Posts from — February 2011

We belong to a children’s film club.  It’s $5 per kid for the month, and they show two films every Saturday in this old theater.  They clear the area in front of the screen and toss down some bean bag chairs.  No one cares if the kids talk through the film and the M&Ms are free-flowing.  It’s just about 3000 kinds of perfect.

Every Thursday, they send out an email with the two films, and we decide whether or not we feel like going (since, did I mention that it’s only $5 for the whole month?).  This weekend, one of the choices was E.T., and once I saw that, I had to go.

Before we went, we ran through the major plot points with the kids because we were a bit worried that the scenes at the end would be scary or that they would simply not understand 90% of what was happening on the screen.  They both wanted to sit in our laps for the film, which made it easy to whisper the Cliff Notes version of each scene in their ear as the action unfolded.  All was well in the world.

Until the end.  I thought the ending would be scary, and I actually predicted that we’d leave the theater before NASA stormed the house.  But that wasn’t the problem.  As the boys rode through the development, trying to get E.T. to his spaceship, I started bawling with happiness as the bikes lifted into the air.  It’s that quintessential E.T. moment — the image of the bicycles passing in front of the setting sun — and it was sort of mind-blowing to be in a theater holding my child and remember how I felt sitting in the theater as a kid watching E.T. for the first time (the theater I saw it in has been turned into a DSW shoes…)

So all the adults are internally (or, in my case, externally) cheering, and the Wolvog begins to cry this animalistic, gasping cry because he is so sad that E.T. is going home and Elliott won’t be able to see him anymore.  His crying sets off the ChickieNob, which sets off a chain reaction through the kids.  So the entire theater is filled with sniffling children, wailing about how they don’t want E.T. to go home.

And I was struck with this thought: this theater of children all have this intense empathy for Elliott, mourning the loss of this being known pretty much only to Elliott and his siblings for the majority of his duration on earth.  So where did adults lose that empathy?  The kids in the theater couldn’t imagine saying to Elliott that this was life’s plan or that he should be happy that E.T. is in a better place or that he can always be on the lookout again for another alien.  And yet… some adults think this is a way to speak about pregnancy loss or stillbirth or neonatal death.  At what point do people step over the line from being these amazingly empathetic kids to being the assholes who comment on infertility-related articles in the New York Times?

Whoa… where did that come from?

As we left the theater, we asked if they already knew what would be showing next weekend, and the woman said that they didn’t know yet, but they were open to ideas.  What did we want to show our kids on the big screen — something from our childhood that we wanted to experience again.

In the moment, I couldn’t think of anything.  At home, I came up with Freaky Friday and the original Parent Trap.  I would love to see the original Tron again and see Pete’s Dragon on the big screen.

What movie would you love to see from childhood playing on the big screen of a theater?  With really good popcorn and $2 beer and M&Ms.

It must be near Valentine’s Day because everyone and their mother (by which I mean every infertility organization and clinic … since it would be odd if everyone’s mother started writing me emails) are sending me tips on how to not allow infertility to decimate my sex life.

But I’m not really sure how you don’t have infertility decimate your sex life — at least for a short time.  I mean, it’s sort of like an anorexic’s relationship to food — you need food to live, but your relationship with food is killing you.  And you need intimacy in a relationship, but, come on, the sex-not-equaling-baby thing is soul killing.

It is really hard to want to have sex for fun after you’ve been having sex for days in a timed-manner or want to have sex when you’re bloated to hell from drugs.  Or when your heart hurts.  It is really hard to have sex when your heart feels like a shriveled raisin-of-a-thing barely beating under your ribs.  How are you supposed to become stimulated when you are just so fucking sad?

So if you are having mind-blowing sex this weekend, rock on.  But if you are not; if your body is so traumatized from transvaginal ultrasounds or you feel like sex is just a reminder of what is not working in your body or you are so sad that you can’t get intimate, then stop beating yourself up and stop reading those articles and stop putting MORE pressure on yourself.

You will get back to a happy sex life if you two are both going to work to get back to that place of intimacy.  But all problems don’t have to be solved at the same time.  Sometimes, solving one solves some of the other ones too.  So if not-letting-infertility-destroy-your-sex-life feels like too big a task right now, take the night to eat through a box of chocolates in bed.  And cuddle.  And tell each other what you love about each other.  And promise each other that this is a moment in time and the future won’t look like now.

I feel like instead of “Spice Up Your Sex Life During Infertility!” articles, there should be a simple Michael Pollan-like mantra:

Have sex. If you can. And if not, don’t stress and have it later.

14 words.  That’s the advice I wish I had read back then rather than the articles I did read that just made me feel guilty.  And I was reminded of that this week when I read my 3000th email on sex and infertility.

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Instead of the Weekly What If: taking sex out of the equation, would you rather get a really good box of chocolates to eat without any impact to your body (they would magically be without calories or fat) or get an hour-long massage?

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And now, the blogs…

Okay, this post is from last week, but I read it in my Reader on Friday, which means that I have two options — say “oh well” and move onto the next post, or break the rules and bring it to you this week.  I’m breaking the rules…  I am Vulnerable has a post about soup and vulnerability.  First of all, it starts out with a gorgeous story about finding a recipe she loves from a woman who has already died.  It then goes into the way she wants to live: “But I have to say that your comments and then the discovery of Leila’s blog have only reinforced for me the desire and intention to live with an open heart. Because everything is impermanent, but everything ripples out in ways that we cannot even begin to imagine. And I want my ripples to be reflections of who I am and what I believe most strongly.”  Like many of her posts, I felt myself nodding and it gave me food for thought.

The Eternal Guest Room has a post about the jumbled thoughts in her head when she can’t sleep.  Oh, this thought rang so true for me: “I feel like people must be tired of listening to me by now. I’m even kind of tired of listening to me at this point. I feel like I talk about it less and less, because I’ve already said it all, again and again, and it’s so old and tiresome.”  Didn’t she capture that amazingly well?  I just thought this was an aching, raw, dark, silent-scream-of-a-post.

And lastly, Two’s Company. Three’s a Family has a post about time spent with pregnant family.  It was a good night, but it had those moments.  You sort of felt as you read the post that you were the author, sitting in the room, silently processing the situation, knowing a very different reality than the one the family suspects.

The roundup to the Roundup: Have Sex. If you can. And if not, don’t stress and have it later. Chocolate or massage?  And lots of great posts to read.

A really interesting comment was raised with the Exclusion Project which was that the person felt that the ALI blogosphere itself broke down into separate cliques.  She questioned whether we’re really a cohesive community or whether we divide ourselves into small groups usually based on experience (those parenting after adoption stick with those parenting after adoption, or those with PCOS hanging out online with those with PCOS).

I see it from where I stand as sort of both truths at the exact same time — we’re a cohesive group (especially in comparison to other online communities) yet we’re also very much divided into small cliques.

Back when I first started blogging, I had about 100 blogs on the original blogroll.  There were 10 categories.  Now, there are 52 categories and over 2700 blogs.  And I add about 20 more each week.  Back when there were 100 blogs on the blogroll, I didn’t read all 100 regularly, but I knew all of them and I checked in weekly or monthly.  Even if I didn’t read the blogger personally, when someone posted about someone else on their blog, I always knew exactly who they were talking about.  When the LFCA started, there were already many more than 100 blogs on the blogroll, but people still could look down the LFCA and know at least 90% of the people who had news listed.  Now there are times when I’m uploading a blurb for the LFCA and I don’t even know the blogger, and I read a wide-swathe of blogs and have a fairly good memory of blogs I’ve even only seen once.

By virtue of size, we have had to become fragmented.  No one can keep 2700+ blogs in their mind when blogging is a hobby; not a job.  It’s supposed to be enjoyable.  It’s supposed to be a place to draw support.  It is not supposed to be a huge guilt trip of what you’re not doing or not getting or not achieving — at least, that is how I see it.  I feel your online life should add to your overall emotional health, not suck it dry.  People break down into cliques not with the desire to exclude, but instead, with the desire to have an enjoyable online experience that brings something missing to their world.

I also don’t think these cliques are impossible to break into though people tend to enter a state once they’ve been online for a while where they travel with the people they originally found.  They add fewer and fewer new bloggers to their Readers.  It’s not that they wouldn’t welcome a new person into the conversation or go and read a blog post or two on a new blog, but they’re less likely to start up that two-way relationship with someone new when their Reader already feels full.  That said, there are always new people entering, so there are always new people to connect with.  And those connections certainly happen.  A big portion of my Reader are blogs I’ve been reading for 4+ years.  But there are also people in there who haven’t yet celebrated their first blogoversary.  Mostly because whatever they said or conversations we’ve had off-blog have resonated with me.

It is hard to be a new blogger.  It feels like it’s harder to be a new blogger now than it was to be a new blogger years ago.  It was still hard to find your niche and build a readership.  There are tools now that didn’t exist back then — such as other social networking sites — that can jump start a readership.  But it was also a smaller group and once you had stood around in the blogosphere for a while and participated in reading and commenting, people welcomed you in to the community simply by virtue of the fact that there were so few bloggers around at all.  Now, there are so many people entering the blogosphere that it can feel a bit like overload and new people aren’t necessarily going to be dragged into the center of things simply by standing around.  You need to shout to be heard.  You need to nudge a bit.

I think there are things we do exceptionally well as a community.  We cross out of our cliques to give comfort (which does not mean that there aren’t people who slip through the cracks).  We bond together for big projects.  We add our voices so we can shout extra loud to the outside world.  There are also things that have waned in our community — I believe due to size more than due to maliciousness or uppitiness — the LFCA, the support, the welcoming in of new people.

The President gives a State of the Union every year.  Perhaps we also need to revisit yearly the State of Our Blogosphere (SOOB!) to look at ways we can improve and places where we’re kicking ass.  Do you agree or disagree with how I see our corner of the blogosphere?  I’d love to hear from older bloggers and newer bloggers from what they’ve observed.

So now we get to the meat of the day; the “soy protein” as it were for vegetarians like me.  As I said in one of the first posts, all I entered with was a vague understanding that we’d be discussing broad categories such as the economy and the Let’s Move! initiative.  I was worried that since the gathering was pegged as a “women’s” online summit that there would be a pinking down of the information.  And I didn’t want the softer side of our economic crisis; I wanted to hear the facts, plain and simple.

And that’s what I got.

So thank you, White House.

The day was arranged by the Office of Communications and had about 15 or so speakers covering a wide-range of topics: from education to military family outreach to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.  The first 3/4ths of the day were briefings by the speakers (everyone from the First Lady’s chief of staff, Tina Tchen to Elizabeth Warren, who has to be one of the most dynamic, engaging speakers I’ve ever heard).  The final 1/4th of the day was a discussion on how the administration is utilizing online media as well as brainstorming about how they can do it better.

Because they don’t take the online world for granted.  I think they know that they might not be in power right now without the grassroots ability to organize and communicate quickly which is afforded by the Internet.  From day one, this administration has been about two-way communication, and while that’s a difficult task with 310 million people, they have to be commended by at least attempting to give the average American access to the ears of lawmakers.  And their focus on the online world is reflective of their knowledge that they need to leverage both — traditional media and new media — to get their message across.

So what is their message?  In a nutshell, it’s about helping the world become flexible enough to deal with the changes that have swept over it while the system stood rigid.

How does that apply directly to the various topics we discussed:

• Military: there is going to be ramped up support for military families — both those serving who are moving between active service and veteran status as well as their families back home (especially those who are off-base or who need to move and find new jobs due to their partner’s military status).  As the White House said, “1% of the population is serving, and 100% should be aware of their sacrifice.”  Because that is something the other 99% of us can do — support those who serve in the military.
• Let’s Move!: it’s the one-year anniversary of this initiative this week, and it’s limiting to think about it as a public health issue.  This is about infrastructure — are the parks and sidewalks in place so people can get the exercise they need?  Is our outside world safe so we can walk instead of drive?  This is about community development just as much as it is about taking care of our health.  And I loved the idea presented about the way little changes have big consequences.
• Health Care: we learned the bare facts of the new Health Care bill, and frankly, it was pretty eye-opening.  The main message is that if you like your insurance, nothing is going to change.  But if you are having problems, you finally have support.  A lot of the health care focus was about empowering consumers – insurance companies can’t try to confuse us anymore.
• Education: the administration is looking at a cradle through career agenda.  They want to support teachers so they can do their job, make greater accountability in No Child Left Behind, and bring more girls into STEM fields.
• Workplace: workplaces have to adapt to a different type of worker.  Women are wearing a lot of hats at the same time and workplaces need to be flexible.  The Administration is supportive of work sharing because it means we retain workers and in-house knowledge.  Productivity benefits from flexibility.  They want to help employers become more flexible.  There was a lot of emphasis on the Women Owned Small Business Program.
• Accessibility: 1 out of 4 homes do not have access — either logistically or financially — to broadband Internet.  And while we may scoff that having the Internet isn’t necessary, the White House would argue that as the world moves more and more online, we develop a deeper rift between the haves and the havenots.  We can’t make computers a priority in schools or communication and then not give people access to the online world.  And this is the way communication has moved, therefore, the system needs to be flexible and move with it.
• Economics and Personal Finance: there was a lot of talk about how we come out of a recession as well as what got us into a recession.  The emphasis is on making sure that the average consumer can be a careful consumer.  That companies can’t confuse us or give us the run-around.  That there is going to be a new bureau aiming to make sure the laws in existence are enforced.

One of the highlights of the day was when the President came into the room and spoke about how women have “a broader bandwidth of stuff to deal with.”  He looked at everything discussed as people issues rather than women’s issues.  We happened to be looking at them through the lens of women, but everything that affects women affects everyone else (since, as the President says, “women are at the intersection of the family.”)  He talked a lot about how women need to balance their own needs with career, keeping the family going, raising kids, worrying about finances.  It was moving to have the President recognize how difficult it is to “have it all” as well as the tremendous pressure — either out of necessity or desire — to still attempt to … well … have it all.

My overall take-away was that the administration’s heart is in the right place.  That the collective 310 million Americans is a fairly unmanageable beast, and we will never have complete adoration of every policy passed by the administration — I’m an enormous supporter of the President and even I am not enamoured with every idea he puts forth.  But that aside, the administration is staying true to their vision (yes, this is about their vision, not our own personal ones), and that is the only measurable aspect to a politician — do they remain true to their overall goals and attempt to work toward them?  And on that end, yes, the administration is doing a lot on their end to ensure that the transparency and communication they promised are being offered to the American public.

I don’t intend for this to become a political blog by any stretch of the imagination, but I loved thinking about this element of the situation: that the disseminating of information is an enormous game of telephone, with each site interpreting the ideas until it barely resembles the original message.  I loved walking out of there and thinking about not the people hearing the messages, but the spaces in between all of us, and what happens to the ideas when they travel over those spaces.  I walked out of that room looking at all of this as a writer, first and foremost, and as a consumer who often feels as if the news outlets aren’t giving me enough of the story.  I am an American who feels as if she is getting her most accessible information from The Daily Show. (Seriously, for those of you without a background in economics, how many to you understand the current financial crisis?  I certainly don’t.)

I am now on the press release list for the White House and sometimes, I’m going to sit in on phone calls.  I’d like to post my thoughts afterward under the new tag “Politics as Usual.”  If you want to skip them, I completely understand.  It’s sort of like how I feel about phone solicitors around election time.  The one difference is that I am not attempting to point out just! how! fantastic! this! candidate! is! for! you!  I am attempting to present just the facts, ma’am and give my opinion on them.  To make these big, amorphous ideas a little more concrete.  And sometimes I’m going to think the administration rocks.  And sometimes I’m not.

If you are non-American, I hope you read them so then we can discuss — what is our government doing that seems truly ass-backwards when compared to other nations?  What is our government doing that truly rocks-out when compared to other nations?  I give accolades for what I perceive to be applause-worthy.  But I’m also not shy about voicing criticism I feel as well.

So, yeah, like our government, I’m going to be transparent.  I’m a Barack Obama supporter, democratic voter, kumbaya-singing socialist in actuality, and a great lover of trying to understand things outside my ken as well as disseminating information.  Anything that comes under the Politics as Usual tag, unless noted, is based on information I got directly from the White House or another branch of government.  And I am not a huge fan of anything political — perhaps a product of my Washington upbringing — but damn, I love a good chunk of facts and debating them.

Hopefully, you will stick around and debate as well — because the only thing more boring that discussing the economic woes of the country would be if we all held the same political viewpoint.  Yes, I really do want to hear your point-of-view even if it differs greatly from mine (though let’s keep things polite since, you know, the whole kumbaya thing).

So, the Question: Sounds good?  Or has reading this post been as painful as a transvaginal ultrasound?  I’d like to hear your honest opinion — which I’m sure will vary from person to person and I’ll still do what I want to do, but perhaps I won’t subject you to all of the ideas I geek out on if you tell me you’d rather have a camera in your vagina that read this.

Personally, I’m finding all of this a lot more exciting than the insurance person who said yesterday, “now we need to talk a little more about your breasts and reproductive organs.  For instance, there would seem to be something wrong with them … right?”

Indulge me with more White House stories as I finish the post with my actual notes tonight.  The night before I went, I inscribed a copy of Life from Scratch for the First Lady and threw it in my bag.  You just never know who you’ll bump into over there.

Many of you might not know this, but the First Lady is a blogger (and a BlogHer) herself.  During the election, she wrote four posts for BlogHer, and the whole administration has been forward-thinking in using online technology to disseminate their message.

So, a book about a blogger who uses an online medium in order to connect with others?  It seemed like a clear fit for the First Lady. (And it’s a pretty light read; I have to imagine that her job is fairly stressful.  Perhaps she wants to unwind with a good book at the end of the night.)

While I met her husband, the President, the First Lady was nowhere to be seen.  Before I left, I asked a staffer if she’d be able to give the First Lady my gift and she said she’d be happy to walk it over to her office.  So my book — like the many famous biographies lining the walls of the White House library — is currently inside the most important address in Washington, D.C.  Who knows if it was actually deposited in the First Lady’s hands and if she’s happily reading about how Rachel Goldman is teaching herself to cook, but it’s a fun visual to daydream about.

Okay, so if it’s good enough for the White House, don’t you want to get your own copy?  Or send a copy to a friend and tell them that they now have something in common with the First Lady?