http://consciouswoman.org/2008/08/04/conscious-woman-of-the-month-august-2008/
Want to have your blood pressure raised? Want to realize yet again how incredibly lucky you are to have been born as you were? Read this month’s Conscious Woman article, about Dalit activist Manjula Pradeep.
http://midwiferyworld.com/?p=232
WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 16, 2008)—Just in time for Father’s Day, at its annual meeting last weekend, the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a resolution to introduce legislation outlawing home birth, and potentially making criminals of the mothers who choose home birth with the help of Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs) for their families.
I think what kills me about this is that if home birth is outlawed… what are they planning to do with the babies of the women who do it?
More news as it appears, and as soon as I have some concrete action to take, I’ll let y’all know.
Apparently, having a child in this culture means you are disabled. At least, that’s what HR thinks.
I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with the illustrious folks who administer these things last week. This is the third baby I’ve had while working, and thank goodness I kinda know what I’m doing, or it would have been ugly. Last time, I was all fired up about my VBAC, about fighting the birth machine, about making sure everyone and their dog knew that I was having a homebirth, by God.
This time? This time I just want to have my baby in peace. Course, that’s not the way it’s done in these parts…
“Who’s your OB” the chipper operator asks. I simply give her the name of my midwife; it’s easier than arguing.
“What hospital are you delivering at?” I simply give her the name of the only hospital in CA that I would consider setting foot inside. I’ve never actually been there, spoken to anyone there, or interacted with the place in any way, but they’re the only hospital that “allows” VBACs, so that’s my “in case of disaster” backup option. But it allows her to fill the blank in her form without the computer having fits.
“What’s your due date?” This one is a bit trickier. I don’t actually have a due date, for a lot of reasons, that mostly involve my cycle being all messed up from my miscarriage still at the time I conceived this baby. Besides, due dates are pretty bogus (my favorite discussion of this is here). Babies come when they come. If my boss is OK with me working straight up into contractions, if my coworkers are OK with this, then why do I have to… oh never mind. I pull a date out of thin air that’s more or less in the right range, and reaffirm that I can indeed switch the date around “if work requires it.” And that seems to be OK… if the demands of my job require my leave to change, that’s alright. So we’re set.
Because I’ve done this before, I am prepared for the gotchas. I’ve had two other babies in this timeframe, so I know what’s coming. I ask the HR person “so is that goofy rule about not being eligible for Performance Review if you’re on disability still in place?” She mumbles something, and goes to look it up. Sure enough, it is. So by virtue of the period of time for which I’ll be on leave, I will not be eligible for any of the perks that come with a good performance review. Luckily, I figured this out before. So I tell her, “OK, so I’ll contact you, go on vacation for the week of reviews, then back onto disability afterwards.” She gasps. No one has ever handed her this particular workaround before, but of course, other than being a paperwork hassle, it’s utterly valid. I do not make the rules, I just figure out how to work around them.
But I’m lucky; this woman is on the ball. “Oooh!” she says, “it’s the same stupid thing (her words!) for holiday pay too! So go off disability and onto vacation for July 3, so you get paid for July 4, then back on disability again!”. It’s always nice to have a collaborator on the inside.
So my paperwork is all set. I’m good to be considered Disabled by the State after giving birth to my child. But only for six weeks, mind, because I’m not that disabled. And that, my friends, is a whole other tirade.
As usual, things are nutty in the birth advocacy world. It’s not worth going into the details, but recently, I was questioned by someone who basically said that because I was a mother of sons, not daughters, my birth advocacy work didn’t have the urgency that the work mothers of daughters had. You know, because my boys were never going to get subjected to what women here routinely do.
That part’s true. My sons will never be the direct physical victims of the physical, emotional, and mental abuse that passes for birth care in this country.
My sons, like their father before them, are likely to end up being helpless observers as the women they love are gutted like halibut. Woken up from a restless sleep in an uncomfortable chair to discover that other people have decided that it’s time to take your firstborn child by surgery. Completely discounted, completely marginalized, completely ignored. Here, put this surgical suit on; we’ll let you into the OR so you can see your wife’s intestines, smell her skin roasting when we do cautery, hold her hands when she starts convulsing, and have a moment of sheerest panic when we take the baby to the nursery; here, decide on a dime who needs your presence more, your helpless newborn or your helpless wife. Try really hard not to guilt yourself for either decision, but do so anyway.
My sons, like their father before them, will head home with a woman who underwent a surgery that everyone minimizes. Who is a shell of herself. Whose world was ripped apart and reassembled with vicodin and steri-strips. And they will be looking at between a year and as many years as the rest of her life, wondering when they get the woman they married back. And in the meantime, if she’s lucky, she’ll figure out that it’s the system, not her, and get her act together. If she’s not lucky, she’ll spend her days sitting in a rocker pulling on her hair, trying to figure out what’s wrong with her. Maybe she’ll get medicated, maybe she won’t. And my sons will be there, trying to deal with that and a newborn, and wondering where it all went wrong, and powerless to do a damn thing about it.
I have nothing to worry about. I’ll just be the mother in law, watching the impending train wreck, with no way to get in there and be useful to prevent … anything.
Friends… my urgency is huge. And there’s not nearly so much time as we think. In the time since advocacy groups began howling about the rate of cesareans, ours here in the US has skyrocketed from 5% to just over 31%. At that rate… by the time my sons are having children, my scenario is far more likely than the chance that the mother of their children will have a normal birth.
I could get lucky. They could hook up with women who know the score, who know how to fight, who are strong enough to have a normal birth. And of course I wish that for them with all my heart. But you know… *I* didn’t know any better. And in the years I’ve been doing this birth advocacy thing, I have met all kinds of women who are the sorts of women who could love, cherish, and honor my sons, who didn’t know any better. Not the first time, at any rate. Sometimes not even the second or third, and by that point, the fight to birth normally is insanely difficult, and uphill every step of the way, in the snow, both directions. I can’t assume my boys will hook up with women who are birth advocates. I have to assume they’ll be normal women, having normal lives, who are unaware of the monster of US obstetrics.
I can pray that I’ll have a relationship with them based on respect and support, and that maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll have earned the right to be involved in their process. It does happen; I myself have a wonderful MiL. But I can’t assume that.
Which means that I have serious work to do, on behalf of all women. And there simply isn’t much time.
A coworker of mine, whose wife is pregnant with their first child, just sent me this:
This makes me unspeakably sad for so many reasons. Here’s my take on it:
Every time I think I’m imagining at least part of how bad things in the American Birth Climate can get, something like this pops up in my face like a horrorshow. Someone talk me down?
http://www.popsci.com/scitech
Check it out. Not only can they screw with our births, not only can they damage our kids, but then they can freaking MAKE MONEY OFF IT LATER when they figure out that ARTIFICIALLY DOSING OUR KIDS with a hormone OUR BODIES PRODUCE AT BIRTH FOR OUR BABIES can help fix what should never have been broken in the first place.
I‘m thrilled for those for whom this is a cure, a help, an assistance. And utterly terrified at what this says for the growing number of women and babies whose natural process is being willfully tampered with.
Profit, profit, profit all around. And all the costs to us.
Fuckers.
UPDATE: Angela tells me this wasn’t clear enough, so let me expand on precisely why I’m upset. Oytocin is flooded into a woman’s system with the end of 2nd stage labor. So the mother and the baby are both just swimming in the stuff. That’s why bonding is such a big deal; there’s a chemical peak of oxytocin in both their systems at the moment of vaginal delivery. Dianne Wiessinger speaks and writes extensively about this, from her background as a biologist, if you want to go look it up.
That entire mechanism is nonexistent in a cesarean.
Neither the woman nor the baby get oxytocin in a cesarean. Jostling the mother, having lights on, pretty much EVERYTHING involved in cesarean delivery stops the mammalian brain from producing oxytocin. This is why if you mess with a birthing cat, for example, she will abandon the kittens. If the oxytocin isn’t there, bonding becomes an intellectual rather than emotional/biochemical exercise. It’s also a fact that the rise in autism completely parallels the rise in surgical/medically managed births (as does violence in a culture. Michel Odent is your source for this tidbit.) So the very idea that they can force women into (profitable for them) cesareans, that mess with the oxytocin delivery, and then make those same women pay for artificial oxytocin to help heal the babies they themselves damaged…infuriating.
This hit my feed reader this AM:
http://yellodyno.typepad.com/yello_dyno_blog/2008/02/realistic-fake.html
Realistic fake photos challenge child porn prosecutors.
Each week, about 100,000 sexually explicit images of children arrive on CDs or portable disk drives at Michelle Collins’ office.
Although challenges to digital photos come in all types of criminal and civil cases, they are especially pronounced in child-pornography cases because of a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a ban on computer-generated child pornography. Defense attorneys are trying to use the ruling to introduce reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds about the images’ authenticity. And many law-enforcement officials worry that the time and money needed to withstand any challenges will only grow as technology improves and makes it more difficult to tell a computer-generated image from a real one…
Some of you work in the this arena. Please give us more insight into this issue so we can help to ensure children’s safety.
So please, if you have the talent (and the heart) to help, please contact Jan at YelloDino.
Previously, I’ve posted about Digital Natives, (here and here) mostly in terms of how unschooling is pretty much the most ideal way to approach the sticky problem of trying to be an authority to someone who can look up your sources faster than you can.
It did not occur to me, until I was sitting in a room with about 40 other corporate web content delivery professionals (a set of Kiss-of-Death adjectives if ever there were), at a recent gathering for sharing of information about using multimedia on websites, how thoroughly our assumptions are informed by the schooling we got. The point was to familiarize people with the technologies available, and give them some ideas for how to use them.
So how come, I’m sitting there wondering, less than 1/4 of the presentations actually used multimedia? See, corporate folks? Their attention is on keeping their jobs, and looking good for their management. Sort of like how kids in school want to impress the teacher. More and more, I’m convinced that they don’t actually participate in the web beyond what’s required in their daily work, the same way that schooled kids tend to do what’s required for the grade, and not much more, and certainly not much different.
For example, one presentation stressed strongly how important it is to have good solid metadata in things like videos, because there’s no text for a search engine to provide more context and/or relevancy through, so the tagging you give is pretty much all you get. People all over the room are nodding and smiling, like this is news.
Um, hello? Old news, folks. My son Rowan, who is five, understands metatagging. He knows how to start the laptop, launch a browser window, get to YouTube, and search for Tom & Jerry cartoons… in English. He also gets really upset when his searches return videos in other languages (although sometimes he thinks the Japanese ones are pretty funny…). He gets that lack of appropriate tagging is a usability problem, because that’s what it is for him. Of course, he doesn’t have the language to fully express all that the same way we do. But the fact is that as a consumer of multimedia content, his behavior and his reactions are utterly predictable, and at age five, he is already forming opinions about the technological acuity of the people who post such content.
You can remind people to tag their content, but if they are not consumers of such content, they won’t really understand, as Rowan does, how insanely frustrating it is when it all goes pearshaped.
So then, later in the day, people are talking about using new media (whatever that is) to attract “the new developer”… you know, the youth who are driving things now. And I’m nodding, cause I totally agree. And then they start talking, heaven help me, about the Universities and speaking to college students! And in my head, I can see Rowan, already cruising the web, already conversant with how to click past annoying Flash intro pages, already becoming a savvy consumer of online technology. Considering the ugly brushes we’ve already had with minor forms of academia, (here and here), the very idea of my child going to college is ridiculous, and waiting to graduate from the Ivory Towers Of Ossified Thinking to become successful is laughable in the economy of today.
Rowan knows who Duke is, he knows what Flash animation is, and he knows to look for the blessed “skip this intro” buttons. He knows what HTML is, and I’m teaching him coding, a little bit at a time. I think about him encountering his first “Hello, World” and I cringe just a little bit. Just like it’s absurd for a roomful of adults who don’t even use multimedia to stand around talking about presenting it to people who are native users of it, it’s absurd to think that someday some professor will be more competent to teach my child about the Cloud than he, who’s been breathing it for years, is.
I‘d like to really recommend that my colleagues and compatriots leave work early, go home… and watch their kids interact with the digital environment. They will learn far more from that exercise about the context of the Digital Native, and about the reality of content propagation for that audience, than they will by listening to a roomful of Digital Immigrants blather on about a sky they’ve never even really seen.
Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War by Joe Bageant. 2007, Crown Publishers. 267 pages of sheer rampaging depression upon a backdrop of a subtly pounding headache you weren’t quite sure you had, but are now mainlining excedrin to try to relieve, unsuccessfully.
How’s that for the opening of a book review?
I was ranting to Beverly, our dock neighbor, about the hell my parents are going through, learning the lumps of the American Lack-of-Medical-System while it slowly murders my stepfather, the Bear, by inches. This isn’t something I’ve blogged about a lot, mostly because a great deal of the pain involved is way too close to the vest, and a bit much to discuss out loud in public. But sometimes, like this last week, where the Bear was in two different surgeries and several different dialysis treatments and not a little bit of psychological abuse, designed, as far as I can tell, to both dehumanize him and compel obedience, I was done with holding my act together, and had started ranting to poor Beverly, who simply had the misfortune to be the first person who noticed that I looked like crap.
She handed me Bageant’s book. And walked away. So in I went, as much for a hit of bibliotic escapism as anything else. And found myself being drug backwards through my very own history and background, through the socio-ethnic matrix that explains what the hell makes Americans capable of so much atrocity, so much mindless hatred, such willful, blind ignorance.
Page after ugly yet totally honest page, I found myself nodding, connecting the dots right along with Bageant, squirming uncomfortably, thinking “yeah, I’m related to those people.” Pretty horrifying moments for someone who thinks of themselves as a humanistic liberal. Apparently, there-but-for-the-grace-go-I. As a nation, we are either super-wealthy and utterly heartless, or we are overworked, sick, and incapable of reading well enough to string two original thoughts together. I finally understand how we could possibly have elected Bush twice. I finally have a window that makes a little sense into the fundies who are so sucked into the vision of the Rapture that they’re blowing the shit out of everything.
While I was writing this, my Mom called to tell me about a mutual acquaintance of ours, who after an 18-year career as a Sheriff in a small town, is tired of getting screwed over, tired of living paycheck-to-paycheck, tired of realizing that his family is up to their neck in debt again, after already filing bankruptcy once. So he’s signed up as a consultant to a heartless megacorp I won’t even name, to go teach Iraqis how to be police officers. I suppose the fact that he’s lived in the desert all his life, surrounded by nothing but lily-whites and Indians somehow qualifies him to pass along techniques that will work in the cradle of civilization. ::shrug:: It gets him away from his family for a year at a time, makes excellent money, and buys them another lease on their debt-go-round. Somehow, this exemplifies to me every last thing that’s wrong with the whole damn system.
I guess it feels so much worse, Bageant’s writing, because I’m at a stage right now where 3/4 of everything I say to people makes them tilt their heads and change the subject. EC, babywearing, extended breastfeeding were bad enough; now there’s homeschooling, food sensitivities, and living on a boat. The cesarean epidemic, global warming, godforbid I mention the political crisis in this country. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I have enough soapboxes for eight people. And that right there is the problem. Why am I one of the few people I know who either knows about this stuff, or bothers to get in a twist about it?
Many years and two vehicles ago, I had a bumper sticker that said “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” So much has changed since I got that, about me, my politics, my worldview. And it’s only gotten worse. I have no stickers on my car any longer. Back in my Humboldt-soaked treehugger youth, I had this idea that it was just that people were unaware of the issues, and all you had to do was talk to them, and they’d be on board.
Isn’t youthful naivete adorable?
Anyway, I really recommend the book for anyone who’s still, in their heart, baffled by how America got to be the way it is now. But I recommend you pick up a stiff drink to have along with.
I haven’t had a good solid birth rant in a while. Sometimes, the Universe conspires to set me up for one, though.
Night before last, my fabulous pal Jessica invited me to a showing of The Business of Being Born, being hosted by UrbanCrunchyMama. I was really excited to be there, since other ICAN women had been seeing it, hosting screenings, and generally talking it over for a while, and I was looking forward to forming my own opinions.
More on those opinions in a bit.
We got back late, and while I was still reeling, the next day, working on this very blog post, the CDC released the preliminary statistics for cesareans in the US in 2006 (pdf).
Days like this, I wish alcohol was an option. Days like this, I wonder if the stress to the baby I’m gestating is worse than the impact of the glass of chardonnay I could hear calling to me.
31.1%, my friends. I can’t even type that without crying. 31.1% of babies in this country are ripped out of their mothers through an act of major abdominal surgery. More than one woman in three has this damned scar on her belly. And that’s an average. In some states (pdf) , it’s far higher. And you know what really sucks? Those numbers are still, even, low. In some states, cesareans for multiples (twins, triplets, etc.) are not included.
I am not even going to try to be balanced and rational about it at this point. If you want balanced and rational, stop reading.
Nothing has changed suddenly in the last 15 years about American womens’ pelvises. The only thing that has changed is malpractice insurance, and physician arrogance. Oh yeah, and women’s compliance. We just walk right in, when we find out we’re pregnant, we find an OB, and we let that person tell us what to do, because we have this blind, naive, stupid idea that they have our best interest in mind.
I just recently heard the story of a woman whose doctor told her that her baby was in distress, and not a few minutes later, overheard the nurses talking about how what was really happening was that the doctor had a new wife who demanded that he be home for dinner promptly at 6PM.
31.1 fucking percent. Women cut. Babies cut. Women and babies dying (pdf). Families disrupted. Biology disrupted. And oh, how the money rolls in to the pockets of the hospitals. I hope the shareholders are fucking happy, safely counting their earnings, drowning in blood and pain they never touch. How many Americans are enrolled in a 401(k) that includes shares in Kaiser or any of the other big “health” organizations? Go check your plan. Do it now.
So meanwhile, back to Business of Being Born…
I forget, sometimes, because I am so immersed in the politics of birth, how far I’ve come in the last five years. I was trying hard to keep my cynical mouth shut, with fairly limited success.
I found the portrayals of the births themselves to be fantastic. Women at home, moving, vocalizing, whining, complaining; doing all the things that real women really in labor do. The midwife had filmed her own birth, and she was the biggest whiner of the lot; a fact she admitted with no small degree of humor. I found myself indulging in some equally funny memories of my own homebirth, and chuckling.
It was really really nice to hear other people saying what we say in ICAN all the time, and get branded as being “bitter, hysterical, angry women” over; that American birth is dangerous, pathological, and all about the cash flow. That the lithotomy position is evil. That birth is a natural bodily function. That OBs are surgeons with no training in normal birth. That most medical professionals have never seen a normal birth. That when you start in with interventions, you are playing with mechanisms that are poorly understood, and that nothing good comes of it. A few times, I flat-out applauded.
I have to say though, that while the film is a great start, I am wildly disappointed by the end. And again, maybe that’s just because of where I am, and who I know, and how immersed I am in the whole birth thing. For those of you who haven’t seen the film, basically despite everything she’s seen in making the film, the director (Abby) opts for a classic American McPregnancy, early ultrasounds, OB care, the whole enchilada, and ends up with an emergency cesarean for a breech baby. Oh sure, there are some other complications, and I suspect that we’ll never know the whole story, nor should we necessarily have the right to. But what women are going to take away is that cesarean for breech is acceptable, and it isn’t.
Breech birth is a variation of normal. It has a few special techniques involved, that require some additional training to be able to manage correctly. But instead of simply acquiring that training, midwives who practice more in the medical model, and obstetricians, simply declare breech to be an automatic cesarean, and that’s that. I know a lot of very dedicated women (I’m talking about you, Christie!) who have dedicated themselves to fighting back the tide on this one, and Abby’s inclusion of this debacle in the film sets them all back, and hard.
One step forward, two steps back. Good news, a film about the insanity of American birth culture is getting attention. Bad news, it ends with an unnecessary cesarean. Good news, people are talking. Bad news, they’re talking about how great it is that Abby and her baby were saved. I could beat my head against the wall.
Abby was one of those 31.1 percent of women, cut in 2006. Face to the statistic. Just one out of so very many.
On a list I’m on, a woman just asked a question about using IUDs. It got me thinking, which got me writing. I thought I’d go ahead and post this.
Right after my cesarean, the very thought of getting pregnant again was so completely horrifying, I got an IUD immediately (I’d had one before I’d gotten pregnant, I was familiar with them, blah blah blah.).
And it felt… wrong. Not medically; everything was fine. But on some deep psychic level, it felt weird and wrong and uncomfortable. Someone demanded that I get a copy of Taking Charge of Your Fertility.
I sat in my bathtub and read it. And cried. And screamed. And shook my fist at the sky, that there I was, a very-educated 33-year-old woman with a newborn son, and in all my life, I’d never known that stuff. It was frankly horrifying, how much goes on with your body that a few incredibly simple observations, done regularly, will let you understand, that no medical professional ever bothers to educate you about.
It was in reading that book that I realized that what felt “wrong” about the IUD, for me, was that it was a form of the allopathic medical community waging war against my body every single stinkin’ day. It was “liberating” me from having to really listen to my body, pay attention to its rhythms, and thereby gain wisdom.
I realized that for the first time in my life, I had the knowledge of my own body to know when the sexual act was likely to result in creating a new human life, and I had the ability to share that information with my partner. And we were free to choose.
I discovered that I didn’t much like the idea that the medical community thought it was OK to stick some hunk of metal and plastic into my womb, placing it in a state of constant irritation, all so that I would be uniformly sexually available to my partner whenever he desired. Oh, and of course, freeing me from the responsibility of having a baby when I didn’t want one. Cause that’s all my responsibility, right?
I used to think birth control was a critical issue in women’s rights. I believe that even more now, but I think we were told a half-truth, and we swallowed it whole.
I love NFP/FAM. Love love love. I love knowing, for instance, that the week before I ovulate I’m generally miserable, so I leave that week clear of meetings or heavy obligations. I love knowing that morning when I’m going to get my period, and being prepared 100% of the time. I love knowing what all those weird twinges actually mean, rather than taking all this information my body is giving me, and ignoring it.
I believe that medical control is false control, an illusion of control based on good marketing spin and brainwashing, just as surely in birth control as in birth itself. I don’t choose to be saved from knowing myself any longer, any more than I choose to be “saved” from my pain in labor, and so every morning, I take my temperature, I check my cervix and fluids, and I make my little marks in my chart. I know myself. And I don’t need any medical infrastructure to tell me anything about me. I don’t need to spend money on their drugs and their contraptions, I don’t need to be dependent on a medical infrastructure to prevent, or to create, a baby.
It’s a kind of freedom I was never even aware of before, at the other end of a little purple beeping thermometer. Who knew?
I just heard a few minutes ago that Cindy Sheehan has resigned from the peace movement. This blog on Daily Kos explains why.
I don’t even know where to begin. I have watched her get attacked over and over, in increasingly ridiculous, harsh, and anatomically impossible ways, all for saying that a mother’s grief trumps a politician’s greed. Well it appears today, the bad guys have won. Cindy will no longer speak for mothers.
I am devastated by this.
I cannot imagine what it must be like to send off a living boy full of ideals about what he’s doing, and receive back a telegram telling you that your baby is gone forever. And to have the President who sent him off to die refer to you as “Mom” while your grief is still raw (does it ever get unraw? Ever? I can’t imagine that it would.) Maybe Cindy escallated, but maybe, just maybe, that man in the white house could have talked to her. Just once. Maybe he could have answered the question about what noble cause Casey died for. How hard would that have been to do? It’s not like he was constrained to tell the truth; he could have said anything. But in the end, for whatever reasons, he would not face her.
Personally, I arrived at the same conclusion Cindy did, but I did it years ago. This America is not the America I was raised to believe in. The Federalist Papers didn’t address the unchecked greed, the viciousness, the stupidity, I see around me. When my husband resisted voting because it was pointless, I encouraged him to come with me, to make it a family outing. And then George W. Bush turned that into a complete farce. Who won the election? Who knows? Not us, any more.
Where will my family end up? I have no idea, but I know it isn’t here, and I believe in my heart that while staying and trying to inspire change from within is a noble sentiment, I, like Cindy, figured out a little while back that this empire needs to topple; it cannot be fixed, not with all our might. And if this nation is going to be as violent, as vitriolic, and as hateful to the grief of a mother as it has been to Cindy, I have to ask if it’s worth being saved at all. And I find myself being very, very sad that the conclusion I come to, is “no”.
I do not think Cindy started out to be a voice of mothers, but to me, that’s what she ended up being. A mother who stood the hell up and fought the senseless death of her beloved child in a stupid war. I hope to God that I will have the same grace, the same strength, the same courage of coviction, and the same spark, that Cindy Sheehan has, should the time ever come when I am tested as harshly as she has been tested.
Thank you, Cindy Sheehan. You’ll never read these words, but I want them out there, to try to counteract, just a little, all the hate you’ve had to soak up. You have been a beacon to me, of what it can mean to be a mother of boys, and I will admire you forever.
