Posts from — May 2011

The first story was just interesting and/or helpful.  A couple in England who experienced recurrent pregnancy loss due to high levels of natural killer cells were treated with three injections of fats from egg yolks and soy beans.  Afterwards, she carried twins to term.  Simply seemed newsworthy.

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The next continues the new trend of reprolit — fiction that contains an infertility storyline.  We’ve already heard about the horror book, Breed, and now, Salon has a piece about Natalie Portman’s father’s infertility thriller.

I guess I’m just curious about the intended audience since whenever you’re marketing a book, you state who you believe will read the book.  Is it assumed that infertile men and women (Dr. Hershlag’s patients) would be drawn towards this sort of book?  Because we really want to think about stolen embryos?  Because treatments in and of themselves are not enough of a horror show that we need to bathe in a fantasy world of in vitro incest?

Or are we not the audience at all?  And then why is a fertility doctor, one who treats us and knows the emotional landscape of infertility via conversations with the patient writing an infertility thriller?  Is it entertainment at our expense?  If I share how depressed I am with my doctor, I hope he doesn’t use that to create entertainment down the road.

I doubt we’d ever see an oncologist making “Cancer — the board game!” or any other doctor using their area of medical expertise as entertainment.  Which is quite different from using your area of medical expertise as education, as exploring the experience of that disease via fiction.

There are plenty of times that art is used to illuminate — think: Schindler’s List.  Which would be quite different from a Holocaust historian making “Auschwitz! The Musical!”

I don’t know — I’m just curious whether anyone would be interested in a reprolit thriller/horror book?  What about a sensitively-explored piece of fiction that tries to delve into the world of treatments and show the reader what that experience is like?  Do you think there’s a difference?

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Lastly, I read an interesting article about Rosie Pope on the Stir by the ever-enjoyable Jeanne Sager.  She points out that,

If you think it’s hard for women going through infertility to run into an old high school pal who’s pregnant or having to face their best friend cradling a newborn, imagine what it must be like all day, every day, to be face-to-face with a big belly.

And I assume it is hard — for doctors, for people who work in baby-item/maternity stores, for teachers, for women in a same-sex relationship where both are undergoing inseminations, for Rosie Pope.  For me, as a teacher, it was only hard during conference time when I’d be speaking to parents who so clearly knew nothing about their child and didn’t seem to care about the aforementioned child.  I would be holding my face expressionless while thinking: “you could procreate and I can’t?”

So my first thought was whether certain professions/life situations are actually harder or is it entirely dependent on the person?  My gut tells me that it’s entirely dependent on the person.  That you could have infertile ob/gyns who never think about how their patients have what they don’t have and you could have infertile ob/gyns who spend their entire day coveting.

The other point Sager makes in the article is that Pope is a vision of hope:

Pope has given these women a gift. She’s telling them they’re not alone. And in many ways, her son Wellington and her decision to show him off this week is a gift too. He’s the gift of hope, the knowledge that, as she told Life & Style, “Miracles really do happen.”

I totally agree with the first part — putting your story out there means that other people hearing it know that they’re not alone.  It is comforting to hear an element of your life reflected.  But what about that second part — the idea that seeing an infertile woman on the other side of the chasm — does that fill you with hope?  Does it make you feel like things are more possible in your world?

Again, there’s a line and I don’t know where it is.  I liked hearing from people who were successful with treatments when we were starting out treatments because I liked hearing that it had a possibility of working.  If it happened for them, perhaps it could happen for me.

But then there is this line where I am also mindful on the other side of it that someone else’s story is not my story.  That treatments could work for them and not work for me, and both truths exist in this world.  That their success does not translate into increased success in my life.  And in that way, they aren’t hope at all.

What are your thoughts?  Do you (did you) look at another person’s success as hope that you’d be in the same place one day?  Or is it simply an acknowledgment that treatments/adoption/surrogacy can work, but it has no bearing on your world whatsoever?

Updated at the bottom

On September 11th, I worked in a school.  We gathered all of the students, from sixth grade to twelfth grade in the theater to give the news and then broke into smaller rooms until parents could arrive for pick-up.  I had everyone in my room write down the thoughts passing through their head at the moment, and I collected them, xeroxed them, and gave out a copy to all of the middle schoolers who had waited in my room.  I told them that it would be a way to remember where they were, who they were with, what they were thinking.  In that moment in time, trying to contain and comfort preteens, creating a written time capsule seemed like the only way to fill that space.  All of us were too numb, too distraught, too scared to do much more than silently jot down disjointed thoughts.

The students from pre-K to fifth grade were in a different building on the campus.  They went into lockdown in their classrooms and while the teachers quietly whispered from room to room, they continued with lessons until they were released early from school.  Years later, those students expressed how terrible it felt to be cognizant that something was wrong, something was happening, and to not be told even in age-appropriate terms.  They could tell the adults were upset.  They could see students out the window walking across the campus, crying.  Not being told made them distrust the teachers; made them wonder what they weren’t being told.

And wouldn’t we feel the same way if we knew someone had information and they weren’t telling us for our own good?  Children are human beings just as much as adults.

I told the twins about Osama Bin Laden when they woke up this morning.  I explained that there was this terrible man (“Worse than Darth Vader?  What about Voldemort?  Was he worse than Voldemort?”) who had been hiding for almost 10 years, and we finally caught him last night.  I stopped short at telling them that we had actually killed Bin Laden because I didn’t know how to explain that without opening the door to a new room of greyness.

I didn’t tell them what he had done except to explain that he was worse than Voldemort in the sense that he was real.  That he had hurt at least 50,000 people; again, not ready to explain that when I said “hurt,” I mostly meant “killed.”  They asked if this meant that there would be no more wars — after all, isn’t that how life continues in Harry Potter’s world?  Get rid of the bad guy and all bad things stop — and I had to explain there probably would be wars in the future.  That the world was both a safer and equally dangerous place because of this.

In Judaism, we don’t celebrate the death of an enemy.  It’s part of the Pesach seder, therefore, that idea was fresh in their minds.  I told them they might see adults happy today, but what we were celebrating wasn’t about Osama Bin Laden.  We weren’t celebrating the fact that we hurt him.  We were celebrating that we could give closure to the families he hurt.  We were celebrating that he couldn’t do anything bad again.  I made the celebration about us vs. being happy over what the enemy was losing.

After they each had a pre-school cuddle, we went downstairs to breakfast and packing bags and making lunches.  They went to kindergarten as if this were an ordinary day.  I went home and held my breath.  One day, I’m going to have to explain September 11th to them.  I’m going to have to explain the Holocaust.  I’m going to have to explain that J.K. Rowling didn’t dream up Voldemort from scratch, that he is an amalgamation of all the evil that exists in the world; that inhabits very real people.  That Osama Bin Laden was human, just like we’re human.  Which makes it all the more horrific.

It is easy to compartmentalize evil robots and evil aliens — we’re not cut from the same cloth and we can use that as an explanation.  It is something quite different to wrap your mind around the fact that it was a choice.  That he chose to kill people not because it’s coded in his DNA, part of who he is as something inhuman, but because he wanted to do it.

I would like to keep them like those students, closed up in the room, pretending that we can keep them oblivious because I do believe that sometimes, ignorance is bliss.  But hearing how the students processed being kept in that glass bubble — being able to see out and know something was happening, yet unable to hear it or get close — made me pop the one around the ChickieNob and Wolvog.

Update:

After school, I asked the twins if their teacher had spoken about Osama Bin Laden with the class.  They both gave a nervous laugh and told me that she hadn’t.  I asked if any of the kids in their class were talking about it, and the Wolvog stared out the window, thinking.  “We’re the only ones who seemed to know,” he admitted.  “Except for probably the 5th graders.  But they don’t talk to us.”

Which led us to a final talk about why parents might not want to talk about Osama Bin Laden with their children, and how that was fine too — there was no right way or wrong way to approach a topic.

All of my fears that others would get to the kids first were unfounded this time.  They probably could have skated through the next few days oblivious.

The only mark left behind was a casual remark later in the evening by the Wolvog that his imaginary friend Jancefer has a friend whose father died recently in the war.  How recently?  Sunday.  This friend’s mother had also died a while back (“She was old.  Like over 200.”), and this current military death left this imaginary person an orphan.  The Wolvog relayed this to me from the back seat, his voice breaking as he repeated several times that this imaginary boy had lost his father.

The questions, the imaginary friends living out their worst fears — it’s all in the vein of trying on dress-up clothes, trying to see how it feels, rolling around in it uncomfortably.  And I’m just grateful that in their current life, it’s all just play-acting.  It’s all just practice and pretend.  Because it’s dawning on them that for some very real families, that truth hits closer to home.

It has been over 9 years since I’ve watched the news.  A few days after we entered the war in Afghanistan, I decided that I couldn’t watch the news anymore.  I couldn’t watch the images.  NPR followed a few months later.  I dipped in and out of newspapers for the last few years.  Somehow, you pick up what is happening in the world via osmosis; it just seeps into your skin as you ride the Metro or walk through the streets.

At 10:30 pm, we climbed into bed to watch the news on CNN.  At first, I was half on Twitter, joking through the anxiety.  And then as the news started leaking out, I set down the computer and stared at the television screen.

And I could feel this strange sadness bubbling up into my throat as we waited for the announcement.  That whatever was said wouldn’t erase everything that came before.  That I didn’t feel necessarily safer.  Every time the newscasters repeated the troops killed, the people lost in the attacks, it felt like nothing could ever be done to overcome the devastation of the last almost ten years.

I was so relieved that this person wasn’t in the world anymore.  It is strange to celebrate someone’s death.  It made me feel like I wanted to cry and couldn’t.  Like how words collect on the tip of the tongue, my tears were strangely caught somewhere between my windpipe and the lump in my throat.

Today, May 1st, was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.  Back in college, we used to sit in a cage on Library Mall and read the names of the millions who were lost.  Not the entire list, of course, but a scattering of names.  We had been talking around the Holocaust at dinner, trying to figure out what the twins had picked up about history.

I opened the computer again to write this.  To try to take this out of my head.  I have a feeling I’m going to start crying soon — I’m not even sure why I’m crying except that it’s a release.

And the President begins to speak.

Almost 10 years ago, I collected the reactions of my students on 9/11 as we waited in lockdown in our classroom until we were released from school early.  So I’ll ask this question now to pool our words in a single space; the bookend to that moment.  What was your reaction to the news?

I was on an Internet radio show with Dina Roth Port (who wrote the Huffington Post article asking us to speak more openly about infertility) and Barbara Collura (Resolve), and you can listen to it here.  It’s available for download at iTunes.  The theme for the show: “Can We Create Infertility Awareness Without Breaking the Silence?”

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the show after you listen.

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There has been a request to compile a list of bloggers attending the BlogHer conference this summer in San Diego.  List yourself in the comment section below and I’ll compile a list.  If you’re not attending the conference but you live close enough to San Diego to stop by for lunch, let me know that too.  When you leave a comment, it asks for your email address.  I can create a bcc list (so people won’t see your email address) and mail out details for the lunch plan once they’re in place.

ALI Bloggers Going to BlogHer List
(* connotes that they’re not going to the conference but live in the area)

• Stirrup Queens
• Unwellness
• Problem Uterus*
• Creating Motherhood
• Dragondreamer’s Lair
• Who else?

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We had a rockin’ time watching the wedding on Friday.  At first, the ChickieNob wanted to be a princess too.  Then we talked about all the things Kate can’t do anymore — it just wouldn’t be proper to hang out in Chincoteague at Famous Pizza in flip flops and a sun-bleached t-shirt advertising a college.  And after some more thought, the ChickieNob decided that she wanted to go back to her original plan to be a rock star (she’s going to play electric bass) and asked if we could get a scooter.  So we went out and got scooters (you know, those pre-skateboard things) and rode around my parent’s neighbourhood for a bit.  And talked about how Kate Middleton can’t really skate around anymore, at least not in a random neighbourhood with other skateboarders.  Not that she was ever really skateboarding in the first place. (Or perhaps she was.  Perhaps Kate and Pippa used to ride the half-pipe.)

I’m not sure if this is a Jewish thing (we are a demonstrative people) or an American thing (we are also a demonstrative people), but that kiss was not a kiss.  You should not be able to blink and miss a wedding kiss.  I’m not saying that you need tongue, but that kiss that they had?  That’s my “welcome home” kiss for when Josh walks in the door at night.  That’s my “thanks for making me a cup of ice cream” kiss.  My kiss goodnight is longer than that one.  Trying not to judge their kiss since I’m aware that most people are more reserved than I am and who knows what took place behind closed doors, but damn.  That’s the kiss we all were waiting for?

That was like someone asking you if you wanted chocolate and after you say yes, handing you a chocolate chip.  And you’re supposed to be happy because you got a piece of chocolate… but not really.