This was a lovely article: honest, bittersweet, real.

Although the guilt that "open adoption" mothers is undeniably real and admirable, I hope they can take solace in a little perspective.

Try to remember the devastating journey of birth mothers in the past. In the past year, I was reunited with my biological grandmother. I took with a fair amount of equanimity the revelation that my father was the product of a rape, but Louise has never recovered from that. What shook my world was the way this highly responsible young woman was treated by family and society in 1940. For most women of that era and prior ones, violence, or the threat of it, was constantly beneath the surface of daily life. Losing a child to adoption was . . . well, I cannot even begin to describe the emotional turmoil my grandmother went through, because she struggles for words describing it to me. I heard the anguish even in the voice of her husband, who was with her at the time but clearly not the father. I learned that most of the guilt was on their side, not my adoptive grandmother's.

And what of abortion? Look around you at women over 70, and try to see young women faced with a choice that was, truly, no choice at all. There are more of them than you think, and don't kid yourself, some of them are in your own family. The power of birth mothers to control the circumstances of adoption is directly related to their power of choice in the first place.

And then, when you have considered these things, if you are an adoptive mother, put your guilt in perspective. Not all happy choices are without a painful underside, just as parenthood itself is a bittersweet journey -- even feeling guilt is a privilege. Things could have turned out much, much worse for the birth mother.

Meeting my grandmother happened around the same time I found out I would not ever give birth. Someday, I may be an adoptive mother. And I choose to feel good about that.

Mothers who choose to work make the choice to stay home harder. This results simply from the law of supply and demand.

Two-income families simply bid up the price of real estate in neighborhoods with good schools. Feminists and traditionalist women alike have failed to agitate, or have been powerless to agitate, for school improvement. Only in the mythical Lake Wobegon are all the children "above average." In America, we fight each other over scarce resources.

There is no "catfight" or "internal war" outside this reality.

Thanks, BobbyG. At least somebody gets the point: A president repeatedly making ass-covering excuses, saying he had every right to declassify government documents and leak them to the press, or spy on Americans -- but he had to do it IN SECRET. In other words, he did nothing wrong, but he didn't want to get CAUGHT DOING THE RIGHT THING. In honor of BobbyG's exceptional insight, here it is again:

<<On the latest President Leaks-at-Whim revelations: Let us not fall for the White House red herring here. Assume Mr. Bush indeed has unlimited de-classification discretion. Why, then, did the President not then simply go public at the outset to "refute" Ambassador Wilson (even w/redactions), if it was SO vital to the nation’s interest? Why the necessity to leak it on deep background to Judith Miller, with no one apprised of it other than himself, Cheney, Libby and Ms. Miller? Why? We know why. This dog just won’t hunt. Wake up, people. The President has been playing politics with national security all along, and the bloody, chaotic consequences are plain for all to see and are likely to just keep getting worse.>>

A country that still puts up with this OBVIOUS administration bullshit deserves what it gets. Oh, please, folks, cut the whining that you're going to be arrested and prosecuted and spied on and searched without a warrant and tax-audited in God-knows-what replay of "1984" if you complain or show up at a protest. Just do everything in your power to express your outrage. If little old ladies from Iowa could take the bus to the inauguration in 2001 to personally kick ass, you can call your congressman using your free cell phone minutes. Send some money to MoveOn. Show up on time to a demonstration. Look at that cocktail-party blowhard who wants to nuke everybody like he's the nut that he is. Circulate accounts of New Orleans and Abu Ghraib and, while we're at it, Riker's Island.

At least on the right they get to claim they "fought for our freedoms" by fighting pointless wars (or, by proxy, sending somebody else's kid). What the hell did we sacrifice lately in service to an actual point?

Why? Just for the heck of it. Because I have fun reading all this stuff -- it's called entertainment writing and it's gosh-darned entertaining! I even like the letters. And posting them when I have nothing better to do. And if I don't like the movie as much as Stephanie Zacharek does, I'm still going to re-subscribe. I'm just stupid that way. And cute. I'll bet I'm even cuter than Stephanie is, and I don't care if you're married, Theodore. I'll watch "American Dreamz" with you. And "American Idol." And "American Pie."

For a second there I thought that Gen X-ers or Y-ers or whatever were doing something IMPORTANT with their lives instead of sitting around watching yuppified TV shows. It turns out, according to David L., that they're e-mailing some of their best friends who happen to be black, posting blogs, and laughing at their own jokes. Instead of leading marches in Washington. But at least they get to comment on this sad, sad culture of ours. And, being in the coveted 18-34 demographic, they get to vote by buying stuff. Which they do, on cue, without even a whimper of protest.

They also watch these yuppified TV shows -- why else would the networks put them on if not to capture the 18-34s? But at least they're posting some great subversive stuff on the 'net, huh? And not blathering on and on boringly about the good old days of wine and pot and protest. Thanks to DSL, they figured out a way to be revolutionary without even getting off their asses, and thanks to TiVO, they can watch dumb TV shows without admitting that they watch them.