Thank God it's 2008.

Last week, I realized it was one year since I had my miscarriage. I'm mostly okay now. I don't flip out every time I hear the song "Evangeline." The pipes seem to be working as they should, though of course I'm not in a position to get pregnant again.

But sometimes it still gets me. Four pregnancies, three babies. I cannot completely ignore the fact that I'm short one baby. Bobbie and I were on the bus last week, and there was a baby girl there just about the age that my baby would have been if I hadn't lost it. Bobbie said something about she wished I had a baby girl like that.

Me too.

Anyway, I was thinking about this year versus last, have been since the 9th of this almost-gone month (since that's when Rob left me). This time last year I wasn't being allowed to see my kids. I had no real hope. It was easily the blackest place in my life, and I haven't exactly had a past filled with rainbows and puppies.

Now I'm sitting here and things aren't precisely wonderful, but they're pretty damned good. I'm getting somewhere. The kids are on their way back from Dad's as I type. Rob just texted me to let me know they're on their way, in fact. Which is a huge improvement from 99% of last year, when he'd send my calls to voice mail consistently. (And no, I wasn't calling him every hour either.)

My Ethics midterm is Monday. That means I'm close to halfway through my first semester of college. I'm on my way, God willing and my brain working, to an ADN. One of these days, and not in the distant, unseeable future, I will be financially secure. Two, maybe three years, and I will be able to pay my own way in this world. (I know I'm not going to be rich, but we don't need much.)

Only a McCain win could make things better...

For some strange reason *updated*

When I'm on Blogger's Dashboard, it doesn't display my entire profile picture. It just shows my neck and the top of my cleavage.

Someone please reassure me that's not what you see on my blog's main page, 'cause if it is I'll have to change it.

*Update.* Yeah, when Murphy said all he saw was my arm, I realized it was showing up wonky for everyone, so here's a pic of the girls & I instead.

Race & The Race.

The Left seems to think that the Right is going to win the election.

Why do I say this? They're already gearing up the excuse machine. To wit: Lingering Racism May Hurt Obama and Racism and the Race. Probably others too.

I said this before Obama even announced his intent to run. If he loses, the Left will blame racism. This wasn't exactly a feat of prognostication. From the moment of his election to the US Senate, damn near, the question was asked: "Is America ready for a Black President?"

I'm not dumb enough to claim that America is racism-free. Not when it's been maybe two months since I went to the bathroom at the Park & Ride and saw something about "dirty Mexicans" scrawled on the stall door. Not when, in junior high school, I had a school employee tell me "I believe her because she's black and you're white." (Thereby allowing another child to steal my lunch for the day.) Not when my best friend and I still get funny looks when we go out to dinner together because on the surface we appear to be a mixed-race couple.

But to point the finger at ingrained racism as THE reason why Barack Obama might lose the election? Please!

I read newspapers religiously. I have a subscription to the local paper, & read USA Today whenever I get the chance. I have seen no fewer than six editorials in which the author said that either he or someone he knew planned to vote for Barack Obama because he IS Black. And that was 100% okay with the author.

So how is it that it isn't racism to DO something because of someone's race? Nevermind, I don't really care. I've heard all the justifications before, and they're bullshit. If you are going to do or not do something specifically because of the color of a person's skin, then you are racist.

I gave up on counting the number of times someone enthused about Barack Obama simply because of his "historic candidacy." Because, of course, that's a great reason to vote for someone. That's right up there with the circa 2004 "Anybody But Bush" war cry. (And see how well that one turned out?)

Know what, though? I've never heard anyone say they won't vote for Barack Obama because he's black. I've heard a few folks say they could never vote for a Muslim, which is another topic for another time, because the dude's not Muslim. (Don't give a damn if his Daddy was. Don't give a damn where he went to school. He's been a Christian at least 20 years. If you really think he's Muslim: Shut up. Your stupid's showing.)

But not vote for the dude 'cause his father's from Africa? Nope. Haven't heard that one.

You know what I have heard a lot of? "He's too inexperienced." "His tax policies suck." "He'd be too friendly with terrorist regimes." "This idiot really wants to have a sit-down with Ahmadinejad?" "Why is he hanging around with guys like Bill Ayers?" "Why won't he answer questions about ______?" "If abortion is really 'above his pay grade', he's got no business as President."

In other words, if Barack Obama doesn't get elected, it's going to be Because he's on the wrong side of the issues from the majority of the American people. Just like John Kerry. Just like Al Gore. Just like George HW Bush. Just like Mike Dukakis. Just like all those white guys, in other words. Hey, equality!

I shouldn't laugh. But I am.

One of the ladies at Mama-Drama has this in her sig:



Once I finished laughing, I figured I'd better check out PunditKitchen.com And I am so glad I did. 'Cause then I found this:



And this:




And this:



And I am now going to spend sleep time going through all n pages of that blasted site.

We're trying to help.

Lots of Hurricane Ike evacuees on the busses today, trying to make their way around to find help.

I'm not very good at planning, but I know without a doubt that if I was going to evacuate my home, one of the things I would remember to take would be clothing. Apparently, this thought escaped a lot of people. Or they expected it to be another Gustav, where they'd be bussed home within a day or two. Or they didn't have the sense to hop a bus and leave, and were pulled out of the water with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Or some of all the above, actually.

Clothes seem to be the big issue with these evacuees. The Salvation Army or Goodwill or both is/are handing out $20 (per person, minimum) clothing vouchers. Catch is, you've got to go to their job center & register. Apparently, they mean their central, big job help center. We had a fellow on the route 91 trying to get over there. Only problem with this is that, although the 91 goes by it, it goes by it. Doesn't stop anywhere near; he needed the 92.

Waiting for the bus downtown to go to Bobbie's school to pick her up, we encountered another evacuee. She had a parrot in a cage and two cats in cardboard carriers that she wasn't even sure were still alive (they were). She said she had come from Galveston and was upset that the shelter wouldn't take her. Someone told her to go to the "Air Force Base." She then said Stinson, which isn't a base but a municipal airfield, and the main place they're housing evacuees' pets. We assured her she'd been given the right bus route to take and that they'd care for her animals there. (All volunteer vet techs and veterinarians & assorted other animal lovers.) She was visibly upset, and reasonably so, but one thing she said struck me as a bit unfair. "No one in this city cares about me."

She was standing at a bus stop with five total strangers doing our best to help her.

This city is doing its best. We've still got about 3,000 people in shelters. They are being housed. They are being fed hot meals. They've been given wristbands that give them free bus rides. Via not only picked them up from the Coast, they're running shuttles from the shelters (at least the main one) downtown on a regular basis (more often than the real route I was taking, in fact). We're housing, feeding, and caring for their pets--pets which many Ike evacuees are likely to leave, as the Gustav evacuees did. Bobbie's school is collecting supplies. My church is raising money. A lot of the other churches are hosting special-medical-needs evacuees. The food bank has 900 "spontaneous volunteers" working there, including some evacuees.

We care.

Reason number somethin' why I don't support universal health care.

OK, it's not the federal government fucking things up this time, but still...

My child support was never late until the State of Texas got involved.

That is all.

Read this!

No, not this.

This:
I just finished reading this novel and its successor, Magic Burns. (Clicking on that cover takes you to "Ilonaland".)

I'm a huge fan of urban fantasy, but had passed this over because the synopsis on the back sounded boring. I checked the two novels out at the public library closest to campus last week because I had a total dearth of fiction on-hand to read and these were both there together, and something I hadn't read before.

Didn't hurt that Patricia Briggs (of the Mercy Thompson books, which you should also read) wrote a cover blurb for this book.

The setting is Atlanta in an unnamed future. Magic has come back into the world, and is fighting for supremacy with tech. There are "waves" of both magic and technology; neither works when the other is ascendant. (Save for a few random things like telephones, which work sometimes.)
Kate Daniels is a mercenary of mysterious heritage, and a mage. In Magic Bites, she is trying to solve the murder of her guardian. In Magic Burns she stumbles upon the struggles of a Celtic god to manifest--a premise handled much, much better than I can explain it--while trying to find the lost mother of a teenage girl.

You get all the goodies typical of the genre--witches and shapeshifters and vampires and whatnot. The authors (Ilona apparently is helped along by her husband) have an excellent variation on vampires which I haven't personally encountered before.

There are only two books so far, but it will help fill some of the time until the next Jim Butcher novel comes out.

'Tis a strange sort of anniversary.

A year ago today, my husband left me. Took the kids, snuck out the back door, ushered in the worst period of my life.

And you know what? At the moment, I don't care.

I'm not over it, but I'm in the process of healing.

I love that man, and in a way I always will. I would never swear off the possibility of reconciliation, but I am now at the point where I wouldn't blindly welcome him back, either. I can admit to my mistakes, but one that I am not willing to make again is letting him get away with whatever.

For my student development course I have to take at SAC, I was supposed to take the Myers-Brigg personality test again. I didn't. I know which one I am. INTJ--introverted, intuitive, thinking, & judging. It's a rare personality type, about 2% of people. The point of that, in this, is: from their relationships, INTJs expect "inexhaustible reasonability and directness." (That's a quote; I know "reasonability" isn't really a word.)

This is the type of person I am. I will speak to you the plain, unvarnished truth. I never met an ass I wanted to kiss. Tact and I have only a nodding acquaintance. I don't have the energy to flirt, or to talk circles around something. I grew up reading romance novels, and was always kind of annoyed that, when the heroine fell in love, she would never come out and say it.

I didn't do that. I fell in love, and the question was not whether to say it but when. I was always honest and upfront. And in the beginning that was welcomed.

But we did not value the same expressions of love. I have noted to my best friend, with some acerbity, that I was left, in essence, because I don't consider stuffed toys to be the ultimate expression of romantic love. I liked to get flowers, and even roses, but made the cardinal mistake of coming right out and saying that I much prefer tulips. I made no beans about the fact that, with my husband the center of my world, I expected to be the center of his as well. This is something he always had a problem with.

The clearest way I can explain that is this: When we moved to Hawaii, we had $40, because we didn't get the dislocation allowance we were supposed to. We were staying in the Navy Lodge on sufferance, and the assurance that we'd pay them. (And a hold on a maxed-out credit card.) Someone at work--mind you, this was perhaps our third day there--told Robert he found this apartment for him to rent. We went and looked at it. I said that it was nice enough and I had no objections to living there, but how on Earth were we going to pay for it? I went back to the hotel and looked up the wait lists for housing in the area. Lo and behold, two of them had available three-bedrooms. We could move in almost immediately.

We eventually did this, but not until it was made known to me that Robert was mad he'd "offended" people at work. Total strangers. Yes, I realize these were other sailors, but damn. Trying to get us to move into an apartment with no way to pay the deposit or the rent wasn't a favor.

And this was how my marriage was. I had a husband who constantly, consistently, put the opinions and needs of others above his wife's.

I wasn't okay with it. But I bore it because it was a small facet of my life with my husband.

When he left, he accused me of many things. Very few of them true. If he had said "I left you because you are mean and judgemental and frequently pessimistic," it would have been true and it would have been understandable.

Instead, he said that expecting him to put me first was abusive. No kidding. Every single adult I have spoken with, from my priest to my counselor, to the social worker CPS sent over, to random drunken gay men, have agreed that husbands and wives are supposed to put one another first, that this is the natural order of things. (His own parents taught this, that you should put your spouse first.)

Instead, he claimed that I cut him off from his friends, that from the second we got together, he was never allowed to have a life outside of me. This was the most outrageous of the accusations. In August 2004, my uncle and my niece died within 36 hours of one another. This was the week of my birthday; my niece died Wednesday or so, and I believe my birthday was a Thursday. We didn't celebrate my birthday that year. I was in no mood to. The next week, the next Friday, I played hostess to two of his friends from the Boise, who came over to play Dungeons and Dragons. (A game with which my uncle had had a mild obsession, and made me think of him and want to curl up in a little ball.)

Several times over the years I'd hunt down his friend Robert Marquez, a man he'd met on the USS Oklahoma City, and let him know where we were and what we were doing. I'd e-mail him our phone number so he could call and talk to my husband. When we moved back to San Antonio, I looked Marquez up on MySpace and updated him and sent him Rob's e-mail and phone number.

And that's really only a small part.

But I cut him off from his friends.

I do not mean this as an indictment of my husband. I mean to share a small part of the pain and bewilderment I felt then.

And this is why: Robert has always been one of the best people I've known. Honest, to a fault. Does the right thing, even when it doesn't benefit him. And then over the course of a day, he went batshit insane and tore my world apart.

And he still doesn't seem to feel guilt.

We are approaching friendship, he and I. I don't understand it, but we're friendly enough that all of the past year seems surreal, as if perhaps it wasn't quite so bad as all that, though logically I realize that it was, and in fact I've always kind of low-balled the horror online.

I was left for another woman. I am somewhat vain, but I am also honest. I'm not merely trying to make myself feel better or run her down when I say this, it is simple truth. I am smarter. I am better looking. I am a better person.

And yet, in the end it doesn't really matter. That relationship lasted longer than it should have, but it seems to finally be balls up (a fact for which I am certain her husband is grateful). The Other Woman being a certain sort, she has publicly blamed him for all her ills. He wouldn't have been happy anyway. There's a saying that a man who marries his mistress only creates a vacancy in that position. Well. A woman who marries her lover merely creates a vacancy in that position. A woman who swears undying love to three men at once probably loves none of them.

Lessons he had to learn the hard way. Take a guess as to how much sympathy I have. Lowball it. Lower. Lower. There.

So there I am. Here I am. Out the other side of hell. I still feel sorry for myself sometimes and still lick my wounds, and sometimes still wake up in the night shaking for the lack of that man.

But you play the cards you are dealt.

My Psychology teacher in high school once said, "Sure, your parents have a lot of influence over you and what you do with your life, but eventually you have to be an adult and take responsibilty for your own life.

And so it is here.

Yes, he hurt me. Damn near killed me, spiritually. I can hurt. But I can't lay here and let life happen to me.

And I am not. I am up again and beginning to slowly move forward.

Grownups are worse than adolescents.

'Tis true.

I was going to explain that I now have comment moderation turned on here because my apparent internet stalker is back, and throw out my typical quip that I'm apparently dealing with some 12-year-olds.

But it wouldn't be fair to the preteens.

There is no one nastier to grown women than--wait for it...other grown women. I had some issues here and there over the past 18 to 24 months with people leaving nasty, libelous comments on my crochet blog & occasionally here. Usually I just leave them up so the stupid can make themselves known, but this one was nastier than most, and so I took it down and turned on comment moderation this morning. I don't like doing it, but I'm so sick of dealing with the crap. I put someone on an ignore list on a message board for the first time in years. This was a person who posted something nasty in response to damn near everything I said.

I'm sick of dealing with it.

I've gotten some great, in real life, help from some mamas on the internet during a very tough time in my life. I've gotten some very helpful advice online. I've used the internet the way women typically do, to reach out and connect.

I've debated in some cases. I've disagreed rather vehemently over certain subjects. But I've always had the intelligence to drop it and move on to the next topic. I don't spend time thinking about internet "enemies", or at least not until they go over & above to be assholes to me for a long time running. I don't have the energy to lead a double life even on the internet, to be real nice to someone to their face and then attack them in private messages. I certainly have never expended the effort of creating a dummy MySpace profile to libel someone to their spouse or their friends.

But I've had to deal with all of this shit. So. Enough. I'm not going to let it run me off. But I am going to do my best to minimize how much I am forced to deal with it.

I apologize in advance to the two or three folks who comment most often on my blogs, in case you get any of the MySpace style "Sabra is EVIL and here's why" comments/e-mails.

Because it's Friday night and I'm bored...

Here are a couple of pix of the pink streaks:

Really f'ing large, I realize. Sorry. I'm just too lazy to resize them again.

I used Colour Rays from L'Oreal, which is specifically made for dark hair. It has bleach built into it, which means the pink will fade and leave me with pale highlights. (I know this from prior experience.)

The next time I do this, I will bribe my best friend to help me. He's had cosmetology training, which is like some gay rite of passage in Texas.

I wanted a much neater array of streaks than I wound up with, and wanted them all the way around, but I had so much trouble with it for some reason that I gave up with the streaks only on the sides, not all the way around back.
Only I could manage to dye apparently unnoticeable pink streaks into my hair. No one at church commented on it, which I find strange (we're a small group at CAYA, and know one another pretty well). In fact the only person thus far who has said anything about it is my ex-husband.

And he complimented me on the red I'd added to my hair.

I'm not too disappointed with the effect, though. It's my one silly-college-girl affectation.

I have home work I should be attending to, but I'm reading blogs instead. I have to pre-write a paper for Freshman Comp. It's the "remembered event", wherein I have to tell an autobiographical story which gives insight into the person I am now. Joy. I categorically refuse to delve into my recent past. 'Tis one thing to share it online, in near anonymity, another by far to discuss it face-to-face with a room full of teenagers. (Mostly. There are a couple of other grownups there besides the teacher, but not many. Maybe five of us.)

It's hard to be a two-year-old.

This post is peppered with pictures of my very own two-year-old, Esther-Rosemary Joy.

Caylee Anthony has been in the news quite a bit again these past few days. She was two-years-old when she "disappeared," and let's not kid ourselves, the girl is dead.

That's the case in national news.

There have been a few local cases of child death lately. None have caught the attention of the national press the way Caylee's case has, but a few of them are more horrific.

Eliseo Gonzales, Jr was killed by his aunt. She claims it was an accident, that she merely rolled over on him. (This is the woman who weighs approximately half a ton.) She has been charged with murder, and his mother has been charged with neglect for leaving him with this person in defiance of a Child Protective Services order. He was two.

Sariyah Garcia, age two, and her infant brother were murdered by their mother and her boyfriend (I'm not sure offhand whether he's the father of either child or not) and stuffed in a plastic bag and "hidden" under a house on the south side back in 2007. Their mother had, apparently, had other children taken from her by Child Protective Services.

Baby Grace's body was found last year in a storage container in Galveston Bay. A tiny little body, with long blonde hair.

Riley Ann Sawyers, it turned out. Beaten to death by her mother and her mother's boyfriend, allegedly for being impolite.

Another two-year-old.

It's not only two-year-olds who are being killed, of course. Researching this post brought up the story of Makala Cantu, four years old, who was killed by her mother because she wouldn't stop crying. This is another mother who had a history with CPS.

But it certainly seems to me that two is a dangerous age. Maybe I am just more sensitive to it because I have a two-year-old of my own.

I do know that Bexar County has a higher incidence of deaths from abuse or neglect than the national rate. (Almost three deaths per 1,000 here, instead of almost two deaths per 1,000 nationally, according to this article.)

I also know that our teen pregnancy rate is damn near twice the national average. In Bexar county, the rate is 39 births per 1,000; the national average is 21 per 1,000. (Source.)

Are the two connected? I don't know.

There was an article in the newspaper a couple of months ago, early June I think. An almost-two-year-old little boy was laying in bed in the hospital, beaten by his mother's boyfriend. He was on life support with little hope of recovery. He had curly blond hair, little golden ringlets. He looked so much like my youngest daughter that I had to put the newspaper down; it was too upsetting to read it, because it was like looking at my own baby in that hospital bed.

(I cannot find a citation for that article, as I don't remember any of the names involved.)

I look at my own kids when I hear these stories. I think we all do. I wonder what pushes a person to hurt a child. I know some of the risk factors. Age, substance abuse, unrealistic expectations, a history of having been abused yourself.


And yet...And yet, I do not understand it. I simply do not.

I understand post-partum depression. Been there, done that, damn glad they don't give out t-shirts.

I understand how damned frustrating and annoying toddlers can be. During the course of writing this, I had to send Esther off into her sisters' bedroom to play, because she kept throwing things on the floor and I was losing my temper.

I understand what it's like to lose your temper. I've yelled at my girls sometimes, like just about every parent has, and felt like week-old shit afterwards.

I understand how it seems sometimes that toddlers misbehave constantly. I've curtailed dinners out, shopping trips, even trips to the park for nonstop misbehavior. I have threatened to turn this car around and drive right back home. (Yesterday, in fact.)
But I do not understand following through on that anger and frustration by hurting your child.

I wonder what we can do.

There was an article in the newspaper a few months ago on the "controversial" practice of attachment parenting. Controversial.

Know what attachment parenting is? There are some who'll set out a whole list of dos and don'ts when it comes to attachment parenting. And, true, there are things AP parents tend to do. Breastfeed for a startlingly long time. Allow our babies to sleep in our beds. HOLD our babies, sometimes almost constantly.


But if you strip it all away, it all boils down to this: Attachment parenting means that you treat your children--ALL of your children--with the exact same respect that you treat any adult.

That's it. Respect. You realize that the little person standing in front of you is a person. An individual. Not a proto-person. Not a personality-to-be. But someone else.

This doesn't mean you treat your children as adults, or that you let them run the house.

It means you respect them.

And if that is controversial, it shouldn't be.

There are a variety of parenting styles out there. I'm not going to get all "my way or the highway" here.

All I'm sayin' is this: Mamas with a proper attachment to their children do not abuse them, or allow them to be abused. It's that simple. In order to systematically abuse and eventually kill another person, most of us must first detach from that person and dehumanize them.

What's the right way to go about this, to make sure parents have the right attachment? That's the question I'm struggling with now.

I know there are some things that can help. I know that holding your baby--simply learning to respond by picking your infant up when she starts to cry--makes a difference in attachment. I don't know if it's pheromones or what, but holding your baby and smelling your baby helps you realize what a wonderful thing that baby is.

I know that breastfeeding helps. I almost hesitate to go here, because it's such a taboo subject, and I don't want to seem like I'm very much on the edge. But it's true. We know the mechanisms of this one. Breastfeeding stimulates the release of oxytocin, which has been variously called things like "the trust hormone" or "the love hormone." Oxytocin's one of those feel-good hormones. It's released in breastfeeding. It's released in orgasm. It helps promote bonding. (Obligatory disclaimer: Breastfeeding, of course, is not the only way to bond with your children. Just ask the fathers of breastfed babies whether they're bonded with their kids. Duh.) There's some evidence that oxytocin acts upon the brain to promote maternal actions.

I think that education in child development would help. I'd like to see this made part of science class. (We studied it somewhat in psychology in high school.) This would help to address the issue of unrealistic expectations. Riley Ann Sawyers, after all, was killed for being impolite. I've heard of several cases of children badly beaten because of messing themselves during potty-training. Maybe knowing what a child is capable of, both physically and psychologically, would help. God knows that learning children have essentially no impulse control before age three made a huge difference in my parenting.

But beyond that? I don't know. I don't know what to do to try to help, on a practical level. And I want to help, because what's the use of recognizing a problem if you don't try to do anything about it? Saying "Damn, something needs to be done about that," and then not even trying to do anything is not an authentically conservative way of behaving. I can't just sit and wait for the government to do something, because the government isn't equipped, simply is not designed, to stop problems before they happen. But I feel like I am spinning my wheels, because I just don't know where to start.

I mentioned this at church earlier this summer, and one of the other parishioners said she knew of a charity here in San Antonio that does some of what I want to do--they assign teen mothers mentors, which I think is an excellent idea--but I don't remember the name and she hasn't been back to church since that week (or if she has, it's been at one of the services I missed), so even there I'm stuck.

I'm open to suggestion.