Listen, I usually think that Hax gives good advice, but this particular column was read on a day when I needed to read it. No, my situation was not like the woman who asked the question — dealing with the loss of her baby conceived via IVF and, subsequently, the end of her marriage — but it was stressful for me, and I had been emailing with a friend about the concept of self-care when you don’t really have the space to practice self-care just that morning.

Hax has the woman visualize what she is going through as an actual uphill climb, and talks about how the same things that would sustain you on that physical trip — breaks, sleep, food — are the same things that could sustain her on this emotional trip. As she writes, “[The struggle will] be no less grueling; you’ll just be better equipped to manage the burden.”

And she goes further to talk about the basic self-care that this woman can manage in the moment, not as an escape but as something that can help her keep putting one foot in front of the other: “Beyond sleep and nutrition, such care is a matter of personal preference, but an easy option — we’re all about easy here — is to pick one from each category: exercise, art, sensory comfort, empathy.”

Hax’s whole response is like a verbal hug. And it’s the best explanation I’ve heard of self-care in a while, both how to do it and why to do it. It isn’t escape: you can’t escape your problems. Even if you go on holiday, you take your problems emotionally with you. But self-care is about fortifying yourself.

Go give the column a read. I bookmarked it.

Mugglenet recently put together a personality test based on your favourite Harry Potter book, and I was extremely disappointed with my results. They seemed to disregard anything about the books to arbitrarily assign meaning to your choice. But rather than stew in my sadness, I decided to put together my own Harry Potter personality test, revealing what is important to you based on your favourite book in the series.

So scroll down to your favourite book and see if that’s the reason it got under your skin.  And yes, there is an option for people who didn’t read or didn’t finish the books.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

You love beginnings; when everything feel electric and new. In fact, the beginning is the best part. You love plotting out new blogs and new projects, though you rarely follow through with more than a few posts or gathering supplies. Still, if there was a job where you could just start things for other people and then they would take it over, you would be golden because no one does beginnings like you do beginnings. When you are on fire, you cannot even take a deep breath because you have so much energy coursing through you. Your favourite part of book one? When Harry enters Diagon Alley for the first time. Your heart exploded over the idea that such a place could even fictionally exist.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

You keep up with the Kardashians, and if not the Kardashians, then celebrities like the Kardashians since People magazine is your first choice in any doctor’s office waiting room. You are also the type of person who finds favourites on reality television shows and cheer them on from afar. You have been known to post Brene Brown quotes on your Facebook wall. But strangely enough, Sherlock is one of your favourite shows, even though you can’t imagine reading the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories. In other words, you like a film of distance between you and celebrities: you like to read about them in magazines and follow them on Twitter and you may even try to discreetly snap a photo of someone if you saw them dining in a restaurant. But you’d stop short of walking up to their table and interrupting their meal for a picture.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Come on, this is a book about depression. People who love this book are drawn to its pages because it finally gives them words in which to describe their mind. It is a gorgeous book that treats mental illness as not something that can be banished with a single act, but something that needs to be attacked again and again. Additionally, you are a person whose daydream wondering makes your reality more livable. That longing is important; it grounds you and gives you direction.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

You are competitive, but you also suffer from Imposter syndrome. You’re very scared that you don’t have what it takes, but calm down because you probably do. And even if you don’t, no one is going to find out about it. But back to that competitive thing. You don’t just like to win, you also take a look at the people around you and need to mentally find where you have an edge over the other person. Maybe you have a better marriage or better house or better job. Whatever it is, you need to find it so you can set aside your competitiveness and enjoy being with the other person without feeling jealous.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

You feel calm when you feel like you belong, and you feel ragey when you don’t. For instance, you love being invited to parties, though you hate attending them. But if you see people post pictures of an event on Facebook that you weren’t invited to? You instantly want to unfriend the host and all of her minions. You are in touch with your inner teenager, and that can be a good thing and a bad thing. You still have a lot of hope, but you get annoyed easily and sometimes you utter the words, “it’s not fair” when fairness has nothing to do with the situation.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

You love to listen to other people’s stories. Humans of New York is a favourite site (at the very least, you click on the status updates when people share them in your Facebook feed), but you’re also the type of person who ends up talking to the person sitting next to you on an airplane. You like to figure out what makes people tick, and sometimes in social situations, you listen more than you speak. Moreover, you’re a collector of stories. You hate to lose things, and you keep a blog or journal partly to connect with other people but also to have a written record so you don’t forget things.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

You are the person who needs to have the money in hand. You’re not happy with an IOU; you need to be able to feel the dollar bills in order to feel settled. Closure if a big deal in your world, and you feel like you can’t mentally move on until you’ve ticked something off your to-do list. Half-done is not done, it’s just half-done. You like books that make you feel something; that make you feel as if you are being transported to another space. As much as you didn’t want this book to start, you also couldn’t put it down once you read the first page, and because of that, it has held your heart more than any other book in the series.

TL;DR Series

I’m assuming that you don’t like fantasy? Or you buck conventions so if everyone is telling you to read a book you will purposefully not read the book? Or you can’t see committing to 7 books but maybe would have read Harry Potter to see what the fuss was about if J.K. Rowling could have told the story in about 200 pages total?

Got a Few Books In and Quit

Again, I’m going to assume that you don’t like fantasy? Or you buck conventions so if everyone is telling you that you will love a book, you will purposefully not love that book though you’ll never admit that is the reason you don’t like the book? Or you started reading and said, “7 books? I cannot do this for 7 books. If she could tell this story in 200 pages I would have finished it.”

Got a Few Books In and Will Return

You like to save books for when you know you’ll need a good book, plus you’re the type of person who needs to mix up your reading list. You may chase three fiction books with a few memoirs and a social science non-fiction book before returning to a series again. Moreover, this is not your only unfinished series. You also got a few books into the Sookie Stackhouse books or a few books into Game of Thrones, and you’re planning to return to those series, too. That is, when you need them.

How did I do? Which was your favourite book, and did I describe (at least an aspect) of your personality?

When I grow up, I want to be mayor of Crab Towne, USA.  It is a physical space of pure love; a crab shack filled with dozens of fried food options, a liquor store filled with dozens of alcoholic options (actually, I admittedly haven’t been in the liquor store part so I’m assuming they have dozens of options, but maybe it’s just 5 or 6), and a vintage arcade filled with dozens of video games.

Most of the listings on the classic arcade site (which is bookmarked on my phone for easy access whenever we travel) have two or three entries.  But Crab Towne, USA caught my eye because it was a solid paragraph of games.  The first time I saw the entry, I started gasping and rolling about in ecstasy.  But would the Crab Towne of my dreams match the Crab Towne of reality?

I am pleased to report that it does.  It swims past the world of dreams into an 8-bit reality filled with blinking lights against a steamy background of fried crab perfume.

The ChickieNob is a pinball wizard and she stuck firmly with a single pinball machine for 20 consecutive games.  The Wolvog moved between some of his favourites (Galaga) and driving games.  Josh cleared boards on Ms. Pacman.  And I spent a lot of time exploding creatures in Dig Dug.

And I’m not going to lie to you, it was hard to leave.  It was hard to pull out that bottle of hand santizer and wash away the stickiness of Crab Towne.  It was hard to drive away from that 8th wonder of the world.  How did so much happiness get stuffed inside a single room?

I will be celebrating my birthday there this year, a plastic cup of quarters in hand.  Just as it should be.

I’ll admit I looked up my doctor on FertilityIQ, the new “Yelp for Fertility Doctors.”  Why?  I have no clue since I usually don’t go on review sites.  But there I was, typing in his name on FertilityIQ.

I reasoned that it’s not as if I’d suddenly think crap of him if he had a low score and a bunch of negative reviews. I mean, my experience has only been positive, even caring. Still, I held my breath as the page loaded, as if his score was a comment on my common sense. Had I picked a good doctor or a total dud?

8.8 out of 10. A B+ in report card terms. Nothing to be ashamed of.

On the other hand, the doctor my mother used for having me got a 10.

Which made me sort of wish I had used him instead.

What the fuck am I talking about? My 8.8 doctor was not only kind and smart and helped me conceive the twins, but before I looked on this site, I would have said nothing but positive things about him.  He talked me through a bunch of hard moments.  He even called personally to apologize on a weekend when another doctor at the clinic forgot to call me back about test results.  He is a good guy.

Yet seeing other people’s complaints made me feel… I don’t know. Like I missed something?

This is precisely why I don’t go on actual Yelp. I like my opinions to be my opinions. I don’t mind recommendations from people I know, but with complete strangers, I don’t know their motivation. Maybe they got pregnant easily with my doctor and therefore have warm feelings toward him. Maybe they never got pregnant and blame him. Maybe he told them something truthful that they weren’t ready to hear, or maybe he offered them the same compliments he offers every patient but they thought they were unique.

And now my opinion is my opinion plus that number — 8.8 — which didn’t come from my brain.

But still, knowing this site existed, I couldn’t help but look him up.

Have you looked up your doctor? Can a number change the way you feel about him or her?

How did I end up on a folding chair in a middle school gymnasium, listening to their next principal tell me about the world the twins will inhabit next year?

No, I mean, really.  I remember them entering Kindergarten.  How can I forget?  I spent a few days sitting parked outside the school, reading a book, because I was too worried to be a few blocks away.  (I clearly take anxiety to a whole new level for you, don’t I?)  I remember circle time and cutting out yellow construction paper squares and the dazed look on their face during their class Valentine’s Day concert.

And then life sort of jumps to now.  My brain rationally knows that I’ve lived five years in between those moments and now, but it’s hard to sort it all out in my mind.  If you ask me to think about third grade, I can remember the night they found out their teacher assignment or how much the ChickieNob adored her teacher’s shoe collection or the Wolvog bringing home a worksheet on tetrahedral numbers or that special teacher bringing out their inner writer.

I can remember each of these individual moments if I concentrate on them.  But overall, it feels like elementary school went by in the time it took me to walk from the front door of the school back to my car.

And I am so sad that it is almost over.

Unlike a lot of other parents, I have never dreaded this age.  I taught middle school for many years, and I enjoy kids in this segment of life.  What can I say: I like talking about feelings, and middle schoolers have a lot of feelings to discuss and dissect.  Of course I’m worried about peer pressure and anonymous texting apps and general preteen cruelty.  But I’m not dreading living in a house with two middle schoolers.

But sitting in that gymnasium, I felt old.  I felt like I was on a roller coaster, barreling towards the end of the ride, and all I could think about was how long I waited in line to enjoy this two-minute amusement park attraction and how it was ending so quickly.  Yes, yes, yes, I know the end is not really the end.  I still hang out with my parents and enjoy their company.  But things will change the moment they leave home for college.

We’ve been building towards this: the moment we release them out into the world and say, “do your thing.”

I want that to happen.  I want them to be happy and healthy and find their way in the world.  I want them to go off and do cool things and then report back about those accomplishments.  I have put all of this hard work in raising them for that to specifically happen.

But I don’t want this moment to end.  Each time they pass through one set of doors and walk through another, we are one step closer to that moment when I will need to tell them that I agree with them; they’re ready.  Because I am well aware that they will tell me they are ready much earlier than I am prepared to let them go.

Before my wedding, someone told me to make sure that we took a moment to step away from the party and consciously observe it.  To stand together and mindfully think, “We are at our wedding and look at all these people gathered together in a room to celebrate with us.”  If you don’t do that, the whole day can be over and you’ll realize that you barely took it in because it’s so enormous.

I do this a lot with school.  I take two minutes to step back in the room and observe the twins in action.  I will say to myself, “I am at their last Valentine’s Day class party.  Look at how much fun they are having and how we were all in this moment.”  And then I step back into the action and let it pass over me knowing I grabbed my mental snapshot.

And it’s not enough.

It wasn’t enough at my wedding to make me not crave more time in the festivities, and it isn’t enough now to make me feel full of their childhood.  And it really sucks that it’s the best a person can do — take a mental snapshot — and not get to return to a moment over and over again, trying to soak it all in.