The writing of the book is coming to a close (sniff). More on that later when I can breathe again (the deadline is upon me). But a last favour where you can weigh in and earn your keep since I already thanked all of you in the acknowledgments page of the book.

I am compiling a resource section of books, organizations, and online sources (bulletin boards and website–I have blogs covered). I have the ones that I frequent or read, but I don’t want to miss a really good one. I’ve created a list below of places where I am looking for books, organizations, or online source recommendations (bulletin boards and websites for information). If you have one that fits for an infertility/adoption/pregnancy loss book, please leave a comment (with links if possible). I need to finish off this list at the beginning of this week so answer now if you have one rather than coming back later.

I am pretty much drowning right now with the deadline so I will not be able to write back and let you know I included it. But know that I am eternally grateful for all of the help and the fact that this book is an enormous literary stone soup for our community.

Categories:

1. General infertility
2. Adoption
3. Third-party reproduction (donor gametes and surrogacy)
4. Living child-free
5. Pregnancy loss, stillbirth, and neonatal death
6. GLBT adoption/third party reproduction
7. Single parents by choice

To make it easier, you can list the number next to the resource so I quickly know which category and others can see in the comment section what is already listed.

Welcome back to Show and Tell. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. In fact, we hope you do go back to your blog and post your own Show and Tell item and then return with the link to your post. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

Can everyone line up at the door? You…in the back…spit your chewing gum out. We’re going on a field trip and you will be representing our school to the general public. I expect you to be on your best behaviour. And I said: no gum! Please, are you ready to go? Has everyone used the bathroom?

And then come back to the classroom, ready to talk about the item you brought to show the class today.

What are you showing today?

Want to bring something to Show and Tell?

• If you would like to join circle time and show something to the class, simply post each Sunday (or earlier in the weekend or on Monday if you can’t do Sunday), hopefully including a picture if possible, and telling us about your item. It can be anything–a photo from a trip, a picture of the dress you bought this week, a random image from an old yearbook showing a person you miss. It doesn’t need to contain a picture if you can’t get a picture–you can simply tell a story about a single item.
• Label your post “Show and Tell” each week and then come back here and add the permalink in the comments section below (make sure you don’t just comment that you participated: add a link to your blog in your comment so people can click over). I post a new Show and Tell post every Saturday night or Sunday. I usually move people up into the body of the post every few hours.
• Oh, and then the point is that you click through all of your classmates and see what they are showing this week.
• If you want it…
  I’ve now placed a Show and Tell archive on the sidebar that will be updated each week in case you miss it. And click here for the icon code if you wish to have it for your blog. It links to the archives.

A few days ago, we swung by the bookstore to pick up a book for a friend. There’s an employee there who reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally likes to be helpful so whenever I go and he’s working, he follows me through the store suggesting other titles that we pass. I was there to purchase a women’s health book so he paused in the section, aiding me as he pulled out other books I may want to get.

Sean (I actually don’t know his name yet, but he looks like a Sean, so let’s call him that): This looks like an interesting book. The Only Menopause Guide You’ll Need. That sounds good, right? You’d only need to get one book on menopause if you purchased this one.
Melissa: I actually know what I need today.
Sean: Or, wow, this one looks interesting. Women’s Gynecologic Health. I bet you could learn a lot from that one.
Melissa: It sounds fantastic, but I really know what I’m looking for today. I don’t need any help.
Sean: Did you see this one? The Heart of Tantric Sex. It sounds like a sex guide, right? I bet it has a lot of good tips.
Melissa: You know, my kids are standing right here. Right here. Please, I don’t need any help.

And that’s how The Tantra came to be.

The Tantra (sometimes pronounced TaTantra or DaTantra) is a blue, My Little Pony who is part tangible plastic toy and part imaginary friend. The day after the bookstore visit, I came downstairs to be greeted by said plastic toy who was speaking to me through the ChickieNob (she often acts as a translator because I don’t speak plastic toy fluently). About how she was “interesting” and full of “good tips.” And could I please purchase a My Little Pony ice cream shop for her so she could eat there afterschool with the other ponies.

I would, except there’s a similar man who lurks in the toy store who always wants to talk Matchbox cars with me.

Today, when I logged into my dashboard, there was a green, free-floating silhouette towards the right of my blog title, gently informing me that these people are interested in my blog. Has anyone else seen this? I jumped when I first saw it. I think I spent too much time with Sean on that bookstore excursion. The man makes me jumpy.

Is there an expiration date on wishes? For instance, if I wish on a star tonight, at what point do I write off the wish as not coming true? One week? One month? A couple of years? And, if by chance, that wish does come true albeit five years down the road, do I believe that it was simply delayed wish grantification and that the two events (the wish and the fulfillment) are entirely connected?

I mean, if you believe in wishes at all.

I’ve always made wishes, but I certainly kicked up the sheer amount of magical thinking once diagnosed with infertility. The end of a cycle (especially the end of a pregnancy) is so exceptionally painful emotionally that wishes are stand-ins for begging off the torture. I wasn’t just wishing for a child. I was wishing for the hellaciousness of cycling to end.

That wish, of course, came true. It took two years and a bunch of treatments to come true, but it came true nonetheless. Was it the wish and if so, which one (I made the same wish so many times, but on a multitude of objects such as first stars, train tracks, and 12:34 on a clock)? If it wasn’t the wish, would I have the twins today even if I had never sent those thoughts into the universe?

A few weeks ago, we were at the National Mall and we swung by Yoko Ono’s wish tree. As luck would have it, the box was out of paper therefore, I only got to view others’ wishes. There were earnest requests for dogs, pleas for marriage, and a wish for a cure for Alzheimer’s so a grandmother could know her granddaughter. It is powerful to be standing in front of this tangible reminder of so many hearts laid bare.

My aunt once told me (I will add that this should be taken with a grain of salt because she also informed me in the same conversation that 95% of the English language actually comes from Hebrew and that doesn’t sound quite right) that the word for luck in Hebrew–mazel–is actually an acronym. Hebrew does not have vowels, therefore, if you write this word in Hebrew, it is composed from three letters: mem, zayin, and lamed. The mem stands for the word “makom” or place. The zayin stands for the word “z’man” or time. The lamed stands for the word “la’asot” or to do. Therefore, luck is about being in the right place at the right time doing the right thing.

Pretty cool even if it’s wrong.

I like this vision of luck–that some of it is chance (place and time) and some of it is active (doing), therefore, it’s a balance. And because it’s a balance, when we wish, we need to keep doing. The wish may come true in the right place and time–that stuff we can’t control–but we need to actively keep trying to fulfill our dreams if we want them to actually happen.

Or, we need others to help fulfill our dreams. I believe in some cases we make our own luck, simply by not only being in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing, but because someone else took that ember and fanned it a bit to pass the fire to the next person in line to help. On that note, completely unrelated to infertility, I give you this wish I saw on the tree as well as a link to her art which I found through a quick google search. I hope her wish comes true.

How crazy wonderful would it be if an art dealer was reading this right now and fell in love with Anna Bieniak’s art and she became a famous artist simply by making the wish and having someone else pass the ember until it reached someone who could fulfill it?

I can only hope that someone else, wishing for a child, has others who step in once they hear her wish and try to help her make that wish come true. There are small ways we can help one another, pass along information, make connections. I think blogging is simply a larger and wider net of wish making, especially since the words don’t disappear into the ether. We hear each other’s wishes and sometimes even grant them.

I may do this often (wishes are such a recurring theme in my life), but bringing the spirit of Yoko Ono’s tree to you: please leave your wish in the comment box of this post.

When I read Eat, Pray, Love, I had a very different understanding (or maybe not different) of the idea about smiling in your liver. I didn’t take it to mean that you smile with your entire being, though that was one element to the larger picture. Why smile in your liver as opposed to your bladder (too busy churning out that urine?) or stomach (too busy digesting that burrito from last night?) or even your heart?

Actually, Ketut may have meant your heart, but not having him in front of me to retranslate, I’ll tell you how I’ve been processing Liz’s recording of liver.

I first heard about this idea of smiling in your different organs from an ex-boyfriend (truly, we haven’t even scratched the surface of my dating tales of woe). One night, we were at a bookstore and he told me in this matter-of-fact manner that he didn’t orgasm anymore. Correction–he did orgasm (in fact, this practice gave him multiple orgasms at once), but instead of going for the full release, he took that energy (and sperm?) and sent it skyrocketing up his spine and out the top of his head.

“Isn’t that called blue balls?” I asked.

He gave me a book on Taoist sex principles which, strangely enough since you can find connections wherever you look, is written by a proponent of liver smiling as well as Chi Nei Tsang, an abdominal massage that releases the anger, frustrations, and grief we have stored in our abdomen (read: liver).

My brother is fond of sweetly reminding me of a local church sign, “bitterness destroys the vessel that contains it” because I am the one who cannot let something go. I will relive the same conversation in my mind 1000 times, bringing myself directly back to the same anger, frustration, sadness I felt when the words were first said. I can literally make myself cry replaying conversations that are twenty years old. I bruise easily AND I never heal–a terrible combination (though the inverse is that I care deeply–especially about others–so it’s a toss up about how much you want to mess with the system).

When I read that line in Eat, Pray, Love, I was reminded of Monsieur Blue Balls and his grinning liver. We had many a terrible fight and the anger compounded–I wasn’t just angry with situation D, but also brought back my anger from situation A, B, and C. He asked me to try his form of meditation and I even went so far as to go to an initial workshop (except there was a cricket in the room and I simply couldn’t stay). For whatever reason, this man brought out a fury in me like no other.

The same is not true for Josh. When he frustrates me (which, you know, never happens because he is perfect), it remains in the moment and once we resolve the argument, I never carry that anger with me. And the same is true for some friends, though not others. And some family members and not others. There doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to why some people bring out the compounded anger; the bile that I cannot let go through my spine or any other energy passage, and others give me…for lack of a better term…the full release.

As I was reading the book, I was thinking about the fact that I actually need to deal with my liver right now. That I am continuously negotiating a relationship with a few people who bring out that compounded bile. I can feel the anger each time we communicate, I can feel the anger in between each communication, and the smallest statements tie back to those larger transgressions even though no connection exists between them whatsoever except that the reason for the anger (most notably, the way we communicate) is the same each time.

Were horrible things said? Yes.
Were my feelings dismissed? Yes.
Was I treated crappily? Yes.
Can I get over it? No.
Should I get over it? Probably.

By which I mean, yes, I do need to get over it–if not for them then for myself because I waste so much energy being angry.

I’ve been trying to remember this book whenever I feel the bile start bubbling. It is not a conscious exercise where I sit down and force myself to smile (I took, of course, smiling in my liver to mean taking that angry frown and turning it upside down). Instead, I just think about the book and how I need to control that anger, release it or get emotional blue balls.

Blue balls? How can that ever bring you to multiple orgasms?

Do you ever find yourself holding onto anger? Especially with certain people and not with others? Why do you think that is (is there a common factor between those certain people) and how do you release it?