Unpleasantness

This post was originally written in 2013. I found it in my “draft” folder and thought it was worth dusting off. Six years later… I still agree with heartbroken emotion expressed. I think when I wrote it, it felt too judgmental to publish. My how the world has changed in six years.

So… yesterday I jabbed myself in the eyeball with a piece of rebar that was sticking out of the side of a rabbit cage.

It wasn’t a pleasant experience. However, I survived and live to tell the story, no pirate patch needed.

Another unpleasant experience this evening? Dos’s pants fell down. We were walking the parking lot and one minute she was clothed, the next minute she wasn’t.

I don’t understand how these things happen. And why is she always the one who ends up nekkid in public?!

My silly troubles faded away quickly when I popped over to the World Wide Web and read an article about Kermit Gosnell, the Pennsylvania doctor who is being charged with murder for performing live birth abortions.

If you have the ability to experience, to truly feel outrage, this case must make your blood boil and your stomach heave.

The article I read is one of many surrounding the story of this macabre business as the testimony in the case is revealed. Details of late term abortions resulting in live infant death are being revealed, along with the callous disregard of Gosnell and his willingness to end those lives by severing the spinal cords of the littlest ones.

I think of it and remember how I felt the moment I heard my child’s first, gasping cry. And then I imagine that whimper cut short, and the confusion that tiny human felt, along with the pain.

It makes me cry. But who am I? Just an emotional mother.

Assuming you’re unemotional, no matter how you look at it, this case is chilling.

So, after learning of this story, my family went to dinner. While we were there we noticed two families in the restaurant with very little newborns. They were so tiny! The eyes had that disoriented, unfocused look and their cries were so soft they were almost laughable. I held my own baby, a robust 9 months old now, and remembered back to the days I was just getting to know him. I looked at my 7 year old daughter and marveled at how she has lengthened and matured.

I don’t know what history will say of us for our culture’s ability to overlook the death of innocents, but I do hope the outrage over this particular story spreads deep and wide – and is loud!

If statistics are true, 25% of American women have received an abortion… and while I can’t even begin to know or understand the circumstances that led to these decisions as women and doctors exercised their “right to choose,” I do believe there is a trail of unhappiness and pain littering that right to choose.

My response tonight, for a bit, was to hug my children tighter and hold them just a little longer in gratitude that they are here, present, in my life. They enhance everything I do and I would be lost without them.

Even when they drop their drawers in the parking lot of the China Star Buffet.