Category — Uncategorized

Carolyn Hax had a fascinating dilemma. An infertile woman wants to keep their infertility private, only sharing with a close friend or two and the therapist. Her husband wants to tell his parents and siblings, and wants her to tell her family. You can’t be in and out at the same time. Who gets to decide how open they are when it’s a problem shared by two people?

Carolyn gives a few suggestions for how to meet in the middle and find a solution that works for both people, but she ultimately gives the woman veto power since it’s happening in her body.

This is one of the first times I ever willingly dove into the comment section. When I looked, it already had over 1.7K comments. Yeah, you can say that people had big feelings about this one.

I’m totally curious what people think of Carolyn’s advice.

“At the school, she rarely experienced the feeling of being needed; she wanted that feeling, wanted the weight of responsibility.”

This article broke my heart because I could so deeply relate to Vivia despite the two of us leading very different lives. It’s the story of a woman with an intellectual disability whose only desire in life is to be a mother, but every path to parenthood seems closed to her. To place that enormous love somewhere, she got a realistic doll.

As she held the tiny body to her chest for the first time, Vivia felt a rush of maternal love. This was August 25, the day that would become her baby’s birthday. Vivia had never enjoyed being touched or hugged, but cuddling with the doll came easily.

The article goes on to talk about these realistic dolls:

The doll might help them grapple with an infertility diagnosis, a miscarriage, the death of a child, or an adult child leaving home. Although many women have benefited from Reborn dolls, the stigma around adult women playing with dolls remains exceptionally high … Because of the stigma, most Reborners treat their parenthood as a private, sometimes shameful affair. But Vivia wasn’t interested in keeping her relationship to Emma quiet. She was going to bring her doll into the public sphere.

And the line that made me cry: “Through Emma, I realized, Vivia was bringing her childlessness and disability into the open, and forcing strangers to confront it.”

It’s a beautiful, judgmental, realistic, and bittersweet article. It takes a while to read, but it’s worth the investment.

Josh and I sometimes walk in the evenings. We don’t keep it up all year because we’re so lazy. Like so lazy. But every once in a while, we pull our shit together and throw on a pair of sneakers and walk around the block. When the kids were little, we brought them along. When they grew up, we used those walks as a time to get them comfortable with staying alone. And now, they are a chance to talk without little ears listening to everything we say.

Those little ears seem to keep the exact same wakefulness hours as we do, giving us very little time to talk out things without someone interjecting, “Hey, what do you mean when you say…” outside the kitchen door.

Quartz had a post about the term “solvitur abulando,” which means “it is solved by walking.” Meaning, when you get moving, your brain also chugs along and helps you process emotions and problems that feel bulky and overwhelming while you’re sitting. And it’s totally true. I do feel better after a walk, at least, emotionally, even though I equally dislike being outdoors. But walking inside just doesn’t cut it. Except when I walk in place to see everything on Wuhu Island.

Which hasn’t happened in a long time. I feel like I need to go visit that place.

If I owned an enormous warehouse, I would convert it into an indoor beach track. Like it would be an indoor track, but I’d put sand around the track and a wave pool and even crabs scuttling across the floor. It would be awesome.

It’s the fourth of July tomorrow, which is always an interesting time in DC and even a more interesting time during election season. We don’t go downtown anymore for the fireworks because it takes so long to get off the Mall afterward. I feel like fireworks in DC are either for the young or the well-connected who have access to a rooftop deck. Those of us who are not young and don’t do well in big crowds and do not have access to a shmancy rooftop deck are better off sticking to small town activities.

I am excited because an old friend is coming for the fourth next year. So… yeah… 365 days from now, but still.

For everyone outside the US, happy Thursday. For everyone from or in the US, happy fourth. Hope you have something good planned.

I wrote about this last week, and thought I’d present the other side. People who don’t appreciate finding themselves (or aspects of their life) in someone else’s book. The New Yorker covered this recently, too:

I realized that the real world is full of people who, presumably, have feelings about being appropriated for someone else’s run at the Times best-seller list … When an author plants a made-up character in a novel, that character gains breath, agency, life. But when an author plants a real person in a novel, she metes out a kind of death … Is moving someone down the existence scale from “human person” to “character” anything like murder? Is moving someone up the scale anything like art?

Whoa.

As in, by fictionalizing, you flatten the person, you turn them into a character which is always two-dimensional (or maybe three-dimensional at best) whereas a human is four-dimensional and super-complex.

The article is about Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, which was on my TBR list, as well as the author’s own experience finding herself in the pages of someone’s book, her life fictionalized. It begs the question: who owns a story?

The person who lived it? The person who observed it? The person who heard about it? If I heard your story and feel moved by it, can I write about how I feel (and by default, tell your story)? Is it only your story if you’re the only one in it? Once there is a second person in the story, do you no longer own the whole thing?

Big questions without clear answers.