Bear with me a while – this two-part post will eventually meander around to a point.

The other week I went bowling with my boyfriend. Neither of us are what you’d call talented bowlers, but we like to go every once in a while just for the fun of it. A perfect score is 300; Bryce usually gets about 160, and I call it a great day if I break a hundred.

My difficulties with activities like bowling come from the fact that I have almost no coordination. And, as an extremely shy person, I also tend to get stressed out and self-conscious when people are looking at me. Given all that, my usual technique is to lumber up, dump the ball ungracefully, and cringe as I see how the odd spin I’ve applied makes the ball drift to one side or the other. Strikes, for me, are rare.

Sometimes my lack of talent bothers me, and other days it doesn’t. On the day in question, however, I was feeling particularly un-confident. Every move I made seemed to turn out badly, and the teenage boys sharing our lane seemed to be watching and laughing. I got more and more nervous, and hit fewer and fewer pins.

My normally-patient boyfriend was getting irritated with me, as the point was to be out having fun, not beating myself up over a silly game. I realized that to rescue our day, I needed to snap out of it. I didn’t know any other way to perform this quick change of attitude but to talk to myself:

Here’s what I said:

“Look here, you silly git. You have a successful career in an international corporation, and while you're working you're also finishing graduate school with straight A’s. You’ve made several big, scary moves throughout your life, and you always come out okay. You’ve been through the biggest loss anyone can face – the loss of a child – and you’ve survived. You’ve finally found love and a good man. You’ve been all over the world, and you’re about to travel to Peru to hike in the high-altitude wilderness alone. That’s a strong woman. Surely you can get over yourself long enough to toss a stupid ball down a lane.”

Then I stepped up to the task and threw a strike. Then a spare. And another strike. It wasn’t perfect - I still threw some awful balls at times, but on the whole, I got a lot better, quickly. And the only thing that had changed was my mental attitude. I’d stopped listening to the destructive voices in my head, and allowed myself at least the possibility of success.

This is the very same thing that needs to happen for women in unplanned pregnancies, but it almost never does.

A woman who is unexpectedly pregnant is already feeling low about herself for making “a mistake” or being in a “bad position to parent”…and then the hordes descend. Agencies, lawyers, social workers, and busybodies of every stripe make it their business to tell this woman that no matter what, she will never be as good as a married couple with a nice home.

“They” are the deserving ones – you are just some chick who got knocked up. If you’re smart, you’ll make lemonade out of lemons and give this baby to people who are better than you.

That’s the basic message, and women who are already feeling low about themselves are all too primed to accept it.

(continued)