Category — Uncategorized

As a group, we have well-covered our eternal pet peeve: variations on the “are you going to have children” question.  Either you are trying and the question is salt in the wound, or you have stopped family building and the question asker seems unable to accept your answer.  It is really really really annoying to get that question — I KNOW — but I still need to vent about this answer:

The celebrity who states that they don’t know because “they haven’t thought about it.”

Really?

You’re 42 years old, but the idea of children has never crossed your mind?  You know what has never crossed my mind until this moment while trying to think up an example?  biathlon.  No one has ever asked me whether or not I plan on taking up biathlon in this lifetime, so I’ve never thought about it.

(The answer, by the way, is no, since I have thought about it in writing out this question.)

But saying that it hadn’t even occurred to the person whether or not they want to have kids is disingenuous because EVERYONE ASKS THAT QUESTION.  And pretending they don’t makes people believe they’re posing an original thought.  Has Melissa ever considered children?  I’m sure she hasn’t.  Let’s ask her so she doesn’t forget to consider this enormous idea.

I encounter this “never thought about it” answer at least once in every issue of People magazine.  People asks the celebrity if they’re planning on having children, and the celebrity answers, “Oh… wow… I don’t know.  I’ve never thought about it.  I guess we’ll have to see if it happens because I have zero clue how one goes about building a family.  And now I need to forget you even asked this question in order to reset so I can state that I’ve never thought about it the next time an interviewer poses this question.”

It would be great if the celebrity said, “That question has nothing to do with my work on the screen, so I’m going to refrain from giving an answer.”  Or, “Yes, we’re trying but we’re having a really hard time with family building.”  Or, “You know, we thought about it and we decided we didn’t want to parent.”  Or, “We tried to build a family and it didn’t work out, so now we’re doing this project instead.”  Anything EXCEPT: “Huh… I haven’t thought about babies.  Ever.”

You’ve thought about it, liar.  You know how I know that you’ve thought about it?  Because everyone asks you that freakin’ questions ALL THE TIME.  And then it becomes like that thought experiment where you’re told not to think about the elephant.  All you can do is think about the elephant because other people keep bringing it up.

Everyone, please stop asking this question.  I promise you, no one has ever hit the end of their life and thought, “Oh crap, I wish someone had brought it up because I never considered the subject.”

I am terrible with languages.  I know that sounds strange since I have a translation degree, but my brain moves like a seven-year-old computer; still functioning but annoyingly slow.

I am helping the twins prepare for their B’nai Mitzvah by translating their Torah portion with them, going through the etymology of each word and how they’re connected to other words.  We sit at the kitchen table with five dictionaries fanning out across the table.  It is painful watching me translate.  Once upon a time, I skipped through short stories, nimbly transforming them into English.  We now focus on maybe three words per day.

It’s their work, but because they’re still learning this, it’s also my work.

They’re starting French in the fall.  I’m also supposed to help them with that, so I downloaded a language app so I can review intro level French.  They’re also using the app, absorbing all the vocabulary and spitting it back out at me while I’m trying to chop lettuce for a salad.  My brain spins like the cursor on the computer, buffering buffering buffering, trying to remember conjugations so I don’t tell them the wrong thing.

I am dreading being the person linguistically in charge when we travel.  I’m mostly fine reading French.  But people expect you to speak it when you enter their country.  They don’t want to help you by writing out everything they’re saying so you can read it from a piece of paper, and then wait until you write back.  I’ve always been terrible with organizing my thoughts verbally, whether in English, Hebrew, or French.  It doesn’t help that I haven’t used two of those languages in the last 20 years.

It is hard to switch back and forth between three languages in one day when your brain has so little RAM.  My brain is like a computer that still has a slot for floppy discs.  That has a dusty modem on the side that sputters to life, tying up the phone line.  That is my brain.

Wish me luck.

This is it.  The last post about Matthew Quick’s book, Every Exquisite Thing. You have to be impressed by a single book that has generated 8 blog posts. (You can find the other ones here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)  As always, you don’t have to read the book to follow these posts and have an opinion because I’m using the book as a springboard to other mental spaces.  But it makes a damn fine beach read.

There are times in your life when you feel like you’ve met everyone.  I rationally know that there are thousands of people around me — right here in this town — that I don’t know, but… it also feels like I rarely connect with new people.

The same goes with interests.  It feels like I’ve already established all of my interests, even though rationally I know that I can scroll back through the blog and see things like video game genres or guitar lessons — interests that were new at one point or another.

There is always a chance that a new friendship or interest or opportunity will pop up on any given day.  Which is why I appreciated this sentiment from the book, and it feels like a perfect end point to all the navel-gazing.

On page 253, Nanette asks, “Is there anyone worth admiring in the world? Or does everyone let you down eventually?”

She receives an answer on page 254 from her therapist:

There are seven billion people in the world, and you have only experienced twenty thousand at the most. And those twenty thousand were fairly homogenous. Your experiences with people have been largely dictated by your parents’ choices. The neighborhood in which they chose to purchase a house. Where they sent you to school. And maybe those choices weren’t the best for you. Maybe you don’t fit in where you are now. But you still managed to survive four years of high school and have a few meaningful experiences along the way. There are seven billion other people out there. Seven billion. Are you really pessimistic enough to believe that you wouldn’t get along with any of them?

I was going to include this in the Roundup, but the post needed its own breathing space.  So think of this like the Roundup-lite: one really thought-provoking post on where sadness meets grief.

Inexplicably Missing has a post about invisible grief which brought up a thought-provoking idea that I’ve been chewing on all week.  She writes, “the grief may be unnecessary because I don’t even know if I am supposed to be grieving, because maybe our missing child will miraculously show up one day.”

As I asked in her comment section, is grief something we should wait to feel, separating it from sadness?

Like is grief something we only feel after we definitively know something, or can we feel grief before we know the “end point”?  For instance, it is grief when we know a person is dying, but it isn’t grief when we’re sad because someone is seriously ill.  Isn’t it partially sadness because we’re feeling the bad news but we also have hope?  When there is no hope — when we definitively know — isn’t that when it moves from sadness to grief?

You can certainly grieve points in a journey.  You can grieve that infertility diagnosis (but only after you have one in hand?  Is it grief when you start suspecting something is wrong?) or the end of a cycle.  But is everything else sadness?

Is there a difference?  I personally don’t use sadness and grief interchangeably; I apply them to two very different situations.  But there is this fade point between the two, where sadness passes into grief or grief moves into sadness.

What do you think?

It occurred to me this morning that many years ago, there was a thriving male blogger population.  There was Eric and Max and the DI-Dads.  There was Smarshy with his own bag of ass.  There was Fertile Frank, XBox4NappyRash, and Elm City Dad.  They weren’t guest posting on their wife’s blog or splitting the writing duties with a partner.  They were bloggers, on their own, full stop.

I guess I thought about them because Father’s Day is coming up.  Actually, I think I thought about them because Julie from A Little Pregnant was in my dream last night.  Not that Julie has anything to do with male bloggers.

Anyway, there are a lot of posts in the ALI community right before and during and after Mother’s Day about the difficulty of that Hallmark holiday.  But I rarely see a Father’s Day post.  The men who used to write about it are gone.

I’m still friends with Eric on Facebook (hi, Eric!).  Max died many years ago.  And the rest of the boys drifted away from blogging.  Some stated they were shutting their blog — I remember one writing that his wife was uncomfortable that he was writing about IVF — but most just stopped updating.  And then no one came to fill those missing slots.

Or maybe they did and I just haven’t found them.  Maybe they’re out there, a new, connected mass of male infertility and loss bloggers, all writing about their experiences.  They don’t know about me, and I don’t know about them.

I kind of like that idea, similar to the concept that in other solar systems, there are planets just like earth in their own Goldilocks zone.  We don’t know them, and they don’t know us.  But we both move in our respective orbits, little rocky balls floating in the sky, teaming with life.

Do you guys remember the male infertility bloggers?  Are you in touch with any of them?

P.S. Speaking of trips down memory lane, I went on DI Dad to see if he still had up Max’s Don’t Be a Wanker badge, and I saw the badge from the 2008 IF Film Festival!  Which led me to Cyclesista.  Do you guys remember Cyclesista?  I’m really down a wormhole this morning…