Foundation Beyond Belief Oklahoma Tornado Crisis Response Campaign

The Foundation Beyond Belief is currently aiding in the effort to raise funds for disaster response in Oklahoma City and the surrounding area. From Executive Director Dale McGowan:

Our hearts go out to all the Oklahomans affected by the devastating tornado in Moore. Due to overwhelming feedback from the atheist community in support of taking action, we have worked around the clock to research and select two beneficiaries: Operation USA and the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma. As the nature of immediate needs continues to evolve, we may add additional beneficiaries. Please spread the word and help those in need by donating today.

FBB is a 501(c)3 organization and your gift is tax deductible. Donations will be sent to the selected charities on a continual basis. If you like the work they do, also consider becoming a regularly contributing member. I have, and I am proud of where my money is going. I know how hard they work to ensure that donations are sent to reputable, effective charities with secular, evidence-based programming.

Preeclampsia Foundation Study Enrolling Now!

From their Facebook page: A University of Vermont study on preeclampsia, a disease of pregnancy associated with high blood pressure and protein in the urine in pregnant women, is recruiting healthy women who wish to conceive. The study will look at how differences in body function can contribute to the development of preeclampsia. Eligible women must be 18-42, and plan to conceive in the next year. They can either have never had a child before, or have had preeclampsia in the past, have Type 1 diabetes or have a personal or family history of hypertension or preeclampsia. Ovulation detection kits provided to aid timing of conception. Financial compensation of up to $375. Information: 802-656-0309 or email carole.mcbride@med.uvm.edu. If you are planning to conceive soon, contact them and participate!

Haters Gonna Hate

Don't believe everything you read on the internet.

It's Not About You

Infertility; loss; hell, breakups. They're all dreadful. As anyone can tell you, sometimes the nastiest part is when you think everything is fine and life decides to remind you of what you haven't thought about in a week, a month, a year.

The little girl and her daddy out to brunch on what is obviously an auspicious occasion. The picture your friend posts of a most memorable interaction with her growing baby. Yet another pregnancy announcement. The pretty wedding photos of people who are much happier and much more in love than you ever were.

Whatever your first feeling is, that is both normal and absolutely okay. It hurts to be reminded of what is absent. But don't dwell and don't perseverate on why did she post this when she knows what you're dealing with.

Take a breath.

It's not about you.

You are entitled to your feelings, and to sharing your pain. You are not entitled to dictate the joy others are permitted to experience or express.

Now, if he's really a jerk and refuses to listen when you need to talk, or she hasn't spoken to you since she got pregnant because you're too depressing, then respect yourself enough to find better friends. But if she listens and cries with you in your space, give her the same charity and leave her to celebrate in her space. Sometimes you can't join in that, and you don't have to.

But, when it feels like the world is rubbing it in in the worst way...

Take a breath.

Say it out loud if you need to.

It's not about you.

I'll be saying it, too.

I am too busy for you. ;)

I finally found a job. In fact, I'm so expeditious, I started two jobs. I also went back to derby practice for the first time since my injury. Needless to say I'm very busy and trying to figure out how to juggle everything. But I am enjoying myself, which is a nice change. I am excellent at what I'm doing and I'm doing meaningful work. I will most certainly find time to post soon. But I wanted to let you know why I've been quiet of late.

Growing up grieving

Today is the 20th anniversary of my father's death. [breathes] In the last 20 years I've learned a lot about grief. Grief is a living, breathing organism; one that changes through circumstance and individual and through how our lives transform us. The grief I feel now is not the grief I felt 20 years ago. The loss I live with is not the loss I experienced on that day. I have learned what it is like to not have the childhood people imagine everyone has. Losing a parent. People think of it in terms of the relationship lost. But the loss reaches far beyond that. Livelihood, social interactions, trajectory, even personal ideology and identity can be fundamentally changed. I can only begin to imagine who I would be and what I could have done if my father had lived. It isn't a very productive exercise, but it is interesting to think about. The simple difference of not moving to Florida would change everything. Not all of these changes would be for the better. I had a lot of trouble in school between behavior issues and other things and this had already begun before my father became ill. If we had stayed where we were, I may have been subject to increasing stigma in school and a progression of my reactionary behavior. I experienced some of this after the move, but I don't know how much worse it could have been. Would I have been more influenced by my father's western conservative values? How would I have benefited from more years of the confidence and strength my mother had before his death? How much would my sense of the struggles others endure have suffered from just a bit less exposure to hardship? Children have no idea that their parents are people and only gradually discover this. I have learned what it is to discover that your parent was a person... a person you can never know. I have written about this before. The sharpness does not abate. I have learned how and when isolation and shutting down works and how and when to force yourself to go through the motions. This makes the years easier, and gives me a chance to make my loss useful. Obviously, my father died in the middle of the holiday season. Some years, this meant we didn't have a holiday. But now, as I told a friend of mine who is experiencing her first holiday without her brother, it means my holiday is different. A lot different. It's still absolutely impossible. When the radios switch over; when the decorations go up; when the stupid grocery stores pull out all that cinnamon flavored garbage. I can't walk around in public without being at the very brink. I am constantly in pieces. But when I have tried to ignore it, it makes it worse. It is so painful and so isolating. The whole world is going on. The whole world is sparkly. I'm not. So, I make me sparkly, and then at least I'm not alone. No one gets it. No one wants to hear it. No one cares. No one even looks. But going through the motions helps. It doesn't fix it, but it helps. I have learned what it means to leave faith and, in many ways, when I did, I lost my father all over again. I have learned that grief builds on grief and not having my father to share new pain with compounds the pain and weaves them together. The loss of my grandfather was greater because of the role he had taken in my father's vacancy. The loss of my pregnancy was greater because my father will never tell me it will be okay. I have learned that joy is never without pain and each milestone, each event, each accomplishment is tinged by the empty seat. I have learned, most of all, the long game, and that grief, in a way, becomes a new person in your life. There is a relationship and a person lost, but the role doesn't disappear. That role simply becomes a persistent empty space.

Guest Post: Pro-choice means so much more

This post was written by a friend of mine with a long and challenging history. She had a beautiful and precocious little girl about a year ago. She is not the only friend I have in similar circumstances, and I am proud to be learning from them. As a pro-choice woman, I fight for access to safe and affordable abortion and contraception so that women can choose not to become mothers. But pro-choice is so much more than choosing not to become a mother. Pro-choice means fighting to ensure that women are free to choose to become mothers without also becoming impoverished. It means ensuring that women who choose to carry a pregnancy to term are not exposed to abuse from those who project their own moral failings on others. It means fighting to protect women who have been raped or are trapped in abusive relationships from the whims of the "father" whether that is in choosing abortion, choosing to adopt out, obtaining child support, or even just living safely. It means fighting to affordable child care and housing and job training. It means fighting for nutrition assistance and cash assistance because just raising a family is valuable labor. So, that's enough from me. I'll let her speak for herself now. The moment I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, I was a bag of mixed emotions. I was thrilled, and wanted my baby so bad after having a miscarriage 7 months prior. I was also terrified, the timing was horrific and I knew there was no way I could provide for my child what I wanted to. This tends to be the case with most unplanned pregnancies. I was on birth control when I got pregnant, I wasn't planning on having a child anytime soon at that time in my life. I was torn. I then faced the first hurdle every woman with an unplanned pregnancy faces: should I abort? For me, I couldn't choose to abort. I had just lost a baby, there was an emotional need to see this pregnancy through. I had a rough pregnancy with my daughter, and because of medical complications there was doubt that I would get past the first trimester without a miscarriage. I made the conscious choice that I was going to see what happened, and if I lost another child so be it, and if the baby survived I would make take the next step from there. That was my choice, and I took comfort in that if I had decided otherwise I would at least have that right to decide in my state without punishment, and I would have access to a sterile and professional abortion if I had chosen that route. Amazingly my daughter did survive the first trimester, but because of complications I was still at risk to lose her. Regardless, I had to face the next hurdle: should I keep the child after it's born? There were bad circumstances when I found out I was pregnant, the father and I had just split up a week prior. I had just left my job, I had no vehicle. The father was only interested in getting drunk every night, and I had no family support that could take me in at the time. Adoption immediately came to mind, but could I do that? It was a really hard choice that I went back and forth with quite a bit and my thoughts on it changed throughout the pregnancy many times. I had decided initially that I would just try to raise the child by myself and if I couldn't do it or felt I couldn't give her the life she deserved I would give her up for adoption. In my opinion that was the right thing to do. There were two times during my pregnancy that the issue of finances, and not having anyone around in a physical manner to help me, made me think there was no way I could even try to raise my child. Those two times I felt that maybe adoption was the only thing I could do for my baby. This is when I learned with horror that my state has no idea what they are doing as far as birth mother's rights. I had started looking at child support laws, adoption laws, what rights I had, and what rights the father had. I discovered a GIANT fatal flaw in my idea of how to handle this pregnancy from the start. You could not give your child up for adoption without the consent of the father. I was shattered because now my daughter's life was at the mercy of an irresponsible person who is looking only to hurt me for his own emotional gain. An even bigger flaw, he already knew I was pregnant, and in my state so long as he verbally stated he was a the father there was nothing I could do to revoke his rights. When I confronted my daughter's father about adoption he refused to take any part in the idea. He also refused to take any responsibility for our daughter in the same breath. He was not willing to raise her on his own, and he was not willing to help out with buying anything that I needed to raise her myself. His mother was supposed to put together a baby shower for me, but I knew early on that her downward spiral into alcoholism was going to put a kink in those plans. I remember being in my last trimester begging the father to please either consider adoption or commit to helping out with this child. I remember feeling sick to my stomach knowing that somehow my choosing not to have an abortion was becoming a trap for myself to become a welfare mom if he didn't get his act together. I never did get my baby shower, and with the help of a few precious friends I was able to bring my daughter home, when she was born 3 weeks early, and have enough supplies to provide for her. But it was only right after bringing her home that my roommate at the time decided to drop the bomb that she was not going to stick around for the end of the lease, she was going to be leaving in two weeks, with 80% of our kitchen. This is where programs like food stamps and WIC saved my ass. Because you know there are actually people out there that legitimately need the help, we aren't all a bunch of sorry slobs trying to get a free ride. Some of us genuinely get screwed over in life, and programs like food stamps and medical assistance are meant for people in those situations. Since I didn't have a vehicle, I started taking my daughter with me on the bus when she was 4 weeks old. We traveled like this every day, for everything. Sometimes it would be an 8 hour trip just to go to the doctors office because of how inconveniently laid out the bus system is here. I would sit and listen to the other passengers talk, a lot of them in similar situations as me. I started to see more and more how a corrupt system had made for a perfect breeding ground of single mothers forced to survive on the system. Try to get ahead, and pay the price causing you to end up back at square one. Women who like me had no local support system, thought they could try to raise their child, only to be slammed with a harsh dose of reality. I had originally set a goal to get a job as soon as possible after the birth of my daughter, but even today when she is a year and a half old I'm still on the waiting list for daycare vouchers. In order to work right now, I would end up essentially PAYING to work because the wages wouldn't even cover my child care costs much less the transportation to and from work. I'm limited to where I can apply because it needs to be on the bus route. When my daughter was around 10 months old I finally obtained sole legal and physical custody of her. This finally set a turning point for me and opened a few new doors. My daughter's father finally got the message and started pitching in more. But until this point he had me completely under his thumb. Before gaining legal custody of our daughter I had tried to get child support established. But the DSS office closed my case almost as soon as I opened it because the father stayed at my house so much. I even called them after they closed the case and asked them how would a woman who is trying to get away from an abusive spouse ever succeed with the way their system was set up? They didn't even put us in separate rooms when they asked how often he stayed at my house. If I had been being beaten I surely would have never had the chance to even say a word to help my case in order to get child support to afford getting away. In my case I went over their heads and went straight to court where they had to enforce the court order for child support. But what about the women who are being abused? How do they get help? Now I am raising my daughter with her father, and we are constantly in a borderline emotionally abusive relationship and only recently are we not completely struggling to get by financially. We are on and off again, and many times I find myself trying to work things out with him simply because I have no other choice but to try to make the best of what I have. Or because I just can't afford any other way of doing things and provide for my child. Even recently, I have many times thought that even though I love my daughter more than anything, this isn't the life I would have chosen for her. I wouldn't have chosen to put her in a family with parents that are in such a damaged relationship, who are so poor, and so off track. I can't help but think about all the women out there who decide to not to abort and find themselves in similar situations, completely unaware that there are laws designed specifically to keep them at home, raising children they can't afford, and on the system. If they have abusive spouses they are even worse off. I can't help but think that there must be countless abortions that happen simply because the women can't give their child up for adoption without the consent of the father, and they don't want to be in my shoes with their lives dictated by how much a man they don't trust is willing to help them. I think of how many welfare moms must be out there that are on the system purely because of the way the system is set up in the first place and not because they ever intended on having to utilize those programs in the first place. You see there are a lot of women just like me, who are just plain stuck. We aren't monsters, we aren't bottom feeders. We are people who were put into tough situations and tried to make the best choices possible. But because of the laws out there working against women, we are forced into a type of single parenting that nobody should have to face.