There are about five reasons why you should do IComLeavWe this September (what are the dates, Mel? They’re always the 21st to the 28th. That is so easy to remember! I know! Everyone should do IComLeavWe each month. I could not agree more).

1. Leaving comments makes you feel good. It’s like a good teeth brushing.
2. Getting comments feels even better and IComLeavWe participants can attest that commenting on their blog goes up during the week.
3. A comment could take you on this bizarre path to this fantastic opportunity. For instance, perhaps future president Obama is reading blogs late one night because he wants to understand people better and he comes across this great comment on a blog and he clicks on it and it leads back to your blog and as he reads, he thinks to himself, “this chick would make an excellent person for my cabinet.” And suddenly, you find yourself attending meetings in the Oval Office. All because you participated in IComLeavWe.
4. You could forge a life-long friendship with a fellow blogger and end up on Oprah.
5. It gets you out of your niche and reading blogs outside your usual circle.

Which is just a long way of telling you that the IComLeavWe list for September went up during Labour Day weekend and if you haven’t yet joined along, you are missing out on some hot commenting.

Updated:

Naomi Campbell: supermodel, phone thrower, jetsetter…and stirrup queen? News sources are buzzing with Naomi Campbell’s battle with infertility, struggle with infertility, and renewed fertility. But it sort of begs the question: if an infertile woman is not actively trying to get pregnant, is she battling infertility?

I ask this not as a commentary on Naomi Campbell’s journey towards single motherhood–she has no obligation to tell us how many donor inseminations she has done or what this mysterious non-cyst was that was removed from her…vague…reproductive tract. I ask this because of the assumptions that are made by the journalists when writing their headlines.

Battle and struggle are active words connoting constant vigilance and active measures. I hear struggle and I don’t picture a person going about their day; I picture me, bloated on stims to the point where I couldn’t close my jeans, sniffling through the lunch hour.

Yet Campbell reveals very little about the steps she attempted to get pregnant prior to the surgery in March nor has she discussed what has happened since with the exception of the fact that she changed boyfriends. In fact, it is not clear at all that she ever attempted to get pregnant despite the cyst-that-turned-out-to-be-something-different-when-they-opened-it-up. Just because someone cannot have children does not mean that they are actively trying to have children.

Hence my issue with “battle” and “struggle.”

The slipperiness of language is not only used to blow up a story to make it newsworthy (I guess “Naomi Campbell Has Fibroid Removed! or Naomi Campbell’s Polyp Party-Crasher! just doesn’t have the same ring) but celebrities employ word choice to make something interesting seem less so.

This summer, when People magazine announced that Rebecca Romijn was carrying twins, they casually mentioned in the article that the babies were conceived “without the help of in vitro fertilization or the fertility drug Clomid.” The investigative reporter in me immediately said, “why not add IUI with injectables to the list…hmm?…UNLESS THAT WAS HOW ROMIJN OBTAINED HER PREGNANCY GLOW AND BABY BUMP!”

The problem with celebrities revealing some and not all or journalists playing with language is that it leads to misinformation. And while it isn’t of dire importance to know whether or not a dress came off the rack or is truly couture, it is important for men and women to have facts about reproductive health straight so that they make sound decisions about the timing and route of their own family building. When you go into reproduction believing that AMA stands for the American Music Awards you can understand why some people are shocked to learn how much fertility declines after advance maternal age is reached after the age of 35.

Which is also why journalists need to learn that the proper term is transfer rather than implant. A doctor cannot implant embryos into a woman’s uterus. Using that term makes IVF sound as if it is instantly successful–a panacea for all your infertility woes. And when the New York Times can’t get the terminology correct, it sets a tone of sloppiness (lest you think the New York Times has changed their ways since 2000, the same mistake is still repeated in 2008).

We need to use the same energy we bring to educating young girls on the realities of teen pregnancy to educate adult women about the limitations of fertility. To not believe celebrities who claim that fertility can be miraculously restored with every small operation or those who strangely know their child’s gender when they’re in the first trimester (but who did not use IVF with PGD according to a reliable source in their camp!). And, at the same time, make sure that the general public doesn’t believe that IVF is a newfangled procedure only performed on nameless, baby-desperate women in secluded clinics. After all, if 12% of the reproductive age population is infertile, you have to believe that more than a few Prada-clad celebrity babies were the product of fertility circumventing procedures.

Unless, of course, movie careers ensure unending fertility.

I’m not a fertile woman, but I play one on tv.

Cross-posted with BlogHer.

Updated:

More than one have said it in the comments so I wanted to respond in the post to be clear–you can struggle and battle infertility in many many different ways. Through any of the four paths (treatments, adoption, donor gametes, or living child-free) and all four are active paths with mindful decisions. You could battle infertility without ever seeing a reproductive endocrinologist. You could struggle with infertility and not be actively trying to build your family.

BUT the problem I had with the headline is that it makes a lot of assumptions. It is not clear from anything Naomi Campbell said that she ever tried to have a child, wanted to have a child prior to the operation, or was upset. All of that was assumed by the journalist and the title made sensational. It may be true that she battled infertility or it may not. The point is that journalists are choosing how infertility is portrayed vs. presenting a realistic vision of the information presented (and the problem, of course, is that if all she reveals is that she had a non-cyst removed, it isn’t newsworthy and they have to make it larger and newsworthy in order to justify placing it in the magazine).

If Naomi Campbell had said, “I was actively trying for three years to have a baby and didn’t realize anything was wrong until I started seeing an RE. I’m really lucky that I had medical intervention and hopefully, my fertility is now restored”–well, that deserves a blurb in a magazine and perhaps a title with the word “struggle.” And she may have said that, but when it doesn’t make it into the article, I have to go with what I read. And I read nothing in any of those blurbs that stated there had been a struggle or battle or that she had even tried to build her family. And that, to me, is sensationalizing a story with assumptions rather than presenting facts.

Which is a long way of saying that I am in agreement–you can struggle emotionally with infertility forever. And you can struggle financially with infertility long after you’re done with the actual family building. And you can struggle physically with the conditions that brought on the infertility indefinitely. But I’d only put on the label of struggle or battle if the sentiment came from you. I would never assume that I knew how you were processing your infertility. I can only write generally how many do process infertility based on my own experience and what others write. But I can never speak specifically about an individual person’s experience.

I am further embarrassed to admit that despite the advice that is actually sinking in, I still spent today in the building after pretending that I was on my way to do research for an article. Instead I cried in the bathroom until the hallway was empty and then slipped back down to a lesser-used wing of the building to my library space. I lied to the other parents, lied to the twins. I am a big, filthy, pathetic liar.

I really don’t want to be this person.

But the only way I can describe it is that I feel completely unable. In the same way that I feel unable to make myself jump from the high dive. Intellectually, I know I could do it. But I can’t seem to be able to will my body to take either plunge.

And, forgive me, September 11th just doesn’t feel the correct day to push this issue.

I have decided to print out all of the advice, find a quiet space Thursday night, and meditate on each suggestion until something clicks. And putting something (at least a small step) into action on Friday. You’ll hear how it goes with the roundup. And since I can already tell that multiple suggestions are coming together to form one plan, I am placing all names in a hat and randomly choosing the winner. Just so you know that you weren’t the most brilliant, but simply, the most randomly lucky. Now I must think up the prize by Friday.

If you were not already aware, Bridges is running a post about September 11th every half hour from midnight (in other words, a half hour from now) until 11:59 p.m. on September 11th. They are heartbreaking and gorgeous and emotional and gut-wrenching. Hopefully, you will feel move to leave your own thoughts on September 11th in the individual comment sections.

Children mentioned…

No Barren Advice today. Perhaps, instead, you have advice for me.

I am admitting all of this here for two reasons even though this embarrasses me tremendously. (1) It could help someone else who is going through the same thing and (2) I want to reflect one day how far I’ve come because I do have a lot of hope that things will change.

I have been conducting my life out of the preschool library. By this point, I consider the end seat at the table my own and if need be, I would pee on it like a squirrel monkey to mark my territory. I spent the morning writing notes to my niece and friends on my new pink stationary. I read a book. Made some phone calls. And told myself that tomorrow would be the day I’d leave the building. And then I promptly felt ill and decided I would wait until the morning to make a concrete decisions.

I have not actually left the twins at preschool yet.

The first day of school, I was the only parent crying. The children were not crying, their parents were not crying. But I was sobbing–and not just for the initial drop off. I sat in the library by myself and cried long after every other parent had left the building.

The next day, I was again the only parent crying. And while people were sympathetic on the first day, they seemed a tad confused by the second day. This week, I have not admitted to anyone that I’m remaining in the building. I drop off the kids and walk down the hallway as if I am going to use the main door to the school. And then I veer down another hallway and go to my library space in a lesser traveled part of the building. I come back out close to pick up time and pretend that I just arrived from errands. No one asks me what I did and I don’t admit that I have been standing on a chair in the library, trying to see the playground from my perch.

I am embarrassed that I can’t bring myself to leave the building. This is really not how I want to conduct my life. I have a ton of things I’d like to get done–both workwise and homewise. I would love to be going forward with new projects and instead, I am frozen. I am completely frozen. I can’t bring myself to leave the building. And it’s not that I don’t trust the school or their teachers. I love the school and their teachers are fantastic. I can’t really put into words what it is. Maybe that if I walk out the door, it will be an admittance that my children are now four years old and moving away from me. Growing apart from me.

And even if I get to have a third child, this will all happen again. I will not be able to keep them at home with me forever.

This is a problem that can’t really be solved.

I thought I’d write out this long entry and come to this perfect peace that would enable me to walk out the door tomorrow. But I have erased the end of this post numerous times because I don’t really think I can say what I want to say. Meaning, I can’t find the words. I can’t tell if I’m grateful for the fact that I don’t have deadlines this week. On one hand, it enables me to sit there. On the other hand, there is no impetus to work through this beyond my own shame.

I wrote out small goals for myself–Stop crying. Move outside to the car. Walk over to the post office. Drive over to McDonald’s for an iced coffee. Go in the house to get something and come back immediately to the school. Go home and stay there, writing out the LFCA. Go home and begin work on something creative again.

I have not accomplished much.

It all boils down to time. As a child, I would horde candy and never eat it because if I ate it, I didn’t have it to look forward to anymore. The sad part, of course, is that we ended up tossing a lot of candy I could have enjoyed. As a college student, I would start mourning the end of the trip on the first day. I was so sad to have vacations start because it would mean that I was closer to the end. And now, I am just so incredibly sad with this idea of people aging–of myself aging and Josh aging and the twins aging. Having them moving apart from me is just a reminder of the passing of time.

This post probably doesn’t fill you with confidence to submit a question to me for next week’s Barren Advice. But know that I have a lot of time on my hands, a quiet library, and a good deal of neuroses of my own.

A gift for the comment (well, to the commentor) that triggers my ability to at least run local errands. Send your best advice and I will let you know the first one that works.

This is how I came to wear a turkey cutlet on my boobs at the wedding last week.

A month or two ago, I called my cousin with a proposal. She likes to shop; I do not. I needed a floor-length black bridesmaid dress. She met me at the mall with my list of requirements. I had the dress instructions from the bride, a price range, and a request to make the shopping portion of the trip last under a half hour. She moved us through the mall like Michael Phelps in the 100 meter butterfly.

She whipped through a rack of dresses, yanking down two and thrusting them into my arms. She moved through the store, sniffing the air like a meerkat to identify a break in the clothing racks that led to the dressing rooms. I held up the first dress dubiously.

“Really?” I asked.

It was pretty much the most un-Melissa dress you could find. Sleeveless, backless, plunging neckline and black. But it fit.

“We only have 22 minutes,” she reminded me.

I whipped the dress back off, we paid for it and she ran me up to the undergarments department, calling over her shoulder as we wound our way past the nightgowns and men’s dress shirts, “You are going to need one special bra to hold up those titties in a backless dress.”

Wasn’t that my point? Was a backless dress the way to go when it required so much other hardware? Why the hell do designers make backless dresses?

With ten minutes to go, the three children (oh, wait, I didn’t tell you that we had three kids under the age of four in tow and only a half hour on the clock?) decided to have a meltdown amongst the Olgas, dragging the lacy bra cups over their faces while they screamed like banshees.

“Let’s ditch the undergarments,” I foolishly said.

And that was the start of my downfall.

A day or two later, I dragged the dress back out with me when I went to meet Lindsay and Karen for lunch. Lindsay agreed to follow me over to the mall and help me pick out a bra and panties that would forgive any weight I happened to pack on this summer. We started with the panties and picked out a fine pair when the Wolvog announced his need for the potty. We were in the middle of potty training and we didn’t get a lot of warning before spillage occurred. Lindsay began the sprint for the bathroom with the Wolvog while I grabbed the ChickieNob, the panties, and my credit card. We made it to the potty in time and were so gleeful with our victory that we eschewed bra shopping. After all, there were still plenty of weeks before the wedding.

About two weeks before the wedding, I realized that I hadn’t hemmed the dress. I called my mother’s seamstress who does an excellent job under time pressure (she is accustomed to my flakiness, in other words). She also mentioned the need for a bra and asked why I hadn’t purchased one yet. “I am so on it,” I replied.

The day before the wedding, we were driving the kids over to my parent’s house a few hours before we were due downtown for the wedding rehearsal. In Hilde’s knee-high boots, I jumped out of the car while Josh and the twins idled by the curb, and ran through Bloomingdales, locating the lingerie department.

There was, as always, no one to help me. But I found an adhesive bra and decided this was perfect. And the price was right–it was only $12 and since I only planned to wear this dress once, the bra only needed to last once. I went with the smaller cup size, thinking it would do a better job of holding me in. The bra was tossed on the floor of the front seat, we dropped off the twins, and made it to the rehearsal in time.

The wedding unfortunately fell one day before the book deadline. I woke up early in the morning and edited until 1 o’clock when it was time to start dressing for the wedding. I took a shower, taking special care to dry my lotion-free breasts as per the bra instructions. Josh glanced at the boob stickers and shook his head. “You think those things are going to work?”

“Models wear them all the time,” I snarled. “What do you think they’re wearing when you see a backless dress on the runway?”

I stood in front of the mirror, leaning forward and attempting to smooth down my adhesive bra. It was like trying to hold up your boobs with mini bandaids. The bra puckered and detached itself whenever I moved. I tried three more times before I gave up.

“What are you going to do?” Josh asked. “Do we have time to swing by Bloomingdales for the next size?”

“Josh, we don’t have time for Bloomingdales. We need to go to a place where they know boobs. We’re going to Sylene’s.”

There comes a time in a woman’s life when she decides that if she is already spending upwards of $50 for a bra, that she might as well throw a few more dollars into the pile and actually get a bra that compliments her breasts. And when I say that Sylene’s knows breasts, I do not mean that a senior employee gave them a measuring tape and gave them instructions such as “flat girls get Calvin Klein and the chesty ones get Wacoal.” I am talking about women who can match a bra to your boobs like no one’s business and make you look fantastic. They are artists. They are more skilled than surgeons. They are breast experts. They are breastperts.

I called them beforehand, explaining that I’d have under a half hour (there’s that 30 minute limit again) to get a bra and wear it to the bridal party pictures at 3 o’clock. They promised to set out my choices on the counter and throw them on me when I came in. The last time I had been in there was to buy the undergarments for my wedding.

I ran into the store, braless (but in a damn fine pair of panties), and was taken into a dressing room with a bunch of adhesive bra samples as well as a contraption similar to the machine the Orcs used to breach the wall in Lord of the Rings. The first few bras left my boobs limp and lifeless, hanging out in the dress like goody bags. The contraption was fantastic, giving me boobs of iron that could knock out a caterer waiter as I danced the hora. But, alas, over an inch of the bra was visible in the back due to the cut of the dress.

The fact is that this dress brought out all of my insecurities about my body. No one wants to spend ten minutes in clothing that makes them feel like shit and here I was agreeing to spend nine hours in it all because I simply didn’t have any time or money this summer. Every minute that wasn’t going to the twins was going to the book. I was overstressed and hating my body because I hated the dress. And I hated the dress because I hated my body. It was all very chicken and egg. I spent most of my time in the store with my heart pounding, mindful of the fact that I needed to be at the hotel and taking pictures, as well as the fact that I was completely screwed and braless.

The salesgirl went to get reinforcements. She brought back Helen, the queen of the breastperts, who can wield a measuring tape like a lasso. She took one look at my breasts and sighed. “There is really only one solution.”

The turkey cutlet.

The turkey cutlet is an adhesive silicone bra with front closures. It feels more real than a real boob. Seriously, it was like that game that you play as a child where you put your index finger against someone else’s index finger and run your other thumb and index finger up and down the linked index fingers to cause your brain to go into chaos. Which finger is mine? Which finger is yours? Which boob is real? Which boob
is Nubra?

Our name for the titty cover? The bra bore a very close resemblance to an uncooked turkey cutlet.

I looked in the mirror, dress in place, and nodded. Helen of Sylene’s is a genius, able to sheathe any boob and bring out its full, perky potential. Or, at least, hold it up for nine hours to get through a wedding.

“How much is it?” I asked anxiously, peeling off the sample.

“It’s going to be $70, sweetie, with tax,” she admitted.

The clock ticking, my frustration with the stupid dress mounting, my anxiety about the work I still needed to do at home, the lack of money in my bank account. I decided to go braless, saggy boobs be damned. Did I look like crap? Yes. But I also couldn’t spend more time or throw more money at solutions.

I picked up my purse, trying to hide the fact that I was beginning to cry, when Helen uttered the words that pushed me over the edge:

“I’m feeling generous today, honey. Go wear the bra to the wedding and be beautiful.”

She slapped the sample back on my breast and helped me back into the dress. As I was running out of the store, I asked her if I could write about this and she shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “who would be interested in reading about how you wore a turkey cutlet to a wedding?” But she agreed and handed me her card. I ran outside to Josh, sobbing and ruining my make-up because I was just so touched to have met a woman who could saw through how self-conscious I was about my breasts and fixed the problem–if not indefinitely, then at least for the evening. I felt 100% better about myself at the wedding wearing the turkey cutlet (which every bridesmaid admired and praised).

I am trying to figure out a way to pay this forward. With a simple action, she changed the course of my whole weekend. But I do not know how to make women feel great about their breasts. What I can do is go back to Sylene’s this weekend and purchase myself a fancy little new bra and make myself exceedingly happy for even longer than nine hours.

And I can also tell you that if you ever have a bra emergency, you should learn from my story and not leave shopping for a new bra that fits a backless dress until you’re on your way to a wedding. You should skip the department stores and fly directly to Washington, D.C. and go to Sylene’s. Or, if you’re not willing to fly a couple hundred miles (or perhaps overseas) to buy a bra, you can always purchase online and have them ship it to you. It is well worth the care they put into how women feel about their bodies (they also specialize in post-mastectomy bras and swimsuits). If you do this, sign up for their email because you get $10 off your first purchase. Just saying.