There was a movie a few years back called Twin Falls Idaho about a set of twins who worked in show business and survived–albeit poorly–on a diet of circus food: popcorn, corn dogs, and cotton candy. That’s sort of how I think about my own relationship with Christmas.

It’s a beautiful holiday–a true holy day–that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ. And I have boiled it down to music, candy, and sparkle lights. It’s a diet thin on meaning as well as nutrition.

Christmas is a very difficult time emotionally for Christians going through infertility. The holiday not only centers on a baby and a birth, but families celebrate the holiday revolving the festivities around its children. Unlike a holiday like Rosh Hashanah which is celebrated by adults with children fitting their activities around the established rituals practiced by adults, Christmas and Easter, from what I understand based on reading blogs, listening to friends, and watching Love Actually, is about children. Adults may drink their eggnog and kiss under the mistletoe, but most people celebrate the holiday outside of the church service with the focus being that Santa brings presents for children. It’s not that adults don’t receive presents as well, but presents for adults are a different phenomenon. It’s nice when I receive a gift, but it really is the thought more than the item that touches me. I am an adult and I can work and buy myself things. I’m not a child anymore, dependent on adults (or Santa) to bring the things I want into my life.

Posts started cropping up months ago. The fears of a referral not arriving in time for Christmas, the anxiety about Christmas dinner with a pregnant (and bitchy) SIL, the sadness of having another year pass. And it’s hard for me to completely relate because I don’t have an equivalent. My holidays aren’t celebrated by the mainstream, therefore images and reminders are not constantly being shoved down my throat when I go to the food store or collect my mail. If I choose not to celebrate Pesach one year, I can do so without having to hole myself up in my house. Literally, all I have to do is not walk by the Kosher aisle in the food store or open any mail from my shul. There. Done. Holiday passed over.

I think Christmas is ten times more difficult because it is not only a holiday that revolves around children and by default, the parents of children, but because it is a holiday impossible to escape. You literally can’t drive outside without the constant reminders. You can’t enter a store or go by your mailbox or speak to another person without one reminder after another. Last year, I spoke about this as the reason why Christmas makes me feel like an outsider. But this year, it is with a deeper understanding of just how difficult it can be and why it takes so long to steel oneself for the onslaught of Christmas reminders when you want so badly the vision of Christmas that has existed in your head for years–the family photo in Santa hats, the emotional midnight Mass holding a sleeping baby, the search for gift hiding places as the children get older. I’ve been sitting long and hard with all of the posts I’m reading, trying to see the holiday as a 33-year-old Christian woman (perhaps not a long stretch seeing that I already have the 33 down pat) and, perhaps an admittance of my dimness, but the enormity is just beginning to dawn on me.

For me, I never could see the burn of Christmas. My Christmas is music, candy, and sparkle lights–the three things from the season that I find enjoyable. I couldn’t really see until I looked harder why everyone couldn’t put those other parts of Christmas on hold and enjoy a good piece of toffee or peppermint bark while listening to “Jingle Bells.” And I’m sorry. My vision of Christmas, as naive as this sounds, is an infertility-free holiday. I mean, it made sense for years in my Jewish mind. It’s the one day of the year they won’t schedule procedures at some clinics. Everyone seems to have children when you’re looking through Christmas catalogs. As someone who has never celebrated the holiday, I have co-opted it in the last few years to be my infertility-free zone. It is my happy place. My only-good-things-can-happen space. I listen to the music and I really feel like this alternate universe exists where no one is infertile and everyone is eternally happy and filled with good cheer. Naive, right? But if you’ve never celebrated the holiday before, you could see how one could come up with this vision.

Though my Infertile Christmas is nothing like your Real Christmas. Christmas for an infertile person is like having your face rubbed against a pregnant belly for a full three months. I would imagine it gets pretty difficult to breathe by the second day of having your nose pressed up against a Mimi’s Maternity clad bump.

And if you’re Christian and grew up with Christmas, I’m fairly certainly that you can’t join me in my Christmas as much as I would love to bring you over here while you’re hurting. Because you know Real Christmas and it’s sort of like celebrating a poor translation with missing pages rather than reading the original text. Cotton candy and popcorn taste great in small quantities, but if you’ve grown up eating from the four food groups, you’d probably feel like shit after eating only crap for days. My holiday in comparison to what reality can be even if you’re not there now is like a corn dog diet. Even I get sick of my Christmas by mid-December.

Ellen at Miss E’s Musings is taking back the Christmas. In fact, she is putting the sex back in XXX-mas. She writes in Making Merry: “I used to daydream about what the holidays would be like when I had a house and husband of my own. I would walk in a winter wonderland, meet friends for holiday drinks and hors d’oeuvres, decorate entirely with lush velvets, maybe do a ‘Santa Baby’ striptease for my husband, make love by the lights of the Christmas tree, enjoy champagne toasts, etc.” She’s pulling out the dirty Mrs. Claus costume AND she’s getting together with friends to watch Christmas movies (but not at the same time). She isn’t waiting for kids to enjoy Christmas–she is going to enjoy it. A lot. Right now. She is making “a list of both naughty and nice holiday hjinks.” Go over and help her. She will compile the list and become a trading post of all things naughty…and also nice. It’s apples for oranges rather than apples for junk food. Okay, you can have a little junk food. But not an entire season of it or you’ll turn out all Christmas-delusional like me.

Updated at the bottom:

Let’s see if I can write this without crying.

I don’t write a lot about my siblings…actually, I don’t write at all about my siblings because they’ve asked me not to blog about them. Therefore, you have no idea what sort of incredible, wonderful, brilliant siblings I have. I have been cleared to tell a single story that came up during Thanksgiving and in order to do so, need to create a blogging name for each. I was running through possibilities last night–plugging their names into the ever popular Get A Chinese Name? Professor Poopypant’s Name Change-o-Chart? Randomly thumbing through the Best Scottish Baby Names book and pulling out Ealusaid and Cainneach?

Apparently what I believed to be the perfect names were my last thought before sleep and I found them scrawled across a post-it note next to my bed–Hansel and Gretel.

Things always seem more brilliant at 1 a.m. But since the story is more important than the name, they will henceforth be known as Hansel and Gretel even though neither is German, plump with candy from a gingerbread house, or itching to push a witch into the oven. Just know that these names made perfect sense in my head last night before drifting off.

At Thanksgiving, Hansel and Gretel sat down at the dessert table across from me. Gretel sort of stared up at the ceiling for a moment and addressed her comment towards the light fixture. “Hansel and I were thinking that a Virtual Lushary should have a very real drink–you know, for the bartender and all of the regulars. So we worked with a mixologist at Van Gogh Vodka to create two custom cocktails for the Lushary.”

She passed two certificates across the table complete with recipe as well as several bottles of flavoured vodka. It took me a long time to process exactly what she meant (not just because I’m a bit dimmer than my siblings but because I was really overwhelmed), but what she meant was that Hansel and Gretel had been conversing back and forth via email with a mixologist at the vodka company to create two customized drinks that summed up the Virtual Lushary as well as myself. The first is the Cafe Conception and this is the only place where this recipe exists (and I know because I’ve been googling it):

My freshman year of college, I was friends with a senior named H. He was 23, meandering through school as a performance artist. He still needed many more credits to graduate. The last of his friends in his year graduated at the end of my freshman year and he returned the next fall when I was a sophomore to complete his final credits.

At first, everything was like it was the year before. And then one night in October, after the movie we rented was over, he looked at me and said, “I can’t hang out with you anymore. It’s nothing you’re doing, but everything comes so easily for you and it makes me feel like shit when I see how hard I work and I don’t achieve the same things.”

And believe it or not, this post is not a musing on the parallel between H’s earnest parting and the same thoughts I’ve had about overly fertile friends.

I didn’t think I achieved things easily, but in retrospect, it doesn’t really matter what was the truth and what was perception. H was entitled to his need to cut me from his life. I didn’t take it well at the time. I spent a great deal of the week crying because I really missed having him in my life. But it was college and when one person slips away, another person usually slips in. I never forgot him but, for whatever reason, it didn’t affect me tremendously.

At the beginning of my senior year, a mutual friend was getting married. I was sharing a car with my boys–that circle of friends that included H that I spent all of my time with during my freshman year–as we drove across the state to get to the wedding. Though I achieved a lot in my freshman year, the awards and accolades had sort of petered out over the next two years. I had been accepted two years early into my department–the youngest member–and I won a prestigious award my freshman year. But since then, I had not only been eclipsed achievement-wise by most of my classmates, but I was emotionally lost. I didn’t understand how I worked so hard and my hard work wasn’t recognized. I wasn’t certain that I was going to get into graduate school and I didn’t know what I was going to do after May. I had come off of a terrible junior year and a hard summer and I didn’t really want to go to the wedding at all. But I got in the car and smiled broadly at my boys because it was easier than explaining why I didn’t really want to see all of them much less drive across the state with them.

At the wheel was the only one I had remained close with throughout the first three years at college. Beside me on the back seat was R, a peripheral friend at best by that point. And H took the front seat, turning around to chat with R while I stared out the window. Finally, H turned to me and said, “I heard that things haven’t been so great.”

I shrugged my shoulders while R agreed with him, “she’s not the little golden girl anymore.”

At that moment, we passed by a sign for the Old Grey Horse, a bed and breakfast between our college and the wedding site. H turned to the rest of the car and he said, “Mel, she’s that old grey horse who ain’t what she used to be.”

And I never forgot those words.

It really hasn’t mattered what I’ve done since he has said that. It has always been in the back of my head and you better believe it came out to play when we were doing treatments the first time. I’m the horse who showed so much promise when we started trying after the wedding and years later, with my feet in the stirrups, I had turned into the mare in that dirge of a song. Not what she used to be. Plodding towards the same goal with a heavy heart. Feeling left behind.

I mean, I’m not. It’s really ridiculous. A person cannot have momentous events happen on a daily basis. Now, looking back at college, it doesn’t really matter that I didn’t gather all the departmental awards for my sophomore and junior year. The perception that I was falling behind and not being the shining star that I was during my freshman year was just that–a shift of perception. The reality is that I wasn’t a shining star my freshman year, except in my own mind and the reality is that I wasn’t an old grey horse at the beginning of my senior year, except in my own mind. We think people spend a lot of time thinking about us when the reality is that I was neither the golden girl or the grey horse. I was simply one more student matriculating through the department.

What H said was not so outwardly terrible. It’s not as if he turned to the car and yelled, “you’re an idiot and a bitch and we’re all thrilled that things didn’t go smoothly for you after freshman year.” What he said, based on both context and phrasing, was a snide remark, meant to be a small dig on my self-esteem. Bring me down a notch since he still saw me as someone higher up than him in the luck department.

And H probably stated his own insecurity when he said that line in the car. He probably saw himself as the old grey horse, now 26-years-old and still living in our college town. He was probably still jealous and still had the same skewed perception that had divided us two years earlier. I’m sure, if I wrote him today and told him this story, he would never remember saying those words in the car. They were something he flipped out of his mouth, a joke at my expense tying in the passing landscape. But for whatever reason, they are still words that come back through my head. They were the muzak playing through my head when I made my December appointment back at the clinic. Yes, I’m returning. Yes, I still can’t conceive on my own. No, I don’t seem to be ovulating anymore. Thank you for fitting me into the RE’s busy schedule.

We never know what will stick in someone’s head forever. Senior year was twelve years ago and I still feel like I’m in that car, fighting back tears. He probably didn’t remember the words five minutes after he said them, but they shaped my night, they shaped my year, they shaped how I feel when I sit on the other end of the line with the clinic.

And knowing something with your head doesn’t mean that you necessarily know it with your heart.

I have anonymous comments on my blog because we talk about something that is pretty sensitive. Infertility means talking about sex and hoohaahooteruses and soft core porn in the shwanking cubicles. It means talking about marriage and friendships. Sometimes, a person needs to get something off their chest–something that is only meaningful to them and not hurtful to another person–and they want to say it without their name attached to it in this googlable universe. Which is why I have anonymous comments on my blog–for those occasions.

I have been lucky that I haven’t received many anonymous comments that have been hurtful and I hope this post isn’t the tipping point where I see a bunch of hate mail each time I open my inbox. But I’m always surprised when I see an anonymous comment on someone’s blog that is just that–the words that are meant to cut, the words that are meant to burn. The words we say when we’re angry and bitter and we want the other person to feel shitty too. They’re not always in the outwardly obvious, “you’re an idiot and a bitch” vein, but they’re sometimes words that we flip off our fingers: words that state judgment or are meant to bring down someone we see as luckier than ourselves or dismiss another person’s emotions.

I think the fact that the person leaves the comment anonymously means that they know that what they’re saying is potentially hurtful and probably wrong. I have a similar feeling when someone writes something hateful on a blog and stands beside their words, but that’s a different post. This one is about the hand grenades that are thrown into another person’s comment box.

Why am I writing this now? Because I saw one this weekend and it bothered me. Because it’s the holiday season and emotions run high. Because we get tired and sloppy and leave a comment without thinking about how the other person
might feel when they read it. I don’t mean for this post to sound preachy. I am certain that something I have said before has hurt another blogger–I’m certain that I’m guilty, like H, of speaking without thinking. I even apologized for it at Yom Kippur a few weeks ago.

But please think before you hit send. The blogosphere has such potential to be the friend that you don’t necessarily have down the street, but only if we engage in the same courtesies we use when we engage face-to-face. I know that will bring out the comment that people are hateful face-to-face, but I think you know what I mean. Think about how the other person will perceive your words and think about what you are trying to accomplish with your comment. If the words are harsh, are they necessary? What would happen if you walked away from a post that annoyed you without leaving a comment behind?

It’s hard to see a comment that you know will be taken badly. It’s hard to hear from the receiver how it affected their day. It makes you wonder if it will become their old grey horse, still plodding after them twelve years down the line.

It doesn’t matter if there is also a function that can delete those comments; erase them from the blogosphere as if they never existed. The receiver still knows the words that were once out there. Write carefully.

Okay, stepping off my soapbox. I just felt terrible after I read the comment. It wasn’t the first one I read this month. Making sure that everyone feels welcome and valued in the community is important to me.

Edited to add: I am speaking specifically about anonymous comments. I just can’t give them the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t mean the words to be hurtful. At least if there is a name and blog attached to the comment, there is a way to respond and have a conversation. Anonymous comments seem to give people the sensation that they can say things that wouldn’t be appropriate if they were to be standing in front of the person.

Everything–including the blogroll–is still on the sidebar. I’m just moving things around and streamlining things to see if that works to make the blog load faster. Let me know if this is any better.

I love the long blogroll on the sidebar, but the reality is that it has grown to about 1025 blogs at this point and grows by several more each day. I’m keeping it as a linked list on Stirrup Queens. If you want to access it via a sidebar (which is actually how I always preferred to use it), it’s now on Lost and Found. If it starts slowing things down there, I’ll move it to the Annex since we don’t post things on that often.

Sigh. Being unschooled on computers and trying to fix a problem is really difficult.

I had a really really good Thanksgiving. It was the sort of Thanksgiving that made it very difficult to say goodbye to my siblings, that rushing out the door, I really wish I could stay longer, I’m really sad that you live far away feeling. I am terrible with goodbyes in general. But this time, it was particularly hard to drive home.

It was also difficult because my niece was taking with her the game that I had become obsessed with during the pre-Thankgiving meal festivities. It’s called Zooreka and it’s by the makers of Cranium. My sister warned me that it would become addictive and two or three rounds into the game, I was already shrieking “banana me!” every time someone rolled the dice. It was seriously the best fun I had all week. I am going to hunt down a copy for myself but the real problem lies with the fact that you need four people to play. It’s sort of the joy and sadness of board games–they bring together many people but you need many people in order to play them. If only they created a feature on the Dyson that allowed it to free-think and roll dice…

You may have noticed a small button on my side bar that states “Passionate Blog” (go ahead, scroll down and look towards the left. See it? Okay, come back up and read the rest of the post. See, I knew you had to go look for it if I mentioned it. I studied medical anthropology back in college and whenever the professor was speaking about a body part during a lecture, everyone ended up touching that feature. She would be discussing mandibles and everyone would end up massaging their jaw. Or talking about the pectoralis major muscle and everyone would end up massaging their breasts. Wait. No. That wasn’t medical anthropology class. Scratch that last example).

Anyway, if you click on the Passionate Blog button, it takes you to Magpie Girl’s Small is Beautiful Manifesto which is this: “We believe stories are valuable, no matter how many people read them. We believe following your passion is more important that watching your sitemeter. We believe in the handmade, the first try, the small start, and the good effort. We believe that small is beautiful.” It is such a beautiful sentiment and one that I can stand behind. I think all the big achievements begin with the small start and the good effort. If you believe this too, please go over and place the button on your blog and let Magpie Girl know that you’re standing behind the manifesto.

Speaking of blogs, mine has been giving people a headache as of late–hopefully only the technical end of it and not the actual words and ideas. Many people have reported that when they try to open my blog using Internet Explorer or click through to comment from Bloglines (I’m assuming also through Internet Explorer?) they are getting an error message, the blog isn’t loading, or the screen is freezing. None of these are good options. The problem seemed to be in the Technorati code I had on the blog which I removed. If you are still having trouble viewing my blog, will you let me know by sending an email? In other words, if you’re currently reading in bloglines and you normally have trouble when you try to click through to comment, test it out today and let me know if it’s now working for you. Thank you to everyone who gave me the heads up since it wasn’t happening on my computer.

Lastly, I’m just finishing up placing the next few book tours in place, but we have a bunch of authors participating–Karen Fowler for The Jane Austen Book Club, Sara Gruen for Water for Elephants, Tertia for So Close, Jenna for The Empty Picture Frame, and Beth Kohl for Embryo Culture. I’m still waiting to hear back from a few more authors and take everyone’s time needs into account. So…list should be up soon.

And now the blogs:

I loved Becky’s Gotcha Day story at Are We There Yet? I always end up bawling when I read a Gotcha Day post because there is something so incredibly moving about the idea of having your entire life change for the better in a second of time. It is obviously more moving when you’ve followed the story ahead of time, known how much the person was longing to be a parent, as well as followed the story afterwards, reading how much joy the person feels now. Adoption is an amazing thing–not just for the people it can bring together and the love that can form where there was empty space, but the magic of watching a family slide into place.

Thwarted Repeatedly had been going through life, enjoying the fact that IVF #2 worked when the shitty comments started rolling in. Her post chronicles two situations. In the first someone asked her wife who the father was and Gold Star writes: “Seriously, I know I shouldn’t be shocked that people are going to ask the question in this way, but I can’t help it. Unmindfulness makes my skin crawl – it’s pretty much the ONE THING we owe each other as human beings. And while I’m at it, I’ll add that I feel the same way when I meet someone who acts awkward when they find out I’m gay, presumably because they don’t know any/many gay people. Not only does this endlessly irritate me (who doesn’t know any gay people? leprechauns? cave-dwellers?), but I instantly have a low opinion of this person, and they have to work to make it up to me.” The other, a deeper cut, came from E’s grandmother who asked why she didn’t just adopt if they were going to use GS’s eggs. I think people lose sight of the bigger picture–that a baby is about to come into a family. There will be new life and growth to that generation. Many of us have had the judgmental why asked of us, but I think Gold Star writes about those moments eloquently.

Watson has an end-of-pregnancy (read: quite similar to the drunken love fests that happen after a few beers) post about the blogosphere as she waits for the twins to arrive. She writes: “I was a female prisoner on Alcatraz, and for some reason I had legions of friends on ‘the outside’ (as we hardened criminals like to say) whom I had never met. They were all women and we communicated via a carrier pigeon I cleverly named Pidgey. I would send messages on a little piece of paper attached to her ankle, and she would fly to the shore of San Francisco Bay and reach all of my friends. My friends would then all write wonderfully supportive missives back to me, also attached to Pidgey’s tiny little bird ankle.” Her dreams are exactly what I love about the blogosphere–a life crisis can make you feel imprisoned, stifled, confused, alienated. Everyone needs a Pidgey and Watson needs these babies out of her. Go over and give her a lot of good thoughts since it looks like the c-section might be scheduled for this week.

Lastly, this brief post from Here We Go Again cracked me up. And sometimes, you just need to end on a funny note.

And, thank you to Tubelessstl for letting me know–Karen from Naked Ovary has posted!

The Christmas music has started at our local station. I’ll be making candy this weekend, listening to ‘O Holy Night and dreaming of sparkle lights. Oh, and before you click away, if my blog is loading better now, let me know. And if this post just made your computer freeze…well, let me know too once you reboot.