Category — Friday Blog Roundup

Well, obviously mainstream media touched a nerve with me this week.

Denver Laura’s question about what would be written in her obit got me thinking what would be written in mine.  What would make the highlights reel?  If Yvonne Brill will forever be known for her beef stroganoff, which recipe of mine will people talk about after I’m gone?  Will it be my balsamic vinaigrette, which people seem to enjoy?  My challah, which I wrote down on the inside of one of our cabinets?  Or my chocolate chip cookie recipe which I perfected a few years back?

I think the chocolate chip cookie recipe.

But maybe put that in the second or third paragraph vs. the lede.

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I am currently living in fear of the Brood II cicadas which are set to emerge this May. (Warning: there is a picture if you click that link.)  They are different from the Brood X cicadas that won’t be here until 2021, but they’re still a big brood.  The only thing giving me any comfort whatsoever is that our town may not see many:

Not everyone will hear it. Cicada sightings will be spotty throughout the Mid-Atlantic. In this area, D.C. residents might not see or hear any, but residents in Southern Maryland and Virginia could witness more than their share, entomologists said.

Based on sightings of this group’s parents in 1996, residents of the following municipalities should be on the lookout: Richmond, Williamsburg, York, Fairfax, Falls Church and Baltimore, and Loudoun, Prince William, Anne Arundel, Prince George’s, Queen Anne’s, St. Mary’s, Wicomico and Baltimore counties, among others.

Which is a small comfort.  I don’t want to see any.

Friends keep teasing me, but I have no idea why they’re laughing when they know full well that I have no qualms calling them until they come over to remove a cicada regardless of the hour or what they’re in the middle of doing.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “Gifts” (Serenity Now)
• “Practice Makes Perfect” (Through the Ardennes)
• “5 Years” (Viva la Vida!)
• “Travel Plans?” (Certainly Not Cool Enough to Blog)
• “The Break Becomes an Ache?” (By the Brooke)
• “Easter Blues and Bubbles” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “Giving Up vs. Letting Go” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “Open Letter to Infertility” (The Kooky Chronicles)
• “Tiny Pants: They’re Like Lunch” (Glum Bunny)
• “Luxury of Time” (Anabegins)
• “What It Feels Like to be Infertile” (Life of a Digital Girl)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Queen of the Slipstream has a post four weeks into parenthood.  It is about the role adoptive parents serve as one of the three relationship bridges in adoption.  She writes: “I have wrestled with my emotions over how I feel about my position as Baby J’s mom, R’s position as Baby J’s first mom/birthmom and what my role is in bridging all of the complex relationships that are unfolding together.”  I love her discussion of how the relationship defies description: that it works even if she can’t explain why.  Great post.

Baptism by Fire has a post about pinboards and infertility and childlessness, focusing on the 369 pins on her boards.  She admits, “I have other boards, such as horses, ice cream, cadbury eggs and Star Wars, yet I keep returning to infertility boards to see what pins had been posted, either for me to pin on my board or to click on ‘like’.”  It is a powerful, powerful post about the role the Internet has played in both healing her and separating her from the outside world.

Lastly, Inconceivable has a post about waiting for her beta after getting a call about her progesterone levels.  After patiently waiting through the first week in the two week wait, she thought she would be able to get to that final blood test without drowning in the anticipation.  But good news about her progesterone levels has infused her with hope.  I love the conversation between the angel and devil on her shoulder, and hope that she gets a positive next week at the end of the wait.

The roundup to the Roundup: Newspapers are making me cranky.  Freaked out about cicadas.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between April 5th and April 12th) 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.

Thank you for all of the kind words about Cozy Jackson.  My office feels very quiet without him.  At the risk of rushing things, maybe foolishly, we’re going to go to the pet store today to talk to the ethical pet dealer.  An EPD differs from a pet store in that it matches the right animal with the right person.  There are very few animals in the store — mostly only small mammals — and she can tell you how the animal was bred and its lineage.  She won’t sell you an animal if she doesn’t think it’s the right fit at the right moment.  I started the conversation with her on Thursday when I called to tell her about Cozy’s death.  I let her know that we were thinking about moving forward with another pet just so I could gather her thoughts.  She knows us, so I trust her.  She didn’t think it was a terrible idea, especially if the kids create a memory book for Cozy and process his death.  She’s open to the possibility.

We are only considering another hamster, a guinea pig, or a chinchilla.  We’ve obviously had a hamster so know what to expect with that.  I once had a guinea pig, so I know what to expect with that (and think it’s the best option for our house/family).  I’ve never even known someone who has a chinchilla, so if you have, I’d love to hear about your experience.  The Wolvog came up with the chinchilla idea, and I’m not against learning about a new animal.  But it would mean getting accustomed to a new animal.  There are other pets we’d like but we don’t have the space or means to take care of it, so we’re sticking with those three possibilities.

So hopefully we’ll have a new addition to the family soon.  No new pet will ever replace the Cozy-sized hole in my heart, but my hands need to hold something.  I have a lot of love to bestow on a pet.

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We went to a concert last night.  On the way, we listened to the band on CD.  While we were there, we listened to the band live.  Then we got in the car and drove home, back to listening to the band on CD.

When you’re going to a concert, do you listen to the same band on the way there and back?

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And now the blogs…

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

• “Gifts” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “My Thoughts on North Dakota’s Abortion Ban” (Yet Another Bitter Infertile)
• “Why Do We Pretend Away Infertility” (Silent Sorority)
• “What the Body Remembers” (Invincible Spring)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I loved Mrs. Spit’s post about the gratitude that has influenced her own decisions years down the road.  A small gesture from another person after her son died becomes an explanation for why she takes the time to tell people how she appreciates them.  I especially loved this line: “It was such a simple, such a small gesture. I think that she doesn’t remember it any longer, it was so natural for her and yet it meant so very much to me.”  That idea that even things we don’t remember could still have repercussions (in a good way) for someone else.

Miss Conception has a post about breaking her promise to herself that she would never put up a Baby on Board sign.  I love how she takes us through her reasoning, and it drives home the fact that we often make promises to ourselves without knowing how we’ll feel when we’re in the actual situation.  Perhaps it’s a manifesto for fewer cases of “I will never” and more understanding that sometimes the things that annoy us are someone else’s comfort.

Lastly, These Are The Things I’m Made Of has a beautiful post about the things she is missing with the loss of her son.  It’s a montage of all the probable moments, the summation of love.  She writes, “Taking you to the park by our house. Pushing your stroller as the redbuds pop and the forsythia tickles my nose. Counting daffodils.  The woman with a baby down the street who was supposed to be my friend. I pass her house every day. I’ve never met her.”  For me, it seemed like the perfect exercise of still connecting with someone who is gone.

The roundup to the Roundup: Maybe getting a new pet.  Do you listen to the band on the way to the concert?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 29th and April 5th) 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.

I follow our summer ice cream shop at the beach on Facebook, and this week they asked people to name their favourite flavours as they planned out their summer rotation.  I told the ChickieNob that she better go on and tell them which flavour she wants.  “I don’t need to,” she scoffed.  “All I want is chocolate, and they’ll always have chocolate.”  While she is most likely correct that chocolate seems like a constant, I told her that it’s a terrible habit to get into.  That if no one says, “chocolate,” the store may reason that no one really wants it and get rid of it.  Of course, they’ll hear from people once they get rid of it, people saying, “but I do love chocolate!  I just assumed it would always be here!”  And by that point, it may be too late for them to whip up a batch.

We went and told the ice cream store that we wanted chocolate ice cream.

So go tell five chocolates in your life — the constants that you sometimes overlook thinking they’ll always be around — that you love them today, whether that be a store, a person, an organization, or an ice cream flavour.

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April’s IComLeavWe list has opened for sign-up.  As always, IComLeavWe runs for the week of April 21 – 28.  Commenting galore.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “The Darkness” (A Glimpse Inside)
• “Time Whooooshing” (I Can’t Whistle)
• “Memento Mori” (The Empty Cookie)
• “When Family Stories are Hard to Tell” (NY Times)
• “A Birthday of a Different Sort” (Teach Me to Braid)
• “On Marriage Equality” (Bereaved and Blessed)
• “Better When” (The Journey of a Woman Warrior)
• “The Trouble with Twins” (Stephanie Snowe: the Blog!)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I too loved Stephanie Snowe’s post “The Trouble with Twins.”  We’ve heard the same sentiment, which has always struck me as bizarre when people say it to us.  I mean, say it to a fellow singleton parent, say it behind our backs, but to our faces?  Or to the kids’ faces?  We always tell the kids that some people have weird-ass ideas about twins and that this is their problem and not ours.  And I loved her point about how everything doubles except time.  Perfect post.

A Crack in Everything also had a post on Thursday that I didn’t read until after I wrote the last Roundup about telling her boss about her infertility as well as trying to become a single mother by choice.  It’s a moving story about two women coming together in a conversation about grief, and the things that are learned when we open up to each other.

Bio Girl has a post about the tangible things we leave behind when we die.  Her sister’s things have migrated into various places, and now everywhere she looks, tiny reminders of her sister are around her house.  It was telling how important those tangible items can be; how much we need to record and remember with something visual.  The part that moved me the most came towards the end: “And in a way, it feels so wrong to have her things at my house, because I so desperately want her here to need them.  I want her to walk in and ask for them back.  Since I know she can’t, we will surround ourselves with her things; we will think of her when we look at them, but we are already thinking of her all the time anyway, so that won’t be anything new.”

Lastly, Kmina’s Blog has a post about our imagined futures.  She admits that she never imagined life beyond 35 (though her real life looks nothing like the life she imagined for herself at 35), and she states of this visual cliff: “Perhaps it is a good thing I have no idea what turning 40 means, for once I can leave behind the prejudices and other people’s ideas of what my life and I should be like, and start on this journey just as I am.”  I really loved that idea of starting a stage of life without expectations.  And I found the whole story about beds amusing.

The roundup to the Roundup: Go tell the chocolate in your life that you appreciate it/them.  April’s IComLeavWe is open.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 22nd and March 29th) 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.

I have been thinking a lot about that New York Times article about the importance of family stories; of creating family holidays and creating a family culture.  I think my parents and my larger extended family did a good job of shaping a family culture.  There are stories that keep getting passed down through generations and made-up words and shorthand.  I am close with my siblings and my parents.  I feel as if we all belong to one another, like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces connect snugly.

Some Jewish couples have an engagement ceremony called a tenaim.  We did, and we created two versions of the wedding conditions that we wrote together outlining both what was important to us as a couple as well as promises we were making one another in regards to our marriage.  It contained the lofty (how we wanted to raise the kids) and the mundane (financial decisions).  The first version was made as a piece of art that we currently have framed in our living room, and the other was painted directly onto the pottery that we broke.  We actually had our mothers do the breaking, placing the ceramic tile inside a pillowcase to catch the fragments.  And then we placed a chunk of pottery inside a clear box and tied it with a knotted ribbon to symbolize that idea that marriage will bond us together and to ever part would cause the heart to fragment.  We gave a piece each to our siblings, parents, and grandparents, and we have one in our house too.

[As a side note, family members, no harm no foul if you’ve lost our tenaim piece.  I mean, it’s just the manifestation of our wedding vows…  Um, I am just kidding.  I get that my marriage is important to me, and lots of other people are cheering us on, but I don’t expect everyone to still know where their shard of pottery is in the house.  But, if you have lost your piece and would like a new one, we happen to have the pillowcase in our storage room and we’d be happy to pass along another copy.  And no judgments about all the crap in the storage room — our tenaim is important!]

So, family culture, I think we’re doing a decent job of creating that for the twins.  They know their place in the much larger family story going back many generations (remember the never-ending family tree project from last summer?  We’re continuing it this summer with a family website and oral history project).  We have family holidays and made-up words and stories we tell over and over again.

But I was thinking about how these stories are also one thing that makes death so difficult.  Why we’re gutted even when the death occurs at the end of a long life.  Because for the rest of us who are left behind, that death cuts us off from our stories.  Our chronological space in the family doesn’t change, but the virtual space it occupies does, shifting us around, creating fissures, melding people.  And this thing that we’ve determined is so important — the key to our happiness: stories — is the one thing we can’t ask about anymore.  We can’t go back to that person and ask all the questions that we think of — because don’t we always think up one more question after the person is gone?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week, the idea of our family stories, and how many times I have thought to call my grandmother to tell her something.  Her phone number is still in our phone, and I sometimes scroll past it when I know I can’t call her just to feel as if I’ve connected somehow.  I have an audio tape in a storage box of her telling me stories about her childhood, and my goal this summer is to go through those boxes and find the tape so I can make a digital copy.

There are questions that I can ask others in the family and get an answer, but there are things that she took with her, that I can never find out now.  Things I hadn’t thought to ask or record.

These are ideas that I played with a lot in Measure of Love, a paper tenaim, our connection to those stories and losing them with death.  I just hadn’t really put together how I had been thinking about this for a long time before I realized that I was thinking about this for a long time.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “The Red Carpet” (Something Beautiful)
• “Best Laid Plans” (Blog-o-Holl*ic)
• “My Rose Bush” (Lessons from an Infertile Social Worker)
• “Isolation” (Dreaming of Dimples)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Two Adults, One Child about the wave of anger she is feeling after the loss of her child.  She writes with such honesty: “I’m not even going to try to justify myself today, or talk myself down.  No introspection, no justifications.  I’m not going to start spouting all the advantages of having a family of three, and I’m not going to even think about how exciting it might be to be making a new start now that we’ve given up the infertility fight.  Those things may be true, but they don’t change one simple fact – that this situation is really fucking unfair.”  Please go read the whole post.

Something Out of Nothing has a raw post about mourning after a negative IVF cycle.  She moves in chunks of time, charting the process of letting the news sink in.  It is a very moving post.

Hapa Hopes has a post about a series of incidents at work which reveal how differently she processes her infertility than those around her.  Whereas they see her as cured now that she is pregnant, she knows the truth that not only do children not repair uteruses, but they also don’t erase all that came before them.

Family Building with a Twist has a post about how quickly her son has grown, and how they are culling out the baby items.  It’s a bittersweet post about not knowing what the future holds, but wanting to hold onto the present tightly.  She says it perfectly: “This wistfulness? They don’t mention that in the parenting books.  It hurts. A lot.”

Red’s Wrap has an amazing post on BlogHer about parenting after adoption.  I really can’t do it justice with a description, especially the powerful ending.

Lastly, is it wrong that I laughed through a lot of Bionic Mamas’s post on her uterine news?  Especially, “So. Out it comes, via hysteroscopy. That’s hyster- for “uterus” and -scopy for “you’d rather not be awake for this.”  It was just a damn fine read.

The roundup to the Roundup: More thoughts on our stories, tenaim, and death.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 15th and March 22nd) 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.

So I’m still trying out other RSS reader options.  Netvibes would be great if it consistently pulled in my feeds.  I’m holding off judgment for right now since I’m sure they’re swamped and weren’t prepared for the deluge of new users.  I’m also trying out Feedly, which pulls in feeds as quickly as Google Reader BUT I’ve only used it on the phone.  Currently the app pulls in the feeds via Google Reader, though they say the site will switch over to their own replicated RSS feed grabber once Google Reader closes permanently.

I’m glad I’m not alone in still caring about blogs.  I like Twitter and Facebook, and they definitely fill a niche.  But blogs fill a very different niche, one where I like to spend the bulk of my online time.

More than one person wrote to ask if the closing of Google Reader would affect producing the Friday Blog Roundup.  Hells no.  There will still be a Roundup week after week after week.  It’s not going anywhere.

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I knew this was going to be a fairly stressful week, workwise, so on Tuesday, I picked up the kids from school and drove toward the city in order to restock my stash of Canfield’s Diet Chocolate Fudge soda.  There is one store in the area that still sells it, a place I’ve nicknamed “Island of Forgotten 1980s Food.”  I’m not sure if they are selling food that has been there since the 1980s or food that is still being manufactured and yet no other store has carried it since the 1980s, but I figure that either possibility is fine when it comes to diet soda.  That stuff doesn’t rot, right?

So we drove about a half hour under the pretense that we were picking up other things at the store because who wants to admit aloud that they’re driving that far for chocolate soda?  Still, when we entered, the twins said, “so we should probably get the big cart so you have space for all your soda.”  And then I pretended again that we were there for things other than soda.  And they repeated that we should get the big cart for all my soda.

We entered the soda aisle and it was CRAMMED FULL of Dr. Brown’s.  Dr. Brown’s were EVERYWHERE.  It looked like a virus.  There were six-packs of Dr. Brown’s cherry soda on top of the Diet Cokes.  And there were big bottles of Dr. Brown’s root beer blotting out the Orange Crush.  Everywhere you turned, tucked into every crevice of the aisle, choking out all other soda, were three billion extra bottles and cans of Dr. Brown’s.  Listen, I like Dr. Brown’s as much as the next woman, but you couldn’t see any other drink due to the Dr. Brown’s that was choking out the beverage selection.

I started taking apart the aisle, pulling out the Dr. Brown’s to see if my soda was hidden behind the towering wall of cream soda cans. (I swear, the six-packs were multiplying while we were there, building a soda wall as if we were in Minecraft.)  But the store was completely out of Canfield’s Diet Chocolate Fudge.  And when I asked an employee about it, she told me that maybe I wanted to try something from the Dr. Brown’s selections instead.  They must be popular, the woman told me, because there were so many of them.  This was right before she was crushed by a swelling wave of Cel-ray.

If I am cranky, it is because I am without my soda.

Because someone over-ordered Dr. Brown’s and now they don’t have room for my drink.

We didn’t need the big cart.

What food/candy/drink do you miss most from the 1980s?  I bet you that this store carries it.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “Infertility Junk Bingo” (The Smartness)
• “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” (A Separate Life)
• “Let’s Make a Documentary” (Silent Sorority)
• “The 10K Surrogate Abortion Scandal and the Angles Missed by the News” (The Smartness)
• “Talking to Children in Our Family about Adoption Part 1: The Booklet” (Funny Little Pollywogs)
• “A Story that Begged Me to Write It Down” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, St. Elsewhere!
• “Tired” (Project Progeny)
• “Forgiving the World” (Lavender Luz)
• “The Heart of Life is Good” (One Thousand Single Days)
• “Our Eulogies to Ree” (Jump Over the Rainbow – It Won’t Rain Forever)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Torthúil has a post looking forward to this upcoming year.  Her workplace asks her to fill out an intention form for the next year, and her post explores the far-reaching side effects of infertility.  She admits, “I want to be a parent and I’m willing to take on ART and its risks, and whatever else the journey might bring. I’m not going to change my mind about that. But still, when it comes down to actually saying that my professional life is no longer priority number one, I feel some discord.”  It’s a situation I know a lot of people in the community have struggled with; how to balance family building with all the other parts of life affected by the schedule and emotional drain of treatments or adoption.

An Unwanted Path has a beautiful post about a baby she lost four years ago.  She writes, “Whenever I mention my losses, it happens. People tell me to move on, remind me how lucky I am, or they ignore my mention, or worse — they get silent as if to say, “You’re not over that yet?”  No. I’m not over that yet.”  It is a post about balancing the idea of life continuing on without forgetting the past.

A Woman My Age has a very moving post about the process of losing her mother.  I cried when I read, “I’m back to that space when she first had a stroke and the first thing on my mind in the morning was her and the last thought I had before going to sleep was her.”  She captured this familiar thought so perfectly, that bookending.   It’s a really important read.

Lastly, The Great Big IF sums up her current state in one word: sad.  It begins: “I am surrounded by good news and other people’s hope. It should wash over me like a contagion and I should revel in the fact that new life is being celebrated everywhere I turn. Except that I am not in the mood to celebrate. Not anymore.”  It contains the vivid image of her 50-pound heart, the simple truth of sadness.

The roundup to the Roundup: Still trying out Google Reader replacement options.  What food/drink/candy do you miss from the 1980s?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 8th and March 15th) 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.