Posts from — May 2010

My favourite piece of art that Max made was a photograph called Reserved which featured an empty red chair.  It spoke of so many possibilities.  We had a large red wall in our living room, completely empty.  Max and Vee sent me the photograph as a surprise to fill that space.

Max died yesterday and there is a huge, gaping hole in the blogosphere right now.  Writing this feels unreal.  Vee and Max are two long time members of the ALI community, both bloggers for over five years, and the blogosphere is not the same without his voice and art.  Please go over and give Vee your love if you have access to her blog (it’s password protected).  Feel free to leave her any good thoughts here if you don’t have access and I will make sure she gets them.

Let’s say that peanut butter sales have tanked.  The good people at Jif put their nervous little heads together and come up with a brilliant plan–they will sponsor a television show called “Jif Presents the Great Peanut Butter Cookoff.”  Each week, contestants will prepare their best recipes and the audience will cheer them on.  There will be educational information presented by an Alton Brown-like host about the nutritional qualities of peanuts or interesting facts about different peanut varieties (are there a multitude of peanut varieties?).  There would be a website where you could collect recipes that were prepared on the show, which would air on Food Network.

Would you watch it?

Honestly, I might.  If I liked peanut butter enough.  I’m their key audience–a home cook who is constantly looking for new and interesting recipes.  Plus, peanut butter is one of those staples we always have at our house so it would be an easy ingredient to use to recreate a recipe at last minute.

Now, let’s take the next step in this not-so-hypothetical situation.

What if pregnancy test sales have tanked because in this economy, people are putting off having babies.  Or they’re saving money any way they can and choosing not to test at home before a beta.

There is a Web show currently running that is sponsored by a pregnancy test company and it follows the trying-to-conceive efforts of six women.  A spokesperson/doctor offers additional fertility information on the show.  Much in the same way some people watch Super Nanny to learn parenting tricks to use with their children, some will watch this show to learn fertility tips.  Some will watch it pre-infertility diagnosis to feel less alone.  Some will watch it because they just like to watch a bunch of women stress about ovulation.

There’s little difference in my mind between the peanut butter company filling my need for recipes in order to guide me towards their product and the pee stick company filling my need for emotional connection and information in order to guide me towards their product.  And at the same time, since one speaks to my fears and anxieties, it does feel different.

Unlike cooking, trying to conceive–even when it comes easily–is usually an emotional experience.  And this pregnancy test company knows that and knows that people will watch the show because they are emotional about trying to conceive.  They might be eager to get started, or anxious that it’s not working, or depressed that they’ve been diagnosed as infertile.  The show’s participants run the gamut in terms of experience.

So is it wrong if they’re giving you something (information) and trying to soothe fears through education while at the same pushing their product by featuring it heavily on the show, having their company name in the title, and controlling the information presented as well as how it’s presented?

Regardless of whether you’d watch the show or not, how do you feel about a network having a company sponsor and create a show for them?  And is there any difference between pee sticks and peanut butter (beyond which hole each product is meant…)?

I Tweeted that I had just finished Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies and had started a new book and was thoroughly disappointed in the next book not because it sucked on its own, but it certainly sucked in comparison.  It is hard to leave characters you like–real or fictional–behind.

I didn’t think I’d like Gillies’s book at all, but I quickly jumped into her world and suddenly cared very much about her family and the demise of her marriage.  Memoirs are a bit like blogs–reading the intimate details of a person’s world.  There was an additional factor that drew me into this memoir; the people were so accessible.  They’re on Facebook.  They’re on a university web page.  It felt more akin to a blog than let’s say a memoir about a celebrity.

So, this next book (which shall not be named because it actually is quite enjoyable, just not in comparison to Gillies’s book) was sort of difficult to get into and I commented on how hard it is to leave a really good book and go into the next one.  Others chimed in with their book experiences and asked what else I was reading and could recommend.  It seemed like the perfect time to throw out what we’re reading and how we feel about it so people can take recommendations with them into the summer reading months.

This is what I look for in a beach/pool/summer book: readability–sort of the same idea as Bud Light’s drinkability, only with 100% less alcohol.  I want a book that is going to be meaty enough for me to want to return to the characters or the subject, but light enough for me to not have my mood changed or struggle to understand a paragraph.

But you know how sometimes a book can put you in a mood?  When I’m away or at the pool, I want a book I can jump in and out of quickly.  I think of my summer books in the same way as I think of my summer movies.  I save the heavy stuff for the winter when I’m going to spend hours curled up reading.  I like to relax with fun books and memoirs (even heavier memoirs) and chicklit and creative fiction in the summer.

So this is what I’ve read lately that I can recommend.  There’s also a lot of literary fiction out there that I enjoyed over the winter, but I’m throwing on this list books that sort of fit that summer mold–stuff you want to read on the beach when you have three hours to plop down on the sand.

Memoir

• Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies: fantastic–my best pick for memoir.  It is about a marriage unraveling and she writes beautifully.
• Straight Up and Dirty by Stephanie Klein: I really liked Moose too.  It’s about her divorce, but more about the dating that took place afterward.  Very fast-paced.
• It Sucked and Then I Cried by Heather Armstrong: good, quick read.  It feels a lot like her blog–Dooce–in paper form.

Fiction

• Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner: you sort of can’t go wrong with Jennifer Weiner.  This happens to be her latest book and it’s a bit loose mystery a la the Desperate Housewives variety.  Really enjoyable read.
• Something Borrowed and Something Blue by Emily Giffin: she has a new book coming out soon, but I just read these two books which are a few years old.  Great chicklit and it’s the same story told from the point-of-view of the two main characters.
• The Ivy Chronicles by Karen Quinn: chicklit in the Allison Pearson vein.  It’s that New York, ultra-rich world that is fun to peek into in fiction.

Nonfiction

• Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain: didn’t exactly hold together as a book, but it was fun if you went into it knowing it was a series of disjointed essays.
• In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan: a lot of food for thought, though the book didn’t grab me as much as it grabbed others.  Definitely worth a read, but I thought it could be boiled down to an essay and serve up the information better.

On My Summer Reading Wish List (and please chime in if you’ve read them and can either bump one up to the top of the queue or save me some time and not read it)

• Neon Angel by Cherie Currie: memoir about the Runaways.  I started reading it in the bookstore and fell in love.
• Publish this Book by Stephen Markley: again, I started reading it in the bookstore and found it amusing.  Maybe too clever?  I’m not the biggest fan of clever books.
• Bitter is the New Black by Jen Lancaster: I’ve always meant to read her books and a friend gave me a few to get started.  Would love any insight into where to start first.
• Fluke by Christopher Moore: I’ve always been curious about his books and a friend recommended this one first.

Leave a book recommendation in the comment section below and take one if you’re looking for something to read.  Or chime in with your thoughts on a book that has already been thrown into the ring–either to cheer it on or dissuade.

To misquote Li-Young Lee, this is the city in which I love them.

It is Mother’s Day tomorrow, but I don’t have to tell you that because Hallmark has done an excellent job sounding the alarms.  They are, if nothing else, the king of the long lead-up.  I believe I saw Mother’s Day cards at the food store starting in March.  You know, just in case you wanted to get a two month head-start.

I’m not really a fan of flowers or breakfast–in bed or not–but I do like a good experiential day so we are going downtown to see the Hope diamond after spending a few hours last night scaring the twins with stories of their imminent doom if they so much as even think about owning it.  We will go to dinner with my parents tomorrow so I can toast my mum and the twins can toast me and the ChickieNob’s doll, who apparently can’t be left at home lest she crawl away on her little plastic legs, can toast the ChickieNob for lugging her around the house in an adult-sized baby bjorn that hangs down to her knees.

I am well aware that not everyone reading this has the same feelings about Mother’s Day, regardless of whether you are parenting or not, whether your child is alive or not, whether you still have your mother or not (or have her, but with a strained relationship).  But this is how I see the holiday and it’s in terms of tornados.

Tornados are on my mind because the twins were asking me on Friday to retell them this story of a tornado during my junior year.  Our storm cellar was outside the building, a rickety three-story house that had been converted into apartments.  My roommate and I were studying when the tornado alarm went off, but when we stood up to make our way outside, we saw that the tree outside our apartment was bent with its highest branches scraping the ground.  It was an oh-shit moment.

My roommate suggested that we open the windows to keep them from exploding inward, so we wrapped ourselves in our comforters and crouched on the floor, as far as we could get from the windows and listened to the wind howl.  Afterward, there was the obvious clean-up of the room, the nervous laughing, the gathering on the street to trade stories with other nearby students.  We went about our day and the next day and the next day.  It felt dangerous and nerve-wracking in the moment, but no damage was done–at least to us–except for some mud and rain-stained bedding.

That’s the best way I can explain how Mother’s Day sometimes felt.  That you think you’re prepared and you do things to protect yourself, but the day howls through you.  But afterward, while there is a surge of sadness and it feels like it should be more of…something…the day also sort of gets written off with a shrug of nervous laughter when you realize that Mother’s Day is no more painful than Monday (just as that tornado turned out to be no more dangerous than riding a bike on the street or drinking whatever mixed drink was being served out a garbage can at the frat house.  It just felt like it could be dangerous).

By which I mean that Monday is pretty damn painful.  It is no harder to not be able to build your family on a holiday than it is to not be able to build your family on an ordinary day.  Infertility is emotionally painful whether or not you are experiencing it on a day that has greeting card exchanges as part of the rhythm or not.  But, at the same time, just as it would be foolish to ignore the tornado alarms and say to yourself, “suck it up–nothing bad is going to happen” it would be equally foolish (and G-d help the person who suggests it) for you to just write off whatever internal alarms go off when you think about the holiday.  Everyone should be wrapping themselves in a virtual comforter whenever they hear those alarms go off–whether they occur on Mother’s Day or Christmas or a random third Wednesday in the month of June.

Mother’s Day after infertility feels a bit like a different tornado.  This one happened while we were already in a basement seminar room.  When the alarm went off, we all froze for a moment–no one knew where we were supposed to go if a tornado came and we weren’t at home.  And then the professor looked up at the ceiling and said, “we’re already in the basement.  Maybe we should just stay here and continue with class.”

So that’s what we did.  We sat and talked about fossils.

By the time class let out, the storm had cleared and afterward was this strange calm; this heavy, wet, quiet calm.  Branches were off of trees and garbage had blown out of trash cans and signs had been knocked off their posts.  The sky looked concerned and peevish.  It felt like we shouldn’t be outside, even though there was no good reason to go back in a building.

I loved experiencing that.  It made me think about how some of my Midwestern classmates had never seen the ocean and how my Eastern friends back home had never seen this layer of calm that comes after a storm.  I have never experienced anything quite like the moments after a tornado; it defies words.

I have the same love for Mother’s Day, and as I’ve already said, Mother’s Day before parenthood was never a day that was worse for me than the Saturday before or the Monday after.  It was just another painful day that howled through me, and at the same time, it also felt like I often had a comforter around me because it was the day I celebrated my mother and sister, support and protection from the storm.

Mother’s Day after infertility has that eerie quality that comes after you’ve weathered an dangerous storm–the sort of storm where you could really lose yourself, and some do.  It is a beautiful calm, one that I feel lucky to get to experience and wish all of my friends could too.  And at the same time, as you celebrate the day, it comes with this acknowledgment that within all of this beauty is also the figurative branches down and overturned signs signaling your friends back in the trenches.  And it’s not just about your friends back in the trenches–it’s about your old self too.  Remembering that woman.

I am grateful that I get to have three generations of women sit at the same table, celebrating motherhood (four generations if you count the ChickieNob’s doll).  That this tradition of celebrating motherhood started well before I ever started trying to build my own family and will continue–if Hallmark has any say–long after I’m gone.  I really do hope my daughter gets together with her grandchildren on the second Sunday of May.

Would this be a different post if I wasn’t parenting, or if I had lost my child–absolutely.  I can remember that world, but it isn’t the same thing as living in it.  But part of keeping a focus on someone during Mother’s Day was my way of not losing myself in the storm of infertility.  And I am lucky that I have such an amazing, giving, intelligent, creative, strong mother to celebrate this day.

*******

A picture of my incredibly short hair.  It was still a little wet when we got to IKEA with Calliope and Lindsay because I went running beforehand.  So it’s not really that grey (yes, it is).  Lindsay and I are now twins, or will be once my hair actually reaches my shoulders again.