God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

 God is not always in the lobby. Picture a bright, sunny lobby with posters on all the walls. The inhabitants there are fairly tribal, hailing each other with pride and solidarity. Once you get in the lobby, there is only one way out, through a door to the dark hallway of unintended concequences. The hallway is full of more doors. It's scary and complicated, a place of woe and pain, so many denizens of the lobby just stay there. It's a happy place of rigid moral rectitude, a place where simple bromides make so much sense, they couldn't possibly be wrong. The fetus/child poster Take for instance, the poster that reads, "It's not a choice, it's a child." Wow, how could anyone refute that? If you believe in God, that little fetus is a reflection of God. Killing it is murder, and fighting it is to offend God, the Creator of all mankind. Even that gooey blob of protein has the DNA of a human being in it. I admit, for a believing Christian, it's a tough call...

 At least mine weren't. And I was 40 and 43. My faith sustained me. A little backstory first. I married at 39. Being a devout Christian, I felt I had a promise of marriage and kids, so when I met my lovely geologist husband at the Division of Mines and Geology in San Francisco, I didn’t hesitate to, you know, do what you do to make babies. I got married in a $70 creamy off-white dress that you could wear to dinner, which looked great on my size 10 body. However, 2 months later, it was clear I wouldn’t be wearing it for a while. So I put on the pounds right away. By the ninth month, when a woman sees her gynecologist once a week, I was huge and extremely uncomfortable. I could hardly turn over in bed, which is about when some women grab their doctors’ coat collars and shout, “Get this thing out of me!” “I’m so biiiig,” I wailed to my doctor. “No, not really,” he would always reply. “You’re fine.” “What’s happening down here, that’s going back and forth?” “That’s the head.” “The head...