Roundup Celebration
In honour of the 700th Roundup (really 600th due to misnumbering), I’m asking YOU to comment with a link to a post that has stuck with you. It can be your post or someone else’s post. It can be written any time within the last 12 years. (The first Roundup was on July 21, 2006.)
Leave a link and an explanation for why this post resonated with you, just like the regular Roundup. Once you leave your post, go and peruse everyone else’s post.
If you’re posting more than one, please put them in individual comments (not bunching them into one comment). And, yes, the more the merrier so post as many as you wish in separate comments.
This is mine to kick things off:
I’ve thought often about Toddler Planet’s “It’s Not Fair” since she wrote it back in 2011. And I return to read it again and again as a reminder of how to get through life with grace. She wrote it about six months before she died from metastatic breast cancer. These lines may not make sense without reading the longer parable contained in the post, but I think about them all the time: “We each get one life, one daily wage, and that’s it. The guy next door gets one life to live. The mom down the street gets one too. No one ever promised us the same life, the same opportunities, the same blessings, or the same time to live. No one ever promised that. We are promised one opportunity, one life, and how we live it is between us and our Creator (I believe). There is no comparing.” She did a lot of amazing things while she was on this planet, and I’m eternally grateful for her writing that put the imbalance of the world into perspective gave a frame for considering all moments. I hope this post changes your life, too.
I cannot wait to see what you guys post. Give us posts to read to celebrate the weekly Roundup!
35 comments
Sadly, I had two blog posts in mind to share, but in going back to search those blogs, neither of them is active anymore. 🙁
Oh, I love that post by Toddler Planet. I didn’t know her, but I went back and read other posts, and I felt her loss and was grateful for the wisdom she left behind. That’s a truly special post.
My Roundup Celebration post is from Mali: “Infertility’s Waiting Room.” I come back to this post over and over, and it was immensely helpful as I was trying to figure out which door to ultimate go through as the others were slamming in my head, and it does such a great job of highlighting the pluses but also hardships of every door — every single one. That there is no one truly ecstatically happy outcome, there are tradeoffs in all of them. And it highlights that the door everyone fears isn’t as horrific and tragic as you think it is, that there’s a beautiful life waiting on the other side of that door. I feel like it’s a life-changing, beautiful, informative post that ought to be widely read.
https://nokiddinginnz.blogspot.com/2014/03/infertilitys-waiting-room.html
This is one that has always stuck with me because it put so perfectly and painfully into words feelings I have had and still have about loss:
https://inconceivable12.wordpress.com/2017/10/12/sometimes-you-cant-run-after-them/
And another favorite, because again, it speaks the truth I feel so strongly about this community – we are the ones who make things happen:
http://www.kathylynnharris.com/dear-moms-of-adopted-children/
Happy to join the celebration!
Jay at the 2 week wait was a staple during those early years of infertility for me. This post was one I have come back to time and again to help chase the blues away.
http://the2weekwait.blogspot.com/2011/01/bikini-waxing-ivf-special.html?m=1
This is an older one, but one that gave me comfort while deep in the trenches and wondering if I was making too big a deal about the pain of infertility. Tertia’s posts are ones that I consider timeless with regards to infertility.
http://www.tertia.org/so_close/2006/04/infertility_ref.html
Happy 7, er 600!
Interesting and challenging criteria. When I think of who influenced me, I tend to focus on how certain blogs evolve over time, not so much on individual posts. But two posts came to mind based on “what have you come back to?”
The first was “The Infertility Manifesto.”
https://www.stirrup-queens.com/2013/04/infertility-manifesto/
It’s the sort of post where you name your territory and stand on it. I have re read many times.
And this one.
I don’t know really what to say about this post, except that if there is one thing I’d want people to remember from all my blog entries and comments and stuff I’ve put out there over the years, it’s “I am for you.” “You” being each individual, each irreplaceable story.
“I am for you” is an impossible goal if you think collectively, but 100% achievable if you think one blogger at a time.
https://www.in-due-time.com/faith/i-am-for-you/
Like Sharon has noted, so many blogs from the “beginning” aren’t active or accessible anymore, it’s so sad, all the great posts that are lost. I have one in mind that I think was on a Creme de La Creme and the post was titled “Pineapples” written by Ophelia @ Ophelia’s Revival. I still remember so much of it, it yanked my heart out.
A current one I really identify with is this post on rituals by Torthuil
https://torthuiljourney.blogspot.com/2018/02/ritual-objects-and-offerings.html?m=1
It is so interesting the things we do when we are holding onto hope. Doesn’t have to be just about IF.
Aw thanks xo
Here is another post I just loved and think of often:
https://www.stirrup-queens.com/2018/04/we-covet-what-we-see/
So many truths in this short post. Such good reminders and raw emotion so easily identifiable to.
This post ALWAYS makes me smile:
https://www.stirrup-queens.com/2018/06/life-is-funny-the-story-i-didnt-get-to-tell-alan-cumming/
I love how Alan was such a thruline of your life. It’s so interesting how life bobs and weaves and connects in the strangest of ways;it makes the world seem not so big after all. And your enormous, beaming smile is contagious!
She hasn’t blogged in a really long time, and I really miss her voice. But this post from Justine I just love, the bittersweetness of it, especially when speaking of the ghosts.
http://ahalfbakedlife.blogspot.com/2016/05/caveat-emptor.html?m=1
It reminds me of how I felt about my grandparents house that I always felt so safe in, and briefly lived in when my little family was just starting out.
You have me down a rabbit hole, Mel! I just stumbled upon Nancy’s blog, and found a beautiful video of her testing her camera out, and I realized I was thinking of her because it has just been 6 years since she suddenly passed away, almost to the day.
This post is an old one of mine, but it’s one of my favorites I wrote.
https://muchadoaboutnothinggg.blogspot.com/2014/09/birthdays-and-cake-pops.html?m=0
A comparison of how difficult conceiving and birthing her was and the painstaking work I found myself doing the eve of her 10th birthday. Sort of sums up parenting in a way.
I really like it too: how the (worthwhile) challenge of cake pops parallels the bigger (also worthwhile) challenge of infertility and birth. And it’s a vignette about how we integrate difficult experiences with time, I think. At first we tell (and experience) them as a drama that commands 100% of our attention. And then with time, the story and memory become integrated with all sorts of routines and habits.
Thank you! Xoxo
I saw that someone else named my selection, but it is one of my all-time favorite posts and the post that helped me recognize that infertility *would* be over someday. That there was something great waiting beyond the exhaustion and sadness, no matter how treatments, etc, turned out. It gave me a point to focus on and enormous hope: https://nokiddinginnz.blogspot.com/2014/03/infertilitys-waiting-room.html
The voice of this entire blog has stuck with me over the years. It was the first blog I read from start to finish and it gave me a new language in which to understand my experience. It was hard to decide on which one post to share. So I clicked on the tag “disenfranchised grief” since her blog was the first place I had heard the term, and I found one of my favorite posts of all. https://infertilityhonesty.com/2017/03/08/emotional-labor-misconceptions/
I actually had bookmarked some memorable posts during my early days of blogging, but as several commenters have sadly noted, many of these blogs no longer exist. 🙁 But I did a bit of thinking and searching through my blogroll and found a few that I loved from some of my favourite bloggers, past & present. 🙂 Mali, of course, would be one of them 🙂 and a couple of people have already noted “Infertility’s Waiting Room.” The one I still think about sometimes is titled “The real success stories.” I always thought (still do) it sounded a bit like a “Declaration of Independence” for those of us living childless/free after loss & infertility. 🙂
https://nokiddinginnz.blogspot.com/2012/04/real-success-stories.html
Here is another one from Justine that I really love.
http://ahalfbakedlife.blogspot.com/2016/04/legacies-with-soda-bread.html?m=1
It’s a great story, and I recently went back to the post again as I have been thinking a lot on legacy and what we leave behind and what stories people may share about us someday.
Pamela’s “positioning exercise” on her original blog, Coming2Terms, has stayed with me over the years (more than a decade now!! — before I started my own blog, even…!!). I immediately think of it, and her, whenever I hear or read someone uttering the words “as a mom/dad/parent”!
https://www.coming2terms.com/2007/09/10/the-positioning-exercise/
So waaay back when there was a blogger named Lilith, who was an amazing single mama of 6, who took a time out from dating to work on herself. When she entered back in to the dating game, she found the unexpected.
https://crunchygreenmom.blogspot.com/2008/10/my-current-distraction.html?m=1
If you want an amazing story of fate and meant to be, you can go back and read the She said/He said posts, all in order. She blogged through this experience not knowing (at first) that this new man in her life was keeping a written version of his own, and what transpired was pure magic. Lilly no longer keeps a personal blog, but the two have been married for a long time now and have grandchildren now as well. She was an inspiration about life and live when I most needed something to hang on to.
Brooke writes so eloquently about the loss of her first daughter, Eliza (& hilariously about her two subsquent little girls, Zuzu & Coco). There are many posts of hers I could have chosen — this is just one of them:
http://bythebrooke.blogspot.com/2011/01/this-grief-is-your-grief-this-grief-is.html
Another blogger who doesn’t blog anymore, but this is to date one of the best announcements I have ever read. Lots of long time bloggers will probably remember DAVS who then became the LCs, and the finally The MTLs. I remember being so so so happy to read this post.
http://mytwolines.blogspot.com/2011/01/double-scoop.html?m=0
My friend Reiney has spent the past year (ish) transitioning to being female. This passage in one of her Medium posts really stuck with me: “I spent the greater part of the year compulsively staring at other women, wondering why I couldn’t be pretty as them and just how unfair it was. Then I realized that this is, in fact, the quintessential women’s experience.” Here’s the whole post: https://byrslf.co/10-musings-on-my-first-year-as-a-woman-f395caf8d847
This is one of my posts that represents one of the most fundamental thought-process changes of my life. I am glad it happened every single day. http://biggreenpen.com/2015/06/28/not-about-me/
I still think about this post, and its author, who stopped writing. Missing now from the blog is the fantastical photo of the writer with her husband: in their wedding clothes, underwater, forever frozen in time and beauty. Submerged in fact under the sea. They looked like tragic heroes in a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale.
It’s important to remember that infertility can break many things.
http://submerged.blogspot.com/2013/01/cycle-21-cd-23ish.html?m=0
One of the first blogs I discovered in 2016 when I first started seeking out support on this challenging journey was dreamingofdiapers.com. Her posts were full of pain but also empathy. One of the posts that stuck with me over time was this one: http://dreamingofdiapers.com/2017/02/28/scars-between-my-fingers/
I understood the intensity of the prayer; I appreciated the sensitivity of planning to limit parenting posts to a different platform; and I felt the sincerity of the promise not to abandon the blog once her miracle child arrived.
I’m late to this, but I had a weekend that was technology semi-free. (I couldn’t go the whole way, could I? lol) I’m terrible at remembering posts that I loved, but the one that came to mind, that inspired me and made me smile at the time, and that was a wonderful celebration (and had a song just to cap it all off with wondrousness) was Loribeth’s I am Woman, Hear Me Roar post back in 2012.
http://theroadlesstravelledlb.blogspot.com/2012/05/i-am-childless-hear-me-roar.html
I know there have been many posts over the years that have struck me but this one was the one that came to mind with your call for the “ultimate roundup”. It pinpointed exactly why I felt so alienated and furious at the world during my fertility struggles, and it is the reason I am still very self aware of this “privilege” now that I am on the other side and have a child of my own. I am sharing it with those who will nod along knowingly, it’s really the general masses that I wish would read it, but here is as good as any place too; https://schrodingerscatbox.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/fertility-privilege-part-2/?wref=tp
Adding to the list! This recent post about alloparents. In our current society that assumes only those who are parenting are experts on children, this post is a great counter example of that misconception (including that there’s no evidence to support this thought). I also love this definition of an alloparent.
https://www.stirrup-queens.com/2018/06/alloparents/
Coming back to say that I have read that post from Toddler Planet (have you linked to it before? I feel like you have) and I remember when Susan passed away, how broken we all were about it. After you posted her I went back and re-read things and I was struck again by her grace in the face of death. How she didn’t want to die, but she had a peace and insight about it that is just remarkable and special.
And the post you highlighted I really needed to read again, because it means something a little different to me now than it did the first time I read it. And I am so glad that her words still exist even though she is gone from this earth.
I found another one that I’d bookmarked (I am so bad at bookmarking…):
https://inconceivable12.wordpress.com/2018/04/30/flipping-the-script-solidarity-not-pressure/comment-page-1/#comment-3328
I LOVED this for the solidarity piece, and the nixing of the “I did it this way and that’s how you’ll do it too” trap of pregnancy or adoption success that is often well intentioned but can put so much pressure on those who are still toiling, and who might be considering resolving childfree but feel the pressure of everyone else’s success preventing that release, to some extent. It was powerful for me, and so helpful.
And one more! I loved this one and come back to it frequently, because it turns the idea of “someone else has it worse than you” into “Someone would love to take your pain away” — which is a beautiful transformation.
https://www.stirrup-queens.com/2017/11/taking-other-peoples-bad-days/
What a huge library of goodness and understanding you’ve fostered, Mel. Congrats!
I was reviewing my original blog and found this post from nearly 10 years ago: Looking Back At How I Got Here: https://www.coming2terms.com/2008/08/02/looking-back-at-how-i-got-here/