Grace has brought me home

Do I really know how lucky I am? I hope so. I hope I make good use of the grace showered upon my family.

This morning online, I read the news that another UK friend is out of work. Specifically, her husband has lost his job. In my mummy world, that is just as bad. She is expecting another baby and they had just moved house. Amongst this group of treasured friends who have worked together, there have been several job losses this year. How come I got so lucky? A New Zealand passport and a place in the sun (well the rain here in smallwettown, but we do get sun as well). How come so many people in the world, on the Gaza strip and in Rwanda for example, are so unlucky?

After I had read my emails I went out to feed the chooks. I'd kept my exhausted son home from school and Friday is a no-paid-work day for me. A whole day with both of my children and food in the cupboards. I looked carefully at my blessings in the garden. Chooks laying every day, kale, broccoli and silverbeet growing for winter and spring, a bed of yams for winter and potatoes in various spots in the garden for late Autumn eating.

I don't find it simple to see the ways in which fortune and fate hit people. I read not long ago of an environmental scientist who believes sincerely that our earth is overpopulated by a factor of seven. That's a lot of people to lose. I admire the gesture of hope and love of each new loved child in a family. I have a particular admiration for my friends Tania and Rachael, on different sides of the globe, who love life so much they want to share their breakfast table with a new little one most years and have done this for a long time already. It may not seem a rational admiration in these straightened times (or ever, from an environmental perspective), but a loved baby is such a positive gesture and yet for many people, I can see that news of babies is going to bring great great fear and the fertility rate will drop, worldwide. In my family, the immediately post WW2 generation is largeish, 3-8 children per married couple. The generation before, the young couples of the Great Depression, they all had families of just two children.

This prospect, not at all hypothetical for many men and women, intensifies a situation which already exists around poor women and abortion. Not a fan of abortion myself, I would march to keep it legal in this country, protecting the lives of women who have a desperate need to terminate a pregnancy. I would like to see the end of unsafe, back street abortions world wide. The presence of safe, clean and legal channels for abortion does not make a woman abort, but it does diminish and hopefully eliminate the power of illegal, literally dirty and unsafe butchers.

[If you are new to my blog and feel cheated by there being hardly any gardening talk and mostly my rants on everything else, I can absolutely see your point. But it may not improve until one day suddenly it does and there might even be photos of the garden. It has happened before.]