Category — Uncategorized

It is entirely possible, as The Atlantic states, that people are journaling about their life during the pandemic, but I don’t truly believe it’s as widespread as they make it sound from the article.

Back in March, I thought more people would return to their blogs to write through the pandemic. Many did, dusting off old sites and proclaiming they were going to write again. And then they never returned after that initial post. Or they returned two more times and then disappeared again. Or they wrote an initial post, disappeared, and then popped up again in July to point out that they didn’t blog like they said they would.

No one owes anyone a blog post. This is not meant to make you feel guilty if you did exactly what I describe above. The point is that I’m surprised that more people didn’t return to their blog and go back to writing regularly, at least for a short period of time. I’m surprised more people aren’t journaling their way through the pandemic in the same way they’ve journaled through other crises in their life. The vast majority of bloggers I’m reading right now are people who consistently blogged before and during the pandemic.

Of course, perhaps more people have taken their words offline. Like Doogie Howser, they’re typing their journal in a Word doc. (I have zero memory of word processing programs prior to WordPerfect and Word. What did we use?) Or they picked up a new Moleskine and they’re jotting down their words with pen. But I suspect the vast majority of people aren’t doing more than writing quick Facebook posts or tweets.

Are you surprised that more people didn’t return to blogging during this?

We were finishing Rosh Hashanah dinner when we heard the news about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We had been laughing about my low spelling group from elementary school, but my phone kept going off behind me. Over and over and over again. So I turned around and saw the top text from my cousin letting me know that she had died.

Our table got very quiet, and then ChickieNob started sobbing. The first fifteen minutes or so was just about calming her down and trying to make sense of things and wondering about her family—to lose her on Rosh Hashanah Eve, the last few minutes of the year.

Once she had calmed down, I came upstairs to cry by myself.

So many times since 2016, I’ve felt complete despair. I can’t say that this despair is different or worse or more hopeless than all the other moments of despair. But there is an emptiness inside of me. Like the outline of my body is despair, and the inside is completely hollow.

The title of the article: “Imagine a World Where Men Stressed About their Sperm as Much as Women Stress About Their Eggs.”

I love this article because the hypothetical man at the beginning of the article lives his life much as I did in the very beginning of wondering if there was something wrong with me when we were trying to conceive. (Once we got to the actual diagnosis, eating the right foods felt more like arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.) And for this line: “Not only is John not real, the world I have just described does not exist.” In other words, while many (not all) women do a version of all the things listed at the beginning of the article, men do not.

Because, as the article points out, even though sperm are half the equation:

There is still no cohesive medical specialty devoted solely to men’s reproductive health, no recommendations that men have their reproductive organs examined regularly, no public health campaigns about the male biological clock, and no government labels warning men about the toxic effects of alcohol and drugs on sperm.

Go read the whole thing.

I have always been terrible with compartmentalization, and I chalked it up to the fact that everything was happening in my body. But maybe it’s also because I’ve been taught to pay attention to every twinge because the I have been taught to think about my body—from doctors to politicians to random stranger with opinions in the grocery store—nonstop. Until now when my body can no longer create a baby. Actually, scratch that. They’re going to keep regulating my body, even now. Because that’s what has always been done.

Last thought from Blue Ticket because we’ll soon get into spoiler-land. And, I promise, zero spoilers in these posts. But if you read the book and want to talk about it, I have plenty of other thoughts about the end.

On page 273, she reflects on two women she saw—one white ticket, one blue ticket—and the impulse to have a child when you can’t.

I wondered about the old woman in the bed and breakfast, and the woman I had seen at the swimming pool, serene in her childlessness the way you could be serene in your motherliness. They were a chorus, asking me, what do you even want it for? … To pathologize desire into flat compulsion reduces the possibilities of it. Which is not to say that I had not felt compulsion. But perhaps I was learning the difference, finally, between that and conviction … Call it kindness, finally, shown toward myself.

I love that. I love embracing a desire to reach for parenthood, even when it’s hard, as conviction rather than compulsion. As a kindness I’m showing myself by being true to what is in my heart.

I think so many times, our decisions are questioned. Decisions that are trying to help us reach what other people can do easily, and they’re weighted with judgment: we’re hysterical, obsessed, single-minded, jealous… compulsive. But we’re not. Or, as she says, that reduces the story to someone else’s judgment. We’re filled with conviction—whether we reach parenthood or not. Whether we reach it is not the point. The true story is how hard we work to be kind to ourselves.

Another spoiler-free, you-don’t-have-to-read-the-book-to-understand-this, Blue Ticket quote.

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On page 220, the narrator meets a white ticket woman (Valerie), and the exchange draws a parallel between how infertile women may see fertile women, and how mothers may see women without children.

She writes: “We tried to explain to Valerie that we were intrinsically wary because she had been found worthy all those years ago where we were somehow lacking.”

That was, for me, the feeling that separated me from women who were fertile. I was “intrinsically wary” because they could do what I couldn’t do. The book contains a system of judgment, but even without that in the real world, it feels like the universe stated what it thought of me.

Valerie responds:

I don’t see it like that, she said. If anything, I’m the one found lacking. All my life I’ve been told I can only be complete if I grow something inside of me and bring it into the world. Whereas you are whole and perfect as you are.

I loved that twist in perspective; the white ticket woman stating that she didn’t want her identity wrapped up in motherhood. She wanted to be enough on her own—a complete person—with or without a child.

I loved hearing both sides speaking to one another; unpacking everything they had been carrying in their heart.