My kids are sometimes overscheduled, but not for the reason you think. (Oh, and they’re happy too.) I recently marked my calendar with all of the rehearsal and performance dates for my daughters’ participation in our church choir. As I inked in their music theory sessions (once a week for each daughter, at different times), their rehearsal times (once a week for one daughter, twice a week for the other), and services (every Sunday morning plus some Sunday evenings), I... Read more
I spend several hours a day sitting on this bench in our front yard. I do this to keep our puppy, Sunday, company as she roams the yard. I want to keep an eye on her to make sure she’s respecting the boundaries of our electric fence. Plus our neighborhood is home to coyotes and foxes, and in the past week neighbors have reported black bear and bobcat sightings, so I’m not comfortable... Read more
My colleague and friend Amy Julia Becker had an interesting conversation on her blog earlier this week, in which she and her readers discussed “whether or not those of us with children with Down syndrome should allow abortion into the conversation surrounding prenatal diagnosis.” Most of the people Amy Julia cited in her post, as well as commenters (including me) argued that if abortion is one of the legal choices that parents can make, it must be part of the... Read more
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to get a tattoo. This idea came out of nowhere, but immediately made sense. I realized a tattoo could be a great way to honor my body—my crooked and broken body that has nevertheless borne and cares for three children. For once, I would do something to draw attention to my body instead of away from it. I began discussing this idea with some Facebook friends, as I thought about what illustration would... Read more
One commenter to my essay on the New York Times Motherlode blog last week, in which I told my story of making childbearing decisions in light of having a genetic disorder that my children could inherit, wrote this: In your article you mention “hard questions about choice, responsibility, and suffering”, but you don’t discuss them, and I’m disappointed that you didn’t…I feel you missed an opportunity to explain your reasoning and decisions. Anyone notice the glaring flaw in this commenter’s... Read more
(Editorial Note: I’m including an excerpt from my book below, so this is more an online article than a blog post, much longer than my usual. If you have the time and inclination to read it, thanks! I’ll be back tomorrow with my usual shorter blog post.) Last week, the New York Times’ “Motherlode” parenting blog published an essay I wrote about our reproductive decisions in light of my genetic legacy—a brittle bone disorder that I was born with (osteogenesis... Read more
Every Friday, I share links to blog posts by other writers. I link often but not exclusively to writers affiliated with Patheos, the religion and spirituality web portal that hosts my blog. Please share the blog love by reading these posts, sharing them via Facebook, Twitter, etc., and/or participating in the comment conversation. Here are some more blog posts considering the Colorado movie theater shooting, violence, and guns through the lens of Christian faith. Tim Fall writes on the Radical... Read more
If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you know that we’ve had some hard times with our dogs over the past year, with two failed adoptions of adult rescue dogs under our belt. I shared our hard-won wisdom about adopting rescue dogs in a blog post back in May. We eventually decided to adopt a puppy—a terrier/spaniel/poodle mix who we named Sunday (in honor of her mother, Easter). Here are three things I have learned about, and from, bringing... Read more
A few things I learned from Monday’s post on guns and the shooting at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater: 1. You get WAY more blog hits when you get preachy and unequivocal than when you promote dialogue, generosity, nuance, and complexity. But I already knew that. And I will continue to write mostly from the nuanced complexity camp, despite the fact that doing so is unlikely to make me a blogging superstar any time soon. 2. A key factor affecting... Read more
My favorite line in writer, reviewer, and all-around nice person LaVonne Neff’s review of my book, No Easy Choice, is this one: “If you like things cut and dried, [No Easy Choice] will drive you nuts.” It’s true. It will. But I still think that the balanced, nuanced, maybe-this-and-also-that style in which I wrote No Easy Choice was the only way I could write it, and has actually served me and the fraught topic of reproductive ethics well. For example,... Read more
Ellen Painter Dollar
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