Category — Uncategorized

Carolyn Hax has a brilliant, wonderful column about how to tell someone infertile that you’re pregnant.

The advice: There is “a preference to respond to hard news privately on their own time. So, tell her this in writing — email, a letter slipped under her door if you live close by — and aim its arrival for the best time you can gauge.”

I would take it a step further and say that is good advice on how to tell anyone your good news outside your very immediate circle of people who will be connected to the child. The truth is that you don’t know what other people are going through, and almost everyone will appreciate being given time to process news vs. hearing it and needing you react in the moment. Some only need a second and will jump on a call to discuss upon receiving the note. Some need a few days.

Keep it simple. Keep it brief. Make an empathetic statement that sometimes even happy news can be hard for someone to hear. Make it clear that you don’t expect a reaction. Good advice that can apply to so many life situations where two people with differing situations meet.

I’ve been thinking about a recent post that I highlighted in a Roundup. The Uterus Monologues wrote about Mother’s Day looping back around, which it will do here in the US in a few weeks.

Though I was thinking about it because it’s Pesach. Our third pandemic Pesach, to be exact. The first one was tinged with anxiety, and I prepared a ridiculous meal because I thought that we needed to keep things normal. Better than normal. Look at how we were thriving in the face of uncertainty.

The second Pesach was all about pride. Look at me keeping things going while dealing with vaccine envy. But this third one is barely happening. I am burned out. I cannot make this special. Our seders were brief. Or meals were cobbled together.

Which makes me sad because we’re staring down the end of the twins at home. They may not be home for Pesach for the next few years. This is not the note I want to leave them with. But I also know I have limits, and I’ve reached mine this week.

But I was thinking about the post because the years go round but we are always different, which means the holidays are always different. The situation is always different, which means the holidays are always different. I mean, truly, every time we come to a holiday, we are a completely different person. Isn’t that bizarre to think about? How much we change, and how much that change impacts the way we interact with these stable dots on the calendar that we spin around?

This holiday, I’m not internally pretty. My mind is in too many places at once. My emotions are all over the place. The way I’m moving through the holiday is both a reflection of that and tinged with the fact that I am a different person than I was last year or the year before. The world will keep turning, marking where I am at this moment.

While there has always been people raising the flag on the difficulty of Mother’s Day, it feels in the last two years or so that the sentiment has hit the mainstream. I commented on it last year when the Royal Collection Trust sent out a message asking if I would like to skip any Mother’s Day messages. They sent the same email this year, too. And then Debrett’s, the etiquette guide, had a post about “surviving Mother’s Day.”

Under the “Be Aware” section:

“Remember that not everyone who wants to have a child is able to do so, and many women are contemplating, or undergoing, the arduous process of assisted conception. Bear in mind, therefore, that people in this category are not likely to be enraptured by the glorification of Mother’s Day.”

The UK seems far ahead of the game with being sensitive to the way people may experience the day. I’m hopeful the rest of the world may catch up and think about how everyone may not approach the same holiday in the same way.

Everyone has been sharing this Twitter thread of random facts, which kicks off with a promising, interesting, and easily checkable fact: “Every ‘c’ in Pacific Ocean is pronounced differently.”

But then there are all of the facts that appear in the list that sound wrong but are probably true and are difficult to confirm without Googling such as: “Sharks have been around longer than the rings of Saturn.” Have they? Saturn feels kind of old. Maybe its rings are younger. Sharks have probably been around for a while. Googled it. It’s correct.

Or, “If you are over 45, Earth’s population doubled during your lifetime.”

Or, “There are 6 state capitals west of Los Angeles.” Which is followed by “27 US states extend north of the southern tip of Canada.” (I had to Google that one.)

It’s fun to read through, though I’d love for someone to go through and fact-check it.

Mark Slutsky wrote a piece about what he called amygalar earworms: “the memory equivalent of a melodic hook—amygdalar earworms.” So they’re the memories that bubble up to the surface in response to a trigger. For example, I spent thousands of hours on or around Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin. But if you talk about Lake Mendota, I immediately think of one of two memories:

1. Picking up a rock near the edge of the frozen lake and throwing it against the surface to test if it would still support our weight or if the lake was beginning to thaw, and watching the rock smash through the surface.

Or

2. Somewhere between midnight and two in the morning, my friend and I had the brilliant idea to walk to Picnic Point in the dark with flashlights. When we got to the stone wall, a man walked past us, without a flashlight, totally silent and just glancing our way as if walking in the dark in the middle of the night without a flashlight in a muddy nature preserve (it was the summer of The Bog) was non-comment-worthy.

And then I will keep thinking about either one of these two memories — or both — the rest of the day. It happens whenever someone mentions the lake.

If you pushed me to come up with other lake memories, I could. I remember the day I climbed into the lake fully dressed or watching kids feed Starbursts to the swan or running around on the frozen lake with Marts and making snow angels. But they don’t get stuck in my head for the rest of the day, or bubble up readily any time someone brings up the lake.

What are your amygdalar earworms?