Monthly Archives: August 2012

Politics, truth and what really matters..

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So. I think of myself as one if the 100 most disenfranchised people in the United States. Why? Because I vote.
And because when I have contacted elected officials about our growing need to protect our children they tell me that protecting our children is not their issue

Let me rephrase that: local and national elected officials who have responded to my concern about protecting children from pedophiles have said they won’t help me because it is “not” their “issue”

I used to think it was everyone’s issue.

I keep thinking–this is an election year, shouldn’t someone care?

So the Akin thing forced me to study up on the politics and what I found was interesting.

Akin was wrong–really, really wrong, but to what end?

He was trying to save babies. He meets his political downfall because he crossed a line in trying to prevent murder, mass murder.

The ends do not justify the means. His strong desire to save babies from elective abortion does not make what he said right…

but a bit of contextualization never hurt anyone.

Rape is rape, but the strange wording and semantic crash for Akin came because he was trying to legally address something that is known, practiced and acknowledged in obstetrics–doctors can call a lot of things the way they want to. Many doctors are already allowing or referring for elective abortions to minimize their risk of law suits if parents deem their child imperfect.

Akin is 50 steps ahead of a 50 year old game, but what he was discussing when he got caught out was the notion that a baby would be valuable even if she were the child of a rapist or child molester.

Ironically, another recent flurry of outrage occurred over a pregnant teen in the DR who was not permitted to abort her fetus so she could receive cancer treatment.

I thought it was interesting that no one thought to question why a girl of 13 or 14 was pregnant and how old exactly was the father?

Akin was wrong and he will pay for his verbal gaffe. But we all pay an unacceptable price if we laugh at the “rape rape” without asking how we can help the young victims of rape by providing healing, safety, comfort, advocacy and a voice–not a brutal medical death to a second innocent child when the first has endured too much.

“the good beach”

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For a long time my name was Bitch. I will only write it once, hereafter I will use a placeholder, but it is important for me to acknowledge it just once.

My adopted daughter called me this regularly for years. Never without venom. It hurt to be called beach because of the venom. It hurt because she was saying I was not human, without value.

I suspected that my new nickname, like much of her other abusive behavior, was a reflection of her own struggles with identity. She said I was the beach, but struggled with who she was and how valuable she was.

She was valuable to me. I had sacrificed a great deal to be her beach, um… mom.

She is still valuable to me. I know she can be a pain in the grass, but she is my daughter. She is my daughter.

When someone treats her badly or dehumanizes her or devalues her. And let us be clear, those words themselves are placeholders for very bad things. People who should help her have done very bad things instead. Well, I may be a beach, but I want to stomp and yell and kick’em in the shins.

I want to say stop!! She is worth more than this!! She is my daughter.

I want to have a healing, undoing, potion for the harm done to her.

I do. It is a single name–Jesus. He became the beach for her, for me, for all of us to undo the undoable, to restore our lost and stolen value.

When she tells me what has happened to her I grieve and wish she would stop running from the one Man who raises the value of an ordinary beach like me.

He buys the field/finds the treasure/sets the captive free.

And instead of the rude name we have become accustomed to, He cups our faces in His hands and calls us by our eternal name–
Dear
Very Dear…

Insubstantial as smoke

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After Herculean attempts at allo-lactation, she gives up. Her mermaid ancestors have failed her. In the intervening days she has prevailed upon a highly skeptical she-goat to abide with her and the child to act as a wet nurse.

Gwendolyn the goat: lifesaver.

The failure of the experiment fills the dragoness with a nameless grief. It is irrational and contradictory to expect dragons to parent much less nurse, but this failure cuts her deeply. She is keenly aware of her scales, her reptilian heft, so much about her unmotherly.

She sits in the mouth of her cave and rakes her long talons into her scaly hide in a mindless show of hopelessness.

What are you doing?

Gwendolyn demands when she arrives to find the baby hungry and his mother a crumpled figure of despair.

The dragon chuffs. Turning away to hide her own blood and the gashes she has made in her skin.

Gwendolyn stomps her feet. You must get ahold of yourself! You have a baby now.

The she-goat curls up next to the hungry baby and nurses him.

Get up right now! She commands. Go clean yourself up. We have work to do.

The dragon reluctantly obeys.

Forgiveness

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She is a tough mama
Says things like
listen carefully
And be still

Of course she is swamped with work
Mostly contract–
Cleaning up crime scenes
And the debris left by careless
Men

She does not make the stuff she cleans
Disappear
She simply packs it away
In suitcases which resemble– safes
Attaché cases
Body bags
Zip

Then she turns to the aggrieved
Yes, the aggrieved
with her steely-eyed gaze
Says c’mon
Let’s drag this
To yonder cross.

My friend

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Anger is my intimate
Companion
Eyes me over soup
Shouts instructions
As I mow the lawn
He has the worn face
Of a college professor
The demeanor of a silent
Partner
In what?
You are right to ask

Why is he here?
Oh, I will blink,
As I think how to phrase this…

He helps me to articulate
Why I am so dependent on
His wife, Forgiveness,
For everything

Goes with famous…

Image

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My thanks to Sal and Verrochio…

There is famous
And there is crazy
There is infamous
And obscure
There are Germans
And all the other people
With immaculate public transportation

And then there is the gaze of the Almighty
So often obscured by
The cardboard ads for beer
But unwavering in His vision
Of us
To the end of love.

Famous?

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I am in a children’s museum feeling inadequate because I know that I had one primary goal in life: be a good mom. Even before I had kids I wanted to be a good mom in Sunday school, youth group, to my 50 year old Iranian student–good mom.

I will feel my inadequacy in my bones

It is not our fault we are deceived by predators.
It is our fault if we don’t provide the remedy.

The truth sets us free…

The substance of things

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She had been out of radio contact for awhile so I was glad when she called
She was in the hospital for all the usual stuff
I worry about the baby.

Give her my usual (inadequate) pep talks

Pray.

There are so many kinds of prayer–which we must remember, means talking to God.

There is easy prayer
Otherwise known as grace
There is harder prayer
Which involves some level of suspense
Like when will the baby or rain
Come?

And then there is the prayer you pray for a child lost at sea.

This prayer is only possible with miracles and men rising from the dead

It starts with a profession of faith
Something like…no one could do this but You

Or
You are a God of miracles…

Or (I admit)
God I have no idea whatsoever how you could do this but You can, only you can..

This last prayer is always a life and death matter