I just sent out the last assignment for the Roundup Extravaganza. You should have a note from me via email stating your assigned blog. If it’s not in your inbox, check your spam filter and let me know so I can resend. Make sure you’re checking the email account you asked me to use.

I think my hand may fall off. We have 144 participants which means I sent 144 emails.

Show and Tell coming later tonight after I recover and can get my picture off my camera…

Many years ago, in a cabin far far away, a group of thirteen-year-old girls thought it would be clever to all sleep naked on the night when word had gotten back through the long tables of the mess hall that the thirteen-year-old boy campers would be sneaking out that night. After our counselor left for the evening to get drunk up by the flagpole with the other counselors, we all slipped off our pyjamas and left them at the bottom of our sleeping bags, waiting patiently for the boys to arrive. Throughout the cabin, we were trying to imagine the looks on their faces when they entered the cabin and we jumped out of our sleeping bags. Ta-da!

After an hour, we were all getting anxious for the boys to arrive, wondering if they had been caught sneaking out of their cabin. Being anxious makes me have to pee so I slipped out of my sleeping bag and into our cabin’s bathroom, right in time for a random male camp counselor to enter because we were speaking so loudly that they could hear us up at the flag pole.

My bed was empty so the counselor immediately started yelling at me to get back in bed. Except that I couldn’t walk out of the bathroom in front of him. Every time he yelled, “Mel, get your ass out here!” I would respond, “I can’t.” Finally, he had the thought to add, “fucking tell me why!” and I admitted, “I am completely naked. We’re all completely naked right now.”

It was such a good idea in thought. Such a bad idea in execution.

I changed my sign-off name officially to Lollipop Goldstein. And I was still giggling as I did it, though, once I opened my blog again and saw that it had removed any trace of The Town Criers, I wondered if it was still a good idea. Was it like being caught naked? It certainly felt vulnerable to change my name formally. Would people know who was commenting on their blog? Was it something that seemed clever at the time but would bite me in the ass in the future when everyone was left simply confused.

Only time will tell.

I need to explain this with something that will sound as if it should be set to violin music (with perhaps a slow-mo closeup of a single tear rolling down my cheek), but I never had enough friends growing up. Do you know what I mean by that? I’ve had friends at every stage of life–I was never popular (in fact, I am quite certain that few people from high school remember me and the proof is in the number of people who stared at me quizzically at reunion, their head cocked to the side as they said, “we were really in physics together? We were lab partners?”) but I wasn’t unpopular. When I got to college and I heard about other people’s middle school or high school years, I realized I got off pretty easy in comparison. But just because I had friends–and good friends at that–I never felt as if I had enough friends.

I am greedy like that.

It’s that feeling you get when you sit down to eat, fully expecting to be satiated by the end of the meal, especially when you see the amount of food at your disposal. But you walk away from the table with this gnawing hunger still present. And what is it? A failure of my own body to not recognize that there is food in my stomach? A true need unfulfilled? How do you know if it’s something wrong with you or something truly missing?

The same could be said for my heart. I had friends and I obviously connected with people and loved many. I’ve never consciously known what was missing or looked for it (or, more accurately, known how to look for it). It was always this small emptiness, a tiny gap of air in the heart. In my mind, I imagined everyone I love squeezed into atriums and ventricles, bodies locked against each other as I carried them inside my chest. And somewhere, free-floating through that mass of love, a tiny space. A pocket of emptiness. And absence searching for a presence.

And I realized as I read those blogoversary comments that it’s gone. The little bubble is gone.

I drove around for an hour and twenty minutes this morning, misled by Google maps and a mislabeled street. I stopped for directions four times, each time being sent farther and farther from my destination until, after the start time of the concert, a man outside of Blockbuster video informed me that I was “miles and miles away, man.” We turned around and headed home.

In the hour and twenty minutes, I tossed around this thought in my head: what you took notice of, it is all part of carrying that bubble for so long. I am so acutely aware of what it feels like when your heart isn’t full. I never want anyone to feel that way when there is something so simple we can do: reach out and show care and remove the small empty spaces that collect inside the heart.

Everyone deserves to be full.

Ah, fuck, you already knew my kumbaya-ness. And now, there is my period to contend with as well. Thank you. I will never be able to put into words how much those comments meant to me.

My blogoversary, my blogoversary, ferns, dancing, tons of people. Every pink flower west of the Mississippi. Blogoversary cake in the dining room and the NaComLeavMo cake… Hidden in the carport.

Wait.

Shit.

That was Shelby’s wedding. And this in my blogoversary. I get these two occasions mixed up. All. The. Time.

My blogoversary is not bathed in blush or bashful, but my blog is two years old today. It is also almost the anniversary of my little planner and I am still lugging it around with me a year later. But it should get its own day to shine.

It is hard to remember what was started this year and what was merely a continuation. Show and Tell is definitely new as is IComLeavWe (which was called NaComLeavMo in its first incarnation). U.T.E.R.U.S. was started and we did our first big fundraising adventure. I kicked off the weekly Barren Advice column and a bunch of us have already chosen our new blogging names and added them to the Blogging Name Registry to mark the two year milestone. The collective Shop Mom or Pop was started last winter. The Public Living Room was utilized for online meetings and simultaneous television watching. Twelve and a Half Fighting Back took on activism projects. We had an international candy exchange. The largest project–Lost and Found and Connections Abound (LFCA or L & F)–not only began but got so large that it moved into its new space and has published almost 200 entries so far.

Other projects simply continued. The blogroll grew like a weed. The Creme de la Creme rolled around again as well as the Roundup Extravaganza. We kept meeting at the Virtual Lushary each month. The Barren Bitches read a lot of books. Entries were added to Operation Heads Up and new people volunteered for the Peer Counselor List. Secret Ode Days popped up out of nowhere.

I looked at the two years this blog has been in existence and used their overarching themes to determine the course this blog will take in its third year. This is different from the word that defines the entire blog which is “community.” I think that word best describes the blog as a whole if it had to be boiled down to one word.

But, if you take each year on its own, the first year was best defined by the word “connections.” I started the blog because I had always wanted a single space on the Internet that combined all the best aspects of the individual spaces. The information from the medical sites and the support from the bulletin boards and the fun projects from…well…camp. The connections were sometimes between two people or sometimes between a person and information. But so many of those early projects were about removing the isolation inherent in infertility. If you had an Internet connection, you had a community, not just a blog. I did this for myself, but I’m happy if it helped others too.

The word that defined the second year was “action.” I have a definite antsy side to my personality. I don’t sleep a lot. I don’t remain still for very long. I don’t like to talk about things–I like to see things happen. I live my entire life by Gandhi’s adage “be the change you wish to see in the world” (albeit at a high speed with the theme word being “now”). So we changed things. We saw needs and we filled them. We fought the good fight. We made sure–to the best of our abilities–that more people got the support they needed. Thank you for this.

I am never sure what word defines the year until after it is over, but I’m entering this year with a single word to help guide me. I don’t know if it is helpful or not to name it right now, but I’m going to place it out there as a thought. My defining term from now until next June is “listen.” It’s a hard thing to do–to truly listen to another person. To set aside the time to concentrate on someone else’s thoughts without simultaneously considering your own. To practice a form of verbal relativism, listening while trying to place yourself in the other person’s point of view rather than your own. Talking is easy. I have about 850 posts on this blog. Being silent. Reading. Actually hearing; internalizing someone else’s words, tossing them around inside your head, allowing them to change your world. That is hard.

Already, the small projects that have planted seeds in year two are sprouting into year three. Show & Tell at its core is about listening to what is important to another person. Lost & Found is about sitting with someone’s words and letting them know that you’re listening and supporting them.

The thing that I have the most hope wrapped around is IComLeavWe. I would love for this idea to build and for comments to gather the same respect as blog posts. We honour blog posts all the time, but how many times do we honour comments? We lament not being able to post enough, but how many times do people also consider their lack of commenting? NaComLeavMo was admittedly hard. It became suffocatingly difficult to remember to comment a quota every single day for a full month. I hope that by making it weekly and making it often that people will drop in and out with an eye to what is happening in their own life. When the list opens next week on Tuesday, I hope people add themselves. When IComLeavWe rolls around (each month from the 21st to the 28th), I hope we see a huge spike in comments. Thoughtful comments. Comforting comments. And also…

Even when you don’t have something to add, when you can’t find the words to respond, I hope this year that it becomes socially acceptable and understood to simply write the phrase “I am listening” and post the comment under your name. What does this do? Sometimes, it helps to know that your words were read. That someone didn’t click on and click off of your blog without processing your words. Sometimes it simply feels good to know that you’re not alone, even if the other person doesn’t have a solution or deep comfort. Some people may think this is lazy; a comment not worth the effort to leave or receive. But I think it can be very powerful to know that someone listened even if they have nothing to respond with in return. If all comments ran this course, I would need to rethink my stance on this, but right now, amid the other thoughts, I would love to hear the small “I am listenings;” especially on
a post that you see does not have a lot of comments.

So happy anniversary, little blog. May this next year be one of deep listening, good community, enormous love, wonderful news, and only more kumbayaness. We cannot control so many things in our lives–the enormity of what we can’t do sometimes leaves me speechless–but ensuring that no one feels alone: that is actually within our power. So it is my goal: to make sure that anyone I encounter knows that I have listened.

This is the tenth installment of Barren Advice. You can ask questions that are fertility or non-fertility related.

Barren Advice is posted each Tuesday. If you have your own question for Barren Advice, click here to learn how to submit. Please weigh in with your own thoughts in the comment section and indicate which question you’re addressing if there are multiple questions in the post.

Dear Mel:

I’m having a bit of a crisis of confidence, of the how-infertile-am-I-*really* variety (warning – all this may just be the Clomid talking). I’ve always been averse to medical intervention for anything that isn’t a clear and specific injury or illness. In the realm of infertility, there seems to be a lot of ambiguous or conflicting information. For example, take luteal phase length supposedly anything under 10 days is too short, and yet I can plug in “Short Luteal Phase (<10)">

Although I do appear to have ovulation problems and DH’s s/a was less than optimal, we haven’t been trying all that long (about a year), so it’s not clear how much these things are reducing our odds. How do I sort out which reproductive issues are definitely a problem and really do require medical help, versus those that doctors think are probably a problem but don’t really know for certain?

–Kate of “No Blog” Fame

The heart of this problem comes with linguistics. Infertility is a bit of a misnomer. A large portion of those diagnosed as infertile are actually subfertile. After all, if you were not fertile at all, there would be nothing one could do to help you along. It would be like trying to grow a flower in concrete. Some people in the community are the equivalent to concrete (and I say this in the most loving way)–nothing they could do would give them the ability to become pregnant. Either they are completely sterile and do not produce any sperm (and this is different from a low sperm count which also isn’t getting anyone pregnant) or they are missing necessary reproductive organs such as their ovaries or uterus. The rest of us are actually more accurately subfertile. We’re more like poor soil–add some nutrients, change the seeds you’re using, adjust some details–and, hopefully, plants will grow.

And that is what makes this suck so hard.

If we were infertile, we could make neat decisions. We could accept our limitations and we’d know the right time to move on. But we’re not. We’re subfertile and that’s where things get grey and we enter an analogy akin to gambling. How many IVF cycles should you do with your eggs? What if the next one was the one that would have worked? What if we had held off one more cycle before starting treatments–could we have gotten pregnant and avoided all of this? Too many questions linger like that when the boundaries aren’t clearly defined and it’s hard to walk away from the table once you start gambling. Because that’s sort of the allure of gambling–there’s always the chance of the next time.

Therefore, I think a lot of this has to do with what type of stakes you’re comfortable laying on the table: not when life is good and you’re at the casino for a lark; but if you were playing for something really important to you. Are you the type who would rather watch the game for a bit and figure things out and decide if you really want to enter? Are you the type who jumps into the game and places everything you’ve got on the table, even before knowing whether the dealer is working with blackjack or 5-card draw (can you tell that everything I know about poker I learned from Intellivision)?

Let’s strip the analogy away and ask this question: are you the type who feels it’s worth the risk of losing time or chances in order to work on the problem sans treatments? A lot of people feel this way and many are successful. If you try enough times, chances are, you will win. You’re not guaranteed to win because the statistics remain the same each time you try. If you have a 1 in 4 chance, you will still only have a 1 in 4 chance, but you’ll have it 15 times. Please don’t ask me about this fuzzy math.

Or are you the type who needs this to happen for your own sanity. Please do not disregard mental health–your soul, your emotions, your heart need to be given as much care as your body. Separating them is detrimental to your whole. Therefore, if you would treat an ulcer, you should also treat the stress that caused the ulcer (if stress caused the ulcer). If infertility is affecting someone emotionally, I think it’s worth treating all medical issues–the reproductive health and the mental health. Sometimes, treating the infertility by default treats the mental health issues.

I once asked my RE how my mother got pregnant with me when she couldn’t get pregnant with treatments (yes, I’m an off-cycle baby) and he explained it this way. Every subfertile woman creates perhaps one or two good eggs every once in a while. They may have happened before we started trying or they may happen when we’re 41. We just don’t know. It is the perfect cycle where egg quality and uterine lining come together. If you are having unprotected sex every single cycle around ovulation; never taking a month off, you will hopefully catch that egg and have it fertilized and implant. And you will carry it to term. That’s how people become pregnant after adoption or how they become pregnant after stopping treatments. Or how they become pregnant naturally after 8 failed IVF cycles.

Some people are willing to wait for that cycle. Some people luck out and inadvertently find that cycle. And other people are not willing to sit around for something that may or may not occur. I didn’t fall into the first category, I am here on this earth due to the second category. But my heart feels best (and this is personal for me) with that third category. That’s how I chose treatments. I don’t know if it’s helpful to hear how someone else reached the decision to plow ahead.

No really, the beauty of a blog advice column is that you get to weigh in with your two cents too. Let the questioner know if you support the advice, add to the response, or dispute it completely. I would love people to add how they decided whether or not to enter treatments.

Leave a comment in the reaction box below–only keep in mind that conflicting advice is embraced and rudeness is not. Want to ask your own question? Click here to see what you need to send in order to be included in a future Tuesday’s installment of Barren Advice.