I really don't have time to blog, but I'll do it anyway because it's just not good journalism to leave your readers waiting. Blogging is hard to do. It requires a good deal of creativity to make the day in the life of an average person sound interesting. It takes a far greater amount of creative energy to come up with ways of making such a standard existance sound extraordinary and worth reading about on a regular basis. I don't envy my favorite Glamour bloggers who are required to write daily, but I guess if I was getting paid to blog, I wouldn't mind so much.
It would be untrue to say that I haven't had a rather unusual day today. It has been such an unusual day that it doesn't take much creativity to make what I am about to say about my day interesting. It has been raining off and on for the last few days and today the rain would have fit its heavy mood.
A slight burden rested on my shoulders when my day began at 6:30 this morning. I was getting ready to pick up my friend to drive her to a women's clinic to get an abortion. As I drove to pick her up I thought about the questions I had to ask in an interview I was conducting with a breast cancer survivor in the afternoon... yes, the mood of the day was heavy indeed.
Sadly, it wasn't the first friend I have known to have an abortion and it wasn't the first time I have helped a friend out who was getting one, but as I write this I sincerely hope it is the last time I will have to deal with either.
The waiting room at the clinic was clean and comfortable; my friend later reported the staff was very kind and caring, but there were several girls in the waiting room with us and a whole different group of girls waiting when I came back later to pick her up. One girl was several weeks along and showing. She was the 'kind' of girl you would expect to see in an abortion clinic with it's negative, taboo image. The girl was dressed in all black with greasy hair, twitchy gestures and a nervous laugh. My friend sat next to the girl during the prep and later told me that the girl seemed to be cracked out on some drug, probably heroin because the girl was talking about using needles. It was the girl's fourth abortion and she had four kids at home. She was definitely the kind of girl who shouldn't be having children at all and clearly couldn't keep her head straight long enough to stop getting pregnant.
I felt bad for my friend as she walked out of the clinic wobbly from the anesthesia. Unlike the other girl, my friend would have made a great mom; will make a great mom one day. It was just inconvenient timing - as bad as that sounds and the child would have been fatherless. She's regrettful that she wasn't more cautious and has vowed to abstain from sex because of this ordeal. She just never expected to be 'that' girl - but then again, who does?
There was also a couple in the clinic - I'm presuming he wasn't her brother - that looked wholesome and good and maybe even capable of raising and supporting a child. I couldn't help but wonder why they were there... they looked so 'normal'. One of my favorite Glamour blogs, Storked!, is about single-motherhood. The mother who writes the blog is a hip, 27 year-old, New Jersian who obviously makes a decent living writing for Glamour and freelancing. She gets no financial support from her son's father and legally wrote him out of her son's life when he decided he wanted no part of fatherdom. It happens. Single-motherdom is becoming less and less taboo and some financially independent moms are even stepping out on a limb, like Storked! blogger Chrissy Coppa, and permanently writing off the soon-to-be-estranged-anyway 'Baby Daddy'. It certainly takes feminism to a new level. That's not to say these women wanted their baby's to grow up without a father - my friend may have made a different decision if she was still with the guy or even if he had wanted to keep it. Some may argue it's unfair to the child to be raised without both parents, but some of these single moms may say what's unfair is not giving that child half a chance at life and the mom is then left to struggle with the memory of what might have been.
The breast cancer survivor's interview was surprisingly positive as far as those kinds of things go. She's in remission and credits her positive outlook for her recovery. It was honestly one of the best interviews I've done and at one point we both became a bit teary. Her tears came from personal experience and mine from the memory of what it was like for my mom. Like an abortion, the memory and knowledge of having had cancer stays with a person for some time. At the end of the interview, I remembered what Julia Roberts (or some female celebrity) once said to Barbara Walters in an interview, "I'm wasn't going to cry, I wasn't going to let you make make me cry." I guess Walters has been to known to bring her interviewees to tears and since I made my interviewee cry, I thought, I've made it in the journalism world. I've been defined as a true journalist.
One final up note: my troubled day will end with peace and harmony restored tonight when SM gets back to town. He's on the "fly-in" leg of his return as I write this. Look for my blog next week about the fabulous weekend we are going to have in Margaret River - wining, dining, and... ugh! more surfing... and maybe a few photos *wink, wink*
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