Tag Archives: vasectomy

Duggars

Repost: “Why don’t you eat what you’ve got?”

Here’s a repost from June 12, 2012. I am sharing it because it makes a point about a much more recent situation that will be relevant to today’s fresh content.

I remember when I was a small child, my mom would fill up my plate at dinner time.  I’d eat a few bites and then want more.  My mom would look at me in disgust and say, in her most peevish tone of voice, “Why don’t you eat what you’ve got?”  Suitably chastened, I would then try to enjoy what I already had on my plate before accepting more.

Many years later, I look at super sized families like the Duggars, who are hellbent on having “blessing” after “blessing”.  To date, Michelle Duggar has had 19 pregnancies.  She’s had two sets of twins, fifteen single births, and two miscarriages.  She and her husband, JimBob, now have 19 living children, several of whom are now adults, but still sleeping in the same dormitory like bedroom as their toddler aged siblings. 

The Duggars, who once lived a very humble existence with all those kids living in a tiny house, now live in a large compound.  They have a reality television show that has allowed them to enjoy things that would have been well beyond their means had they never been discovered.  Oddly enough, the Duggars claim not to watch TV… and yet TV has afforded them a luxurious lifestyle.

The Duggars in the early days. They did not live in the Tinkertoy Mansion.

Since about 2004, this family has been on the airwaves and I have watched their ranks expand with each new pregnancy.  I’ve watched their clothing styles change from frumpy jumpers with lacy collars and polo shirts with khakis to name brand sportswear.  There are an astounding number of “blessings” in that household… and yet the Duggars still want more.

They claim that each child is a “gift” from God and they are happy to accept any “gift” God wants to send to them.  But I can’t help but think that with each new “gift”, they get the chance at another season on TV.  Last year, Michelle Duggar hoped to have her 20th “gift”, even though her 19th child was born very prematurely and has had some significant medical obstacles to overcome.  I think about the cost of that 19th child Michelle Duggar had in her 40s…  That child–Josie– no doubt generated huge medical bills.  A regular middle class couple with a child who had Josie’s medical problems, would no doubt have serious challenges taking care of that child’s needs. 

Yet the Duggar family had 18 healthy children before Josie… 18 kids who no doubt also generate expenses.  Yes, several of those kids are now legal adults who can help out, but they still live at home.  They are committed to the “family business”… JimBob’s side businesses and their TV show, which they have to keep on the air if they hope to maintain their lifestyle.   

The Duggars have become entertainers.  And they are presumably paid well to be entertainers.  Michelle Duggar’s hyperactive womb has turned them into stars just for existing and being conservative Christians. A lot of people admire them because they seem like such a nice, wholesome, loving family.  But here they are, whoring themselves on TV– a gadget they claim is too evil to use themselves– and Michelle is encouraged to risk her life to keep having “blessings” to prove to everyone just how special and blessed they are as a family.  To me, it just looks an awful lot like greed and foolishness.

I tell you what.  I cringe when I hear that family talk about how every child is a blessing from God and that each child is proof of God’s favor.  What about the many men and women who are infertile?  Does God not love them too?  I don’t have kids.  I always wanted them, but I fell in love with a man who had a vasectomy with his first wife.  A vasectomy reversal has not been effective in making us fertile… and rather than spend thousands on medical or legal remedies in order for us to become parents, we opted to stay childless.  Does that mean that God doesn’t love us?

I realize we’re pretty lucky.  The desire to have children together was not that strong for us.  There are a lot of couples out there who don’t have kids and go to great lengths to have them.  They endure expensive, painful, and invasive medical treatments or they set aside their privacy to allow social workers and lawyers to allow them to adopt.  And sometimes, those great lengths they go to aren’t enough and they end up with nothing to show for their efforts.

I look at the Duggar family and others like them and I hear my mom chastising me.  “Why don’t you eat what you’ve got?”  I want to ask Mrs. Duggar why what she has isn’t enough.  She has beautiful children, most of whom are completely normal and healthy.  It looks like even her 19th child, Josie, will overcome many of her medical challenges.  Why isn’t that enough?  What good is being a mother when your oldest daughters have to assist you in raising your children?  What good is being a mother when you can’t even tell reporters what your children’s favorite colors are or what subjects they enjoy in school?  Why can’t the Duggar family enjoy what they already share and so many people would love to have?

Just a thought that popped into my head this Sunday morning…

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Bill

Bottoms up…

Thanksgiving approaches this week. Since we’re in Germany, it’s not a huge deal in these parts. Bill is planning to cook Cornish game hens, and I’ll probably make his favorite cake from scratch. We’ll have our usual sides, cranberry sauce, maybe some rolls, and plenty of wine. No raw vegetables will be consumed, though, because on Monday of next week, Bill has to have a medical procedure done. I’m… uh… not really looking forward to it. Let’s just say that Sunday promises to be quite shitty. Being ever the pragmatic, prepared sort, Bill came home last night armed with what’s in today’s picture. He has butt wipes and butt paste, since he’s probably going to be a bit… raw. I hope he won’t require diapers, too.

Since Bill is 55 years old, his healthcare provider suggested that he have his colon scoped. This procedure, known as a colonoscopy, requires that he be sedated. Since he’s going to be under the influence of drugs, I must accompany him and drive him home from Landstuhl. This probably means I’m finally going to try driving our new Volvo, since that car is more comfortable than my 2009 Mini Cooper convertible is.

We bought the car a few months ago. It’s a 2020 model, and we got it straight from the factory in Sweden. Bill says it practically drives itself. It has all kinds of fancy gadgets and tools designed to make driving safer and more pleasant, including a very annoying GPS system that turns down my music to repeatedly tell us where to go. I actually hate driving with the GPS, even though I know it’s a handy device. I find it hard to have conversations or enjoy music with that carping female computer voice booming over everything. But since it’s Bill’s car and I’ve never driven it before, I guess I’ll defer to the nagging old bitch. At least the voice in the Volvo’s GPS doesn’t sound like it belongs to a two pack a day smoker, like one of our old GPSes did. By the way, Bill would happily let me drive the Volvo if I wanted to. I don’t really enjoy driving that much, though, so I let him do it when he’s not bombed out of his mind on mind altering drugs.

We’re taking Arran to the Hunde Pension Saturday, then on Sunday, we’ll go to Landstuhl. Bill will fill out forms at the hospital, then we’ll check into a hotel, where at 6:00pm, he’ll drink half of a bottle of GoLYTELY. This is a brand name for a polyethylene glycol electrolyte solution, which is a laxative. Bill will then shit his brains out until 3:00am, at which he has to drink the other half of the bottle. I expect we won’t be getting much sleep. Bill also isn’t allowed to eat solid foods the day before the procedure, and has to adhere to a special diet this week. No raw veggies, no nuts, no seeds, no foods with red dyes, and I forget what else he has to avoid. He can only have clear broths on Sunday, and booze is out of the question.

Monday morning, they’ll sedate him. I’ll sit in the waiting room while they root around in his colon, looking for any signs of trouble. Then, while he’s mildly coherent, they’ll tell him what they saw in there. After that, I’ll drive us back to Wiesbaden and hope we don’t have an accident. Really, I’m an excellent driver, but I don’t like driving very much, especially in Germany. The Volvo has so many gadgets in it that it’ll be strange for me. It has an automatic transmission, and I don’t even have to use a key… I just have to have it on me or in the car. That will be weird.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to be Bill’s chauffeur. Back in 2004, Bill very kindly had his vasectomy reversed so we might be able to have a baby. We got up in the wee hours of the morning at our house in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and drove to Fort Meade to what used to be a full scale Army hospital. It’s now a health clinic with a same day surgery center. We happened to luck into the schedule with the vasectomy reversal, since the surgeon had just come in from downrange in Iraq. Military surgeons have to keep up their skills, so they do certain elective procedures for servicemembers, free of charge.

Bill had the surgery and it went very well. It was technically successful, and according to the test he took the following month, he was firing live ammunition– 90 million sperm, to be exact. Alas, I didn’t get pregnant, but maybe that was for the best. We didn’t have the money or time to pursue other methods of getting me pregnant, so that was that. Anyway, Bill had decided to have the surgery as a means of taking back a bad decision he’d made under pressure from his ex wife. She had convinced him to get “snipped”, complaining that pregnancy was “hard” on her. She had a son and their two daughters and convinced Bill that she was “done”. So he went under the knife for her.

A few years later, they got divorced. Two years after that, she had remarried and was pregnant again. She had another baby a few years after that, bringing her grand total to five. Meanwhile, I’m a mom to rescue dogs. One reason why I get so pissed off about people who promote vasectomies as if they’re simply reversed is because I have seen firsthand that they aren’t. Vasectomy reversals are not a joke, and they are a hell of a lot more expensive and involved than vasectomies are. And they don’t always work, either. People who have vasectomies should consider them permanent. It’s true that a lot of men can regain their fertility after getting a reversal, but it’s definitely not a given. I’m for people using less permanent birth control methods unless they are absolutely certain they are done having kids.

It used to upset me that I wasn’t destined to be a mother, but now I think it was probably a blessing that I missed out on having children… even as I wonder what kind of a child Bill and I would have had together. He or she probably would have had blue eyes, a short stature, and a propensity for swearing. Or maybe not… maybe he or she would have been genteel, polite, studious, and endlessly caring, like Bill is. He or she probably would have been a good writer and perhaps might have been a good singer or musician… or, more likely, a fine artist, since we both have artists in our families. Eh, well, we’ll never know. At least Bill’s daughter is sharing her kids with Bill, so he can be a grandpa.

One thing I do remember about that surgery was that Bill was asking the surgeon all kinds of questions. The surgeon kind of laughed and told me that he wouldn’t remember asking the questions– no one ever does. Sure enough, he didn’t… and I remember bundling him into my 1997 Toyota Corolla and driving us home, where he was laid up for two weeks to recover. We were lucky his bosses were so understanding, especially when he had to beg off of a PT test because he had a “profile” (meaning he had a health issue that prevented him from taking PT tests). The sergeant who administered the test winced when Bill said, “Ain’t gonna be there, Sergeant Timms, I gotta go get my junk hooked up.”

When he came back to work, his buddies had decorated his office with tons of cut out paper sperm, which he was still finding months later. They’d put them all over the place… in his desk, between pages of books, under his computer… it was hilarious!

If someone at his current job decorates his office with shit, I will probably shit a brick myself. But I don’t think any of his current pals are that irreverent. Besides, he works for a hoity toity contractor now, so it probably wouldn’t be kosher. Maybe I’ll decorate the house, instead… hang a log on the tree or something. I’m sure Arran will provide the best, or maybe I should stock up on brown construction paper and glitter.

Nah… it’s more fun to write shitty blog posts. Stay tuned for more that stink. I’m here all week.

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