Posts from — May 2009

Welcome to the eighteenth tour of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade–a book club from the comfort of your own living room. Grab a cup of coffee and start clicking away at the links below.

Just to explain, this book club is entirely online and open to anyone (male or female) in the infertility/pregnancy loss/assisted conception/adoption/parenting-after-infertility world (as well as any other related category I inadvertently left off the list). It is called a book tour because everyone reads the same book and then poses a question to the group. Participants choose a few questions to answer and then post their response on their blog. Readers can jump from blog to blog, commenting along the way.

Anyone can jump aboard–it’s a book club where you can drop in and out as you wish and all in the community are welcome.

Book: The Red Tent
Author: Anita Diamant
Start Date: March 10th
Post Dates: May 26th
(need an explanation of how a book tour works? Click here to go to a list of posts on the past book tours as well as information about future tours.)

About The Red Tent: According to Wikipedia, the book is “a first-person narrative which tells the story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and sister of Joseph, a talented midwife and proto-feminist.

Barren Bitches Book Brigade List (The blogs below are participating on this current book tour. You’ll be able to jump from post to post to read a plethora of opinions and thoughts on The Red Tent.)

Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters (post below this one)
I Won’t Fear Love
The Road Less Travelled
Baby Smiling in Back Seat
Weebles Wobblog
Aurelia Ann
Coming2Terms
The Dragondreamer’s Lair

Even if haven’t read The Red Tent, you can still add your own thoughts on the blog tour or react to someone else’s critique.

Like the idea of being in a book club without leaving your living room? The current group chooses the next book. The 19th tour will be…er…my book. We’re reading Navigating the Land of If by Melissa Ford and it will probably stray a bit from the traditional book club format, though I’m not entirely sure how. Read an excerpt from the book over here.

The Details: Tour #19 will start May 26. Participants will read Navigating the Land of If by Melissa Ford. On or before June 24th (the day before my blogoversary!), everyone will send one question based on the book (to get a sense of questions, click here to see the questions sent for book tour #2) to me. I will compile the questions into lists that will be emailed out to you by June 26th. Everyone will choose 3 questions from the list and answer them on their own blog on June 29th. I’ll also post a master list and people can jump from blog to blog, reading and commenting on the book tour.

If you would like to sign up to participate in book tour #19, leave a comment below or send me an email. I need the title and a link to your blog as well as an email address where you’d like the two or three book club emails sent. If a spouse wants to participate too and he/she doesn’t have their own blog, have them set up a blog solely for book tours (as we did with the Annex) and send me a link to that blog. And if you’re a reader without a blog, now is a great time to set up a space for yourself on Blogger. People will be able to find brand-spanking-new blogs because they will be on the book tour’s participant list. The participants on the Navigating the Land of If book tour will choose the book for tour #20.

Happy reading.

Though it was simply the luck of the draw, it was especially fitting that this book turned out to be the 18th selection of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade. Eighteen is a special number in Judaism, symbolizing life (the word for life–chai–adds up to the number 18).

The difficulty of any novel set in a familiar space is making it new, and Anita Diamant constantly takes the reader out of the Bible and into her own imagination of life during that time period. She gives a voice to a character in the Bible who doesn’t have a voice–Dinah–and the women in her novel are, as Diamant states, “active agents in their own lives, not passive pawns or victims.”

I think what I love best about this book is the story I found on Diamant’s site about its origins. It had few reviews in major outlets and almost no advertising budget. It’s success was entirely in the hands of the early readers and I think that’s a pretty powerful statement about the story and the writing.

The family trees shown at the beginning of the book don’t include miscarriages, stillbirths, or children who died before weaning. Given the rate of infant mortality at the time, this was a logical method for “counting” children. Now that it’s much more rare (but still too common) to lose children both before and after birth, at what point do you think children should be added to the official family tree? At what point should they be added to the parents’ personal tally of children?

I kept coming back to this question so I guess I should probably try to answer it. In order to examine the question, I had to remove the idea of the state of medical care (or loss rates) or how often it occurred in Biblical times vs. now. The general population may have a numerical rate of occurrence, but the fact of the matter is that it’s 100% when it happens to you.

I really struggled to pin down a date and started as far out as possible. Anyone born alive was obviously added to the family tree. Anyone born still but over the age of viability I added to the tree. And then I started to work my way down, finally settling on ten weeks in utero. Somewhat a random distinction, but it’s the start of the fetal period.

Like so many aspects of infertility or loss, my emotional side and political side were at odds.

Dinah is awaited and welcomed by all of Jacob’s wives. The one daughter, the one to carry all their stories, all their voices. In the context of the book it is a literary device that allows the author to tell us stories of Jacob’s wives from their own perspectives. But what does it speak of to you? In your own life, have you felt, as Dinah does, a carrier of living memory? Do you feel your own voice to be better protected in the age of the blog, or do you see an enduring need for connection across generations?

This is such an interesting question because blogs do pass along our thoughts and voice in this very public manner, placing pieces of ourselves for others to carry. It’s not just the twins who will carry my stories to the next generation–all of you will carry my stories as well. I think I’m more interested in how others see themselves (as a carrier or as a giver).

“The Red Tent” vividly describes the ritual Dinah’s mother & aunts perform to celebrate her coming of age. Lately, I’ve been hearing about young girls being presented with cakes & gifts when they get their first periods. This was definitely NOT done when I was growing up! Describe your first period & your family’s reaction (if any) — how old were you, & how was the occasion marked (if at all)?

I’ve already spoken about my period enough for people to throw up in their mouths a bit so instead I’ll write about what I did for a student. Her mother died when she was nine or ten and her father was completely clueless about girls. She stayed after class one day and told me that she thought she had gotten her period for the first time. I sent her to the nurse to learn how to use a pad and to get some Tylenol.

When she got back, I told her that she should celebrate that night and she said that (1) she would never be able to discuss periods with her father and (2) her heart hurt too much to celebrate without her mother. I asked her show up at school a bit early the next day and come to my room.

The next morning, we had breakfast together and I told her that while I was not going to embarrass the crap out of her by discussing menstruation, I thought the moment should be marked. Just two women having muffins, celebrating being ladies. If her mother was not here to do it, she should not have to ask for someone to make the day special. Any adult who hears her news should throw her a small party, so I did.

I still think about that student. I have no idea where she is or what she is doing. She should be about 20-years-old by now; have experienced nearly 100 periods. I hope she always thinks about that day when she eats blueberry muffins.

Hop along to another stop on this blog tour by visiting the main list at Stirrup Queens (above this one). You can also sign up for the next book on this online book club: Navigating the Land of If by Melissa Ford.

children mentioned…

Queenie and Bluebird both wanted to know more about how we’re raising the kids with an equal voice in the family and while I am actually working on a serious post about emotional ahimsa and family equality, I also want to state that when it boils down to it, despite all the touchy-feely ideology, the way our family runs is putting them to work.

Those tiny fingers are perfect for cleaning all the nooks and crannies of our cars. I took a break Sunday morning from writing to peek out the window and saw Josh teaching them how to wash our cars. It started with towels. It ended with a full-body experience. It was camera-worthy–I ran outside in my pyjamas to capture it.

Since my post about family politics isn’t that long, I’m open to answering other questions you may have about me from how much coffee I drink per day to whether I wear white in winter. You can email me your questions and I’ll choose a few for the post.

See what others noticed for Perfect Moment Monday.

You may have noticed that the blogroll has undergone a huge change. It was simply too large to be usable anymore and updating it took a long time because I was constantly scrolling through 1800+ blogs in order to find where to place a new blog. Therefore, the post you know and love and link to has become the table of contents and I’ve created nine smaller posts that contain a few sections of the larger blogroll.

So think of it like a house with the table of contents the foyer and then there are now nine rooms.

Underneath each of the nine red, hyperlinked room titles are the smaller categories that appear within that room. For example:

Diagnostics Room
Azoospermia
CBAVD and CAVD
Clotting and Immunology
Endometriosis
Female Factor
Male Factor
PCOS
Translocation and Chromosomal Issues
Unexplained Infertility
Uterine Anomalies
Varicocele

So you click on the red “Diagnostics Room” and it will take you to blogs that are in any of those categories below it. At the top of each room is a link to the main menu so you can always go back and enter a different room. Please link only to the main menu and not the individual rooms to enable people search for blogs to find the whole list.

It was hard to keep it to a few rooms, so everything may not be placed perfectly. And if you prefer to be able to search the entire blogroll at once, you can still do so by clicking here to access all of the blogroll rooms on the screen at one time. That’s also the way you can search the entire blogroll to see which room you’re in or check that you’re on (the old program sometimes dropped blogs if it couldn’t find the feed for a few hours so check that you’re on there now because I stopped using that program and it shouldn’t happen again).

So now, I will only update the table of contents when a new category is created. But I will update the rooms every week as I add new blogs. It may take a bit to get used to it, but I think it will help keep things organized and usable well into the future. That list of 1800+ blogs simply took too long to load and people didn’t know all the categories.

I’m sad that everyone is not on the same post anymore–that we’re not one long list–but the house analogy hopefully keeps us together. Your opinion on the change? Feedback? Good/bad?

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

Please turn in your homework: It has been a full year since Show and Tell began, therefore, last week, I gave you a little homework. Please enter your favourite post from a past show and tell. Give the permalink url for the old post (not the permalink for the Show & Tell post, unless you are choosing something I showed. Give the link to the post that appeared on the other person’s blog) in the comment section of this post. And then go back through memory lane and revisit some old objects and stories from this year.

This week:

I didn’t take this picture (I got it here), but it is the perfect image to commemorate my Bat Mitzvah anniversary. The big 2-2. Which also happens to be today.

I share my Bat Mitzvah anniversary with Amy, one of my best friends from college. We met in an introductory Hebrew class on the first day of school and have been friends since (in fact, she was a witness at my wedding and signed my marriage contract). We realized that first spring that we shared a Bat Mitzvah anniversary which makes us parsha twins.

Part of this Hebrew class was memorizing these small plays that contained vocabulary words and performing them for the class. She was always my partner and we liked to spice them up. Instead of simply reciting them as everyone else did in the class, we brought props and costumes.

One of the plays had the phrase “l’yad ha’amood” in the dialogue and I couldn’t stop bitching about what a useless vocabulary word “pillar” was. How often in life do you need to use the word “pillar?” And I didn’t need to use it for almost three years. But one day, we were standing near the student union and I was trying to point out the boy I liked and I said, “l’yad ha’amood” because he was, indeed, standing by one of the pillars in that picture and Amy cried, “see! It did come in handy!”

So happy anniversary to Show & Tell as well as to my Bat Mitzvah twin, Amy.

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (hint: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name). The list is open from now until late Tuesday night and a new one is posted every week.

Yesterday, I decided to stop working an hour early and head out to the library bookstore to see if they had a copy of Twilight. I figured spending 50 cents on it was a nice medium ground where if I didn’t love it after one chapter, I could pass it along to someone else. I’ve mentioned it before, but our library system has three bookstores in the area where they sell both donated books and excess copies of books from the library system (for instance, they may purchase 100 copies of a popular book right when it comes out, but after a few months, they shed 50 copies to make room on the shelves). Most books are between 50 cents and a dollar.

This is the same bookstore that gave us the story of TaTantra, who still exists in our house and was actually “speaking” to me this morning about how much she enjoys the fact that we are continuously watching the same My Little Pony video. Sean wasn’t working today so I wasn’t offered any scintillating sex reads nor did I find anything I wanted beyond some old Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books. But that didn’t really matter. Just being in the bookstore made me happy.

Afterwards, I stopped by the Borders and I thought about this video, which I love (a warning, it was made for Mother’s Day and therefore mentions mothers a lot; it is, in fact, about the author’s mother, but the author, Kelly Corrigan, absolutely rocks and if you don’t own her book, you should and the video makes me laugh). I went to visit my book before browsing. She (I think of the book as a girl) was facing outward from the shelf (a step up! Last time I was there, only the spine was facing out), sort of smiling at me, as much as paper can smile. I went over and gave her a little pat before heading over to get coffee and walk up and down the aisles.

I’ve been uploading pictures that people are sending me from bookstores. Please keep sending them–it is so much fun to feel that at least a part of me is getting out and about even if I am stuck in the same city.

The Weekly What If: In honour of the only book that made me feel better this week in the 7th circle of Hell–if you were enrolled in Hogwarts, where would the Sorting Hat place you? For those who haven’t read the books, what this question essentially asks is if you could only pick one trait, are you brave, smart, loyal, or clever?

I would, I think, be placed in Hufflepuff. It’s hard to get, but once you have my loyalty, you have it forever.