it was friday: the end of a long week for the yuppies gathered around the table at a local watering hole in delhi. as we enjoyed our (turned out afterwards to be falsely advertised) two-for-one drinks, conversation turned to pornography. "how," i queried, "can you consider pornography to empower women? how would you feel if your sister or mother decided to partake in modeling? and how can you say it's fine when all three of the women gathered around the table are not smiling?" did i miss the joke? has playboy suddenly become acceptable? or did i miss the boat? perhaps playboy's always been accepted by the masses as empowering and respectful of women, led by a purely enterprising man. while i was surprised by my passion regarding this issue, the flippancy of at least one male at the table infuriated me. i know there are gray lines everywhere we look and one can argue for many degrees of decency (or indecency). i'm simply blogging about it b/c it still irks me.
Today's Rare Disease Day. There's sometimes a particular weightiness to life with a rare disease. All the appointments, emergencies, traumas, doctors, therapists, medicines, opinions, schedules and upset schedules. My touchpoint is being mom to my precious girl with Wiedemann-Steiner Syndrome (WSS). You'd have to spend a day or week shadowing me to know what it's really like. Doesn't that sound alienating? As though you couldn't possibly imagine if you're not living it? Well, maybe. But think about a time of immense grief you've lived through, or a time when your world seemed to be falling apart around you and it felt like everyone else was completely unaffected. I suppose it's a bit like that. You might have thought that those around you couldn't possibly know how that experience felt to you. A couple weeks ago, I started keeping a list of all the extraordinary things that happened in my life due to my daughter's rare disease. I learned a c...
Comments