During Pesach, I saw my aunt for the first time in almost four years. There’s no reason why we haven’t seen each other–simply distance and time. But, since it had been four years, it meant that she also had never met the ChickieNob and Wolvog. The last time she saw me, the twins were in my belly and I was two weeks away from their early arrival.

It was very emotional to step into her house and hug her. I love her very much, but I didn’t realize how much I missed her until we were face-to-face. It is very easy to get caught up in life and keep putting off visits and not realizing how much someone means to you. Sometimes it takes that face-to-face contact to remember.

Lori had a post a while back about her daughter spending the day with Crystal, the woman who gave birth to her. She referred to that time spent together as returning to the well. And that perfectly describes how I felt being in the house. It was as if I was returning to a source, my roots, and was drawing something in; something I didn’t even know was necessary or missing from my life until I was dragging up that bucket and drinking in. My aunt has known me my entire life.

The reason it has taken me so long to unpack this is because what happened there was totally out of character for me. I am extremely sensitive to people pointing out the physical traits that the four of us share. It twists something in my chest when people refer to the ChickieNob as Mini-Mel. We do look alike. We have so many of the same mannerisms. I do love that she looks like me and that she looks like herself. And the Wolvog looks like a Mini-Josh. I can physically pick the twins apart and tie each trait back to a family member.

But when I turn it outward and include other people in this aspect of life, I get upset by the same thing that I love because I don’t know how this third child will enter our world and I have this strong, intuitive feeling that he/she won’t be genetically related. I am so often wrong that it feels silly to think about this until it is happening, but I am acutely sensitive to the idea that this third child will not be a miniature version of us. And how that child will feel seeing that physical connection between the four of us. And beyond that, it is a global sensitivity to the knowledge that family building can take many paths and a belief that all people should be examined on their own terms and not in comparison to others. You simply don’t know how people feel about those connections.

When people bring it up, I usually just scrunch up my nose as politely as possible and say something like, “we don’t really look at things like that. The ChickieNob is simply beautiful on her own terms.” And then most of the time, people move along and comment on the beauty in her individual traits (or, the same with the Wolvog). We know a few people who will never let it drop, but that is something we’ll cross when we need to cross it.

But it was like someone had flipped this switch at my aunt’s house. I couldn’t stop talking about how the ChickieNob looks like my cousin as well as my uncle who died when I was little. I was the one bringing it up, I was the one continuously pointing out this expression or that hand movement and tying it back to the two of them. My aunt couldn’t stop marveling at the connection and I felt so proud knowing that I was a part of that too. And it made me feel terrible inside.

The thing is, I miss my uncle very much. Perhaps I didn’t realize how much I missed him or how long I linger over his picture in the living room at my parent’s house or how I associate him with certain toys. My mother gave the kids a toy he had given me and I ended up taking it away from them, too scared that they weren’t going to play with it gently enough. That they’d break one of the few tangible things I have. Toys are just…toys. But I have so few things, so few pictures, so few clear memories even by this point.

I think the oral diarrhea was about trying to form new memories, new connections since the old ones are getting so hazy with time. And I realized that I do the same thing for Josh’s grandmother. Whenever I see a trait of her husband repeated in the Wolvog, I call her and sigh, “it’s just like your husband.” Because I know she misses him and she loves that we named our son after her husband. And in finding these traits, it is like bringing someone back a little bit.

It’s a natural desire to look for these similarities, to wish that you could bring someone back. But I worry about doing it especially not knowing what the future holds. Because I know that my strongest relationships and connections break down the line in a 50/50 split with some genetically related and some not. The strength of those relationships have nothing to do with blood or genes. Genetics cannot create intimacy. It can only give you games to play
around the breakfast table when you’re drinking your coffee and missing someone who is no longer there.

That same night, we went to a seder and a cousin marveled at my daughter, calling her–as most do–Mini-Mel. She asked me if Josh and I just sat back watching the children play and thought they looked like replicas of ourselves. Regardless of what I had done just a few hours earlier, I arched my eyebrows and gave her my most droll, conversation-halting look. “Genetics aren’t something Josh and I focus on with the kids; it just isn’t important to us.”

And it made me feel like such a liar.

I’m doing a bit of housekeeping tonight and I’ve brought back the normal comment settings. Now that I have a caveat in place–I delete SPAM and rudeness and I determine what is SPAM or rudeness–it feels like that option needs to be there for when I ask a sensitive question that people don’t necessarily want their name attached to in their answer. Not because they’re hiding behind the anonymous comment to say something they know isn’t right to say, but because they’re hiding behind the anonymous comment to protect their own identity or the identity of another person. Good anonymous commenting vs. bad anonymous commenting.

Bleu and I were also musing tonight: have the word verification boxes become impossibly difficult to read as of late? I’ve been reading tonight and it takes me four or five tries to leave each comment. Are we getting a larger portion of the scrunched together ones or is everyone having a hard time reading them lately?

Here is the master list for the twelfth tour of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade. What is the Barren Bitches Book Brigade? It’s a book club from the comfort of your own living room. The book club is conducted 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. We read both fiction and non-fiction.

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: Water for Elephants*
Author: Sara Gruen
Start Date: April 17
Question Due: May 21
Question List Sent Out: May 22
Post Dates: May 27 and 28
(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.)
*with author participation!

Description of Water for Elephants (from wikipedia): Set during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Water for Elephants tells the story of a young man who leaves his life as a Cornell University veterinary student and jumps onto a train that happens to house the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth…The story is told as a series of memories. The main character, Jacob Jankowski, is in a nursing home and reminisces about his time with the circus.Jacob is employed as the show’s veterinarian and he faces a number of challenges in dealing with the head trainer, August, while also learning how to function in the hierarchy of the circus and falling in love with August’s wife, Marlena.

Barren Bitches Book Brigade List (The blogs below are participating on this current book tour. On May 27, you’ll be able to jump from post to post to read a plethora of opinions and thoughts on Water for Elephants. I will keep adding to this list until 11 p.m. on May 21. The list is currently open)

Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters
Life After Infertility and Loss
All Things Deb
Slaying, Blogging, Whatever…
The Road Less Travelled
Everyday Stranger
Falling or Flying
There’s Hope
Carrying On
Weebles Wobblog
Crazy Yet?
Desperately Seeking Baby

Not on the list and want to join? Drop me an email at thetowncriers@gmail.com. You can add yourself up until 11 p.m. on May 21.

How the book tour works:

(1) leave a comment or send me an email (thetowncriers@gmail.com) saying that you’re interested in participating. I need your blog name, blog url, and email address.

(2) read Water for Elephants by May 21 (or at least enough of it in order to ask a question to the group).

(3) create a single question that would kick off a discussion (in other words, any question that leads to more than a “yes” or “no” answer where someone can express their opinion) and mail it to me on May 21 (or any time beforehand). I will send you a reminder email close to the date. Click here to see sample questions from tour #4.

(4) the author, Sara Gruen, is open to answering any questions and reading along. Please send me any questions you have for her by May 21.

(5) on May 22, I will send you a list of possible questions. Everyone will choose 3 questions off the list and answer them in a blog entry. You will find out if you are posting on May 27 or 28 (you can choose).

(6) on May 27, people will begin to post their entry. Each day, I will post a linked list of all the people putting up their entry that day so people can go around and read the entries and comment (start a discussion back and forth in the comments section). Reading the entries and commenting on the posts is the best part of the tour–by the end of the week, you should have a comment from every participant (and maybe even a few new permanent blog readers).

As you may have now heard, I am going to be speaking at BlogHer this summer. This is but one of the many things dotting my “fear” list, though this one covers many categories including flying and public speaking. You’ll know it’s me because I’ll be the one either asleep from all the Ativan at the baggage claim or crying nervously in the lobby of the hotel. I am also, apparently, buying all the alcohol this trip.

The panel, which was kicked into action by Pamela Jeanne (it is her hard work and good thoughts that brought an IF panel to BlogHer), will be comprised of Pamela Jeanne, Lori, Monica, and me. I will be moderating which I take to mean that I have free-reign to ask all of the most embarrassing, pressing questions that are on IF bloggers minds. Thongs or bikini cut? Have you ever had an ovulation-induced quickie in the library stacks? How about in a public restroom?

Um…I’m just kidding. Or am I? I guess you’ll have to come to BlogHer and find out…

This is my first time at BlogHer. I imagine it like the computer equivalent to the 1971 sweat-under-the-nose period-synchronizing experiment where all of these women go there and they come back posting at the same rate and on the same schedule. Someone will be the alpha and start posting on Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays between 8-9 a.m. and then, like our periods coming into line when we spend too much time together wiping each other’s faces with our underarm sweat, we’ll all start posting on Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. And then the Google Reader bitching will commence each Wednesday and Thursday when there is nothing to read.

If you’ve been to BlogHer, what can I expect? Someone who loves me dearly and knows my penchant for wearing the wrong thing has warned me not to show up in my usual cargo shorts and t-shirt. Is this true? Do I need to wear…gasp…real shoes and not flip flops? Will there be recess where we can go out and play? Will I have time to make plans to see my cousin in San Francisco who just happens to be getting married this weekend (happy wedding, sweetie!)? Does everyone bring their computer?

And if you’re going to BlogHer this summer, let me know so we can all meet up and have an enormous love fest in San Francisco. Also let me know if you’re in California or going to be in San Francisco at that time separate from BlogHer. I need to get in all of my West Coast meet-ups since who knows when I’ll collect up enough Ativan again to fly out there. Also, I find it very amusing that we’re speaking right before Dooce since I have been described as “blander than Dooce.” I am vanilla pudding to her pistachio and I am the use-it-as-a-bathroom-break opening act to her main stage show. I am actually very excited to hear her speak, but I only hope that I’m introduced with the superlative “blander than.”

So…that’s the BlogHer news. And if you needed incentive to come out to California this summer, I am apparently opening a brick-and-mortar version of the Virtual Lushary.

Several press releases later and the world is no closer to learning the truth behind Aliza Shvarts’s senior project but frankly, it only holds my interest by this point as a jumping board to discussing terminology. Regardless of what she intended to do, she never had a miscarriage.

I am not just saying this because there is so much more to a miscarriage beyond the bleeding–it is a holistic experience encompassing emotions, intent, desires, pain, bleeding (amongst many other things). I am saying this as a statement to the basic biology lesson Ms. Shvarts slept through at her university: you can’t have pregnancy loss without a pregnancy and you can’t have a pregnancy without implantation. It is highly unlikely implantation ever occurred but without a beta hCG, a positive pee stick, or even 18 consecutive post-ovulation high temperatures, using the term “miscarriage” or “abortion” is only to press buttons. After all, how many women who are having unprotected sex around ovulation refer to their period as a miscarriage or their monthly abortion? Those who would demean the actual event.

Yet saying that she collected the blood of 9 periods doesn’t have the same ring to it. Nothing shuts off discourse faster than mental images of full tampons and nothing pushes more buttons than using terminology tied to emotionally-charged events such as miscarriage or abortion.

The infertility community was buzzing with reaction to the event, from Square Peg, Round Whole’s passionate post stating: “But this…. THIS. This makes me want to wretch, and scream, and yell. This is an abuse of – so many things. It is an abuse of a woman’s right to do to her body what she chooses. It is an abuse of fertility. It is an abuse of technology. It is an abuse of common sense” to Vacant Uterus’s explanation, “Hoax or not, it doesn’t really matter to me. The damage is done. Whether her display is fiction or fact, the very idea of it still spits upon all that I hold sacred and painful and private. She’s taken my very most deeply painful experiences and made a mockery of them. For that, I have no forgiveness.”

Yet after the initial gut reaction, I keep returning to the idea of the terminology used and how words hold more than their definition.

Julia at I Won’t Fear Love had a post this week about the imaginary line existing at week 20, the time period when a loss switches from being called a miscarriage to a stillbirth. She writes:

A somewhat significant chunk of the obsessing has been about whether if things were to go to shit now I could hold off delivering until Monday, when we would officially be over 20 weeks. Apparently I am way too attached to let anyone call my son a miscarriage. Veterans of subsequent pregnancies, tell me please, is this normal or am I bringing the crazy extra hard this week?

Jeanette at Keep Me In Stitches had a similar, powerful thought from the other side of the 20 week fence:

I hate that I don’t have a picture, either mental or real of what she looked like. I hate that I let the hospital *dispose* of her. I hate that they never told me I had the option of burying her. I hate the word dispose. I hate the term “Late term miscarriage.” I hate the term “Gross genetic defect.” I hate that my only daughter is in heaven and not here with me. I hate that people don’t really consider her a loss because she never really lived. I hate that I get so sad whenever I think of her. I hate that I seem to be the only one on earth who mourns her loss. I hate that I have no grave to visit.

Beyond the switch from miscarriage to stillbirth, there are the terms associated with loss that make us cringe. Spontaneous abortion. Though it is the body doing the aborting, the term has such loaded connotations in this day and age that it feels emotionally irresponsible to continue to use this term in reference to a pregnancy loss. Blighted ovum. Chemical pregnancy.

It’s not just pregnancy loss that comes with hot-button words. I cringe every time I read an article that uses the term “implant” with IVF. Embryos are transferred; they’re not implanted. We only wish we could implant embryos. Adoption language is continuously changing, trying to respect all members of the triad rather than presenting a particular view through word choice. Even common words such as “ours” and “own” become emotionally-charged when coupled with nouns such as “child.”

Yes, they are all just words and they are merely representative of the ideas they define. But words can be a powerful medium and their misuse is what rankles and raises the emotional response in those who feel the weight of trespass.

Which words push your buttons?