PAULA NEAL MOONEY

In her Aug. 9 letter ``Abortion's Dark Ages,'' ( Akron-Beacon Journal ) Peggy Phillips decried the days of illegal abortion and feared the return to a time when ``many women will be forced to endure such dangerous procedures that put their lives at risk.'' Never did she sympathize with fetuses that may experience horrific pain during pregnancy termination. Medical advances now make us privy to more scientific data regarding childbearing from conception forward than in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided. DNA tests predict babies' sex at five weeks after conception. Pregnancy calendars inform us in Week 6 of the ``beginnings of the central nervous system,'' which receives pain signals. Pro-abortionists' desire to keep abortion legal is more about parental convenience and abdication of responsibility than anything. It's a wrong mind-set I too employed in the past, growing up in a self-centered society whose laws during most of my life made it OK f...

Jesus and Me There’s been a big debate lately about college-educated housewives, and if we’re wasting our brains and baccalaureates by abandoning good jobs to wipe little noses and butts all day. It started with Linda Hirshman’s “Homeward Bound” article in The American Prospect , wherein she decried homemaking as a detrimental road leading to a “demonstrable future loss of income, power, and security for the woman who quits.” Intense reaction to the piece landed Hirshman in “Good Morning America” segments that engaged career, hybrid and at-home moms in side-by-side tête-à-têtes. One homemaker was asked if she feared her husband leaving her destitute. Hesitating slightly, a nanosecond of silence masking her dumbfounded state, she offered a terse and defensive, “No.” If only she’d let down her more-motherly-than-thou guard long enough to tell the truth: that some of us save promising want ads until late-afternoon lessons with our kids compel us to toss them. That after heated fights wit...

In 1978, Christina Crawford shocked the world by releasing Mommie Dearest , a tell-all book that detailed the beatings she endured at the well-manicured hands of her famous mother, screen legend Joan Crawford. “She ought not do her mother like that,” my mom said as we watched a news report about the autobiography. I took note – not of Mommy’s lack of sympathy for Christina’s plight – only of her disapproval towards a daughter who exposed her mother’s ugly side – especially after that mother had died. Back then, at age 9, I intimately related to the perplexing state of living with a woman crazed with rage yet filled with a supreme love that prompted her to preserve my every hand-written report card and softly intone endearments like “sweetheart, lover, doll-boxy.” At 37, I now reside in the completely confusing, all-consuming state of blind devotion felt by any protector who would undoubtedly rip a mangy dog limb from tail that threaten to bite the same defenseless children she takes he...

I saw her in my pediatrician’s lobby: blonde and good-looking, too much make-up covering her 30-something magnetic face and slight jowl. Fighting time. As she leaned over to read to toddlers milling about, I surveyed the scene – and the dad who honorably gazed away from the fleshy humps uncovered by her deep V-neck. Another fair-haired lady threw her guarded glances. This kind of vixen pops up often in my observations, student of human nature that I am. One surprised me with a honeyed lilt in her voice and never-before-seen smile in her eyes as she joked with a married man, ignoring the wife at his side. A different one angered me with her pink-bowed, charcoal-black unmentionable (with an intriguing cutout design, I must say) on display above her belt loop for all of Chuck E. Cheese to see. Truth be told, I readily spot her type because I once was her – a vamp more concerned with the stomach-flipping advances of the male species than the soul-nurturing companionship (or glaring rage a...

Past a curved lane and down a rocky driveway sliced through a swath of skinny towering pines in New Franklin, Ohio, an oasis emerges. Complete calm exudes from the modern ranch resting amid fives acres of greenery, despite telltale signs of young life everywhere: upside-down bicycle helmets strewn about the lawn, a gray pygmy goat hopping atop his pen. Other clues point to a cog missing from the well-oiled machine. Fresh lettering on the mailbox spells out only one name, that of 41-year-old Dan McNeill, who jokes with his children as they beg to go fishing. Yet when they depart and talk turns to their mother, Barbara Jean McNeill, Dan’s eyes glisten behind the panes of his glasses and his head drops. “I’m capable of dying of a broken heart,” he sighs. Feb. 6, 2006 The date will forever be a bold notch on the timelines of those who loved Barb, a 38-year-old homemaker. On that cold Monday, Dan carted their six home-schooled children down to Salt Fork State Park for a day of fun and learn...

“Don’t you want me too, Mommy?” my son Cameron asked. He wriggled in the middle of our bed, outside the two lines formed by my daughter Cara’s body and my own. His vulnerable question transported me back three decades in time. I was once again a young girl, sitting with my mother on the edge of her bed, confronting her for the first time about her obvious favoritism for my one and only sibling. “You like Amber better than me!” I whined. It was a scene straight out of “The Brady Bunch,” with me cast as the oft-ignored Jan. But there was no laugh track in that bedroom with the coffee-bean colored hardwood floors, no warm-hearted denouement within 28 minutes whereby Mike and Carol dipped their heads into my room to assure me I was an equal. “No I don’t,” Mommy answered, and turned her head down and to the left, but not far enough to hide the smirk on her face. My mother’s preference for my big sister was apparent long before she admitted it. Amber was the baby she had wanted forever, the ...

"What do you think about Akron, Ohio?" Chris directed his question away from the headhunter on the phone. I paused about two seconds before wrinkling my nose and shaking my head in disapproval. Ten stories up into our skyscraper’s air, with the bustling downtown Chicago streets that bore and bred us beneath our feet, my future husband and I were desperate to move away from our psycho boss. But Akron sounded like an expanse of green more populated by cows than people. "Let us show you around beautiful Fairlawn," promised a different raspy-voiced fellow on our answering machine. I chuckled. How beautiful could it be? Pretty beautiful, it turned out – especially once the hand attached to that voice pushed salaries that represented whopping raises across a conference room table. In no time flat Chris and I packed our black Ford Explorer to the armrests and made the short trek across Interstate 80 eastbound toward our new lives. But four years into the deal, I couldn’t s...