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One reason that I really loved Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth is that it inadvertently explains infertility. Maybe not inadvertently—I know nothing about Roth and perhaps she struggled with infertility—but I’m assuming inadvertently. This post contains zero spoilers for the book.

Chosen Ones has a bunch of “primary sources” that you wade through explaining how magic works. They’re tucked between sections of the plot, and you need to read them to understand what is happening in the story. On page 170, there is an excerpt from a fictional book about magic:

However, I would argue that while intent is a component of a magical act, and certainly a significant one, it is not the essence of what distinguishes a magical act from a mundane one. Any man with a hammer can intend to hit a nail—that itself is not magic, and a siphon is no hammer. Instead, it is the argument of this text that the essence of a magical act is what a person wants. Or, to be more specific, what a person wants that is not easily achieved with the realm of the mundane. Desiring that a nail sink into a board is a want, but it is not magic. Wanting the boards to hold together with no nail at all—that is magic. In other words, for something to be magic, it must be an impossible want.

The excerpt continues on page 365:

What, then, is a desire? We may begin by stating what it is not. A desire is not a whim. It is not an idle wish concocted on a sunny afternoon. A desire is a profound want, a deep and abiding craving that cannot be denied. It is for this reason that it is impossible to force someone to perform an act of magic one does not truly wish to do. The magic requires desire, and a desire cannot be threatened or manipulated into being.

That is how infertility felt to me. Like “a deep and abiding craving that cannot be denied.” That desire to build a family couldn’t be forced into being by someone else. But just as it couldn’t be forced into being, it also couldn’t be forced out of existence because of circumstances or obstacles. It couldn’t even be forced out of existence when we finished actively family building.

Building a family beyond the two of us felt like an impossible want. It was almost entirely outside my control. I could set up circumstances where it could happen, but month after month it didn’t. And when it did, it wasn’t an accomplishment; the result of a hammer hitting a nail and a nail behaving as it should after a hammer hits it. It was outside the “realm of the mundane.”

And maybe that is why infertility is so hard to resolve. Why it still lingers even after you’re finished engaging in the act of family building. It sticks with you because it is something deeper than intent. It is an impossible want that cannot be denied, and it changes you once you’ve experienced it.

There is a grandmother pageant every year in New York. It actually sounds like a sweet event, celebrating elderly ladies. They make a chicken soup, they wear a national costume, and they perform a talent. I read the article because I miss my grandmother, and it seemed like the type of article I would have brought up during a visit.

Towards the bottom of the article, there’s a paragraph I kept re-reading.

The MC introduces each grandmother by reading a short bio she has provided. There is an almost willful omission of some fairly important information in these introductions. For example, in lieu of something as significant as “She survived the Holocaust,” Mara Goldshtein prefers “Mara has two granddaughters and loves to read and dance.” They lead with their passions, not with their hardships.

What they include, of course, is their choice. It’s their bio. That’s the best part about a bio: you hopefully get to write your own and decide which facts about you are important to tell others about and which ones can be tucked away. So I guess I support it as long as tucking away hardships is not celebrated. That someone who wishes to lead with “She survived the Holocaust” feels encouraged as much as someone who wants to talk about reading and dancing. Maybe it worried me because it sounded like positivity gone awry?

Or maybe I’ll see that paragraph through entirely different eyes when I’m competing in the 2060 Your Highness Grandmother pageant. Not as a grandmother, mind you. But as a bad-ass gate crasher, still in my combat boots, shrieking, “Old ladies rule!”

I recently read a book with my cousin for our book club of two. I want to talk about why I don’t think it should have been published, but I don’t want to name the book. Of course, if you want to know the book, send me an email because I’m happy to tell you. But I (1) don’t want to ruin it for someone who doesn’t feel the same way I do and (2) I don’t want to shame the author because I believe she proves my point by repeating a myth that she probably learned from reading books.

So two things. (Well, there are more things, but these are the two big things.)

The first reason is the less problematic but annoying trope that keeps popping up in books. It’s the modern-day version of “the butler did it.” If there is a woman who is behaving erratically or irrationally or rudely, she is, without a doubt, infertile. And if there is a perfectly nice infertile woman in a novel, she is—without fail—the murderer. And she murders because of her baby obsession. The infertile woman has become the new Chekhovian gun. If you introduce an infertile woman in the first act, she needs to murder someone by the third.

In this book, it is particularly offensive because the character is described as “obsessed” simply because she is struggling with infertility. Other characters trying to build their family are presented as strong and maternal. An infertile woman doing the same thing is “on a mission for a baby… It’s like she’s possessed.”

The second reason is much more problematic, and it is the real reason I think this book shouldn’t have been published in the first place. The first reason is annoying. The second reason is dangerous.

People reading fiction knowing it’s not fact, but it also informs their understanding of the world. Think about all the cultures or professions or places you’ve learned about—not from a textbook but through fiction.

So in this book, a woman has a child out of wedlock. The man she marries (while the child is a baby) decides to present himself as the child’s father because he just loves him so much, and the mother goes along with this idea, keeping the child’s history a secret from the child.

There are no consequences to this decision. The decision is not presented in the book and then used later to show why humans have a right to know their history and how detrimental it can be to withhold adoption information from a child. The child never learns their origin story, and the family never grapples with destroyed trust. Instead, his parents die—saints who just loved their son to bits—and the book ends with no comment on this myth. It never loops back and explains that parents shouldn’t pretend adoption never happened.

And so another book is out there, perpetuating this myth. Which, by the way, had zero impact on the plot. It didn’t need to be there and didn’t move the story forward. Such a frustrating read.

I love this.

As in, I don’t take Internet quizzes, but I finally took this one, throwing caution to the wind. If the New York Public Library now knows how I feel about the Lord of the Rings books, so be it. I wanted to know which Dewey Decimal number I am.

I am 398.2: Fairy tales

It says: “Fairy tales may be fictional, but they’re kept in the 300s because they represent, and teach us about, the cultures they come from. You like a deep dive, dear reader, and you’re not afraid to use creative means to get there. Books in your category range from The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm to Town Mouse, Country Mouse by Jan Brett.”

Swoon.

Which Dewey Decimal number are you?

I started writing this post on Friday, and hit “publish” instead of save when I was pausing midway because we had to leave. I finished it up this morning. An explanation in case you saw the title come through on Friday.

A friend linked to an article that gave me a glimmer of hope and provided an answer for the Wolvog when he lamented that the problems in America feel too overwhelmingly big and it is daunting to turn the figurative ship. Well, yes. But we try anyway.

The BBC article starts out: “Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.” It goes on to list moments when a group of people created change through nonviolent action. The examples are a little different because they apply the 3.5% rule to situations such as the toppling of a single dictator vs. changing a mentality, but the article continues to look at how nonviolent protests get the job done.

Overall, nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns: they led to political change 53% of the time compared to 26% for the violent protests. This was partly the result of strength in numbers.

People are more willing to join something nonviolent than violent—on average (from the events studied) four times more likely. More people = more disruption to everyday life = more people paying attention to the cause = more people thinking about where they stand = actual change.

The researcher of the paper states: “There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event.”

So how many people would that be in the US? “It would involve 11 million citizens – more than the total population of New York City.”

11 million people. Yes, I get that it sounds like a lot, but I also feel strangely hopeful that there are 11 million people out there willing to actively participate. 11 million people out there who actively support reform initiatives. They’re willing to go to the polls and encourage other people to vote in representatives who will work to dismantle systemic racism in this country.

We took the twins to a socially-distant, masks-on protest down 16th Street in DC on Friday. People honked in support or had tears streaming as they drove down the road. It was impossible to not have hope (even knowing the history of hope) when you saw so many people coming out and lining the streets (10 feet apart!) to say Black Lives Matter.

And if we can get 3.5% of people actively caring and working towards a goal, we can accomplish a step in the right direction.