Abortion: Hollywood gets it right

(*Spoiler Alert: if you're behind on your Downton consumption this season, look away)

Or British Hollywood, such as it were.

Last night's episode of Downton was one of the best on-screen depictions of the reality of a crisis pregnancy that I've ever seen. Not because it was brilliantly written (though it was) or because the characters were compelling in their dialogue and emotion (though they absolutely were), but because it was realistic. At least, as realistic as the fictional depiction of an earl's daughter falling pregnant by an older married man whose wife is interred in an insane asylum can be. Ahem.

The truth behind most crisis pregnancy situations is not a political truth, as so many on both sides of the issue would have us believe, but a deeply human one: loneliness.

I don't mean loneliness in the sense of isolation, necessarily, though it can certainly be that, but rather, I'm speaking of the loneliness that affects someone who perceives themselves to be alone in a crowded room.

I am alone. I am abandoned. I am trapped. Nobody can feel what I am feeling, and there is nobody who can help me out of this place I find myself in. I am utterly alone.

That is what drives most abortion-minded down to the nearest Planned Parenthood or women's 'services' clinic. It isn't politics. It isn't even religious beliefs, or a lack thereof, necessarily. It is loneliness, and the fear that accompanies the desolating poverty of options that a woman facing a crisis pregnancy perceives.

My parents will kill me. My boyfriend will leave me. My Church will reject me. My husband will walk away. Her husband will find out what we've done. I'll lose my job. I'll lose my friends. I'll lose my life.

Abortion might be a buzzword in our culture, but the banality with which we discuss it betrays the truth of the matter: it is a horror, for every body involved.

With the rare exception of those abortion apologists who are so wounded, so enamored of this culture of death that they've pledged their allegiance to, and perhaps a handful of truly earnest practitioners who have deadened their minds and souls to the gruesome reality they participate in, hardly anybody is truly pro abortion. You might spend some time on CNN or MSNBC and walk away believing otherwise, but don't mistake the cacophony of a few shrill voices for the silent dread of millions of quiet ones.

Abortion is awful.

As the storyline for last night's episode played out on the small screen, we were made privy to Edith's visible interior struggle over her situation. In one scene she confesses to her mother that 'she has bad thoughts sometimes' and wonders aloud if she is, in fact, bad. Her mother reassures her that we all have bad thoughts, but that 'acting on the bad thoughts is what makes someone bad.'

If only more parents were willing to have that simple conversation.

When Edith announces to her aunt that she intends to 'get rid of it,' the older woman reacts with natural horror and pity, not with a callous agreement or an 'atta girl, you exercise your right to choose.' That isn't realistic. Nobody feels that way, not in the real world of flesh and bone and complicated situations and sorrow and regret. The media might (usually) want us to believe otherwise, and the small chorus of bitter and twisted voices promoting abortion for abortion's sake might want to convince us it is so, but let me assure you, it is not.

I have sat with women as they wrestled with the decision whether or not to take the life of their child, walked alongside them as they entered the bubble zone surrounding a 'clinic'.

If any of them failed to see the humanity of their unborn baby, none of them voiced it. Maybe the belligerent boyfriend accompanying them into the clinic did, or perhaps the aging and angry mother (grandmother, really) escorting them firmly by the elbow…but not the mother herself.

No matter what the media - or Cecile Richards - tells us, the truth is that abortion is always the fruit of a hideous, soul-wrenching decision bred of a lack of options (either actual or perceived) and most of all, that ultimate loneliness.

As Edith sat perched in the dingy waiting room of an illegal abortion clinic in post WWI Britain last night, she bared her aching heart for the audience as she admitted she would never be able to return to the nursery at home, the nursery containing her niece and nephew, her sisters' children.

"Yes you will, in time, you will." her accompanying aunt consoled her.

"I know that I will not. I am prepared to kill the wanted child of the man I love."

Edith's fear of rejection - by her family, by her missing lover, by her society at large, is so great that it forced her to consider what she herself recognized to be unthinkable: killing her own child.

It's never a simple decision, let alone a celebratory one. With few exceptions, the decision to abort is a painful one. And so is the decision to choose life. Edith, ultimately, did. And she didn't do so for political reasons (crowed the tired, predictable leftists blogosphere this morning) nor for lack of courage. Her decision to embrace the life of the child she carried was born from courage, from the decision to face the unknown rather than to embrace the horror of the known. And ultimately, it was a rejection of loneliness, of the lie that 'I am alone' and 'there is no other choice.'

May her courage, while imagined and portrayed by a skillful actor, breathe a spark of life into a culture obsessed with death. And may her fictional story speak to women living this an all-too-familiar storyline out in real life.

10 Days to Go

This afternoon found me logging miles on the elliptical and testing out my newfound resolve to refrain from using the scale for at least the next 3 months (and possibly forever.

Seriously what possible reason do I have for knowing my exact weight? My driver's license and my passport both have at least 5 years before expiration, so…) so consider that my Wellness Project update for the weekend. (20 days down, 10 to go.)

For the digital record, every workout I've had sans weigh-in has been infinitely more satisfying than any workout that ever preceded or followed a rendezvous with the worth-giver. I mean the validation dispenser. Or maybe we can just call it the shitty day-o-meter. Because folks, I could have logged 4 solid miles on the treadmill, lifted weights and be dripping sweat and feeling like a warrior princess and then … beep, beep, beeeeeep: the numbers prove me wrong. The numbers say that my work has been in vain, and not only that, has potentially set me back in my pursuit of bodily perfection, for I am 1.3 lbs up from yesterday.

So stupid. Why it took my 31 years to realize this, I can hardly say, but consider it realized. Working out is only fun (and sustainable) when I'm doing it for the right reasons, anyway.

I have some other thoughts percolating, thoughts about gratitude and worthiness and comparison and what an interesting weekend it has been, but a hungry angry baby who most definitely doesn't appreciate the dairy I ingested yesterday is calling - nay, shrieking - my name.

Rewiring the soundtrack

The past 5 days or so have been rough in the area of, well, honestly, basic personal hygiene. I've showered some, but only under the careful scrutiny of pint-sized bathroom intruders. My children - and all small children, I guess - have an internal alarm that sounds when mother disrobes. I intensely dislike this aspect of parenting. Rant over.

Anyway, I've been limping along, trying the keep the house together and the kids alive-ish and warm, and I haven't been doing much in the way of the Wellness Project most days, and I feel it acutely. Yesterday was one of the hardest days I've had with the kids, and I was exhausted and so broken down by 4 pm and wouldn't you know it, all that negative self talk I've been laying waste to? It came roaring back. 

I began to find myself making the odd offhand comment here and there as this interminable week has dragged on, but it wasn't until today that I stopped and looked closely at the correlation between one exhausted, over-extended mommy and the soundtrack of doom that plays like a broken record in my brain.

You're such a failure, look at this house/your body/this dinner/their attitudes/your tone with him…

Why can't I look like her? Why does my body look so awful? Why can't I dress myself? Why don't clothes look that way on me? Why doesn't my house look like that?

etcetera, etcetera.

Tellingly, from an eternal perspective, I don't spend much time pining over the holiness or charity of others. But the temporal stuff? I'm all over that.

And this post is all over the place. I guess what I'm getting at is when I get really run down and, consequently, stop making conscious efforts to care for myself in a healthy and realistic-to-this-stage-of-life way, it's harder for me to practice virtue. It's just plain harder to be good; to myself and, more importantly, to others. I would never have imagined that there would be a connection here, but there you go. Body + soul and all that.

So today? I took a shower. I put on make up and blew my hair dry, even though it was close to 4pm. And I felt better for it. And I know Dave appreciated it, even though I was strrrretching the definition of 'fully dressed' from the waist down in my highly inappropriate but whoops, nothing else quite fits yet black leggings. Leggings are not pants. Except when you stuff them into boots and pretend that they are. 

Nope, they're still not pants. But boy are they niiiice and stretchy.

Tomorrow is a new day. I'm re-commited to this project, and to the idea that something good is happening here, and that the soundtrack that starts to play whenever things start to slide downhill isn't infallible. Hell, it isn't even true most of the time. 

It's time to start listening to something new. 

Winterized

I don't know you guys, I probably shouldn't even throw my cap into this ring because I'm sure it will be close to 50-something next week here in (usually) sunny Colorado, but this week has been brutal. Canada, I feel your pain. Kind of. I have never been the kind of mom to flinch in the face of the elements, at least when it came to something like weather standing between me and my forays to procure groceries, coffee, etc., and yet here I sit, 7 week old baby tucked snugly under one arm and croupily coughing up a storm and the mercury? It's hovering right around negative 10 degrees and so I'm eating Panda Puffs for lunch. My options - like my luck - have run out.

Poor Genevieve has been sick as a toy poodle for days now, and yesterday spiked a scary (to me) fever of 101.5. She is better today but still not eating well and keeping us (okay, mostly me) up aaaaallll night long with her sad snorting and snuffling and gagging on snot, etc. Too much information, I know. But my brain is short-circuiting from too many consecutive days of crazy housebound baby-wrangling, and I'm pretty sure my sweet, single, medically-trained sister in law, visiting us from exotic south Asia, just had the SAHM version of a 'cultural immersion experience,'

Claire, I'm so sorry, and God love you for all that Curious George you read Joey. He is currently waving a sippy cup in my face and berating me for serving him "old" milk, so feel free to come back any time. Or right now, really.

Do you see that liquid? It turns out you cannot leave an unattended keg of beer in the company of men of any age. "Beer fight, Mommy!"

Don't even ask why we had a keg in our garage, but know that it was Fat Tire.

This too shall pass, I know, I know…but just when I felt like I might kind of maybe be getting a little bit on top of my newly-expanded mom game, bam: gut check courtesy of mother nature.

So there you have it, delivered to you fresh from the land of stretchy gym pants and unmade faces. I've been sustaining myself on this gem of a book my sweet husband brought home for me last week and came across this cool lady, who saw housework as a form of temporal punishment for sin and oh MY GOODNESS YES. Amen. And alleluia.

If you'll excuse me, my penitential load of dishes awaits me.

On a warmer note, now that the embargo has been lifted, I am beyond thrilled to invite you to come share a pint poolside on a glam rooftop in the humid heart of Austin, Texas this summer with Jen, Hallie, and a whole slew of other queens of the internets who will be speaking at the Edel Gathering.

You best believe when J + H emailed me a month or so ago to ask if I would emcee this fantastic creation of theirs that I simultaneously started doing labor breathing and trying to craft a somewhat cool and casual reply of "Oh hell yes" a very reserved 11.2 seconds after the email hit my inbox.

So if you wanna come hang with the creme de la creme (them, not me) of the mommy hood, I hope you'll start dropping hints to your husbands about what a fabulous St. Valentine's gift a weekend away of this caliber would be. Come on, a rooftop pool. Starbucks. Multiple bars in the hotel. Quiet, sanitized bathrooms with ample hot water. I'm sorry, I just fainted from the anticipation of a 25 minute shower followed by an enormous glass of red wine.

Join us. You know it to be your destiny.

(I'm really, embarrassingly sleep deprived. Luke Skywalker called and confirmed it for me.)

We interrupt this utter lack of programming

To report from the land of sick and sad babies with head colds. Sriously, there is nothing sadder than a congested baby. Still, we did get her baptized Saturday evening, as planned, and she does smell deliciously of chrism and salvation and all that.

But she can either breathe or eat, and not both, which has made for a kind of awful weekend. Trying to sprinkle a few lunges here and there, coupled with polished nails and toes and extra shots of espresso, in the spirit of keeping the Wellness Project - and myself - limping along.