March for Life, Washington DC, 2010

Wild and crazy bunch that we are, our little family made the spontaneous decision to join the March for Life in Washington D.C. this year! Chris was inspired when he was able to participate in the March for Life Charlotte the week prior (while the kids and I had to stay home sick). He brought up the idea of his going to D.C. and then we realized that this was probably going to be a rare year of good timing for the whole family to go: We have only two kids, so we could keep track of them easily in a crowd of perhaps 200,000; both kids are young enough to be physically contained (in a stroller and my Ergo); and I'm not yet pregnant (and therefore too sick to travel). So, on Thursday morning, we hit the road!

I was worried about the six-hour car drive because the kids (especially the older) have never been good in the car (and, by that, I mean that he could scream for hours straight). However, I suspect that the pod people came and replaced my children because they were downright pleasant for what turned out to be an eight-hour journey to D.C. There were two short stretches when Mary fussed, but otherwise she played with toys and ate snacks while John mainly looked at books quietly to himself. As I said, pod people is the only explanation I can think of.

John loved the backpack we had bought him the night before. It is one of those harnesses ("leashes") that I used to think so undignified before I had children. I wouldn't use one regularly, but I'd rather use one in a massive crowd than lose my child. Anyway, John thought it was the best thing because we told him it was so that we could play "follow the leader" and he'd lead the way while mama or daddy trailed behind, holding the strap.

We stopped for an hour to eat lunch while Chris took a work conference call in the quiet car. John really enjoys playing the Cracker Barrel game of placing colorful golf tees in the holes.

He enjoys it so much that we discovered hours later that John had put all the golf tees (and crayons) into our binoculars' case to play with later.

There is a demolition site a block from our hotel and we parked next to it for quite a while to watch. In fact, there was another vehicle with a mom and her joyous little boys watching the demo work, and there was even a group of grown men standing around watching!

On Friday morning we tried to attend the Mass for North Carolina visitors at the National Shrine. However, it turned out to be a much bigger event than we realized, so when we got there just in time for the Mass to start (can you tell that we were first-timers?), we discovered the Shrine was overflowing with thousands of people (including many teen visitors sitting on the floor in the vestibule eating their lunches). I later learned that the Shrine has a seating capacity of 3,500 and the Mass was standing room only, so you do the math. Ultimately, Chris drove around (because parking was impossible) while the kids and I stayed through the homily before leaving. It was at Mass that John discovered with feelings of betrayal and deep offense that his most special backpack with a fun strap for playing "follower the leader" was not such a thing at all. In fact, it was a device to keep track of him and Mama would not let go of the strap--he was very mad about that!

The Mass had begun at 11:30 while the march was scheduled to begin at noon, so you can see there was going to be an overlap. We left the Mass and had already bought sandwiches for lunch, so we ate those in the car and drove back to the hotel, where we parked. The hotel was several blocks from the beginning of the March, so we got bundled up and started walking. The weather was forecast to be a high of 39 with 80% chance of precipitation turning to snow, so I thanked God many times throughout the march that precipitation did not fall! But it was bitterly cold until we were amidst the mass of people: that many thousands of people squished up against each other really helps keep a person tolerably warm!

One extra little mortification I had to offer was my inability to wear any makeup. Because I developed conjunctivitis, I now have to throw away all my makeup because it is contaminated. And there is no point in buying new makeup while I'm still taking a course of antibiotics because that makeup could (not likely) become contaminated too and infect me later. So I'm not wearing any makeup this week, which is especially unfortunate because my facial skin is covered in big red blotches and is peeling off because of the severely dry and unusually cold weather we've had lately. A Catholic lady has got to "offer up" whatever mortifications God offers her, right?

We listened to the beginning speeches on Catholic radio on the drive over, then arrived in time to hear the second half of the speeches. Then we began marching. Well, first we began standing still for perhaps nearly an hour. It took a long time to move so many people along the route!

Mary, snug as a bug in a rug

Yes, John had new mittens, which he insisted on wearing in the car and in the hotel room, but refused to wear in the frigid weather.

The kids ended up falling asleep for a good two hours of the march, which was a good thing, I'm sure, because they would have become bored and antsy.

The kids and I had been battling illness and mine is really hanging on, making the decision to come to D.C. a last-minute choice and a difficult call. I had a bad cold and have an aggravating cough hanging on, conjunctivitis that is still being treated with antibiotics, and I'm fending off a sinus infection (trying all manner of treatments) that is causing headaches and earaches too. It's been tough, to say the least, to have all this pain and to lose sleep because of it. But the kids recovered in time for the trip, so I decided to push through my illness and make it something I could offer up to God as part of this march. So I was feeling really ragged, treatments were hardly helping, and I had 25-pound Mary in the Ergo on my front (not as easy as carrying her on my back, but it felt safer to me to be able to see her). I brought long johns but forgot to put them on and my socks lost their elastic during the march. After a couple of hours, it was becoming very hard to walk. I was limping and struggling badly to keep up morale. My back was feeling sharp pains like being stabbed by ice picks. I really had to meditate on the babies for whom we were marching. Also, I focused on others who were sacrificing more than me. I saw a monk wearing his sandals without socks as part of his normal habit, even though it was so cold that snow on the ground wasn't melting. I saw a teeny tiny elderly nun hunched over with osteoporosis, but with a beaming smile of joy on her face when she saw my children. I noticed a serenely happy man alongside the march: he was so crippled that he was in a wheelchair that he could move only by blowing air into a special sensor tube. I witnessed a person marching while hunched over his walker. And I started crying when I saw a couple marching together without any helpers, both of them blind.

The march route itself plus our walking to and from our hotel was about four miles, and we ended up standing and marching for about five hours.

We are not surprised that once again this huge event received almost zero attention in the media (this is wickedly funny and accurate). I don't know how many people were estimated to be at today's march, but there have been about 200,000 for the past many years. Yet I just searched online news sources: Fox News and Drudge Report seemed to make zero mention of hundreds of thousands of people shutting down the streets of the Capitol for half the day; CNN had a brief article much shorter than this blog post. And note that the headline picture is of pro-abortion protesters (which was probably a CNN stock photo because we didn't see any of them there.) and the article gives equal times to both sides, as if there is a moral equivalence between both sides. The fact that so many people have been showing up every single year on the same date for 37 years should be the journalistic story. I had been very startled to discover that our devoutly Christian, pro-life house cleaners had never heard of the March for Life in Washington D.C. but, with the way the media ignores it (hides it), I shouldn't have been surprised.

Chris and I are very glad we were able to come. It was a deeply meaningful and memorable experience for both of us.