Posts from — June 2009

I know Andy Samberg and T-Pain have got a motherfucking boat, but I have a blog, I have a blog, take a good hard look at the motherfucking blog. Er…and by motherfucking, I don’t actually mean “mother” fucking since our sex does not actually result in parenthood…hence that whole problem with the mother connection…er…

But what better way is there to celebrate the eve before the eve of my third blogoversary than by writing a post that is sure to elicit several emails asking me why I feel the need to use such foul language. Honestly, Melissa.

Happy third blogoversary to me–I’m having a virtual gluttony of blogger loving this week between seeing Chez Perky, Family Beginnings, Baby Smiling in Back Seat, and A Little Pregnant. It’s just like candles in a cake…with one to grow on.

Get your towels ready, it’s about to go down…

I promised that the whole delurking thing would become clear but I feel like it will be a huge disappointment now to discover that the dog feces and ice cream questions were inadvertently placed next to each other and are unrelated. While I’m glad that almost everyone is willing to slap on some latex gloves and root around in a dog’s excrement, the ice cream question was just a throw away–I was trying to make it simple for people to delurk who didn’t want to think too hard about a dog’s anus. The Weekly What If is always there and then, on top of that, I was asking for people to delurk too. But all of this needs a larger explanation. We’ll start here:

It’s my blogoversary this week.

It comes around every year, doesn’t it? And while, yes, it isn’t until Thursday of this week (I started this blog on June 25, 2006), having Show and Tell go up on Wednesday night leaves me with a conundrum–either post early and not have the blogoversary day be special or post late and miss my blogoversary. So I hope you’ll indulge me on my third anniversary in celebrating it now, within this post, and with my Show and Tell this week.

I like to make my blogoversary a big deal. If it were realistic to set off fireworks, I would, environment be damned. I would ride elephants through the streets, tossing sapphire necklaces to everyone in the crowd. I would commission Cirque du Soliel to create a performance art piece called Le Blog with acrobats hanging from ropes constructed out of old posts.

But barring all that, I’ll just reflect on the past year and set a goal for the future one.

First and foremost, my blog visually got a revamp this year, making it more user-friendly. Actually, a lot of things got a revamp including the Lost and Found and the blogroll. The forums were started, giving people an extra space to post and reach out of the community when they didn’t want to use their blog. We started Bridges, which never quite took off and started doing collective Kirtsying instead to get our stories out to the general public on the front page of the social media site.

It wasn’t really a year of starting new things because, as I stated last year, my focus was on listening. Instead, projects continued. IComLeavWe happened every month, Show and Tell happened every week, Barren Advice continued whenever there were questions to answer. The Blogging Name Registry to mark the two year milestone kept adding names, the collective Shop Mom or Pop went through another holiday season, and the Creme de la Creme rolled around again. We kept meeting at the Virtual Lushary each month. The Barren Bitches read a lot of books. Entries were added to Operation Heads Up. Every week, I continued to pull together the Roundup.

It was a busy year of hearing words and then figuring out how to get them out to the general public. Because it is one thing to preach to the choir–it certainly makes a person feel less alone to hear that someone else is going through similar emotions–but it is also important to get those words out to other people. I am sad that I couldn’t keep Bridges afloat, but I think the community Kirtsying (and everyone should participate with that and submit great posts) fills the same goal. I hope to keep that growing and expanding, doing everything I can to get our words out there to people who need to hear them (either because they need to find this community or because they need their eyes opened).

Last year, I started giving each year a single word to use as a goal. The overall word defining my blog is “community.” But then each year received a word that defined the overarching theme for the year:

• Year One: Connections
• Year Two: Action
• Year Three: Listening

I think I did a decent job listening this year. I wrote about this idea of setting forth a guide word:

My defining term from now until next June is “listen.” It’s a hard thing to do–to truly listen to another person. To set aside the time to concentrate on someone else’s thoughts without simultaneously considering your own. To practice a form of verbal relativism, listening while trying to place yourself in the other person’s point of view rather than your own. Talking is easy. I have about 850 posts on this blog. Being silent. Reading. Actually hearing; internalizing someone else’s words, tossing them around inside your head, allowing them to change your world. That is hard.

So I did a lot of reading this year. A lot of commenting via IComLeavWe. A lot of hearing and sending forth the words I was hearing. So I do think it was helpful to set a guiding word. We’ll see how successful I am at following this year’s word.

Oh…you want to know what it is?

• Year Four: Tune

Tune is obviously a word with multiple meanings. Tune can be a “pleasing succession of musical tones” which I think is a term that speaks largely of community. I want the people I interact with in tune with one another. Which does not mean that every song needs to be a syrupy waltz–even DC hardcore punk songs sometimes have a tune–but that X leads to Y leads to Z. In blogging terms, keeping a tune would mean setting a blogging standard of courtesy so the song continues. There have been too many times that people have stepped away from community because they don’t feel welcome or are harassed. And finding a tune means agreeing to both our role as a contributor and a taker from community. I think this code of standards can be set over time with multiple contributors–a huge group project–but I do think that having a list of standards, a list of what we’ll accept or rail against–is important.

Tuning can also refer to an adjustment. I think projects will continue to be fine-tuned and streamlined to be more user-friendly. I can get pretty stuck in rut and not want to change things out of fear of change. But I do think that it is a good thing to keep tinkering with existing projects, making them better, rather than solely starting new ones. I am considering (gasp!) self-hosting in order to take advantage of more software out there. But adjustments in baby steps…

Lastly, the thing I want the most for this upcoming year in terms of “tune” is to give sound to the silent. I think we often times focus on the musical piece (the blog post) or even the music critics (the commenters) that write about the performance, but my thought is on how
to bring those in the audience–those who are listening and thinking and internally reacting–into the conversation.

I asked people to delurk last Friday. 2161 people “read” the post (it’s impossible to know how many people actually scanned their eyes over the content, but 2161 clicked on the blog that day). Even if we said only 1000 people read it, it still is interesting to look at the fact that 86 people left a comment. The majority of those were people who have commented in the past. A small handful were people who delurked for the first time. So about 1 in 25 people left a note.

I have been thinking about those 24 out of 25 ever since Lori from Weebles Wobblog pointed out the silent majority of blog readers during an email exchange. And by silent, I am taking into account a multitude of ways to get your voice heard from leaving a comment to writing your own post to sending an email…speaking your mind at all. Look at your own stats–I’m sure that you’ll see that you have many more readers/subscribers than people you know reading your blog.

Which is not a problem on one hand–I mean, there has been a fine tradition of blog lurking and I am just as guilty as the next person of reading and running (there are people who probably have no clue that I’ve read every word they’ve written…creepy)–but is on the group project end of things. When we’re talking about community and we’re presenting voices from community, it’s hard to know that such a large portion of people are silent.

Plus, delurking is more for the writer to know who is reading her blog than it is for the silent person to speak their mind. So my point is not to get people delurking. My point is to get more points-of-view heard.

So many people start their email when adding themselves to the blogroll: “I’ve been a lurker for years and I’ve finally been inspired to start my own.” Which, of course, is fantastic, but what about all of the people who don’t have the time or inclination to start their own blog. I think there have been projects in the past–100 Words and the Blilts–that helped bring in new voices. And I am playing with more ideas that will unfold during the year to bring in more of the silent voices.

What would be most helpful? I would love to hear your ideas/reaction to the concept of ensuring more people have a voice without having to do a lot of work on their own end as well as hearing from those who are blogless on what they would like to see happen to ensure that they are a recorded member of the community–noted, known, and while still blogless, with an important voice.

The first step I’ve taken is to include a new feature on the blog. If you look up at the navigation bar at the top of the blog, you will see a little crown towards the right side with the words “Your Thoughts.” It is a place to leave private comments. The only person who can see them is me. My wish, if you don’t feel comfortable leaving a comment even anonymously on the blog, is that you’ll use this feature to speak your mind. Politely, respectfully, not use it as a space for hate, but it is a private space. I may ask you if I could share your words anonymously within a blog post, but I will never use what is respectfully written in that space without permission.

Technically, it could even be used to submit a short blog post that I could upload on the Annex and Kirtsy in order to get out a point-of-view. But I think it is a valuable place to speak your mind when you don’t want to leave it as a public comment.

So, tune. And all the incarnations of the word “tune.” It will be interesting to see how many people we can bring into the harmony and make sure the silent ones are noted and as important as those who of us who like to talk and talk and talk and fill up the blogosphere with hundreds of posts per year.

Happy anniversary, little blog. You continue to be this huge source of comfort for me and I often jump to you mentally. I am so glad I started you, so glad I continued you, so glad that I’ve met so many amazing people through this space, been affected by their story as they have been affected by mine. I am so proud of the work we all do to take the stigma out of infertility, adoption, and loss. I am grateful to be a member of the ALI community. Thank you for joining in this enormous, three-year-long version of Kumbaya.

children mentioned…

I’m not a very good judge of time or distance. When I say “not very good” I actually mean terrible and when I say terrible, I really mean that it often makes Josh wince. The Wolvog dryly told me once that my two seconds always feel like ten minutes. Because they are, little man, they are.

This post really isn’t about my inability to judge time.

When the idea of a possible preterm delivery was first thrown our way, I spent the day running around, ordering baby announcements (because, you know, when your twins have stopped growing and are measuring at 2 pounds, the thing you should concern yourself with is designing your own baby announcement at a shmancy D.C. stationary store…anyone want to discuss denial with me?), ordering roller blinds, and most importantly, buying baby books.

I wanted to have the most kick-ass baby books. The kind where you recorded their birth weight and hand prints and the day they took their first step. I went to three different stores (returning to the first one for a second time) to get the books and I wrote in my journal:

It’s funny, once I bought their baby books, I felt myself calm down. For some reason, it made me feel like I could go to the hospital and be content with my delivery experience. I had wanted to bring the baby books to the hospital with me, and once I had them in hand, it felt like I was somehow more prepared.

I’m not sure why I felt more prepared. Perhaps I was just in the fourth stage of panic. People usually quote three stages of panic, but I see long-term panic–the type that would come from finding out that your children were no longer growing and no one could say what would happen next–as following this circuitous route:

1. Anxiety
2. Sadness
3. Denial
4. Calm
5. Anxiety
6. Sadness
7. Denial
8. Calm

I’m sure you can guess the next set of emotions. By which I mean that the doctor would tell us news and I’d instantly go into that anxiety space, my heart pounding, light-headed. And then Josh and I would talk about it and I would end up crying. And then I’d talk myself into thinking that I was blowing everything out of proportion and things had to be okay in the end. And then I would enter this calm state where I believed I was at peace, even though, right under the surface, without any trigger, the anxiety was building up again until it would break–not from a new piece of information, but simply from sitting too still with my thoughts or having a bad experience with a barista at the Starbucks cart at the hospital or having someone visit us at the hospital for too long and take away one of the twenty minutes I was given every three hours to hold the twins.

When I wrote in my journal that I felt at peace, I believed it. I believed that I was at peace and all was fine and I had my baby books ready to go. I cycled many times through those four stages of panic, sometimes rapid cycling through them in the span of a single contraction and sometimes cycling through them over the course of several hours. I would go backwards and forwards through those four stages and keep coming back to those baby books. Did we have the baby books? Did the nurses know about the baby books? Did they know I wanted the information recorded–even their Apgars–that I wanted footprints and handprints? Not from their second day of life, but from their first day. I needed it on the first day and did they know? Did they know? Did these nurses know?

I got the handprints and footprints. The weights and lengths. The rest of the book is empty.

I don’t know why I didn’t fill it out. Why I kept such a detailed journal and scrapbook of the months leading up to our wedding, but didn’t create one photo album of the twins. I have about seven places where I’ve recorded information here and there and I could reconstruct all the important milestone dates and food preferences, hence why I am creating these scrapbooks now.

I don’t think it had to do with time because I’ve always had dozens of projects going at once. If I wanted to scrapbook, I could have found time to scrapbook. It doesn’t have to do with a lack of sentimentality–I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone more sentimental, who becomes nostalgic before something has even begun. I obviously love to write, to create records, to organize. I have tens of thousands of photographs of them, meaningful art work saved. I just haven’t put these things together in a way that is usable, accessible to anyone beyond myself.

I believed that I’d plow through the books, have them finished within the next week or so. Except that two hours of work have yielded three scrapbook pages in one album. I stare at the pictures and then consult the different journals and call a few people to check details and finally write up a blurb to go under the photos. I have obviously misjudged how long this project would take. I’ll be happy if I have all three books completed by the end of the summer.

I think one reason I haven’t scrapbooked these images is that I have spent the entire week back at the NICU. I have gone through hundreds of photos, selecting ones that don’t make me cringe and then replacing them with ones that do and then returning to ones that don’t. I remember printing out some of these pictures while they were still in the NICU and defiantly showing them around, silently saying, “you have all shown me your pictures of your gorgeous babies post birth and these are the ones I get to show; the ones where they are encased in tubes and wires and you better fucking tell me that my children are gorgeous because if you don’t, it will be just one more place where we were cheated.”

I know, it’s so petty. It so easily could have been otherwise and we are so lucky–so incredibly lucky, so fucking lucky in comparison to some of my friends now–and I feel like an ass saying this. But I wanted the pretty baby photos. We got them later on–which is why I feel like an ass writing this because anyone who didn’t get the other photos later on probably wants to slap me– but I wanted those initial gorgeous baby photos where the baby is swaddled and sleeping and cuddled close. The ones that aren’t truthful to the experience at all–I mean, first days are never easy days–but I wanted those newborn pictures just like I wanted to conceive naturally or carry to term or be able to breastfeed or bring the twins home.

I have been sitting with these pictures that I haven’t really looked at much in the last five years. There was a period of time where the twins liked to look at them so I saw them then, but this week was the first time in five years that I went through all of the photos rather than looking at the five or six the twins watched on a video Josh made for their first birthday. It was the first time in five years that I opened the journal I kept during that time. I’ve checked the one I kept during treatments numerous times but that one was buried deep in a drawer. We go back to the NICU every year for their reunion party, but it is very different to see the places void of anyone you know–just a hospital room, really–than to see photos of the twins in that space.

Doing this scrapbook means sitting with those early days, before I entered this stage of retrospect where I know how everything would shake out. We have a few light preemie issues still on hand, but for the most part, you would never guess their beginnings. It is hard for the twins to look at the pictures and believe it was them. They think the pictures are hysterical. They ask why we fed them through their nose or why they had to sleep in the incubators, but they laugh as if they don’t really believe that they ever looked at that way.

And it’s difficult for me to reconcile that those were our first days. To return to the emotions from that time period. There was a night wh
en we were leaving after they had locked the front doors of the hospital and so we had to exit out the basement near the emergency room, except because I had never gone through this exit and was crying too hard to hear anyone, I thought that Josh was having me committed and that we were by the locked ward of the hospital. I remember walking through the hallway screaming, terrified that I’d be separated from the twins because I was just too damn crazy to exist as I cycled through my panic.

We got outside and true to the panic cycle, once the anxiety and sadness portions were complete and I was entering a car, not being sedated and restrained to a bed, that went into the denial that any of this was happening, the believed calm. I sat in their empty room at home and cried that night, still going through the cycle. I found a picture of me taken about an hour before I was led down the hallway. Should I include it and tell them the story of that night? Should I leave it out, rewrite history?

Looking at those pictures, reading the journals, makes me think about panic. And I am with those memories for so damn long, working so slowly as I make my way through the NICU days. I am really a terrible judge of time. I thought I’d have to look at them for a few hours. My mind has been travelling back five years for many days.

I think time does heal all wounds that we never poke again. That we never touch and allow to fade into oblivion. But anything that we continuously rub raw just by going through life, confronting our wound visually in the lives of other people or having it bumped through questions, I don’t think those wounds truly heal. We can leave on a bandage for long periods of time, even forget that the wound exists. But if someone jostles the site, the wound reopens, starts bleeding profusely. Our body goes back into trauma mode for a moment, cycles through the panic quartet. I stare at the picture and I feel anxiety, then sadness, then denial that I feel anything at all, and finally believed calm. Until the next picture.

So, yes, time heals some wounds completely. But it only heals all wounds if we cocoon ourselves, never open the photo box, leaf back through the journal, remember. Barring that, I think we need to rephrase the adage.

I have become rabidly consumed with The Next Food Network star, rabidly. As in, I just spent the entirety of dinner arguing out my case for my favourite contestants as if my husband were Bob Tuschman (who we affectionate refer to as the Tusch at our house). As if we’ll ever see the winner again after this season, because really, with the exception of Guy Fieri, have we ever seen the other ones again?

I may be totally off with that last comment. We only watch the Food Network at night. There is possibly this entire daytime Food Network underworld that is happening without our knowledge. Perhaps The Hearty Boys are still cooking up a storm for the cameras.

I’m talking as if I know who the Hearty Boys are. I don’t. This is our first foray into a commitment to a reality tv show. We’ve tried to do it in the past and haven’t gotten far in the process. But we are fully commited, have blocked off Sunday nights on the calendar, and have set our alliances with our favourite contestants.

I currently have two favourites: Jamika and Michael. I think either one could win it and I’d watch both if they had their own show. I think Jamika has a good chance of winning because she’s sort of that quiet one who holds back and doesn’t play it too loudly and will keep getting through each episode until she turns it on at the end. Michael has my heart and I think his recipes are interesting. I wish he’d tone them down a bit, make the food a bit more accessible (oh my G-d, I so want a job discussing the Food Network shows). But I think he’s creative and fun and watchable.

Since we’re still early in the show, I’d like to place my bets on the order of elimination. We all know that Jen and Brett are gone, which leaves us with 8 left. I think it will go in this order and for these general reasons:

1. Jen (her food was the least interesting in that challenge–it sort of sucks to be judged by one recipe)
2. Brett (he was inconsistent AND he’d shit on a fellow contestant. If he didn’t want to help her, he shouldn’t have helped. But once he did, he needed to close his mouth about it and not point out her foibles)
3. Eddie (he talks a lot and says nothing and they haven’t been impressed with his cooking thus far)
4. Teddy (he doesn’t seem to bring anything new to Food Network and he’s so focused on his catchphrase that he’s sort of missing the larger picture)
5. Katie (she will last this long because they really want her dietican angle, but she isn’t growing enough as a television personality nor as a chef so they’ll let her go)
6. Melissa (her food is good, but she’ll mess up big time with one of the challenges and leave with a big, teary goodbye. I don’t know why the pot is mocking the kettle because we’re both big weepy messes)
7. Debbie (she is never going to last until the end, even though I think she has a great angle in terms of her food preparation. I think she has a tendency to either grate or embrace and the Food Network can’t afford to go with someone who pouts so openly on camera)
8. Jeff (I think he’ll get close to the end, and I’m sure his food is probably the best out of the group, but I think he’s missing a spark necessary to catapult him from the camera into the viewer’s home)
9. Jamika (I hate to eliminate her at all, but I think she’ll lose out to Michael’s big personality)
10. Michael will win, become best friends with Alton Brown, and get an invite to the Food Network’s coveted Christmas special.

Are you watching? What do you predict to be the order of elimination and who will win?

Listen, I’m not too proud to admit this: when I was younger, I’d make lists of people before I went somewhere new to remind myself that I would know people there once I arrived. Like before camp–I had to look at the roster and write down the names of everyone I knew who would be there–however peripherally I knew them–and then count up the names on the list and say to myself, “12 people, you know 12 people. So there will be someone you can sit with at the first meal.”

Am I sounding cool yet? Oh, and while you picture the younger Melissa, picture me with huge, frizzy bangs and a penchant for oversized Forenza sweaters.

Having names were sort of like a security blanket. One was good. Two was better in case one decided to ditch me for someone cooler. Three was even better in case two brought her cousin and was hanging out with her and one decided to ditch me for someone cooler. Four was even better than that because…well, you get the idea of the other side of safety in numbers. I’m not really worried about having a posse to stave off an attack. I like having numbers because I know I’ll have someone to sit with during a panel.

Hence why I wanted to know who was at BlogHer. Or in Chicago because it’s all one-and-the-same for going out at night. So here’s who I have from the ALI community:

June 19, 2009   92 Comments