PregnancyFamilyEducation Blogs
March 30, 2009
Forgiveness
I am afraid of forgiveness.
I heard someone say of forgiveness, “It is like knowingly giving yourself, clean and pure, to a person who will then walk over you with mud.”
Yet Jesus is low enough to be willingly walked over with mud. [more]
- Tags: Religious Faith
March 27, 2009
The Case of Mercy Hospital and the Brown Belt
I sat in class today and I just didn’t understand.
The professor lectured, “Mercy Hospital is a large, multi-service, religious affiliated, non-profit private hospital….”
There was something about his clothes.
We were reviewing a human resource case study. “In 2007, the hospital’s total expenditures were projected to be $30,000,000 and 5% of that was devoted to nursing services….”
I understood him wearing a wrinkle-free white collared dress shirt under a twill two-button blazer. [more]
March 26, 2009
The Little Girl
The therapist asked me for my earliest memory of myself.
I remember at age four standing in the middle of our living room floor wearing an extra-large, bright yellow t-shirt. If it is true that our brains are patterned after our childhood, than I am an adult that has simply grown into a t-shirt that was once too big.
If a child never learned to swim, do we expect him as an adult to hold a mouthful of air and dive under water? [more]
- Tags: Childhood Memory, Therapy
March 24, 2009
Bloody love
I opened the email. I read. It caused a memory that nearly paralyzed me.
“AM I RIGHT OR WRONG!?”
He screamed at my mother, squeezing his hands around her throat.
Before he blackened her eye blue, before her face swelled, before she surrendered to be beaten, he demanded an answer.
She never answered.
And I couldn’t reply. [more]
- Tags: Mothers, Daughters, Childhood Memory
March 23, 2009
Trying
A young man wearing a black leather jacket, baggy blue jeans, and a tear-drop tattoo under his right eye stood next to me in line at the local Dunkin Donuts. He asked for the manager.
The manager arrived, still tense from having just kicked out a drunk, “How can I help you?”
The young man replied, “I haven’t heard from you and I wanted to check in.”
Nothing.
“Do you remember me?” he asked. “I filled out a job application.” [more]
- Tags: Working, Urban Life, Intervention
March 19, 2009
"1968"
I watched a History Channel documentary entitled, “1968.” I witnessed Dr. David Smith, in the summer of ’67, during a cultural and political rebellion, find love in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. After beating his own LSD dependency, he sought to help other users. He walked through apartments with young men and women sprawled over the arms of loveseats, or passed out on toilets, the bathroom walls their headrests, with syringes nearby. He loved them high and helped them sober with a free clinic. [more]
- Tags: 1968, Social Change, Activism
March 16, 2009
March Madness
The holiday season is three months passed. Nevertheless, the cars in Boston are decorated with bright orange florescent parking tickets.
“Ho, ho, ho!” The city of Boston is generating revenue and using my Impala as their reindeer. The city of Boston has hit me hard with fees and fines; in three days, three tickets. The city of Boston collected $340 from us.
A secret Santa? I was told the city of Boston offered 40 police cadets jobs as meter maids; instead of, because of budget cuts, the jobs of protection, safety, and enforcement for which they were trained. [more]
- Tags: Parking Tickets, Economy, Urban Life
March 15, 2009
The Oven is Hot
“If the oven is hot, don’t touch it!” I screeched at my Sunday school class. “If I’ve been burnt and have the wound to prove the oven is hot, why would you purposely touch it?” [more]
March 12, 2009
Copies of Me
It was a long day’s work. My muscles felt like those of a man making steel from sunup to sundown. And my back ached like I had lugged a ton of that steel.
I sighed. I lay down next to my husband. (He sleeps, snoring.) [more]
March 11, 2009
The Blister
Every day I take Levoxyl, a “man-made form of the hormone made by a healthy thyroid gland.” I have also been prescribed Zyrtec, to treat my allergy symptoms. After I took my pills this morning, I also did some Benadryl to relieve my itchy throat.
It took me almost five minutes to get the Benadryl capsule out of the blister. I am not sure why, but the manufacturers use push blisters with an aluminum lid web and a thermoformed web base to protect the product. On the back of the blister it says:
1) Fold
2) Pull and [more]
- Tags: Blister packs, Medicine
