Browsing the "on balance" Tag

Mind

That Is Who You Are

July 24th, 2020 | by Meg Thompson

“Who knows what’s good or bad?” —-Taoist Parable ​On any given day, I vacillate between wanting to be a tenure


Adoption Stories

HOW TO MAKE A FAMILY

October 15th, 2018 | by Lakshmi Iyer

You want a baby. Babies. Your husband agrees, albeit begrudgingly. But month after month your hopes surge and fall. You



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  • “You’ve already told me that story,” he said. Switching gears, he asked, “Why isn’t my father around?” #breastfeeding #parenting #fuckit #protest #teenagers #sexualviolence “Over time, Anabelle learned to talk about her feelings. She said saw her birthmother in the sky. She drew a picture of grief moving through her body like water. When she had more language, she began to talk about her losses.” “I’m not sure why I read that poster and thought that it applied to other mothers, other people’s children. But it probably has something to do with the shock I felt two years later when a neurologist confidently diagnosed “Autism Spectrum Disorder” and I responded with at least twenty “What about…” type questions. I had described my dynamic, interesting, loving toddler to this doctor, and her response sounded dire and clinical. That poster was the same. All of it seemed so unfortunate.” “Someone hit the call button. No one came. Someone rushed to the nurses’ station; still no one came. The contractions, a creature, twisted my uterus, lancing its nails. I tried to breathe through them, but there was no space, no time.” “But when, one-by-one, natural disasters ransacked too many of the communities we visited, including my home-state of California, I began to spiral into a grief I didn’t know how to support. I came to realize that our climate crisis wasn’t off in some far-flung future. It was here. Now. I’d birthed two perfectly good humans, boys who wanted to set up lemonade stands and play soccer, but who would be tasked instead to worry about rising seas and firestorms.” “I have to say,” my doctor said. We were still in the OR. He seemed saddened. “There was a uterine rupture. A large one. I have only seen something like this four times in my career.” “This is the part where I am supposed to articulate that taking time for myself allows me to be a better a parent, which is true. But the compulsion to footnote derives from accepting the baseline that I should feel guilty at all for taking time for myself, which I do not. I’d meet my pals for dinner, go to a movie alone, or attend a weekend bachelorette trip even if it resulted in worse parenting. Parents deserve pleasures unattached to their children.”

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