I’ve decided to bring the ChickieNob and Wolvog with me to vote even though the last time I brought them to an election site, the Wolvog broke free, ran to the center of the room, lifted his shirt and screamed to the voting masses, “Peoples, these. are. my. niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiipples!”

Voting is interesting for them simply because it involves pushing buttons on a computer. If it’s exciting in the checkout at the grocery store, it’s certainly exciting when deciding the fate of a nation. But I’ve been trying to impress on them that it’s not just button pushing and fancy computer screens. There are issues at stake and I am beyond undecided at the moment. And beyond my own lack of a decision, there is the problem I bring to the table.

I always back the losing candidate.

Therefore, it stands to reason that whoever I vote for will certainly not be the democratic nominee for President. And that is a huge responsibility to have–do I vote for the one I want, knowing it means without a doubt that they won’t win or do I vote for the one I don’t want, essentially forcing my favourite candidate into a winning seat? Or will the fates know that I am trying to circumvent my losing streak and punish me accordingly? It is all so hard.

It began with the Weekly Reader election in first grade. My first vote. I went with Jimmy Carter because I existed solely on peanut butter at that time and I had heard my parents say that he was a peanut farmer. We all know how that election went. I was for Dukakis, I was for Paul Tsongas before Clinton, I voted for Gore when Gore won and didn’t win, I backed John Kerry. You’re seeing a trend, right?

All joking about voting on the annoyance scale aside (except for a certain woman running for Congress in my district. Seriously, lady, you have run such an annoying campaign, calling my house three times a day with prerecorded messages and littering my lawn and mailbox with handouts that you lost the vote I was planning on giving you just because I can’t stand the thought of giving a vote to someone who has wasted so much of my time with hanging up on your campaign messages and recycling your flyers. Wait, what am I saying? I will vote for her. I was going to vote my convictions, but instead I’m going to vote my spite. Yeah, you’ve got my vote–also known as the albatross–around your neck. You’re going down!), voting is a huge responsibility–bigger still when your vote means a person will lose instead of win.

And I have to make a decision now because if I waver on Tuesday, if I left my electronic pen hover over a candidate’s name for too long, I know the consequences. The good people of Maryland will get a good look at my son’s nipples.

I think I’m going to take a chunk of Friday Blog Roundups to ask all of my blogging questions. The posts may end up long, but it’s the weekend, so you can read it in chunks. Chunks. It’s one of my sister’s least favourite words–chunky–I always think about that when I use it. So I’d like to apologize in case someone else is bothered by chunk. Chunk. I can’t stop chunking it.

The impulse for this question will come clear when you read one of the blogs in the roundup, but it boils down to the friend-that-got-away. I think most of us have one; that intense friendship that ended abruptly and the person will not really explain why they have severed the tie. Mine took place during my sophomore year of college and it was a long, painful breakup. If she would have been amenable, I would have gone to couple’s counseling–this woman was truly my heart. I still remember the first day we fell into “friend” and I still remember the last time we spoke which was at 4 or so in the morning during my 21st birthday.

For a while after we broke up, I wanted an answer. Nothing she said was really good enough to warrant throwing away our friendship. Later in adulthood the reason dawned on me, but it doesn’t feel right to google her (okay, I googled her. How can you not google her after you read Shelli’s story?) and send her an email out of nowhere saying, “hey, is this is the reason we broke up?” Because why we broke up has ceased to be important. We have now moved on to the sadder stage (which is mingled with the angry “why” stage) which is that we have broken up.

I think the reason we are so sad when friends exit our lives is because each person who interacts with us–especially those on an intimate level such as a best friend or a roommate (of which my person was both)–know a piece of us that no one else knows. Josh may know me best right now, but he never knew me during sophomore year or high school or middle school like my friend did. She is the only other person in the world (except for all of you, right now) who has the same collective memory of the price check on the tampons at People’s Drug. She knows a certain Melissa and having someone else hold a piece of you–a piece of your shared consciousness–and not having them in your life is disconcerting. Especially when you know that they’re walking around out there, holding your collective memories.

She is holding a literal chunk of my heart.

Chunk.

Which brings us to the blogging question in all of this. When you write a blog, you sometimes (depending on the type of blog) share a huge piece of who you are. You share collective memories of things you’ve read. Each of us share a collective memory of the losses that rocked the blogosphere for the past two months. We each share a collective memory of the Creme de la Creme and the creation of the Braces Bunch and all of the other small pieces that quilt the blogosphere. Years from now, when we’re old and grey and our granddaughters are talking about their own infertility because everyone is infertile in the future due to movies-coming-true syndrome (MCTS) as well as the Great Coffee Tidal Wave of 2038, we will tell them about Julie and Serenity and Bea and Lori and all of the other women in the blogosphere. And the man-pies. I will be telling my granddaugther about Smarshy. Which means that I am walking around with pieces of you and you are walking around with pieces of me.

Right now, we are all accessible to one another and there is rarely a falling out that precludes the person contacting another. The blogosphere usually operates on a “just slip away” tendency. But what do we owe each other in terms of that friendship? And how do we view that idea of collective memory in something as amorphous as the blogosphere? You intimately know my thoughts and feelings yet you don’t actually see me (except for bloggers I meet face-to-face) and you hold these pieces of me yet you’re somewhat unreachable because sometimes I don’t even know who is reading this.

Which is a topic for a different day.

The point is that idea of the lost friendship and what they take and what we willingly give away on the Internet and what we keep. Beyond that, I’d love to hear your friend-that-got-away story because for a few years, I truly thought I was the only person on earth who had broken up with a best friend. So…discuss.

Next chunk:

Sometimes, when I don’t post a Connections Abound it is because I am lazy…I mean, busy. But other times (like this week), there wasn’t enough news to post on Wednesday. Is this because nothing was happening across the blogosphere or things were missed? I’m willing to guess the latter.

There are clickers for different categories reading through blogs, but you can greatly help the process by (1) sending in your own information when you need support, want to celebrate something, or are seeking information on a specific situation. (2) If you are shy about sending in your own information, ask a reader or friend to post it. (3) If you are reading a blog and the person looks like they could use some good thoughts or support, send it in for them. Send it here and my email is always in the opening at the top of each post.

I’m just saying, the resource is there. Anyone in the community can use it. Don’t be shy–I don’t always write back, but I do post anything on-topic (meaning, if you are a cooking blogger and you want to talk recipes, well, I’m not sure why you’re posting on an IF/pg loss/adoption blog, but that has happened in the past. On the other hand, if you are an IF/pg loss/adoption blogger and you want to talk recipes, well, by all means, send a blurb). If nothing is happening in your life right now where you need specific support or celebratory comments or questions answered, just keep the idea in the back of your head for a time that you do.

And in other news, I created a list of common abbreviations specifically for IF/pg loss/adoption blogging and added it to Operation Heads Up. It’s #53 on the list. If you see common abbreviations missing, let me know so I can add them. Hopefully, one day, we can make MCTS so commonplace that it can be added to the list.

And I’m still adding to the Creme. It’s trickling down–the new posts. It’s sort of like popping corn when it gets to the end and only a kernel or two is going off. I will retire the little icon down the sidebar when I go a little bit without a new update.

And now the chunk that is the actual purpose of this post, the blogs:

Shelli at Hydrangeas Are Pretty had the post that kicked off the questions above. It’s not only well-written, but in reading it, it made me think about my own friend-who-got-away and the deep sadness that comes with such a loss. So my heart went out to her and it started me on a mad googling spree. It was nice to see that my old friend was running 5Ks and taking care of her heart with exercise. I still wish her only the best.

Speaking of heart health, when I read this post by Julie at A Little Pregnant, I
laughed so hard that I had one of those moments where my heart hurt from laughing too strenuously. My reaction to an already amusing image was compounded by the ChickieNob’s current “can it eat me” stage. As in, can a tiger eat me? Can a lion eat me? Recently she asked if a pigeon could eat her and when I answered that pigeons are too small to eat her, she thought for a moment and returned with “can a pigeon eat my finger?” I hope the pirates did not turn bad and eat Charlie’s head. Nor any of the other children.

Marjorie at MomBrain had a very touching post called “Tempting Fate.” She grabbed my heart at the beginning of the second paragraph: “What I am is most kindly — or at least euphemistically — worded by the big red words on the chart my OB carried into each appointment with me while I was pregnant: Advanced Maternal Age. Those big red words still feel like a hot embarrassment, my very own scarlet letters, as if I had sinned by getting pregnant when a smart woman my age would be helping her teenagers with their college applications.” And she only gently set it down with the question that comes towards the end. You need to read this post if you have ever simultaneously mourned and been blessed by fate.

On the topic of fate and choices and change, M at The Maybe Baby had a post about her recent cycle. She asks about the decision to start down the IVF road: “If things fell to sh*t right now and we decided to not try again, to leave this dream behind, I would have no hesitation saying that the exploration, the process was all worth it. I was pregnant, if only for a few days. That’s what I would say today. Catch me at another time and I might rue the day that I ever started to question my childfree life. It wasn’t/isn’t so bad, is it?” It is truly a gorgeous, heartfelt post.

Lastly, you must click over to read this single-paragraph post by Baby Steps to Baby Shoes on the topic of menstruation. It’s as simple as that.

Still with me at the end of this chunk? Apologies for the extreme length. So, to roundup the roundup, send stuff for Lost and Found if you have stuff for Lost and Found or if others have stuff for Lost and Found. Plus what are your thoughts on the ideas on friendship as well as your friend-that-got-away? Much peace this weekend.

Arthur B. Fuckelstein, we found the mouse.

I was standing near the closest with the ChickieNob discussing the nutritional content of yogurt-covered raisins when Josh sweetly but urgently asked me to pick up the ChickieNob and move across the room and do not look down. Caught in the glue trap was a m-o-u-s-e, a little grey m-o-u-s-e, who was still struggling in the glue. It broke my heart and freaked me out at the same time. I’m not sure how you can have it both ways–a m-o-u-s-e-free house (what will we do once they can spell and we can’t discuss m-o-u-s-e m-u-r-d-e-r over their heads?) and ahimsa.

Josh took him outside. I thought about him all day.

Reading about someone’s loss makes you contemplative.

Kathy V started a discussion on her blog and we’ve been going back and forth with it and it made me realize something that hadn’t occurred to me until I wrote it. In Judaism, we don’t have baby showers–nothing is done for the baby or the mother prior to birth.

What happens is after a baby is born, the parents hold either a bris (boy) or simchat bat (girl). There is a set ceremony for the boy complete with ritual circumcision (I know people tend to have strong feelings about circumcision, but it is part of my religion, so…this isn’t really the space to debate it. Just saying). Parents can sort of go any which way with creating a ceremony for a girl–I’ve seen parents wash the newborn’s feet as a Middle Eastern sign of welcome. We did something akin to the fairies in Sleeping Beauty where each family member made a wish for them starting with each letter of their name. For both girls and boys, the name isn’t revealed until this ceremony on the eighth day.

Men and women often separate out during religious rituals, but they’re together for the bris or simchat bat, and that is the deciding factor in determining whether or not we attend the baby naming. To be honest, I’m not sure I could drag my ass to a shower and sit there as the lone infertile person in the room, cooing over every baby item.

It makes a huge difference when you’re standing there with someone who knows everything about you and feels the same way you do even if he expresses it differently and isn’t ducking into the bathroom for a quick, frustrated cry. Beyond that, there is a different curiosity driving you towards the baby naming. You get to see the baby AND you get to find out the name if the parents haven’t already announced it.

But in talking with Kathy V, I started thinking about all of these drawbacks to doing things this way. I mean, the benefits are easy to see in the IF/pg loss/adoption community. But part of the baby shower is helping the mother prepare for the baby and Judaism sort of has this scrambling period built into the ritual. Not having a baby shower or bringing things into the house before the birth is actually not a law (halacha), it’s a custom (minhag). Therefore, it’s up to the person to decide whether they want to follow it or not.

I wanted to follow it. I mean, I didn’t even tell people I was pregnant until I was five months along. When my Jewish therapist asked me why I wasn’t bringing anything into the house to prepare, I mumbled something about tempting fate. She asked if I really believed that–if I thought purchasing a crib was really going to affect me medically. My rational mind said no. I mean, I’m sane enough to know that having a crib in the house does not cause labour at 33 weeks. But my heart said yes.

The reality was that taking apart a crib was not going to be the thing that undid me. Losing the children would take care of that and create the wound and any baby item would simply be the salt that made it burn. But even without that salt, a gaping wound is still a gaping wound. You don’t look for salt, but it has a way of finding you anyway, even if you take great pains to avoid anything sodium-related.

The other thing I think a baby shower does is recognize that life and recognize the woman as a mother. And this is the part I’d really like to understand from non-Jews: how do you feel about baby showers? If you had one and then lost the child, would you regret having had women come together and celebrate the child like that or would you feel good knowing that in the baby’s short life, they had already had a party thrown in his/her honour? Does any sadness stem from the baby shower or is it like my salt-in-wound analogy above where the gaping wound would still exist and would still be painful regardless? If you are not Jewish and have chosen to have a shower (or been strong-armed into one by loving relatives), do you have any regrets? And what changed about your shower if you are holding one after IF?

This question also holds for holding showers prior to an adoption–in Judaism, we do it after the child arrives during the naming ceremony. But I can see the benefit of doing it beforehand–to recognize the woman during that waiting period. To help her prepare.

I think a woman is a mother so long before a child actually comes into the world, hence the creation of a childless mother in regards to pregnancy loss, stillbirth, and neonatal death. It’s like the Law of Conservation of Maternal Energy: energy exists; it can change form, but it can’t be destroyed.

A shower, on one hand, recognizes that fact. When you wait until the bris or simchat bat, the childless Jewish mother isn’t celebrated with. She is only mourned with. Truthfully, as much as I love Judaism and plan on practicing Judaism indefinitely, any mourning rituals (and they are few and far between in regards to pregnancy loss) really only addresses the lost child and does not mourn the transformation of maternal energy. Which I think–if we want to be truly healthy in our culture–needs to be recognized as well. Not just in the moment, but for the eternal transformation of that energy and the way it plays out every day. Any good physicist knows that.

The idea was already in my head from when I was speaking to a mutual friend this weekend and she told me that our friend’s good news came on the anniversary of her bad news. There are times–such as September 11th–when the world stops for a day in the face of a collective event–but most of the time, the moments that rock our world (either good or bad) are quietly our own. And one person’s best day of their life can line up simultaneously with another person’s worst day of their life.

As Josh and my father were jumping together last night, screaming over the Giant’s win at the very last second, I was thinking about how this broke down on the field–the emotions of the Patriots, the jubilation of the Giants. And how, in our own little blogosphere, as others face the television set and watch football, there is so much mourning going on.

The juxtaposition of elation against despair can take your breath away as you click through blogs.