MY great-great grandmother, Catherine Garvey, was born in Castleblaney, Ireland in 1816. She married, moved to America, had seven children (two of whom died in infancy) and took care of her home in Pennsylvania. She became a widow at the age of 60 when her husband fell down the stairs in the middle of the night.

Catherine Garvey died in 1905 at the home of her daughter. She was 89. Her obituary in the Scranton Times contained a brief description of her life that is worth contemplating this Mother’s Day. It read in part:

Mrs. Garvey’s character was noble and grand. She centered her affection upon her family and made the circle of her home the embodiment of virtue and happiness and in her dealings with her neighbors she was always kind and charitable. (more…)

ARETE writes:

I too was disturbed by the photograph on the cover of Time. That was the point of it. This was a very direct frontal attack on motherhood and I will explain why.

Now, thanks to one of the biggest magazines in the country, millions have a negative first impression of breastfeeding. If Time just needed a visual they could have chosen a beautiful painting by any of the masters but they chose this awful photo on purpose. This picture equates nursing with perversity! This is an attempt to make mothers who have normal, close nursing relationships of one to two years look like perverts and extremists. Whatever handful of mothers there are who breastfeed children of three are not doing so in tank tops in front of millions. (That looks like a photoshop job to me anyway … that child is huge!) (more…)

DUE to a formatting problem, the discussion in the previous entry about the Time cover of a mother breastfeeding her older child in a provocative pose is continued here.

Mary writes:

Funny how this dovetails so nicely with Elizabeth Badinter’s recent statements. Hmmm…one might even get the impression that there is some kind of unified message being presented in the media. (more…)

BUCK writes:

TONY at Catholic Phoenix made the announcement last week:

In a move already denounced by Catholic bishops & other leading religious conservatives, St. Sincerus University, the nation’s 84th largest Catholic university, has invited Satan to deliver its commencement speech later this month. (more…)

  TIBERGE at Galliawatch has posted an eight-minute video of François Hollande celebrating his victory in the presidential election at the Place de la Bastille. She writes: Hollande, who seems to be hoarse, shouts that he is happy that the young people he is addressing will construct the new French republic. This is an eerie document, where an ethnic Frenchman, a pawn in the hands of his potentially violent, multi-colored, multi-ethnic, multi-racial audience, imagines he is a leader, when in fact he is being led by a pre-determined doctrine of destruction. He appears terrified, but so did Nicolas Sarkozy, whenever he had to put himself among the immigrants and speak directly to them. He is both pathetic and demagogic, possibly foreshadowing things to come. She also quotes the French writer Bernard Antony on the results: The Socialist party and the whole left and extreme-left with it, now dispose of our country from the Presidency, to the Senate, to all the regional Councils, except Alsace, to two thirds of the general Councils, to the City Halls of Paris, and those of a majority of cities including Lille, Lyon, Toulouse, Nantes.

  NATASSIA writes: In Houston, Texas a man forgot his infant in the back of his truck while he attended a conference. He did not realize it until his wife called to see how their kids were doing. The child died. In Dallas, a mother left her child in her hot car to drink margaritas in a restaurant. She drank four in the space of 40 minutes.

  A READER writes: Regarding your recent entry on Vincent van Gogh, you may be pleased to know that there has recently been serious doubts cast on the belief that he killed himself. In brief, art historians who set out to write the first comprehensive, definitive biography of van Gogh discovered that his suicide was never thoroughly investigated, and that there was a local understanding that his confession of suicide was a cover-up by himself on behalf of a couple of village boys who were careless with a gun. There is a good article with the details here, a quick Google search will turn up many others.