Posts from — September 2010

With the exception of Kol Nidre, the Yom Kippur eve service, I’ve never gotten a lot out of the High Holiday services.  We go every year because it would seem bizarre not to go, but I’ve also never been a fan.  It’s not just that the Torah and Haftorah portions are all taken from infertility stories (seriously, it’s like the infertility galore service) — I never really liked to be in shul for the High Holidays even before we started trying to conceive.

At the same time, they are also the services I usually use to judge a shul.  We used to go to a fantastic shul downtown where there was no rabbi and no cantor and the service was peer-led.  I am really not a fan of having people say the prayers for me, and so many shuls bring in choirs and trot out new tunes for the High Holiday services.

A few years ago, we moved to a shul outside the city which had decent High Holiday services.  I still didn’t love them, but I could sit through them, mostly because there was this family that we called the Vampire Family (and later, after we encountered the Twilight series, we renamed them the Cullens) because they were impossibly young and never seemed to age.  We always sat near this family and I spent a chunk of the service ignoring the fact that the rabbi was talking about infertility and instead mused on the ages of the Cullens.

This year was our first time in a new shul yet again and the service was fine.  I missed the Cullens, missed having deep roots somewhere.  We know a lot of people at this shul, but they’re all new friends.  They haven’t known us for years and years, through various incarnations.  When I walked into this shul for the first time, I was a mother of two, and that’s the only Melissa they know.

The shul started using a new prayer book this year and like High Holiday services in general, I’m usually fairly unimpressed with newfangled prayer books.  I’m not a big fan of change, of making things — which weren’t broken in the first place — “better.”  I don’t need new translations in English or poetry down the sidebars or long commentaries from famous  rabbis.  Just give me the prayers that have been said for hundreds of years in their Old School form and let’s call it a day.

I had written this book off without even seeing it and hadn’t cracked the spine in services since we entered during the Torah service (and my usual way of getting through the infertility stories is to not open the book), when Josh passed the open pages to me and pointed meaningfully to the sidebar.

There, as a remark to people listening to the Torah service, it reminded the reader that not everyone conceives easily and there may be people in the congregation who have experienced infertility.  And better still, it went on to remind people that while these stories may bring some people hope, they will not be received that way by all listeners.  And it mentioned that people might want to be mindful of that.

You know.  In case they’re into that “mindful” and “thoughtful” sort of thing.

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Where I do encounter deep spirituality (beyond Kol Nidre, which — if done well — has the ability to bring me to my knees) is within Tashlich.  On Friday, after regular services, we drove out to West Virginia to a favourite spot on the Shenandoah River.  We first let the twins kick off their shoes and play on the rocks for an hour.  They collected shells and watched the water bugs while I stood lookout for sharks (and, for the love, cleaned up the ChickieNob when she fell into the river, jeans and all, within the first few minutes).

And then we all sat down and thought about our year and what we didn’t want to bring with us into this next year.  We squeezed those thoughts into rocks and threw the rocks towards the middle of the river.

You may not think I’m there, but I’m the shadow on the river, above their heads in the photograph.

Fine, I relinquished my camera for a few shots.

Afterwards, we hiked up this hill to the remains of an old stone church and beyond it a graveyard.  Parts of all four walls remain from the church, though by now, the floor is grass and the inside has been gutted.

It was our first time taking the twins to the graveyard, an old pre-Civil War graveyard where I took Josh a few weeks into dating.  The twins have been to graveyards before — they’ve been to funerals before — so it wasn’t an enormous revelation, except that it was their first time walking into a sacred space where they knew no one and no one in the space could possibly know them.  And yet, they walked quietly.  They walked mindfully.

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We went to the yearly NICU reunion at the hospital.  One of our favourite nurses died a few months ago and they spoke about her during the address.  They also had a scrapbook set up where families could share memories about her.  I got very weepy while I was there because she was this person who was there at the start and who remembered the twins year after year.  She usually greeted us at the sign-in table, and she obviously wasn’t there this time.  The ChickieNob saw me crying and asked why everyone was crying when they mentioned P–, so I told her that she had died and her response was the natural one: why is everyone upset if she wasn’t part of our family.

Because she was still a thread in the enormous blanket we’re weaving of our lives, Chickie.

Because through circumstances, our lives crossed and I learned all about hers in the late night hours that we stayed up in the NICU, and she was obviously a witness to ours.  She held the twins long before many of the people currently in their life touched the twins.  And that is a powerful thing — to lose someone who was there at the beginning.  There are so few left at the hospital that we still have contact with, that were there to thank face-to-face.

We connected with their old neonatologist and took our yearly pictures.  I love that she remembers them year after year, can still recite their stats from six years ago.  She has perfect recall of that time, and in that way, I consider her to be a little god-like.  A little Dumbledore; not quite person, not quite deity.

We went upstairs to the NICU where our favourite nurse was working.  She is never at the Reunion, but she is always working and up in the NICU during the festivities.  This year, she was putting in an I.V. and couldn’t leave the baby, so we passed along our hellos and thank yous.

Before we headed out to my parent’s house for dinner, we swung by the bathroom that I locked myself in the night they made me leave the hospital for the first time.  Again, we actually all had to pee, but it feels important to visit that space and retell the story, for many of the same reasons why people attend Rosh HaShanah services and say the same words, year after year after year.

I find spirituality there — in the hospital bathroom, smelling the hospital soap, and sitting on the dirty tiles.  It’s a ritual just as much as High Holiday services.  It’s revisiting a core space, a place that changed me.  It is just as much a truth — for me — as anything I learned at Hebrew School.

Do you know who knows what it’s like to carry another human being inside their body? Experience round ligament pain, hemorrhoids, and indigestion? And then, after peeing every two minutes for a nine-month time span, push a human being out via a small, 10-centimeter hole while they excrete blood, sweat, and poop? You know who knows EXACTLY what that is like? A man.

A man like John le Carre who recently compared writing a book to birthing a baby.

Completing a book, it’s a little like having a baby … There’s a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.

Having written books and having given birth, this wasn’t how I would describe the process — but what do I know? I’m just a woman. I didn’t have relief and satisfaction when I felt my daughter slip out of my body. I had my heart literally explode to the outside of my body, as if she was pulling out my internal organs with her — both figuratively and literally. I cried and screamed and the incessant worrying began — never pausing even though she is now 6-years-old — twisting my body to see her, to hear her Apgar scores, to fret about where she was in relation to my throbbing body, still prone on the table, waiting for her twin brother to join her.

And, you know, I hoped I got it right with each of them rather than looking ahead to future kids with a shrug of “oh well, there’s always next time!”

But, it’s fitting that a man likens putting words together to creating a live human being, because — as a woman who would know best — I always compare book writing to being kicked in the balls:

Writing a book, it’s a little like getting kicked in the nutsack. First, there is the sharp pain of having the words flow faster than you can get them on the page, and then the burning agony of not being able to transfer the brilliant ideas from the brain to the paper. After a writing session, it is a throbbing ache as the person realizes they have to scrap everything they have written at the next edit and start anew.

See, it’s a perfect analogy.

If le Carre can’t let go of the idea of comparing books to reproduction, at least get the analogy closer to reality:

Publishing a book is like experiencing infertility.

There is this thing you really want — something you should be able to do if you dedicate the time and energy to the process, because, after all, other people have gotten to do this book publishing/baby-making thing in the past. So you do all the work and send out the query letters and get your heart stomped on month after month as the rejection letters/negative pregnancy tests pour back in — often without explanation.

And sometimes in frustration, the writer/almost-parent considers walking away from the whole publishing/baby-making process, especially because often, there is not a clear answer for why the process is so damn difficult. But it’s hard to talk a heart set on publishing/parenting that it would be okay if you walked away. So you stick around and invest more time, more money, more emotional energy.

And then one day, you get an agent/positive pregnancy test and you feel like you’re finally on the right road! You want to celebrate, but you’re so damn scared — for good reason. The reality is that this first hoop is merely a first hoop to jump through in order to bring home a published book/live baby. And many writers/almost-parents experience more frustration/loss on their way to a publishing contract/live baby.

And if you have stayed in the game this long, you most likely know a lot of other writers/almost-parents, and invariably, many will have gotten to the finish line while you are still running the race. And it will make you feel bitter and frustrated. It may make you feel sad enough that you begin avoiding bookstores/baby showers.

And what drives you forward — what makes you keep writing/trying to build your family — is simply hope. This irrational belief that it will happen for you because it is something that you need. And yes, it is sometimes a need, not a want, these desires that are buried so deep in our skin and bones that we would put ourselves out there — time and time again — despite not seeing the results we want, because the action is tied to who we are as people, to our very core.

And that, Mr. le Carre — having experienced infertility, birthing, and book publishing — is an analogy.

Perhaps I am simply bitter because in his analogy, it sounds like having a child is just something you decide to do (such as … oh, writing a book) and we all know that it isn’t quite that simple.  Nor is the loss of life quite akin to a few deleted paragraphs.

Mostly cross-posted with BlogHer.

If you have seen the first movie in the recent straight-to-video Disney franchise, Tinkerbell, you know that fairies are born when a baby laughs. (This is a relief to learn because I was so freaked out at the idea of REs trying to get the speculum up the tiny vaginas of infertile fairies — there are no infertile fairies; only dour babies who are not contributing to the world’s fairy population due to their poor sense of humour.)

The ChickieNob was inquiring whether her new baby cousin had laughed yet, producing a new fairy and whether we could go to Pixie Hollow to meet said fairy since, you know, she’s sort of part of the family.  As she was inquiring about this, she realized that SHE must have laughed at some point and, by fuck, is she currently the mother of her own little Tinkerbell?

She became scarily intense asking after her baby (albeit a baby with translucent wings), almost frantic over the idea that she had created this being and sent it out into the world, and she had no clue where her fairy was at this very moment in time.

It was like turning a mirror on myself, a glimpse of how I’ll look when they leave for college.

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The Weekly What If: What if you were given your own talk show to start filming next Monday.  Who would be in the line up of your five first guests — Monday to Friday?

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And now, the blogs…

Lifeslurper has a post called “Little IVF Earthquakes,” about a tiny mistake made by her clinic which has huge life reprecussions.  The name and address of her anonymous egg donor was accidentally left on a form mailed to the author, and now, instead of having the woman remain an anonymous entity, she has become someone reachable; Google-able.  And while they would have had access to this information when their child was 18, that information was supposed to be years away; something to deal with at a later date.  The post is gut-wrenching — especially as she explains the other events that fell during the days she was pregnant before she experienced a pregnancy loss.  And it’s simply a chilling post, that leaves you in a state of wondering what you would do in the same situation.

Waiting for Baby has a post about her recent loss and telling people about it.  She muses over whom they will tell, explaining the pros and cons of placing this information with other people.  She writes, “Instead I feel like the choices are suck it up, fake it, or share and risk being upset by their lack of understanding and sensitivity.  In a way not telling is a way of feeling more in control.”  I found my head nodding at times while I read the post.

Riding the IVF Roller Coaster has a post about being hopped up on hormones.  I love these lines: “This is a rough cycle.  They all are.  It is endless.  I can’t think at work – sooo many things are slipping.  I’m not the on-the-ball person I usually am – and it’s really hard to care.  The thing I’m best at doing at the moment is being weepy and emotional.”  She manages, through her words, to make you feel as if you are also racing along the same hormonal road.  Later in the week, she writes the gorgeous and heartbreaking, “Grief Pounces,” explaining that, “the great puma of grief pounced on me in the night.  I’m surprised anyone can recognise me today; I feel like I’ve been mauled.”  Seriously, click over to read both.

Speaking of writing that makes you feel as if you are in the author’s head, Someday has a post about her crazy, swirling thoughts.  They are of the “if this happens, then I’ll do this” variety.  And the post contains this eloquent truism for many in the infertility blogosphere: “I feel like giving up at the same time that I feel like desperately hanging on.”

Lastly, Child Bearing Hips has a sweet and sad post about remembering Nora.  She comments on the difficulties she has had in finding a way to remember her: “I know it’s silly. It’s just a tree and an earring. They don’t REALLY represent Nora… but seriously. SERIOUSLY. Can I catch a break? My good friend told me that maybe it’s a sign that Nora it meant to only live in my heart – but I just wanted something nice and small… and it seems like every effort fails.”  Read the post, if for nothing else, her therapist’s excellent advice.  But really, read the post because it’s beautiful and raw.

The roundup to the Roundup: Please don’t worry about infertile fairies and their tiny vaginas.  Answer the Weekly What If about your talk show.  And lots of great blogs to read.

It’s Rosh HaShanah — New Year’s Day for Jews.  Clean slate.  New year.  Endless possibilities except that you know that Rosh HaShanah is going to slide around again in 365 days, wiping the slate clean again, which makes you wonder why you’re racing through things — feeling frantic about life — if you’re going to keep getting sent back to the starting line.

The Wolvog came to this awful realization during the first week of school — that this was it.  That every year, it would start anew, but it would all repeat in a different formation.  That from now until 18, he’s in school.  And then he’s in college.  Then he’s maybe in grad school.  And then he’s in a daily job.  But every year, at least until he’s 18, he will keep up with the race only to find himself back at the starting line every September.

When you see time stretching on ahead of you like that and how much you still have to get through, it’s overwhelming.  And when you look backwards at how quickly time actually passes, it is equally overwhelming.

Therefore, instead of living my life as if I am frantically counting pomegranate seeds, I am attempting to start this year by just enjoying the new fruit.  In Judaism, we eat a fruit we haven’t eaten yet that season (usually the pomegranate) on the second day of Rosh Hashanah.  The purpose is to welcome the season and the turning of the year; nod at the fact that things keep coming around again.

I’m using this holiday to remain in the moment.  To pause from worrying about the future.  To set aside trying to control the things that feel out-of-control since they’re obviously going to come back up again regardless or whether or not I believe that I put them to rest.  I am going through this holiday without thinking about first fruits to come or first fruits past.

Let’s just get this over with.  You’re wondering if I’m going to read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.  I can hear you thinking it across the Internet; it will, after all, fragment our society yet again in the same way that there were the Titanic-watchers and the non-Titantic-watchers (who later also divided into the Avatar-watchers and the non-Avatar-watchers).  So, fine, yes, I’ll put you out of your misery so you can know which side of the line I’m going to fall; are we friend or literary foe.

I am going to read Franzen’s book.

But I’m going to wait until it comes to the used bookstore because I’m cheap (sorry, Mr. Franzen).

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Many years ago, my pediatrician said as the punchline to another comment, “But Melissa is the size of a 10-year-old boy!”  This idea has stuck with me; so much so that while in a store, purchasing the Wolvog’s winter wardrobe of vintage Star Wars t-shirts, I wondered if I could fit into one of the larger sizes.  The boy’s department sign said that it carried clothes for kids ages 5–11 (I’m assuming this is because boys who are in middle school don’t want pyjamas with woodchucks on them saying, “Little Rascal!”)

So I went back into the dressing room and low-and-behold, though Batman’s symbol stretched suggestively across my enormous boobs, I could fit into a large children’s t-shirt.

Which opened a whole new world of clothing opportunities.  Did I want a pyjama top with a woodchuck that says, “Little Rascal?”  Well, no, I didn’t.  But I certainly wanted a vintage Star Wars t-shirt and a Superman one.

I tried them on for the kids when I got home and promised them that I’d only answer to the name “Bat Mum” from now on.

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Now that I have answered that I am reading Freedom and I am the size of a 10-year-old boy, I’m certain there is very little else you’d want to know.  But ask away if you have any other burning questions and I’ll answer them in a future post.