Lessons

We are walking home, a riot of color and giggles and floaty dresses.

Oh! There on the sidewalk, fluttering madly is an injured butterfly.

Clop, clop, clop, the sidewalk is busy, I hold my breath as I watch you take in the scene in but a moment, you, my little clown and sometimes-smasher of bugs. But down you swoop and hold out your hand, your face now solemn, the picture of concerned wonder. The butterfly immediately crawls onto your palm and stills. You can almost feel its relief.

I motion to a potted bush to the right of the sidewalk and you gently let the butterfly down into its leaves where it will be safe.

This is compassion, and this is one of the ways it is honed.

Only a few steps later and we are confronted with another creature, this time a sparrow which has flown into a sign and fallen, dead. All three of you stoop down and gingerly touch its soft brown wing.

A few people walking by give a disapproving look.

It is ok, this is curiosity, learning, and compassion.

I share a short explanation. You understand and we move on, back amid the busy crowd.

But a little wiser, and I suspect -I hope- a little kinder.

Summer Storm

The street is a river,
Thunder claps!
Rain like a blizzard
And the trees fairly flap!

Wind and hail
Making folks scurry,
Down the drenched sidewalks
They race in a hurry.

The air is deliciously
Cool and sweet
As the rain slows its wild,
Windy beat.

Then all of a sudden
Its gone on its way,
The grass stands back up
And the trees stop their sway:
A summer storm came
Into town today~

Copyright Jacquelyn Bytyqi 2014

I hope it isn't yours

Sometimes I wonder how people can read a vaccine insert and not have that alone be enough to convince them not to inject such things into their child. I wonder how they can hear their friends and neighbors horror stories of vaccine adverse reaction and dismiss it. I wonder how graphs which factually show the historical decline of disease prior to the introduction of vaccines (and in some cases, displaying a sharp rise in a given disease immediately following said introduction) mean nothing to some.

Then again, I remember the fear that fueled my early decisions to vaccinate, despite the nagging of the intuition I've thankfully come to trust that there was something very wrong with it all. When you're faced with a white coat and lots of snappy rhetoric combated only by your own wavering uncertainty, well, often you cave.

Maybe you're a doctor/nurse/scientist, etc. and because of this you feel you've done your research. Well I'm a Mother, and I know I've done mine. I've spent hours and years pouring over everything I can read on the subject. Yes, I often use the internet to do so. Does this mean I have a Google degreee? Uh, no. What it means is that I've used this tool to access everything from Mommy blogs with anecdotal evidence to peer reviewed journals to informational videos from doctors and scientists who believe vaccines to be unavoidably unsafe and ineffective to independent studies to research conducted in different countries all over the world. Maybe you don't care, maybe that means nothing to you. Maybe you think its all bunk.
Then let me say this.

I hope it is not your children who are fully vaccinated and up to date on their pertussis vaccine and still get whooping cough, and get it bad.

I hope it isn't yours who burn with such raging fevers that they shake after having multiple vaccines injected into their tiny bodies.

I hope it's not you who find your baby convulsing with seizures following a vaccination session and are confronted with a pediatrician mildly shaking their head at you, dismissing your concerns as "all normal."

I hope it isn't you with a perfect and peaceful newborn, who is eating and sleeping well, but quickly all of that disitegrates into daily fits of screaming that last for hours on end, for weeks and weeks post vaccination (brain inflammation much? If only we'd understood then what we know now.)

I hope it isn't you watching your previously engaging and cheerful baby regress into strange repetitive behaviors that make your heart drop, staring at nothing with a dull, vacant look in their eye immediately following vaccination.

Those were just our experiences before we wised up and discontinued the vaccine madness all together and thankfully, everything I mentioned stopped there too. I don't believe in those kinds of coincidences.

Oh, but I have friends with worse stories. Some of those end in life long debilitation of the brain and/or body. Others in death.

And if that's just in my own small circle, then perhaps vaccine adverse reaction and inefficacy are not as rare as previously thought? Perhaps those things are actually the norm.

Maybe you don't think so. Shrug, that's fine, I guess. But when you stop suggesting that I'm endangering my children with my hard-wrought decisions, I'll stop suggesting you're poisoning yours.