Category — Uncategorized

We had the oddest thing happen. We ordered four books from Blackwell’s in the UK. We do this every other month, buying books we won’t get in the US for more than six months (or not at all). We got a notice that two books had shipped, and we received another message when they reached the US and entered our postal service.

All seemed well.

One morning, I received an email that the package was there. I went to retrieve it, and it was… an empty box. Completely flat. As if someone had broken down the box to put it in the recycling bin. The words “received without contents” and “received damaged” were stamped all over the outside of the box.

There are a few possibilities. The most likely one is that someone opened the box and stole the books at some point. The box is opened too neatly, like human hands ripped it vs. a machine. I guess that’s the other option — a machine ripped open the box, the books fell out, and they’re lost somewhere in the machine. The odd thing is that Blackwell’s sends their books in boxes that state: Blackwell’s | For Learning * For Life. Super clear that the contents will not be sexy electronics or jewelry. It’s going to be books. So I like to think that someone out there coveted our British history books.

In any case, we have a message to Blackwell’s with photos of the box to figure out what we do next because we need the first part of our order. But isn’t that odd? Have you ever received an empty box?

Maybe I should wait to see how I feel next year, but I turn 49 at the end of the week (happy birthday to me!), but I don’t feel about the end of my 40s as I did about the end of my 30s.

I struggled with turning 40 and saying goodbye to my 30s, mostly because I saw 30 as the decade that brought me the twins whereas 40 would be the decade that would see the twins leave home.

I don’t feel the same anxiety about switching decades — at least, not yet. I feel grateful that I’ve reached this point. Many don’t. Instead of lamenting my grey hair — greyer than it was a decade ago — I feel lucky that I’m still alive to style my grey hair. I feel lucky that I have Josh and the twins and the rest of my family and friends. I feel lucky that I know what I do well and what I’m okay with not being able to do.

My questions now circle where the twins will be vs. who I will be.

I’m okay. I’m still dreading the twins leaving home, but a birthday won’t change that. So cake at the end of the week along with graduation. I just have to keep reminding myself that I can do hard things.

Substacker (that sounds weird as an adjective, but I guess “blogger” did, too, once upon a time) Haley Nahman writes from time to time about their family-building experience. Her writing reminds me of the early days of the infertility blogosphere. One of her recent newsletters most of all.

She talks about finding the TTC boards and her assumptions about the people writing and answering questions online. Why were they so laser-focused on trying to conceive? “Who else would be so eager to sacrifice their bodies, their autonomy, their time, their freedom? I wasn’t the same, I assured myself, as I exhaustively scrolled their posts, my browser set to incognito.”

You know where this is going. “And so the forums became my little secret. Outwardly, a joke; inwardly, a comfort. Trying to conceive made me feel so nuts and unlike myself that it wasn’t too difficult to split my consciousness this way.”

But the unpacking of how those feelings play out reminds me so much of early IF writing. I don’t mean early in the journey. I mean early IF blogosphere, where we shared a much deeper story than what unfolded on the bulletin boards. Where we admitted deep truths and talked about what they meant. Coming to a deeper understanding of what made us hope or want to hope or how we felt about that hope.

If you’re not reading her, I recommend her Substack. It’s frequently about things other than trying to conceive, but I’ve definitely appreciated these posts.

Last summer, I preemptively told Josh that this would be the summer of hard nos. I had an inkling that I would be having a difficult time with the transition to college, and I knew that social visits or obligations or pretty much doing anything for anyone else that we didn’t choose ourselves would use up my very limited emotional energy. The twins didn’t want to sleep out of their beds or have things added to their plates.

So no plans in July or August beyond college orientation with a few days of vacation tacked on to emotionally recover from the fact that we’re at orientation. Minimal obligations in June.

It is hard not to fill a calendar. Harder than you think. I mean, yes, we will still be busy in the sense that there are 30 tasks to complete before they leave. We work full-time, so we will spend the weekends ticking off tasks. But it’s hard not to look at an empty weekend and think, “Oh, we should fill this with _______.” Fill in the blank with something local or far away. A person, activity, or experience.

It can be hard to give yourself what you need.

I know we won’t regret doing what we need to do in the moment, and I may have regrets if I don’t take care of myself emotionally. But it is so hard to stick to a summer of nos. Even knowing that this stage of life will be over and a new one will begin in August.

There has been a lot of talk about the post-platform internet after the destruction of Twitter and nostalgia for the olden days of the internet after the death of Heather Armstrong.

I do miss the old days of blogging. It was like sitting on someone’s front porch, hearing about their day. And then walking down the street and sitting on a different front porch and hearing about another person’s day. We visited each other’s sites and held conversations in the comment section. It was slow content. You read fewer thoughts, but you connected with them more.

And then, one day, most people decided to abandon their homes on the internet and rent Facebook or Twitter apartments where they could visit each other easily. They didn’t have the bloggy front porch for long conversations, so they mostly stopped happening. But you could keep up with many people all at once in your feed.

And then, the landlord sold the buildings, and new owner changed things. Or the landlord stayed, but the residents started learning disturbing things about their living space.

So what if we returned to our homes on the internet? What if that is the next step in a post-platform world? What if we went back to blogs?