Category — Uncategorized

I was driving home a few weeks ago and suddenly couldn’t remember how old I was. Was I 47? 48? Simple math brought me to the correct year. A few days after that, someone said they were turning 50, and I thought, “50 is old.” And then realized I would be turning 50 in a few years, and it is my birthday this week.

Gulp.

I’m clearly having trouble with aging. I want to age in the sense that I don’t want the alternative, but I’m not really a fan of this aging thing. It ceases to be fun once you reach a certain point.

Or maybe you have to make it fun.

At some point, we’ll do a day trip to the beach and eat French fries for lunch and read books on the sand, a tradition we started when I turned 40. That will be good. And I’ll hopefully remember my age.

Happy birthday to me.

There is a black bear wandering around our town. Every day, dozens of people post which neighbourhood he’s hanging out in, taking videos of the bear padding around their backyard or climbing into trees. And every day, I wish the bear would choose our house, would pad around our yard, would climb our trees.

We drove around the neighbourhood where he was spotted one morning, looping up and down the streets. But it was like whack-a-mole. When we went to that neighbourhood, he apparently wandered over to a nearby church where everyone put up videos of the bear near the church with messages like, “Guess who came to worship?” And by the time people posted that message, the bear had wandered away again.

I want a bear friend so badly.

I fear that he’ll leave town, and I’ll never get a chance to see him.

The word “infertility” caught my eye as I was scrolling through Apple News. “How Kate Middleton Paid Hidden Tribute to Women With Infertility.” Do tell.

It turns out there was a pineapple design on her clothing when she “announced her patronage of the Maternal Mental Health Alliance, which aims to help new and expectant mothers.” And Newsweek reports that the pineapple is the symbol of infertility.

So.

This brings up many things. First and foremost, that infertility is lumped in with fertility. I get served ads for diapers because businesses believe that people focused on infertility must also be focused on all things baby. Because the only trajectory through infertility ends with a baby? So I’m not sure why Kate would be wearing infertility symbolism to announce how she is helping women who have had children and are experiencing post-partum depression.

I think maybe she just likes the pineapple design.

Though it made me think about Anti-Pineapple Kim from IVFC (where did she go?), and how, once upon a time, people would post how they were eating pineapple, drinking Robitussin, or consuming wheatgrass during IVF or IUI cycles. And I haven’t heard that in years. Until this Newsweek article.

Actually, let’s just skip the one about the parents suing the son and daughter-in-law for not giving them a grandchild.

So. Article Two: Slate had a great interview about how IVF is tied up in Roe v. Wade. Not just IVF — treatments for ectopic pregnancies, IUI, genetic testing. We’ve been beating this drum for years. It begins with what our community has always known:

If Roe v. Wade gets overturned, it won’t just affect women who need an abortion. For people seeking fertility treatment and their doctors, the big concern is the foundation of the fight against abortion: fetal personhood. If a fetus is a person, it raises all kinds of questions.

Republicans chipped away at abortion via personhood bills. It is terrifying to think about where this will go — into far-reaching corners we can imagine and not quite imagine yet.

Article Three: I wanted your thoughts because I thought Carolyn Hax’s answer was interesting. A writer asked: “Could we please stop “making conversation” by asking whether people have children and how many? People struggle with infertility, decide to remain child-free, have lost a child somehow, don’t want to discuss reproductive decisions, etc.”

Carolyn responded with sympathy but pointed out that few topics are truly safe for discussion because you never know someone else’s situation. She writes: “Almost any well-meaning inquiry can hit an emotional mine.”

The answer is to go into conversations knowing someone may touch a sensitive spot and have an answer/deflection at the ready. And to people making conversation, pick up on cues, pivot, don’t pry.

What do you think?

Once upon a time, I had a phone with very little storage. I had to download the images off the phone and delete the ones that weren’t super special to me to make more space. If you look back at the early years of my camera roll, they are the best of the best — fantastic images that I want to keep forever.

I got a new phone right before the pandemic. Even though I had more space, I behaved the same way, anticipating a time when I would run out of storage again. I would carefully cull out the blurry pictures or screenshots, download the good but not great ones to my computer, and delete.

But at some point during the pandemic, I stopped doing this because it felt like one more thing on my to-do list. And I wasn’t taking many images anyway. I would back up the images to my computer but leave them on the phone, too. And now my camera roll is an unruly mess.

For some unknown reason, I take a screenshot of my Wordle every day. I’ve played on this phone for 178 days. (Before that, I was on the computer.) I have 178 unnecessary screenshots that I will never look at again. I have three billion pictures of Beorn. Most of them look exactly the same. There are hundreds of pictures of the kids with masks over their faces. You cannot see their faces. Why do I need this many pictures?

Because I didn’t keep up with it, it will now take me a whole afternoon to clean up the camera roll so I don’t have to scroll past four thousand pictures of wallabies eating treats to get to those older, curated, best-of photos. It makes me tired to think about it, so I never begin.

Clean as you go, digitally.