BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

Mother's Day, for me, is filled with a conflicting thoughts & feelings. Party because I struggled over 12 years with almost intractable infertility issues. My own mother had a personality disorder whose negative aspects were focused on me. I never told her I was an infertility patient. I couldn't, it would have brought with it a lot more verbal abuse than I was already taking for simply being alive. Once I finally did have children I realized I would never feel "normal" - I would always be infertile because I could not do easily what most other women do. One thing she said to me a great deal was " you owe me ." Over and over I was reminded that I 'owed her' for working to provide a home for myself & my sibling, raising me and most of all: for having me in the first place. Especially since I was a " freak, a loser, ugly " and " no man would ever want " me. So it was to her tremendous shock when she had this convers...

By Lisa Copen (excerpts) "I don't understand why you won't at least take his phone number; he's a Christian and he specializes in herbal remedies. He could heal you and then you could share his success with everyone and that could be your ministry…" I was standing in the buffet line at a special dinner for committee members of an international revival that had come to town. Some would go as far to say that those attending this dinner were the who's who of local women in ministry, and I was proud to be among their company. Despite their involvement and leadership in ministry, however, this group of women was healthy-bodied and provided many examples for me to share about how, as a church body, we can increase our awareness and understanding of those who live with chronic conditions. When one committee member asked why I was appointed as the disabilities coordinator I shared a few words about my ministry. She in turn asked me what drugs I was on because ...

I've found a guy who can do this better than I can By Dave Barry Before we get to today's column, I have an important announcement regarding outsourcing. "Outsourcing" is a business expression that means, in layperson's terms, "sourcing out." It's a trend that started years ago in manufacturing, which is a business term that means "making things." You youngsters won't believe this, but there was a time when Americans actually made physical things called "products" right here in America. Workers would go to large, grimy buildings called "factories" where they would take a raw material such as iron ore and perform industrial acts on it, such as "forging" and "smelting." By the end of the day, as you can imagine, they smelt terrible (rim shot) but they had turned the ore into something useful, such as a locomotive, or a toaster, or (this was not a big seller) a toaster-locomotive. The making of thin...