Naturally Reducing The Population

At the end of Real Time with Bill Maher for April 12, 2019, his rant is about population pressures in general and the over population compared to available resources which often drives migration. Maher noted that 18 to 35 year olds are having less sex than previous cohorts. That is a good thing. He advised masturbate don’t procreate.

He noted that more young people remain in their parental homes longer now. That is not a bad thing either. I have no expectation regarding my sons leaving our home. As I approached my senior year in high school, I simply knew my parents expected me to leave and had I not married a month before I graduated, I already had plans to share an apartment with a friend.

When I was in high school, my concern was not getting pregnant out of wedlock and I will admit that I simply got lucky. Having learned my adoptee parents’ origins stories and realizing my mother was pregnant with me out of wedlock and yet she was not sent off to a home to have and give me up, I got lucky then as well.

Another factor in young people having less physical sex may be the easy availability of pornography on the internet which I have read is more stimulating than the real thing and thus the real thing can prove disappointing.

Whatever the reasons, the current population uses 1.7 times more, almost twice the available resources that the planet has to sustain us long term. I don’t recommend wantonly killing off large segments of the population (though some elites and political types seem to favor such a solution) but if a lower birth rate could produce less stress upon the planet, I do believe that would be a good thing.

One final thought – many adoptees wish their original mothers had aborted them instead of giving them up. There is that much trauma associated with the practice. Considering that the planet is already overpopulated and some of those lives that the pro-life folks have preserved wish they had not been, maybe we all should drop arguments against the availability of safe and medically appropriate abortions. Just saying . . . one should think about it more deeply.

International Women’s Day

Mothers are essential to the continuation of the species on this planet. Yes, men are important in that equation too. Yet, at this time, it is a woman who carries the baby inside her womb (extraordinary stories not withstanding).

So on this International Women’s Day, I want to honor all of the mothers who carried a child in their womb and give a big hug of understanding to those who found them separated from the most precious of their life’s creations.

It may be that to many people motherhood doesn’t feel like it is making much of a contribution to civilization because it is – well – all so common. We were all born of a woman, who was the mother of our physical body.

Mothers change diapers, kiss away boo-boos, will often drop whatever is their primary interest at the moment, to attend to whatever their child believes they need. The child always believes their need is more important than ours and maybe they have a point because children tend to grow up VERY FAST.

Being a mother is something that any other mother can understand, even if her life is very different from our own. There are a million minor things that being a mother demands of us and mostly they seem unremarkable on the surface of things. But they are crucial.

So here’s to you – whether you are a mother or not. As a woman, you had a mother and a grandmother. Today, women have a choice about whether to carry a child in their womb – or not. I think it is best that EVERY CHILD be wanted and that every child is able to be cared for by that woman who carried the child in her womb.

We’re not there yet but maybe someday soon . . .

What Is Lost

I think about it sometimes. I read in the book Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman that one of the things a daughter misses out on when a mother dies while she is yet young is a lot of little things that are transferred in person.

In this case, it is a smidgen of milk added to an egg to help the white break up as it is stirred for a scrambled egg. My youngest son wants to eat one almost every day at the moment and I don’t cook it the same way my mom did, we use a microwave. And it is a bit complex to get it just right – several little cookings and stirrings until it is no longer wet.

My mom made certain we knew how to do all kinds of wifely things because I grew up in a era when the differences between little boys and little girls were clearly drawn, though feminism was beginning to soften the lines. Though we were a family of all girls and there were no boys, causing me to become somewhat of a tomboy growing up close to my dad.

Mothers could, and probably should, teach their sons some of the things that my mom taught us. There is no guarantee there will be a compliant servant wife to do them for my sons. At the same time, childhood is so brief. I understand that so clearly now. My mom’s mother didn’t teach her much in the way of wifely things. She said she was quite ignorant about how to do even the simplest thing at first but she muddled through and became quite proficient.

The world is changing so quickly. Who knows what life will be like when my sons become independent ? Somehow, I just believe, they will figure out what they need to figure out for themselves. We all do.

Children Playing

As with your shadow I with these did play

~ Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

I was thinking about what to write today as I read the words above. And it came to my mind, my childhood.

I thought about how my grandparents were 100% my grandparents when I was a child. In reality they were not my original grandparents. But as a child I didn’t know any difference.

To their credit, they did treat us as though we were, even though they knew the secret that we were not. I do not know in what ways they didn’t wholeheartedly feel that we were theirs. They were my grandparents because of adoption – both of my parents having been adopted in the first year of their life.

I think about how we simply accepted them as what they were called – Granny and Granddaddy and Grandmother. We played as children at their feet and minded them with all the same authority. We could not know how it might have been different because it was not.

Love Created My Family

Though adoption and other custody related separations tore my family apart, I know that each of us was conceived in an act of love between a man and a woman.

Today is Valentine’s Day and this day I celebrate that LOVE created each of us. I was born a Hart – I was once told by a psychic I chose to be born in that family as a constant reminder to myself.

When my husband and I chose to conceive our sons at an advanced age, we also cared about genealogy and so gave both of our sons the Hart name as the middle name.

Though becoming parents was a bit unconventional for us, I don’t regret our doing so. Our sons may not have us for as many years as my husband and myself had our parents but they get all the love we have to give each and every day. Every child should be loved. In our family, even the children who couldn’t be raised within the family they were born of, were loved even so.

I have heard from my newly discovered cousins that my parents who were taken away by adoption, were yet remembered and yearned for in their original families. I believe that is because they were first conceived in love.

The Ties That Bind

This movie never fails to bring me to the verge of happy tears at the ending as the family is reunited by the music they all share, though differently.

We own the dvd but I had not seen it in some time, certainly not since I began to discover my family origins. The child knows that he has parents out there and remains convinced the music will help him find them and it does in a very beautiful way.

I also finished reading Dani Shapiro’s – Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love yesterday. She discovers thanks to inexpensive DNA testing that the father that raised her was not her biological father. Turns out she was donor conceived.

When she discovers her biological father all of the unanswered questions of her life are explained in their similarities.

There are many variations of children who are separated in one way or another from their genetic roots. We cannot dismiss the validity of those ties because they do bind the person.