This is just to say

[rivka]

I'm not doing very well.

I'm crying at work.

Thoughts of miscarriage keep crossing my mind. Not as in, wanting to have one, but as in, how could the baby possibly live through this?

I know that's crazy.

But when the majority of my fellow Americans have given their stamp of approval to the architects of Abu Ghraib, where can I find hope? How can I be a parent in this world?

Comments

[ailbhe]

I was born in Ireland in 1978. It wasn't a good place to be. But as I grew up, I watched them release Mandela, knock down the Berlin wall - I still remember seeing a punk heave a grannie over the top of it, I don't know which direction she was going but she kissed him - and I was listening to the news when they violated the 1996 IRA ceasefire agreement. I voted Yes to the Good Friday Agreement - the first referendum in which I was eligible to vote. I approved of what Clinton did for Ireland; I had no idea what he was doing for or to America. I cried when I read of the Omagh bombing in August 1998 - a bombing that targeted children. When I was 14, male homosexuality was decriminalised and female homosexuality was protected by the same laws of consent that covered heterosexuality and male homosexuality (this is clumsy; the laws are about acts, not people). Not long ago, I held my baby and cried and cried as I watched children fleeing from the school in Beslan.

Today I took my baby swimming. She had a bad morning - she's teething, and when I went in to her she was standing holding onto the sides of her cot and screaming. I gaveher pain relief and breastmilk and cuddles and she had an hour nap before we went out. While we were swimming, she learned to sit on the side and jump off into my arms; she tried to swim towards a boy who had a lovely red and yellow ball; she splished and splashed and afterwards we had a shower.

She will live through terrible, terrible world events - she already has. But someday, maybe she'll take a baby swimming, too.

A.
Now crying myself. Perhaps it's the chlorine.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Now crying myself. Perhaps it's the chlorine.

No. This made me cry, too.