Category — Uncategorized

Sorry, more Blue Ticket questions. I promise I’ll never post spoilers, and you don’t really need to read the book to have thoughts on these quotes.

*******

Some infertility has a known diagnosis. Some infertility falls into the unexplained. When infertility is a surprise—when you’ve gone through life thinking you would be able to procreate and then discover you can’t—there is a “why me” element to it.

I mean, the simple response is also “why not me?” No one deserves infertility. Like most things in life, it’s doled out randomly. Our uterus works or it doesn’t. It was a good egg or it wasn’t. The sperm found its way to the goal or it didn’t.

On page 185, the narrator lies in bed, thinking about her blue ticket diagnosis:

As I lay there I thought about what the lottery might have seen or not-seem inside me. What had been recorded and observed and commented upon for my whole life; the times I refused to play, or pulled someone’s hair, or buried dolls in the dirt.

In the book, you only have twelve or so years for the universe to determine whether you’re given a blue or white ticket. But infertility comes after twenty or thirty years of choices. It was very hard for me to not let my brain go to that place: Why was I being chosen for this? What had I done or not done that put me in this situation?

And if it’s this hard, why don’t I stop? Why don’t I accept it rather than fight against it?

A few pages later, on page 189, she answers that.

Because it seemed like everything was telling me it was the right thing to do. Every cell in my body … Having a child is both the most rational and irrational decision possible, in this world. This fucking awful, beautiful world, which I can’t stop loving, though I have considered it, I have evaluated and counted the ways.

The most rational and irrational decision to fight against those clear signs from your body and decide to forge ahead anyway, without knowing how it will turn out.

Yet again, a thought that came up while reading Blue Ticket.

We are taught to be suspect of strangers, right? Don’t talk to strangers. Stranger Danger. But…

Babies are strangers. We don’t know them until we actually know them. But we’re not scared of them. I mean, we’re partly not scared because the most they can do is wail and maybe gum our arm. It’s hard to be scared of something that helpless. Yet… I’m terrified of crickets, so size and lack of danger isn’t really an argument.

On page 174, a character (let’s call her X) is speaking with another character (let’s call her Y). Both are pregnant.

Y asks, “Do you ever think what the baby will be like?” The conversation that follow:

I have no frame of reference, I said.

They are two strangers coming to meet us, she said. Are you ever afraid about that?

I am now, I said.

I picture them not as babies but as two tall, mysterious figures walking towards us from a moon-like landscape.

Isn’t it sort of odd with babies? I was scared of my own ability to take care of the twins. I was scared of my own ability to get through the day while keeping them nourished and stimulated and happy. But I was never scared of them, even though I’m terrified of many smaller things including snakes, mice, and bugs.

So why aren’t we scared of babies?

Another one of many thoughts that came while reading Blue Ticket.

So we have roads-not-taken that we know about, and we mourn those lost dreams or imagined futures. But Blue Ticket brings up the idea of the unimagined future. On page 92, she writes:

Even though I had thought often about becoming a doctor, becoming an emissary had never crossed my mind. There were some futures I had never imagined for myself. But then not so long ago this would have been one of them, too.

Emissaries are the government officers who keep the system in place, and the doctors—in this case—are psychiatrists. So she imagined and rejected becoming a psychiatrist—something she could have done—though looks back wistfully on the thought as she realizes while looking at an emissary that she never considered becoming one. She can’t mourn or regret what she never considered in the first place until she considers it.

We can only mourn the imagined futures, not the unimagined ones, so they hold no power, no ability to bother us or get under our skin.

It’s a meditation on wants and how those wants feed our sadness; a musing on the Buddhist Four Noble Truths and the lack of suffering when our mind hasn’t latched onto wanting a particular future.

Except once our mind latches onto a particular want how do you release it if you don’t fulfill it when the mind mourns our unlived lives? Of course, yes, the answer could be the Eightfold Path, but I put that frame of Buddhism around it. The reality is so much harder; releasing our imagined lives and accepting that we have an equal amount of unmourned, unimagined lives diluting that larger sadness.

Another thought from Blue Ticket, this time about miscarriage. (So skip if you need to skip.)

A blue-ticket woman gets pregnant and frets when she sees blood in the toilet paper. After the blood dries up within the same paragraph, she talks about her fears with her doctor on page 81: “So it could end at any moment… How am I supposed to cope with that?”

The doctor responds: “Yet lots of white-ticket women manage all the time, he said. Interesting.”

The blue-ticket women, in some ways, feel more akin to infertile women. A pregnancy when you have a blue ticket is different; it’s unexpected. It’s hard to achieve. The stakes are the same, but they somehow feel higher.

Whereas white-ticket women expect to get pregnant, and they expect to get pregnant again in the event that they miscarry. The loss is the same, the devastation is the same, except…

Except I kept thinking about the stakes. If you have $1000 and you lose $800, you’re left with only $200 and limited options. How long can you feed and shelter yourself with only $200? But if you have $100,000 and you lose $800, you’ve lost the same amount, but you’ll see that loss through a different lens. It may be just as frustrating or sad in the moment, but it’s also what comes next. Do you assume you have options or do you assume (or actually have) no/limited options?

Of course, multiple miscarriages make all theoretical fertile women turn into infertile women, so fertility isn’t a constant (like having $100,000) but rather an assumption until proven otherwise.

But the book raises the question: Is miscarriage different depending on circumstances?

The Handmaid’s Tale is the first e-book I ever purchased. I read it constantly, and the idea of always having it with me felt like the best use of my iPod space. It holds a spot in my top five books of all time, so it’s no small thing to say that Sophie Mackintosh’s Blue Ticket is equally worthy of inner circle space. That is, if you get all the way to the end. Unlike The Handmaid’s Tale which answers all questions the moment you may have them, Blue Ticket waits to answer all of your questions until the last page. But once answered, it’s a perfect story.

Think of it as The Handmaid’s Tale 2.0: What if instead of being told you must try to have a child, you were told that you were not allowed to try to have a child?

So the basic premise: When you get your period, you go to a centralized office where you either get a white ticket (which means you are allowed to have a child) or a blue ticket (which means you are not allowed to have a child). We don’t know a lot about what happens to the white ticket girls next, but the blue ticket girls are outfitted with an IUD and sent on their way to start their adult life. They can do anything they want to do except have a child. That’s their only restriction. And in society, there is no benefit to having a child except experiencing that relationship. Yet some white ticket women don’t want parenthood. And some blue ticket women suddenly find themselves coveting a child.

You don’t need to read the book to have feelings on some of the thoughts I had reading the book. And I promise that my questions will not ruin any part of the book.

The first thought is unpacking who/what generates the desire to become a mother. Is it something biological (perpetuate the species), something emotional (love), or something societal? Are we led into family building because of pressure from family or being raised to see that as the norm or promised that it will be an exciting stage of life or feeling like you can’t achieve certain things without having a partner and child?

On page 22, she unpacks the meaning of a blue ticket. It’s relief that the decision is made for you. It’s an unbiased system that finds you unmotherly. It’s a belief that you are enough as you are and do not need a child to make you better/different. It is an understanding that your life is important and shouldn’t be risked by something as dangerous as birth. She feels differently about her judgment every time she thinks about it.

On page 23 she writes,

Sometimes I became aware that there was somewhere I could not go. And I wanted to go there. Who wouldn’t, when told it was impossible? Motherhood was the last perversion; otherwise known as loving and being loved. It was the only one closed off to me. I want. There was a purity to that feeling that other sensations lacked, a simplicity, even as it remained the most complicated thing in the world.

In other words, the decision is made for you, but your brain still makes a decision anyway; to accept the decision bestowed on you or to want something different.

I’ve tried to mentally unpack this over the years: did the impulse to build a family come internally or externally or a combination of both? I still haven’t found a good answer.

Your thoughts?