Morals – lilyinaparknlot

Please allow me to set my family demographic for you. I grew up in small town rural America. My father was on social security and my mother worked full-time at the local elementary school. Our household income would have been less than $50,000. My mother did not have a high school education. My father was a high school graduate. He stated multiple times that he graduated from college, I never saw proof of that.

I was not raised going to church with my family. I instead was around 8-9 years old when I started walking the block to church every Sunday, alone. I did this for many years. I was even baptized and invited my parents to witness the event. I find it comforting that the time in my life when I learned about Jesus was out of my own curiosity and that it was such an authentic experience. At the age of 12, my father became part of an extreme white christian nationalist movement and withdrew me from school and moved us across the country briefly to live with this group. This was a frightening time for me and as a result of that, I struggled with what role my faith would play for a long period of my life. The birth of my children, motherhood and experiencing the love of children was a soul-affirming experience that restored my faith in a spiritual connection and that has carried me through so many hardships in my life.

As I have gotten older, faith is not about a building I go to or about a religion I name, it is about having faith in a community of people that I see God’s grace in – just like I was born believing to do. No one had to teach me that, to see the beauty, the spirit and God’s grace in the people in our lives, to see it in the disabled people Trump mocks, in the LGBTQ+ community that he threatens, in the immigrants that make our country diverse that he stereotypes, and in the women that build up our communities and raise our families that he assaults. Faith should never be used as a weapon to cause anyone any harm.

I was surprised by the outcome of the election because I had let myself be optimistic and I underestimated the amount of people that would grant themselves the permission to act with no regard for others under the guise of being a “follower of Christ” while voting for and now celebrating a Trump presidency. Trump is NOT representative of traditional Christian values while he spews bigotry and outcasts people made in the image of God and Christians can’t hide behind their religion to wreak havoc on people’s lives with their votes.

My childhood home would have been one of the little rural counties in Georgia that turned red for Trump. My father would have voted for Trump as they shared many things in common. He was a narcissist, a racist, and a misogynist. I would have expected it from him. What I would have had a harder time understanding as a young girl, is that my mother would have voted for Trump – out of loyalty to my father or because he told her to. She would have voted against her own interests, against my interests and I would have as a result been a child in one of the households that voted against their own interests and their children pay the price. I have a great amount of empathy for these children. I learned a tough lesson over the last couple of years. There is not an endless empathy well and you have to be more selective with who you reserve your empathy for because when you give it out too freely, it is damaging to your own mental health. If Trump is going to let RFK Jr, “go wild” on health in his administration with nothing but an English degree and experience as an environmental lawyer, it is well within my right to be conservative and withhold a little empathy where I see fit in my life.

I am educated and understand that no one factor is responsible for a second Trump presidency. However, this is not informing my decision to withhold my empathy from white women in my life, who look like me but do not empathize the way I do. I am talking about the statistics showing the amount of white women that voted for Trump and did so stating he was the Christian candidate, with their continuous posts about saving the lives of countless unborn children. It’s hard for me to put the lives of unborn children over the lives of actual humans who exist the way in which it is done by so many in this group. You hear so many times that it has to hit home, before some people can care about it enough to take it on. It hit home. Women across the country are dying as a result of not getting healthcare. This could have been your daughter, your sister, your niece, your best friend. You had the opportunity to listen to a woman when she told you that she was ready to take on the challenge. She promised to restore and protect our right to healthcare – for you, your daughters and your granddaughters and for all women that make up the fabrics of your lives, your neighbors, your best friends, your sisters, your nieces – the ones you share you lives, your secrets, you build your memories with. She had a plan and she was ready to sit down with people across party lines to protect and fight for the futures of the American people. While declaring Trump was the Christian candidate, so many in this group, didn’t want to talk about what policies of Vice President Harris they didn’t agree with or her qualifications. Instead of voting for her, an educated public servant with a resume consisting of state attorney general, senator and vice president making her uniquely qualified, instead…they went as far as to degrade her by saying she slept her way to the top and then cast their vote for a man who was found guilty of 34 felonies and sexual assault who is a blatant racist, xenophobe, misogynist who insults, dehumanizes and belittles people on a regular basis that incited an attack on our nation’s capitol and democracy itself while again describing him as the candidate with traditional Christian values. Let me speak to you like Trump, I’m going to say this, whether the white women like it or not – I hope you get everything you voted for and by that I mean…I hope that everything you voted for affects you personally in some way because this is a lesson I believe you can only learn the hard way. When this happens, I hope you take the time to reflect back and remember that you had the opportunity to help protect not only yourselves but other women and marginalized groups, but you didn’t.

I’ll be somewhere, probably still waiting for Taylor Swift to release Reputation Taylor’s Version – listening to one of her other songs like KARMA on repeat. You’re terrified to look down – cause if you dare, you’ll see the glare, of everyone you burned just to get there. It’s coming back around!

If you were to look up the world life in the dictionary you would find several definitions. My favorite is a bold definition. Merriam-Webster defines life as the sequence of physical and mental experiences that make up the existence of an individual.

With the current political climate, you are hearing a lot about “pro-life” and “pro-choice” as people tend to use a handful of reasons why they would choose to vote or not to vote for a particular candidate and this happens to be one that is on the forefront of people’s thoughts. I’ve read so many articles that I’ve been so impressed with and so many that make me cringe.

I had my first child as a child being raised by an un-medicated manic depressive father and an uneducated mother with the best of intentions who never once had one single conversation with me regarding sexual education. I was barely 16 years old when I gave birth to my first child. I never considered getting an abortion. Not because of a belief that it was right or wrong but because it was never an option that was discussed.

I gave birth to a 7 pound, 5 ounce baby boy with a head full of curly hair and the sweetest little round face. The curls attracted people from all over the hospital. There would be knocks at the door of my hospital room, asking could they see the little baby with the curls.

Little did we know that those curls were a trademark sign of a terminal neurological disease that would affect so many of the physical and mental experiences that would make up his existence.

Like so many parents, we would watch him say his first words, sit up, take his first steps, and play with his friends. We would beam with pride as we listened to him in preschool telling us all about his ABC’s, “T is for tasting tater tots.”

Unlike so many parents, we’ve also watched him lose the ability to express himself in a manner where he can be understood. I can count on my fingers how many people can understand him enough to carry on an intelligent conversation. We took him to physical and occupational therapy appointments year after year, trying to hold on to every minute of independence he could. We watched as he took his last steps. We sat in a waiting room as a doctor performed a surgery to insert a feeding tube because it became unsafe for him to eat without the risk of choking to death. We sat with a surgeon after he performed a 10 hour surgery to repair his spine because it was affecting his ability to breathe, a surgery that he was not sure he would survive. We’ve sat by his bedside as his little body fought to survive, a tube in every place possible. We’ve watched a helicopter take off with him from one hospital to another and drove hours to be by his side, time and time again. We’ve seen him come out of seizures where he begs not to die and come out of some where he doesn’t understand why his legs don’t work. We’ve listened to a doctor ask us if we were sure we wanted a feeding tube because that was “extraordinary measures.” We’ve heard a doctor say, “if he makes it through the next few hours” on more than one occasion. We’ve heard “there is no cure, there is no treatment, take your son home and enjoy what time you have left.” We’ve grieved with the parents of other children who have had this disease who have buried their children because of a complication of this horrific disease.

Our son can no longer walk. He can barely drive his wheelchair due to the contractures of his hands and his eyesight. Our son hasn’t ate anything in years. He barely drinks enough in a day to wet his mouth. He is fed by a tube. We hook him up three times a day, everyday. He can no longer urinate. We catheterize him four times a day, everyday. He wears diapers, all day…everyday. He sleeps with a machine that has a backup breath rate with a monitor that beeps if he doesn’t breathe enough. Every night. He barely has the use of his hands. He can’t pick up anything for himself or do anything for himself. He can’t shower himself or dress himself or even brush his own teeth. He can’t even sit in his wheelchair without a strap across his chest because he doesn’t have the strength to sit up anymore. He is totally dependent on us for everything. There is not one single thing he can do independently. This will continue to get worse with time.

The sequence of mental and physical experiences….

The most heartbreaking of all to watch was the loss of friends, one by one. He’s one of the most social people I’ve ever met and he doesn’t have a single friend outside of his family. I can’t tell you the last time anyone came over to spend time him without being asked to. He doesn’t get invited to go places. He goes to school and even in a special needs class is still the only child in a wheelchair and is not able to participate in several activities. Do not get me wrong, we have a handful of supportive people in our life and we have been blessed several times by people we met that had no reason to care but did.

Our son just turned 18 years old. He’s been called an inspiration. He gets up every morning with a smile on his face, ready to start the day despite the fact that his disease has ravished his body. I think because he carries himself so well people have this idealistic impression of what his life is. Our family are positive people and we just take one day at a time. We follow our son’s lead.

However when the day is over and the house is quiet I think about his life and all of the mental and physical experiences that have made it what it is. The truth is he has never been in love. He will never go on a first date. He will never get married and have a family. He will never drive a car. He will never have a career. He will never have independence ever again. As his parents, we are done with the good “firsts.” We have a lot of loss still to come. Just when you think there isn’t anything left to take, the disease surprises you and takes more. We know that there will come a time when his disease will take everything from him but his mind and he will be trapped inside a failed body with what I assume will be both a fear of living and a fear of dying at the same time.

We consider ourselves one of the lucky families because our son has been great cognitively even when physically it was more than challenging. We know that there are diseases much worse than what our son has. I have a friend whose son was diagnosed with Asperger’s and she told me one time that she hated “venting” to me because she couldn’t imagine what it must be like to think you have a healthy child and watch them develop and do all the things that children do and then have to watch it all be taken away. Our neurologist that diagnosed our son told us that this wasn’t like a child getting diagnosed with cancer. This was a long road. There would be no casseroles. There would be no celebrating the last day of chemo. There would be very few small victories. I remember thinking what an awful thing for him to say, to compare one illness to another. I understand what he meant now. He was trying to explain that people almost just get used to your normal and it’s hard for them to see the daily struggle.

This is just our experience raising a child that had there been a genetic test for in the womb, a physician might have suggested a termination of the pregnancy. Let me be clear in the fact that I am pro-life and I am also pro-choice. I believe a woman has the right to make decisions about her own body.

So ask yourself, are you pro-life or are you pro-birth? Women consider abortion for all sorts of reasons. What are you doing to enrich the lives of the children who are born to the struggling single mom? Are you constantly putting down the government programs that provide aide to these families? What are you doing to help the family of the disabled child down the street? How are you helping the child at school that’s struggling to stay awake and is hungry because they are living in poverty? Are you teaching your healthy children to be kind and generous? Are you teaching them to be considerate and grateful? Are you teaching them to be a friend to those who don’t have one?

I wish people were as dedicated to enriching the sequence of mental and physical experiences as they are to making sure the life is sustained.

Category: Morals

I can only assume I am experiencing the political anger that once fueled the Dixie Chicks…

Are you really Pro-Life or are you just Pro-Birth?