I haven’t seen Juno, but I want to, especially after watching the Academy Awards. So this morning I was drawn to a Canadian mommy-blogger who posted on it here.
Juno resonated with the blogger (who calls herself, I hope ironically, Her Bad Mother) because of her decision years ago to abort an unwanted baby. The entry is inspired by her gratitude to her own mother, who supported her through the abortion despite her own obvious grief. It’s a moving and disturbing column, worth reading in its entirety, but here are some excerpts.
On the abortion itself:
Then, then, she made all arrangements and we made the long drive, together, to the place where I had to walk a terrible mile alone, but she was there, again, on the other side and that night we curled up together on a dusty bed in a motel together, somewhere some distance from home and cried and contemplated our ghosts…
On appreciating her mother for helping her to have an abortion:
I didn’t understand the depth or breadth or weight of my mother’s sacrifice until I became a mother myself, and the ghosts gathered ’round me, and whispered to me of love and loss and regret and unregret and gripped my heart in their tiny hands and squeezed until I cried. I didn’t understand until I’d suffered a loss not of my own devising, until I’d prayed for the life of this child, this oh-so-badly-wanted child. I didn’t understand until I became a mother, for real, for aching-heartfelt-feargripped-real, just how great a thing she had done.”
This blog entry speaks to me of three victims: The unwanted child, the heartbroken grandmother, and the blogger herself, whose grief years later shines through in her writing. What a culture we’ve created, in which a young woman suffers “a loss of her own devising” and is convinced she did the right thing. What a strange standard by which to judge motherhood, that helping your daughter abort your grandchild, while doing permanent damage to herself, is considered worthy of gratitude and praise.