Tonight we had an audience with The Queen. Ha, ha, ha, I’ve been saving that little joke for the entire time it took my computer to boot up. I have an affinity for the queen, mostly because we share the same title. She, the ruler of the United Kingdom. I, the tamer of the stirrups. Both of us, in thankless positions. Stiff upper lip (except when I start crying in the middle of the meeting with the RE). Love of hats. She enjoys a good walk. I enjoy a good walk. She likes tea and, by fuck, I like tea as well. She lives in a palace and owns several properties. I aspire to live in a palace and own several properties. The list of similarities is endless.

I loved the film not just because I am totally and completely in love (in LOVE) with Helen Mirren, but because it led to a very interesting conversation on the ride home about celebrity worship. There is a point in the film where Prince Philip looks at the video footage in disgust of the mourners crying and exclaims, “Sleeping in the streets and pulling out their hair for someone they never knew. And they think we’re mad!” The whole film made the concept of finger pointing seem so ridiculous in retrospect. The judgements we levy on people we don’t know. The assumptions we make based on a small amount of information.

I was thinking about it in the way people jump down one another’s throats based on a few words on the screen. When we have no concept what has shaped that person’s view of the world. Or what else they would say if we were to engage in conversation. Reading blogs is a privilege. Growing up, no one left their diary open to the world. Even if reading each other’s diaries could have saved most of us a great deal of heartache and angst during those middle school years.

I’m thankful for everyone who shares their blog with me. And while I take all with a grain of salt–on one hand, I don’t actually “know” you simply by reading your blog and on the other hand, what does it mean to truly “know” someone and do we ever really know another person–I can’t put a price tag on what I’ve learned in the last six months of blogging and reading blogs. Without the editing of a publisher, this raw material of first-hand information is invaluable. I love every typo–yours and mine–that show our humanness. I love the posts that are left up even though we have an impulse to take them back down after a response. I am eternally thankful for the people who admit to their jealousies and foibles and the hushed out side of humanity. You make me stop kicking myself so viciously. We all have our faults.

Helen Mirren admitted in an interview that I recently read (in People Magazine) that she was worried how the Queen would view her portrayal. “I had been invited to Buckingham Palace while I was making the film, but I turned them down because if the film became mortifying to the royal family, I didn’t want their mortification to be doubled by me turning up. If they invite me now, I’ll go. And if I get a steely stare, then that is what I get.” I don’t think she will get the steely stare that she fears–though I understand the impulse. We all want to be loved. We all want our work respected. Queen Elizabeth expresses that hurt over her unpopularity post-Diana’s death so eloquently in the film.

I think she did a wonderful job of showing the Queen as human. As a woman who argued with her former daughter-in-law. Who thought it was best to internalize emotions and not dump them on other people. While the world was mourning Diana, the Queen was concerned with her grandsons. And rising above the difficult relationships she had with her son and former daughter-in-law until the end. At the end of the day, she is simply another person whose car breaks down now and again. Who owns a cell phone and sleeps with clips in her hair to keep her curls crisp upon awakening. The movie showed her as a human, whereas the press portrays her as an entity. And I love humans. I love seeing their foibles and accomplishments.

I leave 2006 with a large thank you to everyone who had read the blog thus far. And a thank you to everyone who has commented and shared their point-of-view. I still have so many thoughts brewing to carry me through not only 2007, but well beyond. Can you imagine if your kids grow up to find themselves faced with infertility and I’m still yawning on about infertility. In my day, we didn’t have these fancy Follistim pens! We had to mix our own vials. In my day, we didn’t have implantation information the moment it happened! We had to wait two whole agonizing weeks to find out results.

A thank you to everyone who writes blogs–all the blogs in my blogroll and an advance thank you to the people who will be added this upcoming year as they begin their own blogs.

My New Year Resolution: To listen and read without judgement. When I feel judgement creeping into my mind, looking at the picture of Helen Mirren taped onto the refrigerator and remembering her portrayal of the Queen. Her stiff upper lip, yes. But the way her lips also trembled slightly when she admitted how hurt she was by the way she was judged. And with that lack of judgement, a sense of temperment when leaving comments or blogging about something I read in the newspaper that upsets me. Perhaps not when it comes to huge entities such as insurance companies, but certainly when it comes to individual people.

Happy New Year. May 2007 be a wonderful year.

Sunday to Monday seems like a huge step this upcoming week. It’s just a date on the calendar, yet we take the turning of the year so seriously. It’s a chance to reboot. It’s a chance to start over so to speak. To change something. When I was little, I used to write out the same poem every year on December 31st and slip it into an envelope. I liked to watch my handwriting change. I would make envelopes for myself to open in the future with far-off dates like 1996 listing everything I hoped to have accomplished by that year. By 1996 I wanted to have a harem of boyfriends. I coveted wall-to-wall carpeting. I believed my life would only be complete if I had a white bunny rabbit named Snowball. I wanted to be a mommy. A mommy at 22 somehow sounded right to an eight-year-old.

I have one husband. I prefer hardwood floors. If I ever had a rabbit, I doubt I would name it Snowball. The desire to be a mommy is the only thing that hasn’t changed (though it certainly didn’t happen in my twenties…).

I hope everyone closes out this year with peace. I hope that 2007 turns out to be the best year yet. I wish everyone ease in keeping resolutions who makes them.

And now the blogs.

My prize for best Christmas post goes to DrSpouse at What am I? She talks about viewing the service as a woman experiencing infertility and the thoughts flitting through her mind. She discusses the connection between birth and Christmas and ends with this thought: “But Christmas is also so much about birth – and I have to remind myself to skip ahead to other parts of the story, where we are adopted as children of God, who are equal with birth children. And also that Joseph, crucial in Christ’s lineage, was his adoptive father. Somewhere, tonight, a child is born. Maybe to us.” It was just a gorgeous post.

Nica at Life as a Sandwich has a very funny post lamenting all the baby showers she has attended and calls for someone to throw her an infertility shower. Why do we only shower people with love and attention for celebratory life events such as weddings or impending motherhood? Where are the infertility showers where friends provide the couple in need with money for fertility drugs or adoption? Where are the friends giving the couple a day of relaxation to escape all the stress of infertility? Nica may be on to something… Why are we only gathering to celebrate or mourn? There are too many in-between times, the stressful times where we could benefit from people gathering around and comforting the couple. It’s food for thought.

Shlomit at You’re Still Young! had a funny thought that she passed along to her husband, Sariel, during their last insemination. It was a question that we probably all have asked at some point in our life. We’re going on a date tonight and returning to the restaurant of our first date in honour of Shlomit’s question… (hint: you need to click on over to see the question and laugh).

Lastly, Stacie at the Twinkies cleared up a lot of confusion this week and put my idea of natural is nice to shame. In case you were vying for the title, Stacie has revealed that she is the most natural mother. Ever. I am fairly certain that she also hums as she cleans the house (both babies in tow) and deers and rabbits smile at her kitchen window a la Snow White. It’s a very funny post reminding us of the crappiness of the Mommy Wars.

Happy New Year!

We have a word in Hebrew–b’shert–and what it literally means is that it was fate. It was meant to be. People usually use it to discuss their soul mate–the person they were meant to marry–but read enough infertility or adoption blogs and you’ll see the same thought popping up when it comes to children. The child you ultimately parent is the child you were meant to have.

And I love this idea. I love the idea that the waiting was worth it. That it was all a process to bring you to the child you were meant to have in your life. It makes the whole journey worth it because it was all part of the whole–you had to go through that heartbreak, you had to go through those treatments, you had to go through those anxious nights waiting to get your referral, you had to go through all the failed cycles before you realized third party reproduction was the path you needed to take. All those things led you to the person you were meant to hold at night after a bad dream and put bandaids on her knees after a fall. To quote Ben Folds: “Now I know all the wrong turns, the stumbles and falls brought me here.” The child who made you a parent is the child you needed to wait for in order to become a parent.

You can’t hurry love.

No, you just have to wait.

She said, Love don’t come easy.

It’s a game of give and take.

The only place where I begin to trip over this idea concerns loss. How does loss fit into the bigger picture? When a spouse dies and a person remarries, no one dismisses that first husband or wife by saying, “their death needed to happen in order to bring this person to their b’shert.” And no one would even say that about a child who had lived for a short period of time: “oh, sweetie, it had to happen in order to bring you to your new child.” Somehow, we know this would not be appropriate or helpful. But people often use this idea to explain pregnancy loss.

“If you hadn’t gone through all of that (pregnancy loss is usually reduced to the word “that” in these cases), you never would have met this child that you were meant to have.” And I can’t accept that. I see the two events as completely unconnected because I must in order to not reduce the loss. Am I grateful for the children I have? Of course. I could not imagine my world without them. But I also miss and mourn the children who weren’t born without believing that they needed to die in order to bring me to the twins. Their lives are completely separate–not small stepping stones to bring me to my b’sherts. They are like the first spouse who dies–b’shert in and of himself/herself. Death and the loss of a b’shert creates a space for fate to step in once again and create destiny.

You can’t hurry love.

No, you just have to wait.

You got to trust, give it time.

No matter how long it takes.

To paraphrase Eytan Fox, I’m trying to convince the convinced. You all know that words like “it was meant to happen” do not comfort when it comes to loss. They prickle and they stick in your mind like a cactus needle even months after they’re spoken. It is impossible to see how a person’s death–whether they were born yet or not–was necessary in order to bring about another step on your journey. It’s a very self-focused point of view: that others only exist insofar as how they affect my path. But how to convince the unconvinced that these words hurt terribly? That while you are either still waiting or are eternally grateful for the children you have, you miss the others along the way: the IVF cycles that didn’t take, the miscarriages, the late losses, the adoption reversals, the surrogates who fell through.

How long must I wait?

How much more can I take?

Before loneliness will cause my heart;

Heart to break?

No, I can’t bear to live my life alone.

I grow impatient for a love to call my own.

But when I feel that I, I can’t go on

These precious words keeps me hangin on.

And back to the original thought: b’shert. If it is truly destiny, I can accept that I can’t hurry it along. It will happen when it is meant to happen and the only thing I can do is to keep plugging away so that I’m keeping all paths open to chance. And it’s that part of the idea that things are meant to be that I love. That makes the waiting bearable even when it feels so heavy that it may crush me beneath its weight. Beneath its wait.

With help from the great Diana Ross (and Mr. Ben Folds)

Hope everyone who celebrates Christmas had a wonderful holiday. To be honest, I’m dreading getting in the car in a few minutes and hearing the normal easy-listening music on our Christmas station. It’s as if my best friend has split town in the middle of the night, barely even mentioning that she was leaving.

But a question for you from my notebook that Teamwinks actually addressed this week too:

Here’s karma coming back to bite me in the ass (karma in the misused western sense of the word and not in the actual, Hindu sense of the word): In an already iffy relationship, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the chance of infertility. A month or two after he told me, I broke up with the boy because he casually mentioned that his doctor once told him that he may have difficulty conceiving since he only had one testicle. I knew from a month or two into the relationship that he was never going to become my husband due to a complete lack of chemistry, but hearing that he might impact my ability to easily have a child hastened the break-up.

Well, you get what you deserve, perhaps.

Since I am the infertile one in my marriage.

And based on something I just read in a book about divorce rates and infertility, would you continue dating someone you intended to marry if you knew that they were infertile? At what point would you want to be told about the person’s infertility? Early on (or could that backfire if the person wasn’t yet committed and that clouded their judgment)? Later (or could that open hurt because the other person felt like it should have been on the table earlier, even if it wasn’t going to affect how the person felt)? Should it come up when you begin speaking about having children? And would it be somewhat easier emotionally to jump into treatments from point one (as Lance Armstrong’s exwife did–she knew she would be doing IVF before they ever tried to conceive) or is it a non-issue: even if you know beforehand, it’s still the same level of emotional pain expended during treatments?

All things to consider if Josh were ever to leave me…

Since it would be me doing the telling this time.

Western-karma really bites.

Discuss…

We had dinner at my parent’s house last night for the last night of Chanukkah. My mother told me that she was bothered by the use of the word “guilt” in the post this week on infertility diagnoses (yes, my mommy reads my blog, and she does call me every time I use a curse word. I was going to write a curse word in this space to be funny, but I know that she will not find that amusing).

(I find it amusing)

She felt the term “guilt” implied something within the person’s control. She believed a person experienced guilt over knowing the right thing to do, but choosing a different path. Most of the time, infertility isn’t about choices or right vs. wrong. It’s about a medical condition and elements that are outside your control.

I grabbed my dictionary.

Guilt (n) 1. the fact of being responsible for the commission of an offense. Culpability for a crime that carries a legal penalty. Remoreseful awareness of having done something wrong. Self-reproach, as for inadequacy (American Heritage Dictionary).

So what is the right term to describe what you feel as you lie awake at 3 a.m., worried about finances and feeling the weight that your reproductive organs are the reason you are spending your money on fertility drugs rather than a vacation?