I was asked to write an essay about one aspect of infertility and I realized something I have barely written about. Not infertility, I mean, but the subject I’m about to tackle. This is a racier post than usual so…um…Mum, you may not want to read. And if you do, please don’t let me know.

Loss is inherent in infertility–the negative beta at the end of the cycle, diminishing hope, forgoing opportunities. We have spent so many years of our life together in a perpetual state of continued loss. And mixed in with the loss is the physical pain and the emotional embarrassment. The financial holes and constant anxiety. And, of course, shwanking off in public.

When my husband, Josh, would complain about the donation rooms, I would lift up my shirt to show him my bruised belly. Needles, in my mind, always trumped a date with your hand because at the end of masturbation comes an orgasm as opposed to the end of a Follistim injection which comes with an annoying sting and a little medication dribbling out. How could he ever compare rubbing one out with nightly injections?

And then I took a field trip to the donation rooms and listened to the nurses discussing the viscosity of a semen sample on the other side of the thin wall and I had a newfound appreciation for my husband’s prowess to zone in on an image of breasts (always my own, always my own) and get the job done despite the andrologist crooning “Careless Whisper” in his office, three feet away.

On the morning of our first IUI, we drove to the clinic, bleary-eyed from lack of coffee and somewhat anxious to see if this next step would work. Josh’s appointment was at 8 and my insemination was at 10 but we went together, intending to spend the downtime at the Starbucks down the street. When he was called back to the room, he seemed a little surprised that I was coming with him.

“I think you wait here,” he said.

“I’m coming back for moral support,” I said to the nurse. “If that’s okay.”

“Fine,” the squat, German woman barked out as she led us through a set of doors into a series of labs. She paused outside of tiny room that contained a barcalounger, magazine rack, television set, and a sink counter containing a sealed collection vial.

“Des eez ar donation room,” she spat. “Vee need a clean specimen. Do not put your mouth on heez penis, understood? It needs to be a clean specimen. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” I said.

“Wheech meenz no mouth. No mouth. No saliva.”

“I will not use my mouth,” I promised. “I’ll be very quiet. I won’t touch anything. I’ll just read one of the magazines.”

“No mouth,” she repeated a final time, picking up the sealed donation vial and slamming it down on the counter as a final reminder of her wrath should my lips creep close to anything that is currently under her domain.

And this is what babymaking at the clinic is like. Someone else is conducting your intimacy and someone else is setting the time. And frankly, someone else is doing the job. It can be sobering, stilling to think about how much this process is out of your hands, the wonder removed, the love vacuumed out of it in the quest for a clean specimen. But that was why I was there. I was taking back the porn.

“I don’t know if I can perform if you’re going to be watching,” my husband admitted.

“Oh, I’m not going to be watching,” I said.

And that is when I stripped off the oversized grey sweatshirt and wide-legged jeans to reveal a black merry widow-like contraption with garters and thigh-high black stockings peeking out over knee-high boots. I unhooked my barrette and let my hair tumble down past my shoulders. “I’m Hilde,” I breathed.

“Hilde?” my husband asked unsteadily. “Like your great uncle’s girlfriend?”

Which wasn’t the reaction I had been hoping for. I had sort of assumed that the outfit would cause immediate schwangage–that he’d have to dive for the collection cup in slow motion to catch the stream of semen shooting out just from the mere site of his wife parading in front of him in material that was black and shimmery and see-through. That I would be triumphantly and tantalizingly emblazoned in his memory whenever he looked at our child (because, you know, we would conceive on this cycle) and thought about how fucking hot his wife looked the day that child was created.

Because don’t newborns always make men think about merry widows?

But Hilde was already part of the persona I had created; part dominatrix (will you fucking get on with this collection business? We only have an hour and a half left for Starbucks and I want my iced Americano), part ingenue (innocent, pure, has fallen into a trashy little side life not of her own creation), part black-and-white Ingmar Bergman-esque exquisite angst (it’s really tragic, this infertility thing. And now I need to take advantage of this poor girl night after night after night, filling her with my seed. The despair. The modernist abyss).

“I’m Hilde,” I said, shaking my ass a bit in his face as I leaned over to check out the porn in the magazine rack. Victoria Secret catalogs, a few cock-in-mouth covers, naughty nurses. I should have gone for the slow reveal. Now I have to fill another ten minutes. “Perhaps we should get to know each other,” I murmured, trying to look at him through my lashes without getting a headache. “I have a lot of secrets.”

“Really, Hilde? Secrets,” Josh said, not really making any motions that would get us out of this room and to Starbucks before the end of the hour.

“Lots of secrets,” I moaned. “Here’s the first one. Why don’t you just get your donation vial ready and we can begin.”

“Mel,” he said gently. “I think you’re beautiful in that. Hot. I wish you’d actually wear something like that at home. But…I love you. I want to make this baby with you.”

For him, it wasn’t about what was lost. It wasn’t about everything that came before or even this moment itself. It was about looking forward, thinking about what we were creating together. It didn’t matter if it took place at home or in an office or in the single-stall Starbucks bathroom–the end result would be the same. Parenthood. A child.

That is how we tuned out the conversation happening on the other side of that door; the whore and the madonna, sitting on the floor, holding his knees just so I could feel connected in some way to the experience. My eyes averted, a quiet connection, a return to the continuous mantra chanted by the heart, “could this be our chance could this be our chance couldthisbeourchance”.

All to the tune of “Careless Whisper.”

Fini.

Welcome to the fourteenth tour of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade–a book club from the comfort of your own living room. Grab a cup of coffee and start clicking away at the links below.

Just to explain, this book club is entirely online and open to anyone (male or female) in the infertility/pregnancy loss/assisted conception/adoption/parenting-after-infertility world (as well as any other related category I inadvertently left off the list). It is called a book tour because everyone reads the same book and then poses a question to the group. Participants choose a few questions to answer and then post their response on their blog. Readers can jump from blog to blog, commenting along the way.

Anyone can jump aboard–it’s a book club where you can drop in and out as you wish and all in the community are welcome.

Book: Eat, Pray, Love
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
Start Date: July 10
Post Dates: August 18 and 19
(need an explanation of how a book tour works? Click here to go to a list of posts on the past book tours as well as information about future tours.)

About Eat, Pray, Love: Though it may seem like a stretch before you begin reading, this book about the author’s divorce and year of finding happiness actually has a lot of hidden lessons on coping with infertility and loss. An amazing read in 108 brief sections, Gilbert’s journey will take you to Italy, India, and Indonesia.

Barren Bitches Book Brigade List (The blogs below are participating on this current book tour. Each day, you’ll be able to jump from post to post to read a plethora of opinions and thoughts on Eat, Pray, Love. This is the final list of participants)

Slaying, Blogging, Whatever…
Life After Infertility and Loss
The Unfair Struggle
Three of a Kind Working on a Full House
The Fertile Infertile
Saucy Eggs
There’s Hope
Our Family Beginnings
This is NOT What I Ordered!
Baby Smiling in Back Seat
The Road Less Travelled

Even if haven’t read Eat, Pray, Love, you can still add your own thoughts on the blog tour or react to someone else’s critique.

Like the idea of being in a book club without leaving your living room? The next book for book tour #15 is Baby Trail by Sinead Moriarty. The description, according to Simon & Schuster:

Emma has it all mapped out: Go off the pill in December, have sex, get pregnant by January, have the baby in September. And with the help of a personal trainer, Emma figures she’ll be back in shape by Christmas. Happy New Year! But when three months of candle-scented sex fails to produce the desired result, Emma’s life becomes a rollercoaster of post-coital handstands, hormone inducing (a.k.a. sanity reducing) drugs, and a veritable army of fertility specialists. Emma and James try everything, from ovulation kits to in-vitro, but all their carefully laid plans seem to go south — in direct proportion to Emma’s plummeting self-esteem. And just when Emma feels she’s alienated everyone in her life — her twice-pregnant confidante, her singleton friend, even her own husband — events take a ninety-degree turn that will have unforeseen consequences for everyone.

The Details: Tour #15 will start August 21. Participants will read Baby Trail by Sinead Moriarty. On or before September 24th, everyone will send one question based on the book (to get a sense of questions, click here to see the questions sent for book tour #2) to me. I will compile the questions into lists that will be emailed out to you by September 26th. Everyone will choose 3 questions from the list and answer them on their own blog on October 2. I’ll also post a master list and people can jump from blog to blog, reading and commenting on the book tour.

If you would like to sign up to participate in book tour #15, leave a comment below or send me an email. I need the title and a link to your blog as well as an email address where you’d like the two or three book club emails sent. If a spouse wants to participate too and he/she doesn’t have their own blog, have them set up a blog solely for book tours (as we did with the Annex) and send me a link to that blog. And if you’re a reader without a blog, now is a great time to set up a space for yourself on Blogger. People will be able to find brand-spanking-new blogs because they will be on the book tour’s participant list. The next few tours are always listed on the new upcoming and past tours list. Happy reading.

Welcome to the fourteenth tour of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade–a book club from the comfort of your own living room. Grab a cup of coffee and start clicking away at the links below.

Just to explain, this book club is entirely online and open to anyone (male or female) in the infertility/pregnancy loss/assisted conception/adoption/parenting-after-infertility world (as well as any other related category I inadvertently left off the list). It is called a book tour because everyone reads the same book and then poses a question to the group. Participants choose a few questions to answer and then post their response on their blog. Readers can jump from blog to blog, commenting along the way.

Anyone can jump aboard–it’s a book club where you can drop in and out as you wish and all in the community are welcome.

Book: Eat, Pray, Love
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
Start Date: July 10
Post Dates: August 18 and 19
(need an explanation of how a book tour works? Click here to go to a list of posts on the past book tours as well as information about future tours.)

About Eat, Pray, Love: Though it may seem like a stretch before you begin reading, this book about the author’s divorce and year of finding happiness actually has a lot of hidden lessons on coping with infertility and loss. An amazing read in 108 brief sections, Gilbert’s journey will take you to Italy, India, and Indonesia.

Barren Bitches Book Brigade List (The blogs below are participating on this current book tour. Each day, you’ll be able to jump from post to post to read a plethora of opinions and thoughts on Eat, Pray, Love. This is the first list of participants)

Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters (below this post)
Weebles Wobblog
Everyday Stranger
Age 30 – A Year of Books
Beyond the PaleMother
Working on It
Coming2Terms
Emily the Hopeless
My Whole is Greater Than the Sum of My Parts
All Things Deb
The Daily Doings of Mr. Silly and Little Miss Trouble
A View On My Life

Even if haven’t read Eat, Pray, Love, you can still add your own thoughts on the blog tour or react to someone else’s critique.

Like the idea of being in a book club without leaving your living room? The next book for book tour #15 is Baby Trail by Sinead Moriarty. The description, according to Simon & Schuster:

Emma has it all mapped out: Go off the pill in December, have sex, get pregnant by January, have the baby in September. And with the help of a personal trainer, Emma figures she’ll be back in shape by Christmas. Happy New Year! But when three months of candle-scented sex fails to produce the desired result, Emma’s life becomes a rollercoaster of post-coital handstands, hormone inducing (a.k.a. sanity reducing) drugs, and a veritable army of fertility specialists. Emma and James try everything, from ovulation kits to in-vitro, but all their carefully laid plans seem to go south — in direct proportion to Emma’s plummeting self-esteem. And just when Emma feels she’s alienated everyone in her life — her twice-pregnant confidante, her singleton friend, even her own husband — events take a ninety-degree turn that will have unforeseen consequences for everyone.

The Details: Tour #15 will start August 21. Participants will read Baby Trail by Sinead Moriarty. On or before September 24th, everyone will send one question based on the book (to get a sense of questions, click here to see the questions sent for book tour #2) to me. I will compile the questions into lists that will be emailed out to you by September 26th. Everyone will choose 3 questions from the list and answer them on their own blog on October 2. I’ll also post a master list and people can jump from blog to blog, reading and commenting on the book tour.

If you would like to sign up to participate in book tour #15, leave a comment below or send me an email. I need the title and a link to your blog as well as an email address where you’d like the two or three book club emails sent. If a spouse wants to participate too and he/she doesn’t have their own blog, have them set up a blog solely for book tours (as we did with the Annex) and send me a link to that blog. And if you’re a reader without a blog, now is a great time to set up a space for yourself on Blogger. People will be able to find brand-spanking-new blogs because they will be on the book tour’s participant list. The next few tours are always listed on the new upcoming and past tours list. Happy reading.

My sister was the first person to tell me about this book. We were wandering through a bookstore and it was on a display table. She slapped the cover and said, “you have to read this.” For a long time, it remained on my “to read” list. Lindsay bought me a copy for my birthday and I took it with me on a beach trip, starting it on the bathroom floor in a hotel in Chincoteague. It made that early bathroom breakdown scene feel like method reading (except that I was treating the bathroom floor as my office so I could read without waking the twins).

I don’t know why this book grabbed me so much, but it did. I think that is the amazing thing about Gilbert’s writing; she figuratively brought me along on her trip and I got to go through my own metamorphosis through the reading complete with a return to meditation (those were not my japa mala beads though in the picture…hmmm…the story gets even more interesting).

What is the word that defines your city? workplace? home? yourself? Why?

The word that defines my town is “safe.” You can practically hear people murmuring it to themselves in the grocery store. I don’t really have a workplace unless you count my living room. The word that defines my home is “laugh.” The word that defines myself is “love.” It’s the word I use to weigh everything else against (I won’t continue with something if I don’t love it) and it is the impulse that drives all of my actions.

As Elizabeth Gilbert is writing her letter to G-d about divorce, she begins saying names of individuals who ‘signed it’. She says, “I became filled with a grand sense of protection surrounded by the collective goodwill of so many mighty souls.” As you blog about IF, parenting, life, and love; in what ways do you feel protected? How in your journey has ‘the collective goodwill of so many mighty souls’ guided you? Who are those mighty souls?

I feel so incredibly protected–by which I mean my heart feels so incredibly protected–by the blogosphere. I often jump to your blogs in my mind. I will be sitting somewhere stressful and go figuratively into my blog or visit you at yours by thinking through old posts. There are songs that remind me of some of you or colours that make me think of some of you or places I associate with some of you. And collectively, my life would feel very different without your souls.

The author learns Italian for the pure love of it (no real practical reason). Have you wanted to learn something just for the pure sake of the knowledge? Did you pursue it and how did it make you feel once you had done it?

When I was a junior in high school, my art teacher asked if I wanted to go to the Smithsonian school to learn etching. My tuition was paid–all I had to do was show up once a week for several months of my senior year and attend the art classes. There were twelve people total in my class. I can only remember four of them (and at that, only three names): there was the boy with a single arm (who hand-wiped his plates and I still can’t completely explain how he did it nor replicate it, but he continuously left me in awe), Adam (who became a rabbi), Zoe (who is still a visual artist), and Sabrina (who is a lawyer). Oh…and there was Worm Boy who only drew worms. Huge etchings of thousands of worms.

I didn’t really know if I wanted to learn etching, but I knew I wanted to be out of my regular school for one day a week and I knew that I wanted to be downtown on the National Mall. Once we checked in, the day was entirely our own. The same tape played on a continuous loop with each song cut at the five minute mark so you could time out your day in five minute increments. The songs were all by Bruce Springsteen and though we rarely spoke during school time, for someone inexplicable reason, whenever the line “nothing feels better than blood on blood” came around, we all lifted our heads and sang that line together.

I would check in and take out my plates and tools. But when the carousel started running outside, I’d go out and ride it several times. I bought ice cream from street vendors and walked through museum exhibits alone. I’d swing back through the room, do a little work on my plate, and then pack up to go home for the day. It probably now makes sense to my mother why I needed to go down on the weekend before the show to finish up my work…

When I got to college, I was trying to decide what I wanted to study and I spent freshman and sophomore year trying on a bunch of majors. I kept coming back to the art classes in the catalog even though I knew I didn’t want to be an art major. I finally signed up for an etching class even though it didn’t fulfill any credits.

I had signed up for a second level etching class because I assumed what I had learned back at the Smithsonian would be enough to boost me to the second level. But the first day, when people set out samples of their prior work and explained their vision for the semester, I decided I was in well over my head. I stayed after the class to speak to the professor and ended up crying as I told her that I thought the class was too advanced.

She kept dismissing my claims because I had studied under a very famous printmaker until I admitted that I spent most of the class time riding the carousel and standing in the whale room at the Natural History museum. Finally she said, “Melissa, why do you even want to take this class.”

And I had to admit that I had been really happy just being back in a printmaking lab. That I like the smell of ink. That I have a really great old school etching needle. I liked the time while the plate was in the acid. I liked that there was no going back sometimes with a plate. I liked the fine powder when the plate came out of the dust box and turning it in the light to judge the thickness of the rosin like I was a bee considering the amount of pollen on a flower. I liked handwiping my plates and continuing the day with the ink still embedded in the fine folds on the side of my hand. I really liked everything about printmaking and if she would catch me up to the rest of the class, I really wanted to stay.

I continued to do printmaking for two more years of college–working after the first class in independent studies (and the professor wasn’t even that upset during the time I decided it would be a great idea to pass actual pine needles through the press for the Christmas tree I was creating and the sap squeezed onto the felts and made the whole room stink like we had been buried under 3000 cloying pine cones). And then when I got to my MFA program, I completed my six credits outside my MFA program in the etching labs. Once the twins are in school full time, I intend to return to printmaking. I’m really not very good at it, but I love the smells of the room.

I randomly chose my questions off the list and almost returned this one to the batch to choose another because at first I couldn’t think of anything I studied because I loved it though it didn’t have a practical use (cake decorating and bread baking wouldn’t count). And then I remembered this story.

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.

I have the absolute coolest story in the world, but I cannot tell you it yet. I know, what a tease. But it will be worth the wait for the explanation to the pictures, which will come next Friday in the Roundup. In the meantime, why don’t you guess the story and whoever comes closest to explaining these three pictures will get a prize.

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.