Posts from — February 2011

I have six hours of MTV footage from the day that Kurt Cobain died.  I had been out picking up these watercolours that I special ordered at the university bookstore, and when I walked into the apartment, my roommates gave me the news of his suicide.  We watched MTV continuously for the rest of the afternoon and evening, and at some point, I decided to put a new tape in the VCR and let it record until it ran out of tape.

Every so often, I hook two VCRs together and make copies of this tape for other people.  It has every Nirvana video, Kurt Loder grimly reporting the news.  Every so often, when I am feeling most sentimental, I put it on and watch it alone if I can’t rope Josh into a few hours of it.

We have two or three boxes in the basement filled with VHS tapes.  I didn’t mean to create these time capsules.  Most of the time, I simply recorded something because I wanted to see it later.  And then time passed and I recorded something after it without erasing the first thing and now I couldn’t erase the first thing until I saw the second.  Once the tapes filled in this manner, I started a new one.

So we have random old Thirtysomething episodes.  And probably 20 or so Real World episodes.  We have every episode of My So-Called Life — out of order.  Probably 4 hours worth of The State.  I have snippets from the Tony Awards and made-for-tv movies and news footage of random events.  I have Family Ties and the Facts of Life and several Party of Five.

I probably can’t reuse the tapes at this points and I don’t watch them very often (though I have been known when Josh is out of town to slip in a tape or two).  But I also find myself unable to part with them.  With few exceptions, those recordings meant something to me at the time.  And if they didn’t mean something to me then, they mean something to me now because they’re a time capsule of that era in my life.  I can’t imagine throwing them out any more than I could toss old photographs.

What specific television episode or footage do you wish you had on VHS tape right now and could watch again?  Who know… I may have it in my basement.

If I could see anything, it would be the Family Ties episode where Alex Keaton’s friend dies and he sings  “Light My Fire.”  I remember it being the perfect piece of television drama for invoking a good cry when you need one.  But I haven’t seen it in many years.

Came across this little upcoming book description in Publisher’s Weekly, and call me crazy, but I don’t think I’ll be reading it:

Sold his horror debut, Breed … which follows a group of very desperate New York parents in an infertility support group.

When I am queen of the world, I’m going to ban the pairing of “desperate” and “infertile.”  In my world, treating a disease or trying to circumvent a problem doesn’t equal desperation.  Google the two words together and you get over 800,000 hits.  You’re a writer; you can stretch farther than this cliche.  But I’m really glad to see that infertility is entering into the horror genre.  I’ve always found infertility terrifying so I’m glad to see the literary world in agreement.

And I hope there are zombies.  Zombie reproductive endocrinologists.

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The Weekly What If: What if the best reproductive endocrinologist with a nearly 100% success rate was a zombie.  Would you go to him?  What if he was local and inexpensive with a great shared risk program?  Had a warm bedside manner and always called you with test results himself?  Literally the only thing out of place was that he was part of the undead and wanted to eat your brains.

Just wondering — you know, if horror infertility books are the next big thing, I want to do my research and stay ahead of the curve.

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Write Mind Open Heart has kicked off her annual Limerick Chicks contest.  She is taking entries until February 28th, and I have decided to get mine in early this year.  I have chosen to pick on Forever Reaching because I’ve read her forever and she has been quiet this month.  She’s not the only one, so this limerick is dedicated to all who feel that they are in a writing slump.  And NYCPhoenix — I hope knowing there are people out there cheering for you will give you the energy you need to write again.

Forever Reaching has been quiet
She tweets as if on a blog diet
She’s looking to be inspired
She’s written out; tired
Hoping like a phoenix she’ll rise up and riot

Vote for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

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And now the blogs…

The first one goes off the beaten track because it’s an image rather than words (I think this is the first time I’ve done this?).  But once I saw it, I couldn’t stop thinking about Bionic Mamas’ painting “Baby is Gravid.”  It defies being described (though I will give you the heads up that it’s a nude and features her pregnancy), so I implore you to click over and just marvel at the skill.

Park Slope Purgatory has a post about that limbo place between optimism and pessimism where she can’t really wrap her mind around the pregnancy.  She describes that space perfectly — where you want to believe and yet she explains she is living more in a place of “if” than a place of “when.”  And I love this: “But I’m doing my best not to grieve a potentially devastating day before I absolutely have to.”  Please hold her hand today as she goes in for the ultrasound.

Knocked Up By Another Man has a post looking back a year into the past.  I love this way of looking at the scars of infertility: “The scars of the journey remain on my heart. But instead of being something bad, they are mixed with the love of Fairyegg’s gift and the pride of our determination. Instead of marring our hearts as parents, I think the scars add to the character of our love for E.”  Isn’t that beautiful?

Lastly, Sesame-Seed-Sized Dreams has a heartbreaking post about a vivid dream that ties in with the loss of their daughter.  The description of the dream — in and of itself — is interesting as you try to interpret it, but it’s the final lines that really squeezed my heart: “Trying to make babies is a big game of uncertainty. I know all that but I still find this so hard.”  Such a beautiful post — please read the whole thing and give her comfort since the cycle is over.

Actually, really lastly, I thought Songs for My Unborn Children is a really cool idea — a blog where she is telling a story in poems.  She already knows the ending (which sort of reminded me of Drama 2B Mama, where you start the story already knowing how it ends).

The roundup to the Roundup: Zombie reproductive endocrinologists are all the rage.  Answer the Weekly What If (would you let a zombie near your girlie parts or man sack?).  What do you think of my limerick?  And lots of great posts to read.

Astute readers of Life from Scratch probably already know that today is my character, Rachel Goldman’s, birthday.  She is most likely celebrating it by NOT baking a cake, but instead buying one from some nearby bakery, sticking her finger into the box to steal some icing on the way home, kicking herself for doing so because now she has messed up the cake, and then saying fuck all to that and eating it whole.  Just a girl and her fork.

Which is a step up from her last birthday.  We won’t even mention last year’s birthday since the whole sordid tale is in the book.  And yes, she still has the lobster pin.  Though she and Arianna trade it back and forth as a joke.

The secret you don’t know — which I will reveal now — is that Rachel shares her birthday with my very real best friend.  And I dropped her old last name into the book too in her honour because a good friend is hard to find and when you have one, you celebrate her any way you can.  Let that be a lesson not to interact with me too much lest you find yourself on the pages of a fictional book.

In honour of Rachel’s birthday, the publisher is giving away the Kindle version of the book for free as a promotion.  You can download it without charge for a limited time.  So go share the love with your best friend and toast female friendships for Rachel’s birthday.  Because the broad would do it for you (and she’d let you have a 24-hour mope avec chocolate mousse if you needed that too).

And let my paper friend, Rachel, know that you’re celebrating with her.  And let my very real friend, Julie, know you’re toasting her too.

So I read the recent Huffington Post article by Dina Roth Port about how we need to talk more about infertility.  I’ll start with the positives — it’s very well-written and she makes some excellent points about why we need to come out of the proverbial closet.  I’m not going to argue with the fact that we do need to talk about infertility as openly as we speak about any other disease.  You build understanding via words.

At the time of writing this post, it had 249 comments, which means that the post also got people talking.  I didn’t dive into the comments because I know better than to dive into the comments on Huffington Post.  I’ve seen what has been written every other time they’ve tackled infertility as a topic.  Not that HuffPo is unique — my personal favourite for vitriol is the New York Times.  Those commenters usually make me want to face-punch them.

Which is to say that I could be missing out on some amazing discussion happening in that comment section, but I’m going to hazard a guess that I’m not.

So, just to be clear, I think we should be talking about infertility, and I am extremely open in talking about our situation with anyone and everyone — from the grandma buying produce in the food store who didn’t ask me about my uterus at all (but I volunteered its defectiveness anyway because I just like to shaaaaaaaaaare) to everyone who begins their thoughts with the words, “are they twins?”

BUT

The onus was on infertile men and women in this article.  We heard all about how WE need to talk about this.  But what about the listener?  Why isn’t there an accompanying article for all the douchebags who live in the comment section about how they have to listen?  And listen better?  We can talk all we want, but that comment section tells the real story (fine, I did click over for a moment, saw the words “these comments are really disheartening” and clicked away after seeing that once again, the comments were a divide between those who have experienced infertility and those who say douchebaggy things like this).

I talk about infertility daily.  I volunteer the news that my body is defective with the same ease in which I comment on the traffic on the Beltway.  I talk about it openly and calmly.  I’m certainly not making people uncomfortable with my tone because two seconds before I mention my uterus of doom, we are having a perfectly harmonious conversation.  They are asking questions, I am asking questions, we are getting to know each other, we are laughing gaily, we are skipping through figurative fields while the wind dishevels our hair, they ask if twins run in my family, I mention that infertility does.

And the conversation screeches to a halt.

They are uncomfortable.  They apologize, they try to change the topic.  I smile and say that it’s totally fine, and I try to keep us on topic by explaining just how one goes about creating twins in a fertility clinic.  They get more and more uncomfortable.  And then I let the conversation change back to more agreeable topics.  Such as the traffic on the Beltway.

And is it diseases?  Well, no, it isn’t all diseases because the very same conversation I’m describing also had a long interlude about cancer.  About death.  That we skated over with empathy.  The topic of infertility made me feel as if I had just shat in his corn flakes.

So while I agree with the author of the post and Resolve and everyone else quoted in the article that we need to talk about it, I also want equal pressure put on people to hear it.  You see — it’s not just what we do.  The article insinuates that we are the reason we have little insurance coverage, little support, little understanding.  Our lack of talking has brought this upon ourselves.

But that’s a little too simplistic for me.  Because this article was talking about it, and you can see from the comment section what happens when people talk about infertility.

I could be wrong, but I have to hazard a guess that those who experienced breast cancer thirty years ago weren’t hearing that they were selfish, whiny, and should just adopt when they finally started talking about their disease.  Since, as Port says,

Thirty years ago, breast cancer was where infertility is today — women just didn’t talk about it … There weren’t countless support groups, fundraising walks, and an entire month enveloped in pink. Women battling breast cancer did so in silence and, in turn, many felt isolated and ignored. However, now because there is such an international dialogue about the disease, breast cancer receives multi-million-dollar grants each year in research funding and patients are inundated with an outpouring of support and understanding.

It is very easy for people to understand and get behind diseases such as cancer and AIDS because it is quite clear that these diseases kill, and that has an urgency that infertility lacks.  Infertility is hard sell because I don’t think — until you have lived it — that you can fathom what it feels like to not be able to build your family.  It doesn’t directly kill you.  There are plenty of people out there who think infertility actually sounds like a positive (don’t have to worry about birth control?).

And yet, it hurts so badly that sometimes, you wish for your own death.

It certainly has urgency to me.  The problem is conveying that urgency to THEM (that faceless them that we apparently need to discuss our infertility with).  Mental illness also hasn’t succeeded in getting that disease’s much needed insurance coverage and support.  I think we can learn more from watching that fight than we can from comparing ourselves to cancer.

I think we should fight for that support.  I think we should fight for that insurance coverage.  But I don’t think we should pretend that it’s as simple as talking about it.  Because we still need the other side to listen to it.  And let’s hold them as accountable as infertile men and women are held in this HuffPo article.  Because, yes, in thirty years, I’d like to see illnesses such as depression or infertility given support and coverage.  And hopefully, the comment section change dramatically along with that support and coverage.

A few days ago, I wanted to talk to Josh and I wanted the kids out of the room.  First, I asked the ChickieNob politely.  Then I told the ChickieNob to get out of the room.  Finally, I told the ChickieNob that I had to tell her father something terrifying and if she overheard it, she would have nightmares for months so could she please, for the love, get out of the room so I could tell her father this without damaging her delicate psyche?

Absolute wrong tactic: she perked up and moved closer saying, “you’re going to talk about something terrifying?  I’d love to hear!”

There are things the ChickieNob doesn’t like, but few things that scare her.  We were hiking in the woods and we came across this snake, and the natural instinct would be to jump backwards, but she moves closer.  She loves haunted houses, vampires, werewolves, and monsters.  She always picks the roller coaster, the steepest part of the hill for sledding, and marches straight into the ocean.

At 6-years-old, she is absolutely positive that she is going to be a bass player in an all-girl band (this all-girl band includes her brother because — as she rolls her eyes — he’s her twin and she guesses that he should be included).  At the music school, she announced to the cashier working in the store where I bought some guitar picks that she needed a 3/4 electric bass — a silver one — and an amp.  She needed the amp to go extra loud because she was going to “rock out.”  She told the boy that she was going to form the band with some other kindergarteners, and casually dropped that they were going to be bigger than Green Day.  And I believe her.  She has me convinced.  She has this swagger when she walks and she is fearless.

I once asked her how she was so brave.  She thought about it and said, “I try to be the scarier thing.  When I’m scared, I either scream to scare the other thing, or I try to freak the other thing out so that it isn’t the scariest thing in the room.  I am.”

Let’s juxtapose my timidity with the ChickieNob.  Before the first lesson, I sat on a piano bench outside the music room with my stomach in knots.  She danced around and I silently stressed out about how bad I was going to be.  I kept reminding myself that there was nothing at stake.  If I sucked, I sucked, but it wasn’t like high school where I’d be getting a grade and it would direct my future.  This was supposed to be fun, but it was making me a stress case.

My teacher came to fetch me and the twins, and I walked back to the practice room.  We talked about form and posture.  I was deeply aware that my enormous boobs were resting over the top of the guitar due to the way I was sitting hunched over.  We talked about what I hoped to accomplish with these guitar lessons (you mean, beyond the ability to ROCK OUT?  Oh, then I guess I’m looking to play some stadium shows.  You know, that sort of thing).  And what sort of music I like to listen to and hope to play.

I have a bunch of old papers and sheet music books in my guitar case, and I took one out to show him that I had taken guitar lessons from this school when I was a child.  Underneath it was the book I had been working on when I quit and he picked it up.  “Did you know that this is the book that they use for first years at Peabody?  You were playing from this when you quit?”  We flipped through my old teacher’s notes on songs and I felt so enormously sad.

I felt like I really wasted something by being so damn scared of everything.  When I quit, I chalked it up to wanting long nails (and to be able to wear polish) and not spend time practicing.  But I also know that a lot of it had to do with the anxiety I felt playing for anyone.  I’m not talking about performances — I mean, just playing for my old piano or guitar teachers.  I was so worried that I’d mess up and spent those lessons as a kid with my stomach in knots.

Josh and I joked before my current lessons began that I’d have to ask the new teacher to face the wall while I played so he wasn’t looking at me, and I would have if (1) I wasn’t concerned with also appearing sane and (2) the Blair Witch Project sort of ruined the whole face-the-wall thing for me.  I can count the number of times I have ever played piano for Josh, and in all of those cases, I was drunk and inhibition-free.

In quitting, I stopped feeling that anxiety.  But when I look at those old books, I also look at what I missed out on due to the fact that I made myself feel so terrified over something that was — again — low stakes.  So what if I messed up, especially when it was just me and my teacher?  What if it took longer than expected to master a song?  I was really really good — I have the notes from my teacher to prove it — and I had literally no self-confidence.  And I’m not even talking about having the self-confidence of the ChickieNob who, at age six, would literally be able to command the stage in a stadium and get people to rock out for two hours.  I didn’t even have the self-confidence to play in my own living room.

I walked out of my first class elated simply because I had gotten through it.  I had picked up my guitar and played a few chords in front of another human being.  I have had three classes now, and while I can’t say that I have picked up much of the ChickieNob’s swagger, I am now able to play for Josh every night.  I am playing for my teacher and when I mess up, I just laugh and say, “start over.”  It’s not that I’ve gotten rid of that internal voice that keeps telling me that I could suck.  But I am working on being the scarier thing in the room.

What fear would you like to get past?  What fear has limited you?