Posts from — February 2011

Remember how all the media sites back in August were saying how stress could affect your chances of getting pregnant?  Remember how WebMD crowed, “There is now scientific evidence to back up the widely held belief that stress can interfere with fertility.”

Scratch that.

This week, WebMD is crowing,

Stress and infertility have long been linked, with stress sometimes blamed when a woman can’t get pregnant naturally or with fertility treatments.  Now, a new report finds that a woman’s stress levels don’t adversely affect her chances of getting pregnant in a single fertility treatment cycle.

Seriously.

The very same media sites who misinterpreted the first studies are now bringing an equally dubious understanding to a new study that once again appeared in a medical journal.

So which is it?  Can I be stressed or can’t I?  And does any of that even matter?  How many people are actually holding their breath to find out whether stress and infertility are related? (Dr. Domar, put down your hand.)

The fact is that there is already enough evidence that enormous amounts of stress are detrimental to your overall health.  Whether or not this includes your fertility is beside the point.  I wouldn’t leave stress untreated just because it’s not affecting my ability to conceive.  Nor can I truly believe that if I could just relax enough, the lack of stress would overcome my blood’s clotty tendencies.

I think the takeaway here is that whatever stress management techniques you can do — whether it’s exercise or yoga or meditation or listening to really loud music with a lot of obscenities because you find it soothing — is worth doing for your emotional health.  To have a sense of control in a very uncontrollable situation.  To simply do something for yourself.

Oh, and totally ignore the media.  Reading infertility articles can give you whiplash.

I’m going to comment on something I read that I have no clue about. (Why preface it with that when I comment on things I know nothing about all the fucking time?  I have no idea, except that I feel it exempts me from a whole host of things.)  I don’t even follow either of the people on Twitter.

But it fascinated me nonetheless.

Serena Williams started tweeting that she was crying, heartbroken and hurt because someone she was following on Twitter wasn’t following her back.

I'm sooo hurt. So hurt. I mean so hurt.

February 26, 2011 2:36 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@serenawilliams

Serena Williams

@BJAOfficial following ONLY @Ladygaga = @serenawilliams hurt and tears

February 26, 2011 2:55 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@serenawilliams

Serena Williams

Which wouldn’t be that strange except that Serena Williams has almost 2 million followers and follows only 102 people.

Couldn’t nearly 2 million people tweet the same thing — cry about the same thing?  That she is following 102 people and they aren’t one of them?  What the hell do we owe Twitter followers?

There are many reasons why I don’t follow someone who is following me, and none of them are malicious.  It may be as simple as the fact that I can go days without signing into Twitter on a desktop (vs my phone), therefore, I sometimes miss that someone has followed me that I do have every intention of following because the Twitter email is now buried somewhere in my account.

I’ve certainly experienced not being followed back or not having a Facebook request accepted, and I usually chalk it up to the fact that I don’t know what the hell is going on in the other person’s mind, but I believe that unless they tell me otherwise, it was never done maliciously.  Maybe their Facebook account is only for family.  Maybe they think I curse too much in my tweets.  Maybe they think I’m boring.  I usually don’t want to know why someone isn’t following me.  I mean, do I really want the person to tell me that I’m boring?

But Serena is saying that she’s crying, that she’s hurt, that she’s sad and needs to be comforted.  Maybe it’s the middle-child-keeping-peace side of me, but that’s a lot of pressure to put on another person… over Twitter.  I think it would be inappropriate to tell someone that I’m upset that they’re not following my Tweets in a private manner, therefore, I think it’s even more bizarre to Tweet about it.

What are we Twit-owed?  Especially when you semi-know the person following you (vs. someone who follows you at random with no prior contact)? Should we follow someone for the sake of keeping peace?  Or should our Twitter stream solely be what we want to read without regard to anyone else’s feelings?

And yes, I really do give these things way too much thought.

On Thursday, I went to get the mail, and there was a package in my mailbox.  I was, you see, expecting a package — a book — from Barnes and Noble.  But the package was from Amazon so I had a moment of weirdness where I stood there and tried to make sense of it.  The package didn’t feel quite like a paperback book, but I had never seen said book so perhaps it came with a plastic-y cover.

I opened it right there by the mailbox because what else do you do when your book arrives from the wrong company?  Though it wasn’t my book at all.  It was the fifth season of Family Ties.

And I started bawling.

See, I didn’t even need to watch the DVD.

It all comes down to being heard.  And when you are heard so enormously like I was this week — a tiny admittance at the end of a post — you bawl at the mailbox.  Because that act of leaving a comment, of sending an email, of sending someone the episode of Family Ties that they mentioned at the end of the post is just an extension of a hug; of wrapping your arms around the person with a simple “me too” or “go ahead and cry” or most commonly — “I just wanted you to know that someone heard you.”

Baby Smiling in Back Seat heard me.  And like a fairy godmother, she granted my wish.

And I got to have a good cry; times two.

*******

Part of kindergarten is apparently honing your comedic skills, and every day, a child is chosen to tell a joke.  The ChickieNob takes this very very seriously.  She will not perform anyone else’s material — the girl writes her own jokes.  When she tells me this, it makes her sound as if she is two seconds away from composing her own version of the Aristocrats.  One day, you will turn on Comedy Central and she will be there, chomping on a cigar with Denis Leary (in her two pigtails), reciting her own tale of debauchery.

Er… you may not want to watch this at work.  I mean, I watch this at work, but I work from home.  So…

She came home this week upset because her act fell flat.  She wanted me to try it out on you because she thinks she has written something amazing, and it’s everyone else who just.doesn’t.get.it.  So this is the ChickieNob’s joke (and it is more appropriate for all offices):

What instrument does a cow play?

A moo bass.

She further explained that “a moo bass” was the punchline, though she feared that the reason that her class didn’t laugh was that they didn’t understand that some of her favourite opening bass lines sound like the lowing of a cow.  She told me that she knew that there wasn’t a problem with her joke, but was it possible that her classmates didn’t listen to the same music?

Please, please, for the love, please don’t ask her why the punchline wasn’t something like, “a horn.”  I asked this.  It was a big mistake.  Ditto “a cow bell” and “a moooooooooooooooooooooog.”

*******

Instead of the Weekly What If: Tell your favourite joke.  Or, at the very least, post a link to something on the Web that makes you laugh.

*******

And now, the blogs…

Infertile Fantasies’ birth story was crazy enough that I had to call Josh mid-day to tell him about it.  I seriously can’t say anymore without ruining it.

Renovation Girl weighs out the pros of stopping family building.  She holds the cons at bay with one hand and gives herself a full post to think about what she gains by stopping.  It is a bittersweet list; a bittersweet post — to sit with the person at the end of a road.  And just hold her hand.  And listen.

Love, Hope, and Faith has a post about falling in love with a place, a place she couldn’t imagine ever liking as of a few years ago.  It’s not just the photographs; it’s the larger idea that we can grow accustomed to something that didn’t really fit us at first.

Child Bearing Hips has a post that struck home for me about the way she eats (which also happens to be the way I eat…)  She writes: “There is a little voice in my head that tells me I SHOULD be able to eat an ice cream cone and not worry about gaining weight. Which I should… but I take it to a level where I’m wanting that ice cream cone every night. And something else I’ve noticed… I love feeling full. Having a nice, big plate of pasta with eggplant parm and garlic bread – send me to heaven right now.”  Infertility can quite literally bury the emotional eater.  A monthly cycle?  Drenched in anxiety and disappointment?  I feel like infertility is one long marathon of trying to seek comfort.  This post just gave me a lot of food for thought about my own eating habits.

Lastly, Baby Steps to Motherhood has a post about survivor’s guilt.  The three years after her loss were marked by guilt, and a seminar helped her to let go of those feelings and get to a good mental space.  But now that she is there, she is noticing something in regards to her blog.  She writes, “I feel that I have lost readers because I am no longer drowning. I feel as if I have survived the torture and no one wants to hear about how happy I am while I still fight this battle.”  It’s an amazing, raw post.  Please read it in its entirety and give her your thoughts.

The roundup to the Roundup: Hearing someone and letting them know it is pretty much the best gift you can give.  The ChickieNob’s joke.  Please leave your own joke or favourite link to something funny.  And lots of great blogs to read.

I have been in a bit of a mood lately.  Josh has been joking that it is my mid-life crisis, and it is strongly making me resemble a 9-year-old boy.  Last week, I took the kids to a comic book store and bought myself Superboy (I am very partial to Superman right now).  Afterward, I took them to an arcade so we could play pinball.  That sort of sums up where I am right now: I’m reading comic books and playing pinball.

I am watching old Fugazi concerts on YouTube instead of working.  I am spending all of my time marveling at how high other people can jump and wondering why I am incapable of getting that much air between myself and the floor.

This is not a good space for me.  I am restless.  I can’t get any traction to finish what I am writing.  I mean, it’s done; I could release it, but I’m keeping it around to pick at it self-consciously.  I both simultaneously love it and hate it.  I’m weighing it against things that aren’t even books.  I’m also weighing it against things that are books.  Usually, the mental scale tells me that it’s not as profound.  Sometimes, I can convince myself that it’s decent.  This is not a good space for me.

*******

The dinner outing came at the perfect time; there is something about seeing Julie that is so grounding.  She is the type of person you can unravel and reknit yourself in front of and she won’t bat an eye.  She’ll just keep asking questions so the figurative stitching can happen.

We ate Thai food until the waitress not so kindly told us that they wanted to shut the restaurant (not to sound gluttonous; we had actually finished dinner an hour earlier and were just sitting there.  I didn’t want you to think that we were like Augustus Gloop, hand-fisting Pad Thai as we ran from the establishment).  We went to sit in the Barnes and Noble until they told us that we had now kept their store open an additional ten minutes.

(See, no one is chewing in this picture)

(This is how Julie sees me: all mouth)

I knew that I would see Julie this spring, so this winter trip just sort of dropped from the sky this week.  And it was what I needed in the moment to help crawl out of this comic-book-and-YouTube hole; a good conversation about nothing and everything.  I realized as we sat there how much I wanted to finish the project and move onto the next thing, so I woke up early to take a bunch of tasks off my plate so I could shut down email for a few hours today and speed up the picking process so the manuscript is nice and smooth.  In that moment, I decided that I had to love it, had to be happy with my manuscript and stop coveting everyone else’s manuscript.  Because fuck it, I have a perfectly lovely manuscript.

There is pretty much nothing better than having someone you read step through the screen.  And it made me miss every single one of you last night — those that have also stepped through the screen, and those who are still on the other side of the monitor that I hope to one day meet.

I was asked to write about how I came to write Life from Scratch for the blog, Riding with the Top Down.  The title is a little facetious, but I think the advice is still good, if I do say so myself.  And I do say so myself, because this is my blog.

The idea for Life from Scratch came to me while I was crossing a library parking lot, holding a stack of cook books I had checked out. What if a woman used the year post-divorce to teach herself how to cook? A half hour later, during my next errand to the food store, I wondered what if that woman became a blogger and that’s how she found the voice she lost during the marriage. Over the next few days, I tugged and twisted the skeleton of the story out on paper, throwing in a best friend and some siblings, an ex-husband and a new lover. And voila — I had a book.

Okay, it took more like six months or so to write it, but I had the bare bones of a book.

You’re supposed to write about what you know, but I think people take that idea in such a literal sense that it limits them creatively.  I’ve always believed that if you are willing to listen — willing to do the research — that you can build off of your own experiences and slide sideways to something unrelated (please note that key point about listening to others who have lived it).

I’ve never been divorced from a marriage, but I have been divorced from a job, and that first year away from work was scary and life-changing and regretful and joyous. It wasn’t the same thing in the least, but it was a window into understanding what friends spoke about when they talked about their divorce, when I did the work and asked people about divorce. The job I left had started out as a wonderful connection and had turned into a soul-draining relationship over the years. In my case, it bordered on abusive. I completely lost my voice and was too terrified to express what I needed. Leaving was the right step, but it meant relearning a lot of things. We financially had to learn a new existence. The daily rhythm of my life changed.

I have never left a marriage, but I have left a life behind and asked myself, “what now?”

Without my career, I was free-floating for a few weeks. The excitement of the first few days (“no work today, yay!”) turned into anxiety (“holy shit, no work today… what am I going to do with myself?”). A random trip to a bookstore changed everything when I saw a cooking school textbook on sale. I couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars it would cost to go to cooking school, but I could afford $49.95 for the textbook. So I started at the beginning and taught myself how to cook.

Which is not to say that like Rachel, I considered toasting an English muffin as close as I would get to baking my own bread. I was a decent cook before I started my cooking school for one. I became someone who understood how to write her own recipe, who understood how to deconstruct someone else’s food and rebuild it again. It really wasn’t about cooking at all. It was about finding my passion.

I did start a short-lived blog about my personal cooking school where I posted some recipes. My husband helped me set it up because he was in that first wave of bloggers on the Internet, and I thought that it was amazingly cool that strangers read his posts and followed our lives. He linked to my blog and some of his readers came over. It was intoxicating to get those first comments.

I stopped posting in that space because I didn’t need it. I think for a blog to be successful, you need to need it. If you don’t need it, you won’t take the time to write there regularly and then it ceases to capture your life if you are swinging by every few weeks to jot down a random idea. I needed to cook, but I didn’t need to write about cooking.

I found the space I needed a year or so later when my husband and I were trying to conceive again. We had gone through fertility treatments to conceive our twins (again, if you’ve read Life from Scratch, it connects to writing what you know… sort of), and I had become massively depressed during those years. My husband suggested that I start a blog as an outlet as we got back into trying to conceive, and I also wanted to connect with other infertile men and women for a book idea I had jumping off of an Ask Amy column. So Stirrup Queens was born.

I needed to write Stirrup Queens, and I needed to read other bloggers and talk with them via the comment section on their blog. While I loved Stirrup Queens from the beginning, it took a little time to find my rhythm and make it feel like an electronic version of myself on the Web. A written extension of myself. It was Melissa Ford, in word form. I think my voice has changed over the years. Like Rachel, I am a general diarist who happens to concentrate on a certain facet of her life. Where Rachel writes about cooking, I write about my uterus.

My blog has gotten a large following. I’ve won awards, gotten work based on my blog success, published two books due to that space, and have gotten amazing opportunities, such as going to the White House. All because I started a blog. So I am continuously asked how one goes about building a large following online. What is the secret?

Here, come close to the screen and I’ll whisper it…

Need your space.

Okay, it’s not as simple as that, but that’s where you have to start. Need your space. If you need it for yourself (not to build a platform or get a huge audience) and need to write there regardless of whether or not anyone reads it, you will build the foundation for a great blog. At first, don’t worry about what anyone else is writing or whether they’ll even want to read what you have to say. Just enjoy your space on the Web. And when you find that your mind goes to your blog when you’re away from the computer; when you jump there mentally because it’s your happy space — a comforting space — you are ready for the next step: connecting with others.

Read other blogs. Comment on them (that’s the important part — people will find you when you comment). Not just once or twice, but go back over and over again, reading every post and commenting when you can. Expand that reading circle to new blogs, and comment on those blogs. And at the same time, keep writing your content. Don’t compare yourself or feel self-conscious. Just write what you need to write; write the type of stuff that you would want to read. Get involved with online projects such as IComLeavWe or NaBloPoMo. And most of all, don’t quit. Don’t get frustrated that your audience isn’t finding you quickly enough for your taste and walk away. Finding your tribe takes time.

I write often about how to build your blog traffic or how to leave a good comment, and while there are general guidelines you can follow (and certainly things you should never do), like marriage, there is no one, clear line that leads to happiness. Though, just like novel writing, you need to start with what you know.

Which is how I came to write about someone so unlike myself (okay, so maybe I’m a bit neurotic like Rachel) — a divorcee who can’t cook and is dating a Spanish photographer — who is based so deeply in what I do know — that it is scary to leave your old life behind even if that life doesn’t work anymore; that sometimes when we can’t find our voice orally, we can find it via a written medium; and that we all need those human connections, to not feel as if we are a tiny voice shouting into the ether, but to know that we have something to say and people are hearing it.

So, now answer this: do you need your space?

Photo Credit: Mary Gardella