It’s worth putting up the last half of the Washington Times article referenced in my previous post. McCain’s choice of bloggers is intense and interesting. Many of the bloggers are hard workers who have given over a significant part of their lives to feeding the maw. No small thing. For sure, it’s never been for the pay.

And, AHEM, Senator McCain, The Moderate Voice would like to be invited to be in on your blogger phone calls too. Feel free to contact us. Joe Gandelman is our Editor in Chief. For that matter, we’re interested in being in on any candidate’s blogger phone call/ news inquires. And we also have a number of thoughtful and passionate male and female bloggers here. (End of ‘Squeaky Wheel Appeal’ for now.)

And, here below, from Stephen Dinan’s writing at the Washington Times:

“The plan is to take the work we’ve already built on with conservative bloggers and to open up a dialogue with non-conservative bloggers and even nonpolitical bloggers,” said Patrick Hynes, Mr. McCain’s point man for blog outreach.

“We hope to be the most accessible and transparent campaign in history, to take advantage of what we think is one of the campaign’s strongest assets, which is Senator McCain himself, and frankly to empower voters who are also bloggers to get the answers they need to decide who to vote for.”

A call last week focused on Mr. McCain’s health care plans. Top McCain advisers talked with health-care-specific bloggers and sites that cater to mothers, a demographic that the campaign figured would be interested in health care issues. The campaign also deployed adviser Carly Fiorina, former chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard, to talk with major health site WebMD’s reporter.

Democrats have had success with online fundraising, but conservative and liberal bloggers said Mr. McCain’s outreach to them puts the Republican presidential nominee far ahead of his Democratic counterparts in getting out information.

David All, a blogger who also runs Slatecard.com, a site that channels online contributions to Republican candidates, said reaching bloggers is not about mass communication, but about reaching opinion leaders who are likely to help shape others’ opinions. By taking that beyond the political and into the policy areas, Mr. McCain is tapping a wide-open market.

“They are the experts in understanding health care policy, and they are the ones who will get beyond the first two bullet points of a health care debate,” Mr. All said. “Everyone who’s reading the health care blogs, the first sentence they’re going to see is something to the effect of, look, I don’t agree with everything in this plan, but I just got off the phone with John McCain, and now here are my more-informed thoughts on the plan.”

Those who follow blogging said the McCain campaign will have to pick and choose whom to invite to conference calls, arguing that some sites won’t treat Mr. McCain fairly.

“I don’t think the people at DailyKos Read the rest of this entry »

At the close of the second of NPR’s two part look at how parents are addressing their children’s gender-identity issues which aired last week, Robert, the father of Violet, who is “absolutely certain” that she is “genuinely transgender,” explains how he finds himself “almost offended” when people suggest that he and his family have been too quick to embrace a transgender identity:

“It puzzles me because we even have well-intentioned parents who we care about and who know us … say, ‘Well she’s too young to know!’ Well, when did you know you were a girl? When did I know I was a boy? I knew my whole life, I can’t tell you exactly when, but it wasn’t like I was 10 and realized, ‘Oh gee, I must be a boy!’ ” Robert says. “What people fail to realize is they made that decision way earlier than that. It just happened that their gender identity and their anatomy matched.”

The story’s focus is a highly controversial treatment, monthly injections of a medication for preteen kids to postpone puberty and avoid developing the physical attributes of the sex they were born with. The family found a therapist and after a two-month evaluation, a gender identity disorder diagnosis was rendered; on a family vacation, Armand, their son, would “transition” to Violet, their daughter.

When I am asked how old I was when I realized that I was gay, I answer, “five.”  How I knew when I was that young, I do not know, but that’s my honest answer. So my sympathies are with those parents. My sympathies are, however, complicated by the condition known as Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Also called Apotemnophilia, and Amputee Identity Disorder, I first learned of the condition in an 8,800 word Atlantic piece from December 2000, by Carl Elliott, titled A New Way to Be Mad:

I am on the phone with Max Price, a graphic designer in Santa Fe, who has offered to talk to me about apotemnophilia. (He has asked me to change his name and the details of his life and history if I write about him, and I have.) Price is a charming man, articulate and well-read, and despite my initial uneasiness about calling him, I am enjoying our conversation. I had corresponded by e-mail with a number of wannabes, but had not managed to talk to any of them until now. The conversation has taken on an easy intellectual tone, more like a discussion between colleagues than an interview. Price is telling me about his efforts to get doctors to adopt some guidelines for deciding when a person with apotemnophilia should have surgery. I am tossing out ideas, trying out some of my thoughts, and I wonder aloud about a relationship between apotemnophilia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. I ask Price whether he feels that his desire is more like an obsession, a fantasy, or a wish. He says, “Well, it was definitely like an obsession. Until I cut my leg off, of course.”

That brings me up short. I had been unaware that he had actually gone ahead with an amputation. “Ah,” I say. I pause. Should I ask? I decide I should. “May I ask how you did it?” Price laughs. “It was kind of messy,” he says. “I did it with a log splitter.” Read the rest of this entry »

For those whose good mothers have died

…for those who were lucky enough to have had what I call, “a beautiful, imperfectly-perfect mother,” but one who too early passed from this world, especially hard when she has been the ground note for her sons and daughters.

Some of us did not have a mother we can remember without fear, but even that doesn’t keep us from recognizing that special bond between many mothers and their children wherever we see it– and blessing that such bounty came to pass for them.

This is just meant to place a hand on the shoulders of those who might miss their mothers, just to take a moment to say, even though your mom is gone or leave-taking in some way, there was and is presence of her still. As long as you are here, she is here.

In some good way, she is here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today John McCain is unveiling a sassy TV commercial with his 96-year-old mother to remind voters about his good genes and American values. Iffy as it may be to call attention to his age, the ad underscores the diversity of motherhood in this campaign.

Roberta McCain, who gave birth to her son at a Naval Air Station in Panama, where her husband, the son of an Admiral and a future Admiral himself, was based, radiates the aura of a strict, no-nonsense parent out of a bygone era. John McCain always knew exactly who he was.

Barack Obama’s mother was a dreamer with, in his words, a “combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in…but also a certain recklessness…always searching for something. She wasn’t comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box.” Her travels and exotic marriages produced a unique bi-racial man who has spent his life finding and creating himself.

Somewhere between these extremes of certainty and self-invention is Hillary Clinton’s biographical journey from a well-to-do suburban childhood that took her to college as a Goldwater girl, transformed her into a Eugene McCarthy protester against the Vietnam war and eventually the first woman within striking distance of the presidency.

In this post-Victorian, post-Freudian era, motherhood comes in all shapes and sizes, producing remarkable diversity in the generation that will define the 21st century.

Happy Mother’s Day to one and all.

Cross-posted from my blog.

There are books about motherless daughters and motherless mothers. I’m the daughter of a motherless mother, but I only came to glimpse even the tiniest look at what it must be like for my mother, and millions of others, a few years ago.

Mother and mothering is a concept that doesn’t restrict itself to women with children, or perhaps even women period. But the need to have a relationship that is like that which we have with a person we call mother - that, I believe, is indispensible.

Nobody Loves Me Better (originally published 5/04)

by Jill Miller Zimon

My mother hates my hair color. She says it’s unprofessional, a color only men like, and if I want to be taken seriously, I’ll retreat to dishwater brown.

I give her compliments too. A few years ago, after she had cosmetic surgery, I told her she looked creepy. Who wouldn’t want me for a daughter?

And yet, this woman does for me what I’d never do for myself. While I finished up graduate school, she planned my wedding. My kids’ Halloween costumes? Made by Grammy. Clothes with missing buttons? Ripped seams and extra long hems? Stuffed in a plastic bag until she visits her only daughter.

I let her commandeer my house when she comes. I don’t buy food for days beforehand because I know she’ll shop and pay for everything. She makes her bed and retrieves towels from unfolded piles of laundry. Then she folds the rest. Not like I fold, mind you, but I let it slide.

Do I feel guilty? Am I abusing the woman who delivered me and survived teaching me how to drive a stick shift? Read the rest of this entry »

Mother’s Day, as we know it today, is a more or less genteel day of hopefully kind words and sweet sentiments depending on whether one’s family more resembles the Simpsons, the Partridges or a holy family of schmoos.

But long ago, Mother’s Day in the US burst forth drenched in blood, and buried in bones and graves. It was anything but genteel.

This fiercely special day was set aside in 1870 to make a cry heard round the world from mothers who were demanding that war never be born again.

This special day was called by women who had lost their sons in a war wherein battle fields were like lakes of red from all the fallen. The women had lost their children, and sometimes, for a time, their minds as well– but not their great hearts.

Sometimes people say the title “mother” can only be applied to a woman who has given physical birth. I’d say ‘a blessed mother’ is any woman who reveres life in her own special ways, who cars for life, and who strives to give birth to new life each day in heart and mind and voice.

Here is the gutsy, Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870. It was written by Julia Ward Howe. Would that her voice were still on earth today. Would that her call would still come to life.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Heart of the Unknown Mother
by C.P. Estés

Whether children landed on earth, but had to leave too soon,
whether they were detoured before they could be born,
whether they were wrenched away, or lost for unexplained reasons,
whether they were here for just a few moments,
or a few days… they all are blessed children.
Full children.

When people ask, “Are you a mother?’
you are entitled to say ‘Yes,
I am a mother.’
‘Oh, how many?’ they’ll ask.
Tell them.
You are entitled to say
the full number of children,
including the ones
who were on their way
and never made it
for whichever reasons.

When people ask, ‘Where are your children?’
Say, ‘Right here, in my heart.’

______
CODA
Back Story: I realize that not all people may agree with my Mother’s Day philosophy, but long ago I wrote this to try to talk about we who have lost our children, been separated from our children, have not been able to complete the body for a child soul, have decided other things. For myself as a young unmarried woman forced to relinquish her first born child, Mother’s Day was the saddest day, if any one day could be said after that ripping away, to be sadder than any other grief-stricken day.

When throughout the years people would ask me how many children I had… beaten down and walking wounded, I never felt worthy to say the full number of souls I’d struggled to carry with infinite love and safely to this earth.

Until one day. It seemed like such a huge break with convention– but as the years gathered, I came to know ever more dear women and men who had lost children in one way or another…and they felt pressed into silence for many reasons…

I honestly don’t know the exact moment I stood up against the forces pressing me to remain silent. But I gradually felt more and more sure that we who had lost our children in whichever way, all had a right to count our children as all other souls counted their children. In full. That we are full mothers. Despite all agonies, despite being warned to silence, despite impossible twists of fate, unconscionable situations, despite never having told our stories, despite not wanting to cause anyone else sorrow, despite being too filled with hurt to speak. Still, and even so… we carry that lit room of the heart for our children forever; we are mothers of all our children.

In full.

A special song from a very special timeless singer:

Tom Purcell is a humor columnist nationally syndicated exclusively by Cagle Cartoons

Mother’s Day — Don’t Take Her for Granted

By Tom Purcell

I used to take her for granted.

When my five sisters and I were babies in her womb, she never took so much as an aspirin for a headache. She never put anything in her body but the nutrients we needed to grow, and I took that for granted.

As a child, my world was rock solid because of her. She put our needs so far before her own that we didn’t know that she had needs. She loved us without condition. I was so unaware of the fear and pain less fortunate children suffer that I didn’t know such concepts existed. She worked hard to create that world, and I took that for granted.

As a teen, I gave her grief. I told her how wrong she was about religion, child rearing, everything. She was just a housewife, I said. What could she possibly know. I challenged her because she was strong, and I took her strength for granted.

She was extraordinarily moral. I still can’t tell a lie, thanks to her, and I even blush when I’m innocent and people think I’m lying. The only thing she hated more than dishonesty was phoniness. She made sure we were, above all, genuine. I took her extraordinary honesty and genuineness for granted.

She prized graciousness and friendliness. She treated everyone the way she wanted to be treated. She was always full of compassion and understanding. The phone still rings constantly at her home, people calling for consolation, reassurance or to be cheered up on a down day. I took her graciousness and friendliness for granted.

She enjoyed simple things. The smell of a flower could send her into fits. The silliness of a child could make her laugh for days. She still sits outside on the deck every morning, enjoying the smell of spring, the taste of fresh, hot coffee, the conversation of her husband of 52 years. But I took her simple nature for granted.

As other parents nudged their children toward careers in accounting or engineering, she nurtured our creativity. While accountants and engineers are important, she believed, even more important are wit, imagination and beauty. I took her love of beauty and creativity for granted.

She sent me off into the world full of enthusiasm, hope and naïvete. My early expectations were unrealistic, I soon found. I took risks — tried my hand at my own business — and, early on, I failed. The work world proved to be much more competitive and challenging than I expected. I was frustrated and angry. I took my anger out on her.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tab, The Calgary Sun

I don’t know nearly enough about them. But I was fascinated to learn they had put up a website.

On The Media has more:

BOB GARFIELD: The FLDS community has been described as something like a tribe in Papua, New Guinea, that is untouched by the modern world. Are they really living in the middle of the 18th century?

BROOKE ADAMS: I think that’s a false perception of this group. They have a number of people who have been to college. They are quite Internet-savvy, as the world now knows with the websites that they have put up to spread their view of what’s happened to them in Texas. So I think the idea that they’re totally isolated is false.

BOB GARFIELD: I want to ask you about the websites that have popped up amid all of the uproar. Are they coming from within the Yearning for Zion compound itself?

BROOKE ADAMS: Yes and no. The FLDS that are there at the ranch have put up, as far as I know, two websites on which they have posted a number of the pictures they took during the initial days of the raid there at the ranch. But there are a number of other websites that have been put up related to the actions in Texas. […]

BOB GARFIELD: There is another issue, apart from the welfare of the children, that has emerged in all of this, and that is the women in the community, who have been occasionally portrayed as essentially being slaves, having to be utterly submissive to the men in the household.
Read the rest of this entry »

NPR has a terrific and nuanced story on a difficult and challenging topic. One issue to dispose of right away, the story is headlined Two Families Grapple with Sons’ Gender Preferences, which may suggest to some that those boys make a choice about their gender identity.

As their story makes clear, little choice is involved. To people of my sexual identity (I self-identify as gay) using the words gender identity in the title would be more precise. Please forgive the quibble and let’s move on… Why on earth would any child ever choose to go through this:

Bradley had always had a preference for girls’ things. From his earliest days he had chosen girls’ dolls, identified with female characters and gravitated toward female children. But Carol had never thought to care. As far as she was concerned, it wasn’t a loaded gun; it wasn’t a lit cigarette. She says it had really never crossed her mind to say, “I’d really rather you played with a truck.” […]

It was a single event that transformed her vague sense of worry into something more serious. One day, Bradley came home from an outing at the local playground with his baby sitter. He was covered in blood. A gash on his forehead ran deep into his hairline.
Read the rest of this entry »

In this TMV blog I keep writing occasionally on subjects that have an important role to play in increasing positivity in discussion and debate on matters related to politics. After all what is politics?…Surely, not just the circus where politicians are the key players. Politics percolates down to, and influences, health, education, art and culture…In fact all spheres of life.

As India dreams of (and works towards) joining the big league of powerful/”developed” nations, there are many individuals/institutions that have raised pertinent points as to whether we are headed towards the “right” direction. The big questions relate to the need to retain the vitality of the social fabric and ensuring social equity in this mad race to reach the high GDP targets.

Recently, I came across two write-ups on these concerns, as also about the role of media, by those who have earned a name for their contribution in the field of education and social welfare in India. The first is by Madhav Chavan of “Pratham”, an NGO that was recently given The Hewlett and Gates Foundations Award $9 Million towards its “Read India Campaign”. To read Chavan’s article please click here…

(The grant supports Pratham’s “Read India” initiative, which is working in conjunction with Indian state governments to help ensure that children between the ages of 6 and 14 achieve basic mastery in these skills by the end of 2009. The grant to Pratham will improve basic learning skills in 100 districts of India, touching 10 million children spread over 10 states for three years.)

The second article is by a sensitive young lady concerned at the questionable priorities of the mainstream media. Writes Snigdha Jain:

— Rush-hour murder on Kalkaji street, April 8, 2008
— Tibetan protests burn bright, Olympics torch put out in Paris, April 8, 2008
—Gurgaon pub brawl injured two pilots and their friends, April 7, 2008
— Rape and murder of British teenager, April 6, 2008

“This is all that I get to read in the newspaper and see on the news channels everyday. The news that creates vibes or sells has to be related to crime or political gimmicks. All my mornings begin with reading about incidences of rape, murder, bomb blast, riot, suicide and so on. On the one hand, it instills a certain degree of fear in me but, on the other gives me a sense of comfort that I am not one of the victims. But, is it really so? Don’t we all get affected by things happening around us? Read the rest of this entry »

Overlooked So Far, The Nation’s Unmarried Women in 2008 was released two days ago. You can read the summary here and the full report here.

From the summary:

So far unmarried women are mostly overlooked, but they are a key to this year’s campaign. A fast-growing demographic that is increasingly focused on politics, these single, divorced, and widowed women compose 26 percent of the electorate—in other words, unmarried women are more than one in four of all voters.

And appalling, unacceptable statistics:

A few facts make clear the challenges unmarried women are facing, and why their agenda is somewhat different from what the nation has heard from the campaigns so far.

• Economically Vulnerable. More than 40 percent of unmarried women have household incomes of less than $30,000 a year. That’s much worse than married women and married men, and worse than unmarried men.
• Work Pays Them Less. Unmarried women make less than others for the same work, and earn only 56 cents to every dollar a married man earns.
• Responsible for Children. The responsibility for taking care of children often falls on unmarried women: There are 12.2 million single-parent families in America, and more than 10 million are headed by single mothers.
• Missing Health Care. Unmarried women are more likely than other Americans to have no health insurance. They were twice as likely to be unable to afford medical care in the past year as women who were married.
• They Rely on Social Security. More than 25 percent of unmarried women rely on Social Security as their only source of income.

…

In this agenda, we outline the steps that leaders, particularly the next president, should take to address the needs of unmarried women. The policy agenda is divided into four categories: Expanding Opportunity by Rewarding Work; A New, Stronger Social Contract; Resolving the War in Iraq; and Improved Health Care for All.

I don’t imagine these numbers are going to reverse without consistent, intense attention, or without our elected lawmakers getting in there and doing something to create jobs, make health care affordable and demand that salaries and work conditions provide the stability and flexibility needed for not only the unmarried women, but especially those with children - since if the woman cannot provide for herself, how is she to provide for the child?

This is, of course, part of why we need more women in elected offices.

Cross-posted from Writes Like She Talks.

In Eldorado, Texas, there’s been a gathering up of women and children taken into protective custody from a commune that practices polygamy, one that claims LDS (Mormon) status, (Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints: FLDS) but long ago was exiled from the Mormon Church… Facts presented in affidavits brings again into the spotlight, evil toward children justified by wrapping it in robes of religion.

Lawyers for the commune are arguing that this was ‘an unlawful raid,’ “matching anything in Russia or Germany,” rather than a taking into protective custody 401 some children and girls, most under 18 years of age and more than a few either pregnant or with children of their own. Proponents of polygamy are outraged.

The alleged phone call that was the catalyst for this protective custody came from a girl who said she was 15, had been married off to a 48 year old man who raped her, abused her and that she had a child by him already and was currently pregnant again… She said other women in the community would hold her child, while her (their) husband beat her.

Where this girl-woman is among the 401 taken to shelter by protective services of Texas, is not clear. (Also accompanied by 130 grown women who volunteered to leave the commune, I think to be with the children.) It appears that the young caller’s husband, an LDS progenitor of babies, is also a registered sex offender, according to records, showing he was charged with trying to solicit a minor, and put on probation for three years.

It’s a long night, and it’s cold here in the Rockies tonight. Maybe that’s disturbed my outlook.

It’s not about polygamy between adults. It’s a set of different issues regarding children.

Remember all the arguments, for/pro, years ago about the usefulness and the ethnic roots that ought not be disturbed in female genital mutilation “rituals?” It was “religious,” they said. Therefore, somehow, supposed to be ok.

This ‘ritual’ is wherein a girl child between ages of birth to eight years old is held down and with an old knife or rusty razor to her tender parts has her clitoris sliced off and sometimes her outer labia also lacerated off, with the inner labia sewn shut except for…. good God Almighty, what are people thinking? Or not.

If you’re a man reading this, the equivalent is not taking the foreskin… which personally despite all mohels’ teachings and any physician averring “it doesn’t hurt” or that boys will grow up to be too stupid to learn to wash themselves properly, so “this must be done.” (what are people thinking? Or not.) … as a mother who labored to bring life into this world, who knitted up bones from my bones, blood from my blood, I am never, ever going to accept grown mens’ claims …in the clear face of seeing many a newborn boychild at hospital screaming bloody murder red-faced and sobbing themselves to sleep after ‘circumcisions’ that ‘don’t hurt.’

I don’t buy the bring ‘em into the world, and hurt them right away to make them Read the rest of this entry »

December 24, 2007, After Dark in the Rockies, the Full Moon, Mars Shining Bright, 15″ of Snow…
posted for The Moderate Voice

UPDATE: IT IS DONE…

PEPINO

Big Boy Dalmation, Guardian of the Family

Born 1994, Died December 24, 2007

Go well dear, dear, loyal old friend. Thank you for showing us, we who are far more frail, what bold unconditional love a soul can truly give to others while on earth.

And, don’t rest in peace, Pepino. Run in happiness. Strong again and to your heart’s content. There is a little boy in heaven just waiting for you, and all our mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers have just now come to heaven’s gate to meet you.

Let our tears be the river that takes you there Pepino.

December 24, 2007, Early Afternoon in the Rockies, posted for The Moderate Voice

When your grown children call you ‘mommie,’ their childhood name for you, you know they are in need.

The call came just an hour ago. Pepino cannot stand up. They are carrying him to take him outdoors to the bathroom.

Six months ago I had a hunch. Christmas. I thought Pepino would make it through Christmas. That’s not to be.

I promised my family six months ago, I would…. well, what? Certainly be there to take Pepino to rest, for the family has suffered a loss of a son 11 years ago, that makes it all come rushing back now that Pepino is so ill, and devastatingly so. On the phone just now, I could tell. The boat with the dark sail has pulled up and moored right outside my family’s minds, and they are building sandbag walls as well as they can, so as not to slip back 11 years, to not have that vault that took so many years to shut, crack open again…. Just trying to stay here in the grief of Now. It may not be possible completely. The worlds do leak into one another, sometimes.

I just pulled on my snow boots a few minutes ago. Then, I’ll get in my black pickup and drive through the snow to get down to the city where my family and Pepino are waiting for me …

But, I stopped as I was lacing the boots, thinking for the millionth time this year about my elders who are all gone to heaven now … and suddenly I thought “I am putting on my father’s boots, my grandfather’s and grandmother’s boots”… the big shoes of the people who stayed up all night to help the mares, the people who had their arms up to their elbows to turn an ewe or a colt in the birth canal, and the ones who looked angry while in tears, when they laid the horses and the dogs down as their times came.” I hope I can do as well.

I understand now, they weren’t angry, just so intent to do the right thing by their animal, by this loyal, stalwart soul who’d been their familiar for so long. In the end, to focus the most infinite tenderness and love possible in one burning star of might, enough to do what must be done, to do what no one in their right soul, can hardly stand to do…

….to lay this grand dog, Pepino, our relative, down.

Maybe I’ve lost it, but before leaving, I’ve stumbled around gathering up Pepino’s Christmas gifts to take to him, a little red mesh stocking filled with bones and a label showing a silly Dachshund in stocking cap dancing on back legs. Pepino always liked other dogs, even pictures of dogs. He would always grin like he’d just seen Chaplin take a prat-fall.

And two things keep conjuring to mind, one, a prayer for the dying animal by William Stafford the poet, and the other a tiny child’s prayer that keeps translating itself in my mind to Pepino: Now I lay you down to sleep, I pray the Lord your soul to keep….

Six months ago I had a hunch. Christmas. I thought Pepino would make it through Christmas. That won’t be. But just now I thought, maybe Pepino will have made it … it’s literally Christmas already on the other side… of the world.

Big breath. Prayers. I can do this.
Without losing my mind. I hope…

_____________

July 17, 2007, posted for The Moderate Voice

I Promise The Last Voice You Hear Will Be One of Such Love: Pet Loss
By Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The worlds leak into each other sometimes… Most often when our lives are surrounded by people who are facing life and death challenges, we don’t want to burden them with sorrows going on in our own lives. So I was thinking.

…until July 1st of this year, when, on Freecycle ads, I saw “WANTED: Christmas wreath.” I had one. I contacted. The son of a father who is dying quickly wants to make one more Christmas for his dad. In July. No better place my Christmas wreath could go. But too, when this stranger, this good son wrote back to me, copying my email back to me, I saw I’d made a huge Freudian/ Jungian/ Adlerian typo in my email to him. Instead of writing “Christmas wreath,” I’d accidentally or otherwise instead written, “Christmas grief”…. I’m a shrink. I get the picture. The worlds leak into each other sometimes. Being a shrink does not insulate; if anything, it sandpapers the senses all the more, right down to the walls of the arteries.

This summer, in my family world, there are waves of “know it’s coming, try not to think about it right now.’ Pepino, our family “big boy,’ is a 13 year old Dalmatian who last week was just a crazy bitey, grabby, wacko-grinning pup jumping all over, mistaking all of us for a fun trampoline. Today, Pepino is a brave elderly dog who sleeps most of the time and has cancer throughout his whole body. So far he is not in pain, but my family has known for months… “time, time time keeps slipping into the future…’

I know. I do. I’ve been here before over these many decades, with my team of Huskies, with our “found on the road’ dogs… all of them, “throw yourself into the grave with them’ times… but I’ve never been here before in “this way,’ not since a hideous “watershed event,’ took place in our family’s life… an event that all things of our lives are now measured against forever, as “before’ that event, and “after’ that event. I’ll get to that time in a moment; it’s a place in the psyche that I have to circle to build courage to look, not for the last time… there’ll never be a last time.. but for one more time…

In the meantime, there’s Good Boy Dog Pepino. God, if I describe this, I know you will be able to see him vividly: Read the rest of this entry »

In the dark of a one-room shack, a new-born baby sleeps in the arms of a young mother. It could be a biblical scene. The glow from a kerosene lamp gives the mother a halo. Add an ox, a lamb and a manger, and this could be the story of Christmas, a painting of the Madonna and Child from the Middle Ages, or the living crib assembled by St Francis in the 13th century.

Sierra Leone should be a scandal, a scar on the conscience of a world which, seven years ago, promised to eradicate extreme poverty, cut child mortality by two thirds and improve maternal health by 2015. Halfway to that deadline, conditions for babies born this Christmas in the 10 toughest places for a child are still devastating. And Sierra Leone comes top on that list.

To read this complete story in The Independent please click here…

I’ve been a military wife for two decades; my husband USAF, 21 years, retired, now working for the VA helping vets get their prosthetics.

Not long ago, on a rehab ward, having gone to visit with two dozen vets recovering from injuries …I brought ice cream cones… a hit…. what laughing boy moments there still can be sometimes, the spirit of boy still deeply rooted inside the adult soldier, even though injured.

Later, in the visiting room, the conversation turned more serious: hopes and dreams, disappointments, perceived failures, visions and plans. I’d mentioned I’d been trained to pray by ‘the madwomen in black’ (the good Sisters of the Holy Cross). Some men asked, would I pray for them? ‘My specialty,’ I said, ‘the Angelus three times a day, every day of my life.’ I would be honored to pray for the men.

We requisitioned scraps of paper and everyone wrote down as best they could what they’d like prayed for. Some told me what to say, and I wrote for them. Then, I gathered up the papers, asked would it be alright if we prayed right now, out loud? And all assented.

I come from old country refugees and immigrants who prayed so loud in church that other more sophisticated people born in the USA would give us dirty looks. So yes!, the men and I did pray. We did pray big and wide and loud… with some pretty good counterpoint Amens and Right ons! and Yes sisters! flying.

One soul wept, saying he couldn’t pray. Someone greater with wings, put a hand on his shoulder, saying through me, ‘Tears are prayers, liquid prayers.’ By the end we all prayed in the rivers we stood in.

I promised that their askings would be in my prayers from that day forward, and asked permission, ‘Could I pass their needs onto others to pray for too?’ And they said, very much yes. And I have.

So I was thinking to share some of their prayer requests in a different way today, a way that most readers never see, a kind of hidden news of the goodness of warrior souls… just in case readers would like to, on this Veterans Day, have a direction to aim their prayers… fluid, rough, or otherwise.

You’ll see, what is being asked for is not material, but of this time, and also, eternal… which is simple in words, but more complex in another way: I think written prayer requests, (of which I have literally thousands from my travels to see and be with many different groups of souls,) contain inside a hidden story, each one. If you have inner seeing and inner hearing you can definitely hear and see the inner story of others who ask for prayers.

Here are some of what the men asked prayer for… any to be added are welcome here too:

Please pray for my daughter who is in prison, not in jail, but in a prison of alcohol. I am ashamed she got this from me. Please pray for my continued sobriety. Please pray for her to find the way out.

Please pray for all my buds, that they make it home in one peace. That their women wait for them.

Please pray that they will let me sit in this wheelchair all my life, that my butt will not wear out so I have to lie down on a gurney for the rest of my life.

Please pray for my son to be returned to me whole. He is lost and beyond reach.

Please comfort my mother over losing my brother. He’s in a better place, but we aren’t yet.

Pleas stiff the sumbatch captain who cheated me out of a 20 after poker game. No serious, keep him safe. I take it out of his hide when he gets home.

Please hold me and my children and my wife together. Please let me not let them down.

I would appreciate it if you would pray for me. I hope God understands that sometimes you need someone else to talk for you. I am in need.

Thank you for remembering in prayer that we will soon have another child. Everyone is tense. we lost our first to sids. I pray for you to continue in your work.

Please pray that my boy can get a stem cell transplant, and for me to find the place of peace that has eluded me so far. I know it’s there somewhere. If you could just pray that God shows it to me really big so I can see it. Or pray for me to get a spiritual magnifying glass.

Please pray that my father will speak to me again. We are on opposite sides. Thank you.

For my mother who is in a wheelchair too. For her to learn humor.

Prayer for the kids I met. All of them. Keep them somewhere they don’t have to see everything.

Please pray for those who do funeral detail. The boxes are heavier than just the bodies.

Please pray that God forgives me for saying the word F in front of my mother-in-law. She just about faints. Please ask God to give me another word. If he cant do that, just ask him to make my Mother-in-law temporarily deaf.

Please pray for a new road.

Pray to have these memories retired.

Pray that everyone can re-up into greater capacity. Pray for me to know the message I’m supposed to carry now.

Please pray for better painkillers, and big scissors to cut all the red tape.

I’ve been through a lot. We all have. Please pray that there really are ponies for all of us somewhere in all this horseshi-.

To which I have only one thing to say, a reverent and fervent Amen.

I had a night dream long ago about how hard it was to get to earth. For those of us who get pregnant when just passing through a room where a man is reading a newspaper and no more, it has sometimes seemed as though women becoming pregnant, carrying to term, and laboring to bring a living baby into this world is easy, common, like falling out of a ground floor window.

But, it isn’t. It is hard to get to earth, more than a one in a million odds, I think with certainty. Those souls who make it to earth have made a long trek with many perils along the way.

In my dream, I saw that getting to earth was like running an obstacle course of timing: making love timing, who what where when timing, physical timing, time of life timing, money timing, right lover timing, right this that and the other timing.

If little souls sit on clouds gambling on a body being made for each one, they’d lose their bets more often than win.

That’s why I think being born, no matter how a person came to be conceived, is like winning the lottery. Most of us were not planned. Some of us were not ‘wanted.’ Some of us arrived through a loveless act or a perfunctory one. Some of us came by accident. Some of us are called ‘the ooopsie baby.’ Some of us came from unsanctioned moments and are called ‘love child.’ Some of us were sick in utero, even sick unto death, but somehow recovered. And some of us, well…
Listen…

When doctors found that Gabriel was weaker than his brother, with an enlarged heart,and believed he was going to die in the womb, his mother Rebecca Jones had to make a heartbreaking decision.

Doctors told her his death could cause his twin brother to die too before they were born, and that it would be better to end Gabriel’s suffering sooner rather than later.

Mrs Jones decided to let doctors operate to terminate Gabriel’s life.

Firstly they tried to sever his umbilical cord to cut off his blood supply, but the cord was too strong.

They then cut Mrs Jones’s placenta in half so that when Gabriel died, it would not affect his twin brother.

But after the operation which was meant to end his life, tiny Gabriel had other ideas.

Although he weighed less than a pound, he put up such a fight for survival that doctors called him Rocky.

Astonishingly, he managed to carry on living in his mother’s womb for another five weeks - until the babies were delivered by caesarean section.

The children are home now. The doctor’s thinking was that one child seemed half the size of the other, not getting enough nutrients. The doctors said his heart was 3x normal size and it was likely the tiny baby in distress would die from a heart attack or stroke in utero.

Mrs Jones said: “They told us that if he died, it could be life threatening for his brother.

“We had to decide whether to end his life and let his brother live, or risk them both.”

At Birmingham Women’s Hospital, when Mrs Jones was 25 weeks pregnant, doctors tried to sever Gabriel’s umbilical cord to cut off his blood supply and allow him to die.

But the cord was too thick, and they could not cut through it.

As a last resort they divided Mrs Jones’s placenta so that when Gabriel died, it would allow Ieuan to survive. Mrs Jones said: “I put my hands on my stomach thinking of Gabriel. It was devastating. I had said my goodbyes.”

But the next morning Mrs Jones felt Gabriel kicking. A scan showed his heart was still beating. She said: “No one could quite believe it.”

Gabriel hung on, and his enlarged heart started to reduce in size. He also gained weight.

Mrs Jones said: “They thought it may be because the placenta had been divided. Inadvertently, it had evened out the distribution of nutrition between them, allowing Gabriel to survive.’

Like I said, it’s really something to make it to earth. If you’re reading this, you’re one of the very few lucky ones. I know with an earth burgeoning with over 6 billion people that sounds like an overstatement. It isn’t. Given all other matters, that you and I are here, is amazing.

I hope I can say this right without it being misunderstood; I hope I can adequately express the way this all sits in my heart, in my bones: I’m not pro-abortion. I’m not anti-abortion except for myself, my daughters and grandchildren: we consider a pregnancy, no matter how unexpected, no matter how it comes about, a gift of a soul trying to come to earth.

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And now the Democrats have highlighted a 2-old and her family — so they are under the same kind of attack.

21st Century Politics 101: If they oppose you on an issue, they must be discredited and taken out… Debate on the issue? Issue shmissue…