I need to go work in the yard (the sun is out and drying the grass; this being Washington, you know that won’t last) but I need to post links to two stories.
It starts this way. This story about giving birth in Thailand is beautiful. The writer is honest and candid. And she has a beautiful baby. The author, Rachel Snyder, says that her her baby saved her life. I think that she saved her life twice, but that is just me. Here’s a taste:
After my water broke, the first person I thought of was my prenatal teacher and her labor chart (Stage 1, the smiley face; Stage 2, stoic; Stage 3, frowny face; Stage 4, unexploded ordnance).
…
But by 9 p.m., my jokes ceased. Stage 2: stoic. By 11 p.m., I was a definitive Stage 3 frowny and quickly approaching unexploded ordnance. (Or so I thought. In fact, I was only 1 centimeter dilated, with another 9 to go.) I’d been in labor for 21 hours by the time it occurred to me that the greatest gift I could give the women of my prenatal classes would be to rip up the damn stages-of-labor chart.
And then sometimes things don’t go the way you expect. This story ripped me up.
At first, 9-year-old Brehanna didn’t seem to understand.
Her family was being evicted from their home in Tualatin, a Portland suburb. Her father, Joe Ledesma, a homebuilder for 20 years, was without a job and couldn’t find another. He couldn’t pay the $800 rent on the three-bedroom house where he, his wife Heidi and daughter lived.
And he couldn’t get through to Brehanna as they packed the family’s navy blue 1986 Pontiac Firebird that she would not be able to bring her bed. She would not be able to bring every toy or trinket, or that checkered desk she had spent hours painting and sanding, either.
If I ever hear some banker talking about ‘moral hazard’ of not forcing people to repay loans, I’ll punch his lights out.
But she has lost some of her innocence. She understands her circumstances, and she can speak frankly in her soft voice about how her family gets by.
“We are having a hard time paying rent,” she tells her reading teacher Mary Weller. She yawned and coughed, battling the second cold she has caught in less than a month at the shelter.
“But if you want to pay rent and you need to get money you can donate blood,” she says. “My dad does that.”But she has lost some of her innocence. She understands her circumstances, and she can speak frankly in her soft voice about how her family gets by.
“We are having a hard time paying rent,” she tells her reading teacher Mary Weller. She yawned and coughed, battling the second cold she has caught in less than a month at the shelter.
“But if you want to pay rent and you need to get money you can donate blood,” she says. “My dad does that.”
Welcome to the world that Bush and the Republicans made.