Category Archives: Female Topics

On Mother’s Day – to mothers who have lost a child.

Posted by Wendy on May 14, 2012 4 comments

Erma Bombeck wrote this column on Mother’s Day 1995, just a year before her death. It is a beautiful piece dedicated to those women who will never get an answer to the only question they have…

If you’re looking for an answer this Mother’s Day on why God reclaimed your child, I don’t know. I only know that thousands of mothers out there today desperately need an answer as to why they were permitted to go through the elation of carrying a child and then to lose it to miscarriage, accident, violence, disease or drugs.

Motherhood isn’t just a series of contractions, it’s a state of mind. From the moment we know life is inside us, we feel a responsibility to protect and defend that human being. It’s a promise we can’t keep.

We beat ourselves to death over that pledge. “If I hadn’t worked through the eighth month.” “If I had taken him to the doctor when he had a fever.” “If I hadn’t let him use the car that night.” “If I hadn’t been so naive, I’d have noticed he was on drugs.” The longer I live, the more convinced I become that surviving changes us. After the bitterness, the anger, the guilt and the despair are tempered by time, we look at life differently.

While I was writing my book ‘I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise’, I talked with mothers who had lost a child to cancer. Every single one said death gave their lives new meaning and purpose. And who do you think prepared them for the rough, lonely road they had to travel? Their dying child. They pointed their mothers toward the future and told them to keep going. The children had already accepted what their mothers were fighting to reject.

The children in that bombed-out nursery in Oklahoma City have touched more lives than they will ever know. Workers who had probably given their kids a mechanical pat on the head without thinking that morning are making calls home during the day to their children to say “I love you.”

This may seem like a strange Mother’s Day column on a day when joy and life abound for the millions of mothers throughout the country.But it’s also a day of appreciation and respect. I can think of no mothers who deserve it more than those who had to give a child back.

In the face of adversity, we are not permitted to ask, “Why me?”….You can ask, but you wont get an answer. Maybe you are the instrument who is left behind to perpetuate the life that was lost and appreciate the time you had with it.

The late Gilda Radner summed it up well: “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned the hard way that some poems don’t rhyme and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what is going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.”

 

Copyright © 2007-2012 Cultured Views. All rights reserved.

Stacey Solomon lectured about smoking by smoker Holly Willoughby…?

Posted by Wendy on March 7, 2012 1 comment

There is one way to be treated worse than a serial killer or paedophile these days and that is to be a smoker – even worse is to be a pregnant smoker – and worst of all is if you are a pregnant celebrity mum who smokes. The almost public ‘lynching’ of young celebrity mum, Stacey Solomon, since she was snapped having a secret smoke whilst 7 months pregnant, reminds us just how our society has grabbed the mantle of being arbiters of everyone else’s behaviour.

Stacey was interrogated, no less, for her dreadful sin on ITV’s This Morning recently by Phil Schofield and Holly Willoughby. The young expectant mum was sat there on live television and made to answer for her actions. I have a problem with why an adult woman, who was doing something privately and something that is LEGAL, has to be treated as though she actually has to apologise to the world for something that is nobody else’s business. The sanctimonious, self-important and extremely irritating Holly Willoughby is no stranger to a fag herself and yet she lectured this young woman like some preacher in a pulpit. Ms Willoughby has two children and is a smoker – but is qualified to imply to another mum that she is abusing her unborn baby…?

Holly Willoughby having a drag: Official Hypocrite.

That’s the problem with these ‘anti’s'…they mind everyone else’s business but their own – they know what is better for YOU than for THEM – they offer unsolicited advice, highlight YOUR weaknesses while hiding their own and they do it all from a lofty perch. While we all know that smoking during pregnancy is not a great thing to do, we also know that many mums DO smoke while expecting and that most of them go on to have healthy babies. Despite what the anti’s claim to the contrary. And no, their babies are not ‘among the lucky ones’ – I do not know any mum who smoked during pregnancy whose baby ended up on a drip in IC after the birth, I do know, however, non-smoking mums whose babies were born prematurely and sick due to  more common problems. People are not vaccinating their children these days, people are abusing their children in their homes, I see children riding unrestrained in cars out on the roads…go and vilify them for pete’s sake!

Stacey; you look after your own life, do as you please and tell all those sanctimonious busy-bodies to sod off!

Copyright © 2007-2012 Cultured Views. All rights reserved.

Raising baby without the gadgetry.

Posted by Wendy on December 5, 2011 1 comment

Our neighbours have just welcomed their first baby into the world, a little girl, and seem to be all prepared for anything that comes their way – well-meaning relatives have given them lots of new fangled stuff that just wasn’t really around when I had my first baby 25 years ago. Even seven years ago, when I had my last baby I never went in for nursery-technology.

The neighbours have bottle-warmers, bottle-sterilisers and a video baby monitor in the room which I am guessing will make them paranoid more than anything.  My cousin some years back bought one of those baby-walkie-talkie things that sit beside the cot as the baby slept and she found herself unable to relax downstairs as she sat and listened for every tiny squeak and sound. I am sure the new parents up the road will work out for themselves that if baby wants to make herself heard she will…monitor or no monitor!

Copyright © 2007-2012 Cultured Views. All rights reserved.