Category — Uncategorized

NIAW and Mother’s Day always kick off a string of infertility-related pieces across the internet. Two recent ones that caught my eye: Glamour ran a piece by a woman explaining why she was finally speaking up about her five miscarriages. She writes: “Typing all of this is excruciating and honestly a bit surreal, like I’m talking about someone else’s life. But I think you should know the whole story.”

It is brutally honest. There was so much that I related to in its rawness:

Do you know how many times in four months—let alone four days, four hours even—a woman who wants to be pregnant counts the moments until she could possibly be pregnant again? Until she can start yet another round of IVF? The counting terrorized me. But it also made me feel oddly better, as though I was actually in control of something when my body was making it clear, miscarriage after miscarriage, that I wasn’t. Everything about the baby-making process is numbers.

Yes.

Go read the whole thing.

And then Lifehacker had a piece about supporting someone through infertility. Most of it was sound, standard advice. One piece that caught my eye was asking the person how often they wanted you to check in. They recommended texting on appointment days (that would have made me feel overwhelmed AND loved at the same time), but being frank in asking how to best talk about it at other times. Again, jump into the advice and see what you think.

It is — at least in the United States — Mother’s Day. My friend posted this New Yorker essay on Facebook, and it so perfectly captures the feelings we may have about this day. It’s about losing your mother, but I think many of the words also work for those whose children aren’t here:

It’s nothing, I tell myself. A day for advertisers. So I shrug off the sales and the offers, the cards and the flowers. I press delete. Still, I now mark Mother’s Day on my private calendar of grief. Anyone who has experienced a loss must have one of those.

Private calendar of grief. The days that mean something only to you, mixed in with the days that you acknowledge in a very different way from the rest of the crowd.

And this moment:

Every now and then, I try to recall what went through my mind as I was standing in that hallway, crying my heart out. (And if you think that the cliché can’t be real—well, then, you’re lucky.)

Even different kinds of loss sometimes hold moments in common.

*******

I lucked out at the library. I walked in on Wednesday, and Normal People by Sally Rooney was on the new release shelf. I had been waiting for it to come out for months. When I finally thought to put my name down on the hold list at the library, I was number 300-something on the list, and that was weeks before the release. Such anticipation.

So I’ll read today. I’ll buy coffee; grind it at the store. I’ll celebrate my mother — I am so lucky that I have her in my life.

Sending good thoughts to anyone who is having a hard day today. May you find time to slip into the library. Find the right book waiting for you on the shelf.

“Are you working on a book right now?”

No, I’m not working on a book right now. Not in the truest sense of the word. I have book ideas. I have pages that I wrote months or years ago that I say I’m going to return to and finish. I have the impulse to write and no time to work on my own stuff.

I get asked that question a lot when I’m playing life-catch-up with someone. The question makes sense. Once upon a time, I wrote books. And then I stopped writing books. I got other work that interested me more in the moment, and I went down that road. And those roads led to different roads, taking me farther and farther from book writing until it was something I was looking at from a distance, or, more honestly, looking at in photographs because it was so far behind me that I couldn’t see it anymore.

I feel guilty when I get the question because it feels like other people see that work as part of my identity. So it means that I’m not being Melissa anymore. Whereas I see myself as Melissa, and right now she’s doing X and a while ago she was doing Y, and before that, she was doing Z. But sometimes I wonder if that’s quite right.

I wish I was writing. Maybe that’s the theme for the week: I miss what I used to do. Because what I used to do was part of who I was. So if I’m not doing those things anymore, then I’m not really the same person anymore. Except I am. Or people change, but at the core, I’m still myself.

It’s this thing: I add new things, but I still want to hold on to all the old things. But if I never shed activities or interests or work projects, I won’t keep moving forward. And at the same time, I wonder if I can still call myself a book writer if I’m not actively writing books. And I miss calling myself a book writer, even if that work doesn’t excite me as much as what I’m doing in the moment.

I always think about writers who take years — decades — to write another book. In between, I still think of them as a writer, even if they’re not publishing new work in the interim. Maybe that’s where I am, the interim between books. Or not. I guess I’ll need to wait and see.

So… to return to the post on Sunday… blogging has changed but bloggers have changed, too. I was circumspect from the get-go — the twins were people in MY story vs. being the focus of my story — but I used to go through my day and sometimes internally note, “I am so going to blog that.”

A case in point: the potato chip factory tour fiasco. I knew while we still on the road that the story was going to end up on my blog. It captured one of my many many many spectacular moments of not-thinking. As we were living the day, I was noting, “this is so us.” I wanted to remember it. I wanted other people to know it because I felt like it captured our family: Josh ever patient, the ChickieNob having an existential crisis, the agreeable Wolvog happy if potato chips were involved, and Melissa exuberantly not-planning a factory tour.

There were other moments like that, too. The tooth fairy fiasco and the talk about evolution; times where I thought as the moment unfolded: I am so going to blog this. Or non-twin moments. When I got to be the press pool note taker. I knew as I was living the moment that I would end up writing about it.

I even had a t-shirt that I got at BlogHer one year that said, “I am so going to blog this.” It was totally see-through. It was immediately relegated to workout clothes.

The point I’m making is that I don’t go through my day thinking those words anymore. It’s not that exciting or funny things don’t happen. It’s just that the impulse isn’t there. The twins say funny things all the time. I do interesting things sometimes. And sometimes as things are happening, I have a vague flutter in the back of my head: Should I write about this? And then the internal answer: Maybe? Would anyone else find it funny? Do I even have time?

And then the moment passes.

I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only person who stopped thinking, “I’m so going to blog this.” Life is still just as full. It just doesn’t seem quite as story-worthy; either because it’s just one more example of something I’ve already said before or because I’ve entered a different stage in life. Not everything gets captured in the word net, thrown up on the blog for posterity.

I started getting emails on Friday about Vox, and Turia sent along an article about Heather Armstrong that contained a sentence about me in the middle. It sent me on a bizarre trip down memory lane, which had already started recently because some longtime DC bloggers formed a group on Facebook for a reunion of sorts.

The twins and I were reading through old posts on my blog, and I was trying to explain to them how different blogging was back then. It was a lot easier because everyone pretty much knew each other. It was rare for someone to say, “Did you see what so-and-so wrote?” and have no clue what so-and-so wrote. I would go to BlogHer and get to see everyone I conversed with on the Internet face-to-face. Now, it would be more likely that I’d find familiar faces in the larger crowd but not be familiar with most people in the room. Back then, I could write anyone with a question, even if we weren’t friends, because we all knew of each other even if we weren’t close with each other. It wasn’t six degrees of separation — at most it was one or two.

And a lot harder because it was all about writing, and if that wasn’t your medium, it was harder to connect with people. Social media has made it so longform writers and shortform writers, video creators, photographers, cartoonists… everyone has a way into the conversation. And the tools… well… frankly the tools were wonky and frustrating. Do you remember when my blogroll was on my sidebar, and it took two or three minutes for the webpage to load?

What I miss is how we used to gather together. The topic of blog carnivals came up recently, and I miss things like that; big internet projects that brought people together, such as IComLeavWe or the Virtual Lushary, but even more the events that crossed niche lines and brought the internet together like Delurking Week at the beginning of January.

I am still in touch with a large chunk of people from that era — many of us are still writing our blogs regularly — and the rest are on Facebook or email. But it’s different from that time when everyone would hang out on each other’s blogs, talking in the comment section, picking apart our lives or recording moments.