Category — Uncategorized

Okay, yet another post (like the first one) inspired by Every Exquisite Thing.  I’ve finished the book by this point, and I mostly liked it.  At the very least, it has given me a lot to think about.  Once again, you don’t have to read the book to think about these posts.

On page 103, the author in the book (by which I mean the author of the book inside the book) emphatically states that they will not discuss his “failed” novel.  The main character responds that it wasn’t a failure, and the author asks why she thinks it “succeeded.”

“It’s my favorite novel. Alex’s, too. And this kid Oliver who Alex—”

“I know all about Oliver. Alex writes about him constantly. But is that the purpose of writing a novel—to be someone’s favorite novelist? Is that why we write or make art? Do you think that’s why I wrote that book? For you? You and Alex and Oliver didn’t even exist when I went mad for literature and sent that collection of desperate words to New York City. I didn’t write it for you. No, I certainly did not.” There was anger in his voice, which was not like Booker.

“For whom did you write it, then?” I asked.

He smiled and said, “You won’t get your answers that easily.”

In general, I agree with Booker, the author. He didn’t write the book for the people who became the fans of the book because those people didn’t even exist when he first wrote it.  Those people may see it as a success, but in Booker’s mind, there is another reason for writing his novel, and he is a failure when it comes to that reason.  He can’t be successful by this fan’s standards; he has to be successful by his own standards, his own reasons for writing.

It made me think about our blogs and how we deem them successful or not.  I don’t write my blog for you.  I mean, I’m glad you’re here, and I hope you keep reading.  I love that part of blogging — talking about stuff that appears on the screen — but even if you weren’t here, I would keep writing.

The reason I see my blog as a success is due to my reason for writing it: to take everything out of my head and make sense of it outside my brain.  To hear other people’s thoughts and see my words in a different way.  If I’m leaving behind things in my brain, I wouldn’t call it a success.  But I’m pretty good at vomiting out words right now, so… sure, chalking this up to a success.  That could always change in the future.

Other people may deem this space a success for other reasons, but I judge the success of Stirrup Queens on whether I’m hitting the mark when it comes to the reason why I write it.

So think about why you blog or write (or blogged or wrote in the past tense if you’ve stopped) and tell me if your work has been a success based on your reasons for blogging or writing.

I wonder if this post will make anyone start writing again who stopped when they realize maybe they were a success in the first place…

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to emotional immune systems since reading No Kidding in NZ’s post about her internal bad guys.  (How is that for convoluted?  I’m responding to a post that is a response to one of my posts.)

So we have our actual immune system that protects our bodies by fighting off disease-causing entities.  But then we also have an emotional immune system that protects our emotional health by fighting off negative-feeling entities.

Infertility (and all trauma) compromises our emotional immune system.

You know how when your actual immune system is compromised, your body can’t fight off simple infections and what is usually manageable becomes possibly deadly?  I think the same thing happens with our emotional immune systems.

When you have a robust emotional immune system, you can handle rude questions or friendship slights.  But when your emotional immune system is beaten down by a trauma such as infertility, you can’t fight off feelings or bounce back from moments as easily.  When your defenses are down — and infertility brings your defenses down — you get emotionally sick.  That could manifest as an emotional cold lingering much longer than it would if you were emotionally healthy or it could be a more frightening emotional illness.

I guess it helps me to think of it that way because just as we’d never say that someone with a compromised immune system is weak or they should just stop getting sick so damn much, it makes no sense to say those things to someone with a compromised emotional immune system.

And beyond that, it helps a person to be gentle with their own heart.  Be kind to yourself, will you?  Especially as we approach Mother’s Day.

Image: Stuart Webster via Flickr via Creative Commons license

Another post about Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick, and, no, you don’t need to have read the book to be able to understand this and have thoughts on the matter. Because today we’re talking about quitting.

Not quitting the book, though that may end up being someone’s answer. Just quitting. In general.

In the same scene in the coffeehouse, the author (remember, it’s a book about a book) asks the main character on page 18: “Don’t you ever feel like you want to quit doing something everyone else makes you feel like you’re supposed to keep doing? Didn’t you ever just simply want to… stop?”

And later: “What do you want to quit more than anything else in the world?”

I was drawn to the word “quit” because it’s very different from the word “stop.” We stop the car, bringing it from movement to non-movement. We don’t quit the car. But when we talk about stopping forward movement; changing direction in our life and stopping movement in one space in order to start movement in another, we call it quitting. Not stopping. Quitting.

Which has negative connotations associated with it. Quit a job. Quit on their marriage. Quit calling. Whereas pain stops. Sadness ceases. Stories conclude. Life ends.

Words matter.

I think those of us experiencing infertility know that. We hear the word “quit” quite often; both in terms of being admonished for stopping trying something and for not stopping trying something. And in both cases, the word “stop” is more accurate. You are stopping doing this so you can do that. Or you are not stopping doing this because it is not the right time to stop.

I can’t think of anything I want to quit, though there are plenty of things I want to stop — that I will stop doing because I always shed a few activities going into summer so we can pick up new ones in the fall. I’m not quitting these things; walking away in a huff. I’m just stepping away so I can try something new.

It’s like I reached a stop sign, I’m pausing, and then I’m going to turn left and start down a new road.

And there are things I want to stop because they don’t serve me in any way: fears, frustrations, and looping thoughts. But even these I want to stop, not quit. Maybe they deserve the word “quit;” but I still think about them in terms of stopping.

Do you want to stop anything?

Josh and I had to clean out our bathroom so the contractor could gut the space and make way for a new vanity.  The old vanity had chunks of paint missing from the time when I taped the drawers shut so the Wolvog would stop opening them as he crawled around the bathroom during my shower.  How was I to know that the tape would take the paint along with it when I finally peeled it away to put tot locks on the drawers?

We dug down into the dark recesses of the vanity, unearthing birth control pills.  Birth control pills, people.  These were not from treatments; in fact, they expired back in 2002.  Why did I keep them?  I don’t know.  Maybe because they were a tangible reminder of a different time period in life, a time period when I thought I needed birth control?

We threw out an expired peestick.  An unused peestick.  During the height of my addiction of urinating way too early, I went through several peesticks per cycle, and it felt like an insult to drop this one, unused peestick into the trash simply because the box said it expired in 2014.  (Please do not tell me that I could have still used it because I will go to the dump to get it back.)

There were the hotel soaps (you take them, too) and stretched-out ponytail holders and whimsical hair clips that I wore through college.  Numerous opened containers of Q-tips because we somehow always lose the box underneath the sink.  A cartoon Daredevil with a voice bubble saying, “Not in my bathroom.”  So many tweezers.  How did I end up with that many tweezers?

And then two things: the positive peestick and the faded hospital bracelet that I cut off my wrist and stuffed in a drawer when the twins came home.  The lines are still dark pink.  The words are entirely missing from the band.  Two ends of a journey I waited a long time to take.

I could have thrown them out.  I don’t need them; they serve no purpose.  But I slipped them into a box to pack away.  They mean something.  They’re just useless things.  They’re everything.

No spoilers unless you haven’t read the book.  In which case, sure, there are spoilers.  But really, you haven’t read the book AND you’re worried about Handmaid’s Tale spoilers?

We’re making our way through Hulu’s new Handmaid’s Tale series.  There have been small changes from the book to the screen, the most notable being the age of the wives.

The wives in the book are middle-aged to older women.  Serena Joy walks with a cane.  Offred grows up seeing her on television.  The commander is an older man, grey-haired.

But in the series, both are still in prime, baby-making years.  The wife is blond.  The commander young.  Their handmaid is their peer; not a much younger woman.  Offred is considered fertile because she had a child at one point.  Their places could have been reversed if the wife had been capable of bearing children.  If she had married a different man.

Which is what makes the theme of infertility that much more heartbreaking.

Infertility was part of the book, but it was always with the thought that the wives were past the age of possible fertility.  The sting of their inability to reproduce was still there, but it was muted from living with it for years.

On the screen, infertility becomes part of the current moment.  The wife is infertile, her handmaid is not.

The first episode contains the familiar Ceremony Day scene; Offred lying between the wife’s legs.  In the book, Serena Joy comes off as crotchety, kicking Offred out of the bedroom, almost as if she’s annoyed by the drama, a woman who was okay being child-free who now needs to participate in this government-sanctioned charade.  Whereas on the screen, it is a heartbreaking moment.  The wife is fighting back tears as she snarls at Offred to leave, and it is clear that jealousy — not indignation — is driving the words to come out of her mouth.

It made me side with the wife.

Because her tears felt so familiar, even if my own (and your own) tears have come from different situations.  No, I’ve never had to lie on a bed with another woman between my legs, but I have had to lie on a table while a doctor completed the task.  I know how family building feels when it doesn’t look anything like the family building fantasies of a childhood mind.

I identified more with the wife than with Offred.  Don’t get me wrong; I felt gutted for Offred, but my allegiance was with the wife who had to endure the monthly reminder — like all of us — that she couldn’t reproduce on her own.

I wonder if the shift in age is due to some horrible Hollywood bias against older women or something more heartfelt. Perhaps Margaret Atwood absorbed stories of infertility — knowingly or unknowingly — over the years, she tweaked this detail from page to screen to convey the emotional side of infertility for everyone who watched.