Lady Bits and Bobs

Friend 2 days after surgery

When I started writing this blog in January, it was at the invitation of writing.ie to contribute something, try a different voice to my fiction and non-fiction writing. I couldn't think of anything to write about, I was beset with worry about financial restructuring, finding a 'proper job', seeing my two sons through third level and trying to figure what the future held, the last few years not being the future that I'd studied and strived for.

The idea of renting out rooms was the last resort, but not the last straw as it turned out. I started writing as if I was sending an email to a friend, which is pretty much my own voice, a familiar one, where all is not despair, in fact we turn despair into harangues with expletives about the sanctimonious cant we get from politicians about austerity, the Troika and making us pay for the émigré tycoons, while squeezing SME credit and hiking our taxes.

So without the expletives and with the imperative to laugh, the posts went up and on and on.

And while having four men in the relatively small house can be a little busy at times (and the washing machine might not endure they're assiduous laundry exertions), they are rarely here all at once. And this weekend they're all missing.

So it was that I found myself with nobody to turn to when I got my first attack on twitter yesterday, and nearly 300 comments on the Irish Times website in response to my article http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/anti-choice-logic-untenable-in-cases-of-fatal-foetal-abnormality-1.1412366

They were mainly supportive, kind and sympathetic. It was the twitter exchange between a pro-lifer and a tolerant French woman living in Dublin that had me aghast.

I desperately wanted to say that protocol is to write to the newspaper or comment on line, but not go direct to the author of a piece about her own life. Anyway I blocked them, the French lady sent me an apology, which shows how decent she was, the other one continued to rant about the headline, which shows what she's made of, I suppose.

Other people's Blogs are about useful things like gardening, cooking, farming, writing even. And I'll start writing about writing whenever I get published but in the meantime I'll do what I can to make women's lives a bit more tolerable when they get the awful news no woman ever wants to get, that your baby is going to die. And that is the end of that for now.

Being well enough to get out this afternoon, I visited my friend who is just out of hospital after a hysterectomy. That was something they used to do to old women, remember? She is far from old and could still have babies, though she has three grown up children, it still takes away the choice and we like choice. But, a bit like Angelina, it was a case of lop it out before the trouble really starts. It's an operation no woman wants to have to face unless she has to. Yikes, men can father children into their eighties.

Cutting out the potential for being a mother again, well, it hits different women in different ways. Some are thrilled, don't feel a thing afterwards, others will definitely feel a line has been crossed and sadly there's no going back. Dear tanned friend showed me her scars; wow I'd say the doctors were dazzled, flat brown tummy, three tiny plasters. She pointed to the one over her belly button SQUEAMISH ALERT. 'This is where they pulled it out.'

Gosh, women are brave and beautiful.