Welcome to My Neighborhood

Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked. –Katherine Anne Porter

Construction began this week on the new Planned Parenthood facility in my neighborhood. The majority of my neighbors are against the idea of having a facility of this kind in our area. They believe that we will be inundated with picketers and become potential bomb targets for religious fanatics.

I have never understood religious fanatics that kill others who violate the “do not kill” commandment. Where is the logic in that? Yes, I’ve heard all the arguments and do not care to revisit the topic here. I say they are no better then the other religious fanatics who bombed our Trade Center, our military bases and our military ships abroad. My blog, my opinion – don’t like it then don’t read it.

Still, my neighbors were worried. On the day that construction began, our association was outside with signs telling would be picketers not to park their cars in our lots and not to be soliciting on our property. They actually had a meeting to get geared up to confront the fanatics.

Well, here we are a week into the construction and no picketers. I think some of my neighbors are disappointed. Personally, I think it is too hot. Picketers aren’t going to go stand out in the heat – I mean, personal comfort comes before political or religious convictions. Last year several of the churches hired the homeless to picket for them. Still makes me laugh.

I believe Planned Parenthood is a good thing. We need an organization that is looking after the interests of the woman and giving them other options to the dumping of babies into dumpsters or down 7 story garbage chutes. I believe in the right to choose – I believe in the woman having rights over her own body.

Yes, I weep for the unborn children but I weep more when I hear how some of them meet with such grizzly deaths at the hands of the one person in the world they were suppose to be able to depend on…their mothers. If we stop focusing on just the abortions they do, and look at the women who have gotten free counseling and birth control to prevent pregnancies we will see that Planned Parenthood is not the enemy.

My opinion doesn’t make me popular with the majority but I really don’t care. People with small minds have limited vision. People who look at life so narrowly do not do the world as a whole any good.

In nature when starvation hits, the mother will leave her babies to starve before she would let herself starve to death. Why? Because nature needs to keep the breeder alive to have more babies later when conditions are better. The babies are expendable. Thankfully, we have better options such as birth control and education.

At the rate that I hear about children being abused, abandoned and murdered…I wonder just how far man has evolved over the other animals on the food chain. I look at babies and children and my heart just melts…I will never understand those who can hurt such little slices of heaven.

So Planned Parenthood, welcome to my neighborhood!

The Family Tree

For those of you who haven’t read earlier posts – I am part of a “big” family by today’s standards with five sisters and one brother. A family of seven is practically unheard of anymore as parents struggle to support two or perhaps three children.

Right now every one of my family members is under going a personal crisis of varying degrees. It is kind of disconcerting to see everyone so discombobulated. We all seemed to be doing so well there for so long.

My oldest sister just had to move from her condo. She is faced with all this upheaval, plus works more overtime then she should, when really she is at a time of her life where she should be considering retirement.

My next sister is also having to move. She hasn’t worked in over a year and can’t seem to shake the slump she has been in. Always a hard worker in the past, it is strange that she can’t let go of the last bad experience she had in the work place.

My brother and his girlfriend of five years broke up a couple of weeks ago. Being single again, he has a ton of new obstacles to overcome. I think, in the end, he will be a much happier person. He has a sunny disposition and a laid back demeanor that will help carry him through as he re-acclimates himself to the single life.

My next sister has cancer and is waiting to die. She divorced herself from the family decades ago in an effort, I assume, to punish us for failing her. An unhappy child as far back as I can remember, she never took responsibility for her own happiness. No one can make a person happy or miserable – they alone have the key to their emotional wellbeing.

My next sister is probably the happiest, at least on the surface. She struggles with her place in the universe – wondering if there isn’t something more to the life she has built. She has loved deeply, and lost deeply – but continues to put on a brave face as she follows the path she has laid out for herself.

My younger sister is on pins and needles wondering what shall become of her family. Her husband has been considering several options this past year leaving her to wait and wonder. Personally, I couldn’t do it and, while sometimes I think she will break under the pressure, she continues to wait.

Me, I’m wondering how long I can live here in Paradise while my son resides so far away? Not a day goes by where I don’t wonder what I’m suppose to do. I miss him so much. I’m not so rooted here in the sandy beaches that I couldn’t move back to Iowa. The desire to do so is like the tide – it comes in with thoughts to move, goes out with thoughts to stay.

So where does that leave us as a family? I know we are all strong individuals which makes us a strong family. I know we will all weather our personal storms and emerge back into the blue skies and sun as we have done many times throughout our lives. We’ll dry ourselves out and go forward on calm seas until the next storm threatens our horizon.

We are family – we know we are always there for each other. We may disagree or fight like cats and dogs – but in the end we agree to disagree. It means a lot to me, my family. Not just my sisters and brother but now our family has grown to include children and even more recently, grandchildren.

With each birth, I celebrate my family and the children who will go out into this world with a strong sense of where they came from. They will have children and their children will have children and our family will be carried into the future generation after generation.

Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him. –Aldous Huxley

Timothy

We met, became best friends, fell in love and lost each other in a couple short years in junior high. Is it possible to continue to love someone from so long ago?

Tim always had such a sunny disposition, always smiling and seemed so happy. He protected me from the merciless teasing I underwent with the popular boys and always knew what to say or do to make me laugh when I felt so much like crying. We’d race to the top of the big slide in the park and then slide down in tandem only to laugh and do it over again. We’d meet up at the movie theater, go swimming, and just hang out playing like normal kids did.

Because we moved a lot, Tim and I lost touch with each other as we grew older. I ran into him a few years later and was saddened at how unhappy he had become. I’ve often wondered what happened back then to make such a profound change in my best bud.

I never got the chance to ask him. Tim was killed from a car accident – newspapers said he was under the influence of drugs and alcohol when it happened. He hung on for weeks in a coma and I wanted to go visit him in the hospital but didn’t know what I would say to his family. His funeral was at a church in his small home town. The church was huge but every seat was taken as the people his life impacted came to say their goodbyes. He was laid to rest at the town cemetery and one would think that his memory would have faded by now in my mind.

Tim’s life taught me one very big lesson: the good we do – the smiles we smile, the times we laugh – can have a much deeper impact on another’s life then we ever thought possible.

Example moves the world more than doctrine. –Henry Miller