Posts from — August 2012

I am finally free of the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy with the completion (fine, skimming) of the end of 50 Shades Freed.  Finishing the third book was like graduation when you throw your cap towards the sky.  I wanted to toss the final book in the air and let it land, pages down in a fan on the floor.  I am freeeeeeeeeeeee.

***This post contains a lot of spoilers for the 50 Shades of Grey series including one for the Harry Potter series and others for the Twilight books.  And it contains discussion on abuse which may be a trigger for you, so please read with caution.  And if you really loved this series, you may want to skip this post because I’m not going to say the nicest things about the story.***

I simultaneously didn’t enjoy and did enjoy these books.  I skimmed the last 100 pages of the third book because I was itching to be done with these characters, but once I was done with them, a bit of Stockholm syndrome kicked in and I began feeling sympathy toward my literary detainers.  I had been so bitter feeling locked into reading these books (without the ability to explain to you why, know that this was a case of finishing the vegetables on my plate before I could get dessert; I sort of had to read these books — please don’t ask me to explain) and then it was done and while I hated them during the duration of our time together, I felt a fondness toward Christian and Ana now that I was free of them.

You know how you have that friend that calls you to tell you about her relationship, and she tells you worrisome things about their interactions?  And at first you’re concerned.  You talk about it with other people trying to get advice on how to give her advice.  And you stay up thinking about this situation she’s in.  When you talk with your friend, even she can admit that this relationship is bad for her mental health, yet she always has a reason for why she’s remaining with him.  After a while, you stop feeling sympathy for her and begin looking at her with incredulity because you honestly can’t believe that she is sticking around.  And after you pass that point, you stop being able to stomach listening to her go on and on about him because what you feel for her is no longer care or concern, but instead you feel disgust.

My friends all had that friend, and that person was me.

I have been in two abusive relationships, pretty much back-to-back.  I left one, found another, and entered it because it felt familiar.  I don’t talk about it often (Embarrassment?  A lack of desire to think about that time period?), though I did mention it years ago.  When I first started reading the 50 Shades of Grey books, I didn’t realize that by the second book, they would enter into what amounts to an abusive relationship.  I sort of thought all three books would focus on the dom-sub thing.

I find it disturbing that young women may be reading these books and thinking that Ana and Christian’s behaviour is admirable or desirable.  I say this even with the ending in place.  I don’t believe that Christian or Ana changed.  Abusive relationships go through peaks and valleys.  If the person was abusive 100% of the time, you wouldn’t stay.  But the hook with most abusive relationships (beyond the ones that people stay in because they fear their life or have limited options in terms of leaving) is that they aren’t bad 100% of the time.  He belittles you and then he apologizes.  You go through three bad days and then you have an amazing day together when you connect on this deep level and you believe all has changed.  You keep hanging on because when it’s good, it’s really good.  And when it’s bad, you can convince yourself that if you stick this out, things could change.

So I don’t believe in the end that Ana gets a happily ever after.  I think she gets more of the same, the emotional abuse and the sweetness, and she’s willing to put up with the emotional abuse for the sweetness.  And that’s fine for Ana; every adult gets to make their own decision.  But this isn’t a healthy relationship; healthy relationships do not include being fearful of your partner or infantilized by him, even if he makes up excuse after excuse later for his behaviour.  Just because there is an explanation for his behaviour does not make the behaviour okay.

The dom-sub stuff is really a very small portion of this series.  Really small.  I know I described 50 Shades of Grey as Twilight sans vampires avec a dom-sub relationship, but the dom stuff was pretty much over in the first book.  The other two books unfolds their relationship vs. pleasure arrangement.  Because yes, when it was a dom-sub arrangement with a contract, it was a pleasure arrangement and nothing more.  But once they stopped the formal dom-sub arrangement and went into dating each other, this became an abusive relationship.  What was acceptable when they were under a pleasure arrangement is not acceptable within a loving relationship.  It crosses the line from mutually beneficial partnership (“I take sexual pleasure over dominating someone” or “I take sexual pleasure over being dominated”) to using those same traits to control another person or their choices.  If they had kept to the contract and tried to add in a relationship, I could have accepted a lot more.  But they didn’t.  They got rid of the contract and tried to go the “vanilla” route, as they put it, adding in their own “kinky fuckary.”

Emotional abuse isn’t as black-and-white as physical abuse, but there are key warning signs, most of which Ana deals with within the series.  According to the Mayo Clinic, some of the warning signs are (Cafemom also had a good list of 13 warning signs, though many of which overlap one another):

• Name calling
• Prevents you from going to work
• Stops you from seeing family and friends
• Controls what you wear or where you go
• Acts jealous or possessive
• Threatens you with violence
• Blames you for their behaviour

And that is pretty much the last two books.  He calls her stupid, and she apologizes for her stupidity (p. 418).  He berates her for doing her job at her workplace, and ultimately buys the company so he can control it.  He continuously stops her or guilt her for seeing her friends whether it’s giving her grief for seeing Jose or punishing her for going out with her friend instead of staying in the apartment.  He comments on her clothing choices, telling her that he doesn’t want her wearing certain things in public (and reminding her each time that you. are. mine).  Jealousy and possession defines their relationship.  He tells her that he wants to hit her, that he thinks about causing her pain, that he wants to spank her — and once this leaves the dom-sub contract, it’s no longer really kinky fuckary, as she calls it.  It’s actually violence wrapped up with a pretty bow.  And, of course, he spends the whole book telling her that he’s only doing these things because either she won’t behave or due to his messed up toddlerhood.  And she spends the whole book defending him.

Please tell me how this is romantic (p. 235):

“This morning, I wanted to punish you, badly, and –” He stops, lost for words I think, or too afraid to say them.

“You were worried you’d hurt me?” I finish his sentence for him, not believing that he’d hurt for a minute, but relieved too.  A small vicious part of me feared it was because he didn’t want me anymore.

“I didn’t trust myself,” he says quietly.

“Christian, I know you’d never hurt me.  Not physically, anyway,” I clasp his head between my hands.

“Do you?” he asks, and there’s skepticism in his voice.

“Yes.  I knew what you said was an empty, idle threat.  I know you’re not going to beat the shit out of me.”

“I wanted to.”

“No, you didn’t.  You just thought you did.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” he murmurs.

“Think about it,” I urge, wrapping my arms around him once more and nuzzling his chest through the black T-shirt…

Because that sort of scene replays over and over again.  Where she convinces him that he’s not abusive because that is the only way she can rationally stay in that situation; if she can convince him (and by default herself) that this is a healthy relationship.  And while people may say that I’m being unfair highlighting an unhealthy exchange without highlighting one of the times when he is quite sweet to her, the reality is that it goes back to those peaks and valleys.  Even the good times are part of that cycle of abuse.  The good times are what power the cycle so it can continue over and over and over again.

The abusive relationship wasn’t exactly a trigger for me.  If it had been written differently, it might have been, but as it was written, I read it with detachment.  Beyond that, the books were just so far-fetched and unlikely that I couldn’t suspend disbelief.  She just happens to start working for a publisher who just happens to have been Christian’s foster brother who just happens to still remember him and harbour a desire to kill him.  Oh, and the husband of the woman whom he had an affair with 10+ years earlier is still harbouring such hatred for him that he hasn’t done anything to affect him in the ensuing 10+ years UNTIL Jack is in jail (a person he doesn’t know) and then he posts bail.  Because people who want to ruin you usually wait 10 years and then go about it in the most ass-backwards, non-direct ways.  These are the types of far-fetched plot points that make you roll your eyes in disbelief as opposed to discovering the bartender of the Hog’s Head is Aberforth in the seventh Harry Potter book.  The former elicits an “oh please” and the latter brings out a “ooooooh… cool!” as you fan back through the six previous books and see all the tiny clues Rowling wove into the story.

Lastly, 50 Shades of Grey was ultimately fan fiction for Twilight, and this didn’t reflect the unrealistic but ultimately sweet all-consuming love of Bella and Edward in Twilight, the model for Ana and Christian’s relationship.  When Bella tells Edward that she know he’ll never hurt her, the reader is fairly certain of that fact along with the character.  I can’t say the same for Christian who can and does hurt Ana — physically and mentally.  We have two characters who both are upset to learn their wife is pregnant, and Christian is upset for himself, angry that he is being thrust into fatherhood.  And Edward is scared for his wife’s well-being, that the monster inside her could kill her.  In one case, I believe in the true love of the character (Edward for Bella) and in the other, I only see the abusive selfishness (Christian places all the responsibility for birth control on Ana, berates her when it fails, and ultimately walks out for the evening because he’s too angry to stay and talk, leaving his wife to cry on her own and contemplate an abortion to keep her husband happy.)

But I meant what I said in the first paragraph or so when I said I enjoyed these books (or perhaps, if I dug deeper, I would see that it’s just Stockholm syndrome redux, justifying their badness in the same way one would justify an abusive relationship).  Maybe it’s more that I enjoyed being part of pop culture for the moment.  That there is a coziness in having read the same book as everyone else.  That I can get the in-jokes and make them about this series.  Is that worth the time it takes to read three books — perhaps not.  But it is what it is.  I don’t have regrets over reading these three books.

I think EL James missed a great teaching moment when she made an abusive relationship something to be celebrated and desired.  If Ana had turned to Christian after the outburst when she told him she was pregnant (p. 418 – 419) and coldly told him that she wouldn’t stand for this sort of treatment, I could have cheered her on.  Instead of making her a strong woman who comes to a realization that she can be straightforward and state her needs, she plays a game with him, trying to cajole him into being happy about the pregnancy by using her body, and I realized in that moment: what if this was my friend?  Screw that; what if this was my daughter?  What would I say to her?

I would sit her down and say: You deserve better.  Not because you are special but because you are a human being and all human beings who enter into relationships with other human beings deserve to be treated with respect.  Being treated with respect does not mean that you will never fight or say things in the moment that you regret later, but being treated with respect means that you are honest and upfront with each other.  You don’t belittle, play games, set up each other to fail.  Instead you hold each other up, help each other reach individual and mutual goals, and allow each person to grow individually as well as together.  You do not have this with Christian on any level.  You have someone willing to spend all the money in the world on you, but that’s not love.  And you have someone who wants to protect you not for your well-being but for his own, and that’s not love.  And you have someone who can’t tell the difference between stifling someone and allowing them to blossom, and that’s not love.  It may be scary to leave; scratch that: it is almost always scary to leave a relationship because you don’t know if you’ll find another one.  But you need to take that deep breath and leave because you cannot fix another person.  Individuals can only fix themselves; they can’t be changed due to someone else’s will.

Putting your foot down and saying what you deserve in a relationship is hard.  But it’s necessary: for every single person in this world.  That’s what I would tell any woman in an abusive relationship, what I would tell any woman who is jealous of Ana and Christian’s marriage, and what I am so fucking thankful someone told me a version of all those years ago.

I know that my opinion on these books are informed by my life experience (and I found waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many similarities between internalized conversations from my past and the ones Ana goes through in the book).  You may not agree with me at all that this is an abusive relationship.

So… yeah… that’s how I read the books.  I’m glad they’re done.  I don’t regret reading them, but I certainly wouldn’t pass them along to others with a you-must-read-this post-it note on the cover.  So off to other books, hopefully with fewer nipple clamps and floggers.

I am nervous to post this.  I don’t know why.  But for some reason, I feel the need to admit that I really wavered on whether or not to hit publish.

I know Missouri Congressman Todd Akin toes the party line and believes that the children are our future (cue Whitney Houston) and he supports personhood bills which make it illegal to create embryos for the purpose of IVF since life begins at conception (in fact, he’d love a Constitutional amendment on that), so it makes complete sense that he is working hard to heap more trauma on women who have experienced rape and become pregnant by supporting legislation that would make it illegal to have an abortion in the event of rape.

You know, since not all rape is rape.

As MotherJones summed up his television interview this morning:

He claimed that women who are the victims of “legitimate rape” are unlikely to become pregnant. Akin said that the female body has “biological defenses” that prevent rape victims from getting pregnant. (That’s not true.) The implication of his position is that if you were raped and became pregnant, you must have actually wanted it—it wasn’t really rape.

And since I read his highly “scientific” remarks, the whole problem of infertility came clear to me, and in one fell swoop, I realized the cure has been in front of our eyes this entire time:

You are not getting pregnant due to legitimate rape.

See, the only explanation is that your body feels forced into sex, therefore blocks the ability to get pregnant, just as it does whenever a woman is legitimately raped.  Hence how rape victims cannot get pregnant, and neither can “infertile” women.  The solution?  Submit, submit, submit.  Lie back and think of England.  Enjoy the sex (because you know that being infertile rocks since you get to have lots and lots of sex!)  And under no circumstances get yourself stressed out or think, “for the love, not tonight.”  Because if you do, you have no one to blame but yourself if you don’t “just relax.”  And don’t even think about using IVF to solve your “problems” which aren’t real problems because I just solved your “infertility” for you.

What?

Oh, there’s no truth to Akin’s statements?

They’re a load of crap?

Just irresponsible, cruel commentary made by an unintelligent man?

Well there went my Nobel Prize for curing infertility.

I am not sure how people can claim there is no war against women in this country when you wake up to shit like this.

* Apologies for any triggers with the sarcasm in this post.  Akin’s comments made me so angry that I’m shaking. *

And the seasons they go ’round and ’round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

–Joni Mitchell

The nicest part about keeping a blog is looking backwards, perhaps in yearly increments, to see how life has changed.  When we’re in the moment, it can feel as if the now may last forever, or, at the very least, the feelings invoked by what is happening now may last forever.  But if you jump backwards into your archives, you can revisit posts and see that often times, while reading about the event may still bring with it sadness or joy, the intensity of those feelings are not as they were when you wrote the post.

A year ago this week, we were separating the twins into two separate rooms.  At the time, I was as devastated as they were over the idea of them being separated for the first time.  And then we set up the rooms and made them their own, and now they enjoy weekly sleepovers in each other’s space. (They each keep a sleeping bag in the other person’s room, and the agreement they have is that the other person can always declare that they need a night of togetherness and sleep on the other person’s floor.)  It feels as if they’ve had two separate rooms for years vs. twelve months.

Two years ago this week, I was worrying about kindergarten beginning and still reeling from a crazy summer which involved helping my parents move from my childhood home, finish edits on a book, and teach the twins how to swim.  And look, kindergarten went fine.  We all survived; in fact, some may even say thrived, in elementary school.  I love my parent’s new house, even if I do drive by their old home every once in a while when I have to go back to my childhood town.

Three years ago this week, about 100 of you were distracting me with a round of Blogger Bingo.  We had two medical appointments that week,  and the one we thought was nothing turned out to lead to surgery, and the one that we were really worried about turned out to lead to more waiting.  In fact, we’re still taking this wait-and-see approach.  But in that post, I told the story of the Wolvog’s bris, which had happened 5 years before that.  Equally as precious as the post itself are the comments beneath which remind me how many people were waiting with me at the time; holding my hand.

Four years ago this week, I was writing about the time I followed my husband into one of the sperm donation rooms at the clinic wearing a merry widow and knee-high boots underneath my jeans and sweatshirt.  That post later became what I read at BlogHer’s Voices of the Year.  If it wouldn’t mean donning what amounts to someone else’s underwear, I would totally create the sisterhood of the traveling merry widow.

Five years ago this week, Grace Paley died, and I wrote about hugging her when I went back to my grad school program in the middle of treatments.  That trip sucked.  Hardcore.  I had stopped writing because I was depressed, and I wasn’t conceiving, so I went back to my program for this reading and felt so empty-handed — no child and no book — whereas it seemed that everyone else had one or the other or both.  And just sharing that moment with her: two women, with the older one clearly seeing how much I was struggling.  And she just held me for the longest time until I could compose myself.

Six years ago this week, beyond starting things such as Infertility’s Common Thread (which still lives on) and Operation Heads Up (which also still lives on), I was celebrating my Needle Day anniversary, the first time I gave myself an injection.  It was a really empowering experience to overcome one of my bigger fears — needles — and use it on myself.  As I wrote: “But it isn’t the needles themselves. The pain is instantaneous. It’s the psychological effects–the why you’re holding a needle in the first place.”

If you’ve never participated in Bereaved and Blessed’s Time Warp, you should jump into the next one in mid-September because it’s a great way to reflect on how far you’ve come from a moment in time.

Now go dive into your archives and tell us what you were doing a year (or two or three) ago.  How has life changed?  How is it still the same?

Updated at the Bottom (meaning, more questions)

I need to get a new phone (maybe), and I am having a lot of trouble committing to a new phone and am therefore doing nothing in the meantime except complaining about my current phone.  This is a real first-world problem, by the way, in case you were about to point that out.  But I do live in the first world, and my phone is really important to me because it enables me to be able to step away from the computer and still be reachable by work.

All of this really comes down to the devil I know vs. the devil I don’t know with a heaping teaspoon of having been bit in the ass by non-returnable technology purchases in the past.  Many years ago, I got my first blackberry and I loved it.  It changed my life.  I could go out during the day and answer people’s questions on the road, and I became a lot more productive and got more work due to my reach-ability.  When it was time to get a new phone, I decided to go with a blackberry again because (1) I liked the keyboard, (2) it had been a good experience up until that point, (3) I liked the size, and (4) while it didn’t fulfill all my needs, it was good enough.

And that blackberry has bitten my ass for the last 2 years.

It has been an enormous exercise in frustration.  I am currently on my fourth blackberry for this current contract.  It stops working, I make a frustrating trip to the store where it turns out that the employees don’t know anything about the products they sell, and they give me a refurbished one that works for a bit and then stops working too.  I have wasted so much time trying to deal with my phone that I swore that when I bought a new one, it would be an iPhone because at least a trip to the Genius Bar yields a person who know something about the product they are attempting to fix.

And now the time has come to get an iPhone and I’m dragging my feet because there are so many things I don’t know about the iPhone.

Here is what I need my phone to do:

• Be reliable.  My current phone is not reliable.  It restarts continuously.  It freezes.  Sometimes RIM is down and emails don’t come through.  I pay for it 100% of the time and it works about 75% of the time.
• Have decent sound quality for phone calls.
• Receive email.
• Get on the Web.

Here is what I’d like it to do:

• I’d like my phone to help reduce the amount of stuff I carry around.  Therefore, it would rock if it also was my music player and camera.
• I would like it to buzz to let me know every time I get an email.
• I’d like a keyboard but know that it isn’t a possibility with the iPhone, unless there is a plug-in keyboard for the iPhone that I don’t know about.
• Be able to set different ring tones for different people so I don’t have to look at the phone to know who is calling.

Here are my limits:

• No Android phones for security reasons.  There’s too much malware and too many backdoors on devices and apps for me to be able to get work done on an Android device while on the road.  If I’m getting a smartphone, the only two accepted devices (for work) are blackberry or iPhone.  If this was for personal use, I would definitely consider an Android.

So here are my questions:

• When I take a picture or video with an iPhone, can I plug the phone in my computer and transfer those images or do I need to email all the ones I want to myself?  With my blackberry, I can plug it in, transfer the pictures to my computer, and delete them from my phone to save space.

• Can you make your iPhone buzz every time you get an email?  My hearing isn’t great, and I often don’t hear the phone on my blackberry.  But I have the phone set up to buzz twice every time family members email me and once for work.  So without looking at the phone, I can feel if Josh is trying to reach me or if a work email is coming in.  I sort of need this function to make sure I am always reachable and responding quickly.

• Can I set up multiple email accounts in the email app so I can have all the email come in to one place but respond from one of three different email addresses? (This is what happens when you have more than one workplace — you end up with more than one work email address.)  In other words, on blackberry, my email comes into one app on the blackberry from three addresses.  When I hit respond, it replies from that same email address that the person emailed.  If I’m writing a new email, I get a drop-down menu that asks me which email I want as the “from” email, and after one or two times, it remembers that I always want to write certain people from one of the three email addresses.

• Data Plan: We are currently grandfathered into an unlimited data plan.  We heard from one person that it will carry over with our new phone.  We heard from another person that it doesn’t carry over if we get an iPhone and we’ll need to get a limited data plan.  Has anyone had experience with this?  We have no idea how large a data plan we need.  I’m not going to be streaming tons of movies, but I do get a bunch of attachments via email that I need to check when I’m on the road and sometimes I want to email a photo.  I get a lot of emails.  Like A LOT of emails.  I also think there will be much bitterness if I’m getting a lot of spam and PR pitches and they’re eating up bytes of my data plan because they come into my phone via email, whereas with the unlimited plan, I just hit delete without caring.  But if I have to pay for spam to come to my phone, I’m going to be pissed off.  UNLESS, I misunderstand how the data plan works.  If I don’t actually open the email when it comes into my phone, but I delete it without reading, does it count as using my data plan?

• In order to preserve that data plan for when we’re out of the house, I want it to use the wifi when we’re in the house.  But I only want it to only search for the wifi in our house; meaning, I don’t want it to use free wifi at Starbucks.  Is there any way to set this so it always switches instantly to our wifi when we enter the home and stops searching for wifi connections when we leave the home, or do we need to go into settings every time we go in and out of the house?

• Does an iPhone work out of the country?  When I’m out of the US, is there a way to use my iPhone?

Beyond that, I think if we get an iPhone, we’re getting the 4S instead of waiting for the 5.  The reason being that (1) the 4S is a proven entity right now whereas the 5 will be a crapshoot for a bit, (2) even if we wait until the 5 comes out and buy the 4S, they’ll only have the smaller sizes in stock at the reduced price, (3) there are too many rumoured changes to the iPhone 5 that will mean that I’ll need to carry more stuff with me instead of less, (4) I’m crushing a bit on Siri.  We’re about to get Siri for the iPad so she’s not that big a deal, but she’s a small selling point still for me.

Please let me know your iPhone experience — have you tried other phones, been happier or sadder with the iPhone, would recommend it to others?  Please be honest with me about the iPhone’s limits or annoyances.  I have the blackberry bold, which is obviously not a choice ever again, but if someone has had better luck with a different model of blackberry, I’d love to hear about it too.

That was my mental vomit, but if you are in the same position as me, feel free to ask your iPhone questions in the comment section because your questions may lead me to more questions.  So if you’ve used an iPhone 4S, please peruse the comment section as well and answer any questions that pop up there as well.  Please, thank you, please, thank you.

More Questions:

• What case do you use?  I want to be able to wear my iPhone from my jeans (so a holder that clips to my pocket) because I won’t hear it if it’s in my purse.  But I also want something around it so it won’t break if I drop it.  Anyone have a case they recommend?

• Do you use a screen protector?  I don’t have one on the iPad.  I was wondering if it was sort of necessary for the iPhone.

• What apps would you recommend I put on the phone to make my life easier?

• I have heard that Siri takes some time to “warm up” and start remembering your voice, what it means if you say “call Josh,” etc.  Any tips on how to prep Siri to make that function better?

• Right now my blackberry contacts are all backed up in Outlook.  Can you sync the iPhone to Outlook, or will I have to re-enter all those contacts again?  And is there a way to type contacts on your computer and have them upload into the iPhone so you don’t need to use the iPhone keyboard to create a new contact?

I told the ChickieNob that I had forgotten to ask but I was writing a post where I mentioned her.

“Then I’m angry with you,” she said, pushing her eyebrows together to convey her extreme anger.

“It’s not about you.  It’s about something you said.”

“Oh, then I’m not angry with you.  What was it?  Was it when I said that saliva is the heaviest thing in the body?”

“No, I’m not going to write a post about that because it’s not true.”

“It might be true.  You don’t know.  You don’t know how much saliva weighs, and it might surprise you,” she told me.  “Was it how I want to be in the Olympics, but I don’t want anyone to watch me?  So I want to be an Olympic athlete that no one sees?”

“No, I’m not going to bother to write about that because it’s really not a possibility.  Part of being in the Olympics is agreeing that people can watch your event.  It was what you said about blogs.”

“Oh, about how deleting a blog is like breaking a promise?”

“Yes — I’m writing a post about that.”

“Did everyone enjoy it?”

“I haven’t finished the post yet.  No one has read it yet,” I said.

“But are they anticipating it?  Are they getting excited thinking about it?”

“Well, they don’t know it exists yet, so they’re not really feeling much of anything.”

“I think they’re probably getting very excited thinking about how there is going to be a post about blogs some time in the future.  They’re thinking about what they might say back in the comment section.  People can just sense that it’s coming!”

“That’s not really the way blogging works.”

“Well, that’s how I’d make it work if I were in charge,” the ChickieNob said, and went back to daydreaming while eating her ersatz chicken patty at the slowest rate you can possibly imagine.

*******

BlogHer has this new series going, and it’s giving advice to new parents keeping in mind the multitude of ways families form.  The first “crib sheet” is for parenting after infertility or loss, giving new parenting tips specifically to those who have been through treatments or are parenting after a loss.  There is another crib sheet for parenting after adoption, one for surrogacy, one for being a single parent by choice.  There are ones on raising your child with your heritage while being part of another culture.  One of parenting a child with Down syndrome.

So it’s a really cool project because it gives real life tips that sort of fall through the cracks with parenting books.

And the first one was written by me, and the response in the community came from our very own Jen.

*******

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:

• “On Having it All” (FireWife)
• “August 9th Redux” (It Is What It Is)
• “You Can’t Have it All” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “August Break 6” (Outlandish Notions)
• “What You Wanted” (Project Progeny)
• “Unexpected Grief” (An Unwanted Path)
• “I Say We’re Adopting, and You Say…” (The Ranunculus Adventures)
• “Negative Comments” (A Smaller Version of Me)
• “Searching for a New Lightness” (A Thousand Oceans)
• “Narrative Bias and Why Context Matters” (Silent Sorority)
• “If I Could Turn Back Time with Jamie” (The Kir Corner)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Project Progeny has a gorgeous post about asking herself what she wants.  When asked what she wants, she answers: “I just want everybody to be happy.  This is what I say when pressed, more often than not. I want everybody to be happy and content. But does this just mean everybody else? Or am I included in ‘everybody’ too?”  Not only does she tell the exercise that has been getting her unstuck, but the poem at the end is gorgeous.  A must-read post that you’ll want to bookmark and return to again and again.

Slice of Pie has a sweet post about how her daughter’s obsession with checking out her mother’s bellybutton led her to discover her mother’s estrogen patch.  She writes, “And she looooves it. She loves to poke at it, pick at the edges, kiss it (air kisses only) and otherwise entertain herself with it. She asked what it was (“That?”) and I told her it was my patch.”  The hazards of doing treatments with a toddler around.

Too Many Fish to Fry is taking charge of her blog’s direction and leading the way in a post called “Bye, Bye Balloon!”  It is about having her eyes opened to what is in front of her instead of thinking about what she doesn’t have, and how she needs to have this release in order to move forward.

Musings of a Hormonal Egg Basket has a post I related to a lot about the fears that grip her late at night.  She explains: “I’m stressed that I am not living my life to the fullest that I possibly can because there is no way to know how long we get to be here.  That feeling gives me a pit in my stomach. I don’t want to miss anything and at the same time I’m tired and need a break from the worry and normal life drama.  I need a break from my own thoughts.”  I have to believe that we’re not the only two kept awake by thoughts like this.

Lastly, Creating Motherhood has a post that cracked me up about how she’s going to be someone’s third wife someday.  She will definitely be the best wife, the one that will make her partner laugh.

The roundup to the Roundup: If the ChickieNob ruled the universe…  A new series that kicks off with parenting after infertility.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 10th and August 17th) 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.