[Editor's Note: This is political. I understand if you don't want to read it. My politics have always been very clear here -- someone once tried to get me fired from my job because of them. But I have to write this, because to say nothing might be interpreted as disinterest or agreement.]

The little angel appeared before my side of the bed. I didn't look at the clock.

"Mommy, I'm trying to stop a bad dream from forming," she said.

This has happened several times in the past few weeks.

I climbed into her bed with her and put my arm around her. We both fell asleep.

I woke up this morning thinking about my girl and how much I wish to protect her from everything scary in the world. I just read Margaret Atwoods' The Handmaid's Tale this past weekend. The daughter Offred loses would be eight. The little angel is eight.

"What's the matter? he said.

I don't know, I said.

We still have ... he said. But he didn't go on to say what we still had. It occurred to me that he shouldn't be saying we, since nothing that I knew of had been taken away from him." - p. 182

I'm not pro-abortion. I've never had one. I never wanted to have to make that choice. I understand the pro-life stance, maybe not some of the methods used to drill the message, but the message. In a perfect world, no one would ever need to have an abortion. Being pro-choice doesn't mean thinking all pregnancies should be aborted willy-nilly for whatever reason. Being pro-choice means wanting safe, affordable options for pregnant women who were made that way against their will or who will not be able to provide adequate care for a child or for whom a pregnancy is a health risk. Being pro-choice means wanting pregnancy to be avoided in the first place via safe, affordable birth control and sex education. Being pro-choice, to me, means wanting to ensure girls and women can avoid that, the most horrible choice there can ever be, from ever arising in the first place.

We're humans. The women have the babies. If it were any other way, if instead of genders we had blue and green and sometimes blues had the babies and sometimes greens had the babies, I don't think there would be this issue. The way it stands, the women ALWAYS have the babies; it's just the way our anatomy works. And because of that, it makes individual rights very, very tricky. There really is no comparison for the other gender, and I don't blame men for that -- it's not their fault they don't have the babies any more than it is women's fault that we do, or we can. That we are capable of doing so.

But we are not vessels.

There is no way an egg can get inside a man to be fertilized with the sperm, leaving its existence or nonexistence up to the man or to a government that wants to have a say in that fertilized egg's existance.

If a man is raped -- because that totally happens, too -- the government has no say in how he deals with the fallout. A man can get a disease from rape -- all sorts of horrible things can happen to a man -- but the government can't pass an amendment to the Constitution to force him to keep a pregnancy resulting from abuse against his will. I'm not even talking about a child -- I'm talking about a pregnancy. At a certain point one becomes the other, and we can agree to disagree on when that is, but the government is not trying to make amendments about born babies, so to me, it's a moot point.

I realize completely there is really no point in arguing about whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, because such stances are deeply personal and all we can do is disagree civilly and vote to support politicians who we believe will treat us with respect.

It is the respect part I keep getting stuck on this week, any week, when it comes to this issue. My uterus is in early retirement. I don't plan on using it again, have taken steps to insure against accidents. I'm not worried about the government legislating my uterus, because I benched it.

The Handmaid's Tale is a book about a society in which women are valued only for their fertility due to depopulation and a government takeover by a highly religious society. Atwood, in her ending "A Note to a Reader," wrote this, in 1986:

"The roots of the book go back to my study of the American Puritans. The society they founded in America was not a democracy as we know it, but a theocracy. In addition, I found myself increasingly alarmed by statements made frequently by religious leaders in the United States; and then a variety of events from around the world could not be ignored, particularly the rising fanaticism of the Iranian monotheocracy. The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale except in time and place ... It is an imagined account of what happens when not uncommon pronouncements about women are taken to their logical conclusions. History proves that what we have been in the past we could be again."

I am a spiritual person. I have my relationship with my God. But God isn't writing human laws, people are -- people who are interpreting God. We don't know. We won't know until later. People are fallible, can take things too far, can take their beliefs to unwanted logical conclusions.

I sat in bed for a while this morning, thinking about everything I've seen and read in the past 48 hours regarding abortion and women's health and women being denied services and "legitimate rape," and I, too, wanted to stop the bad dream from forming.

I have a vote, and I have a blog, and this is all I can do. As Atwood also wrote in an interview in the back of my library book:

"After all, this is the United States and it is North America and it is a pluralistic society and we have many people with differing points of view. A number of people would not take this lying down."

We have to keep talking about it. It's important. My daughter is only eight, and she has a whole life of experiences -- good and bad -- ahead of her. I want her to have her rights intact to move forward through life as she sees fit. She is the best thing I've ever produced, but I am more than just her mother. She is more than her someday fertility.

Women are more than that. We are more than one-half of the population. We just happen to be the half that has the babies.

Last night I found out about an unexpectedly large bill. I'd just returned from CVS, where I spent twenty-five minutes combining coupons with weekly deals to save $23. The pointlessness of blowing all that time to save a few bucks only to find out a mistake had cost us hundreds totally deflated me. And it was 107 degrees at 7 pm.

I sank to the kitchen chair. Tears sprang to my eyes. "I think I'm going to throw up," I said.

I sat there, breathing deeply, trying to calm my anxiety, when my daughter appeared at my side and handed me the teddy bear that lives in her room but was mine when I was her age.

She patted my arm and went upstairs to shower.

Wow.

In every marriage, there's a moment in which you get to be the one who is right. My moment came on Saturday night.

On Saturday, a series of events led to my victory. 

1. A two-week heatwave was flaming out in a 105-degree burst of glory.
2. My brother- and sister-in-law and their two daughters were staying the weekend.
3. A door between the garage and the house was left open.

When I realized the door had been open, I went to look for Petunia. She's never left the garage before, but she has visited it when I've left the kitchen door open, and on the night in question, both doors to the garage were open in an attempt to release the atomic air trapped inside. Since Petunia is terrified of my youngest niece, I assumed she'd be hiding out in the basement. 

Halfway down the stairs, I saw something flutter. No, FLAP.

I ran back upstairs and yelled to Beloved there was something with WINGS in the basement. 

Beloved: "Wings? Really? Are you sure it's not a cicada?"

I may not be in Mensa, but I know the difference between a cicada and a bird or bat (I wasn't sure which one it was at the time.) There's a slight size differential.

This is a cicada. (image credit: Gardener41 on Flickr)

This is a fucking bat. (image credit: blmurch on Flickr)

Me: IT IS NOT A CICADA.

He dropped whatever he was doing and went downstairs. Seconds later, we heard a loud crash from the basement. 

Beloved: JESUS CHRIST! BAT! BAT!

(I may have allowed myself a smile)

I went to get a broom to join my knight in shining armor downstairs. He was crouched in front of the door to the half-finished bathroom, which leads to a half-finished, well, room room that we use as a tornado shelter. Nothing in our basement is finished, so we don't spend a lot of time down there. 

Beloved looked back at me, sheer panic in his eyes. I could see the bat flying back and forth between the room-room and the bathroom, looking for all the world like the bat on a string you see on The Muppets.

Beloved: I think he's getting tired.

My BIL came down the stairs and I sent him for a weapon. Then I gave Beloved my broom, because the man was trying to catch a bat with a toy butterfly net. I headed up to re-arm myself when I passed my BIL storming down the basement carrying a shovel. I was pawing through the garage when he reappeared. 

BIL: "He says we need something softer."

Me: "Is he worried about the bat?"

BIL: "No, he's worried about the walls."

I handed my BIL two plastic baseball bats and grabbed a bucket. As we re-entered the house, we heard Beloved yelling at the top of his lungs.

Beloved: "WHERE ARE YOU GUYS? A LITTLE HELP HERE???"

We rushed down the stairs, baseball bats swinging, to find Beloved crouched on the floor. Just the tiniest bit of webbed claw showed out from under the broom and butterfly net. BIL and I stared in shock. The bat was chittering away like a pissed-off rat.

Beloved: "GET THE BAG!"

I had no idea what he was talking about, and neither did BIL. Then I noticed a paper bag behind BIL. I tried to hand Beloved the bucket, as it seemed way more useful and user-friendly than a paper bag, but Beloved had gone to a place that doesn't hear reason. He is not fond of bats.

Finally BIL handed Beloved the bag and they got the bat out into the yard, where PETA will be glad to hear it was released. I admit at the point at which I heard it cursing us out in bat language, I wasn't too keen to kill it, but I was also thinking CHILDREN RABIES CHILDREN RABIES CHILDREN RABIES, as mothers are wont to do.

The next morning, the bat was gone, so we believe he lived to tell his story on his own blog.

AND I WAS TOTALLY RIGHT. Not a cicada, honey. 

NOT A CICADA.

Scene: Gas station. Vicki is parked, and I'm pumping gas. Vicki's top is down. Stop it -- she's a convertible.

Little Angel: (with a clear view of the pump since the top is down) $1, $2, $3

Me: Yup.

Little Angel: That's going really fast.

Me: Yup. Vicki's got a fifteen-gallon tank. It's going to be like $50.

Little Angel: $15, $16 ... (on up to $48).

Me: Huh, gas prices must've gone down.

Little Angel: It costs that much money just to put gas in the car?

Me: Ha. Yes.

Little Angel: No wonder you're not a stay-at-home-mom.

Ba-dum, ching!

Speaking of not being a stay-at-home-mom due to financial necessity, I wrote a new post on crying vs. yelling at work over at BlogHer. The comments are great, go check it out!

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Struggling to get your kids to exercise? Check out my review of Geopalz on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

Today my co-worker Denise pointed out this post on the unimportance of stuff. This was my favorite line:

 I chose not to mourn stuff and save all my sorrow for people. 

My family has always been rather divided on the importance of stuff. There are some of us who hold items very near and dear and are devestated if anything happens to them because the stuff reminds them so much of a good memory or a lost beloved. And then there are others of us -- like me -- who delight in getting rid of stuff and actively work toward not forming attachments to it.

I wasn't always like this. I had very stong attachments to stuff as a child and young adult. A few months after my grandparents died, my roommate in Chicago threw away a blanket from their house. (He claims it was an accident; I claim it was part of his oversight issues.) I freaked out on him. FREAKED OUT. I remember spending hours searching through all sorts of apartments and houses when I would randomly remember a possession and didn't know where it was. Oh, how I cried when I couldn't find (insert possession here -- there were many). I was very, very, very upset a few years ago when I lost my wedding ring. I kept my grandmother's extensive shoe collection for years after she died, even though I never wore one pair. I used to carry a day planner around in Chicago filled with quotes and pictures and cards -- one of my friends actually expressed amazement that I would haul around so much with me every day. I couldn't imagine going anywhere without it.

Somewhere along the line, I became concerned about my attachments to stuff, especially my writing. I made back-ups of back-ups (and still do) and worried so much about what would happen if I lost all those poems and short stories and novels. Right now I have all my notes on my next novel in one notebook that I have ferreted away behind my printer. I haven't typed them up anywhere, and it would be pretty bad if I lost that notebook. 

But I'm actively working on not forming an attachment to it, or to those exact notes. I'm not ready to start that novel yet, not when the one I'm on is out with editors now.

I think it was my grandparents' blanket that got me. Before I left Chicago, I sold the antique three-quarters bed of my grandmother's that I'd been sleeping on to a friend. I realized the depth of my despair over the blanket was really my grief for the people I loved so much. Their stuff is just their stuff, even the stuff made by them. I love the stuff, I cherish the stuff, I place the stuff in positions of honor around my house and celebrate the stuff, but I actively work not to get too attached to the stuff, because something could happen. A tornado. A fire. Just an accident in which said stuff gets broken. A robbery. I just don't ever want to feel that hurt by the absence of a thing again. 

I understand this is just me working against my anxiety, and it's  perfectly fine for other people to feel a different way about stuff. My daughter is so attached to her stuffed animals that she mourned a bunny she gave away for months until I finally asked for it back from the neighbor and offered to replace it with something else. She's displaying a super-strong attachment to stuff, and who knows, maybe she will always feel that way. That's not wrong, and I won't discourage her from attaching to stuff. Especially when you're a kid, I think it's really helpful to have comfort objects.

I'm constantly reminding myself every time the sky turns green that the Corolla was just stuff, and now I have Vicki the convertible. If something happened to Vicki, something else would appear in her place. If my computer's hard drive gets wiped or I lose that notebook behind my printer, my writer mind will come up with a new story, maybe a story even better. I can't worry about losing things all the time. I have to trust I can create anew every lost story, I can replace every lost possession, I can grow and change to fit any new scenario. My people have to be the most important, and all my energy is going into them, because they cannot be replaced.

I will save my sorrow for them.

My cat, Petunia, is thought the world over to be a hellcat. When you ask my niece what Petunia says, she says "HISS." The neighbor girl who desperately wants a cat is scared of Petunia. And the last vet we had saw Petunia as a personal challenge, a mustang to be broken, a spirit to crush. 

Petunia, at home, looks more like this.

But when we went to our old vet, Petunia would barely be out of her travel carrier before she transformed into a flat-eared, fanged, hissing, spitting, malevolent force of nature capable of stealing your breath and banishing you to the land of lost souls. And that sometimes could occur even in the lobby. After two or three rounds of this, the vet suggested we tranq her before bringing her in.

See those pupils?

After the last visit last December in which Petunia was getting her three teeth cleaned (she had to have one canine pulled when we adopted her because of tooth decay) and that little procedure took twelve hours, I called last straw. I couldn't take it anymore. I know Petunia wasn't being abused, but the mental anguish I was going through seeing her so revved up just broke me. I swore never again would Petunia grace the threshhold of what normally looks like a major pet big box store.

And then I put it out of my mind.

This weekend, we hosted Easter for my parents and sister. Somewhere along the line, Petunia ate something she shouldn't have (we can be messy eaters, especially a certain redheaded someone who had a chocolate birthday cake with pink icing that can be seen from outer space) and commenced barfing last night. She's thrown up six times in the past 24 hours, all, of course, on the carpet.

This morning, I told Beloved I was going to do it: I was going to take her to a new vet.

With great apprehension, I stuffed her in her carrier and drove to the new vet. She gurgled the whole way there with unhappiness. I explained to the receptionist that she could morph from sweet baby girl into Satan's spawn in nanoseconds despite having no front claws and only three teeth. They took note.

Into the exam room we went. It had a window, and Petunia and I spent several minutes watching a robin try to brain itself against the glass for no apparent reason.

The vet walked in. I went over again with her that she might want to don a flak jacket. 

She opened the bag. 

She pulled out Petunia.

She palpitated Petunia's neck. She rubbed Petunia's belly.

Petunia meowed in annoyance.

She held Petunia and talked to me for like seven minutes and only at that point did Petunia hiss a tiny bit with impatience.

The vet told me she was going to take Petunia in the back and give her an anti-nausea shot after I mentioned I'd seen her sniffing at some chocolate cake crumbs before I could sweep them away. She told me she would not hurt Petunia but she would restrain her if needed, and then she took her into the back. I heard Petunia meowing and meowing, but none of the gutteral underworld yowls came from the back. There was also no hissing.

All the sudden, the vet was back putting Petunia in her carrier.

And it was over.

Now, does this mean Petunia won't grow to hate this vet, too? Jury's out. However, I'm absolutely kicking myself for allowing a wellness plan to keep me at the old vet for so long. Breaking up with a vet is like breaking up with a stylist, and when this new vet called the old vet to get Petunia's records faxed over, I felt a little like hiding under the steel table lest they see me through the phone.

As I type this, Petunia is winding around my ankles, begging for food, because she can't have anything to eat or drink for twelve hours, and I'm not going to give in because $57, an hour of my time and at least three cups of adrenaline are not going to be wasted just because she is temporarily thirsty and hungry.

This whole adventure just goes to show rule 1 of catdom: HOLD GRUDGES FOREVER.

Sorry, old vet. Petunia clearly just had your number.

The Mega Millions lottery, which is available in a whole lot of states, is up to half a holy fucking shit dollars. Tonight at 11 pm in Atlanta (for which I'm too lazy to figure out the time zone), they're going to draw a number and someone's going to get half a billion dollars.

This morning on the radio the djs were talking about what you should do if you won. Really key stuff like getting kidnapping insurance and immediately hiding your loved ones, who would become immediate targets.

There is a lottery ticket hanging on our refrigerator door. 

That's sobering, isn't it? Money means so many things to people, but though I've often thought it has the power to corrupt, I never thought about it having the power to endanger before. Then again, it's hard to even think about the word "lottery" without thinking of Shirley Jackson's amazing short story.

I'm up again to answer a BlogHer.com Life Well Lived question. This one is pretty great.

How do you put yourself first? How does taking time for yourself help make you happier? 

I don't know what the outside perception of me putting myself first is, but I think I do it a lot. I didn't used to -- I used to do whatever I was asked to do, and then a bunch of stuff I thought I was supposed to do and then maybe at the end something I actually wanted to do. 

About five years ago, I started really examining what I could do to better manage my anxiety. I realized that excercise really helped amp down the adrenaline I can get unexpectedly and for no good reason. Now that I work from home, it's not unusual for me to turn to the jump rope or a short workout DVD or even push-ups if I start to feel my emotions spinning and I need to focus. So after spending nearly twenty years exercising for weight management, suddenly I was exercising to access some good dopamine -- which totally changed my attitude about doing it. I stopped resenting it as something I had to do and started looking forward to the feeling I'd get after working out -- something I wanted to feel, so exericise became something I wanted to do. I now look at that time as me time and putting my good feelings first.

I put a lot of time into my writing, in all its formats. I write fiction, here, and on BlogHer.com. Part of it is my job, but there's such a fuzzy line between work and play when you have a job you really love.

I love to sleep. I sleep as long as I can, whenever I can. Other moms are shocked at how late I will sleep on weekend mornings when Beloved and the little angel let me, and they often do. I make no apologies for this sleeping. It helps me rejuvinate from throwing everything at my work week, and I'm a much more fun person when I'm not tired. We've all made peace with that.

I have one child on purpose. When we first made the decision to have a small family, a lot of people got all up in our grill about it, as though not having multiple offspring was somehow selfish or cruel to our daughter. I felt really insecure about it for a long time, but now I'm as unapologetic about having an only as I am about sleeping. Our family of three is extremely loving and extremely agile, and I relish taking off for the zoo spontaneously and without anything but a wallet. I don't like chaos, and it's easier to avoid chaos without lots of kids. There, I've said it. My daughter has voiced both her love of being an only and her regret that she doesn't have brothers or sisters. I'm sure she'll vascillate on her opinion of it from day to day for the rest of her life, but she'll always know we love her unconditionally. I can't do much more: I've tried brainwashing her that my every decision is perfect, and it's not taking very well.

I don't have a dog. The little angel desperately wants a dog. But even if my mother weren't deathly terrified of all dogs, I still would not have a dog. I don't like barking or licking. Aren't I painting an awesome picture of myself? I adore other people's dogs, but like those who don't want children, I really don't want a dog that will need to be walked and have his poop picked up by me on a daily or weekly basis. It interferes with that agility I so treasure in our little family. Thus we have Petunia the cat, who cuddles and then wanders off to reorganize the library without remark when we leave town for a weekend. 

In the past, when I've thought about taking time for myself or putting myself first, I thought about things like getting a pedicure or going to the library alone. Those things are awesome, awesome, awesome, but anything can be putting yourself first if you're thinking about it that way. Every little thing you do to make your environment more comfortable for your particular needs is putting yourself first. I also think to some extent making your family more comfortable is putting yourself first, because the happier they are, probably the happier you are. Nothing makes me happier than my daughter's joy, so I really like having adventures and introducing her to new things. It might look like I'm doing something for her, but in the end, it's for me, too. I get to see the smile.

What do you do for yourself? Dr. Aymee has some tips over at Live Well Lived on BlogHer.com. Or you can skip straight to commenting to win a Kindle Fire, because I will not rest until everyone has an ereader.

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The folks at Lego reached out to tell me about their new Build Together site. It has instructions for how to build different things with standard lego sets organized by how much time you have and how much skill you have. I thought that was pretty smart, so I'm sharing it with you. I wasn't compensated for that little ditty, I just like legos.

I've been here in Austin at the first Dad 2.0 for two days now, and so far my take-away is how good my husband and I have it. Both our fathers are alive and active in our lives and our daughter's life. My husband is a world-class father and an amazing example of how to bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. He has friends who are dads and indeed capable of talking about parenting with him, if he really wants to (I suspect they talk more about work and sports, but these guys are well-rounded awesome men married to powerful, well-rounded women). I don't know how Beloved feels about his support network, but I feel really good about it. My vision of modern fathers is one of an engaged, enlightened generation of guys who come home from work and talk to their kids about their homework or get on the floor with their babies. It's easy to forget it was just a generation or so ago that wasn't necessarily the case as a cultural norm.

What I'm learning from the men here is that they're as WTF about beer commercials as I am. They are tired of being portrayed in the media as inept cavemen incapable of diapering a baby or ignoring a hot twentysomething. 

They're trying to change the way they talk to their sons about being a man. Instead of squishing emotions, they are facing them and writing about them. They're -- along with moms, I believe -- open to recognizing just good parenting rather than good mothering or good fathering. Men and women do bring different elements to the table as we talk to our kids about puberty or heterosexual relationships, but the act of making dinner for your child or reading her a bedtime story or dropping her off at a friend's house -- no different. There's nothing gendered about most of parenting. 

Having these conversations with fathers who are also writers has been really fun for me. Writers tend to be a different breed just in general, more likely to talk about their feelings with total strangers. I'm accustomed to having these breakthrough conversations with women having been a very active member of the BlogHer community for the past six years, but prior to this conference I've only had those conversations with men outside my family and close friend group with two or three male bloggers, one of whom was in Sleep Is for the Weak. It's not lost on me the same guy who was one of the first guys to talk to me frankly, honestly, as a friend, with no weirdness, about parenting, is the same guy who co-founded Dad 2.0.

It's been a great conference, so far, and I'm excited to meet more of these guys today and tonight. I'm here with BlogHer.com editor-in-chief Stacy Morrison, as well as Polly Pagenhart and Shannon Carroll from the BlogHer conference team, and we're having a great experience. Way to go, Doug and John, and especially you, Doug, old friend and dad blogger extraordinaire. 

It's interesting -- David Wescott tweeted at me this:

@dwescott1 #dad2summit, great mombloggers are here, "rooting for" dads. would be the same if dads had a 5yr headstart?

I didn't say anything much on Twitter, but when I ran into David yesterday I said, "Well, look at Congress." And we stared at each other for a second, both sort of dismayed about that. I wasn't blaming him and he wasn't pitying me, we were both just sort of WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY is more than half the population so underrepresented in power positions in America? And WHY WHY WHY are we still acting like a penis disqualifies a man from being able to make a dentist appointment for his son?

I hope women and men as we go forward can look at parenting just as parenting and look at working just as working and recognize that all people bring something valuable to the table based on personality, not on gender. The world is changing, and I want to see it move toward true partnership between men and women instead of one-upsmanship and competition. Who's with me?