By Rai Rojas
Editor’s note. My family is on vacation. While we are gone I’ll be running some new stories plus past articles that you’ve indicated you liked. Dave
When my nephew Nick was about 6 years old he wanted a Transformer – a popular plastic toy car of the time that transformed into a super-human robot.
He was determined to buy it himself. During that summer spent at my parent’s 5,000 square foot home, he went around the house asking everyone and anyone if he could do chores to earn the money for the Transformer. He wouldn’t take donations so I hid my reading glasses under my mother’s sofa and told him I’d give him five bucks if he found them. He did, and my five dollars put him over the top.
He and my mom went to the store later the next day and she ended up buying him the toy. He came home and at age six insisted on returning my money because his grandmother had bought it for him. I told him to keep it but he insisted on giving it back and I finally said, “Nick, just give it to charity.” He gave me an uneasy look and said, “Ok” and went on to play with his new toy.
About 20 minutes later he came back into the den, Transformer in hand, and asked me: “Who the heck is Charity and why should I give her my money?”
That memory makes me chuckle to this day.
Nick is my brother Ricardo’s oldest child and today he is a sophomore in High School. He still makes me laugh, he is kind, and polite and a joy to be around.
On May 2, 2010, Margaret Morganroth Gullette posted an article she titled “My Mother’s Abortion Improved All of Our Lives.” She writes about a day a few years ago when her then 80 year old mother decided to tell her that she had had an abortion in New York City during the late 1940’s. Ms. Gullette then spends the rest of the article justifying her mother’s decision to have her child destroyed and how “it helped the life paths of her entire family.”
Gullette writes:
“Having had two children already, my parents must have decided they couldn’t afford a third. In [my mother’s] view, you gave children some years of your motherly care – I got 10, my brother got eight. To have given a third child another eight years would have meant at least another eight years of poverty for everyone else.”
She writes about her father working 11 hour days and still not making enough money and how her family “ate through their savings.” And because her mother was able to get a teaching certificate after the abortion, and a job as a school teacher, “she earned a good and secure salary that rose every year.”
Because of the abortion Ms. Gullette says that,
“My mother and father moved us up some inches into the lower middle class so that I could get a good education. Everything proved her decision a correct one. It was clear that my mother never had any regrets.”
I too know what it is like to eat through your savings. My parents were in their late 20s when they brought my brother and me to this country from Cuba. When we arrived we were given a choice by the Federal government – move out of the state of Florida and qualify for many government grants and aid, or stay in Florida and all we could count on was their best wishes. Just as hundreds of thousands of other Cuban families – we opted to stay in Florida.
For the first 10 years here we lived in a one bedroom garage apartment. My father worked three jobs but it was still not always enough. My mother stayed at home with her 7 and 2 year old sons. Language was also a barrier since none of us spoke English until a few years after our arrival. Then almost to the date of our second anniversary of our being in the United States my mother announced that she was pregnant.
Were we to follow Ms. Gullette’s family example and reasoning, it would have surely been my mother’s responsibility to her family to abort that child. Our family took another course of action. My mother had my brother Ricardo.
Ms. Gullette adds that she finds it “hard to define ‘life.'” I suspect that she must because of the apparent callousness in her approach to life. I find it incredibly difficult that not once does she question the “what if my mother hadn’t had the abortion.”
She doesn’t at all associate the child aborted as her missing sibling, nor does she question the endless positive possibilities of having allowed that child to continue to live.
It’s apparently very black and white for her and those of her ilk. Abort and your life will improve – keep the child and it is abject misery. It is the lie that has cost this country 55 million children and keeps the likes of Planned Parenthood in business.
Thank God my parents didn’t see a third child as a familial yoke. How thankful am I that they didn’t do a budget analysis with his life; that my mother trusted my father to provide for one more little one; and that they didn’t see the next two decades of raising him as a burden.
Was it easy? No! As an adult I now know how difficult it actually was and why I sometimes went to school with moist socks, or why we had the same soup two days in a row. But we had each other, my mother ever watchful, both of my parents keeping us safe and as children we never realized that we were even poor.
Lots of hard work, good investments with hard earned money, and my parents, too, made it a “few inches” higher on the rung.
My brother Ricardo’s birth trumps her mother’s abortion. And I have a nephew named Nick who is one of the lights of my life.