications, it still sounded to me like complicity. Feeling helpless, wondering whether any of those in Washington consider the consequences of their actions, I attended a candlelight vigil called by MoveOn.org. In following months, I stood in a village center close to home on Wednesday evenings with others from my rural community, protesting the war. Just before the 2006 election, I brought along the flag which had lain on my father’s casket, and we held it up as traffic passed us.

My father was no pacifist. A very private person, he served in World War II. He did not die in battle. A New Deal Democrat, he had worked to mitigate the impacts of the great depression before the war; later, after it, he labored for the success of farmer cooperatives and crop insurance. He did not live to see these times, so I cannot know what he would say today. I know that he valued his country, as do I.

I must speak for my family now. Holding up my end of the flag in 2006, I spoke to my community, to the commuters’ cars, to the bus and delivery drivers, to the headlights. Then a fellow demonstrator, who had held up the other end—for these casket flags are really long and heavy– helped me fold the flag correctly back into a triangular package, as he had learned to fold so many other flags during the Vietnam war.

Last week, a report in the Huffington Post included a tape of Senator Clinton blaming the “activist base” in her party for state caucus losses, and disavowing MoveOn, specifically. This may have seemed an expedient move in the wake of Super Tuesday defeats, but it was unwise. It made caring people into things.

The Irish poet, William Butler Yeats wrote in his iconic poem, “Easter, 1916” that “too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.” I believe that too much expediency can do things to the heart as well: It can cause a candidate to harden hers. It can fracture mine.

It can split a party wide open.

–Shelley Buck lives in Northern California. She was a founding editor of Her Say News Service. Copyright, 2008.