Category — Uncategorized

I read a lot of childfree after infertility blogs; some because they’ve become off-blog friends and I’m reading their space just to keep up with their life, and others because they’re interesting.  But in almost all the cases, I started reading because I think childfree after infertility blogs provide something unique that often gets lost on a difficult family building journey: That we have an entire life.

Meaning that as much as certain aspects of life take over our mental space for certain periods of time, all people are so much more than one aspect of their life.  That we all have hobbies we enjoy or ideas we’re contributing to the world.

The kids are a big part of my life, but they’re not the only thing.  There are books to be written and a husband to connect with and video games to be played and comic books to be read.  A whole life.

Sometimes we forget that.  It’s easy to forget that.  Infertility is huge.  It blots out everything else in the landscape.  It takes over your schedule and forces itself to be reckoned with on a daily basis, either through monitoring with treatments or waiting for an agency phone call or navigating a baby-filled world.  Loss is huge.  It makes you feel like you’re drowning.  There is no protocol for grief, no set of steps you can follow to clear up grief like an ear infection.

Each childfree after infertility blogger is at a different stage in their journey, and beyond time as a factor, view the world in different ways.  But I really appreciate the bloggers who write about the world beyond family building.  They point out that, yes, there is grief from time to time — of course there is — but there is also travel and books and relationships and mentoring and craft projects and cooking and… a life.

Their words force the reader to take a look at their own life and check in on whether they’ve let one aspect of life grow too large and overwhelm the rest.  We all need to do this; it’s not unique to family building or parenting or non-parenting.  We all need to look at our life with a critical eye and ask ourselves,

• Am I doing things that make me happy?
• Am I spending time with people who make me happy?
• Am I living the life I want to be living vs. the one I think looks good to the outside world?
• Have I followed my bliss, or am I living someone else’s expectations?

And if not, why.  Why am I waiting?

Really, why am I waiting?  Because this is it.  This is the only life I’m going to get, and I can either live it apologizing for my likes and dislikes, my interests and wants, my grief and upsets, or I can take the whole of it, even if it’s messy and hard to hold, and throw myself into the things that spark my interest.

So, thank you, childfree after infertility bloggers, for being the voice that reminds us that a life consists of many different interests and important people.  Each life valid and unique.  And rather than try to put someone else’s life down, we should spend our energy nodding at each other’s lives and saying, “Your life looks awesome.  Check out mine, too.  And then once we’re done reading, let’s each go back to enjoying these lives we’ve built.”

Josh and I have been decluttering, in fact we scheduled various decluttering days on the calendar.  For instance, dedicate a day to decluttering clothing.  Get the whole family involved in the process.  Donate the clothing at the end of the day.  Job well done.

Except that when life feels chaotic or unsettled, I have a tendency to hold tighter to things.  I am like the squirrels who have sex in my backyard by the window, by which I mean that I like to store things on the off-chance that life goes to hell and I need them in the future.  Like the aforementioned clothing.  No, I’m not wearing that Nordic-themed sweater anymore, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t in the future if we are struggling to make ends meet and I can’t buy new clothes.  (Who am I kidding?  I never buy new clothes.  I am allergic to clothing shopping; it makes me itchy.  The only clothing item I acquire are t-shirts and a new pair of jeans — always the exact same kind — whenever an old pair of jeans get holes in the knees.)

All I can think is, “It’s mine.”

And then I think about the money wasted by purchasing said clothing and not wearing it enough.

And then I think again about how it’s mine, and somewhere inside me, I turn into Gollum with the Ring, stroking every item in my house while I call it precious.

Still, it needs to get done because we are suffocating in unused stuff taking up way too much space.

I didn’t read Kondo’s book because it doesn’t sound like my thing.  I am not into minimalism; I’m just into organized spaces.  In fact, in Googling things like, “Kondo, sad about giving my stuff away,” I came across the perfect article that helped me feel okay about my decluttering tactics.  It’s what I’ve been using to make decisions, be okay with letting go of certain things, and be okay with keeping stuff that doesn’t spark joy but makes my inner Gollum roar when I think about releasing it from my clutches.  We have space; we just need to use it better.

So, to sum up, my method for decluttering:

1. Take all the stuff out and place it on the bed. (That’s a good idea; thanks, Kondo.)
2. Put back the stuff I know I wore recently.
3. Put back the stuff that I feel very sentimental about.
4. Put back a few things that bring out my inner Gollum and be okay with that.
5. Take a photo of every item we’re donating. (I need to know in the future that something was given away and not misplaced.)
6. Place items in bag.
7. Donate items immediately.

That’s it.

What is your decluttering method?

This is a post for me as much as it is for you in case comment notification stops working again on my blog.  We had to try a lot of things to ultimately find the solution.

So I didn’t actually know there was a problem at first because some comments were coming through.  Maybe one in five.  I thought that commenting had slowed down.

My first indication that something was wrong came when someone wrote a comment that referenced her other comment.  What other comment?  I opened my blog dashboard and saw that there were dozens of comments I had never seen.  For about a week, very few comments were coming through.

I called my provider, and we tried a bunch of things:

• Unchecking and rechecking the “send email” box in the Discussion section, saving in between the unchecking and rechecking.
• Deactivating and then reactivating all the plugins.
• Deactivating all security plugins, one at a time.
• Deactivating Akismet.
• Reinstalling the current WordPress files.

We got a little success when I changed the email address in the General section to a domain-specific email.  Meaning, some types of notifications would come through, though not comment notifications.  Comments held in moderation, broken links, and new post updates were sent to that new account.  Comments that went up on the blog still weren’t coming through in email form.

What ultimately worked came from a long Googling session after my fourth phone call to my service provider as well as an open ticket with tech support.  I changed the email address associated with the user account AND the email listed in the General section to the same, domain-specific address.  Apparently having the address only in one place was creating a conflict, and the bug is specific to @gmail, @mac, and @me addresses.  So if you use any of those as your blog email address, try switching to a domain-specific email address.  Even if this doesn’t work, it will help your provider see how the notification is being sent because everything is internal to the domain.

Hopefully this bug will clear up with the next update, but it looks like a bug that comes around frequently, so I may just leave the new address in place.

Hope that helps you, too.

The twins had their graduation from elementary school.  It has taken me a bit of time to process the moment.  Like many things, the anticipation was worse than the actual moment.  I cried, don’t get me wrong, but I also felt very numb and resigned.

It had to happen.

There were a few events leading up to the big moment.  Josh chaperoned his final elementary school field trip.  I chaperoned my final elementary school field trip.  There were rehearsals for the big day and a program to pull together and parties to throw.  Each time I would think, this is it.  That day I feared is happening.

I’m racing toward it, unable to stop.

The ceremony was lovely.  The kids sang.  They got awards.  They walked across the stage and stated their favourite school memory and wish for the future.  We watched a slide show full of pictures of their classmates from the last 6 years.  The kids sang along with the soundtrack, bouncing around in their seats while they shrieked out each other’s names.  I bawled seeing pictures from Kindergarten; their toothless smiles juxtaposed against the sea of braces across the aisle from us.

At the end of the ceremony, we walked through the school and the students from the younger classes lined the hallways and clapped us out.  The kids began down near the Kindergarten and special needs classrooms and then made their way past the first grade and second grade and on until they passed their own dark classrooms and made their way out of the school.

It was the moment I’ve been dreading the most; the one I didn’t think I would be able to get through.  I cried.  I bawled walking down the hall, all the kids staring at me as I passed and whispering, “That’s the computer lady” and they applauded.  I hugged their old teachers and said thank you.  I thought about all the things I had done in that school, the shapes cut out of construction paper and the xeroxing and the book club meetings.  And I said goodbye to the space, knowing that I would probably be back in that building again in the future, but it would no longer be our home.

I thought I wouldn’t be able to force myself to walk out the front door at the end, but there I was, putting one foot in front of the other.  We had to hurry to make a lunch reservation with friends, and, once again, the reality of the moment was nothing like the anticipation of the moment.  It was hard, it was bittersweet, but it also felt like what was going to happen.  So I could either struggle against it or let myself be carried on.

I let myself be carried on.

Chalk this up to my different kind of smart…

I went on my last elementary school field trip this past week.  It was an end-of-year bowling party in one of those newfangled, computerized bowling spaces.  Loud music.  Flashing lights.  A lot of fun and bittersweet.  They all looked so tweenish.

When we got back to school, I ducked into the main office to make copies of the graduation program.  I estimated that I had about an hour to accomplish this task.  This sounds like a lot of time for making copies, but the copier hates me and often breaks down mid-job.  Plus the program ran a little long.  Like 24 pages long… (Don’t judge me!)

But the copier behaved, and I got all the copies made and tucked away for graduation.  Success!  I still had 20 minutes to burn until the end of school, so I settled down in a chair in the main office and started reading a comic book.  I was completely lost in a side story about Black Spectre.  (The one that is hunting the Omega Drive, not the Moon Knight/Carson Knowles Black Spectre.)

But then I started noticing that many parents were coming through the office, stating they were there to help out with class parties.  That’s odd.  Why would so many parents show up under 20 minutes until the end of school if they wanted to help with parties?  Shouldn’t they have come an hour before school got out?  Do the younger classes hold their parties in the last 20 minutes of the day?

Finally I asked about it, and the school secretary smiled at me and said, “Well, Melissa, they’re arriving because there is still over an hour left on the school day.”

I looked up at the clock and realized that there was no reason why I was sitting in the office.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, I wondered why you were sitting here,” she admitted.

I sheepishly collected my things and murmured that I would be back in an hour.  The secretary nodded and said, “Well, at least you got to look at your pictures.”

Yeah.

I like to end on a high note.