#teenage years were bad and frankly I'm glad I'm never going back to that

[neverendingford]

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[bekindtoyou4007]

Lovely evening eating oatmeal and watching a documentary, just sitting and letting my body relax with in the warmth. Long day, 200 mile round trip. I blew off any more work when I got home, let myself find the playfulness again. I've done a foot bath before bed and changed into nice jammies. I will have to go swimming tomorrow to keep my exercise levels up. I'm feeling good, no massive emotions flaring up. I am having some disturbing dreams that are really thinly veiled about my family and I guess I should have expected that. I made the decision yesterday to finally express myself to my dad. I just couldn't go on any longer pretending things were fine and holding my tongue when he says and does things I have a serious problem with. In my attempt to be the bigger person I have tolerated the intolerable because I had no idea how to strike a balance between wanting to be there and support people I love without enabling bad and sometimes outright dangerous behaviour. It's like walking out of a fog. I'm experiencing the back draft of it now. I don't expect any miracles, if anything the most likely outcome is a very unpleasant response, but I now needed it to be said. I waited so long it had to happen. I can't allow him to call me up and attack me like that ever again. It hurts me so badly and that's what I've been struggling with the past few years. Everytime I get drunk and start weeping hard and can't stop and don't know why. There's these massive reservoirs of pain and they only get bigger frankly when I hang around a man who used to Beat me and only stopped because he got too disabled to continue, and do favours for him and talk to him and have to listen to him talking about what a great dad he was. It's like too much psychic damage, or something, and I'm so grateful to my healthy adult brain with good coping mechanisms for being like 'you know what this has to stop right now'. I couldn't have gotten as far as this realisation without so much love and support from myself and also insight and patience from other people and I'm not about to throw all that away and keep 'this is fine!'-ing my way into a very bad way, like my mother. She's another story entirely. I'm glad she finally has her bipolar diagnosis official but we're a long way from being able to tell her straight that the way she treated me as a child was abuse, plain and simple, and her illness explains but doesn't excuse the abject cruelty she frequently showed me. I don't think parents should mock and bully their children. And her having an illness doesn't necessarily completely answer why she felt able to do that without remorse for years on end until I stopped being around her. But she's very new to her diagnosis, presumably, and I will give her a chance as always I give everyone to make a good decision. I'll be clear I'm not tolerating going back to that house with both parents under 1 roof again as it's caused immeasurable misery to both parents and they can't heal in this dynamic as it's retraumatising and Co dependent... I've said I think they should live apart a good few times now I guess ball is in their court. But never again am I tolerating what's happened the past few years because its not acceptable. I'm really proud of myself for seeing that now these years on and it's exciting in a sense to be in this period of growth and renewal. Things are going so well career wise, I'm in the best shape I've been since possibly ever, at least since a teenager. I'm a married property owner. I can pay taxes and house train a dog and make a good pulled beef ragu and make friends. I'm doing good.

[wingletblackbird]

I appreciate your nuanced and respectful anti-abortion post, and I want to raise a question that you didn't address. How do you regard medication abortions, which account for about 30% of abortions and can be performed extremely early? Your argument about fetal life wouldn't seem to apply as well at three or four weeks gestation. I'm not trying to pick a fight, just genuinely curious.

Don’t worry I don’t think you’re trying to pick a fight. I can dialogue with anyone on any subject really, so long as we’re both willing to listen and be respectful, even be willing to change our minds if we are exposed to something we hadn’t considered. I actually, generally, quite enjoy a good discussion. ;) I also am a firm believer that as long as you’re sincere, there is no such things as a bad question. I appreciate the ask, and I’m glad you felt my original post was respectful. I was worried about setting the wrong tone.

(On that note, before I get into this, I really want to make sure I make it clear I don’t think women who have abortions are any better or worse than anybody else. I don’t think most people who are pro-choice are bad people either–No more than the rest of us anyway. 1 in 4 people or so in the States, iirc, will have an abortion. It’s ludicrous to suppose they are all horrible people, or that their supporters are. I cannot know what women feel like going into those clinics, but I am given to understand that helpless, panicked, and desperate are common emotions, and if you are not given the proper support, or information, it is hard to make good decisions like that. Beyond even that, people make mistakes. I am not here to judge them, and if any woman is struggling post-abortion, I would say there is forgiveness, and redemption, and support out there for you.) 

You’re right; I barely touched on the issue of medication abortions. I felt the post was already longer than most people would care for anyway. Before I get into why I oppose those too, I should stress first that by the time most people know they’re pregnant there will already be a heartbeat, and likely discernible brain waves. Ergo, I think it would be rare that it wouldn’t be blindingly obvious you were dealing with a young child, even without the further evidence I am about to offer that life begins at feritilistaion. To offer a personal example, when my parents were trying to conceive my brother and I, my mom was very in tune with her natural cycles. She always knew when she was ovulating from the left side because she could feel a twinge in her lower  back, so she and my dad were able to conceive by brother and I on just the one attempt. Likewise, within a couple weeks after my conception, my mom knew she was pregnant even when it was too early for it to even be detectable by a pregnancy test, so she went to the hospital and asked for a blood test which confirmed she was pregnant. Then she and my dad went to get an ultrasound, and discovered my heart was already beating. That was when my dad went from pro-choice to pro-life, because he realised even at such an early stage, before it could easily be detected, I was alive!

But, of course, what if you have unprotected sex, or for whatever reason you have cause to believe that you could be pregnant really, really early? You’ve pretty much asked for an abortion from the first moment you could possible be considered pregnant. Even then I would say that this is wrong. The child is still a legitimate human being. There is overwhelming scientific consensus on this: Life begins at conception. 

First of all, we know that from the moment of conception the individual is alive. They have all the characteristics of a living entity. Cells are the smallest form of life. That is one of the basics of cell theory and biology. Moreover, once fertilization occurs they are the offspring of two humans, and they are humans genetically. Perhaps most importantly they are human organisms. They are not merely masses of tissue, or clumps of cells, because body cells do not have the capacity to grow, and change, and develop the way that an organism does. This is why sperm cells, egg cells, muscle tissue etc. do not have rights, while the human organism does. The zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, infant, toddler, child, pre-teen, teenager, and adult are all humans in different stages of development, and each is as valid as the other. Furthermore, it is expected in our society to protect the most vulnerable of us such as children. To not do so is considered terrible, even monstrous, except when it comes to those who are developing in-utero. This makes no sense to me. Life begins at fertilisation, and if allowed to grow over the course of a couple decades, results into a fully mature adult of our species. This is the scientific evidence. To terminate that development is to kill the youngest of our kind, to deny them to right to continue to grow and learn and change. You would think every stage of human life from the zygote to the senior citizen would be equally as valuable. However, in the interests of profit and convenience, they are not. (Frankly, this applies to many seniors who are mistreated as well, and aren’t granted the respect and dignity they deserve.)

If you look at embryology textbooks you’ll see quotes like this:

Although human life is a continuous process, fertilisation is a critical landmark, because, under ordinary circumstances a new, genetically distinct human organism, is thereby formed. –Human Embryology and Teratology

Human life begins at fertilization.—The Developing Human 

Development begins with fertilisation—Langman’s Medical Embryology

Even amongst the pro-choice side we get:

There is no doubt that from the first moments of its existence, an embryo conceived from human sperm and eggs is a human being.—Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

Hence, the moment you terminate a pregnancy, whatever the stage, you deny a life the right to exist. You will never get it back. You will never know what that child could have been. 

Other issues that have to be considered with the understanding that life begins at conception is the issue of hormonal birth control, (since I’m on the subject and don’t really get into it in the first post...). I recently read an outraged News article talking about how some politician said that the Pill caused abortion. The man in question was called a religious nut, ignorant, and uninformed, but I rather thought the journalist was. Few people seem to realise that the Pill does not always stop ovulation, and hence, fertilization. While it makes it very difficult for fertilization to occur, it can still occur. If that happens, the Pill will usually result in a lost life, because the Pill also prevents implantation of the fertilised egg by altering the endometrium. This is why many claim that the Pill has the potential to be abortifacient. If you believe that life starts at conception, as I do, hormonal contraception is out. The morning after pill is really just a higher dosage of the regular pill anyway, so really this shouldn’t be surprising. 

Taking the next leap from the understanding that fertilization is the earliest stage of human development is the nature of IVF. To promote greater levels of success, multiple embryos are nurtured. They are screened for “undesirable” qualities whether it be for disabilities, or gender. (I’ve already talked about why that’s awful in my original post.) After successful implantation, the other embryos, the siblings of the lucky implanted ones, are terminated or frozen. Moreover, if the pregnancy results in multiples, because all embryos implant, there is often an abortion to reduce the pregnancy to something safer. Some mothers refuse to do this and you get “Octomom.” I respect them for not terminating their children, but it definitely made for some very high-risk pregnancies. The fact is if you are going to say that you believe something, you cannot pick and choose what it applies to. The evidence points to life begins at conception which means artificial methods of conception need to be looked at as well. I touched on this in my viability argument and I’ll just post that again here:

What about embryo adoption though? Did you know that that is possible? That that is even being done? It has already happened that parents who use IVF, and have no further need for the other embryos they have frozen allow other couples who cannot conceive naturally to adopt them. It has been called the earliest form of adoption. Well, how does this fit into the viability idea? If you can take an embryo and implant it into someone else’s womb? What if you can develop artificial wombs? What if you can remove a fetus in the first trimester and still keep it alive? The whole viability argument makes me feel a bit uncomfortable to be honest, because it is so inherently subjective.

As a side note, I wonder how those embryos who were adopted feel when they grow up. They know that they weren’t the lucky embryo chosen by their biological parents. They were the one frozen, unwanted, and then lucky enough to be granted a chance to truly live when they were given up for adoption. How do they feel knowing they have a biological sibling living with a different set of parents? That maybe they have more still frozen? When an infant is given up for adoption, it is usually a loving decision based upon the mother’s, and possibly even the father’s, recognition that they cannot care for the child. Frozen embryos though…they’re just children, or potential children if you don’t recognise them as being alive, stuck in a freezer. Their parents just have no need for them.

Since I’m on the subject I’ll just go all out and talk about that last point too: The family. 

I remember reading an article years and years ago about how in a family one child was given away, and one was allowed to stay. It was years ago, so I remember few of the details, but I do remember the parent was confused that the child who stayed kept acting out. Surely since she was the one who was kept, she would have felt more safe? In truth though, the child felt worse because she never felt “safe” in a family where people left. She learned that being loved seemed to be conditional. She wanted to know what the limits were for her. When would she be sent away? 

I was conceived right after my mother miscarried my elder brother. He was miscarried so late, he was almost born stillborn, but if he had been born, I would never have been conceived. It’s a crazy thought to me, because I was almost miscarried too. (My mom really struggled to carry a pregnancy to term.) I think sometimes about how it could have been James that was born, and me that was lost. As a consequence, I view my life as even more of a miracle then it already is. My brother died and I was able to live. It’s a humbling thought, and I can’t take it lightly. James is a part of my life, and while my family and I don’t speak of him often, when we do it is with love and grief and respect. My mother even cried once saying she could never have chosen between us, and she wishes she could have raised us both. I often find I want to live a good life, for his sake, as well as my own, and my family’s, and others. James is as important to me. I don’t want to waste the gift I was granted. I wonder though how it would feel if James had been aborted instead. There are, of course, few studies done on the siblings of aborted children, but what I have found indicates grief, anger, and survivor’s guilt–especially those who were once part of multiples that were “selectively reduced”. There have even been developed support groups for the siblings of aborted children who are struggling with it. Abortion rocks the entire family.

One woman who works at a Pregnancy Counselling Centre stated:

“Abortion teaches children that they have worth because they were conceived in the right conditions and at the right time; that they have value because their parents want them. Up to 50% of all American children have lost a brother or a sister to abortion, making it much more likely that they live with a performance view of love: I was born because I was wanted therefore I better perform so they will continue to love me.”

I imagine this is particularly understandable for those who were kept because they were a girl or a boy, and the parents wanted a girl or a boy rather than the opposite sex. Do you only love me because I’m the right gender? 

The above woman also said:

“I think one of the most difficult things for me to face is a woman who is attempting to justify an abortion for the sake of her other children. I always want to tell them…the best thing for her little ones is to have a brother or a sister. In fact, explaining to sons and daughters a few years in the future as to why they aborted their sibling will probably be the most difficult thing they will ever do[.]”

One sibling described how her mother felt unequal to raising a fourth child so aborted the baby. She was left wondering if she’d been that fourth child, would she have been aborted? It’s an uncomfortable question. Love is unconditional, and that should never be in question, and neither should someone’s right to live. These concepts go hand in hand. The value of a life does not rest on it’s convenience, gender, or health.  

This is the heart of the pro-life movement. It is about the inherent dignity of all human life from conception to natural death. It means to be so respectful of the dignity of the human person, you could not fathom supporting anything that would harm them. It means such a fundamental respect for human life that you do not terminate it, rather you do everything you can to support it. It means a respect for life so deep that you do not take the risks of having sex if you aren’t willing to carry a pregnancy, however unlikely it is to occur, to term. It means looking at children as blessing not burdens. It means loving the people you have in your life, young, old, or middle-aged whatever their physical or mental state. It means asking yourself the difficult question: Are people an inconvenience to you? It means pushing for better maternity leave, paternity leave, social services, health care, foster care, adoption services, palliative care, and so on and so forth. More than that, it means being willing to pitch-in and help out yourself. It’s not just about what happens in the abortion clinic. To truly believe in life and love means making a commitment. It will not always be easy, but it is worth it. Abortion may be the “easy” option, but it is not the best one. It shouldn’t even be option at all, and it is devastating in basically every way. 

[harmonizewithechoes]

i'm always up for stories!! do tell!! and no worries, like i said, i know this is all real as shit, so i won't think you're crazy. but i do like trying to find other explanations when possible. u feel?

Sorry for taking so long! I have to explain how things were set up so that it makes sense.  But I would absolutely love to tell you this story!Keep in mind that, while I’ve always enjoyed ghost stories and such, I’ve never had much of a reason to truly believe in it.  As a Christian, sure, I believe in the spiritual realm and that there are a lot of crazy things going on there that I don’t really have the capacity to understand.  But without any personal experiences I didn’t really have to care how it affects me.Until I started working as a counselor at summer camp.  Now there are always going to be ghost stories told at summer camps: stories of children that drowned in the lake 100 years prior who never left, of children who got lost in the forest and still wander it looking for a way out, of creatures that resemble humans a bit too closely that have haunted the land for years.  The camp I worked at has the unfortunate history of once being home to a “religious” cult and thus had some unique stories of its own.  But those come with the territory and weren’t something to worry about.  Walking back to the cabins alone in the dark never bothered me since I could always blame the shadows on my poor eyesight.  And when you have anxiety, you pay less attention to what could be causing the hair on the back of your neck to raise.  I was as skeptical as anyone could be- until some things happened that I couldn’t quite explain.The name of the building that I was assigned as a counselor every year is Birch.  It’s the cabin that’s the furthest away from any of the main buildings on camp, houses the older girls, and is tucked neatly away into the forest.  The doors on the far side of building face directly into the darkest part of the forest, which was frankly terrifying when you get back at midnight, and that’s the side I always got the pleasure of being assigned to.  And it’s my favorite side because of the girls that get put there! They’re the ones I always connected with the most and I loved it so much that I could ignore the random doors opening and closing when I was the only one there.  Even though they were really heavy doors that the wind alone couldn’t open, I always felt better blaming it on them.Now the cabin layouts aren’t what you typically think of when you think of summer camp.  Each building houses 4 cabins and on side of the building the cabins are connected by a counselor’s suite- two on one side, two on the other, with a shared bathroom.  With air conditioning, electric lights, plenty of toilets and showers for everyone, and actually comfortable bunk beds, it’s by far the best camp I ever stayed at as a little camper and one of the reasons I went back to work there as an adult.  The layout is important because of what happened my second year there.It was a day off so we didn’t have any campers (it’s a week to week camp rather than one the kids stay at all summer), and I didn’t get back to my cabin for bed until after curfew for…. reasons.  This meant that the camper section was empty and quiet and my friends on the other side of the wall were asleep.  I happened to have the room to myself that night because my co-counselor decided to stay in another building.  She would sometimes come back in the middle of the night to grab things and our door was sticky and super loud when opened so I left one of the lights on and the door cracked just in case.  I got ready for bed and was all snuggled up in my sleeping bag on the top bunk of our room when I started to hear it: footsteps.  Pacing, in fact, as if someone was wearing heavy boots and walking the length of a tiled hallway.  Back and forth, louder and then quieter, on and on for about 20 minutes.  I tried to figure out what could be making the noise the came up with nothing and, given the fact that it was about 2am and I was the only one awake, I was too freaked out to actually get up and see what was going on.  The biggest reason I was so freaked out?  The cabins are carpeted.  It sounded like the person was walking on tiles.  There are no tiles anywhere in the building.So, being the baby that I am but also being too tired to deal with that, especially since we had to work the next morning, I put my headphones in and fell asleep to music.  So there was that fun night.  But it wasn’t really that bad all things considered.  No, the creepiest thing happened two years later (last summer) on the last night of us being at camp.  I knew at that point that I wouldn’t be coming back this year and I decided to take some time alone in my favorite place on camp to reflect. It was around 7:30 and since it was July the sun was still up for a while, though the forest was starting to get a bit shadowy. My favorite spot happens to be a campfire ring next to the lake, a bit far away from all the other buildings and surrounded by trees.  This is where I had some of my favorite memories with my campers and I was sitting on a log, lost in thought and staring at the lake, when something felt a bit off.  I looked around and in the wooded area to the left of where I was stood a shadow that looked an awful lot like a person.  Super detailed, too, it looked like a skinny teenage boy wearing a baseball cap was leaning against one of the trees about 5 feet in, just staring at me.  You know those shadow cowboy cut-out things some people have on their lawns? It was in the same pose- arms folded, one leg up against the tree- and the same kind of black from head to toe.  I didn’t feel scared or anything at that point so I decided to make sure of what I was seeing.  I stood up and, keeping my eyes on it, moved forward a few feet.  While all the trees around seemed to shift with my new perspective, that shadow stayed put.  It didn’t move an inch.  Still skeptical and doubting my eyes (even though it was daylight and it wasn’t super far away so my eyes were clearly working fine) I stepped backwards a few feet and the same thing happened.  A few feet to the left, to the right- nothing happened.  It didn’t change position or anything, either.  It was then that I got the feeling that maybe I shouldn’t stay there. Not scared, exactly.  That didn’t come until afterwards, when I was around my friends and could process what I saw.  Just that I shouldn’t be there in that moment.  So I did something that would terrify me today but felt natural in the moment- I turned my back on it and walked away.  I didn’t run.  I deliberately went at a leisurely pace and didn’t look back once.  In the moment I had this strong... feeling? intuition?... my spidey senses were telling me that I was safe and that whatever it was couldn’t touch me.  I was more confident in that moment than I ever have been.  I have no idea what that was.  Today, the thing that really sticks out to me was the fact that the front part of the baseball cap it was wearing was a couple inches too long.  It was really out of place.  I even asked the couple of teenage boys on staff that kind of fit the build if they were anywhere in the area when I was out there and at moment they were playing Pokemon Go together on the other side of camp.  In fact, no one was in that area at all, teenage boy or not.  So..... I don’t know if heavy footsteps and shadow people with staring problems make for a great story about the paranormal.  But I’m not making any of this up.  These things are kinda scary to think back on and I’ve tried really hard to think of what they could have been but I keep coming up empty.  And I’m really really glad I’m not back in those woods this summer.  My poor little heart can’t take much more of those situations.