Detachment parenting, loving and letting go.

I like to imagine the wind that was blowing on that sparkling fall day, tousling my mom's strawberry-blonde hair. In the photograph, she's holding my older brother Jason, who was around 3 at the time. You can see he has his mother's eyes -- almond-shaped, dark brown eyes that are smiling. My mom's arms draw him in, and they're saying, "I love you and always will."

A mother's saving embrace.

I take the photograph off the shelf and examine it more closely, trying to see if I've missed something, if there are any clues, any hints to what lies ahead. But there's nothing in Jason's boyish grin that says anything about his future drug addiction, the lies, or the shame.

My mom has always kept that photograph prominently displayed in her kitchen. I once told her I loved the photograph's innocence and its glittery gold happiness; the way the camera captured the sunlight shining in her soft hair and the way her unconditional love for Jason is almost palpable.

"That's my favorite picture of us," she once told me. "It offers me hope."

Later, when I became a mother myself and had an innocent baby resting in my arms, a miraculous vessel of hopes and dreams, I winced at my mom's hope. I'd finger my own treasured photographs of me embracing my firstborn and worry that one day these snapshots might also convey only hope and serve as a reminder of when things were better, happier, and a mother's love was enough. I wanted my own old photographs to be what they were supposed to be: Merely nostalgic, sepia-toned glimpses into a happy past. I wanted more than hope for my own children. I wanted assurance that my love could and would save them.

A thoughtful and inspiring reflection by Kate Wicker. Read the rest here.

( Hat tip to Thinking Love No Twaddle)

Nora. This is your song.

The late Joe Dolan, the Legend from Mullingar, the Irish Tom Jones.
Laydeez, check out the moves.The yelps. The... scarf ?

The don't make them like this anymore.
"Yeow! you're such a Good Looking Woman!"

Joe Dolan - You're Such A Good Looking Woman (SUBTITRAT ROMANA)
- Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

The view from the kitchen sink.

Bathtime tonight. First for the muddy veg, then for the pots and pans, and lastly Her Majesty the Baby.
Occasionally it's nice to be chained to the kitchen sink.

The Truth About Abortion

I'm not sure if it's a breach of blog etiquette to copy paste an piece from elsewhere in it's entirety. If it is, I hope I'll be forgiven and an honorable exception made for this post. For so long I've been frustrated by the apparent apathy towards the scourge of abortion in the UK.We pay for this barbarism to be delivered by the NHS. Why are we so quiet about that? Why are our church leaders so quiet?

Honestly, I can hardly bear to hear about another emetic bidding prayer about overfilling kettles or not switching off lights. Small people in our country are condemned to a grisly death on account of their parents "choice" and we are blethering on about being good stewards of the earth.

I'm sure I wouldn't retch and choke with indignation quite so much if the concern for being green was even matched just a bijou amount by concern for the smallest, most vulnerable and most utterly dependant whose lives have barely begun and who are talked about and regarded as just another right in our panoply of rights. A "choice" to be farmed, cloned or exterminated . Longed for, or discarded as an unwanted "consequence".

Listen. Abortion is wrong because it's a baby. And it is ALWAYS wrong to intentionally kill a baby. Always.

How did we get to this point in history where 1in 5 pregnancies are aborted? What kind of savages are we that we just live with this?

I think abortion is so deadly because no one likes to talk about it. So many people have had an abortion that we are afraid of dredging up some crippling guilt if we call abortion what it is. Murder.

And we can't see abortion. Even the doctor performing the abortion doesn't really see it. It's all hidden.. The dark sanctuary of the womb is invaded by blind tools guided by the unseeing hand. Aborting the baby is like an excision. It's merely a polyp to be whipped out and carried off in a clinical waste bag.

When Marie Stopes aired it's infamous abortion advert recently I wondered if this might in fact, perversely, be positive for the cause of Life. Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.
I'm an optimist and I do believe that the night is darkest just before the dawn.
For the first time, I am able to have proper conversations about the reality, especially with young people. The buzz that the advert created has created conversation fodder. Usually it's pretty hard to bring up the subject of abortion in polite company.
So thank you Marie Stopes, for providing the talking point.

Robert Colquhoun of Love Undefiled really has his finger on the pulse of the pro life issue.
This evening I noticed that he had put up a link to this new website. It's very slick and very contemporary and what makes this site really interesting to me is that it's British.

It is about time that we caught up with the much more active pro life movement in America. For too long the stalwart soldiers of the pro life movement here have been elderly women.
This is an issue that the younger generation should be profoundly galvanised by.
I have a feeling that their moment is arriving. This issue is the most pressing civil rights movement of our day.
The unborn need heroic men and women to champion their cause, to be a voice for the voiceless. There is a generation of young people who are ready to be stirred to speak out, to act and to challenge the cruel indifferent apathy of the last 42 years.
Abort67 is named for the year abortion was legalised in this country. It pulls no punches, and it's about time.

If you are fine with abortion,

if you think it's "complicated",

if you think you wouldn't have one, but you "wouldn't tell anyone else what to do",

if you think "it's ok in serious cases like rape" ( that is, if the father was a rapist then it's ok to give the child the death penalty)

then you need to know the truth about abortion.
Dare you?

The following is from here:

The day Marie Stopes International were planning to advertise their deadly services on Channel 4 we took four of our banners outside their Brixton clinic. We had asked them if they wanted our help in advertising their services as they had announced on their website that:

We believe that every woman has the right to accurate, unbiased information about all of her pregnancy choices, including abortion.

After telling us they would get their marketing department to contact us we heard no more from them. We can only assume they were too busy to get in contact so we went ahead anyway.

We were told over and over again by women who had experienced abortions that they were totally unaware and uninformed that abortion did what it did. After seeing our pictures they all agreed they would not have gone through with it. Wait a minute, perhaps that's why Marie Stopes never got back to us. Marie Stopes doesn't care about women's choices, only in promoting abortion.

What do you do if you don't like the answer to your question? Well if you are part of Marie Stopes, you stick your head in the sand and change the subject. Recently, Marie Stopes ran a poll to demonstrate the support for legalised abortion in Northern Ireland.

As the results were clearly showing that they were struggling to find this support we emailed Marie Stopes for a comment and of course we heard nothing. Bernadette Smyth from Precious Life, an anti abortion group in Northern Ireland managed to take them up on this.

On Tuesday 9th March, Director of Precious Life Bernadette Smyth went head to head with an agent of Marie Stopes on an Irish radio station. Bernadette let the Marie Stopes agent dig her own trap by allowing her to say their first poll result “..had to be taken seriously”; “..the government had to act on it”; “..87% of people couldn’t be ignored”; …etc, etc. But then Bernadette sprung the trap by asking “What about the 82% of people who are currently voting on your website poll saying NO, abortion should not be legalised in Ireland?” The hypocrisy of Marie Stopes was exposed live on air when their agent said that poll result could not be taken seriously. Bernadette retorted “Then why are you taking your first poll results seriously? Why are Marie Stopes not issuing press releases stating that that 82% of Irish people don’t want abortion legalised? Do Marie Stopes only issue poll results when it suits them?” The Marie Stopes agent was totally lost for words.

By the time Marie Stopes realised what was happening and pulled the plug on the on-line poll the "NO" vote had reached 94%. When we tried to find the poll on their website the page came back saying "OOPS - You have arrived at this page in error; it may be that the page you are looking for has been moved during recent improvements to our website." Oops indeed!

This isn't the first time Marie Stopes have struggled to gather support for killing unborn children. In 2007 they ran a petition for a year but only managed to get 498 signatures. 77 of which were Marie Stopes staff, 14 from IPAS and 3 from Abortion Rights.

Will Marie Stopes stop pushing their unwanted and deadly trade on the world? I doubt it. Not until there is enough resistance to what they are doing. Will you join us in standing against them?

How a Rabbi led me to Rome

I've written before about my interest in Judaism and how it led me to a new appreciation of the liturgy, the sacraments and eventually back to the church that I'd wandered away from some years before.
I appreciated the way the observance of the feasts and seasons strengthened the Jewish identity and acted as a teacher of eternal truths in every generation.
I recall reading about how, for Jewish people, celebrating the  Passover meal was seen as a way of being mystically present, across time, at the moment when the children of Israel escaped from their Egyptian pursuers across the Red sea..
In this way,  despite the accident of separation by time and space, each generation could, in a sense, "be there".
I couldn't help but be reminded that Catholics view the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in a similar way. That through it, the veil between time and space is lifted and we become mystically present at Calvary.
What hadn't made any sense to me at all as a cradle Catholic, suddenly fell into place as an Evangelical with an interest in the Jewish people.

The pennies, once they started to drop, all fell pretty quickly. And having meandered slowly and  carelessly away from the church, I sprinted back to it at quite a lick.
Having arrived, I was fascinated, and delighted to find that I was not alone. That others had found their way back through discovering the Jewishness of the Catholic church.
It really makes sense to me that what went before, while a shadow of what was to come, was not simply thrown overboard, but found it's fulfilment in the light of recognising Christ, his passion, death and resurrection.

Taylor Marshall is one of my favourite bloggers. He took the circuitous route to Rome and writes eloquently about the reasons why. Here is how his story starts:

"I was not always drawn to the Catholic Church. I once resisted it with great force. As a college student I believed that Pope John Paul II was the Antichrist, and boldly concluded that the Catholic Church was the Scarlet Whore of Babylon described by Saint John in the Apocalypse. I even handed out Jack Chick tracts and left them in the toilet stalls of the dormitory (looking back, a rather suitable place) for fellow students to read. Today my wife and I (and our five children) are Catholic, Roman Catholic..."

Read the rest here.

Today on his blog, he makes this announcement:

I'll be on Al Kresta's nationally syndicated radio show today (June 30, 2010) talking about "How a Rabbi led me to Rome," at 3:10 pm Central Time.
If your city doesn't have Catholic radio, you can listen live through the internet by clicking: here. 

I'm taking my laptop upstairs with me so I can listen to it while I'm giving Marie-Aibhlinn her last feed of the night.She gets kind of tetchy when I try and read a book and breast feed at the same time. She keeps reaching round and grabbing at the pages.
So I'm looking forward to just sitting back and listening to Taylor Marshall instead.
I just thought I'd share in case anyone else would find that as interesting as me.
Goodnight all!

That was their lucky day

Phew!
(HT MommyLife)

Come on!

Three lions on my shirt
Jules Rimet still gleaming
Thirty years of hurt
Never stopped me dreaming...

I'm not really all that into the beautiful game as it happens, but since I met Pat it's been a part of my life. Sometimes in the way that Camilla Parker Bowles was a part of Dianas life. But nonetheless, in between complaining I budged up and made room for it. At times I even took a secret grudging pleasure in it.

The snobby killjoy in me detested the football aesthetic ( the nylon!) and the fact that a big game always seemed to be the occasion of a rambunctious gathering in our sitting room. A football gathering  always necessitated the kind of  snacks that I disdain.
Post match clean up usually indicated the carefree strewing of something like tortilla chip confetti all over my soft furnishings, oh and the sticky drinks and the bottles of beer . Ew.
My doomed efforts to encourage crudites as a match snack caused the house to ring with snorts of derisory laughter. Celery and carrot sticks simply didn't cut the macho mustard on a big match afternoon. And so the crudites were repudiated.
Of course the children are accessorised as well. With squeaky polyester scarves and sweat bands and woolly hats. Oh and (sob) Arsenal pyjamas too ( *cough* thank you Noreen, mistress of the subversive gift!)

But I'm such a conflicted snob because, well, I like it too. I can't help myself.
All that laddish male bonding has an innocent sweetness about it that makes me smile. And there is something about hearing my family roaring together as they jump from the sofas in perfect unison, or even slumped  and groaning in misery together, that makes me grin inwardly.

Musuing about all this made me think about this terrific Baddiel/Skinner/Lightening Seeds anthem.
Can it really be 14 years ago?


I love Frank Skinner.
America, you can keep your Brad Pitt and your George Clooney.
Come on England!

Israel and the Gaza flotilla raid.

 
Here's an excerpt from the BBC's report on the Gaza flotilla raid :

Israel has set up an internal inquiry into its deadly raid last month on a convoy of Gaza-bound aid ships.

Israel earlier rejected a UN proposal for an international probe, but has now agreed to include two foreign observers in its own inquiry.

Nine Turkish activists were killed when Israeli commandos stormed the ships in international waters on 31 May.

Meanwhile, Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair says he hopes Israel will allow more humanitarian items into Gaza.

Washington welcomed the announcement of the inquiry, describing it as "an important step forward".

But Turkey's foreign minister said Ankara had "no trust at all" that Israel would conduct an impartial investigation.

And here's a video on the  raid that I found on Mommylife.




( HT Barbara@Mommylife)

Edited to add. After watching the video above, I saw this one of New Yorkers protesting the raid:




It never changes.
Everyone goes around thinking they know everything they need to know to be quite sure who the good guy is and who the bad guy is, and feeling mighty righteous for being on the side of the angels.
If only working it out were ever that simple.
I think "useful idiots" is the phrase that I'm looking for.

Pretend I'm a tree and save me

Most people I know are fairly comfortable being morally outraged about the rapine of the rain forests, the pillage of the oceans and the plunder of the environment.

Whether it's carbon emissions, bluefin tuna, melting polar ice caps, or the treatment of dogs in China, we can all shake our heads in grim agreement and be of one accord.
Causes which are widely espoused, especially those which have  been made groovy by the support of a  celeb, are even more likely  to win approval and agreement.

It's an easy kind of virtue that doesn't cost even a little independant thought, let alone courage.

Some, like these warriors, really let it all hang out when it comes to their passionate defense of nature.



With eco indifferent hearts of stone, we found it pretty funny seeing them all weeping and apologising to the trees. Those extreme tree huggers are Intense man.


So then I saw this on Breadgirls blog.

Thinking about it makes me feel like I have a stomach full of rocks.

The unborn are persons. Only they happen to still be inside and we can't see them. And if we can't see them we can pretend they are something else.

(  For those who are sensitive, as I am, to images, this video does not have any images of abortion. Just quotes and pictures of  the unborn at various stages of gestation. It is worth watching.)

Here is an interview with bio ethicist doctor Rosario Laris which helpfully discusses many persistent myths surrounding abortion and the "need to keep it legal" ( HT Love Undefiled)

So we can all agree that animal cruelty is wrong, but despite evidence that even the 8 week old fetus can experience pain, the abortion discussion is "controversial".
When are we going to have this conversation?

Is Blogger eating my comments?

My dashboard keeps telling me I have 2 comments awaiting moderation, but when I take a look they are gone.
If you have left me a comment that didn't get published, please will you re send?

Zoe and Gary invite you to share their baby joy.

This is a screenshot from my son Dom's practice biology paper that he was doing online. It's last years GCSE paper,( the whole thing is here if you biology nerds are interested.)

Check out the happy parents!
Is it just me or do Zoe and Gary look like The Undead?
Is this subliminal messaging?
They remind me of those ads that showed the effect of smack on the wasted faces of users.
Zoe and Gary are straining to smile for the camera, but you know it's only a matter of time before the facade cracks and they turn into flesh eating zombies.
But maybe that's just me and my fertile imagination.