Mommies Paradise

Yay!!

Via Feministing

I walked down the hall in a silence interrupted vaguely by the ding of the elevator bell. Of course it was dark outside. It was 4:30 am. I took the silent elevator down. I remembered that my body is strong and that I was ready for this.

The doors to the elevator opened to a shocking amount of people dressed similar to me. They all seemed eager and maybe a little bit caged. They all looked ready.

I found my pace group. These are the people that I have known for the last four months. Every Saturday morning we met. We synchronized, we talked and we breathed. We have listened to the cadence of our shoes pounding on the pavement for miles and miles. And we were sweaty. We were a well-oiled machine at times. At times we were just tired and sore.

And now we are here. It is dark and it is early. And we made it here.

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For some sick reason I am laughing at this. Divorce is hard and all but this may not be the way to resolve conflict.

Woman Sets Fire to Ex-husbands’ Penis

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A woman set fire to her ex-husband’s penis as he sat naked watching television and drinking vodka, Moscow police said Wednesday.

Asked if the man would make a full recovery, a police spokeswoman said it was “difficult to predict.”

The attack climaxed three years of acrimonious enforced co-habitation. The couple divorced three years ago but continued to share a small flat, something common in Russia where property costs are very high.

“It was monstrously painful,” the wounded ex-husband told Tvoi Den newspaper. “I was burning like a torch. I don’t know what I did to deserve this.”

Um, well, to answer the fellow’s question…

“…he sat naked watching television and drinking vodka…”

And regarding the 13 year old girl who shot her abusive father in the face, it seems that after actually taking a look at the situation this child was living in the district attorney has decided to try the child as a juvenile.

This child was absolutely abandoned and abused by every single person who’s responsibility it was to protect her. Based on the squalor that these kids were forced to live in as well as the fact that the little girl told a neighbor at some point within the last year about the abuse, I am having a hard time believing this:

But he and his wife saw the girl and her brother when the children visited their grandparents. “They would say they were fine,” Kim Booth said. “They never gave any inclination something was going on.”

The couple said they were unaware of any sexual abuse.

“If the family was aware anything like this was going on, we would have done something,” Kim Booth said. “This terrible tragedy happened because nobody did anything.” (bold mine)

You got that last thing right, lady.

I can’t explain why I am so focused on this particular story. Maybe because no person should ever have to live like this. And especially no child should ever have to start out life like this.

And as much as we would like to think that this is a rare occurrence, it isn’t. Children live like this more than we would like to know. In situations that we do not hear about because these children can not free themselves and no one will help them.

It is infuriating and heartbreaking all at the same time.

Julia Dahl has a piece up at Salon born of a recent victory by Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill. who more than six years ago introduced a bill which will provide 3 million dollars to the National Institutes of Health to “expand and intensify research and related activities with respect to postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis.”

The great news is that the Melanie Blocker-Stokes Postpartum Depression Research and Care Act has indeed received funding to be granted in 2008. The bad news is that nothing good seems to come without a price.

But there was a catch. In order to get enough support for the bill, Rush had to add language encouraging the NIH to study the mental health effects of abortion.

Ah. Yes, of course. Because postpartum depression and the after effects of an abortion have everything to do with each other.

What the huh? Maybe I’m dense but I really do not see enough of a connection for the two to be combined into a funding bill.

I’ve had both. The two are not the same. I am very clear on that.

And I could go on and on but Dahl sums it up pretty well.

Studying the psychological effects of abortion isn’t objectionable. Abortion and its aftermath are women’s health issues, after all, and it’s hard to argue against more knowledge. But there is something distinctly offensive about anti-choice politicians thwarting efforts to expand the study and treatment of a debilitating, frighteningly common disease (which led the namesake of Rush’s bill to commit suicide less than five months after giving birth) so as to equate it with the possible consequences of a procedure they already believe is immoral and should be illegal.

Right.

NOTE: I know this is late. I meant to put this up last week but it was put on the burner while I decided if I liked the new WordPress interface. I still haven’t decided.

I am just going to go up on this one and say, wow.

BUENA VISTA, Pennsylvania (AP) — A 13-year-old girl used a shotgun to fatally shoot her father in the head early Monday in a home overrun with animals and filth, police said.

The girl told investigators she used a 12-gauge shotgun to shoot 34-year-old Matthew Booth in the face while he was in bed, according to a police affidavit.

[…]Matthew Booth’s neighbor Suzanne Gruber told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the girl had told her she had killed her father because she “just couldn’t take it any more.” Gruber said the girl also told her she had been abused.

The child was living in squalor with her older brother and her father. She told neighbors and her estranged mother about sexual abuse. Ultimately, the child was the one who felt compelled to do something about it. I can only ask where all of the adults were in her life? I don’t have more to go on except that the mother did not have custody of her children. No one wants to imagine that this woman who was obviously aware of the already abusive situation, just left her children at the hands of this man but… did she?

My heart absolutely goes out to this little girl who is now being charged as an adult and is being held without bail.

So I say, good on you little girl, who saved yourself when no one else would. It is a real pile of shit that everyone who should have helped you failed you instead. Hopefully, you will be granted some justice this time around.

CNN ran a story today shedding light on the some 40,000 widows in India who have been shunned by society and are forced to loiter and beg for simple scraps to sustain their lives. Simply because their husbands have died. These widow’s own families have ostracized them and society as a whole sees them as bad luck.

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Er. It has been a long time since my last post. Hopefully, I am back in swing on this thing.

What with one thing and another, the changing of life’s gears, my constant feeling of being completely overwhelmed by a shift in the force, and the bouts of absolute hysteria regarding the irony of this and this, I have simply not been in the mood to write.

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On Saturday we ran in our designated pace groups for the first time. I really had a great time. Even though we were huffing some near the end, we did really well. We did come in five minutes faster than we were supposed to and that made our coach grimace. Next week we will have to slow it down a bit and maybe we won’t be huffing so much at the end.

Leading the group was easy since we were a small group (four women) that day. It was easy to communicate and everyone could hear me. An interesting thing happened though. Each of these ladies told me that I was a great pace group leader. I can not tell you how fantastic it felt to have people tell me that I did a good job.

It seems odd that positive reinforcement would be so shocking to anyone. I started wondering why it is so shocking to me. This prompted me to think about times in my life when someone made a point to tell me I had done something really well. The times that most readily come to mind are all when I was employed and/or acting. Kudos from strangers essentially or employers.
But now I am a mom and a house-(soon-to-be-ex-)wife and no kudos really ever come that way. I can’t imagine that I totally suck as a parent, or else wouldn’t social services be at my door? I’m just sayin’.

If you are a parent, when was the last time anyone told you that were doing anything really well?

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What am I running for, you ask? Well, I am training to run in a the AIDS Half Marathon in September.

We are raising money to help support AIDS Project Los Angeles. APLA provides much needed services to women, children and men living with HIV/AIDS in Los Angeles.

Want to sponsor me? Click here!

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And here we are. Politely going our separate ways. Where will you go? How will you get there? How long will we be able to stay here? What will we do now? Rise.

And so it begins. The bureaucracy of our end. Fill out the papers. What do you have? What do we have? What do I have? A child.