Posts from — November 2011

I love reading the wishes each year and adding my own, but it is always bittersweet as well.  To see so much yearning written out on the screen, and the reality of how much of life is really out of our control.  That all we can do sometimes is wish and wait to see what happens.

But how damn cool is it that it’s 11/11/11 today?

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EPT started following me on Twitter.  It was seriously like an addict getting followed by @Meth.  When I saw the name, I literally started twitching.  As a former peestick addict who can’t keep them in my house because I have no patience and go through them ridiculously, it gave me pause to see that pop up.

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I have serious Siri envy.  I didn’t really care about the app when the iPhone first came out beyond copying the woman’s voice to speak to the twins and annoy them (my Siri voice is very different from my GPS voice, and is frustratingly calm and robotic in the face of their tantrums: “Do you mean, ‘I’m not going to eat this.’  Here are a list of restaurants in your area.”)

And then, right before bed one night, I saw the commercial on television.  That night, I dreamed that I had an iPhone with Siri.  I was actually having a nightmare, but in my dream, I kept calming myself by speaking to Siri and listening to her response.  I rationally knew that it was just a computer program, but I kept saying in the dream that it made me feel less alone.  I woke up from the dream and told Josh that I now had Siri envy, knowing full well that we wouldn’t be getting an iPhone and having no other way to utilize Siri (and yes, I’ve already tried similar apps, but they don’t speak back to you in that soothing voice).

Oooh, I don’t know what to do with my Siri envy.  Those who have it, is it just as amazing as I think it is?

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On the topic of something I love: Pacific’s Vegetarian Pho Soup Base.  I am literally in love to the point where (and I’m embarrassed to admit this) I hid the remains of dinner deep in the refrigerator so Josh wouldn’t find it and take it to work.

First and foremost, it is difficult to find vegetarian pho at all.  I make a similar soup base, but it takes me hours to make enough for about 2 meals.  I haven’t made it in awhile because it’s so much work.  So it’s hard to make at home and it’s difficult to find out at a restaurant.

The soup base let me make dinner in about ten minutes.  I steamed some broccoli and carrots, fried some shallots, chopped some cilantro and green onions, and made the rice noodles. (I totally forgot the tofu until we sat down to eat.)  Heated up the soup in the pot I used to fry the shallots and poured over each bowl.  Oh my G-d — it was so damn good.

I was going to write about it on our local listserv, and then greed got the best of me.  I am waiting to put up the note until I have gone to the store and horded 5 cartons.

Greatest invention since Siri.

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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:

• “Motherhood in the Time of Separation” (Slowmamma)
• “Blogotopia” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Is My Introvert Showing” (The Misadventures of Missohkay)
• “Out of Proportion Sad” (Write Mind Open Heart)
• “Trick or Treat” (Lesbian Dad)
• “A Birthday Story” (Baby, Interrupted)
• “Love Your Body Day” (This is More Personal)
• “Spoken Word Blog Roundup” (Four of a Kind)
• “Worst Parents Ever” (Stirrup Queens) — thanks, Keiko!

Okay, now my choices this week.

Life of an Army Wife has a post about the different ways she and her husband are processing grief.  This point spoke volumes for me: “Communication at times is lacking in relationships.  Its a necessary thing if one wants to receive what they most desire.  Mind reading is not an option.  In the last few months I’ve had more sit down, evening discussions with my husband than most couples have in a year’s time.”  It’s a gorgeous post, and I send a lot of good thoughts for that road to acceptance.

The Lotus Flower writes about needing a date with her husband after the loss of their child.  Since the loss, they’ve spent time with each other, but always with others around.  It is time for them to do something alone.  I love this thought: “we need to start guarding our time. We have a lot of friends and a lot of family. That’s a lot of support – which is great. But it’s also a lot of phone calls and offers to visit. And because I was raised as a good southern girl, I feel a lot of pressure to return phone calls, and it’s VERY difficult for me to refuse an offer to visit.”  It’s a good reminder that sometimes the best support is giving people the space they need to grieve.

Uppercase Woman has a fantastic post about her body.  About how we treat our bodies and how we think about our bodies.  I love, love, love the ending: “This is what I have, now. Peace with the external world while my internal world still struggles. Perhaps, at last, in my fifties I’ll have peace inside too. Only a few years until I find out.”  Go over and read the whole thing.

Lastly, MissConception has a raw post called “Guilty as Charged” about what she is feeling after her loss.  She takes the blame for the loss of her twins even though she intellectually knows her body was outside her control.  She asks the heartbreaking question: “How could I possibly try again, knowing that another child could die as a result of my need to be a mother?”  Please surround her right now with love.

The roundup to the Roundup: Happy 11/11/11.  I can’t believe EPT would do this to me.  I have a scorching case of Siri envy.  I fell in love with Pacific’s vegetarian pho.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 4th and November 11th) 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.

It’s sort of fitting that the one time in our lifetime that the number 11 repeats in the date three times, it is also the third time I’ve asked people to make a wish.  And in honour of this third time, I am actually doling out THREE wishes.  Be careful.  Some people’s wishes end up coming true.

Here’s how this works:

(1) Make three wishes in the comment section (and don’t believe that stuff about how if say it aloud it won’t come true.  That is precisely when the parts that are within another human being’s control can come true).

(2) Then leave a comment on the blog of the commenter directly before you (so it’s a chain.  #2 comments on #1, #3 comments on #2, etc. If the commenter above you didn’t leave an address, just go one above that.  The point is to find new blogs/leave a comment–not stress).

The first person who comments on this post gets a free ride and does not need to leave any comments.  The last person who comments on this post gets … screwed.

It would be nice within your comment to refer to their wish (if it ties in to the post you read and comment on) and if you can grant any part of it, to do so.  If you can’t, because their wish is outside of human control, don’t feel badly.  But if you have the power to grant a wish, why not do it?

In years past, people have seen each other’s wishes and realized that they have the power to fulfill it.  And did so.  Which is pretty damn cool.

So you know those classic 1980’s horror movies where the teenagers are all going about life, holding their keggers at someone’s house while their parents are away from home, and suddenly the prom queen is stabbed to death by some unseen assailant?  And then the kids are all taking a hike through the woods because all kids like to take hikes through the woods, and one of them is garrotted?  And then the teens are all having a meeting to talk about this invisible psycho who is killing all the kids in this town and DURING THE MEETING, one of the kids is suddenly covered in knife slashes and everyone is sprayed with blood?

You totally get how three kids could be taken by the Jason-Freddie-Krueger-Michael-Myers-mashup, I mean, these things happen.  But it’s when the kids creep into the deserted, burned out house at the edge of town where the monster once lived that you finally scream at the movie screen, “you are so fucking stupid!”

That’s pretty much how I sum up my reaction to Mississippi’s Initiative 26 which goes to vote tomorrow morning.

It’s a horror movie starring your uterus.

A Life Begins at the Moment of Fertilization Amendment will appear on the November 8, 2011 general election ballot in the state of Mississippi as an indirect initiated constitutional amendment. State election officials have numbered the proposal as Initiative 26. The measure proposes adding language to the Mississippi Constitution that declares that life begins at “the moment of fertilization.”

Well that’s okay you say, because you believe that life begins at conception.  But there is a huge gap between believing something and creating laws that govern other people.  There are plenty of things I believe with all my heart, but very few of which I need you to believe too in order to have my own personal happiness.  When we take our beliefs and force others to comply with them, what we end up with is not only fascism, but laws that have the ability to stab you in the ass when you least expect it.

We’ve seen backdoor abortion bills try to pass in the past.  What are backdoor abortion bills?  They are laws that effective outlaw abortion by going through the backdoor of lawmaking since they can no longer go through the front door and contradict laws on the books.  By going through the backdoor, they create laws that cover things other than abortion that can effectively be used to apply to abortion in the future.  It’s like a Jedi mind trick: “these are not the abortion laws you’re looking for.”

We saw it back in 2008 in Georgia.  And we saw it in 2010 in Oklahoma.  And now we’re seeing it at 2011 in Mississippi — and these personhood (or personhood-type) bills are starting to feel like the legal version of the Jason-Freddie-Krueger-Michael-Myers-mashup: jumping out to slash our reproductive rights.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: reproductive rights are reproductive rights, and if you want the freedom to choose whether or not you have access to fertility treatments, you need to support other reproductive rights.  Legal wranglings are not a pu-pu platter where you can say hands-off my embryos and making decisions for me about their creation and storage but then leave women who want to choose whether or not they carry a child back on the plate.  Either your government’s hands are in your uterus or they’re not.  And frankly, the only hands I want near my uterus are the ones attached to my RE who is making decisions in regards to my reproductive (and emotional) health by tailoring those decisions to my own unique situation.  The only people I want making decisions that affect my body are my doctor and myself — and my body extends to people I create with my body.

And yes, as Ezra Klein of The Washington Post points out, this has everything to do with fertility treatments:

The Mississippi ballot has incredibly important legal implications: no state has ever given an embryo constitutional rights and, legally, it’s not quite clear what happens when you do. There is a lot of speculation that it could outlaw infertility treatments and birth control, while almost certainly banning abortion. If passed, the Mississippi law would near certainly bait a legal challenge that could wind its way up to the Supreme Court.

I want a woman to have a right to choose because I believe women are smart enough to choose when they want to have children and when they don’t.  I don’t believe that the government needs to tell me when to have a baby or when not to have a baby.  I really believe that you, and you, and even you, are intelligent enough to know whether utilizing an abortion is the right choice for you.  And I don’t want laws that are going to make accessing fertility treatments harder for infertile men and women.

Anti-abortion activists haven’t been able to get in through the political front door.  So they have gone after instead what they can influence through the back door.  And to that I say hands-off my fucking embryos and uterus.

Oh, and don’t answer the phone since the call is coming from inside the house.

Other people are writing about MS-26 (and if you did too, please let me know in the comment section below and I’ll move you onto the list):

• Magpie Musing
• Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed
• The Dragondreamer’s Lair
• A Steel Magnolia
• Health Breaks Loose
• Parents Against MS 26
• Fertility Lab Insider
• Don’t Take the Repeats
• The Hardest Quest
• Family Building with a Twist
• Brett Cottrell

Photo Credit: Double Feature Podcast

I’m going to admit it – I am often overwhelmed lately by how much there is to do online and how much you feel like you’re missing out if you log off. Before smartphones, it was never a given that someone could reach you via email. Now, with my blackberry, I can literally check email 24/7 no matter where I am if I choose, and the pressure is silently there to do so or miss out.

When it was just blogging and there were a handful of blogs out there, it was easy and enjoyable to keep up. But now it’s not just blogging and commenting — it’s Twitter and Facebook and every other fleeting social media site. Many of them move in real time, and if you log off, you miss the conversation.

And then it feels like you’re back in middle school, left out.

It literally feels like the cliques form not by just what people are writing or what they like to read (or, as it was in the past, when you started your blog — people who started writing around the same time tended to read one another): the break down sometimes feels like those who spend a lot of time online and those who don’t.  Those who can hang out on Twitter, and those who can’t.  It’s not that the ones who pop on for a moment don’t say something equally important, but they’re certainly not equally heard as those who are ensconced in numerous conversations at once.  Those who can read every post, and those who can’t.  Those who can always comment, and those who can’t.  The list is endless.

There are suddenly 1000 ways to feel on the outside of things.

The pressure is 100% self-imposed and wholly dependent on the person’s perspective.  You may consider someone a well-connected, popular person online.  They may consider themselves on the fringe (and I’m sure it also occurs vice versa, though I would hazard a guess that more people feel left out of things than think they’re part of the whole).

What does it even mean to feel as if you have the social part of social media under control?  I can say that if I look back on 8th grade, there were moments when I felt like I totally “got it” socially (like the times I was dating someone) and times when I didn’t, but it also sort of became a jumbled mess.  Who cares if I could get it right for that one evening if I didn’t feel “right” or “in” 100% of the time?  No one wants to be included for five minutes.  You want to be socially savvy 100% of the time.

No one wants to have one good conversation on Twitter.  They want to feel like they are part of the stream of words, hanging out on the banks as they flow by, fully seen as part of the picture.  Daily.  Or semi-daily.

I know the answer, so you really don’t have to say it.  Walk away.  Unplug.  Don’t care.  Limit your time online.  Don’t return that email, and don’t spend any time thinking about how you didn’t return that email.  Declare Google Reader bankruptcy.  Don’t comment.  Don’t take it so fucking seriously.

But the thing is, the pressure was 100% self-imposed back in middle school too, and I think we can all agree that it wasn’t necessarily helpful to receive the advice “just don’t care” as the solution to the problem.  I mean, did it work for you, when you went home and told your parents how left out you felt and they told you not to care?  It certainly didn’t work for me: I still cared.

I do take the social part of social media seriously.  Because I care about people; I care that people are heard, I want to hear what they have to say.  I want to spend my time online feeling social, feeling like I’m getting out of those interactions the same sorts of good feelings I get from friends in the face-to-face world.  I don’t distinguish between the two: they are simply two spaces from which I draw social time.

But at some point, when all of these additional sites were added on top of blogging, the game changed.  It became way too fast, spinning those who can’t keep up to the edges.  And it’s sort of strange to stand over here, by the wall, and watch social media keep spinning like a crazy carousel that is traveling at speeds that feel unsafe to jump on.  Or to jump off.

Am I the only one who feels like the game has changed?

Last weekend we went to the Bat Mitzvah of our friends’ daughter.  It was our first friends who we knew pre-birth to have a child Bat Mitzvahed.  In other words, we’ve been to the Bat Mitzvahs of friend’s children, but we met those friends after their children were already born.  These friends have known Josh since college.  The husband married us.  Their daughter — then only two — danced around with my niece at the rehearsal dinner.  We’ve obviously seen her since, but in my head, she is still that two-year-old.

It was bittersweet to be there because so many of our old friends were at the event.  When we moved out of the city, we lost a lot of our close friendships; the people we saw on a weekly basis.  While I know that part of life is moving through various permutations of friend groups, holding onto a few people always while the rest of the cast changes as life changes, it is hard to go back into Wonderland and see that you are the Alice who has moved away while the March Hare, Mad Hatter, and Dormouse are still having their tea parties.  I was so happy to see everyone; I was so sad that life had continued on and that we needed to catch up, that I didn’t know their day-to-day life anymore.

One of these friends had a daughter who was now 13.  She didn’t remember me; I didn’t expect her to.  A long time ago, after a miscarriage, I had decided to visit the mikveh.  I’m not a monthly mikveh go-er — I’ve only actually been twice: right before my wedding and this other time after the miscarriage.  When I went for my wedding, I invited all my girl friends to join me.  They each brought a wish for my marriage and read their blessing after each immersion.  Afterward, we went out to dinner and various bachelorette activities.

Maybe I was looking for that feeling that I had after my bridal immersion — that feeling like I was ready to get married; ready for whatever came next.  After this particular miscarriage ended, I had this idea that I wanted to go back to the mikveh.  This friend was one of the “mikveh ladies” — women who were trained to help you through your time in the mikveh — and I asked her to take me and to bring along her daughter.

Her daughter didn’t know why we were there and she kept asking me, “are you a new Jew?  Are you a kallah?  Are you a monthly?” — religious conversion, pre-wedding, and after your monthly period all reasons that would make sense for us to be there.  I’m sure she was confused by how hard I cried as I went underwater.  I wanted my friend to bring her child because I really needed this visual reminder for why I was putting myself through everything.  I wanted my own child so badly, and I just remember looking at her daughter and thinking I want that I want that I want that.

And now, seven years later, I was at this Bat Mitzvah and I had that.  This little girl who had accompanied me to the mikveh when my heart was completely broken was now this lovely young woman — so grown up — and she had no idea what she did for me that day in the mikveh.  And my own little girl was only a bit older than she had been when she had taken me there.

Sometimes time moves so quickly — like the earth — that you’re not even aware of its movement.  And then an event such as this Bat Mitzvah happens and you suddenly realize how fast you’ve been spinning.

I have been married ten years.  My friends and I have all aged ten years since that night when I first went to the mikveh and they stood giggling by the water’s edge, giving me these blessings of a happy marriage.  It has been about eight years since I went to the mikveh after losing that pregnancy.  Eight years since this little girl crouched by the water’s edge and tried to figure out why we were there.  And it is an incredible thing to age: to have these memories of people from before they can remember; to still be around to see what they’ve become.