Posts from — August 2011

I had one of those when-it-rains-it-pours weeks, though it was all good stuff.  First, we were at the beach and I picked up hermit crabs with my hands.  Which may sound like nothing to you, but is ENORMOUS for me.  I do not usually pick up things such as hermit crabs, so I was very proud of myself for squelching my fears and picking them up.

Don’t judge.

Then I found out that Babble named Stirrup Queens one of their top 50 pregnancy blogs; which may seem amusing since I write about how I can’t get pregnant, but I do like that the site has expanded the definition of pregnancy to include us.  I also really loved the write up paragraph on my blog, even though it made me blush.  This blog was also given the award as being the “most informative.”  Thank you, Babble.

Lastly, Real Simple listed my book, Life from Scratch, as one of their reader-picked 21 great summer reads books.  It was fairly trippy to see the cover of my book on the Real Simple site.  I don’t know who Cindy B is, but I’d like her to know this: thank you for taking the time to suggest my book.  It was two minutes of time for you, and perhaps right after you did it, you clicked away and didn’t think about it again.  But it was two days of smiling for me, and your actions will stick with me indefinitely.

Beyond Cindy B, I want to thank everyone who has supported me with the book. (This is the part where I get all weepy.)  Obviously, an enormous thank you to everyone who has read it.  Thank you to everyone who has sent an email to someone telling them about the book, or lent their copy so a friend could read it too.  Thank you to everyone who has written about it on Facebook or liked my author page (I will be posting things from the sequel there soon).  Thank you everyone who has ever Tweeted about the book.  Again, it’s 140-characters for you, but it means the world to me.  Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to write an Amazon review.  I’m not sure how they help, but I’ve been told that they’re important.  I know it takes time to write a review, so I’m grateful to everyone who has done this.  Thank you to everyone for the one million ways you’ve supported me with this book, some of which I’ll never know about.

That’s the most important point: thank you.  Those two words don’t feel like enough.  I wish I could infuse them with everything I think in my head so you could understand how much your actions mean to me.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “Saying Goodbye to an Alias” (Creating Motherhood)
• “A Tale of Two Tubies” (Mommy Odyssey)
• “In Which I Get Annoyingly Philosophical” (By the Brooke)
• “For Better or Worse” (By the Brooke)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Flotsam has a moving post called “Let it Out” which catches up readers on the last month of her life.  She writes beautifully about the fragility of life and marriage, but beyond that, she writes about needing your blogging space and being unsure you can use it.

Reproductive Jeans has a post about what she’d really like to put as her Facebook status.  It’s one of those posts that need very little explanation — just pointing the arrow so you head over to read it yourself (and let her know what you’d like to put in your own Facebook status bar but never would).

No Kidding in NZ has a post thinking about life in the future; namely, when she is a little old lady.  I love this point, “And so I realise that so much of our loneliness – or rather, so much of our happiness – is dependent on our attitudes.  My mother doesn’t expect (or want) her daughters to be there every day, or to telephone every day.  And so she doesn’t sit there pining for us, she goes out and gets on with enjoying her life.”  It’s an interesting read; especially since life has no guarantees and the best laid plans have a way of crashing down.

Lastly, My Infertility Story has a post about wondering if she made the best choices by treating her infertility.  She asks, “Here we are, 2.5 years later and I’m wondering if we had just let it go and let things happen naturally if we would have a baby right now! I know it’s irrational and unhealthy, but I’m still always finding ways to blame myself. Did I rush things?”  There is no way to know what the road not taken holds, except to try it.

The roundup to the Roundup: A rundown of my week followed by a million thank yous in regards to my book.  Beyond that, lots of great blog posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 12th and August 19th) 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.

The problem with doing a sponsored post is that it’s on someone else’s time line.  So that REI post — which I wrote with a happy heart — is sort of thrust between two pieces of heavy, bready posts like some slapped on peanut butter.  And I apologize for jerking you from one serious post into a giveaway and back into a serious post.  Though perhaps your crankiness with me is that I’m taking you away from a happy giveaway post and writing yet another heavy post at all.

A warning that this post will be difficult to read if you have lost a multiple.  It may be difficult to read if you have used selective reduction.  And it totally ruins the end of Harry Potter.  So three heads up that you may want to skip this post if you fall in any of those categories.

You’ve been warned.

The New York Times recently had an article on reducing twins down to a singleton pregnancy.  Like all NYT articles concerning anything related to infertility, adoption, surrogacy, donor gametes, ART, it clearly showed its bias through word choice.  When I read a NYT article about infertility, I use my special decoder ring (don’t you think that Cracker Jacks should make a special NYT infertility article decoder ring that comes in specially marked boxes?) that usually eliminates their agenda so I can look at the information objectively.

And I found that I couldn’t approach this article objectively.

On one hand, I am unequivocally pro-choice.  The decision to terminate any pregnancy should rest with the woman.  I’d take into account the feelings of the not-yet-father and the medical staff, but other than that, I believe the decision needs to rest with the woman; not the government.  I am also widely accepting of reasons for termination.  I trust that few enter into termination lightly.  It’s a hard decision to make, and I believe that if someone tells me that it was the right decision for them, then it was the right decision for them.

On the other hand, I couldn’t read the article without feeling vaguely nauseated, especially as I listened with half-an-ear to my own twins chattering on in the room across the hall.  They had been together the entire day — from sun-up to sun-down — and yet they still need to spend an hour or two talking at night before bed.  I thought about all these children who could have had that experience going through life alone.  About all the parents who very much wanted their twin pregnancies and lost one of the children either prior to birth or soon after.  And perhaps that plays into the reason why I couldn’t look at the article with the same detached stance I bring to all other NYT articles: because I’m just too damn close to the subject matter.

And also worlds away.  I was never scared of a twin pregnancy, never scared to raise twins.

I think that people romanticize twins, both rightfully and wrongly so.  The reality of twinhood or twin parenting is somewhere between the magical relationship you imagine between the two children and the mundane rationalization that people use to point out that twins are just two siblings.

It isn’t the same as any two siblings, at least not from my vantage point.  And their relationship also isn’t this amalgamation of every strange sideshow act smashed into two people.  They don’t have telepathy unless you count the fact that they know each other so well that they often can guess the other person’s wishes or desires.  They don’t have a secret language unless you count the nicknames and shorthand and made-up words that often arise in any close relationship.  They don’t move in tandem or have the exact same feelings about the same things.  They are two very distinct people who happen to have been born at the exact same time and have spent their entire life together — from the instant of their conception to this very moment in time.  They can comfort each other like no other.  They can push each other’s buttons like no other.  And they have a mutual sense of entitlement over each other, recognizing their individuality while also paying tribute to the fact that they are a pair.  Their relationship is like no other that I’ve ever observed or experienced; except within other sets of multiples.

The work associated with twins is also enlarged and reduced by various people, and the truth falls somewhere in the middle.  It is neither an unfathomable amount of work nor is it as easy as what I’ve observed with my friends who had singletons.  It just… is.  You get through the day and you get through another and you figure out how to do things in duplicate.  Until you’ve found your groove with each change, it’s challenging.  But once you find your groove, you figure out how to navigate two children who have the exact same needs at the exact same time.  You figure out shortcuts and tricks.  Most people worry that they won’t be up to the task of raising twins, and yet all those people who thought they couldn’t do it in theory do it in practice once the twins arrive.

We went to see Harry Potter over the weekend.  I had been putting it off both because I didn’t want the series to end and because I had found the end of book seven to be excruciating.  There was just a lot of death.  Even though George and Fred were not my favourite characters, it made me feel physically ill to read about Fred’s death.  It’s a scenario that I can’t mentally go to without making my stomach clench and my heart race.  The film thankfully raced over that part.

Just as Voldemort marked Harry Potter as The Chosen One based on how he understood the prophecy, I think the twin relationship is somewhat marked by how society treats twins.  We tell them they’re special, we make a fuss over them, and therefore, we create these island relationships.  They are reacting somewhat to what they absorb from those around them.

We’ve had many talks about this with the Wolvog and ChickieNob, and we’ve told them that people have a lot of strange ideas about twins, but that is their problem, not ours.  We need to be polite, we need to be respectful, but we don’t need to answer questions such as “who is the good one and who is the bad one?” or “who do you like more — your friends or your twin?” (Feel free to chime in with the bizarrely intrusive questions that your multiples are asked.)  They’ve definitely noticed the attention they garner, and their personalities have been shaped by that accordingly.  How can it not?

Ashleigh Burrows had a great quote in her panel at BlogHer where she pointed out that questions asked usually reveal more about the asker than about the listener.  And I can’t tell you how many times the first question the person asks in regards to the twins and elementary school is if I’ve separated them.  Which to me speaks volumes about the asker — perhaps they feel stifled by a relationship or they can’t wrap their minds around the duality of being an individual who is part of a pair — but regardless, it just goes so far as to point out how we mark twins.

The first question is not how they’re doing with kindergarten or how they’ve adjusted to a long day away from home or how they’re doing with the workload — all questions we’d ask about any individual entering elementary school.  It’s whether or not they are together or apart.  That is what others deem the most important information; the thing to learn first.  How can the twins not absorb that when they hear the question asked; take from it commentary on their relationship?  And in internalizing it, also change their relationship with one another?  I find that it brings my children closer together; almost an us-against-the-world mentality as it would for anyone if those around them acted strangely about their relationship with another person.  United fronts often come out of a perceived attack.

It is difficult to say how much of their relationship comes from the fact that they were in the same womb at the same time and how much of their relationship comes from living life with the other person.  If it’s the time outside of the womb that is special, then reducing a pregnancy from a twin to a singleton shouldn’t impact the living child.  If it’s the time inside of the womb that is special, then wouldn’t all multiple pregnancies that experience a twin loss result in shattered beings? (I’ve seen vanishing twin rates as high as one in eight pregnancies.  That would be a lot of shattered human beings.)  The truth, like all other things related to twinhood, is probably somewhere in the middle.

I cannot imagine the ChickieNob without the Wolvog, and vice versa.  I cannot imagine them not spending an hour before bed quietly talking (or, as it is sometimes, loudly talking).  They separate when they want to separate and they come back together when they want to come back together, often creating figure eights out of their day as they move between their individual wants, the requests of others, and their genuine desire to be together.  I’m sure those figure eights will grow larger as they age, with the desire or need to spend more time apart.  I hope that they never lose that special relationship, that they’re still best friends when they’re in their eighties, complaining over the phone about their respective children or technology today (in my day, we only had iPhones!  And we liked it.  We had to get our Internet connection from wireless transmission!).

I hope they never lose one another.

My special NYT infertility article decoder ring failed me, not giving me enough space to look at the situation objectively.  Because I both sympathized with the women in the article, wanted to support them on their choices.  And I also was frustrated that they based their decision on the mythos of twin parenting: that it is double the work or double the money.  When the truth — as you’ve probably guessed — lies somewhere closer to the middle.  And I would have loved to hear that they spent a lot of time with twin parents before making their decision; observing a day-in-the-life.  But I don’t get that sense.  I get the sense that the decision was based on what people believe about twins, which often lies fairly far from the actual truth.

What were your thoughts on the NYT article on twin reduction?

Thank you to Baby Smiling in Back Seat for sending this to the Prompt-ly list.

A few years ago, a blogger I will not name was supposed to move to my table as part of the BlogHer conference’s “speed dating” session.  I smiled at her and she turned to her friend and made this dismissive hand motion, and then WALKED BY MY TABLE.  She decided that it was not worth her time to sit and chit chat with eager, little old me.

Down the road, we met under other circumstances.  I was introduced as Melissa from Stirrup Queens and suddenly, she was as sweet as pie.  She just loved my blog and she had all sorts of ideas of how we could work together.

I am fairly sensitive to how I’m treated, and I believe we all deserve respect and attention regardless of what the other person gets out of the interaction.  I know the world isn’t perfect and usually doesn’t act this way, but I try my hardest to always keep this in mind with my interactions and I care about how I’m treated in various arenas.

Which is why when I was chosen for BlogHer’s REI program, I went to the store a week early to see how I’d be treated when no one there knew me or knew that I was writing about the store.  I was just a shopper, looking for a gift, and I walked around the store for an hour, jotting down notes about my experience.  I’ve shopped at REI dozens of other times, and I’ve never had a bad experience, but I wanted to make sure that I had tested this aspect of shopping before I put my name behind the brand.

I spent about an hour in the store, which was fairly crowded for a Friday morning. (Seriously, how were all of these people off of work?  They can’t all be writers who work out of their living room.)  Five different employees asked me if I needed any help.  When I held up my hand and said “no thanks,” they left me alone.  When I paused to ask some questions, they answered them politely.  One told me that REI is actually a co-op, much like my favourite bookstore, and people can become members, which makes them partial owners.  I liked hearing that, though I couldn’t put my finger on why.  It just made my little Commie heart happy.

I also walked around listening to how they spoke to other people.  How they treated women with children in tow.  How they treated men.  Probably my favourite interaction that I noted took place between two twenty-something men — one the employee and the other a German customer.  The customer was attempting to purchase a bicycle and wanted to give it a test ride, but he only wanted to test ride it inside the store.  I personally would have snapped at the customer and said, “you can’t freakin’ ride it in the store.”  But that’s why I don’t work in a store.  The employee patiently said over and over again, “I hear you, man, and I want you to test ride it, but you can’t do it in the store, man.  We can’t have you plowing down customers, man.  Let’s take this puppy outside.”  To which the German man would insist that he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t ride it inside the store and the whole exchange would patiently begin anew.

Undercover customer service investigation complete, I felt ready to actually participate in the program.

So far, so good.

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BlogHer and REI gave me $250 to spend at the store as well as a two-hour guided tour of the store so I could ask all my questions (see, this is why I wanted to go undercover first).  Which was a good thing because even though I’ve been camping numerous times, go geocaching with some regularity, go hiking fairly frequently, I felt like I knew next to nothing when it came to gear.

Though I did some self-assigned homework before I left for the store, using their online tutorials and guides to understand what I wanted and why.  Even so, I was quite relieved to be paired up with John who gave me some background about the store (and did his own homework reading my blog) and then led me from item to item that I was interested in knowing more about, telling me how one goes about making a decision.

For instance, I knew I wanted sleeping bags for the twins.  It’s something they covet.  I know we’re going on a camping trip next summer to a music festival so we’d have them for that.  Slumber parties, camp, power outage in the house. (You laugh, but we have about 8 major power outages per year in the DC area and when they’re in winter, the house gets cold!)  But I had no idea how one went about choosing a single sleeping bag that would fit these very diverse needs.  John walked me through the pros and cons of each one, finally leading me to two adult men’s bags. (See, you thought I was going to say a kids’ bag, but no, we actually realized that these two bags would fit our needs better.)

When I got home, I rolled them out in the living room so they could slip their little bodies inside and snuggle down.

I wanted to be part of this program because I wanted us to geocache better.  We have been doing it in the most ass-backwards way — sans GPS — and while we find a few caches, more often than not, our hike is for naught.  There are only so many times your husband will believe you and drive to the opening of the trail before he’s onto the fact that you can’t really go geocaching without a GPS.

I also wanted the GPS to be easy for a child to use; I wanted them to own the activity.  And John helped me find that too.

The non-gear thing that interested me most were the classes that REI holds ranging from how to use your new kayak to hiking in the woods.  Some of them were also free; most were relatively inexpensive.  I’m considering taking the GPS class with the kids to ensure that we’re using it correctly before we get frustrated in the woods.

To be honest, a large reason why I can put my name behind this review is because they are selling things that help you live longer, provided you use them correctly (have to put that caveat in because John scared me a bit while we were over at camping stoves with some propane stories).  If you go to some businesses that shall not be named and you use or consume what they’re selling, you probably will have a shorter life.  But REI is about getting you outside, getting you active, getting you to commune with nature, getting you to slow down and notice the world.

And beyond that, I liked that they didn’t feel their responsibility to me ended when the cashier rung up my purchase.  They have classes to teach me how to use the gear properly, how to do all the activities they propose safely.  John explained that it was obviously in REI’s best interests that you emerge from the woods in one piece so you’ll come back shopping again. (And they have an amazing return policy to keep customers happy and loyal.  I can call it amazing because I’ve also already tested it once.)  All businesses want to keep you alive so you’ll keep coming back, but REI is actually taking steps to ensure that you remain breathing.  It’s hard to find fault with a business that brings that level of responsibility to the game.

I have one more post coming about how we used the gear that I bought with the gift card.  But now here’s your chance to win a gift card from REI…

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From BlogHer:

What outdoor activity do you pledge to do with your family this summer and how would a $100 REI gift card help you get there? Take the REI Outdoor Pledge and submit your comment to be entered.

No duplicate comments.

You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:

a) Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post

b) Tweet about this promotion and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post

c) Blog about this promotion and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post

d) For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about an alternate form of entry.

This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older and runs from 8/17 – 9/20/11.

Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail.

You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected.

The Official Rules are available here.

Head to the BlogHer round-up page for more chances to win.

As I was reading the comments on this last post about trusting those bringing help to the infertility community, the same thought kept popping up: we pay what we pay in America because we are willing to accept those price tags.  People pointed out the difference in cost between those insured and those uninsured who are using ART.  People pointed out the difference in cost between those doing IVF in another country and those doing IVF in America (same technology, same drugs, very different price tags).  People pointed out the difference in price tags on an IVF cycle out of a university hospital vs. a private clinic.  Though we focused on ART, I’m fairly certain that we could ask the same questions about adoption agencies, surrogacy agencies, and donor gamete agencies.  Our price tags are where they are because the general population is willing to pay it.

Wait, willing is the wrong term.  We blog about how we make gut-wrenching decisions based on the financial side of infertility.  There are those who are not cycling or pursing other paths to parenthood due to the cost.  There are those who are using up the time that is on their side because they need to save in order to cycle, wasting the years when they perhaps would be more successful.

But here’s the question — if the only way things would change would be for everyone to stay home from the clinics, would you?

If you could know without a doubt that everyone would stay home from the clinics and refuse to treat their infertility; that the waiting rooms of clinics would become barren wastelands with tumbleweed gauze blowing under the chairs; that the doctors would all be standing daily at the front desk, drumming their fingers, waiting for anyone to step through the doors: would you do it?

What if the boycott would need to be going on for a year or more in order to effectively lower the price so it is accessible to all Americans?  Would you forgo utilizing ART (or replace that with whatever area of family building assistance you’re utilizing) for a year?  Put off family building for an entire year?  Could you wait out a year if you knew without a doubt that family building assistance would be affordable to many more people if everyone participated?

Time means something with infertility — both in the physical sense of success rates and the emotional sense of peace of heart.  What is worth more — being mindful of time but spending more than you can afford, or sacrificing some time in order to make fertility treatments affordable?  And would you be willing to sacrifice your own time in order to ensure that someone else has access to ART?

I don’t have an answer.  I’d like to believe that we’d all collectively work together towards a common goal, but I also know the emotional side of infertility and how long a year is in infertility years.  Can we really ask that of one another?  My hert tells me that we’d be asking too much.  And at the same time, can we really passionately argue that we want a change if we’re not willing to make sacrifices in order to achieve it?  Boycotts are never easy.  Evoking change is never easy.  It is scary to take a leap of faith that your efforts will be rewarded.

The whole thing is just for shit.

Knowing from historical evidence that boycotts are often an effective tool to evoke change, would you participate in an ART boycott — why or why not?

This is a dark post.  I feel the need to say that because I think I usually see the good in people and write about the good I see in people, and I was fairly uncomfortable having these thoughts.

Long after I wrote the post about Theresa Erickson I was still thinking about the situation. The thoughts floating through my head formed into something akin to a strange film on my skin.  We were on holiday, walking through a supermarket to pick up chips for the beach. All I could think about was how those families were preyed upon, their situation exploited for someone else’s financial gain.

And once I saw it there, I started thinking about it everywhere.  She isn’t the first person who exploited other people.  She won’t be the last.  And what it comes down to is how to find your way back to trusting ground after entering a space where you doubt everyone’s intentions.

I think there is a very thin line between providing a service (and being compensated for fulfilling a need) and exploiting a need.  I was thinking about this in a supermarket and, after all, what is a supermarket except a store that is meant to exploit your need for sustenance.  Or wait, does it fulfill your need for sustenance?  Can you see where my thinking started to get grey and murky? Where does it cross the line from being compensation (something I wholeheartedly support) to being exploitation (something I wholeheartedly deplore)?

We need to eat, and we need assistance with our health, and sometimes we need professionals to help us build our families.  And I’d classify all these things as needs more than wants, though people could argue that the final one is a want more than a need.  But I’m not really looking for an argument — for me, in regards to my own sanity and therefore my own life, family building is a need.  For you, it may fall more as a want.

If there was one store selling food, you better believe they’d jack up the prices, knowing that humans are desperate for food to eat; we can’t live without it.  The only reason food prices are where they are is due to the abundance of food.  It’s a terrible side of human nature — that those with the means would hold it over the heads of those without.

And that is what Theresa Erickson did.

She knew the needs of the community.  She observed the community for years by working in the community and like a sibling who knows exactly how to push her sister’s buttons, Erickson knew exactly who would take her up on her offer for a child.  When a human has been beaten away from their need for so long, they are willing to pay the high price in the same way as if you were starving, you’d pay an enormous amount for food.

And I think that I have finally put my finger on why this bothers me so much; because if she can exploit our needs, then anyone can exploit our needs, especially one who remains in our community for a long time and observes how deep the need goes.

If he wanted to, my RE can hold my sanity over my head and put a disgustingly enormous price tag on helping me.  And who is to say that he doesn’t?  I have always taken the cost of ART to be the cost of ART: meaning; fertility treatments cost what they cost because you are not only paying for the supplies and the expertise, but you are paying for the research and the equipment.  That the price is enormous, but the cost of creating IVF is enormous.  And I’ve always trusted that, and I’m sure I’ll get back to a place where I do.

But how do I know?  This seed of doubt has been planted and it is eating away at what I’ve always felt comfortable with.

From what we know based on what she has admitted (and it is her choice to plead guilty and we can only base our understanding on what she states.  If we have the facts wrong, it is because she has provided the wrong facts) she has clearly crossed the line.   I’m not sure how anyone could twist this through a lens and make it look ethical.  But set aside for a moment (to mentally come back to later) the children at the heart of this, the families affected, the surrogates involved.  Set aside all of that.  At the heart of this is the fact that someone observed our needs for a long time and then started exploiting our needs in 2005.  And kept exploiting them until 2011.

That is too long a period of time for this to not be purposeful.

The unwritten social contract dictates that we request compensation for our expertise.  It’s the modern day barter that grows out of the olden days where I’d trade my surplus of apples for your surplus of tobacco and we’d all be happy (forgive me; Maryland history books seem to always use apples and tobacco as our two bartering items).  Therefore, when I pay my doctor to treat my illness, that money is covering the investment he made in his education.  It’s covering office costs and equipment costs.  I’m not sure how he adds up everything that needs covering and divides that by the average amount of patients, but I don’t begrudge doctors money and frankly, I can’t think too deeply about the fairness of the cost.  The job he does is worth a lot to me, and I wouldn’t begrudge him even more than what his education cost since my life has a high worth to me.

But the Erickson situation is like a doctor seeing someone with Stage 4 cancer and holding out a medication for an outrageous sum simply because he knows he can get the patient to pay the price because he is desperate to live.  This is like a doctor making the conscious choice to exploit that patient’s need for their own financial gain.

I have a lot of fears right now, and I’m finding it very difficult to return to that rosy, rational place where I was comfortable in my beliefs.  Where I knew that exploiters exist — does Madoff ring any bells? — and they may even cross my path, but the vast majority of people I surround myself with have my best interests at heart even if they want compensation for their work.  I know I will get back to that place because if that is your natural state, you always return to that place.  But right now, I’m waiting for this feeling to pass so I can return to a place of trust.  Because what else can I do when I have this need and I require others to help me fulfill it?

This needs to be my final thoughts on this because I find that in this particular situation, I need to vomit it out rather than take more in.  Though I want to hear your thoughts on this too to wrap it up.  And then we can go back to my usual musings on unicorns, rainbows, and sing kumbaya.