Prior to being diagnosed as infertile–which was my first major experience with failure–I was of the mindset that you should push on to see all attempts to their ends. If you start college, you should finish it. If you begin a project, you should see the final product. I had the mindset that if one tried hard enough, they could do anything.

And then I found out that my reproductive organs weren’t in agreement.

As a teacher, I was constantly faced with students who wanted to quit. They would receive low grades on papers and they told me they wished they could drop out of English class. They sat on the bench all season and they told me they wanted to quit the team. They struggled with math and tried to convince me that learning algebra wasn’t necessary for what they wanted to do in life.

And I didn’t listen because I had this philosophy–this philosophy that you had to try. You had to keep going at it until you succeeded.

To keep busy while we tried to get a baby to stay and grow in my uterus, I started taking classes. Cake decorating, as you know, rocked. Leyning didn’t. Leyning is the singing of the Torah. There are little marks that tell you whether your voice should go up or down or hold onto a note or keep it short. Our synagogue is community led, meaning that there is no rabbi who performs the service. Anyone who wants to participate can get up and participate. A friend talked me into taking this class so I could read the Torah portion on a Saturday for the congregation.

Except that I sucked. I sucked hard. I just couldn’t get it. I had learned to play piano by ear, and trying to read marks from a sheet and translate them into a sound was very difficult for me. I was excited the first class. I was nervous the second class. I dreaded going by the third class. That’s all it took–three classes for me to feel like a total failure while the rest of the class read and sang. And I muttered and fumbled over the words. Even my husband–my tone-deaf husband–was able to catch on to the method. But I was completely stuck.

At any other point in my life, I would have made an excuse and said I was too busy and dropped the class. Or I would have forced myself to practice and attend until I had mastered the skill. But failing at making a baby had made me overly sensitive to the fact that I couldn’t succeed at this too. Instead, I went to my classroom and said, “now I know how you feel.” And I explained to my students that I was quitting because I had assessed the situation.

It wasn’t a base experience that I needed to have in order to go onto another experience. It was an entity unto itself. And it was making me miserable. And it was making me feel badly about myself. And it was taking up a huge spot in my worrying cache and I needed that space to worry about other things.

I told them that I would help them quit things in order to make room for other experiences as long as it wasn’t a base experience that was necessary for a journey. Learning how to form a thesis statement? Sorry, you have to push on and learn it or you won’t be able to construct a paper. And that will affect you through college and possibly beyond. Learning how to make a lay-up? What? You don’t want to be a basketball player forever and you’d be happier playing soccer? Well, let’s go down to the coach and I’ll help you quit gracefully.

And in all my years of helping children quit, I never once had a child come back and say they had regrets. And I never once had a parent tell me that they were upset with the idea of quitting once they saw the transformation of their child. Replacing anxiety producing activities with enjoyable ones tended to make a happier, healthier child. It’s not a popular stance in this country, but it’s one that I now feel strongly about. It’s okay to quit. It’s okay to remove things that are stressful from your life. You don’t need to feel badly about it. You can walk away and not look back except with a dull twinge of sadness from time to time. Which is much better than a daily dose of anxiety.

Do I wish I knew how to leyn? Sure, I do. And if I ever change my mind, leyning is still there to try again. But I also know that leyning is an important base experience if you want to become a rabbi or a cantor. But it’s an entity unto itself in my life. Even though I didn’t feel this way when I was considering quitting, in the end, I closed up shop and walked away without it affecting my quality of life.

I think too many times in the fertility process, that mantra of “winners never quit and quitters never win” comes into play and we feel like we can’t walk away from a path until we have exhausted it. Until someone kicks us off the path. And while it’s okay to let yourself take a path to its ends if that’s what you need to do, it’s also okay to step off the path before the end and say, “you know what? I’d be happier on a different path.”

It all comes down to understanding what are your necessary base experiences. For some people, they want to become a parent no matter what. Therefore, trying all the paths to parenthood becomes the base experience necessary in order to achieve the end goal. For other people, parenthood isn’t necessarily the only job they could see themselves doing in this lifetime. Therefore, all those paths aren’t a base experience. They’re entities unto themselves. Therefore, if they stop treatments/the adoption process/surrogacy, they could be just as happy in life living child-free. They replace one goal with another.

For people who do have the goal of parenthood, unfortunately, you don’t have the ability to walk away because these experiences are necessary for achieving your goal. But I think we sometimes get focused on our current path and forget that we can quit and step over to another path. And it’s not quitting in a negative sense. It’s self-preservation. It’s taking control. It’s seeing that the paths are all parallel to one another and each leads to the same place–mommyhood or daddyhood.

It’s so hard to quit for the first time. It goes against everything you’re taught. The pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-mentality of a red-blooded American (are there other colours of blood?). But it can be so freeing and the flip side is that you create a space for a new experience.

I just wanted to say as people are making their New Year’s resolutions that it’s okay to have one of your goals be that you’re going to quit your current path and try something new–either third party reproduction or adoption or IVF or living child-free. Because quitting takes a lot of courage and strength. And it can lead to the most wonderful achievements.

In honour of 2007 quickly approaching–and since I suck at actually doing memes once I’m tagged, I’ve started my own. I’m not sure if this is kosher–if a regular person can start a meme or if there is a group of men and women tucked into a dark room somewhere creating these lists. So…um…I tread carefully, attempting to not offend the Memers with my offering.

I have created this meme which can be done in two different ways. Either you can do all seven categories and list two answers for every category (get it? It’s 2007, so I’m playing on the two numbers: 2 and 7) OR you can choose two of the categories and list seven answers.

The categories:
Things you learned this year
People you met
Things you don’t want to take with you into 2007
Things you want to hold close as you pass into 2007
Things you’re looking forward to in 2007
Things that were life changing in 2006
Things you hope to accomplish by the end of 2007

(see–those are the seven categories. Now you can either give two answers for each category OR you can choose two from that list and give seven answers)

Things I learned this year
1. Even Cooks Illustrated recipes sometimes need tweaking
2. That I’m homozygous for the MTHFR mutation (C677T)

People I met
1. I came together again with Lisa R (who I knew in high school and haven’t seen since) which has been fantastic–I love how our lives criss-cross.
2. All you lovely ladies (and men) of the Blogosphere–way too many to name. And a huge thank you for keeping me sane.

Things I don’t want to take with me into 2007
1. My on-going anxiety
2. Negativity and pessimism (what? Me? Negative?)

Things I want to hold close as I pass into 2007
1. Josh and the twins
2. My current calm with conceiving (it may be short-lived so I’ll hold it close as long as possible)

Things I’m looking forward to in 2007
1. Our trip to Smith Island in June (right, Josh?)
2. A healthy pregnancy–perhaps?

Things that were life changing in 2006
1. Signing with a new agent
2. Starting this blog–it has been a huge outlet emotionally

Things you hope to accomplish by the end of 2007
1. Learn how to knit
2. Make croissants for the first time

Let the tagging begin–if you’re reading this, consider yourself tagged. And let me know you did it by placing a comment on this post.

I was tagged by Michelle about 80 years ago to do that five things meme, and I’ve really been struggling to come up with five interesting things about myself (beyond my conflicted feelings about Christmas…). Sorry if the pickings are slim…

1. I bake all of my own bread. We haven’t brought store-brought bread into our house for almost a year. I usually bake four times a week: bagel day, whole wheat day, challah day, and then a wild card: it could be rye bread, a baguette, or a loaf of crusty Italian. It was one step on our multi-tiered ladder to taking part in a sustainable living philosophy.

2. I once had a guinea pig named Vladimir. When we brought him home, the pet store owner told us that we should make sure that different people held him while he was getting accustomed to his new environment because guinea pigs have a tendency to bond to the first person who holds them. My parents went out the first night he was at our house. I grabbed the guinea pig. I didn’t put him down all night. The guinea pig became solely attached to me–all according to plan (apologies to my brother). I loved Vladimir will all my heart and soul. In his old age, he developed stomach cancer (but lived for an additional two years). He was finally in too much pain and had stopped eating so we needed to put him to sleep. The vet said he had never seen a person cry so hard over a rodent. I made Vladimir a promise that I would never get another guinea pig. I deeply regret making this promise because I would like to get another guinea pig one day. But I’ll always feel like I’m breaking a promise if I take in another guinea pig.

3. I began printmaking when I was in high school. I went to the Smithsonian program. I first studied intaglio (mostly etching). Then, when I went to college, I got time in a studio and continued with intaglio and also silk screening. When I went to graduate school, you needed to complete six credits outside of your program in a related fine arts program. My college advisor wrote the head of the department at my graduate school and got me an independent study (again in etching). I deeply regret going the independent study route. I wish I had taken a course and learned more rather than just continuing to hone what I already knew. But my happiest moments in grad school were mixing acid in my lab over at the visual arts building. That and eating dinner Friday night with my cousin on the Smith campus.

4. I am a neat freak and I love organizing things (as you can probably tell from my side bar…). Whenever I’m stressed out, I have to clean. It is my number one favourite way to relax.

5. My dental file has me listed as a “heavy gagger.” Which just about sums me up. I could not wear a retainer or a mouth guard. I can’t even chew gum. I have such a thing about having having stuff in my mouth. Except…well…some things… Like…um…food. Yes, I can have food in my mouth.

I’m not going to tag anyone because it feels like I’m the last person in the world to do this meme and everyone else has moved on meme-wise. But, just in case I’m not the last person, if you haven’t done this one, run straight to your blog and post five things. And let me know so I can go read yours too.

This is the post where the Jew tries to explain how she views Christmas…

Skip reading if Christmas is your favourite holiday, you’re a caroler, or don’t care to hear an outsider talk about your holiday…

Oh, wait. There’s the other side of Christmas too. The one that makes me feel like an ever-loving hypocrite as I drive down Connecticut Avenue belting out “O Holy Night.” I need to listen to my Christmas music as I drive out of the city because once I’m back in the presence of the kids, it’s Dan Zanes and Raffi. It’s Shiralala every Friday as we make the challah. It’s all about avoiding drawing attention to “that holiday that we don’t celebrate.”

It’s a Christian world, just like it’s a fertile world. So I expect the majority to rule and for all stores and street corners to be decked out for the holiday just as I expect that most people will think it’s perfectly fine to ask if my husband is bonking me and if we’ll be having another child soon. It’s not “right” per se; but it’s expected.

But this is the other way I see Christmas: The sparkling lights on trees and the red ribbons around every street lamp? It’s sort of like showing a Jewish child and entire parking lot full of ice cream trucks and then smiling benignly while you remind them that they can’t have a popsicle.

My son’s nickname is the MOPT (pronounced Mop-tee) which stands for the Minister of Toilet Paper. Whenever someone annouces that they have to go to the bathroom, he follows them to the toilet and stands waiting at attention to rip off the toilet paper. But since Thanksgiving, when the first Christmas lights went up, he has been renamed the Crazy Sparkle Light Fiend. It’s like driving around town with a junkie who sees a dealer on every corner. Our drive home sometimes takes an additional fifteen minutes as we meander down cul-de-sacs to see strings of lights draped over bushes. And then the second you point out a set of lights to him, he acknowledges them by saying, “sparkle lights” and then immediately follows it with “more sparkle lights.” Like a freakin’ junkie.

And feeding into this problem is that my attempts at separation are feeble at best. Josh can drive home without noticing the lights and he never turns to the all-Christmas-all-the-time radio station. But I love seeing the lights too. And having only been in a house with a Christmas tree a handful of times in my life, I’m attracted to the unknown of the holiday. Josh has dated non-Jewish. He’s done the Christmas thing. But I’ve never gotten to get celebrating Christmas out of my system. So I want to see the lights too. And I want to eat candy canes. And take part in all of the secular commercialism that surrounds the holiday. Without actually celebrating the holiday. Since I’m usually burned out by December 18th. And I’m Jewish. And we don’t celebrate Christmas.

If you’re Christian, you probably can’t relate and ask, “what’s the problem with throwing up a few lights this year?” Because Christmas isn’t ours. And Chanukkah isn’t Christmas. It’s this tiny holiday that has one commandment tied to it–light the candles for 8 nights. That’s it. No gifts. No festive meal. Americans commercialized Chanukkah in order to give children a focus during the season. So they didn’t feel left out. I don’t need to celebrate Chanukkah as if it’s Christmas. Think about it this way–do you feel left out during Rosh Hashanah and feel like you need to celebrate a holiday too? It sends a strange message to kids–our religion isn’t interesting enough or celebratory enough so we need to grab other people’s traditions. It detracts from our fun holidays like Purim and Simchat Torah.

The Christian world always looks at this dilemma and says, “what’s the harm?” But it’s sort of the same attitude that drives your Aunt Margaret to ask you if you’re going to have a baby. What’s the harm in asking a simple question in the fertile world? If only 12% of the country is infertile, then odds are that when you ask the question, you’re hitting one of the 88% who do like to think about their fertility. Newly-minted brides are downright giddy thinking about how they’ll start trying soon. They don’t mind the question as much because it makes them feel as if they’ve arrived. They are finally considered an adult and mother material if people are asking them about procreation.

But hit one of those 12% and you’ll have annoyed at best and sobbing at worst. Talking about my fertility is probably one of the last things I want to talk about in casual conversation anymore. Talking about my fertility means thinking about blood clotting and Lovenox. Or finding the money for treatments. Or injections. Or wondering if it’s physically possible for someone to hold their breath for nine months.

Which is what it’s like to be Jewish during the Christmas season. It’s annoying at best to have people remind you to have a merry Christmas. And it’s isolating at worst to think about how you’re out of the loop. I have this image in my head of someone pressing their face against a snowy window while they watch the family inside the warm house decorating the tree when I think about being Jewish in a Christian world. It’s easy to be Christian around Rosh Hashanah. It’s not everywhere you turn. You probably don’t even think about it because radio stations aren’t playing High Holiday music (a little Neil Diamond Kol Nidre, anyone?) and every store isn’t decked out for the New Year. But it’s impossible for Jews not to think about it because it’s sort of like someone waving a party invitation in your face. A party where you’re not invited. It’s not that you want to go, but you certainly don’t want to be reminded that you’re not part of the celebration.

Sometimes it feels a bit like when I’m trying to run errands and everywhere I turn, I’m faced with a pregnant belly and reminders of my own infertility. Pregnant women walking around blissfully unaware in their carefree pregnancies. Never thinking that the woman standing behind them in line may not want to watch them rub their belly and coo at their unborn child to “stop kicking, Mommy, darling.”

But just like pregnant women can’t hide their bump when they face my infertility, I don’t expect Christians to hide their holiday from me. I certainly am not saying don’t celebrate Christmas. But there are ways to celebrate that are private and cozy. And there are ways to celebrate that remind those who are out of the loop how far they are outside of the loop. It’s sort of the difference between putting up lights at your house and coming to my house and caroling. Because it’s just really really really hard to explain to a child that we get Shabbat every week–with challah and grape juice and candles–when two seconds after we point out what they have in their corner, they go back to asking about those lights. And why we don’t celebrate Christmas. It’s something that most Christian parents probably don’t deal with until Bat Mitzvah time–and then what non-Jewish kids want is the party, not the actual ceremony. And it’s easier to explain religion to a middle schooler than it is to a two-year-old.

The analogy between Christmas and infertility doesn’t truly match up because I don’t necessarily want to be “in” in the grand sense of that word (I just want my music, lights, and a candy cane or two). And if I wanted to be in, I technically could be in by throwing up a tree in my living room and attending midnight Mass. But we’re not going to do it because we’re Jewish. And we’re happy to be Jewish. And I am happy with the holidays that we have and enjoy them tremendously. And I know my interest in Christmas is directly tied to my idea of the IF Christmas. Which–as we all know–isn’t like any Real Christmas that anyone has ever celebrated. It’s the stuff of movies. It’s just my own fantasizing about gr
eener grass in someone else’s yard.

When you whittle away all the layers, what remains is that when assumptions are made, people are bound to have their feelings nicked. The majority assumes that all people fall into the majority. Just like it’s unfathomable for non-infertiles to understand why you may not be happy and want to celebrate at the baby shower of a pregnant woman, it’s sort of unfathomable for Christian people to understand why I may not want to celebrate their holiday. Or be ambushed with Christmas ads and tinsel. Or be reminded to have a merry Christmas every time I make a purchase between Thankgiving and New Year’s.

Damn…I think burnout has come early this year.

I’m beginning to sound a lot like a Grinch. A big, infertile, Jewish Grinch.

Um…Merry Christmas?

Candy cane anyone?

(Cringing as I wait for people to throw boughs of holly at me)

This holiday season, I’d like to welcome you to celebrate my IF Christmas. I know what you’re thinking (beyond “what is an IF Christmas?”)–what is a nice Jewish girl like me doing talking about tinsel and stockings and a little baby angel at the top of the tree? Oh…no no no…you’re thinking about Real Christmas. No, that’s not my holiday. I celebrate IF Christmas.

A few years ago, out of nowhere since I had never had any desire to celebrate Christmas, I found myself listening to holiday music. And singing along once I learned the words. And searching for new routes home that took me past the most houses that were decorated with coloured lights. And I started talking about bringing a tree into the house. And I started talking about collecting ornaments. And my husband–my nice Jewish boy husband–almost had a heart attack.

My infertility therapist asked why I had become obsessed with Christmas. And once I started telling her all about how I pictured Christmas, she informed me that my imagination was much more beautiful than anything most people experienced Christmas-wise in the real world. Somehow, never having celebrated Christmas for real, I had imagined that the pain of infertility went away during the holiday. That you just became consumed with baking cookies and laughing with your sisters and decorating the tree. And no one cried about the fact they were barren.

And I need to explain at this point that the topic of barrenness seems to play a role in many Jewish holidays. On Rosh HaShanah, you talk about infertile Sarah. And at Pesach, we’re told about the barren women of Jerusalem during the seder. And at Purim, I once had a miscarriage, so that holiday is ruined for me. But Christmas? Christmas isn’t about infertility–it’s about HYPERfertility. Mary was so fertile that she could get pregnant without even having sex. And yes yes yes I know the whole story because I’ve read the New Testament many times by now, but when I was creating my IF Christmas, I was only seeing the fact that there was a newborn and a fertile woman.

Little did I know that at Real Christmas, infertile women feel like crap. And they watch their parents coo over their sibling’s children. And they eat too many cookies because they’re trying to keep their mouth full so they won’t have to answer, “so when are you guys going to start trying?” And they mourn that yet another year has gone by without any progress on the baby front.

So drop your Christmas and come celebrate my IF Christmas. My IF Christmas is best described in a series on montages, with the common thread being that you are finally pregnant.

Scene One: You’re walking with your husband in the snow on the way to take home a tree (oh–and it’s not from a crowded tree lot. In my IF Christmas, apparently, people collect their trees one at a time from this gorgeous guy who is cutting down trees for people at the edge of the wood) and you fall over on your backs, laughing hysterically. Your husband pauses from making snow-angels to touch your sweater-covered belly (it’s still flat since you’re only a few weeks along) and say, “I love you.”

Scene Two: They’re passing around cups of eggnog and when your mother brings the tray by you, you look at your husband and you both smile. Then you look at your mother and touch your stomach while saying, “I don’t think I should drink any alcohol this year.” Your mother drops the eggnog on the floor while she’s crying tears of joy and shaking. And everyone jokes for the rest of the evening about the fallen eggnog. But no one minds that she has wasted all the alcohol because YOU ARE KNOCKED UP and your family is psyched to hell.

Scene Three: You’re hanging an ornament on the tree and you’re wearing a gorgeous cashmere cream-coloured maternity sweater that shows off your seven month baby bump. Your husband comes up behind you and wraps his arms around you so that his hands rest on your belly and you both laugh when the baby kicks while he’s nuzzling your neck. He tells you, “next year, we’ll be decorating the tree with our baby.”

Scene Four: You’re in the kitchen, baking cookies and laughing with your sisters. And everyone is trading pregnancy and labour stories. Your sisters see how worried you look and they laugh and promise you that they’ll be out there in the waiting room the second you go into labour.

Scene Five: The snow is falling and you’re walking on the sidewalk with your husband, smiling secretly at each other because you just found out that you’re pregnant and no one else knows yet. Christmas music plays in the background and all around you, the trees are covered with twinkling lights.

See–there are no tears (except from the mom–and those are happy tears) in my IF Christmas. When I finished telling my therapist how I envisioned Christmas to be and why I was so jealous of Christian women who got to celebrate this holiday, I realized that I wasn’t jealous about Real Christmas per se. I was jealous of the women who really got to celebrate Christmas that way. The ones who weren’t infertile and were pregnant. So I decided to just pretend that winter. I would hold my belly and smile while I baked cookies. And I listened to Christmas music, pretending that I was walking down the street with my husband after seeing a positive pregnancy test. And I was happy just pretending. Just for a month. And then going back into the real world when the Christmas lights came down in January.

And that is my totally neurotic, made-up, fantasy Christmas that I celebrate every year. It’s my IF Christmas where all of us are pregnant and so happy. And it doesn’t matter if the other 11 months of the year, I’m a nice Jewish girl who bakes a challah every Friday. Once the Christmas songs start playing on the radio until the end of Boxing Day, it’s open season for my IF Christmas. And I start dreaming of my white Christmas and walking in that winter wonderland–hand on belly and my heart singing.

Come join me. It’s sort of like drinking. It’s sad if you celebrate IF Christmas alone, but it’s socially acceptable if everyone else engages in unhealthy magical thinking alongside you. And you have a built-in excuse not to drink any nasty eggnog since you’re knocked up for the month. And I even grant you permission to wear that maternity shirt you purchased during your second month of trying to conceive when you thought motherhood was right around the corner.

I’ll get to writing about the other side of Christmas later…