7 Quick Takes, vol. 97

 1. A friend shared this C.S. Lewis quote yesterday: “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither!” — C.S. Lewis. I have to admit that my first reaction was a bit of resistance. It seems to smack of that notion that good behavior = prosperity, and if you’re poor, it’s your own fault for being a bad person. I have a problem with this. But on further reflection, I think the quote is true–though not at a deeper level of truth than the obvious one.  Because when we have our sights set on Heaven, the things of Earth don’t seem so important. So suddenly everything you have becomes exactly what you want. In other words, you have the world.

2. Just for fun, here’s a video montage of dancing in the movies, set to Kenny Loggins’ “Footloose”.

3. Do you ever find yourself mesmerized by the sound of the insects, like I do? Have you ever spent fiteen minutes trying to separate out each individual sound, and wondered which animals make which noises? Well, here’s a place to start: someone recorded twenty individual species of insects and put them on the web, with their pictures.

4. Did you know that when you are in your thirties, your umbilical cord can begin to grow again? Does anyone other than me find that just a bit stomach-turning? (I won’t bore you with how I discovered that factoid, but suffice it to say it was NOT about ME.)

5. Space freaks, unite! Boeing’s working on taking us to the International Space Station! (Note to self: time to start saving money. For me and for Alex. Our day is coming.)

6-7. I’ve been debating over a week what to do with this. Last week, my post on the mommy wars hit WP’s front page–a little taste of the big time. I spent all day moderating comments, including one that went to the spam folder. Only it’s not exactly spam…exactly. More like an angry, vitriolic essay on how rotten motherhood is. I want to go ahead and post it here, and get your take on it, because I’m still a bit kerflummoxed.

So you ended up being just a mother.

Just another mother, like a chimp, a cow, an elephant, a whale, just another mother, like an insect, or an octopus, or a worm. Just another sad mother.

Your kids will not thank you, your husband will not like you, your own mother will pity you for making her own same mistake.

Just another mother.

For a moment of frenzy, of uterine voracity, irrational and irreversible, you destroyed your body, your beauty, and your own intellect.

Parental-brain-atrophy-syndrome, where your brain biologically adjusts to the need of your infants, descending at their own subhuman level, with just one dimension, food, or perhaps two dimensions, food and feces.

You left your ambitions, your achievements, your potentials outside your life and outside the lives of those who really loved, only to become a receptacle of an unknown body of an unknown person that never will be yours, and to whom you will never belong. Strangers united in a pool of blood and dirt.

And dirt has become your life, and your life has become dirt. Urine, remains of food, excrements, diapers, vacuum cleaners, old soap, crusts, a life of dandruff and diseases, vaccine and lice, high school and drool.

You lost your dignity through your open legs, first inwards and then outwards, first-in-first-out, garbage-in-garbage-out, a boomerang of boredom.

Do you remember who you were?

Do you realize your loss?

Nobody chooses prison voluntarily, except for mothers, except for you.

You chose the life of a slave in a cavern of dirt.

People around you, who know that you are just another mother, do have compassion for you, but no respect. They know all about your emptiness, your pain, your despair, all dressed in the robes of a virgin-mary.

And a virgin-mary you are not, because mary was not a virgin, and you are not a mary.

You were manipulated into just another life wasted on the heap of trash of a lost humanity dedicated to popular procreation and proletarian proliferation, to please the leaders of a domain of plebeians.

The world lost you, and you lost the world.

Good bye, sad mothers, good bye, old cows, with dried-out utters and distorted hips, good bye, and so alone you all will die.

Any perspectives on this? A week later, I’m still speechless.