I recently received an email from RESOLVE about spokesperson Cindy Margolis’s decision to model for the December issue of Playboy (my husband’s response: “see…I told you Playboy has great articles”). I’m assuming that there has been a backlash from RESOLVE members and they put out an official statement explaining their position that Margolis’s professional decisions are her own. Without supporting or condemning her photoshoot, they addressed it as well as the fact that Margolis will continue to be a spokesperson for RESOLVE.

And while I’m normally not a fan of magazines that objectify women and if I catch my husband with this issue he will be an extremely sad man, but…

I think it rocks.

I think a sexy woman, lounging about in almost no clothing, talking about infertility is bold. Frankly, infertility made me feel extremely unattractive. Profoundly unsexy. Grabbing the fat on my stomach to do an injection while Victoria Secret models paraded around the television whispering about their skintimately fantastic bras made me feel like Ursula in the Little Mermaid. A fat, dried up sea-creature-of-a-woman with a messy ponytail and tear streaks on my face.

So I’m all for Cindy Margolis showing off her breasts and taut tummy (her post-IVF, post-motherhood body). I’m all for men who see her as a sex symbol reading about her infertility experience (one son via IVF and twins via a surrogate). Do I think it’s going to change the way people think? Not exactly. Do I think that Playboy is “good” for women everywhere. Not exactly. But am I insanely proud that the Playmate of the Month is talking about infertility and “posing for a purpose”? Definitely. Because she’s donating proceeds from the sale of the magazine to RESOLVE. And she’s putting out the idea that even sexy supermodels suffer from infertility. And she’s making that man who’s donating his sample in the sperm palace and perusing a certain issue of Playboy think about why he’s there and what he’s doing. And that’s huge. Did she pose for the good of womankind? Doubtful–I’m sure she’s being well-paid and it was a career move. But can I see the silver lining in being able to reach a demographic that isn’t necessarily tuning into infertility blogs and the RESOLVE web site?

If it gets one secretly-subscribing lawmaker to rethink mandatory funding after seeing his wet dream discussing PIO shots, then I’m all for it.

Happy National Infertility Awareness Week! So…um…it’s not exactly “happy” like your birthday or your anniversary, but since you’re living in the Land of If, and since you’re going through this crappy experience anyway, you might as well embrace community, reach out to others, and educate.

So what can you do to create awareness?

Start within the community before even moving out towards educating the fertile masses. There are plenty of newly-annointed (or not so newly-annointed) stirrup queens and sperm palace jesters feeling lonely and confused and needing a bit of reassurance and information. Help them to start a blog or point them towards other blogs on a blogroll–reading can make someone feel empowered.

If they have questions, pass along the link to the Peer Infertility Counselor List. In fact, put the link on your blog so others can find it easily and use it. Post it on bulletin boards and spread the word through your fertility clinic or adoption agency.

Wear your pomegranate bracelet and connect with others. Look at other wrists this week. And spread the word! Blog about it, post it everywhere, make a t-shirt and wear it, write it in soap on your car, make bumper stickers, bring threads to other women in the clinic waiting room during your next day-3 bloodwork, make flyers, leave threads tucked into fertility books at the library with a note, tape threads to boxes of ovulation predictor kits at the local food store, write in to your local newspaper–anything you can do to get the word out to as many people as possible this week. Even if you have it as a link on your side bar, post about it this week so other people can find the story when they start googling: what is up with all of these pomegranate-coloured bracelets? If you need the link to the compilation, here it is: http://stirrup-queens.blogspot.com/2006/09/history-of-infertilitys-common-thread.html. You can snag the code for the icon from the bottom of that post. Please use the link in order to give credit to those chickies (and man-pies: thank you, Di-Dad!) who came up with the idea including (but not limited to) Paz, Royalyne, Mandolyn, Aah0424, KE, Ms. C, Piccinigirl, Carolyn, and Serenity.

Post about infertility every day this week on your blog. Flood the Internet with information about infertility so that any stirrup queen or sperm palace jester reading your blog doesn’t feel quite so alone.

Oh…and if you’re inspired to start a blog this week and start venting about your experience, let me know so I can add you to the blogroll.

And that, my friends, is my big public service annoucement to kick of National Infertility Awareness Week. Later posts will be about actually educating those off the island 🙂
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Updated at 6:12 p.m.

I’ve been tackling the blogroll in pieces, trying to keep all of the categories current. I never remove a blog unless the person closes down their blog and removes it from the Internet. So if you see a blog missing from a category, it just means that it has been moved to a different section. Use the “find” function under “edit” on your toolbar to do a word search and you’ll find its new location on the blogroll. Some of the “parenting after” categories have also been expanded to include people who are pregnant or close to adopting. Just so you know since this week is a fantastic week to start reading blogs similar to your own experience. Or to recommend a new blog to a fellow stirrup queen or sperm palace jester.

Jessica at Getting Pregnant the High-Tech Way has simply the best last three lines in today’s post and if you haven’t read this entry you need to get over there:

“I’ve realized something else. I have become emotionally invested in this cycle. I wish there were a drug to prevent that part.”

Me too, Jess. And I think whoever invents that suppressor is going to be mighty rich.

There are one thousand good reasons to adopt and only a few bad reasons to adopt:

Bad adoption idea #1: adopting a child in order to put their nimble little fingers to work.

Bad adoption idea #2: adopting a child in order to make another person jealous.

Bad adoption idea #3: adopting a child so you could be his or her saviour.

There is a thin line between helping other people and becoming their saviour. And sometimes when we discuss transnational adoption, that saviour complex comes bubbling to the top. And when it pokes its head out of the jumbled soup that is parenthood, it makes me worried. For that child and for that parent.

I don’t know Madonna and Guy’s motives for adoption–I’m not in their head or in their family. I don’t know the intimate details of how the adoption took place or what was said to the birth father or what thoughts ran through Madonna’s head when something that smelled vaguely like the starting words of an adoption reversal took place. I don’t know how deeply invested they are in the life of this child or what kind of childcare they’re giving him. I don’t know if Madonna makes her kids breakfast in the morning or leaves all nightly tuck-ins to the nanny.

I can’t throw stones because I live in a glass house where I’m considering transnational adoption as well. What I can comment on is something she said during her Oprah interview: “To see what I saw. It is a state of emergency. As far as I’m concerned, the adoption laws have to be changed to suit that state of emergency. I think if everybody went there, they’d want to bring one of those children home with them and give them a better life.”

And that’s what I mean by the saviour complex. Avonlea has a wonderful post about race and adoption as well as class and adoption. She asks difficult questions about adoption and poverty–whether we are more uncomfortable discussing class and poverty in regards to adoption than even race and nationality. And Madonna’s words played directly into this idea of removing children from poverty and bringing them into affluence as a means for “bettering” their life.

My fear is that Madonna actually believes that she is helping the country of Malawi by adopting this child and bringing him to England.

As I said in the beginning, there are 1000 good reasons to adopt. I don’t think I would be writing this post at all if she said something like this to Oprah: “Oprah, Guy and I realized that we wanted another child and we have so much love and support to give another child. But since we couldn’t conceive with my eggs, we decided to adopt. And we met this boy at an orphanage in Malawi and I instantly knew that he was meant to be in our family.”

Some humble parenting: I hope we do a good job raising him. I hope that we navigate this new experience well and help our son grow. I hope he knows how much we love him and how he is now one-third of my heart.

Anything other than thoughts of saviourhood and how much he needs you to parent him. How about how much you need him to be a parent?

This weekend is just the perfect storm of activity–visit from the inlaws, twin club consignment sale (selling, buying, AND working in it), National Infertility Awareness Week, and I’m certain many Halloween activities thrown in for good measure. The true question is whether there will be time to swing by the salon for an eyebrow appointment…

While next week will obviously be dedicated to all things spooky, this week was sweet: both true sweetness such as Tara’s wonderful news and bittersweet as Manuela discusses life after Shoelet. But they say it better than I can…

Tara over at Plan B found out this week that her plan B worked–her surrogate is pregnant with her baby! With a beta of 204 at 11 days post 3-day transfer. Which is amazing, amazing, amazingly fantastic news. And…on the Twilight Zone-y front…her father always predicted that something big would happen for her in October. In October!

Recently, Artificially Sweetened turned me on to the phrase “Google Med School” through her blog. AfriIndie Mum’s entry this week about getting blood test results back and spending the day engaged in a round of medical sleuthing drives this idea home. It’s not that medical information didn’t exist prior to the Internet. We have a huge medical library a few miles away that I use constantly. But now it’s so eaaaaaaaaaaaaaasy. I just hit a few buttons and two thousand Web sites pop up with information about antithyroid antibodies. The problem with being a medical student at Google University is that you have just enough information to become worried, but not enough information to actually understand the big picture. It’s a great entry, and I hope everything turns out okay when she speaks to her doctor next week.

Sarah Solitare got a big old box of fun this week in the mail: her meds arrived! I always had my meds filled (perhaps like an idiot who didn’t know how much less expensive it could be to fill them all at once via the mail) at the pharmacy in the clinic building so I’ve never had a box like this arrive, but I assume it feels a great deal like Christmas. A big, infertile Christmas. I’m trying to laugh about it because if you don’t laugh…you cry. Hope you get it to fit on one shelf–or better yet, hope you’re shipping it all off to someone else very soon. And congratulations on the saline sonogram.

Jen and Gretch at Butterbeans and Baby Dreams are experiencing a little thing I like to call ICBFT–an “I Can’t Believe the Fucking Timing” (which, for anyone who cares, I pronounce ick-ba-fat). Their next IUI is going to possibly fall during the one day that Jen has her engineering certification. That takes 8 hours to complete. And is one-hour away. What are two chickies to do except pray and keep taking OPKs like crazy women? I think the timing dance of infertility is one of the more annoying factors that no one thinks is a big deal…but is always a big deal. I mean, it doesn’t hurt, it’s not embarrassing, it doesn’t cause complete devastation. But living your life by a calendar and clock is difficult to do and means something always has to give. Hope the surge miraculously holds off until Monday (wouldn’t that be cool?).

There’s no way to end this week without talking about Manuela at the Thin Pink Line. If you haven’t been over there for a bit, please comment and leave your good thoughts. She has an amazing post this week about the birth and her future plans. And I think she just has an incredible point-of-view–of life, of birth, of motherhood, of this process. And I wish it had all turned out differently, but since I lack a magic wand…I wish her strength while her heart grieves and sends love to her Shoelet.