Category — Friday Blog Roundup

We almost never watch a new television show from the beginning.  There are few series (maybe one?) that we’ve given a chance until it has been on the air for a few seasons.  Part of it is quality: we want to make sure a show has sticking power before we invest our energy in it.  The other thing is that we seem to rarely hear about a show until it hits its eighth season.  But we heard about The Americans before it aired and decided to watch the first episode.  We were interested enough in the FX show to endure the last 20 minutes of a Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz film beforehand.

The Americans didn’t disappoint.  I’m not a fan of seeing violence, but I immediately liked the characters and the plot device.  It’s set in DC in 1981.  It unfortunately looks NOTHING like the DC area in 1981.  But even with that distraction, we really enjoyed it.  Enough so that I put an alert on my calendar to remind me to watch FX on Wednesday nights.

But.

I really need to discuss this one part of the premise, and since this isn’t a spoiler, I’ll throw it out there.  The idea is that the man and woman are KGB agents that have been taught to sound and move like Americans.  They came to America in 1965, pretending to be husband and wife, and built a life here, always working for the KGB.  It’s now 1981.  They live in suburbia.  They have two kids.  They’re spies.

The man would like to defect from Russia; leave behind his life as a KGB agent, make a deal with the CIA, and go into hiding.  The woman would never desert Russia and points out the flaw in the man’s plan: what would they tell the kids?  The kids have no idea their parents are Russian much less part of the KGB.  They have a whole fictional backstory they’ve been fed about their parent’s American upbringing.  To defect and go on the run would mean telling them that their parents aren’t really in love, aren’t really Americans, and that the kids are just props in their parents’ charade.

Except won’t that be the case when the kids are older?  At some point, isn’t the woman going to retire from the KGB and go back to mother Russia?  While she could orchestrate a disappearance in her old age, is having your mother mysteriously disappear that much easier on the psyche than finding out she’s a KGB agent?  Really, how does one handle dealing with the props when the props grow up?

Isn’t this an interesting idea?

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A massive thank you again to everyone who has supported me with the release of “Nidah,” my first short story this week.  The people who have read it, first and foremost, plus everyone who has emailed or cheered me on.  The people who have Tweeted and Facebooked and Pinned and Stumbled and blogged and talked to friends about it.

As I said yesterday, I take that support also as a sign of trust, and I don’t take that trust lightly.  I never want to dishonour it, and I want you to know how much I’m touched by 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:

• “A Sense of Urgency” (Genuine Greavu)
• “Refuges in Rural Sweden” (Antropóloga)
• “In Child Loss, There is No ‘Fake It Until You Make It’” (Still Standing Magazine)
• “Trials and Trails” (The Misadventures of MissOhkay)
• “Henry’s Birth Story” (For We Are Bound By Symmetry)
• “Is the Unlived Life Worth Examining” (La Belette Rouge)
• “So Much Less that I Will” (I Can’t Whistle)
• “A Sales Pitch to Our Day 3 Embryos” (It Only Takes One)
• “The Weight of Today” (Family Building with a Twist)
• “Obligation to Give Back?” (A Glimpse Inside)
• “These Two Lands” (A Thousand Oceans)
• “Honing Empathy” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)
• “Living Childless” (The Quest for the Golden Egg)
• “In Which I Contemplate Pregnancy After Loss” (Dear Finley)
• “The Bracelet – the One She Never Got to Meet” (We Say IVF They Say FIV)
• “Probabilities” (An Expat’s Journal)
• “Thoughtful Thursday: Really Really” (Baby Smiling in Back Seat)
• “The Room” (Hapa Hopes)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Maybe Baby (Babies) has a post about how much telling other people about your child’s origins matter.  She’s not talking about close friends and family; she’s talking about the strangers you encounter for brief intervals of time on life’s path.  She’s talking about the person you get into a chat with at a conference or the salesperson at the store.  What do you owe them insofar as the whole story?  There is also an interesting discussion going on in the comment section so be sure to read both.

Inconceivable! has a post about the people who you think will step up and support, and the people who actually do.  It’s not always the people you expect.  It’s about our expectation of reactions, using The Queen as a jumping board to discussing the ideas people bring to how they think others should reaction.  Great post.

Waiting For Little Feet has a post about the reality of parenting a newborn vs. what she imagined before she found herself in that situation.  Going to give you a hint: it isn’t all cooing and sleepy snuggles.  I love her unpacking of the concept of “supposed to” and the additional pressure it places on an already overwhelming situation.  It’s an important read, especially because it’s difficult to sometimes find the truth so you can enter a situation with your eyes wide open.

Lastly, The Great Big IF has a very funny (and true) post about discussing babymaking with kids conceived via IVF.  You’ll need to pop over to read more.

The roundup to the Roundup: Did anyone else watch The Americans?  What do you think of the idea of breaking the news to the kids?  Thank you to everyone who gave me support this week with the short story, “Nidah.”  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between January 25th and February 1st) 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.

We had a partial snow day yesterday so we read a chapter of Harry Potter 4 before school.  We’re post Goblet of Fire spitting out the names and now navigating Ron’s reaction.  We spent just as much time discussing how Ron views Harry’s life vs. his own as we did reading the actual book.  I think I had glossed over just how jealous they are of one another and how they react so differently to their personal jealousy back when I read these books to myself.

Ron sees Harry as having fame and attention — exactly what he wants because he comes from a large family of overachievers and thinks he lacks an element that sets him apart from his siblings. (Until, you know, Book 7.  But he doesn’t know that yet.  And beyond that, I think Mrs. Weasley would have disagreed with Ron’s self-assessment.)  He is so massively jealous of the adoration his friend receives.  And Harry sees Ron as having family and love — exactly what he doesn’t have seeing that his parents are gone and his only living relatives hate him.  Who cares about the adoration of people who don’t really know you (but only know your fame)?  He would much rather have Ron’s situation of a big, loving family who care for Ron simply because he’s Ron.

So they’re both jealous of each other, but Ron expresses that jealousy towards Harry whereas Harry swallows that jealousy in order to stand as close as he can to what he wants.  Ron lashes out, pushing Harry away, and Harry keeps his sadness in check in order to keep coming back to the Burrow.  In neither case is the jealousy itself problematic — people are going to feel what people are going to feel.  It’s only the expression of that jealousy that becomes problematic.

It also leads to the hidden message that runs throughout the books: anyone can find fame — it happens for the best and worst of reasons — but it’s much more difficult to find love.  So if you can only choose one — fame or love — go with love every time.

Chew on that.

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My friend introduced me to the world’s greatest app, which also comes in website form: donothingfor2minutes.com.  The website isn’t as good as the free app.  You have 6 choices of duration of time with the app and 4 different moving visuals.  I’ve been mostly using the waves coming in.

I left the phone on my bed and ran downstairs to get something, and when I came back up, the kids were both lying on top of my blanket, watching the ocean for 2 minutes.  Blissed out.

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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:

• “Don’t Go Slick” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Lori and A
• “Fear” (Relaxing Doesn’t Make Babies)
• “Who am I?” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Those in Glass Houses Will Throw Stones” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “Photo Finishing” (Blood Signs)
• “Six Years Without Her” (An Expat’s Journal)
• “Forty Weeks” (Baby-Making Merry-Go-Round)
• “Unresolved But in Transition” (The Infertility Voice)
• “Don’t Save the Date” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Cristy.
• “Jinx 2” (Single Infertile Female)
• “Life after Infertility” (La Belette Rouge)
• “The Exhilarating Tension Between Being and Becoming” (Baby Smiling in Back Seat)
• “The ‘I’ Word” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Help. I’ve Fallen, and I Can’t…. Oh, F*@k It.” (Schrodinger’s Catbox)
• “The Burden of Hope” (Something Beautiful)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Single Infertile Female has a post on what happened when her nervousness intersected with her first foster care class, and she overshared the details of her life.  I found this post so touching because it was so human.  Through words, she manages to package the excitement and anxiety of the unknowns and the thrill and the fear all wrapped up in one group discussion.

My Scar Smiles at Me has a post about time, especially the happiness and fear of it moving quickly.  On one hand, the days passing at a good clip means she’s that much closer to the finish line.  On the other hand, the days passing at a good clip means she’s that much closer to the finish line.  But it’s the ending that made me catch my breath.  It’s just lovely.

It’s above because it straddles two weeks, but I also loved La Belette Rouge’s post giving concrete advice on how she stepped away from treatments.  While prepping for a panel at a conference on the topic, she puts into focus all the ways she reached the point she’s at where she has let go and resolved her infertility.  It’s a moving post, but it’s also an important post.  It literally holds out a hand to the reader.  I especially loved this side effect of being a speaker: “In talking about my process of letting go I got to see how far I’ve come.”

Mrs. Spit’s “You Will Dazzle Them“… What can I even say to do this post justice?  Except that I think it should be required reading for middle schoolers on a daily basis, and after that, perhaps moving to required reading once a month like a vitamin.

Lastly, Life as I Know It has two posts that stuck with me this week.  One was about her son’s reaction to specialized parking spots as opposed to her own thoughts.  The other is about mentally marking her sons’ due date; how this date still holds meaning for her even though they have a birthdate.  And more than that, discovering she isn’t the only one who thinks about that date.  Loved both posts.

The roundup to the Roundup: Ron and Harry’s mutual jealousy.  Most relaxing app/website in the world.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between January 18th and January 25th) 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.

Inauguration is this weekend, and I wish I could tell you that I was going.  Except I can’t.  Because it is too cold.

I know that makes me sound like twelve kinds of wimpy, and that may be because I AM twelve kinds of wimpy.  But I’m an honest wimp who doesn’t believe in pushing herself too hard, and I don’t do cold.  I don’t stand outside in winter.  I don’t move outside in winter.  I don’t even do things like ski, which takes place outside, near snow.

Now if the President ever wanted to hold his ceremony in a cozy library and serve hot chocolate, I would be all over that.  I would wait in line (not outside, but inside) for tickets to that.  But as is, I’ll watch it on television.  In sweatpants.  With fuzzy socks.  And warm drinks.  Though to get in the Inaugural spirit, I’m hanging a sign on the bathroom door that says Port-o-Potty.

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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:

• “Our Trip to Riley and My Trip Down Memory Lane” (The Empty Cookie)
• “Just Culture” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)
• “Sleep: A Tragedy in Four Parts” (Clay Baboons)
• “Let All the Rest Go” (Mrs. Spit)
• “The Hourglass” (The Misadventures of MissOhkay)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Lavender Luz has an interesting post about viewing open adoption in terms of a grid instead of reducing it to an amount of contact.  Within the grid, every adoption situation has the potential to be met with openness, even when contact is not possible.  It is a totally fascinating way of looking at open adoption.

MoJo Working has a brilliant post about how she reacts when someone tells her that they’ll pray for her when they hear about her infertility.  She asks, “And yet, can anyone seriously look around at our society today and tell me that G-d has been handing out babies only to his faithful? He isn’t fucking Santa Claus. You don’t get a baby because you are good, because you say the right things, or because you pray fervently.”  She gives the reader a lot to chew on in the post.

Always My 3 Boys has a post that is only 18 words long, including the title that runs into the first line.  The simplicity of the thought, the emotion behind the words, punched me in the stomach.

Inconceivable! has a post about Harry Potter, and finding the Snape in herself.  For anyone who has jealously stared at a pregnant woman’s stomach, this post is a must-read, especially in discovering her Snapeness, also deciding how she wants her actions to differ.

Lastly, Still Life with Circles has a gorgeous post about Googling her daughter’s name and finding other lives for Lucias who are still here on earth while her Lucia is gone.  She writes, “There are 13,200,000 results. People all over the world named the same as my dead daughter. She has two twitter accounts, a sex tape, and a Facebook.”  Her search leads her to an artist who emotionally brings her on a road to the child she misses.

The roundup to the Roundup: Watching the Inauguration on television because I don’t like it when my nose hairs freeze.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between January 11th and January 18th) 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.

Learned the greatest word this week from the @mental_floss Twitter feed: “Kummerspeck (German): Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.”

Grief bacon.

Mental Floss recently had a list of 21 emotions to which there is no English word but which exists in another language.  One example is “koev halev” (they have it as koev li halev) which in Hebrew means to internalize the other person’s news so deeply that your heart hurts.  Sort of a fitting term since I have often experienced koev halev while reading someone else’s blog, since we all come to know each other’s hopes and dreams so intensely that it’s hard to read the words on the screen when they’re dashed.

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The ChickieNob and her friend started their own magazine.  They take it very seriously and write their articles at my kitchen table.  My job for the magazine currently is chief speller (though I have been informed that this is an unpaid position).  And fixer.  And can-you-do-this-for-us-er.  And they just decided they wanted a website for their magazine, so I’m now the webmaster.  It’s really cool to watch two kick-ass girls kicking ass on the page.  Being creative and smart and funny and thoughtful.

I was washing dishes this week while they worked, and they were discussing the opening of an article.  The ChickieNob was trying to explain to her friend that a person needs to grab the reader with “a great first sentence.”  They were trying to come up with something that would grab the reader, and her friend was becoming doubtful whether this was necessary.  The ChickieNob assured her that she often listens into our conversations, and her parents have discussed how most readers will not give an article more than a sentence or two of attention if it doesn’t grab them and make them feel something in their stomach.  The other girl finally agreed to try this since it sounded serious, and they went back to working on their first paragraph of the article.

Being reminded that little ears are listening in at all times and retaining, I must remember not to say things to Josh such as “that story totally grabbed me by the balls” anymore.

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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:

• “For What It’s Worth” (A Single Journey)
• “The Key to Failure” (Enjoying the Small Things)
• “Altruism: the Hard Truth about Helping” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “Moving On” (Mommy Odyssey)
• “Cycle 21, CD 23(ish)” (Submerged)
• “Holy Shit, I’m a Mom” (Waiting for Little Feet)
• “Post Partum” (MissConception)
• “Gaining” (Queen of the Slipstream)

Okay, now my choices this week.

It was nominated above, but it fell right on the line on a Friday, so I am claiming Submerged’s post about her blog title as well for this week.  The image is haunting, the story behind it is emotional, and the telling in and of itself is powerful.  A gorgeous read.  The story will stay with you for many hours.

In Search of Motherhood has a post about kicking off the year; looking forward and looking backward at the same time.  She writes about a New Years party: “I love my family more than life itself, but at the metaphorical dinner party, I have outgrown the kids’ table and haven’t quite made it to the grown-up table.”  But it was her thoughts about her baby cousin, about this child aging out of the ability to fill a void that really got to me.

Ladyblogalot has a post about anxiety that comes with the best title.  It begins: “Hello, anxiety.  Back again, I see.  I let him in so he doesn’t just smash through my glass front doors to get to me.”  Because isn’t that exactly it?  Doesn’t anxiety just come in if he pleases with or without your permission?  And this time he has brought with him a lemon-throwing Hope.  It’s a great read.

Me… Plus One has a very honest post about parenting worries.  I highlight it because each stage is either easy or hard, a delight or a struggle, and when we’re in the valley, we forget that it’s not the only landscape.  And because I think that other people will be able to relate.

Life As I Know It also has a post about parenting worries, admitting that what she thought years ago is not what she is feeling now that she has reached a milestone.  It’s sort of the flip side, in a way, of the post above it.  What we think we know before we get there, and what we can’t remember once we reach a space.  I loved this post because it brought me back to a moment in time.

Lastly, Getting There has a post about an adoption support group meeting that conflicts with another meeting.  One could help her family directly.  One could help her community and her family indirectly.  She writes of discussing this with a friend, “Parenting is hard, parenting is relentless, but adoptive parenting has an additional layer that not everyone always sees. Today she saw.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Wake up and smell the grief bacon, or words that lack an equivalent in English.  The ChickieNob listens to my conversations and has started a magazine.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between January 4th and January 11th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

The Russian adoption ban has obviously gotten a lot of posts in our community in the last few days, but I really want to highlight an op-ed that appeared in the Chicago Tribune this week.  Hopefully you’ll be able to read “To Russia, With Love” (because it seems to keep appearing and disappearing behind a paywall).  It is not about Americans adopting insomuch as it is about the inverse; that a problem exists that needs addressing and shutting off solutions is not solving the problem.

I started crying near the beginning:

Since the news of the ban on intercountry adoption of Russian orphans by American citizens, there have been many stories about Russian adoptees who grew up to be Eagle Scouts, National Merit Scholars and even a Paralympian. Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law banning the adoption of Russian orphans by American families, I’d like to share a different kind of a story, one that I assume is much more common. Mine is a story about lost mittens and sticky kisses and bicycle tires that seem to always need air. Nothing spectacular. Nothing newsworthy. Just the everyday life of an ordinary 5-year-old. But perhaps, given the circumstances of his early life, the life we have together is nothing short of extraordinary.

It’s all any of us want: to raise a child so that another human being can learn how to hug and pet a dog and sing a song and send more love into this world.  To replicate not ourselves but our hearts: our goodness (which is not to say that we don’t inadvertently also replicate our badness as humans; we shouldn’t be pollyannaish about this).  I know Toby, and she’s a good person.  And good people can teach goodness.  I am glad she wrote about the ordinary, which, as we know, is sometimes just in its mere existence extraordinary.

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The 2012 Creme de la Creme is up.  Obviously.  Since it’s after January 1st.  I really enjoyed writing it this year, and I’m sad that I’m not continuing to update it for a month, but I have to say that it’s a huge weight off my chest to have the whole thing up and done at the beginning of the month.  I will definitely do it again like this next year, so look for the list opening in October 2013 if you missed it this 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:

• “This is…” (Mrs. Spit)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Donating Hope has a great post about a conversation that took her by surprise.  It’s a tiny, quiet, unexpected moment that made me smile.

The Road Less Travelled has a moving post from New Year’s Eve.  Life is barreling by, moving at warp speed, and then suddenly, a moment is captured in a snapshot.  A game of tag around a car, which started out as laughter as she observed turned to tears as she realized “So much that we’ve missed out on.”  It’s a moment that takes the reader’s breath away.

Hope Floats Among the Cherry Blossoms has a reflection on her former self during a conversation, the one who was prepared to take the world by storm and was giddily plotting out a new life with her then-husband.  It’s a bittersweet reminder of how much we don’t know of what lies ahead at times, but it’s also a measure of her quiet strength.  I especially love these lines: “I know I am in a place of transition once again.  I just need to be patient.  It is okay to grieve what was lost, honor it and put it down again.”

Lastly, FrozenOJ’s Concentrated Life has a post about a failed cycle (as well as looking ahead to the next one) that manages to capture that internal monologue that runs through every treatment cycle.  The symptoms that get your hopes up and picking yourself up once they’re dashed, navigating a vacation and treatments (as well as laughing over the idea of relaxing on a vacation when infertility is nipping at your heels), the idea of taking off a cycle and all the problems that brings.  The post winds and turns like a conversation inside one’s head.

The roundup to the Roundup: Chicago Tribune op-ed about the closing of Russia’s international adoption program.  The Creme de la Creme is up.  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 28th and January 4th) 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.