Today has really been one of those days where I can see His hand at work in the mundane and ordinary details of housewifery and motherhood. My little man is growing up so quickly - and so very slowly - all at once. Every night waking, every diaper change, and every bowl of cereal mixed and spooned into his needy, open mouth causes me to wonder ... "when will this ever end?" ... while simultaneously causing my heart to seize up with the fear that it will end, and sooner than I can possibly imagine.
Nobody told me that motherhood was going to be such a careful tightrope between fierce love and paralyzing fear of loss, intermingled with moments of sheer tedium which my working-girl-self could only have imagined on the longest days of board meeting prep and Excel spreadsheet creation. (And even then, it would have been a stretch. A mighty stretch.)
Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of adult company and conversation, Hulu comes all too readily to the rescue to fill the void with ... further vapidity. Can I get an 'amen,' fellow WAH/SAHM's?
Now I realize this all sounds like complaining... but it's not. I swear it's not! It's just that, darn it, I didn't plan on being so bored with my day to day existence when I was dreaming about white picket fences and sweet, cooing, dewy-eyed newborns who smelled of linen and baby Gap couture.
Or so terrified that it might be taken from me, either in the inevitable future or in a terrifying, tragic instant.
There is such a mighty daily tug-of-war for my heart, for my attention. Such rapid vacillation between contented fulfillment and wild, grasping tedium. So many little victories of scrubbing floors, dishes and diapers for the Kingdom... followed by slumping afternoons of wasted web-crawling and idle online 'shopping*'
(*no credit cards were harmed in the posting of this blog... nor by my occasional, pathetic, virtual window-shopping binges).
I'm so hot or cold.
I'm still that way as a mom, it turns out. As a 'grown up' who has, shall we say, arrived at her vocational destination. It's all or nothing for me, still. I'm either serving God joyfully with the sweat of my brow and the foaming dish soap of my kitchen sink... or I'm flopped on the couch reading People.com's Style Watch and watching the clock tick down to my husband's return home, 20 minutes prior to which I will begin frantically scanning Foodily.com for, ahem, poultry inspiration.
And yet I have the audacity to write about the glory of family life? The splendor of motherhood? The evils of contraception and the closed-mindedness of our anti-life, anti-family culture.
Well, yeah.
I'm still a crappy sinner, after all. And just because I 'get it' intellectually and, more rarely, spiritually, doesn't mean I live it well. Or at all, some days.
And I don't mean crappy sinner in a snow-covered-dung-hill-Martin-Luther kinda way, just in a realization of my own brokenness and need for ongoing conversion and formation kinda way.
Make sense?
No worries. Not so much to me either. But sometimes I've just got to 'talk it out' on paper. And when it comes to blogging, maybe somebody else sees it and gets some sliver of insight from it.
Or maybe not. But it did keep me off Hulu all morning. So there's a start.
St. Therese... pray for me. Seriously girl, I need it.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Some days are tougher than others...
... and tomorrow will be no exception. Keeping my heart fixed on Heaven and my eyes comforted by this view,
and the knowledge that the current resident-in-chief wasn't too pleased when he was tapped for his new job, either.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Now This
Gay 'marriage' is sooo yesterday. The hottest new trend in progressive social justice today is polygamy. That's right, ladies! Now you too can have it all: live-in 'sisters' to share everything with... clothes, household tasks, child-rearing responsibilities...even your husband!
No more dull, drab dual-spouse marriages where one measly person is expected to fulfill all the needs of the other. No more tiresome monogamy. And no more worrying about whether your husband has been sleeping around on you... now you know for sure that yes, he has!
Coming soon: pedophilia and bestiality: The final frontiers. (That is, until we think of something worse. Like people getting really, really attached to their Prius' ... really, really attached.)
No more dull, drab dual-spouse marriages where one measly person is expected to fulfill all the needs of the other. No more tiresome monogamy. And no more worrying about whether your husband has been sleeping around on you... now you know for sure that yes, he has!
Coming soon: pedophilia and bestiality: The final frontiers. (That is, until we think of something worse. Like people getting really, really attached to their Prius' ... really, really attached.)
Monday, July 11, 2011
In Vitro Violence
I've never given much thought to the post-implantation violence begotten by the process of IVF, but after a heart wrenching discussion with a dear friend last night, I've had my eyes opened to a hidden world of incredible loss and unimaginable evil.
The process of in-vitro fertilization is intrinsically evil in its commoditization of human life by the intentional creation, manipulation of and, far too often, the destruction of designer embryos, purchased by desperate, misguided parents and coaxed into existence by truly mad science.
What I failed to realize was that even after the creation of 7 or perhaps 9 tiny babies, 3 of whom would perhaps be lucky enough to be considered 'viable' and implanted into their mother's womb, these 'chosen ones' were still far from home free.
My sweet girl friend lost one of her precious twin daughters at birth last year, and has been attending a grieving group for mothers of multiples who've suffered similar losses. Except, as it turns out, they have much less in common then one might imagine.
For starters, of all the member couples of their group, my friend and her husband are the only couple with 'natural' twins. All the other parents resorted to IVF to conceive their double (or triple) blessings. What was sickening, however, was the process by which those 'lucky' children were selected for implantation into their mother's wombs.
IVF is known for its practical application of eugenics, whereby the medical team identifies the 'highest quality' embryos for consideration, taking into account the parental preference for health, strength and even gender. Practically speaking, parents can custom-order their children from a sampling of 7 or 9 embryos yielded from a successful round of IVF. What the medical staff will usually downplay, however, is the fate of those unlucky 'extra' embryos - children who end up frozen in sterile labs for an indeterminate number of years at best, or at worst, discarded as so much laboratory waste.
I thought this was where the heartache of IVF ended, but I was wrong.
As the grieving parents went around the group sharing their tales of loss and struggle, a macabre theme began to emerge, as couple after couple recounted choosing to 'selectively reduce' the number in their brood following a successful embryo transfer. Too successful, it turned out.
One couple remembered the feelings of 'relief and certainty' which followed the selective elimination of one of their triplets at 20 weeks. (Note: selective elimination = mid term abortion) The mother shared her certainty over the decision being 'just so right... and that rightness was confirmed when the doctor told us that the remaining twins were one of each gender!'
As my girlfriend recounted the story through her own tears, I gripped her counter top as my head spun, trying to process what I was hearing. Her own loss of a daughter was so raw and recent, and here she was, face to face with another mom in her grieving group who had willingly ended her child's life. But why her participation in a grieving group? Had she been moved to remorse and conversion by her violent choice.
Not exactly.
As the result of her 20 week abortion of baby #3, the perfect, remaining set of twins were compromised when her cervix failed to close completely following the 'procedure.' She was ordered onto strict bed rest and required to lay at an awkward, inverted angle to maintain the pregnancy, but sadly she lost another baby at 27 weeks. A few months later she delivered the surviving triplet, a little girl. Incredibly, this woman went on to share with the group that she and her husband had tried for another child 'just to be fair' to her daughter, now an only child, but were forced to abort baby number 4 after an amniocentesis showed possible evidence of Down's.
In summary, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, this infertile couple was able to conceive, select, freeze, destroy, and eventually deliver one perfect 'product' of conception into this brave new world... No word on whether surviving daughter came with a warranty or a return policy.
Isn't progress grand?
The process of in-vitro fertilization is intrinsically evil in its commoditization of human life by the intentional creation, manipulation of and, far too often, the destruction of designer embryos, purchased by desperate, misguided parents and coaxed into existence by truly mad science.
What I failed to realize was that even after the creation of 7 or perhaps 9 tiny babies, 3 of whom would perhaps be lucky enough to be considered 'viable' and implanted into their mother's womb, these 'chosen ones' were still far from home free.
My sweet girl friend lost one of her precious twin daughters at birth last year, and has been attending a grieving group for mothers of multiples who've suffered similar losses. Except, as it turns out, they have much less in common then one might imagine.
For starters, of all the member couples of their group, my friend and her husband are the only couple with 'natural' twins. All the other parents resorted to IVF to conceive their double (or triple) blessings. What was sickening, however, was the process by which those 'lucky' children were selected for implantation into their mother's wombs.
IVF is known for its practical application of eugenics, whereby the medical team identifies the 'highest quality' embryos for consideration, taking into account the parental preference for health, strength and even gender. Practically speaking, parents can custom-order their children from a sampling of 7 or 9 embryos yielded from a successful round of IVF. What the medical staff will usually downplay, however, is the fate of those unlucky 'extra' embryos - children who end up frozen in sterile labs for an indeterminate number of years at best, or at worst, discarded as so much laboratory waste.
I thought this was where the heartache of IVF ended, but I was wrong.
As the grieving parents went around the group sharing their tales of loss and struggle, a macabre theme began to emerge, as couple after couple recounted choosing to 'selectively reduce' the number in their brood following a successful embryo transfer. Too successful, it turned out.
One couple remembered the feelings of 'relief and certainty' which followed the selective elimination of one of their triplets at 20 weeks. (Note: selective elimination = mid term abortion) The mother shared her certainty over the decision being 'just so right... and that rightness was confirmed when the doctor told us that the remaining twins were one of each gender!'
As my girlfriend recounted the story through her own tears, I gripped her counter top as my head spun, trying to process what I was hearing. Her own loss of a daughter was so raw and recent, and here she was, face to face with another mom in her grieving group who had willingly ended her child's life. But why her participation in a grieving group? Had she been moved to remorse and conversion by her violent choice.
Not exactly.
As the result of her 20 week abortion of baby #3, the perfect, remaining set of twins were compromised when her cervix failed to close completely following the 'procedure.' She was ordered onto strict bed rest and required to lay at an awkward, inverted angle to maintain the pregnancy, but sadly she lost another baby at 27 weeks. A few months later she delivered the surviving triplet, a little girl. Incredibly, this woman went on to share with the group that she and her husband had tried for another child 'just to be fair' to her daughter, now an only child, but were forced to abort baby number 4 after an amniocentesis showed possible evidence of Down's.
In summary, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, this infertile couple was able to conceive, select, freeze, destroy, and eventually deliver one perfect 'product' of conception into this brave new world... No word on whether surviving daughter came with a warranty or a return policy.
Isn't progress grand?
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Whew
Well that was a long Lent. Ahem.
Let's see if I remember how to do this thing called writing for leisure. Between work and, well, lying prone on the sofa watching Hulu'd episodes of the artfully cast gymno-epic 'Make it or Break it' (don't judge me) while my tiny tornado naps in the afternoons, it has been preeeeetty busy round these here parts.
So those are my excuses, pitiful as they might be. And here I am, back in the blogosphere, ready to rock and roll.
Except the tornado just woke up. So until tomorrow, gentle readers, I bid you buonanotte. And I'm glad to be 'back.'
Let's see if I remember how to do this thing called writing for leisure. Between work and, well, lying prone on the sofa watching Hulu'd episodes of the artfully cast gymno-epic 'Make it or Break it' (don't judge me) while my tiny tornado naps in the afternoons, it has been preeeeetty busy round these here parts.
So those are my excuses, pitiful as they might be. And here I am, back in the blogosphere, ready to rock and roll.
Except the tornado just woke up. So until tomorrow, gentle readers, I bid you buonanotte. And I'm glad to be 'back.'
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