What It’s Like To Be My Kid

 

 

Kid3:

 

Me: Sweet! Are you at the creepy puppet museum? If so, take drugs to sleep tonight.  Otherwise, the nightmares will make you crazy.  That’s how creepy puppet museums work.  They’re a front for the makers of Ambien.

Kid3: Howdy Doody?  Lol  Emily took me to the natural bridge and they had a toy museum that we looked at in the gift shop.  The toy museum was free!

Me: Really?!  That’s because old toys are creepy.  And creeped out kids get nightmares.  Nightmares are free.  Know what’s not free?  The drugs parents buy to make sure creeped out kids sleep.  It’s all about the drugs.

Kid3: You are a junkie.

Me: I get nightmares.

Kid3: Was Howdy Doody before your time & more for Aunt Kim? I remember one of you two was making fun of us for looking like Howdy Doody or something when we were younger.

Me: Howdy was from the 50s, but I think we watched reruns.  We make fun because we love.  Also, because we hate.  And because we feel ambivalent.  But with you, it was def out of love. 

Kid3: Ah okay.  It looked old but I didn’t know how old.  But we know that’s why you did it all those years.

Unpinking My Wardrobe & My Wallet

I own exactly one pink shirt.  I bought it at the breast cancer walk a few years ago.

Mostly because I was the only person out of THOUSANDS that wasn’t wearing pink.  So there may have been a tad bit of peer pressure there.

But also because it says “Fight Like  A Girl.”

As a tomboy who grew up kicking the asses of neighborhood boys to defend my mouthy, ball-less little brothers, I kinda love that slogan.  By “kinda,” I totally mean I’d make out with it…if it weren’t a slogan & I weren’t married.

I love words, but I’m not a whore!

Tomorrow I will be dropping that shirt off at Goodwill in protest of the Susan G. Komen decision to withdraw grants to Planned Parenthood.

I will no longer be donating to their cause, nor raising money & racing for the cure… in protest of their asinine, politically charged farce of a decision.

For an organization that claims to be a proponent of women’s health to withdraw funding from another women’s health organization in favor of a right wing campaign to limit access to health care is beyond ridiculous.

And their changing stories about the why’s & how’s of it only serve as proof of the political bullying behind it.

Regardless of your stance on contraception or abortion, Planned Parenthood provides health care to women across the nation who can’t afford it otherwise.  And 97%  of the care they provide is screening and reproductive health.  But the far right like to keep that all swept neatly under the rug, while they picket & rant about abortion.

The Komen donations were earmarked to specifically provide screening for breast cancer.

So the message here is the Susan G. Komen foundation is all about breast health…just not for poor people?

I’m not an activist, nor am I pro-abortion.

But I have been a poor, uninsured woman in need of medical care…in a country that increasingly only offers care to those who can afford it.  And the screening and care I received at a clinic back then saved my life.

So this year, I will be donating a nice fat check to Planned Parenthood on the day of my local Race for the Cure.

And then I’ll turn my attention to other, less sexy cancer awareness & prevention charities.

Maybe I’ll even start a new trend!  Like a prostate cancer awareness day!!  We’ll all wear brown & carry giant buttholes on a stick.

I’ll be free on Race for the Cure day.