Posts from — July 2011

Pull out a chair and sit down with your cup of coffee. It’s time to have a little talk. Today’s discussion: ghost blogs.

That phrase has been on a post-it note on my desk for a few months.  I don’t even know why.  I’m talking about those strange spaces on the Internet that haven’t been closed; they remain up, abandoned, their owners disappearing into the ether.  There is no final post at the top announcing the cessation of the project.  On the contrary, the most recent post (which is sometimes years old) usually gives no sense that the blog is coming to an end.  It’s like walking into a house and finding the table fully set with a warm meal but devoid of people.

Last spring, Times Online had an article about the decline of blogging, which always makes me think of that Twain quote, “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Their doomsday predictions aside, the part about people abandoning their blogs was interesting:

Some internet analysts call them “ghost blogs,” lingering reminders of a cultish enthusiasm for self-expression that is rapidly wearing off. Others liken the abandonment of blogs to “the suicide of your virtual self.”

I was drawn to that idea of “suicide of your virtual self,” which sounds fairly extreme. Does walking away from blogs or social media sites really have anything in common with ending your life?

I’m never sure what to do with these blogs on either the ALI blogroll or in my personal blog reader. I usually leave them up on the blogroll because I figure the archives could still be helpful to someone seeking information. I also usually leave them in my Google Reader because there have been a handful of times that the person has — years later — popped back on with a new post (and, let’s face it, I’m too lazy to prune my Reader).

What do you think about ghost blogs and that Times Online quote? What do you do with them in terms of your blogroll or blog reader?

It all ends today.

Well, if you live in London, I believe that it has already ended.

And maybe some other places too.

But it’s ending here today.  (Actually, I think it technically ended at midnight.)

And yes, I’m talking about Harry Potter.  It is on every billboard between here and New York, enormous monstrosities blotting out the landscape and reminding me that all good things come to a close (instead of their usual advertisements for Gentleman’s Clubs that we loooooooooooooooooove passing because the kids have started to ask what they are and why these women are so fancy.  Philadelphia, you are too damn classy).

It has been almost ten years since the first film.  I know this because it was the last date that Josh and I had as an unmarried couple.  I took off for my wedding a day early, and we went to an 11 am showing on the first day (and stood in an insanely long line for many hours outside the Uptown and I couldn’t even drink coffee because then I’d need to pee and get out of line to do so and people were scarily intense that day and they wouldn’t even let urinaters back in line).

If you asked me ten years ago, I would have told you that we’d see the final one on the first day too, but currently, we don’t have plans in place.  I’d sort of like to wait a few weeks and see it with my sister since I saw part one with her, but I sort of don’t want this looming over my head for the next few weeks.  Because I am really really really sad to see this end and part of me needs to rip it off like a band-aid.

I was sad when the last book came out, and I was sad when I read the last page, especially because I read the book quickly so it wouldn’t be ruined for me by someone accidentally talking about the ending.  I feel like Harry marks a decade of my life.  He was with me through my wedding and through infertility and through raising the twins.  He’s my late twenties.  He’s most of my thirties.

I cannot even imagine how JK Rowling feels.

So part of me doesn’t want to see it yet and have it end.  Right now, I still have it in front of me.  And part of me is an enormous wuss and is terrified to see it.  I jumped and screamed through part one and this is going to be even more intense.  And I am dreading seeing the death of Fred.

So, that’s where I am right now.  Are you seeing Harry Potter this weekend?  Do you have plans to see it in the future?  Are you skipping it entirely?

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Best! Mom! Ever! x3” (Write Mind Open Heart)
• “The High Road” (Searching for Serenity)
• “Sometimes Life Without Kids is Awesome” (Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed)
• “Who’s Out There?” (Aiden, Baby of Mine)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Adventures of Endo in the Arctic has a post about the sonohystogram where she brought along her husband.  I love this post because I want to put what he said on a t-shirt.  But I won’t.  Because I live in a small town.  And really, I want Josh to wear it and I know he won’t and he’ll tell me to grow up.

Dreaming of Quiet Places has a tiny post about her ex-husband, and I love the peace that falls over all of the words.   It is about staring something in the face and realizing how much you have healed.  And it’s just a lovely moment.

Project Progeny has a post about belonging and not belonging.  As part of her research, she is asking this question to all of the people she encounters in the area she is studying: talk about a time when you felt like you belonged and a time when you felt like you didn’t belong.  It’s a fascinating post to read but also to apply to your own life: when you belonged (or didn’t) in certain areas, in certain schools, in certain blogging arenas.  I love this thought towards the end: “How much of my fixation on this question of belonging comes from my own unsettledness, my own quest for belonging, my peripatetic life, my ability to “bond” with a place very quickly, at least on a superficial level, but in the long run not to be able to put down deep roots anywhere?”

Lastly, I love this story about Babyland General Hospital from The Hopeful Elephant.  Love isn’t strong enough a word.  Especially when Mother Cabbage is 10 leaves dilated.  And please do not skip the link to the video at the bottom if you want to see a cabbage “push” out a doll.  All I know is that I must get to Babyland General Hospital if it’s the last thing I do.

The roundup to the Roundup: Are you seeing the last Harry Potter movie?  And lots of great blog posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 8th and July 15th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I am well aware how much everyone here enjoys when I write about breastfeeding. 99.9% of the time, I stick to my internal promise to leave my breasts off this blog. And then there is the other .1% of the time that Chicken Soup for the Soul writes me and asks if I’d like to contribute an essay to the book they have coming out in November about food and love.

Because breastfeeding is certainly about food, and for some of us, it’s also about love or hate of our bodies. We want to utilize breastfeeding to show love, and we can’t always get our breasts to work.  I couldn’t think of a better story for the book than discussing infertility and how it ties sometimes into our feelings about breastfeeding.  I hope the average reader takes away the message that infertility isn’t a moment in time to get over.  I also hope that if the reader, by chance, is someone who finds herself in the same situation I found myself in, that she can use what I did if it works for her to take back that label of nurturer.

So this is my story, pre-edit.  You can read it in November in the book along with a second essay about the slacker seder I held in college.  I know it won’t please everyone, but I hope I did the majority in the community proud.

*******

Most women are walking refrigerators. No, wait, milk comes out warm, so they’re more like walking ovens. Or walking stovetops. Whereas men are like table tops, ready to receive the food, women’s bodies are fecund like farms, producing life-sustaining milk; nourishment for our children. We are walking, talking food makers.

I am not one of these women.

I used to be one of these women; or, at the very least, I assume that I was one of these women back before I started down the road of fertility treatments. The mandatory blood work each cycle checked hormone levels. Prolactin, the hormone associated with breast milk, was always in working order.

When we finally became pregnant with our twins, breastfeeding mentally became the way I would take back my body; learn to love it again after its wonkiness made me rack up enormous fertility clinic bills. My breasts were going to produce milk for me, and I was going to forgive my body for letting me down in such a big way. The twins and I would be as peaceful as the woman and child on the nursing pillow tag: mother beatifically smiling down at her perfect baby, her modest nightgown hiding the majority of her perfect white breasts, her hair tidily back in a French twist.

The twins arrived and my milk didn’t. I hadn’t experienced breast changes during pregnancy, but I had been assured that many women don’t and this wasn’t problematic. The twins were too small and premature to breastfeed, but I hooked myself up to a breast pump eight times a day, dutifully staring at the “breast is best” poster in the pumping lounge of the hospital.

Eight times a day the machine would hum, tugging at my breasts. And eight times a day, I would get only a few drops of liquid that looked suspiciously like boob sweat. After a few weeks, I became certain that if I hooked up the breast pump to my husband’s chest, he’d be able to produce the same watery substance. It didn’t help that across from the twins’ NICU room was a family of triplets whose mother filled the NICU refrigerator with vial after vial of her rich, yellowish breast milk. She would close the refrigerator after putting in her pumping takeaway and inform me that she just didn’t know what she’d do with aaaaaaaaaaaaall thaaaaaaaaaaaat miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilk.

I did not look like the beatific woman on the nursing pillow label. My hair was not in a neat French twist, my boobs were red and raw from the machine, and the twins certainly weren’t calmly suckling. At four weeks post-birth, we were a massive trainwreck both physically and emotionally. I had tried medications and sleeping more and sleeping less and drinking more water and eating more protein. I had been to several breastfeeding specialists, tried holding the twins’ sleepy mouths to my breast prior to pumping or sniffing one of their spit-up-soaked burp cloths while on the machine – an idea, I was promised, that would trick my brain into producing milk.

I probably don’t need to tell you that it didn’t exactly work.

After four weeks, someone had the idea to test my prolactin levels, and lo and behold, the culprit for my lack of milk was found. I wasn’t producing prolactin anymore, a side effect possibly of the very treatments that brought me my twins. One month of useless pumping finally came to an end, at least physically.

Emotionally, I couldn’t move on nor wrap my brain around the idea that once again, my body had failed to do what other women could do easily. It couldn’t create a child, it couldn’t carry said child to term, and now it couldn’t even feed a child. This body that I had always loved and treated well certainly wasn’t showing me the care I had showed it over the years. And beyond that, I had always been a nurturer, a cook. I was the person who always provided the food, who baked cookies for friends and held dinner parties and had worked her way through an entire cooking school textbook (with the exception of the forcemeats chapter but I secretly believe that everyone would skip the forcemeats chapter if they could).

I was a woman: food was what we did. Not being able to feed my children in the way that I was led to believe was best from hospital posters and parenting books hit me in the very core of who I was as a person. Was I really the nurturer I saw myself as if I couldn’t do this simple task?

One night, in the middle of yet another crying jag over the idea that I had failed so enormously at this whole make-and-keep-a-baby-growing thing, my husband gave me the solution I needed in order to take back that label of nurturer. He asked me to come up with another task equally as difficult as breastfeeding that didn’t depend on my body to function in a certain way.

Making my own baby food instantly sprang to mind. Peeling all of those apples and pears, roasting butternut squash and deseeding it, pureeing steamed peach slices: all of these tasks were time-consuming and messy as opposed to simply twisting the top off a baby food jar. So we went to the supermarket and bought fruits and vegetables. We purchased dozens of ice cube trays and Sharpie markers for labeling. We set up marathon baby food making sessions after the twins went to bed, turning on some music and creating an assembly line of tasks until the last ice cube tray was in the freezer. And several days later, we did it all over again.

Making baby food for picky twins was a never-ending task. Instead of cracked nipples or mastitis, I had cuts on my fingers from the peelers and knives. Instead of searching for a discreet place to nurse in public, I was constantly seeking microwaves where I could heat-up our frozen baby food cubes when we were on an outing. And instead of feeding being a task solely on my shoulders (or should I say, my boobs), my husband was able to be an equal partner in not only the action of placing the food into the twins’ mouths but creating it as well.

Our twins have had exactly one jar of store-bought baby food in their life, but it’s not a fact that I hold over the heads of fellow mothers. I have come to realize that everyone has things they do well and things they don’t; everyone has special ways they provide that others cannot either due to time, inclination, finances or ability. There is no single way of feeding that is “best” in the grand sense of the term, but only ways that are best for each individual mother; each individual child.

I never got to be that beatific woman on the nursing pillow label, but like most advertising, I don’t think her life was really like that anyway. Instead of a French twist, modest nightgown, and angelic child, I got a messy ponytail, jeans, and the Violent Femmes blasting from the computer while I made baby food, side-by-side with my husband. And that’s a memory that it is worth more to me than fulfilling someone else’s idea of perfect motherhood.

I told you I wasn’t finished discussing friendships.

I think the thing that struck me the most from the comments was the number of people who either stated or lamented that they had never had a best friend or that their best friend was gone.  I didn’t mention it in that post and I certainly have old friends that I’m in touch with, but I’ve always wondered about people who managed to keep close with their childhood friends.  Who still hang out with friends from high school who have known them through various incarnations as they reinvent themselves through life.

I’m certainly jealous of that.  I have a few friends who have known me since I was very young.  I have a few still from college or graduate school.  And both of those are a major feat in a fragmented world where people are constantly moving around.  It’s not like the pre-car era where people stayed in the same area and it was a given that you would still know each other into old age.

I think it is partially the friendships themselves — some connections are just stronger than others — but I think it’s equally the people involved in the friendships and having a mutual desire to keep it going (as opposed to having that desire unbalanced or not there at all).  It’s nature and nurture.

And I think it’s also a matter of perception.  I was once looking at an old friend’s Facebook page and saw that she was still in touch with all these people we knew in high school.  At least I assumed they were in touch, but when I questioned her about it, she admitted that they were just Facebook friends, vaguely connected in the ability to see each other’s wall updates, but nothing more.  Which isn’t really something to be jealous of at all.  I could have that if I cared.

Which is a long way of saying that I think it is more uncommon as people continuously move — both physically around the world and jumping from job to job — to keep the same friends (with the same intensity of friendship) over a long period of time.  And I know an equal amount of people who have strong female friendships vs. those who struggle with maintaining strong female friendships.

I think some of it is luck, some of it is skill, and some of it is just your road lining up with another person’s road and both of you choosing to walk together.

*******

I think about my friendships a lot.  Sometimes I think my personality gets in the way of me being a great friend.  I have a tendency to hole up — either physically in my house or mentally in my… mind (where else would one hole up mentally?)  Sometimes I think my personality lends itself well to friendship — I can be very thoughtful when the other aspects of my personality aren’t getting in the way.

I have always had trouble making new friends.  I am shy, first and foremost.  I am also, apparently, forgettable.  I went to my high school reunion and people constantly said, “wait, you were in school with me?”  It would seem that I am very noticeable when I’m in front of you and forgettable when I’m not.  I was never tormented in high school — I wasn’t unpopular in that way — I was just a bit invisible.  I had my good friends and I stuck to my good friends and I could apparently sit next to someone for a year of physics and allow them to copy my homework daily and still be forgettable just five years after high school.

It doesn’t help that I forget no one.

Sometimes I like the fact that I have an irremovable invisibility cloak, especially when I’m feeling shy.  Other times, I wish I was a little more unforgettable.  I wish my actual person was as memorable as my words.  But if I had to choose which one I’d rather have people remember — my words or myself — I would keep it the way it is and stick with the unforgettable words and ideas.

*******

I have both scattered, individual friendships where the friends may know one another through me, but they don’t have their own separate friendship without me.  And then I have a few small groups that I belong to.

This is one of the things I’m curious about — the people who have scattered friends vs. the people who have interconnected friends.

Which do you have?  Individual friends here and there?  A group you hang out with?  A mixture of both?

Obviously everyone has a small mixture of both, but I am talking more about people you would place in your figurative inner and secondary circles.

This breaks down further into another idea — interconnected friend groups that have a hierarchy and interconnected friend groups that have shifting equality.  In other words, one person may be the alpha one day and a different person may be the alpha on another day vs. groups where there is a clearly an alpha — a person in charge — and the other people circle around them.

Basing this on my own experience and observations, shifting equality groups feels distinctly female and set hierarchy groups feels distinctly male.  At the same time, I definitely also belong to a set hierarchy group (where I am quite clearly a delta — that fourth tier of influence) that is headed by an alpha female and comprised almost entirely of women.  So it’s not one or the other; I’m just saying that I associate equality with females and hierarchy with males based on my experience and observations.

With the exception of the group I just named, I can’t think of any other place where I follow a set alpha.  There is one group where I’d call one person the glue — she seems to hold all of us together — but I’d never define her as an alpha.  And truly, looking at every single one of my friendships, there is always a balance of power.  At least from my point-of-view.

Does this mean that I have less social experience with leaders and followers than the average man?

It reminds me of a recent Next Food Network Star episode where the group of girls were chastised for not having a clear leader, even though the group worked well collaboratively with one another.  They didn’t think they needed a leader.  The male judge told them they did.

Look at your friendship groups — do you have an alpha?  Are you the alpha?  Are you a different ranking in the group?

And more importantly, would you want to be an alpha?  I absolutely would not.  The thought of being the alpha of a group makes me itchy.

*******

Instead of ranking people within a group and allowing this hierarchy to determine the push and pull of the group, I find that I mentally rank people in terms of their strengths and match a situation to a specific person.  For instance, one person is my personal alpha outdoor-activity person.  If I felt like going on a hike, she is who I would call.  A different person is my alpha coffee date, that person I most crave when I just need to go out and talk.  I have an alpha for when I have a parenting issue and a different alpha for when I have a non-parenting issue.

And then there are the multi-faceted individuals who fit themselves easily into any of my needs.

*******

I’m not just interested in hearing about individual friendships.  I love hearing about the types of friendships people have.  The friendship set-ups.  Did you gravitate to a type of friendship — solitary friendships or a big friendship group — or did it find you?  Are your close friendships mostly a la carte or are you part of a larger group?  And do you like your friendship set up or wish it was something different?

It has been over 6 months since the bar was last open.  I didn’t intend for it to get this dusty (all the drink glasses needed to be rewashed) nor to have spider webs spun in the dark corners of the room.

But sometimes places need to close for a bit.

But just as much as it felt right to have the virtual bar closed during the winter and spring (or summer and fall for those in the Southern Hemisphere), it equally feels right to throw open the doors again.  To take a figurative rag to the counter and arrange the bar stools.

So come sit down and fill all of us in on what has been new in your life since last December.  Or if you prefer, what is currently happening in your life this month.

As always, it has been over six months since we met, bitched, cried, comforted, and caught up each other on our cycles and lives. Pull up a seat and I’ll pour you a drink. Let everyone know what is happening in your life. The good, the bad, the ugly. My only request is that if a story catches your eye, you follow it back to the person’s blog and start reading their posts. Give some love, give some support, or laugh with someone until your drink comes out of your nose.

I have a ton of assvice in my back pocket and as a virtual bartender, I will give it to you unless you specifically tell me that this is simply a vent and you do not want to receive anything more than a hug.

So if you have been a lurker for a while (or if this is your first open bar), sit down and tell us about yourself. Remember to provide a link or a way for people to continue reading your story (or if you don’t have a blog — gasp! — you can always leave an email address if you’re looking for advice or support. If not, people can leave messages for that person here in the comments section too). If you’re a regular at the bar, I’ll get out your engraved martini glass while you make yourself comfortable. And anyone new, welcome. I’m glad you found this virtual bar.

For those who have no clue what I’m talking about when I say that the bar is open, click here to catch up and then jump into the conversation back on this current post.

So have an imaginary cocktail and tell us what is up with your life.