I have a dream too…

I have a dream

That no woman would choose abortion

Out of fear

Or shame

Or finances.

I have a dream

That each baby born would be celebrated.

Provided for.

Nourished.

Nurtured.

I have a dream

That girls would grow up to love their bodies.

Their minds.

Their strength.

Their ability.

I have a dream

That each woman would

Claim her sexuality.

Share her body, only
by invitation.

Welcome a child, knowing
that her community
Would always support
the gift of life.

I have a dream

That every father would teach his daughter self-love.

His son, self-respect.

His family self-knowing.

I have  a dream

That every mother would teach her son self-disclosure.

Her daughter, self-care.

Her family, self-restraint.

I have a dream

That we would recognize the fabric of our connection

With each life.

With every family.

With all of the earth.

Love Never Ends (a tribute to a friend)

30 years ago I spent a semester in London, or to be more specific, in Hampstead, in a home filled with American students and just as many retired Jesuit priests. All combined, there may have been 50 of us. Maybe a bit less. There was also a Director of the house, a Professor from our Jesuit university, a cook, named Eric, who made the best scones I’ve ever had, and someone else, unexplained, a single extraneous woman who was housed on the student floor.

Sister Norrie.

I pulled out my address book this morning in search of her last name and her last place of residence and only then did I realize, as I paged through the old book, how infrequently I relied on physical addresses of friends for communication anymore.

Once upon a time, Sister Norrie and I were pen pals, and before that, housemates.

Southwell House in Hampstead just below the Heath was cold and damp and dark and to me this fully explained the British habit of afternoon tea. London itself was cold and damp and dark which further explained the daily indulgence of sweets. Thursdays were my favorite. Eric always made scones for tea on Thursdays. Despite the careful directions Eric sent me via airmail on papery post years later, I have never been able to duplicate them.

Tea and sweets and dark beer kept me warm that winter, as did the occasional hot shower that I snuck in the priests’ quarters on the days when I felt brazen to head down the back to stairs to their the second floor wing.

Sister Norrie lived above the priests at the tail end of the students’ wing, and I visited her often in her tiny room there and she visited me in mine.

Norrie must have been 70 at the time, maybe older, but I was only 20, so she could have been as young as 60. I remember long, white, wispy hair though. Thin bones. Ruddy cheeks. A steady and gentle presence. Effervescent kindness.

Norrie once confided that her only regret of her vocation as a nun was not having children of her own.

Most of my classmates left for home the moment our semester abroad ended, but I stayed on, stashing my belongings in an empty room at Southwell House just off the foyer, so that I could take one more journey to Ireland, to the roots that Norrie and I shared, and to further delay my return to the world of pain that had become my family back home as it silently imploded.

While I was in Ireland, my things were mistakenly donated to charity. They included a stuffed dog and two blankies that I’d had since I was a baby along with a diaphragm and spermicidal jelly which I shuttered to think of the priests coming across.

Sister Norrie was the one to see that everything was returned to me.

Six years later, I returned to Southwell House with my new husband. The life of of the house had dramatically altered too. The retired priests had been replaced by residential youth. What had once been a formal, period home was now egregiously festooned in primary colors. Eric was still the cook. He made Casey and me scones. But Sister Norrie had returned to Ireland. And yet, even after she entered a nursing home, we continued to write to each other until my letters and holiday greetings went unanswered.

It was Sister Norrie, some thirty years ago, who must have witnessed me put receiver back in its holder in the foyer of Southwell on one dark and bitter February day. Or she glimpsed my momentary slump into the corner chair before I stood and smiled at her in the doorway of the diningroom.

I was long accustomed to masking pain, and I was good at it.

“Are okay, Kelly?” Sister Norrie.

“Yes Sister.” I said, as I turned for the staircase as quickly as i could.

Just then a group of students went by, inviting me to a impromptu Valentine’s celebration.

“I’ll be down in a bit to help,” I said, smiling, as they continued into the library with decorations in their hands.

As I put my hand on the banister, Sister Norrie gently placed her hand on my forearm: “You’ve just gotten some bad news, haven’t you, Kelly?”

“No Sister,” I said, “Everything is fine, Really.”

Norrie put her hands on my shoulders and turned me toward her, and looked me in the eyes, and then took my hand in hers, leading me down the hall past the rooms for visiting priests and into a tiny Chapel that I hadn’t known was there.

Norrie sat me down and told me to kneel, and I told her that my grandmother had just died. I did not tell her how I recieved the news. Not from my mother, but from my father’s secretary.

The altar in front of the pews shook as a subway passed in the tunnel beneath us, and I almost told Norrie then why I didn’t belong, why I couldn’t receive her love, why I didn’t deserve it, or deserve the light shining through the stunningstain glass above us.

Four years earlier, soon after my first grandmother was killed in a car accident, I had two abortions. 

But as Norrie prayed beside me, I remained silent and stiff and unfeeling.

As soon as she finished, I slipped away, refusing any further attention of affection.

That evening, after the Valentine Party in the library, I found a vase of flowers and a card in my room.

The calligraphy read: Love Never Ends.

When Sister Norrie and I parted at the end of the semester, she gave me a small brown earthen mug, handcrafted by her students.

In return, I gave her a grapevine heart sent to me by a dear friend.

Hobby Lobby Hocus Pokus

I lifted this from a friend on Facebook for how she SO deftly illustrates WHY this SCOTUS ruling matters to WOMEN, no matter their party, religion or stance:

So, this guy sits down next to me at the bar and falls into conversation with some friends about his dentist and his crown and some decisions he has to make and then the C word appears and he realizes there’s a female in earshot and he turns to me and says, “You didn’t hear that, of course,” kind of nice-like, and I say, “I most certainly did,” and he starts to apologize and I say, “And, by the way, I’m a dentist.”

So, now he’s totally fucked and takes a second to consider his options. Choosing badly, he goes with, “You’re . . . a . . .den . . tist? . . .dental something?” and gets the death stare but marshalls on relentlessly, “I mean, you’re a dentist? Not like the office manager? Or . . .?”

And I had to ask him: “Why would I say I am a dentist if I were not a dentist?”

I mean, for the sake of humor, I’ve dropped some untrue punchlines, but I always clarify quickly that I was making a joke. Or, at least eventually I do.

But it is 2014, and I am knocking on the door of 50 years old, and some dick in a local bar still feels totally at home throwing the C word around and acting as if there’s no way a “girl” is a dentist.

And you wonder why some people watch SCOTUS rulings like the old country read tea leaves.

Dr. Patricia Gibbons, DMD.
(with permission)

Burial

When I was 16, not only did I have two abortions. but I also threw a baby into the trash.

I worked in the pathology department of a hospital that summer, and my job was to catalog the body parts from surgeries, and then to dispose of them once the reports came back.

On one occasion, I opened up a sterile plastic container, dumped out the contents (and  formaldehyde) into the metal strainer, and saw not an appendix, or a gall bladder, but a baby; a tiny little baby.

I had forgotten about this, not forever, but for a long time, and it wasn’t until tonight that I truly felt what it was that I faced all those years ago.

Recently, some of my anti-abortion friends on Facebook have been posting abortion videos and images, suggesting that those who support the choice of abortion should watch it; and I thought to myself, they’re right; if I believe that abortion should be legal, which I do; I should be able to face what it looks like.

So I did, I clicked on a tab that said “Abortion Pictures.”

And suddenly I remembered…

the baby in the plastic cup.

At the time, I thought she must have been only a couple months old, but now I realize that she was at least 5 months old; because although she could fit into my hand, she was perfectly formed, legs curled up and all.

Though I had easily disposed of hundreds of bodily organs, I left her waiting on the shelf for some time.

In retrospect this job at the hospital was too much for a 16 year old, but I didn’t know it then. I even said, “Go ahead, I don’t mind,” when they asked if they could do an autopsy in the room while I worked at the sink (because Pathology was housed in the Morgue at the time.)

There were jars of organs on shelves; one jar of someone I knew who had died in a recent plane crash. There was a man in the freezer on a stretcher with a single shoe. A sneaker. Was he hit by a car while crossing the street? I remember his big belly. He wasn’t wearing a shirt.

I did my job every week, and I was paid well, and for the most part I thought myself lucky, even if I did have to dump body parts right after lunch while nauseous with early pregnancy.

It was the prostates that bothered me the most. They looked like ground up hamburger, and I dumped them as fast as I could, without looking, while I gagged.

I’ll never forget the hard yellow tumor that I saw the Pathologist slice out of a large breast. The woman to whom it belonged must have been old and must have been too afraid to see a doctor until it had grown almost as large as the breast around it. I had a hard time rinsing that breast and throwing it away.

But in my imagination, the baby is still there, on the shelf, because I cannot toss her into the trash. She is not sitting in a strainer while I look at her, wondering what to do.

Instead I’ve taken her home, in a tiny box, and placed her deep in the earth, with a beautiful rose quartz stone.

I’ve said a prayer for her soul and for her parents who must be grieving.

I’ve wondered why miscarried babies are thrown into the trash and not buried.

And now I wonder what becomes of the aborted.

Anti-Abortion AND Pro-Choice

“Fighting against the world that we don’t want is a critical first step, but fighting for the world that we do want is where liberation truly begins.”
Courtney Martin

I can’t recall when I became “Pro-Choice.” Maybe it was by default. When I “chose” to have an abortion, 2 of them, two-months apart from each other, at the ripe age of sixteen. (Though I know others who made the same “choice” and who are equally “Pro-Life.”)

I never gave abortion much thought; not politically speaking. It was a personal, desperate, practical act; that I knew was wrong, inside, but I grasped at it anyway.

Afterward, when I became more conscious of politics, I didn’t feel I had any right to say no to abortion, no matter how I felt.

I did do my best to help other young women avoid that choice, by providing all I’d learned about birth control. While keeping my own abortions secret. Secluded. Shamed.

Later, as a married woman, I suffered two miscarriages, and I knew that these devastating losses were punishments, self-inflicted, for the carelessness with which I had treated life.

In my early thirties, I met a new friend, who shared her own abortion stories, with reverence, but not with shame, which loosed my own, and opened me into motherhood.

I have been a good mother. Good enough. I have devoted my life to my children with consciousness, creativity and fervor.

Before this chapter of parenting, I had been a teacher–a kind and passionate steward of young hearts; and before that, a sister–the oldest of eight, tending as best I could to the lives of little ones.

I’ve always had an affinity for children. And elders. An immigrants. And the downtrodden. Those on the margins, I suppose.

As I age, a radical appreciation for women takes form inside. For who they are. For what they endure. For what they have to offer the world. For how they make a difference.

With this awareness, I know that women’s reproductive rights must be their own. And yet, as I approach 50, and that hard-earned sovereignty is threatened, I realize that I have a responsibility to fine-tune my thoughts and attention and consciousness. And so, I ask, how am I anti-abortion and pro-choice at the same time?

The answer is that these are not stances, or political sides, but instead truths that resonate inside of me.

I still think abortion is wrong. I think it IS the taking of a life. Abortions performed after the first trimester are particularly alarming given how developed a baby is; especially now that science and technology have radically shifted outcomes for premature births. Those delivered in the early part of the last trimester can now thrive. Even some born in the second-half of the second trimester survive. And who knows what new technology might bring.

But do those developments determine the dignity of life? Is a life only worth honoring if science can save it?

When I think back to my miscarriages–one at the end of the first trimester, and the other at the beginning, I remember how dismissive many were of my loss with comments like… Just try again or At least you know you can get pregnant or None of this will matter once you have a child or It was so early, are you sure?

Liberal or Conservative, religious or not, pro-choice or anti-abortion, we all differentiate when it comes to the unborn; but we can’t take this into consideration because to do so would make us vulnerable to the “other” side and we each have so much at stake.

The culture is to blame. January marked the 40th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade; celebrated or grieved; but of course, abortions themselves, legal or illegal, have been a part of women’s lives forever.

What has also been a part of women’s lives is subjugation and inequality, still evident in the places where laws are created that shape our mutual futures.

As women, we must move forward, together, in ways that honor the legacy of what it means to be a woman, and a mother.

Perhaps Naomi Wolf described it best, in her piece “Our Bodies, Our Souls”:

Now imagine such a democracy, in which women would be valued so very highly, as a world that is accepting and responsible about human sexuality; in which there is no coerced sex without serious jailtime; in which there are affordable, safe contraceptives available for the taking in every public health building; in which there is economic parity for women—and basic economic subsistence for every baby born: and in which every young American woman knows about and understands her natural desire as a treasure to cherish, and responsibly, when the time is right, on her own terms, to share.

In such a world, in which the idea of gender as a barrier has become a dusty artifact, we would probably use a very different language about what would be—then—the rare and doubtless traumatic event of abortion. That language would probably call upon respect and responsibility, grief and mourning. In that world we might well describe the unborn and the never-to-be-born with the honest words of life.

And in that world, passionate feminists might well hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead.

I’m not sure if my own words should end with hers. I don’t really want to stand outside abortion clinics. I don’t want to face the horror of what happens there nor do I want to intrude upon the women who make that choice.

But I am only half of the equation. I can let my Pro-Life sisters lead the way. They are fierce protectors and lovers; they will show me how.

As I write these words, a deer, a doe, steps into my view, outside the window at my writing desk, heading East, into the place of new beginnings.

With her characteristic gentleness.

A favorite Rumi verse comes to mind: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

And just as I decide to end with that, a second doe steps forward, facing West, into the direction of wisdom and women.