543rd Friday Blog Roundup

I got into a discussion on Twitter about the mother who was seen beating her son as she removed him from the Baltimore protests. I’ll start by saying that I don’t condone violence of any kind or for any reason. I’ve been uncomfortable with the Facebook comments people have written as they put up the video stating that she wins mother-of-the-year. I would never call beating your child a great parenting moment.

BUT.

I saw a woman who was terrified. Who was in the middle of a chaotic, emotional situation and interacted with her son inside that bubble of fear.

We all like to think that we would continue to be ourselves and hold tightly to our ethics in the face of that sort of fear. But I don’t know if I would. Meaning, I’ve never been in a high stakes situation like that where I had to get my child out of danger. I don’t know if I would be myself at that time.

I have no clue how this woman parents in a calm moment. I’ve only seen how she reacted to stress in this one particular moment. I don’t think that we do our best parenting in those moments.

Do I wish she had removed him without using violence? Yes. But I’ve also have never stood in her shoes and have no clue what I would do if I saw my child in danger and they weren’t going to follow me out of danger by using reason. I just don’t know.

But I do know that it’s dangerous to judge a whole person — good or bad — by a moment.

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My house is loud. It’s hard to think.

I brought Truman upstairs with me because I didn’t want him scared by the noise or breathing in the fumes and dust. He was quiet all day but decided that he wanted to start playing around midnight. I told him to go to sleep but laughed hysterically as he attacked his water bottle, a formidable opponent.  Isn’t our pig so damn cute, Josh?

But I wasn’t laughing when he decided to play with the water bottle again at 2:30 am. Nor was I laughing when he decided that 5 am was a great time to get in another fight with the water bottle. Or when at 6 am he decided he was up for the day and would love to be fed.

It is making me rethink the whole dog idea.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “NIAW: You Are Not Alone” (Unpregnant Chicken)
• “You Are Not Alone: Flying Together With Broken Wing” (Waiting for Baby Bird)
• “You Are Not Alone (But It Sure Can Feel That Way)” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “You Are Not Alone: In the ‘After’ of Infertility” (Inconceivable!)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Pages, Stages, and Rages has a wonderful rant in time for Mother’s Day.  We point out these fails year after year, the narrow definition with which people define motherhood.  She writes, “Mother is not only a noun– it is a verb. One of those definitions is ‘to care for or protect like a mother.’  Please remember it.”  Yeah, I wish they would.

TasIVFer has a wonderful post explaining how she once was fearful for the type of mother her friend’s child would become, and how she has surprised her by being the opposite.  It’s a nice post about how our expectations can limit us, and how people sometimes astonish us in a good way.

Breathe Gently has a post about secondary infertility and all the things she didn’t know until she experienced it.  To quote Smarshy (remember Smarshy?!), secondary infertility is just a different “bag of ass.”  It is such a well-written summary of the complex feelings that surround trying to conceive again after a first bout of infertility.

Lastly, Life and Love in the Petri Dish writes about flying back out to Denver to cycle again at her clinic.  She explains, “Being back at the Denver clinic was weird… strangely boring this time around but also nostalgic. We flew through much of the day without blinking an eye. The consents, the credit card payments, the procedural instructions on injections, etc.? We’ve got all that down pat.”  It’s another leg of a long journey, and I wish them so many good thoughts as they gear up to cycle again.

The roundup to the Roundup: The Baltimore mother.  My house is loud.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between April 24th and May 1st) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.