Good morning!

1. The first news article I read this morning made me a little misty-eyed:

Single Mom Caught Shoplifting Gets Touching Surprise From Cops

I remember what it was like being a single mom getting very little help from my kid’s dad.  I’d been married to him but divorced him when he started getting abusive and refused to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with that and get help.  I got medical coupons, food stamps, and,working as an office temporary all over the place, help with daycare from the state because he was too low-income to go after for sufficient child support, and I was lucky to get that.  But that didn’t cover the cost of diapers, clothes, electricity, heating oil, phone, gas, ect.  That all came out of my sporadic income and some I had to do without on many occasions because my income just couldn’t cover all that at one time. 

For a while, in fact, we had no income to speak of at all, because all I worked for trying to get regular employment went straight and wholly to daycare.  Then President Clinton changed all that when he created a program to help single parents with daycare and technical education programs.  Yeah, that was a misty moment too when I realized that help was finally on the way.  I don’t care how imperfect a character he’s accused of being, he was/is a good person that helped a lot of us when we needed it most and I will always be grateful for it.

I remember feeling that no matter what I did, I couldn’t support my children as well as they deserved and I felt awful about it.  Hence the regular nightmares I had about potentially having another baby – being talked into having another by someone who swore to help raise it but didn’t, or getting pregnant via rape (as happened twice before but I didn’t keep it), or whatever….  So when the state offered laparoscopic tubal ligations to single moms, I took the offer and have never regretted it.

I keep thinking of other women I’ve encountered that didn’t get as much help as I did and I was struggling.  But many fall right through the cracks and raise their children right on the street for lack of better options.  It’s to hear that even one such family gets the help they need from someone acting on goodwill alone and not because they have to of because of a state program that helps some and leaves others to starve.  You know?

2.  I thought I saw a life-size Barbie Doll…

I did!  I did!  Her name is Valeria Lykyanova and she’s actually a pretty fascinating person beyond her Barbie Doll looks.  She’s an artist, teacher, musician, and regular out-of-body traveller who runs her own school for this.

“Boys! Pay attention to the subject matter, NOT the teacher!”

Seriously though, I’d love to take those classes.  I’ve had a few spontaneous out-of-body experiences on my own, but for the life of me don’t know how to do it on purpose.  I think that would be really neat.