Posts from — December 2011

Trinity said it best when she summed up parenting after infertility blogging as complicated.  It is not exactly cut-and-dried beforehand; plenty of bloggers struggle with the should-I-press-publish conundrum.  We all worry about offending readers, not because we’re hung up on keeping people around (oh please stick around please stick around) but because we’re human beings who actually care if people are hurt by something we write.  Though the reality is that blogging is not like a one-on-one conversation where you have a sense of the other person.  Blogging is like playing a game of ski ball blindfolded: you know generally where to roll the ball, but you don’t always know your aim until after the ball is out of your hand.

Trinity raised great points because — and I include myself in this description — we are a conflicted bunch.  The twins are here (and I actually started blogging after they were here and we were trying for our third child, so I have always been a parenting blogger).  I can’t deny their existence and to not mention them at all is strange: they take up an enormous chunk of my time and thoughts.  I want to talk about them.  I like talking about them.  I learn a lot from being around them.  And perhaps I’m reading too much into other people’s compliments, but I think they’re the sort of people that others usually enjoy being around, whether that is face-to-face or in the flat medium of the computer screen via a story.  They — at the very least — say amusing things.

And yet I also know that many people probably don’t want to hear about them.  That it is actually painful to hear about them.  That instead of laughing over a story, that it may even be making you cry.

Which makes me pause — often — before hitting publish.  And sometimes I don’t hit publish.

I think of my blog in percentages much in the same way I think of food in percentages.  I sort of take an overview of my day and see if I’m eating a large enough percentage of vegetables and a large enough percentage of protein.  If I didn’t think about it at all, I know that I’d probably eat pasta for every meal.  Or melba toast.  I am such a fan of melba toast.  But I know that it isn’t good for my body to focus solely on one food even if that food happens to be my favourite and taste good.

And I think about blog writing in the same way.  If I stuck to a single topic and kept a microfocus, it may feel good in the moment to write like that, but I think overall, it probably isn’t healthy for me to deny large chunks of my life in order to only explore a single idea.  So I sometimes step back and take stock for a period of time.  Have I written a bit about blogging and social media?  A bit about infertility?  A bit about the twins?  A bit about melba toast and my enormous love of it?  If I have, then I have a balanced blog, which feels — for me — a bit healthier mentally.  Meaning, I feel healthier mentally when I don’t allow myself to have a solo focus.  Other people may feel much better if they’re only writing about one thing.

There’s more than one way to blog. (Actually, there isn’t; there is only my way, but I feel like I have to say that to get back to that first point of trying not to offend someone.  I’m just kidding.  I’m not kidding.  Crap, this is one of those times that I shouldn’t have hit publish.)

This post is from the viewpoint of someone parenting after infertility; who still has one foot (at least that is how I view myself; perhaps you don’t view me this way at all) in the infertility world and another in the blogging and social media world and another (yes, I have three feet) in the parenting world and another (I lied, I have four) in the melba toast world.

The ALI community is a community that is situationally-based, which leads to tension between those who are still in the situation and those who are out of the situation and those who are sort of in and sort of out at the same time.  We have all these overlapping ways you could be here, and some of those overlapping ways actually create conflict — such as those who need a safe space to not have to see sonogram pictures and those who have a burning need to post their sonogram picture because they’ve waited so long to have one to upload (and perhaps need to upload it to also feel “normal” after feeling on the outskirts for so long).  And we still need to find a way to live with one another.

Regardless of which side of the trenches you stand (or if you’re sort of half-in and half-out of the trenches, munching a piece of melba toast at the same time), do you find yourself holding your tongue for the sake of the community?  And how often?

I guess what I’m really seeking is whether or not through discussion, we can all come to a place of comfort.  That I can post about the twins without feeling the need to hold back beyond the normal amount of holding back (because I get that other people aren’t really interested in hearing about them non-stop) and you can feel safe to read IF blogs without feeling as if you are walking across a minefield.  Or vice versa.

I was emailing with a friend, and one of the points we touched on is do we expect more from others who have been through infertility or loss.  They know the emotional position we’re in, so do we expect them to rise to the occasion: to use the right words, to deliver the message in the gentlest way?

Because let’s be frank; we are annoyed by outsiders using the wrong terminology within adoption, but we are enraged when insiders say the same thing.  We roll our eyes when our great aunt tells us all we need to do is relax and we’ll get pregnant, but we would be angry if a fellow infertile woman suggested that our problems could be solved with a vacation.  We expect our infertile friends to deliver pregnancy announcements well — though we don’t have a standard definition of “well.”  It mostly involves being discreet, respectful, not posting 100 sonogram pictures each day.

It was something to think about.  There have only been three pregnancy announcements that have upset me (at least, that I can remember), and all three came from fellow infertile women.  I wonder now if it was what they said and the way they said it, or if it was the fact that I believed they should have been able to put themselves in my shoes and give me the information better.

Would I have found the thoughtless way the news was delivered permissible from someone outside the experience?  Would I have maybe rolled my eyes instead of cry?

But really, what is the point in sharing information at all if it doesn’t grant us a little empathy?  I mean that with fellow infertile women that we share our journeys with as well as all the people we open up to along the way.  What is the point in knowing these intimate details of each other’s lives if not to help us know how to support one another?  Isn’t that why we share our stories with other people — so they will be sensitive when we need them to be sensitive?

What do you think?  Do you expect more from fellow infertile women (and men)?  Or, beyond that, anyone you share the intimate details of your life with?  And is it fair to do so; to expect more?

Stop what you are doing right now.  I mean, except reading this post.  Continue reading this post, but carve out 10 minutes of your time to create this insurance policy for yourself.  No, don’t say, “I’ll do it later, I promise.”  Because you won’t.  How do I know this?  Because I know you — and by you, I mean that we’re all the same.  We read something and we say, “shit, that is such a good idea and I should do that.”  And then we don’t.  And later, when we wish we had done that thing, we kick ourselves because if we had just taken the time to do it, we would be in such a different emotional place.

Ten minutes.  That is most likely all you are going to need.

There are 10,000 ways to backup your blog, depending on how nervous you are about the possibility of losing your written thoughts.  There are manual backups and plug-ins that can create a scheduled backup.  You can put it on a thumb drive or a portable hard drive or save it to your computer or save it to the Cloud.  And all of those backups are important because they will help you restore your blog if anything ever happens.

But.

What is the most important part of your blog?  The content: the blog posts, the comments, the layout so you can remember where everything goes.  And for that, you can do a poor man’s backup.  Right now.

(1) Take a screenshot of the front of your blog.  Do this every time you make a major change to the layout of your blog.  Other than that, you just want to have one on file so you can remember the order of things on your sidebars.  Don’t know how to take a screenshot?  Just use the button in the top right corner of your keyboard that says something like Print or PrntScr (it will be something similar to this).  Then go into Microsoft Paint or a similar program, open a new project, and hit paste.  As simple as that.

(2) Make sure a copy of your comments are being emailed to you.  That way, you always have them if you lost your blog.

(3) This is the most important step.  Open a blank Word doc.  Open your blog dashboard and go into settings.  Change the number of posts that can be seen on a screen to largest number of posts you’ve ever had in a month.  For me, this is 30.  Now open your blog to each month, scroll down the whole page highlighting the text, and then paste it into the Word doc.  I like to have my Word Doc look like a blog, therefore, I start with the oldest month and work my way towards the latest month.  Once every blog post has been pasted into my Word doc, I select all and change the font size so it’s all at 12 point so the date isn’t enormous.  And then I hit save.  Then I change the settings back to 5 posts, which is how many you will usually see on the front page when you open my blog.  I do this every few days (though you only need to change the settings if you’re pasting dozens or hundreds of blog posts month-by-month into the Word doc today).

I mostly trust my other backups, but this ensures that I can see — quite clearly — that I have a backup of my content; which is the most important thing to me.

Now go do the same.  Right now.  Without waiting.  Because there is nothing more important than preserving your creativity, your emotional processing, your memories.  Not even that salad you were thinking about making for lunch or that meeting that you’re now 5 minutes late for anyway.  Fine; if you really can’t do this now, put it on your calendar in big print so you do it later today.  And then put it on your calender every week so you can go to sleep with one fewer worry.

Photo Credit: Futureshape.

This is it, we’re down to the wire insofar as submissions for the soft deadline for the 2011 Creme de la Creme.  What is the soft deadline?  It’s the December 15th deadline that ensures that your blog post is on the list when it goes up on January 1st in the morning.  You can still submit after December 15th (up until January 5th), but your blog post will go up later — after the Creme de la Creme has already been posted on January 1st.  Which means that you will miss out on getting the most eyes on your post since the largest number of people read it when it first goes up.

We’re actually a little bit behind where we were submission-wise at this time last year, which is strange because we were so far ahead of last year at first.  All I know is that our goal is to get at least 400 posts on the list.  Have you contributed your words?

Speaking of getting eyes on your post, as it usually goes with these sorts of things, the higher up you are on the list, the more people read your post.  We’ve already had one IComLeavWe’er win the 6th slot on the list.  Another IComLeavWe’er will be chosen at the end of December’s IComLeavWe to win the 4th slot.  And here is your chance to win the 2nd slot on the list.  The only thing you have to do is spread around some love.

Like my annual Purim giveaway, the only thing you need to do to enter is leave a comment on someone’s blog.  That’s it — there’s no Tweeting about it, or liking a Facebook page, or blogging about it.  The only entries that count are comments on blog posts.  Here’s how it works (and you can enter as many times as you like):

• Leave a comment below telling me where you left a comment already today–and feel free to leave, write a comment somewhere, and come back.  Please put the name of that blog and a link to the post in the comment.  And say something nice about that person’s post.  And no, commenting on this post doesn’t count for where you’ve left a comment (though my blog still counts as long as you’ve commented on a different post).  The posts that you’re commenting on need to have been written in December 2011 (only entries with a link to a post written in that time frame count).
• You can enter as many times as you like.  Which means the more you comment around the blogosphere, the more chances you have to win.  Only comments that talk about a post you read elsewhere in the blogosphere have a chance at winning (in other words, if you write below, “this is a great idea!” I’ll be appreciative, but you won’t be eligible to win.  You need to list a place where you commented today, give the url for the post, and say something about the post).
• Each comment counts as one entry, so if you’ve commented in three places, you’re allowed to leave that in three entries here.  Leaving it in separate comments is actually sort of an important fact because too many links in a comment will make it caught by the spam filter.  I will release comments caught by the spam filter, but it will take me a moment, and then that only counts as one entry (whereas if you listed them separately, you could have gotten a bunch of entries).
• The contest ends at 8 a.m. EST on Thursday the 15th, therefore, you can return all week and list new, great blog posts you found.  If you’re still confused, think of this as creating a Friday Blog Roundup-type list in the comment section, one comment at a time.

I will also love you forever if you read down the list and click over to read the other posts listed in the comment section.  And don’t just hit the first ones at the top of the comment list. Make sure you hit some of the people in the middle or bottom of the list and leave them a comment telling them that you agree with the original commenter — their writing does rock.

My usual blog rules apply: any spam is deleted — the point is to honour another person, not drum up business for a Viagra website — as well as anything rude.

I’ll use the random number generator and announce it on Friday in the Roundup on the 16th.  So let the commenting/creme spot winning begin.

Tuesday morning, I was emailing with A about crickets, and I had this overwhelming thought that before the day was over, I would see a cricket in the house.  Sure enough, I was making cookies in the middle of the day when I realized that I was missing an ingredient.  I decided to jump in the car and go to the store to get it so I could finish the batter.  As I went to the front door to get my shoes, there, at the bottom of the stairs, was an enormous cricket.

Where did this cricket come from?  I have no fucking idea.  Seriously, I think that this is my own personal horror movie — I think about crickets and suddenly they appear in my house.

I was right near the Dyson so I plugged it in and sucked up the cricket with the wand.  Thankfully, the canister is clear so I could see that the cricket was inside once I turned off the motor and everything stopped swirling.  But once everything stopped swirling, the cricket started jumping.  JUMPING AROUND INSIDE THE VACUUM CANISTER.  I turned the machine back on, certain it would now be killed by being slammed with raging force against the plastic.  But when I turned it off, it staggered a bit and then started jumping again.

I turned back on the vacuum, sat down at the table, composed a long email to A about the cricket which was churning around in the machine for a good 5 minutes.  I hit send.  Stopped the machine.  The cricket started jumping.  This went on for about an hour.  Sometimes the cricket would fake death and lie still for a moment, and I would crouch down to examine him through the plastic, but he’d always pop back up and start hopping amongst the dust particles.

You may ask yourself why I needed him dead vs. just leaving him in the vacuum until Josh got home and could deal with him.  Because that’s just not the way I work.

I finally had a brilliant plan (brilliant for cricket killers like me.  Probably not brilliant if you’re an entomologist).  I soaked a cotton ball in bug killer and then sucked it into the machine so it was in the canister with the cricket.  At first I couldn’t get him to hop over to his new little bed, but using a flash light to direct him (no, I got nothing accomplished that afternoon in case you were wondering), I got him to jump onto the cotton ball, where he snuggled up and died.  And I took a photograph to prove to A how enormous this thing was.  It could have snapped me in half.

*******

Thank you to everyone who emailed me the picture of the largest cricket-like thing in the world.  It made me remove New Zealand from my list of places to visit.  At least, I removed that section of New Zealand from the list.

He looked too large to be sucked into a vacuum.

*******

In talking with A, I was trying to figure out where my cricket fears stem.  I’ve never liked crickets, but until recently, my fear of crickets didn’t factor into decision-making.  I went camping and walked around outside at night.  But at some point in my life, I went from cricket-hating to cricket-phobic.  They went from something that repulsed me, but that I didn’t think too much about unless one was right in front of me, to something that I actively worried about.

The only thing I could tie it to was that I’ve always thought of people who veered from expectations as cricket-people.  Which accounts for the majority of eighth grade.  That person who you thought was your friend but turned out to be talking about you behind your back — cricket-person (get it, because they jump out at you unexpectedly).  That group of friends you always ate lunch with who suddenly tell you that you can’t sit at their lunch table — cricket-people.  I had a few very cricket-y people in my life, and perhaps that led to me to transfer my feelings about cricket-y people onto crickets themselves.

Something quite interesting to think about.  I tend not to trust people that I deem cricket-y in my head, therefore there are few of them in my life because I don’t tend to keep people close who are cricket-y in nature.  But even noticing this fact about myself and wondering if there’s any connection between my dislike of people who behave unexpectedly and crickets doesn’t change how much I scream when I see one of them hopping around inside the Dyson canister.

*******

Getting off the topic of crickets, we had two more Creme prize winners this week.  A Blanket 2 Keep was the winner of the crocheted afghan provided by Wistful Girl’s World.  Thank you, Wistful Girl!  And then Home Grown Love was the winner of the babylegs provided by Here We Go Again.  Thank you, Jen!  Reminder: the deadline to have a post on the Creme de la Creme when it goes up on January 1st is coming up quickly.  The deadline is December 15th.

*******

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:

• “Et Tu, Muppets” (Willcarryon)
• “Ice Lanterns” (Hiding Scars in my Yarn)
• “All the Married Ladies” (The Maybe Baby)
• “Dark and Ugly” (By the Brooke)
• “Maybe Someday” (The Pursuit of Pregnancy)
• “New (Old) Patient” (From IF to When)
• “Letting Go of Our Babymakin’ Fantasies” (Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I actually read this incredible post by Edenland before the last Roundup came out, but for some reason, I wanted to hold it for this week.  And I can’t explain why.  This post is haunting, raw, brutally-honest.  More than one person wrote that they had their breath taken away by her words.  I am sure you will too.

The Zen of the Egg Hunt has a story about the transfer from hell — the one where your worst nightmare comes true and you have the wrong time written down.  But it’s the moment where her husband runs into the room that I started crying too.

For We Are Bound By Symmetry has a post about coming full circle with the idea of “just relax”, and how much she would like to take that idea to heart as she awaits her third beta.  Except she can’t.  She writes: “During all my years of TTC, I scoffed at the advice to ‘Just Relax.’ Never once did I seriously consider relaxing. You fight for what you want, after all, right? And fight I did. Tooth and nail. After so many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds of stressing, worrying, trying, researching, and fighting, I think that’s all I know how to do. And I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want to stress. I don’t want to research. I don’t want to worry.”  It’s about the worrying that never stops.

Lastly, The Maybe Baby has a post about her daughters, Jovi and Isa, on the three year anniversary of their loss.  I found this part of the post so incredibly moving that I think I must have read it now 20 times: “Notes from friends remind me of how much we were cared for when we returned home empty handed three years ago. In the midst of our raw grief, we were weepy. We were cavalier and stone-faced. We made inappropriate jokes. We winced at innocuous comments. We were fragile. We were invincible. We were needy and wanted company. We were offended at social demands and wanted to be left alone. We had to have been simply unbearable.  And yet we were picked up and held and loved and fed and reminded to bathe (um, sorry) and taught little by little how to be human again. And for the most part, I think we succeed. On most days.”  Please read the post in full and send her love.

The roundup to the Roundup: The crickets are out to get me.  Do you know cricket-y people too?  More Creme winners.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between December 2nd and December 9th) 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.