Posts from — June 2009

So, earlier this week, we went to New York for 48 hours. At first, we thought we’d be there over the weekend, but we decided to shorten the trip just to the essentials, so this is what it looked like:

Train, train, train, annoying child sitting in front of us on the train, three hours of his internal dialogue exiting out through his mouth, train, train, I think I’m beginning to smell a bit like this train.

Get off the train, take the subway, and run in heels to the conference. Decide two blocks from the conference that I cannot walk another step in heels. Ask Josh to open the suitcase on a random street in New York City. Find a pair of ballet flats. Walk the final two blocks saying over and over again, “I totally needed to do that. This is so much better” as if these words justify opening our suitcase on the street. Change back into heels two blocks later.

Put on make-up in the bathroom. Go find my seat at the conference. Try to memorize my speech. Look up and see Lindsay running into the room with the baby strapped to her chest. Get a quick baby sniff for good luck. Am promised alcohol if I can get through the conference.

Present my book in two minutes. Freak the shit out of people with the statistics. Listen to the other presentations and write down a bunch of book titles I now want to read. Go down to the dinner. Realize I don’t know what is vegetarian on the table and don’t see anyone to ask. Decide to skip food and be on the safe side. Talk to other writers, talk to programmers, hint that they should bring me (more on this in a moment) for readings.

Leave conference and go outside to find Josh and Lindsay. Cross the street to a random bar/restaurant. Order dinner and a pina colada. See Judah Friedlander. Need to be told that it’s Judah Friedlander because I’ve never seen 30 Rock. Get chatty with one pina colada. Get back on the subway and head out to my brother’s new apartment with Josh. Tease brother incessantly until he decides to go to bed. Try to sleep but can’t because people have decided the space under his window is the perfect place to hold their argument. Wake up just as tired as I was when I went to sleep.

And that was the first day. The second day will be in two posts because I met two more famous people and those stories deserve some space to spread out. I know, you’re totally panting with anticipation.

This began as a single paragraph in the Roundup and grew into this, therefore, I felt it best to remove it from the Roundup since I already have a very long story about a pina colada I had in New York to bore you with.

What kicked it off was this post by Serenity about finding your place in the blogosphere when you have an established audience, but you’ve gone through a transition. In her case, she went from IVF to parenthood. While some stop writing due to time or desire, others do want to write and don’t know how to leap over the chasm without offending readers or being untrue to their own experience.

This is my advice, but in terms of my own experience:

I am a diarist. A diary writer? A diarrheaist? Someone who keeps an online diary. And I think we’d all do better with transitions if we considered ourselves a diarist (and this is what I notice is the difference between those who cross the line from infertility to parenthood somewhat seamlessly and those who are still trying to find their new voice in a new situation).

Which means that we’ll always be talking about what is in the forefront of our mind; what we notice, who we meet, what strikes us. When we’re in the throes of treatments, it will most likely be treatments. When we’re in the throes of adoption, it will most likely be adoption. And if we’re parenting, it may be parenting or it may be cooking or a book that you’re reading or a movie you’ve seen or an insane story of something that happened to you. And you will be a diarist and everyone else–the readers–will place their reading film over your blog and take from it whatever speaks the most to them in the moment. They may consider you an infertility blogger, but you will consider yourself a diarist.

Which means that as you cross from experience to experience, you will attract different people. You will always have with you a core group of people you’ve touched with your words; who remain with you regardless of what you are writing about such as Serenity for me. I will read her until the day she stops blogging (please don’t stop blogging) because I have a connection with her; both on-blog and off. I’m simply interested in the way she views the world and she often makes me think or nod my head. Therefore, if she’s writing about infertility, great. If she’s writing about her job, great. If she’s writing about her marriage, great. I tune in to get her thoughts; not necessarily on a single topic.

She will always be an ALI blogger because that was part of her experience and I think it probably still informs her present and future, perhaps to a lesser degree than it did in the past. But it’s sort of like a scar that doesn’t completely disappear even if the skin is technically healed. So I will always keep her on the ALI blogroll even if the letters IVF never pour out of her fingers again. But she is, at the core, a diarist. As we all are. And if I connect with your way of thinking, you will have me forever regardless of what you are writing about.

And you will pick up others and drop others over time as people change and grow and hold other interests. Readership is not your problem. You cannot control readership any more than you can control getting to parenthood. Yes, there are some things you can do to give yourself a chance to build readership and certainly things you can do that will guarantee that you will never have someone read your blog, but you cannot control another person’s eyes or brain. So leave that out of the equation. Only ask yourself this when you open up the blank post: what do I want to write? What is important to me? Where do I want to connect with others and hear their thoughts? What do I need to process? What do I want to record?

If you are true to your own heart and what you want, the rest will follow. When people ask what I did to build my blog, I simply say that I gave others what I wanted to give myself. Meaning, I have only created projects that I wanted to have for myself and figured that if I was putting in the work, I might as well share it with others. I wanted a daily newsletter so I put together a daily newsletter and I share it with you. I wanted an organized blogroll so I put it together for myself and share it with you. I started the Roundup solely as a way to generate discussion on all the cool things I read on the Internet that week. I will keep writing it even if everyone else deems it unimportant and I never get a hit on a Friday. Because it makes me happy. It documents what I thought about that week. It reminds me of what I read and I always hope that others will find the post too and more often than not, they then comment over there or email me about the post. This is what I mean when I say that I write what I want.

And I write about what is important to me. The ChickieNob processing death? I want to remember what I said and what she thought. I put it out there publicly in case it helps another person, and because in writing about it, people step forward with more advice or ideas that I use in communicating with her. It is interactive and that is why I place my thoughts out there. Because it helps me to hear words back from you.

I keep in mind the audience as best I can in terms of trying not to be offensive. But, again, with so many people reading and not commenting, I can’t always control that or even know what would be upsetting for a reader. So I just use my general circumspection that I carry with me in every other area of life. And I write as a diarist. Who happens to identify the most with the ALI community, but a diarist nonetheless.

My words of advice to anyone who is struggling with a transition–into the community, from one section of the community to another, wanting to remain in the community but unsure of your space–write for yourself. When people see something that resonates with them, they follow. And even if they don’t read for a bit, even if you go through a dry patch in terms of readership, new people will always find you if you keep writing and putting yourself out there as a reader of other blogs.

Just my two cents, selfishly written because I want her to keep writing.

Thank you for the birthday wishes. And truly, not to be morbid, but I wrote this post a few weeks ago and never got a chance to post it. It probably isn’t the best post to follow birthday musings, but since I didn’t have my computer to upload pictures from the Resolve party, I thought, why the hell not. Let’s talk about death.

Oh.

I was forewarned–Tash told me the first time I posted that the talk of death had only begun and she was correct. Something about an empty gas tank and pulling into a gas station sparked the question: “Tell me some people who have died.”

And who am I going to choose? The ones that float to the top of my mind immediately or sift down to elderly ancestors that they equate with dinosaurs–probably real but too far removed to be certain. I paraded out a great-great-grandmother, a few great-grandparents. She asked if you could die if you stopped eating in the same way that a car will die if the tank ran out of gasoline. Yes, I admitted, you could die from not eating, but you’d have to stop eating for a long time.

And, of course, she freaked me out by deciding to skip dinner a few hours later.

It didn’t take too long for the wheels to turn and the Wolvog, who generally shies away from talk of death looked at me and said, “am I going to die one day?” It was as if my very being had been botoxed. We were done pumping gas, but still sitting in the dormant car at the station. I turned around to face him. “Yes, one day, a very very very very long time from now. It’s so far away that you probably can’t even imagine it.”

He didn’t seem phased at all. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “after I die, I’m going to come back one more time as a baby.”

My little Buddhist.

We went through what happens after you die and I told them that after we die, we don’t need our body anymore so we plant the body like a flower so it can return to the earth. And the things that make a person unique–our neshama–leaves and floats away. I didn’t tell them that I like to think that it hangs around on old recipe cards and in mannerisms we inherit. But I wasn’t answering the question well because it kept getting asked and I finally admitted that since no one knew for certain what happened after we died, we could each have our own belief. The Wolvog could believe in reincarnation and the ChickieNob could believe that we all go to a great party in the sky and I could believe that our body is simply gone and we exist only in memories and tangible objects left behind.

The question returned as I made dinner. If Grandma-P was dead, did that mean Grandma-S didn’t have a mommy anymore?

Yes, I told her, her mommy isn’t here anymore.

And one day she’ll learn, equally heartbreaking, that while there are children without their parents, it goes the other way around and there are mothers and fathers walking around with their children missing.

And that is the point when the tantrum began that lasted for an hour and a half that included a missed dinner, two nose-blowings, a bath refusal, a skipped movie, and a lot of screaming. At the time, I thought it was about the spaetzle I made for dinner (and can I just add for a moment that it was freakin’ handmade spaetzle that I asked her if she wanted and took an hour to pull together), but as I sat down to collect my thoughts for this post, I realized the timing. And the thought that kicked it off. And the fear of the lost mother. So I returned upstairs and reassure once again.

She was still awake, even though I fully expected her to be asleep since I had been out of her room for an hour and she had been silent the whole time. She smiled when I came in and asked how I knew that her brother had fallen asleep with the blanket over his face. I didn’t, I told her, that was just a lucky catch. I came up to see you.

I asked her if anything was bothering her and she went through some strange ones–the fact that I didn’t make a playdate for her today; the fact that they stopped selling spaetzle at the store, necessitating me dragging out the spaetzle maker. I probed a little more and she finally looked at me with the most heartbreaking face and said, “I want you to live forever. I want us both to live forever.”

It was like staring at myself.

It was like being sucked into a wormhole beneath her toddler bed and shot out in 1978, she looks so much like me and that blueness, that thought tossing around in her head for the last few hours. As much as people focus on the joy of seeing yourself outside your body, in finding your eyes or your hair on your child, there is an equal amount of discomfort on the other side when you observe your traits as others see them. And there was such a depth in her blueness, her lower lip pushing on the upper one, her consideration of what lies ahead that I wished I could have the power to control fate. I would have wasted my wish on an impossibility just to set that fact out there. I wished I could live forever not because I wanted to live forever, but I didn’t want her to ever experience me not living forever.

Again, my soul thankfully botoxed within an inch of its life, I reassured but didn’t promise and let her dream that the possibility of eternal life exists in the same way that my mother allowed me to dream for years in the reality of invisible cream. It isn’t cruel to allow a child their imagination–especially one that creates a kinder and gentler reality.

I held it together until she put her head down and I started to stroke her back. I had buried my mouth in her hair, kissing her head, and it felt like I was recording a moment. That I would remember the feeling of her hair on my mouth until I died–that it wouldn’t be just another moment that faded into oblivion. It isn’t just photographs and school art we keep. It’s moments where reality shifts, where we enter a new plane of understanding. A terrible plane of understanding, but one that we can’t avoid forever. As much as I wish we could.

I have sort of been dreading tomorrow all year. Today is my last day being on the correct side of the thirty-divide. Tomorrow, I will be 35-years-old.

Every once in a while this year, the fact that I was almost 35 would float into my mind. It was the age you always read about in books in regards to fertility. The age where fertility falls off the cliff, where chromosomal abnormalities go up, where miscarriage rates increase. On one hand, it feels really silly to look at 35 as this big, flashing red number when you had high FSH at 27 and implantation issues. But just as I can’t dismiss the half hour after eating in regards to swimming or the eight hours in regards to sleep or the five-second-rule, I can’t erase that this number is also ingrained in my head as a warning, a threshold, a no-going-back point.

Gulp.

Me, still 34 this past weekend, talking to the ChickieNob off-camera

Okay, so good things that happened this year: the twins started school and I survived (oh, and they survived too). I finished writing Navigating the Land of If and it came out. I wrote my first chicklit book. I finally got to see Smith Island after being in love with it for many years. I continued to be mushy-in-love with Josh. I went to BlogHer, my first conference ever. And I aged one more year and I aged one more year and I aged one more year, and while that may not seem like a large accomplishment, we are all too keenly aware of the alternative. So a year should be celebrated.

I was about to list sad things that happened this year, but fuck that. Not every post needs to be symmetrical. It’s my birthday tomorrow. Let’s celebrate instead.

Showing off the manicure that I got over the weekend. I look like an adult!

And yes, the red nail polish means that I chose the red bag…