Posts from — September 2009

Those who follow me on Twitter know that we’ve become smitten with a squirrel who lives in our front yard. And by “we” I mean everyone in this house who is not Josh. Josh may have a problem with the squirrel because we keep feeding him Josh’s almonds. But the thing is that Simon loves almonds and we love Simon and we just want the damn squirrel to be happy.

One person wanted to name the squirrel Beauty and another person wanted to name him Beatle (as in, The Beatles, except there is only one, so he is simply Beatle) and has been campaigning hard for a name change. But Simon Liverspot suits this squirrel perfectly. I left a camera by the window so I can snap a picture when he comes to eat so you can see how Simon can only possibly be named Simon. It’s as if he was simply born to fill this name. Simon Arthur Liverspot.

This is what happens when you don’t buy your wife a pet and she can’t procreate. She transfers all of her enormous love to a squirrel.

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.

The ChickieNob has recently become obsessed with ballet, and when I say “obsessed” I mean that she spends a minimum of four hours a day reenacting famous poses (mostly just arm movements, which she calls port de bras, because I am not buying toe shoes for a five-year-old. I mean, I’ll buy them for myself despite my lack of ballet training and the potential for a broken ankle, but not her), pirouetting around the living room, and wondering aloud how she will ever learn to do 32 fouette rond de jambe when she cannot even stay upright for one. This literally keeps her up at night. She has had to discuss ballet with me at 2 a.m. because she is just so worried that she will never become a principal dancer with the ABT.

We listen to a lot of Tchaikovsky (on CD–not on my Irish Penny Whistle). I gave her an old ballet program that I kept from 1985 and she pores over it, flicking her wrist like Martine Van Hamel or holding her leg behind her like Marianna Tcherkassky. She is in love with Angel Corella. This past weekend, she gave me a two hour performance of Swan Lake, mastering Odette’s fearful expression when she sees Prince Sigfried for the first time and the traditional swan pose in Act Two:

She just turned five-years-old. Do yo think there is a possibility that we will be scoring free tickets to the ballet twenty years from now? Principal dancers must get a few free tickets to pass out to friends and family…right?

She is about to start ballet classes soon (yes, all of this and she hasn’t taken a single ballet lesson). It’s hard to hold onto your excitement for something when you enter into classes, having to keep pace with the rest of the group rather than sprint with your heart. I hope that she still peppers me with translating everything into French after ballet classes begin. It would be a shame if she lost this spirit.

On the other hand, she has never, ever kicked another child gleefully in the face during one of her performances. She does not know that joy yet and you can only get that by taking a class and getting on that stage. So much to learn, so much to learn.

What are you showing today?

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

I’ve been considering self-hosting the blog, mostly so I can upload audio files and bore you with numerous recordings of myself playing the Irish Penny Whistle. I rock that whistle hard. In fact, I keep it on my desk so I can play myself a little Tchaikovsky when I’m trying to think. Have you ever heard Tchaikovsky played on a whistle that can only range 8 notes? It’s really an amazing sound.

In debating the pros and cons of this (remember, I move very slowly. I only got a header a year ago, over two years into blogging. It could take me three more decades to get to self-hosting status), I told Josh that we could finally have our contest and ask all of you to be the judges of which one of us does the best British accent.

I think it’s me.

I can (1) keep it going a lot longer without dropping it. As in, I can spend the whole evening pretending I’m part of the British royal family, a cousin who just happens to have moved to the Washington, D.C. suburbs and (2) keep it softer. I don’t go for Liverpool or the brogue of the Fens. I go for a very light London accent–nothing flashy, nothing too far off the beaten path.

I was climbing into bed, excitedly telling him that we could finally put our long-running debate to rest when he dryly reminded me that my mother had told him that night at dinner that two children were cut from the hundred who auditioned for a performing arts camp when I was little. As in, 108 children audition and 106 children were accepted.

And I was one of the two.

Methinks I don’t like those odds so much anymore.

The headline on MSNBC read “Woman Implanted with Wrong Embryo,” which begs the response: “Media Distracts with Wrong Headline.” It’s not just the misuse of the word “implant” instead of “transfer,” which overpromises science’s capabilities (and regardless of the you say to-mah-to, I say to-may-to debate we’ve had over the years about improper vocabulary, my stance is that this is important because it is just one more way misinformation about infertility is spread to the general public. Embryos can only be transferred, not implanted, hence why IVF is not a sure thing despite what some people believe when they tell you that “you can always do IVF!”), it’s that once again, the general public isn’t getting a story about what has been happening in clinics across America 364 days this year–what they’re hearing is the one case that happened instead of the thousands of success stories.

My heart goes out to the two couples at the center of this situation. I cannot imagine the position the Savages are in, going through IVF, emotionally focused on creating a life that they would raise and discovering that through someone else’s mistake, they were pregnant, but their two choices were to either terminate or carry to term for another couple. It’s literally impossible to imagine.

Yet I take issue with this thought: “They are telling their story in the hopes that no other couple ever has to go through what they have endured.”

The reality is that telling their story does not prevent human error. This could happen again. Every clinic across America could think about it every second of every day and it could still happen again because humans make mistakes. Even machines make mistakes. It isn’t the happiest thought in the world when you’re trusting your body to a doctor, but prior to this point, clinics never operated in a willy-nilly fashion, leaving unlabeled vials on the counter.

My clinic was merticulous, labeling everything with a number and cross-checking every gamete that exited the body with the owner. My husband had a number on a card he held, the semen sample had a number on it, and they would read off the numbers, over and over and over again, triple checking that even with an IUI, the correct sample was used. And my clinic is not special. This is happening every day in every clinic across America. They have protocols, they have safety nets, they have systems.

And with every safe guard in place, it still happened.

It’s not that I don’t believe that Americans should hear this story and discuss it. By all means, it is newsworthy because it is outside the norm. The problem is that the average American isn’t having that thought drilled into their head. With IVF barely on their radar, they hear yet another tale of IVF gone wrong, treading on the heels of Nadya Suleman. The message they will take away from this is not that IVF is a godsend for millions of Americans (not all of the 7.3 million American diagnosed with infertility will utilize IVF or even IUI, but those who do are thankful that procedures exist that can circumvent medical issues that impede conception), but that once again, IVF is dangerous. This is what y’all get when you go playing G-d and messing with nature.

If I owned the airwaves, I would tell Americans this:

Procedures such as IUI, IVF, and ICSI, are necessities–not choices–for people with certain medical limitations who wish to build their families. That fertility treatments are not evil or selfish or prone to error any moreso than medical procedures such as blood transfusions, organ transplantation, or hernia surgery. When humans are involved, mistakes can happen, as much as we hope and pray that they don’t and have every right to ask for compensation when human error rather than medical realities affect our lives.

That 7.3 million Americans are currently diagnosed with infertility and while it may not be life-threatening, it is certainly lifestyle threatening. Infertility is not caused from waiting too long to procreate or stress or not praying hard enough–infertility is an umbrella term for a series of medical issues that can affect men or women (infertility is about 40% male factor, 40% female factor, with the remaining 20% comprised of a combination of factors or unexplained infertility) who wish to build their family.

And that while other options for family building do exist, it is no one’s place to tell another person how they should build their family any moreso than it would be appropriate for you to decide or even suggest to someone else where they should live, who they should marry, what job they should hold, or any other lifestyle choice. No one enters into treatments lightly, without having researched options and weighed choices.

That there are around 3 million children created via IVF walking around on this earth right now, and that if we’re going to tell the story of the Savages, we need to also balance out the news by reminding the public that in all but a handful of cases, IVF fails not due to human error, but to the body’s error. And that when it succeeds, it creates children who have even gone on to build families of their own.

One night, my freshman year of college, I went to hear a Buddhist monk speak. Part of the talk was about the freeing quality of owning less. It made no sense–the less you have, the more you’ll feel in control? Except that my life felt quite out of control at that point, so I was willing to give it the old college try.

I went back to my dorm room and dumped most of my possessions in the trash room down the hall. I removed every picture from my wall, gave away any book not necessary for my studies, and tossed out dozens of small items I had accumulated in the first six months of college.

I had a lot of regrets afterwards. I also did feel more in control in my life, less cluttered. There was thinking space.

I can’t make myself get into one of these decluttering states–they mostly come to me when I’m very anxious, but when they come, I always ride out the impulse, using it to reorganize, pare back, give away anything unneeded. I accumulate so much stuff. Drawers of tiny play-doh samples and twelve pairs of scissors and used birthday candles. I have dishes we never use, broken measuring spoons, a can of mandarin oranges we will never eat. I have more books than a library. I literally have several thousand books, a large chunk of which could be donated and put to better use.

I have been decluttering for a few weeks now. In the process, I’ve also been redecorating. One of the strange things about this house is that there are no doors on the closets. Every closet opening is a strange size and we need to get new doors cut to fit the space, except we’ve never gotten around to it. It occurred to me that I could put up a curtain in place of a door and buy myself more time to work on that project.

So Lindsay and I headed to IKEA for furniture and decorative items. We were debating between two choices–a white curtain with a black pattern that would have been safe in my white and black kitchen or an orange curtain that would make me happy every time I looked at it. Even though my head was telling me “white curtain white curtain don’t be a fool, Melissa, white curtain” my very loud heart simply said, “orange.” I went with orange.

It is not perfect, nor does it look very grown-up, but as Josh said, “it is whimsical and therefore, it’s you. And the orange is us. It makes me happy when I sit down to eat.” It does make me very happy. We all just like to sit in there now and talk at the table.

On the theme of decluttering, we went to the river for tashlich, which is part of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. We stood at the river’s edge and figuratively threw into the water all that we didn’t wish to take with us into this upcoming year. A soul’s decluttering. Gone is the jealousy, the self-doubt, the bitter feelings. I mean, until they bubble up again. You know, since clutter usually returns.

In addition to telling us what has happened in your life in the last month, if you could grab an uninterrupted day to declutter and reorganize one room of your house, which would it be? Until this week, it would have been my kitchen. Now it’s my living room. What I would give to get rid of the huge pile of papers in the corner…

As always, it has been about a month since we met, bitched, cried, comforted, and caught up each other on our cycles and lives. Pull up a seat and I’ll pour you a drink. Let everyone know what is happening in your life. The good, the bad, the ugly. My only request is that if a story catches your eye, you follow it back to the person’s blog and start reading their posts. Give some love, give some support, or laugh with someone until your drink comes out of your nose.

I have a ton of assvice in my back pocket and as a virtual bartender, I will give it to you unless you specifically tell me that this is simply a vent and you do not want to receive anything more than a hug.

So if you have been a lurker for a while (or if this is your first open bar as someone who found this space through IComLeavWe), sit down and tell us about yourself. Remember to provide a link or a way for people to continue reading your story (or if you don’t have a blog–gasp!–you can always leave an email address if you’re looking for advice or support. If not, people can leave messages for that person here in the comments section too). If you’re a regular at the bar, I’ll get out your engraved martini glass while you make yourself comfortable. And anyone new, welcome. I’m glad you found this virtual bar.

For those who have no clue what I’m talking about when I say that the bar is open, click here to catch up and then jump into the conversation back on this current post.

So have an imaginary cocktail and tell us what is up with your life.