“Mommy, why did you kill me?” was the first line of the comment. It devolved from there into a maudlin, hallucinatory, and occasionally Freudian fantasy of an aborted child’s final message to his mother, and it ended with the little guy playing baseball with God in heaven while the mother burned in hell. The reply […]
Month: May 2012
Michelle and Jessa converse about the reasons we chose to stop at one child. Jessa: So let me check I have it right: you’re an only child yourself and have an only child as well? Michelle: That’s right, and I always thought that if I became a parent I would have an only kid. I […]
On Monday, Cassie explained how the reproductive choices available to her felt like both a blessing and a curse. “I want to want a child,” she said, while admitting that, as of yet, she doesn’t. She’s not sure what to do. I can’t (and won’t) tell Cassie what to do. The thing about the […]
Cassie, when you proposed this series of posts—well, the truth is, I was worried. There’s nothing that seems to make a comments section ignite like someone pontificating on motherhood. And I’m embarrassed to say, I’m not quite sure if my—our—decision to have kids had much to do with science, beyond that biology might have conquered […]
When my grandma got married, the question of whether to have children wasn’t something that one pondered. If you could have kids, you did. My grandma had eight. Luckily she loves children. When my mom got pregnant at 17, she decided to keep me even though she had to drop out of high school. She […]
April 30 – May 4 Guest poster Sam McDougle starts the week the only way any week should ever start: with space dinosaurs. Anyway, his post seems to be about space dinosaurs; inside, you find a question about how far scientists should stretch the implications of their research to draw attention to the science (I […]
Even the dead kept watch. They sat upright in their graves, men and women, and faced the river, waiting, it seemed, for the waters to roil again with massive, steel-grey fish. The sturgeon, barbeled giants with rows of bony scutes down their backs, appeared each spring in Serbia’s Danube Gorge, after battling the current all […]
Earlier this year, during a reporting trip in West Virginia, I happened upon the tiny Watts Museum, a mining-history gallery tucked into West Virginia University’s sprawling Mineral Resources building. Its advertised exhibit, “Defying the Darkness,” detailed the history of mine illumination. Mine illumination? I pictured engineering blueprints and exhibit cases filled with switches and bulbs. […]
