Posts from — May 2011

Once upon a time, there was this blogger known as Dynamo Dad.  He was one of the backbones of the early ALI community.

It has been one year since the world lost Alex, and it is a much darker place without him — without his art, without his energy, without his words.

Around the world, people are doing such cool things to remember him.  I am going to remember him as I first met him online — as Dynamo Dad — part superhero, part-all-too-human.  I am wearing my Superman t-shirt in his honour today.

His wife is getting through this day by putting one foot in front of the other during this very difficult anniversary.  Please circle the wagons around Vee at Trois Little Birds.  Show her your enormous love by surrounding her with good thoughts.  Even if you don’t personally know Vee and never knew Alex, you can still go over and leave her these words: “I’m abiding with you.”  Let her know that she is not alone; that the whole world is remembering him with her.

For those watching my midlife crisis unfold, I bring you the latest installment which has included guitar lessons, a wardrobe consisting exclusively of superhero t-shirts, pinball-and-comic-book afternoons, and now… the scooter.

After the royal wedding, I went out and got the twins scooters.  Not a Vespa, but those pre-skateboard things consisting of a skateboard with a handlebar.  Watching them try with mixed results to balance on the board filled me with jealousy.  I wanted a ride, and if I hadn’t purchased kid-sized ones (where I probably exceeded the weight limit), I would have demanded a turn.

I spent a night researching my options and went to bed with the decision to buy myself one in the morning.  By the time I woke up, I rethought the whole plan.  What the hell was I thinking?  First and foremost, I would most likely break something because I’m the most uncoordinated person in the world.  Secondly, even if I didn’t break something, I’d probably do some other sort of bodily damage — pulled muscles or gaping flesh wounds.  Thirdly, even if I managed to somehow remain alive, I would look ridiculous.  Please, picture for a moment a greying-haired woman on a skateboard.

So I tabled the idea.

Even though it kept nagging at me.

Last Tuesday, we had a few errands that had.to.get.done; adult, boring minutiae that were the more exciting alternative to what had to get done in the house (namely, clean toilets, vacuum floors, and laundry).  As I looked at our afternoon, the nagging entered a crescendo.

I was thinking about a friend of ours with cancer, the same diagnosis that kicked my ass into restarting guitar lessons.  The last time we saw him, he looked so old.  And the amplified, internal get-the-fucking-scooter song was wailing out about how I’m not getting any younger, and how I’m more likely to have the body to do this now than I will ten years from now.

So I picked up the twins from school, and we took care of what needed to get done, and then we went to buy me a scooter.  The man at the store mistakenly thought the scooter was for the kids, so he kept bending down and directing the answers to my questions to them.  We finally informed him that the scooter was for me, and he stared at me dubiously and asked me to be careful.  He sold it to me with this expression that can only be described as fearful.  Like he was a goodhearted drug dealer who wondered if he should be selling this horse bladder-sized bag of cocaine to a junkie.

Something like that.

I should stop here and say that I’ve been on one of these exactly once and it was when I was under ten years old.  We were inside a house, on a flat surface, and the scooter had three or four wheels.

I planned to ride the one I purchased outside.  On a hilly street.  With uneven pavement.  Oh, and it only had two wheels.  And did I already tell you that I’m very uncoordinated?

We brought it home and assembled it.  Even though I should have been making dinner and we were going to be massively late to bed if we went outside, we trekked outside with our scooters.

And I was scared shitless.

I mean, my heart was pounding and I felt dizzy because I was so terrified.  I’m not a fan of roller coasters.  I’m not even a fan of driving over 15 miles per hour.  I am just not a scooter type of person.  But I thought about myself at age 80, and how I’d have regrets if I didn’t do this.  And I pushed off.

After a bunch of wobbly, urine-releasing moments of terror (moments filled with my neighbour screaming, “please be careful!” interspersed with her laughing hysterically at me), I started being able to keep both feet off the ground for three seconds without falling.  And as time went on, I was able to go farther and farther. (Dinner, kids?  What dinner?  I don’t have time to make you your damn dinner.  I’m scooting!)  After a half hour or so,  I was riding down the street — the entirely length of our street — with both feet on the board, taking curves, navigating around the other kids on scooters who came out of their houses to ride with us.

I was a fucking rock star.

Which took care of my first two fears — I was physically doing this without harming myself.  I thought about the third fear as I watched the teenage boys playing football; all of them pretending that they weren’t laughing at the woman on the scooter.  Maybe I was their joke of the evening, but perhaps they’ll one day be in their late thirties and think about how difficult that was for me to get on the scooter and conquer my fears.

Oh, and they’ll think about how I was a fucking scooter ninja rock star.

So much so that I contacted the local skate park to inquire about getting skateboarding lessons.  I think I’ve found my calling.

As I was writing this, I looked at the play kitchen next to my desk and noticed that one of my little Stuart Smalleys had left herself a message:

And I can freakin’ do it too.

When you’re a teenager, May equals prom season.  There is this sharp focus on this one day — a dance that fills some with dread and others with elation.  When you’re an infertile woman, May equals Mother’s Day season, a minefield-of-a-holiday that is uniquely painful because it’s filled with our desires for the future and memories of celebrating our mothers from our past (and this doesn’t even touch on the more complicated situations of those going through the day without a mother either due to death or estrangement).

And it is also tornado season.

Every week I get the episode of This American Life, a radio show that plays on NPR.  This week, the theme was prom, and the podcast was a rerun from 2001 that I somehow missed prior to this point (or maybe heard and just don’t remember).

As I listened to the first act, I inexplicably kept thinking about Mother’s Day.  Which was strange because there is nothing in the act about Mother’s Day.

The radio show starts out with the story of the prom in Hoisington, Kansas when a tornado ripped through the town while the kids were dancing, destroying 1/3rd of the buildings.  Their prom theme was “Lost in the Moment” and that pretty much summed up this bizarre story — the kids, accustomed to the lights flickering and random blackouts in their town, kept dancing, oblivious that anything beyond a rainstorm was happening outside.  And then they left the building to confront this enormous devastation.  Their homes were gone.  Their town was leveled.

Why the hell did I keep thinking of Mother’s Day through their story?

When I sat down to write about Mother’s Day about a half hour ago, I decided to look back at what I wrote last year.  Apparently, I likened the entire holiday to tornadoes.   Not remembering this post at all but rereading my words felt eerie, like I was walking through the aftermath of a storm.  That strange stillness.

I think — for me — the analogy still holds.

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.

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.

As does the explanation of Mother’s Day when you are parenting after infertility.

Mother’s Day after infertility has that eerie quality that comes after you’ve weathered a 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.

The South is still reeling from the recent storms that devastated towns and took more than 300 lives.  It is the second deadliest tornado outbreak in America, the last one being in 1925.  The prom story above, the storms in the South… these are the third sort of tornado, the ones mirrored analogously in the emotional experiences of those navigating loss; of facing another reminder of life without their children.  There is no wiping of the brow from dodging a bullet, no marveling of the strange beauty.  It’s simply devastation.

In the This American Life episode, the reporter and a prom-goer state:

Usually the story of prom is one of disappointment.  You’re in the bathroom crying during the slow dance, or you throw up at the hotel room party, or you go home feeling silly for having been so excited about something so meaningless.  The teenagers in Hoisington got the kind of prom story everybody wants.  They got a legendary prom; the night that actually did change their lives.

It was a prom that taught a lesson.  You know?  It became… our cars and clothes weren’t so important and family and friends… it taught a big lesson about humanity, I think, to everybody there.  Everybody had a new perspective of life walking out of that prom.

None of these subjects intertwine, they are more like tines on the same fork.  It’s May.  It’s prom season.  It’s tornado season.  It’s Mother’s Day.  And yet, there is something that we can learn when we hold up each one against the other.  The way prom can become inflated, and how it behooves us to spend more time thinking about our high school friendships and relationships than thinking about the perfect corsage.  The way a tornado can either leave us unscathed or level us — and how we don’t know how it will go until after it happens.

The way Mother’s Day can be a fantastic moment for one person and a day of dread for another — and neither person should be made to feel terrible about their reaction.  It’s sort of in the same vein as the fact that no two people will experience prom in the same way.  And two houses, standing right next to one another, can have very different outcomes when the same storm passes through the town.

All of this is a long way of saying (beyond listen to This American Life if you’re looking for a distraction this weekend) that if you’re celebrating the holiday this weekend, have a wonderful time and don’t feel guilty about enjoying it.  And if Mother’s Day is salt in the wound, know that I’m holding you in my heart and thinking about you.  And if Mother’s Day simply fills you with anger and makes you want to spit, may I suggest throwing ice cubes outside?  I learned that from Our Family Beginnings — brilliant because unlike using cheap dishes, there is no clean-up; the ice simply melts and is gone.

May your life-prom be filled with pink tulle, may you weather every storm, and may a future Mother’s Day hold exactly what your heart needs.

Much more exciting than that Sunday-holiday-which-shall-not-be-named is Saturday’s Free Comic Book Day.  It has been on my calendar for several months now, and we planned the day around a trip to my favourite comic book store.

I know — Josh likes to say that I’m a 12-year-old boy trapped in a woman’s body.

I’m not that excited about any of the ones they’re giving away, but that’s sort of not the point since I obviously have the means to buy whatever $2.99 comic books I want.  The day is a celebration of the almighty comic book.  It’s to get new readers to think about graphic novels.  It’s to bring back readers who have been away for a long time.

So we’ll be there since I wanted to pick up the rest of the Daytripper series (Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon are my favourite artists — not just because they’re twins — their drawings/inking work is gorgeous).  And to show you just how cool comic books can be, here is a video of Moon inking a drawing.

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Instead of ComOnNaPro, I want to try something new this week and if people like it, will figure out how to keep it going indefinitely.  In other words, add your feedback about this idea in general in your comment so I can gauge interest.

We are approaching the 5th anniversary of the Friday Blog Roundup (I know, freakin’ crazy).  And in honour of this fact, I’d like to kick off the next five years with an idea I introduced over at BlogHer in my new section (are you reading my new Blogging & Social Media section?  Because you should.  You can even subscribe to it so you only get the posts in my section: http://www.blogher.com/topicrss/10/10/feed as well as follow me on Twitter at @BlogHerBlogging).

This is how the new idea would work:

Every Friday Blog Roundup would continue to look as normal — my blatherings at the top and a roundup of a few posts that I read this week that stuck with me (I get asked this a lot, so I’ll just answer it here — the posts that I feature are simply posts that I read and was still thinking about after I walked away from the screen.  That’s my only criteria for choosing them) — but the comment section would become an open thread of the best posts you read this week.

So it would be more of a conversation of great posts — a big Stone Soup approach to sharing must-read posts, focused entirely on posts WITHIN our community (in other words, anything ALI-related which is the only guideline I use for constructing the Roundup.  If the blog fits somewhere on the blogroll, their posts can fit in the Roundup).  BUT the second part is that each week, I’d gather up all the posts left in the thread and post them a second time in the body of the next Roundup under a section called “second helpings.”  So you’d see the posts a few times — in the comment section during the week and again in the “second helping” section of the next Roundup.  So really good posts have an extra two week lifespan.

Makes sense?

So if you want to participate, here’s what you should do:

• Read posts and bookmark anything that really strikes you during the week (this week, for instance, runs April 29–May 6).
• Once I post the weekly Roundup, leave a comment with a link to the blog post you want people to read as well as a brief explanation.  Please include the brief explanation.  My blurbs are not only to entice you, but to give you a heads up before you click over since not every person is in a mental space to read every post.
• Yes, you can leave more than one post, but please curate thoughtfully.  In other words, ask yourself if this is something you think everyone needs to read because it really resonated with you or you’re really proud of it.
• Yes, you can nominate one of your own posts.  You can highlight someone else’s post or you can highlight your own.  Be proud of your words and stand by them — you did the work, you thought the thoughts, own it and shout it.
• Come back and read the thread throughout the week.  The thread remains open from Friday until the following Wednesday.  Any comments added after Wednesday evening will not be included in the “second helping” section, though feel free to still leave comments since people may be checking the old threads in the future.
• I will scoop up all posts left and run the links (though not the explanations due to length) in the next Roundup in a special new section titled “second helpings.”  This next Roundup will also look the same as usual (with the additional new section), and a new open thread will start again.

Makes sense?  So get started this week.  Posts must be published between April 29th and May 6th to be included.  Anything that doesn’t fit that guideline or that isn’t part of the ALI-community will not be included.  And as you read this week, bookmark so you’ll be prepared for the next open thread.

And for this first time, please give me feedback on what you think of this idea.  No one has to participate, no one has to read it, but it’s there to highlight more posts.  Think of it like our own, private, ALI-StumbleUpon.  I still want to point out the great stuff I read during the week, but this gives you a chance to point out the great stuff you read during the week, all in one, succinct space.  And people bored, looking for good posts, can always come to the thread and find one.  And frankly, I think it can be eye-opening to see which posts that you wrote resonated with another person enough for them to add it to the list.  As well as for other readers to see which posts you are most proud of that you added to the list.

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And now, the blogs…

I’m not sure how one can read Mrs. Spit’s post “How to Live Forever” and not cry.  In a note to her son, she explains how another blogger walked to raise money for March of Dimes in his name, though prior to the event, the blogger lost her own son.  I bawled reading: “You are remembered. Your memories as close as our breath. You have entirely outlived your tiny bodies, and your presence reminds us of the need for mercy and goodness. You are not here, but you are not gone.”  Absolutely gorgeous.

Kate, Uncensored has a post musing about whether she would undo her experience with infertility if this were possible.  She explains, “I’ve often said that I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. Yet, I wouldn’t wish it away for myself. I have learned so much about myself throughout the process and since.”  I love her list — what would you add to yours?

Fertility Challenged in Florida unpacks the idea of having a second child.  Namely, why they will never put themselves back on the trying-to-conceive roller coaster but how they may build their family a different way.  It was a very interesting read.

Lastly, The Long Way Around has a post about other people’s baby announcements.  Namely, the joy she is expected to feel upon hearing someone’s news.  She writes, “I think people assume that just because you are now trying to conceive and have babies on the brain, that any baby news is going to bring you joy.  What they don’t realize is that after you have suffered a miscarriage, others’ baby news is the last thing you want to hear about.”  She gives a great breakdown, separating the news from the expectation.  Go weigh in on her question.

The roundup to the Roundup: It’s Free Comic Book Day!  What do you think of the open thread idea to carry forth the Roundup into the next 5 years (I sort of want it up and running before the anniversary in a few weeks)?  And lots of great posts to read.  In fact, there could be more great posts to read: add them into the comment section below and then come back later to see what other posts have been added (and please read the posts).

You knew it was just a matter of time before the questions started in earnest.  Last night, I was flipping off the television after we watched our nightly 15 minutes of movie time, and in the moment between the DVD player shutting off and the television going dark, a flash of a rerun Daily Show played because the television was tuned to Comedy Central.

As we walked to their room, ChickieNob casually asked whose picture had been on the screen.

“That was Osama bin Laden,” I admitted.

“I actually knew that,” she said mysteriously.  “Where is he right now?”

We were standing in front of the mirror, both facing it, so I told her reflection, “He’s actually dead.  He died because when they went in to take him from the house, there was a battle and he died during it.”  I wanted to make it clear that this was related to war.  That if she did something we deemed “terrible” (such as, oh, I don’t know, sitting on her brother for the 11th time), the army wasn’t going to come busting into the house to take her down.

I watched her reflection in the mirror as well as the Wolvog’s, who had come up behind us at that moment after retrieving one of his stuffed animals from downstairs.  Both looked surprised at this development — that Osama bin Laden was dead.  The Wolvog tested out a response:

“Is that a good thing?  So now he really can’t come out and hurt people again?”

“It’s something that had to be done.  We never want to kill a person, but that can happen during a war when two people are fighting.”

We retired to their room so they could ask the rest of their questions.  Taking Tash’s advice (was it Tash’s advice?  I feel like I need to roundup all my posts about talking about death), I was careful to answer just the question asked and not elaborate.  And in doing so, the twins sort of naturally kept the idea of death mostly out of the conversation.  They asked what they needed answers for and we didn’t push anything extra.  Here’s what we spoke about:

• Does Osama bin Laden always wear white? (he was wearing white in the picture on the screen): I’m not familiar with most of his wardrobe.
• Will they show pictures of him dead? (I thought this was an interesting one in light of the announcement that the pictures would not be shown): No, President Obama promised today that they wouldn’t show pictures that would upset you.
• Why won’t they show the pictures? Out of respect.  At the end of the day, he was a human being.  And we need to have a basic level of respect for all human beings — even ones who don’t treat us nicely.
• Did he want to hurt kids? Yes.  He wanted to hurt everybody.
• Did he ever hurt a kid? Yes.
• Did he ever do anything bad?  Or did he just want to do bad things? (and this is where we first broached 9/11): Have you ever heard people talk about September 11th?  Before you were born, there was a scary day where he attacked two buildings in America.  And he hurt a lot of people that day.
• Where were the buildings? One was in D.C. — that’s the Pentagon — and the other was in New York.
• Was the New York one near Uncle R? No, he lives in a different part of the city.
• Have I ever seen the New York one? (they’ve seen the Pentagon numerous times) No, because they’re not there anymore. (This answer brought about a long period of silence).  Do you know when Green Day sings, “and the towers fall?”  That’s what they’re talking about.  The day the towers fell — that these big buildings fell down.
• What will happen to his family? I don’t know.  I don’t know where they are right now.
• Are they sad? I am positive they are sad.
• Are they bad guys too? I don’t really know what they think.  It’s important to remember that they didn’t choose to be in his family; they didn’t necessarily choose to be connected to him.  They shouldn’t be blamed because their dad made bad decisions just like you shouldn’t be blamed if I make a bad decision.  Maybe they think the same things he did, or maybe they were really upset that their dad wanted to do terrible things.  We don’t know them so we can’t say what they think.
• And they’ll never show a picture of him dead and then I’ll see it and get scared? No, they’ll never show him dead and if they ever did, I would be very careful that none of us saw that picture.  President Obama is being respectful because he was someone’s baby — right?  Everyone has a mommy, and he was someone’s baby.  He was someone’s daddy.  He was a person to them and out of respect for his family, President Obama is not going to make them feel badly and show this picture.  Because they didn’t choose to have a son or father who acted like that.  It’s okay to be angry with Osama bin Laden, but we don’t hurt other people because we’re angry with bin Laden.

I wanted them to walk away from the conversation realizing that Osama bin Laden was just a man — not a robot with superpowers or a magical being who can utter words and kill you instantly — he was just a person.  A person who was born and a person who could die and a person who can’t come back (we didn’t broach the many-headed hydra theory since, you know, trying to keep them from crapping their pants in fear).

And therefore, he can be feared because some humans are damn scary, but our fears need to be in check because, again, he’s a human with human limitations.  And I also wanted them to see that he was a human, which meant that he made choices.  And he made some godawful ones.

And I wanted them to remember that he was a human and that we’re often interconnected in ways that we can’t control, and I want them to compartmentalize this person rather than apply his actions to many.  After all, one day I’m going to have to explain the Holocaust, and I don’t want them to apply their feelings about Hitler to all Germans any more than I want them to apply their feelings about Osama bin Laden to other people.

I wanted them to remember that he was a human to bring him down to the proper size.

So we focused the remainder of our conversation on the fact that he was human.  That his decisions are his own and he needs to accept consequences for his actions; just as much as my decisions are my own and I need to accept consequences.  And just as he shouldn’t have held me accountable for decisions that my government made — that he shouldn’t have wanted to hurt me since I wasn’t involved in those decisions — that we shouldn’t want to hurt anyone else just because they had something in common with Osama bin Laden.  Because if we do, we’re essentially doing what he did, which was paint humanity with a large, sloppy brush.

The questions ran out abruptly, and after about ten straight minutes of talking about him, they asked about our weekend plans, signaling that they were full.  Full of information.  And it was time for bed.

Posting this in case in can help anyone else with their future conversations.