Posts from — December 2010

On Tuesday, I was in the house writing when I heard strange music playing, and while it was faint, it sounded like it was coming from inside the house.  My immediate and completely logical assumption was that there was a deranged killer waiting for me in my basement, playing electronic music to lure me downstairs where he would hack me apart (I have a very very healthy imagination).

So I stood by the basement door, my ear pressed to it, about to call 9-1-1 to tell them about the killer playing electronic music in my basement when I realized that the basement wasn’t the source of the sound.  It sounded like it was coming from the living room.  And my next thought was, “great, so the killer is under the table and now I’m going to be hacked to bits.”

I bet you’re wondering how I could possibly be writing this, but I was actually wrong.  The twins had downloaded a musical screensaver to Josh’s computer, hence the creepy, quiet electronic music as fish swam past on the screen.

Terrifying.

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Merry almost Christmas!  I hope you have excellent plans for the weekend and much happiness over the holiday.  And if you’re not having a happy holiday and need to vent to someone, hey, this Jew will be around.  Saturday is sort of just Saturday in my world.  We’ll be volunteering.  And making marble runs.  And eating chili.  And trying to get in the last few moments of Christmas music from the radio (Josh doesn’t know about this last piece…shhh…)

Instead of the Weekly What If: Since Christmas is ending this weekend, and the Christmas music will go off the radio (sniff), please share your favourite Christmas song to make the ultimate play list.

Mine is either Josh Groban’s “O Holy Night” or the Kinsey Sicks dragapella version of “Jingle Bells, Don’t Ask Don’t Tells” (which they retired since they repealed DADT).

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Rather than ask people to make big resolutions that we never keep (come on, admit it), BlogHer is asking people to write small steps they’ve taken towards better health.  One small thing you’ve worked into your day that sets you on a different path.

I’m working on this project so I really want to encourage you to participate.  We think a lot about our bodies — maybe more than the average person.  Surely there is something you have done, some small step, to wrest back control of your body and overall health.

Click over to read how to participate — I’d love to see some ALI people represented in the project.

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And now, the blogs…

Trying to Conceive has a post utilizing one of my favourite songs: “Circle Game.”  It’s about using a song to plug back into how you felt as a child; singing the song with the idea that it was pretty and life continues on, but without the realization of how you’d feel when you’re dragging your feet to slow the circles down.

Blue.Bell.Beat has a post set in 2000.  It is about her first time being alone; on the other side of the world.  And meeting the woman who would kick her out of her funk and get on with seeing the world.  It’s a lovely post, and I feel like a good reminder about living is tucked away somewhere within the lines.

Lastly, Uncommon Nonsense has a post about the uncomfortable questions and comments that can arise when you’re visiting friends and family (you know, as you might be this weekend).  I absolutely love this phrase: “pre-wincing with pain” and wish her good thoughts for her upcoming visit.

The roundup to the Roundup: it turns out that it was a screensaver and not a killer in my house.  Merry Christmas if you celebrate it and answer the Instead of the Weekly What If.  Participate in BlogHer’s small steps project.  And great blog posts to read.

If you never read Coraline and don’t want to know one smidgen about the book (I am being careful not to spoil it), don’t read these posts. They are about infertility, but they springboard off the book.

Willy Wonka: But Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he he always wanted.

Charlie Bucket: What happened?

Willy Wonka: He lived happily ever after.

When Coraline goes into the Old Man’s flat while looking for the lost souls, the voice inside promises her everything she wanted before she ever met her Other Mother.  The material items — such as the green gloves or the Wellies in the shape of frogs — but also a parent who understands her need for adventure and interaction and is able to provide it.

Coraline’s response:

Coraline sighed.  “You really don’t understand, do you?” she said.  “I don’t want whatever I want.  Nobody does.  Not really.  What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted?  Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything?  What then?”

It’s the familiar concept that the sweetness of the victory is contingent on the struggle.  Those things that we think we want that are easy to get really aren’t appreciated and might not even have been deeply wanted if push came to shove.  Coraline’s point is that humans don’t want life handed to them in a neatly wrapped package.  We want to work towards things, struggle — that’s what Coraline calls the “fun” part of the process.

Would you like to debate her right now?

I’m sure anyone who has really struggled with something such as … oh … let’s say family building might have a different view point about the benefit of struggle.

Yet there have been many posts up in the ALI community about whether infertility makes you a better parent; and if not “better” in the sense of knowing all the verses to “Wheels on the Bus” and being an expert diaperer, does it make you a more patient parent, a more appreciative parent in the same way that if you have food all around you, you may not stop to marvel at a meal in the same way that you would if you were once starving?

I think it’s a little offensive to think that the struggle makes you a better parent.  I can think of plenty of people who reached parenthood with ease and are kick-ass parents, and plenty of people who did multiple rounds of IVF that really suck as parents.  And I can think of the opposite too — those who didn’t struggle and suck, and those who did struggle and knock the figurative parenting baseball out of the park.  It all seems a little too much like a crap-shoot to look at this as a “if … then …” situation.

So what of the process?  What part of struggling is necessary in order to build us into who we become?  And where do you fall with life overall — are you closer aligned with Willy Wonka or Coraline once you get past the frustration of your current situation?  If given the choice between always receiving anything you ever wanted without working for it, or having to gather your own happiness, which would you choose? (Think of the big picture beyond the here and now.)

Disclaimer: I have finally reached the end of Coraline, and I liked it quite a bit.  Enough to start reading Good Omens when I finish reading the vampire smut novel I’m currently on.  Perhaps it’s more indicative of where my head is in how I read Coraline, but I couldn’t help but see all of us within this book; within her frustration for how what she wants is mismatched against what she has, and the struggles she needs to go through to reclaim what was there all along.

Dear PR People Who Don’t Actually Spend Any Time on My Blog Before You Write Me:

I am very tired of receiving requests to write about your exciting! new! baby! product!  I am also very tired of receiving requests asking me to write about your wonderful product that will make my pregnancy as easy and wonderful as one of those douche commercials where they’re running along the beach.

You caught that part where I can’t get pregnant … right?

I’m not sure how I got on your list in the first place.  Because if you had done your job at all — if you had actually focused on the “relations” part of “public relations” you would have noticed that I have an infertility blog as we were building our relationship, and you would have tailored your pitch to reflect my status and how I identify.

Oh … wait, we don’t have a relationship?  Then why the hell are you writing me?

No, I don’t want to host an online baby shower for your pregnancy product.  No, I don’t want to send you pictures of myself pregnant and using your product — do you know why?  BECAUSE I CAN’T.  Because I can’t get pregnant.  Hence why this blog has an infertility focus though I also write about other things such as my fear of crickets or the latest Harry Potter movie or my interactions with PR employees.

And while I recognize that your job is difficult — that there are a lot of blogs out there and without key information such as daily page view numbers or which blogs share the same exact audience, it is difficult to know where you should send your pitch for the biggest bang — it doesn’t excuse this.  Because we’re starting from a place where you are asking a favour of me — you’re asking me to write about your product.  I get nothing out of this interaction and you get everything.  Therefore, it would be nice if you took the time to get to know me a bit.  And if your product doesn’t fit at all with my blog, please don’t send the email.

Yes, I love babies.  I love holding my friend’s babies and then sniffing my shirt the rest of the day.  But coveting a child is not the same thing as wanting to hawk your product.

Because receiving an email asking if I want to try a new bottle/pregnancy belly band/binkie/diaper/formula/breast pump is like taking a plastic fork, snapping the tines so they’re extra sharp, and then dragging the broken utensil over my heart.  I could have said a knife to the heart, but I think we all know how incredibly surprising it is when a plastic utensil snaps when you’re digging into your food.  And that’s what it’s like to get your emails in my inbox.

Because I expect to see emails from friends in my inbox, and work emails, and even random requests from people that are completely on target with who I am and what I write and the blogroll I keep.  In fact, I usually love hearing from new people.  But I never expect to see a PR pitch for a baby product — you know, due to that whole infertility thing.

Sincerely,

Mel

If you never read Coraline and don’t want to know one smidgen about the book (I am being careful not to spoil it), don’t read these posts. They are about infertility, but they springboard off the book.

Back in college, my boyfriend-at-the-time (the one who had a heart the size of a rancid sesame seed) and his friends were all passing around a physics book, and I ended up reading it one night too.  I have no memory of what the book was called, but one of our favourite parts was a chapter on hyperspheres.

Hyperspheres are a kind of torus or donut-shape four-dimensional sphere where the outside can rotate through the inside, creating a way to show how everything is connected.  Two points that are as far away as possible from one another are also closest to one another … at the same time.

In Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, there’s a scene where Coraline begins walking away from the house and ends up back where she began.  Sort of like that aptitude test question of how far a dog can run into the woods (halfway; then he’s running out).  Because the world — even if Gaiman doesn’t use the term — behaves like a hypersphere.

It’s a concept that moves out of the physics world and is found in our everyday lives too — that idea of one thing being both as far away and as close as possible at the same time.  For instance — the ALI community.  We’re strangers, but we share our stories like intimate friends.  We live far apart from one another, but we feel emotionally close.

And I can’t think of another real life situation that mirrors this more than infertility because — at the very same time — you are far away from reaching parenthood as well as close to parenthood.  You are deeply entrenched in that parenting world — thinking about not-yet children, revolving your lives around not-yet children, preparing for not-yet children.  And yet, you cannot have children so you are also far away from parenthood.

Perhaps the hypersphere also serves as an explanation for why we can be both joyous for another person and miserable for ourselves at the exact same moment.

Disclaimer: I am midway through the book, and these are my thoughts midway through the book. I may have a very different reaction to the book once I get to the last page.

As we turn the corner into the last few days before Christmas, it feels like this hush has come over the blogosphere.  People are still posting somewhat — though that has slowed down — and commenting here and there, but it feels very quiet.

Barring duplicates, 271 posts should be on the Creme de la Creme when it goes up on January 1st.  Just to give you a sense of proportion; last year’s Creme had 288 posts total, and on the 15th, when the soft deadline fell, there were 187 posts.  So almost 100 posts more this time.  Gulp.

Yes, I am seriously worried that I won’t finish in time.

But I’m up for the challenge.

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While I am reading and writing about your posts, you could read my new book (hint, hint), Life from Scratch.  Lori from Write Mind Open Heart is throwing an online book tour for the book.  For those who have been missing the Barren Bitches Book Brigade, here is your chance to march again.  Everyone is welcome (and begged) to participate.  And it would make my weekend if you joined along.

If you would like to join along (and I really really hope you’ll join along.  How many times can I say that?), please visit Lori’s post to see how to sign up.  In brief, you sign up, read the book, send one question in February that  you’d propose to the group (Lori will collect these), and then she’ll send you the list of questions that you can choose from to answer in a blog post.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

So … this is my begging you to join along.

Pretty please?

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Three things that caught my attention this week:

1. I wrote a post about why I’ve written for BlogHer for the last four years over at The Field Trip.

That obviously caught my attention because I wrote it.

2. Anna Olswanger has started a new site called Yerusha for older, child-free Jews (in other words, Jewish men and women who are child-free not by choice).  It has forums and advice.  I know it only services a specific niche, but since there are people who read this blog who fit that specific niche, I thought I’d throw it out there.  I love how Julia Child is what kicked off the whole idea.

3. 16th and Q created a video for the It Gets Better Project.  And it’s clever because Chanukkah was about the ultimate bully (King Antiochus) telling people that they couldn’t be themselves, and the point of the chanukkiah is to shine light in the world so intolerance has no place to hide.  This video also passed the “Does it Make Melissa Cry” test, though I’d like it noted that I lasted almost 7/8ths of the way through the video before I started wailing.

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The Weekly What If: What if you could time travel and be physically present to witness one moment in history.  You’d be perfectly safe regardless of the situation, and you’d only be standing witness.  What moment would you choose?

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And now, the blogs…

Riding the IVF Roller Coaster has a post about the emotional roller coaster of being pregnant again after a loss.  She writes of her first pregnancy: “When Blobby died I felt so much guilt for not having celebrated and accepted his life while he was alive. ”  And now, back in the same position again, she is struggling to apply the lessons she learned the first time around.  Because it is just so damn hard.  She finds the root of her fears, but it is the last few lines that are so lovely that you need to click over and read the whole post just for that ending.

Many Many Moons has a post that includes Ally McBeal’s dancing baby … sort of.  She was attending a party at a restaurant and she had one of those evenings that was so ridiculous that she couldn’t actually get upset from it.  One after the other, people asked her if she was pregnant yet, that is, until she got to the final moment: “I was standing there barely recovered from the firing squad that had just accosted me, when in walks (and I’m not kidding when I say this) a string of 5 women marching military style as if reporting for duty.  They came to rest almost right in front of me, Ver.a Brad.ley bags in hand, and turn to face me almost in unison.”  Oooh, you’ll have to click over and read the end of the post to hear where they were from.

This is why I’m thrilled that Infertile Fantasies is back to posting on a public blog.  She has a wonderfully terrible post about worst case scenarios, nodding to the actualities of life (“‘Pre-eclampsia can be serious. Worst case scenario, you might even start having seizures and we’ll have to admit you.’ Uh, no… worst case scenario, you die and your baby dies, too.  But, see, it’s awkward to bring that sort of thing up.”) and mixing it with the absurd.  But it’s the stark truth in the fact that the birth is such a small part of the whole, as well as the fact that it’s just as easy to say “shut up now” as it is to say, “take deep cleansing breaths.”

The roundup to the Roundup: good lord there are a lot of Creme posts.  Please join along for the blog tour of Life from Scratch.  Three things that caught my attention this week.  Answer the Weekly What If.  And lots of great posts to read.