Posts from — March 2009

Looking for the book club post?

It’s right here, below the Show and Tell. And my response is right below that. Lots of posts up all at once, crowding the front page like a traffic jam.

Just in case you were looking for things…

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

We spent Josh’s birthday last weekend at the newly remodeled Portrait Gallery. The last time I had been there had been right before it closed to show my students the Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibit (I cried when the docent showed us the Arthur Miller photo where he is sitting next to his divorce papers, cementing my title as freakiest teacher at the school).

The new Portrait Gallery is gorgeous. It makes me want to mail out invitations to everyone in the world to ask them to come to Washington just so they can see the building. When you walk in, at the beginning of the hallway to the left, is the original Hope poster.

What you can’t tell from the replications of the poster is that it is made with paint and old newspaper clippings and is a combination of printmaking and paint and cut-paper. It is so emotional to stand in front of it.

It has always been a gorgeous building architecturally.

But the latest addition is this enclosed courtyard.

The courtyard is huge. There are these low fountains on the floor and trees and a cafe. We sat at one of the tables and read until the room darkened. It is definitely one of my favourite places in the city. And it is completely free to enter and spend the whole day sitting in that courtyard or touring the museum. Reason #76298 to come to D.C.

My portrait of Josh at the Portrait Gallery. It’s the city in which I love you, as Li-Young Lee would say.

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (hint: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name). The list is open from now until late Tuesday night and a new one is posted every week.

Welcome to the seventeenth tour of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade–a book club from the comfort of your own living room. Grab a cup of coffee and start clicking away at the links below.

Just to explain, this book club is entirely online and open to anyone (male or female) in the infertility/pregnancy loss/assisted conception/adoption/parenting-after-infertility world (as well as any other related category I inadvertently left off the list). It is called a book tour because everyone reads the same book and then poses a question to the group. Participants choose a few questions to answer and then post their response on their blog. Readers can jump from blog to blog, commenting along the way.

Anyone can jump aboard–it’s a book club where you can drop in and out as you wish and all in the community are welcome.

Book: Never Let Me Go
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Start Date: January 21st
Post Dates: March 9th
(need an explanation of how a book tour works? Click here to go to a list of posts on the past book tours as well as information about future tours.)

About Never Let Me Go: Award-winning novel about a dystopian England. Saying anything more than that spoils the surprise.

Barren Bitches Book Brigade List (The blogs below are participating on this current book tour. Each day, you’ll be able to jump from post to post to read a plethora of opinions and thoughts on Never Let Me Go.)

Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters (below this post)
The Road Less Travelled
An Unwanted Path
Baby Smiling in Back Seat
The Dragondreamer’s Lair
Aurelia Ann
Destined to be an Old Woman with No Regrets
So It Goes
I Won’t Fear Love

Even if haven’t read Never Let Me Go, you can still add your own thoughts on the blog tour or react to someone else’s critique.

Like the idea of being in a book club without leaving your living room? The current group chooses the next book. The 18th tour will be Anita Diamant’s, The Red Tent. According to Wikipedia, the book is “a first-person narrative which tells the story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and sister of Joseph, a talented midwife and proto-feminist. The book’s title refers to the tent in which women of Jacob’s tribe must, according to the ancient law, take refuge while menstruating or giving birth, and in which they find mutual support and encouragement from their mothers, sisters and aunts.”

The Details: Tour #18 will start March 10. Participants will read The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. On or before May 20th (it’s a long reading period this time), everyone will send one question based on the book (to get a sense of questions, click here to see the questions sent for book tour #2) to me. I will compile the questions into lists that will be emailed out to you by May 22nd. Everyone will choose 3 questions from the list and answer them on their own blog on May 25th. I’ll also post a master list and people can jump from blog to blog, reading and commenting on the book tour.

If you would like to sign up to participate in book tour #18, leave a comment below or send me an email. I need the title and a link to your blog as well as an email address where you’d like the two or three book club emails sent. If a spouse wants to participate too and he/she doesn’t have their own blog, have them set up a blog solely for book tours (as we did with the Annex) and send me a link to that blog. And if you’re a reader without a blog, now is a great time to set up a space for yourself on Blogger. People will be able to find brand-spanking-new blogs because they will be on the book tour’s participant list. The participants on the Anita Diamant book tour will choose the book for tour #19.

Happy reading.

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard about this book. I was in the car, listening to Kazuo Ishiguro speak on NPR as I drove home from work. He warned that he couldn’t really speak about the book, and this came on the heels of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, which boasted a similar claim and really disappointed in terms of surprise.

But I have to admit that I was really taken aback by the book once I began reading it. Without revealing the details of the surprise twist, the whole plotline sent me into a state of panic thinking about knowing your death date. It reminded me of that scene in Big Fish where they stare into the eye of the witch and can see how they’ll die. And whether you’d really want to go through life knowing when it will end. How it would affect how you live and what you do and, more importantly, what you don’t do.

And Ishiguro’s book threw all of that on its head.

And then some.

And blew my mind.

I couldn’t wait to discuss this with everyone and am waiting eagerly for everyone’s post to go up so I can hear their thoughts.

If you haven’t read the book and intend to read it, I would stop reading right now because the plotline of the book is discussed below:

If you knew with certainty that you had a child with a shortened life expectancy, would you raise the child any differently? For example, are there certain experiences you’d want to ensure that they had? Are there things that you wouldn’t bother to make them do (flossing? eat healthy foods? go to school?) since they wouldn’t have the same long-term impact as they would for other children? Would it make a difference in your parenting if you knew exactly at what age the child was expected to die as opposed to a general sense of foreshortened lifespan?

Well this question really bothered me to consider, truly got under my skin and made me feel as uncomfortable as the book made me feel. So it was probably the best place to begin.

I mean, that was the whole point of Hailsham–everyone knew these children were being created merely to harvest their organs and educating them and engaging them in the beautiful side of life made those who would be harvesting their organs feel as if it wasn’t a life wasted. It was a life lived–regardless of the abrupt end.

On one hand, I had this moment where I stepped back and asked what any of it was for–what was the point in going to college or working at a career or having children because every single one of us are going to die. The children in Never Let Me Go aren’t unique–it’s not as if they’ll die but we’ll all live forever. Every single one of us is moving through this life, reading books, gathering knowledge, creating art…only to die.

Not to be a downer or anything.

I think if I had a child with a terminal illness, I would probably (because who can know until you’re in the moment) walk the same fine line I walk today with healthy children of remaining true to life’s rules (flossing, one sugar a day, et al) while engaging in as much hedonism as possible. Until the twins started school, our world was pretty much about what we felt like doing. We’d wake up and decide that we felt like doing art projects, or spending the whole day at the park, or driving to a random place just to see what was there. School is definitely cramping our style, but still, I think that we spend a lot of time doing what makes us happy because in the back of my head is the thought that leads this book–that it will all end someday and will we be happy of what we tried while we were here.

And just so you know, I am giving myself a panic attack writing about this.

On page 197, Kazuo Ishiguro writes, “It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that.” Have any of your relationships unravelled because of IF and were they relationships that you thought would be strong enough weather the struggles of IF?

There was this movie a few years ago called The Myth of Fingerprints that showed how this family unraveled due to this small incident. How there were cracks in the relationships to begin with that allowed a small incident to change everyone, but regardless, it was sort of amazing to see how something so small could have such a large impact.

With the exception of one friend, I haven’t had relationships unravel due to infertility. But I have had relationships unravel–either due to a true cleaving of the relationship or simply due to time/distance. And I am constantly struck at how easy it is to slip into a role with someone you knew when you were younger vs. building a new friendship–regardless of how mismatched you were in the first go-around of the friendship.

There are people I miss a lot–people that I would love to spend time with–regardless of the fact that we didn’t get along fantastically when we were face-to-face. Though I’d still choose to care for them if they were completing.

One thing that struck me while reading the book is that the characters seem very passive. Although certain knowledge is withheld from them along the way, and they do have questions, they do not really rebel or protest their fate, or try to escape. They seem quite accepting of the future that has been laid out for them. Why do you think this is so?

I took it to be a combination of things–privileged upbringing which I think removes some of the scrappiness in a person, a resignation that this is just the way things are, and a true support of the system with the belief that what they are doing is noble–an honourable death.

Would you give up your life knowing that you were going to die at some point anyway if you knew that in giving up your life, you were helping another person? I think there is definitely a type of person who would prefer to go out a hero–and we’re forgetting as we discuss this that all of us are going to die. It’s a matter of when. For the donors, it will be much earlier than most of us. Yes, they could try to escape, but to what end? They will still die in the future–it will simply be more years on earth. And will those years be as filling, as meaningful, in their viewpoint?

Damn, I am freaking myself out again. I can literally feel my chest getting tight.

Jump along to other blogs discussing Never Let Me Go by scrolling up to the post above this one. Join along for our next book: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.

Last weekend, the Wolvog lost his iPod (by the way…children are mentioned in this section of the Roundup as well as the next one if you want to skip down to a child-free space). You may wonder why a 4-year-old boy has his own iPod. I often wonder this myself. Can we skip that explanation?

Regardless, we tore the house apart trying to find this iPod; literally ate up about two hours of time searching for it and finally found it in a random cabinet. He didn’t know why it was there either but he went on his merry way, listening to U2 and doing a dance in front of the mirror that involves running in place as quickly as possible with his legs as far apart as possible. I’ll give you a moment to stand up and try out this position so you can get the visual.

The next day, literally the next day, he lost Little Stevie. For those unfamiliar with the unusual amount of stuffed animals named Stevie in our house, the original Stevie was given to the ChickieNob by my brother and named after his roommate at the time. Stevie is a guinea pig who apparently poops a lot (and shouts out “goodie!” while he does so) and enjoys eating bedroom slippers. While in Harper’s Ferry this winter, the Wolvog found a tiny stuffed guinea pig that he named Little Stevie. And my mother gave him an enormous guinea pig puppet who we call Big Stevie.

He tells us that he can’t find Little Stevie and it’s heartbreaking. I mean, the lost iPod was annoying, but he was distracted easily during the hunt and actually helped us look. With Little Stevie, he was immobilized, sitting on the floor like a survivor in the wreckage repeating over and over again, “I’ve lost him.” We took apart his room and our room and the living room and searched every article of clothing in the laundry basket and random drawers in the house. We couldn’t find Little Stevie and I had an appointment with the periodontist that I couldn’t miss, so we put the Wolvog in the car where he just stared out the window, his little lip quivering as he tried to consider a world without Stevie (all while his sister sat beside him helpfully informing him that she still had her Stevie).

And it bothered me all fucking day.

I literally couldn’t stop thinking about his stuffed animal. We were out at the Portrait Gallery for most of the day and I was mentally searching our house, opening cabinets and shaking out pillows inside my head. That night, when I went to make the popcorn pre-movie, I could hear Josh in the living room, sifting through toy boxes. While he popped in the disc, I took one last swing through the Wolvog’s room (he was, by the way, sleeping out at my mother’s because it was Josh’s birthday and a date night).

I started methodically and then felt this sense of panic that we truly didn’t know the whereabouts of Little Stevie. As I tossed aside all of the stuffed animals in the bed, my hand went inside the puppet and lo and behold, Little Stevie was tucked up in Big Stevie’s belly. It was 10:30 at night. I immediately emailed my mother, she took the news upstairs to my son, and he was able to finally relax and fall asleep knowing Little Stevie was safe and sound.

It had taken us a long time at the video store to choose a film because Josh wanted to keep me in a certain mood and that meant forgoing all dramas that might make me cry. It meant no horror films that would fill me with “what ifs.” It actually knocked out every documentary that could potentially piss me off. We were down, pretty much, to Ghost Town.

We were laughing, we were laughing, we were laughing…and then I was crying to the point where I couldn’t breathe when we got to that whole squirrel stuffed animal story. It was probably only an hour and a half from when we found Little Stevie and it hit a little too close to home. I couldn’t stop saying, “what if we had died before we had found Little Stevie? He would have slept every night with Big Stevie never knowing that Little Stevie was just tucked up inside of him. And we would be gone and Little Stevie would be gone. We would be deaaaaaaaaaaad!”

You would think that I also would have laughed pulling back and seeing how hard I was crying in relief over finding a plush toy. But I didn’t. Because I was just that shade of hormonal.

The next morning, we brought Little Stevie with us over to my parent’s house where my son greeted him with pure bliss. We told him where we had found him and he laughed to himself. “Oh yes, I made Big Stevie pregnant with Little Stevie.”

Seriously, I’m even lapped by a stuffed animal. And a male one at that.

The ChickieNob asked if she came from Ikea. I told her no. She said, “I think I may have been made at Ikea.” I told her that I knew where she was made and it wasn’t Ikea. She finally tried one more time: “I think a doctor may have put me together at Ikea?”

Josh was really offended by her line of questioning. He was like, “honestly, for what it cost, it was really more like Ethan Allen than the Ikea of Babies.”