If you want to find me tonight, I’ll be kicking back in the living room at 9 p.m. (EST) to watch Grey’s Anatomy. You’re welcome to join me. Just follow the instructions on the post*…

*more information on the living room coming tomorrow after this final test run…

When I was little, I didn’t just have an imaginary friend. I ran with a large and diverse imaginary posse. This was a complex system with an inner circle of close, invisible playmates and a cast of thousands of unobservable acquaintances. Like real life, I’ve forgotten most of those acquaintances, though every once in a while, I’ll come across a slip of paper tucked into a childhood book where I will have drawn one of them and I’ll shake my head lovingly. “Aaaaaah, Abigail. I wonder what ever became of her. I’ll have to do an imaginary Google search later.”

My inner circle is a different story.

There was Henry–still one of my favourite names–who was a film projectionist. He lived in a small, bachelor pad–sparsely furnished but neat. He was bald. He didn’t love that, but there weren’t too many Rogaine-like options back in 1980.

There were the twins. Andi and Emmi were identical girls. Very popular. Very thin–in fact, their mother was often worried about their weight. Andi was a little more rock-n-roll, Emmi was a little more studious. Emmi could be a bit of a pill, constantly lecturing us about doing things “the right way” (she was so into doing things “the right way”) but she kept us in line, you know? The twins were crazy, always pretending to be the other one. I remember one time Andi had this date and she didn’t want to go (I know, I know, we grew up fast. I mean, we were only six and we were dating. But that’s the way life goes in the ‘burbs) so Emmi went on it for her. And the boy didn’t know. He didn’t even know that he was dating the wrong twin.

But my girlfriend, my best friend, my heart, was Sonly (pronounced, in case you don’t know her, sown-LEE). She was originally from Japan. She had long black straight hair and gorgeous dark eyes. She had a lot of brothers and her parents often told her that she couldn’t do things as well as her siblings. She kicked those boys’ invisible asses across the sea and back in everything she did. She was an expert fisherwoman. You should have seen how many fish she could bring back from a single trip. Her parents were often close to death, starving, and Sonly would save the family and show them the error of their ways in favouring her brothers over her. Of course, they would forget these lessons quickly. She had to prove herself again and again and again.

Oh Sonly.

I really miss her.

It’s hard to grow up and grow apart from your imaginary friends. I mean, I still visit Henry every once in a while–he shares a birthday with Josh’s grandmother (and he’s a film projectionist and my husband is a film festival director…strange coincidences, right?). But I didn’t even know how to get in touch with the twins to share my good news when we found out that we were carrying twins almost four years ago.

Sonly and I drifted. At one point, we were so close, I was sure we were going to be married one day. I told her all of my secrets. She was the only person who knew all my hiding places in my room. Hell, she was the only person who knew the truth when I created my secret admirer to make my sister jealous (my sister claimed that she “knew” that I had created my secret admirer. Something about how stuff showing up in our mailbox in franked-stamp envelopes on a Sunday being the tip-off. Damn older sister meddling in my imaginary life!). My real friends may not have known about Sonly, but Sonly knew all about them.

We all know how we grow apart from real friends–they achieve what we can’t and we become jealous and pull away. We simply develop new interests and the circumstances that brought us together are not strong enough to overcome a lack of middle ground. We move. We start new jobs. We get distracted and focus on things other than friendships. It is the mark of a true friend to weather through adulthood, remaining close and going through the various changes of dating, marriage, divorce, parenthood, life crises, loss.

But how do we grow apart from our imaginary friends? I mean, I invented them. You would think I could have done a better job in imbuing them with attributes that would allow them to grow with me. It’s interesting because Henry is the only one I’m still in-touch with and he certainly wasn’t my closest imaginary friend growing up. And Sonly, who was my right arm, she was my bones and blood, is lost somewhere. Wandering the world; perhaps wondering how I am.

Maybe I don’t really want to know how Sonly aged. I mean, if she is popping out babies in two year increments (always planning her pregnancies so she wouldn’t be massive during those difficult summer months), yammering on and on about how her husband just has to look at her, would I want to sit through a whole dinner with her? Wouldn’t it ruin my old memories of Sonly–when we used to sit on my bed, whispering about our shared crushes on KD Lang and Michael J Fox, drawing pictures together?

But maybe I’d find out that she also had difficulty conceiving and carrying to term. Maybe Sonly and her wife used donor sperm. Or she had to go through seven fresh cycles of IVF to conceive her singleton. We’d laugh when we found out that we went to the same clinic and had somehow missed each other in the waiting room. I would tuck my fingers between hers and say, “I’ve missed you so much. I can’t believe how things turned out for both of us. I didn’t know when we were little how hard all of this was going to be.”

It’s hard to grow up.

Who were your imaginary friends? Are you still in touch? Do you miss them or have you not even thought about them for the past twenty-five years (and if that’s the case, what the hell is wrong with you–they were your best friend! Yes, I’m the type of woman who sticks up for the invisible friend).

The Barren Bitches Book Brigade turns one on November 29th. Our little girl has grown up. This year, we read 8 books and had almost 100 participants. Taking myself out of the running because I do every tour and Josh because I force him to do every tour, there was a tie for most tours between two blogs who each slogged through six books with the Barren Bitches.

The Book Slogger Award for 2006-2007 goes to…

Beaten But Not Bowed (Drowned Girl)
Southern Infertility (Samantha)

At 5 tours, an honourable mention goes to Weebles Wobblog (Lori).

Speech, speech!

If for some reason you missed it, sign up began last week for Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. All are welcome to join along.

The overwhelming opinion of those that expressed their opinion was having some variety in the book choice; alternating between IF/pg loss/adoption books (fiction or non-fiction) and…well…non-IF/pg loss/adoption books. IF/pg loss is only half (or hopefully less) of who we are therefore it should be half of what we read. Or something like that. I love reading IF/pg loss/adoption books with you because we come from a common experience but have such divergent opinions and thoughts. So I don’t want to give that up. But there are some really cool books floating through the world right now that would be cool to read with you too. So… For the sake of clarity, I’ve named the two categories “salt” (IF/adoption/pg loss) and “pepper” (non-IF/adoption/pg loss).

It’s time to vote for the next books. First and foremost, weigh in now if you would like to read Inconceivable by Julia Indichova or if you’d rather skip this book and go to the first Pepper book. If you are planning to participate in Inconceivable, let me know now. If you’d put it back in the pool for a later read, let me know too. Weigh in.

For both the Salt and Pepper books, the voting works the same way. Even if you haven’t joined in the past, you should vote to make sure that we’re covering books in the future that you’d want to read. Here’s how it works:

• Read the blurbs below and decide which books sound potentially interesting to you.
• Leave a note in the comment section with the numbers of ALL of the books you are willing to read. List the number to the left of the book (you may not be able to participate in all the future tours, but choose books that you’d like to read if you have the time to join along).
• You may also vote two books off the island. Don’t use this if you feel neutrally towards a book, but if there is no chance you would ever join along if we were reading a particular book, vote it off the island. Think of it as Survivor for books.

Got it? Read the blurbs, leave a comment with the numbers of ALL the books you’ll read, and vote one or two off the list (if you wish).

SALT BOOKS (all of these books have some tie to IF/pg loss/adoption–trust me; it may be small, but it’s there)

1. The Empty Picture Frame (Jenna Nadeau): a book by one of our own in the IF/pg loss blogosphere. A panoramic view of IVF and the day-to-day life of someone struggling with infertility.

2. Gilead (Marilynne Robinson): Won the Pulitzer Prize. The narrator is an Iowan preacher writing a letter to his seven-year-old son who may never know his older father due to the preacher’s poor health. The letter serves as a way for this father to leave behind a sense of himself for his child.

3. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (Michael Chabon): what if, instead of Israel, Jews were given a temporary settlement in Alaska after World War II? Chabon takes us to the possible ending of the settlement in a detective-murder-mystery-many-other-genres type novel.

4. The Confessions of Max Tivoli (Andrew Sean Greer): Max Tivoli was born as a 70-year-old man and he is aging backwards, working his way towards becoming a newborn. Due to this strange phenomenon, his life intersects others at various points, constantly appearing as a new person each time.

5. Embryo Culture (Beth Kohl): not only a first-hand account of treatments and the emotions of infertility, but a look at treatments as an industry, how fertility is handled in other cultures, and the far-reaching grasp of technology.

6. The Mistress’s Daughter (A.M. Homes): A.M. Homes’ memoir about her reunion with the mother who placed her for adoption many years earlier and the father who is absent even when present is truly a look at nature vs. nurture–where do our bloodlines end and environment begins?

7. The Baby Void (Judith Uyterlinde): reviewed here (suggested by Drowned Girl).

8. So Close (Tertia Albertyn): again, a book by one of our own, this memoir covers Tertia’s quest to become a mother via IVF as well as her son, Ben’s, life and death.

9. Four Minus Three (Guitelle H. Sandman): It’s a story of how this mother lived through the de
aths of her three sons, at different times and ages (suggested by Julia).

10. Coming to Term (Jon Cohen): a non-fiction book covering pregnancy loss (suggested by Ms. Planner).

11. Tick Tock (Dr. Lillian Schapiro): This is about a young gyno resident who finds herself on the receiving end of fertility treatment (suggested by Kristen).

12. Almost Perfect (Dianne Blacklock): After 7 years of in-vitro treatment, the couple begins to drift apart and the guy starts an affair with another woman, who winds up pregnant at the drop of a hat (suggested by Kristen).

13. Baby Trail (Sinead Moriarty): it begins with a woman who carefully plans going off the pill and getting pregnant soon after (sound familiar?) only to discover she can’t plan everything. It goes on through her foray into fertility treatment (suggested by Kristen).

14. To Full Term (Darci Klein): Through her research and her stick-to-it-iveness, she is able to overcome the odds and avoid a fourth loss. Lots of facts and statistics but more about her true life story (suggested by Kristen).

15. Digging to America (Anne Tyler): two families adopt children from Korea. The book does not focus on infertility or adoption as the centerpiece, but rather uses these as a springboard to exploring our notions of family and how we create ties with the ones we love (suggested by Samantha).

PEPPER BOOKS (no ties to IF/pg loss/adoption as far as I know)

16. Songs Without Words (Ann Packer): Liz has always been the friend who takes care of Sarabeth. But when the tables turn and Liz is the one in need of comfort, Sarabeth is too riddled with traumatic memories to step up and provide support.

17. Eat, Pray, Love (Elizabeth Gilbert): “At the age of thirty-one, Gilbert moved with her husband to the suburbs of New York and began trying to get pregnant, only to realize that she wanted neither a child nor a husband. Three years later, after a protracted divorce, she embarked on a yearlong trip of recovery, with three main stops: Rome, for pleasure (mostly gustatory, with a special emphasis on gelato); an ashram outside of Mumbai, for spiritual searching; and Bali, for “balancing.”–from The New Yorker.

18. Water for Elephants (Sara Gruen): “The novel, told in flashback by nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski, recounts the wild and wonderful period he spent with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a traveling circus he joined during the Great Depression.”–from Publishers Weekly.

19. The Jane Austen Book Club (Karen Fowler): “Five women and one man meet periodically to discuss the work of (arguably) the greatest novelist in English. Six people, one for each Jane Austen title. It is California, a hot summer in the Central Valley early in the 21st century, and these are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them hurting in different ways, all of them mixed up about love.”–from The Washington Post.

20. The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde): “Surreal and hilariously funny, this alternate history will appeal to lovers of zany genre work (think Douglas Adams) and lovers of classic literature alike. The scene: Great Britain circa 1985, but a Great Britain where literature has a prominent place in everyday life.”–from Publishers Weekly.

Okay, get voting. The booth is now open until November 15th (Thursday) at 10 p.m. EST. New books will be announced in the roundup on the 16th. And weigh in on whether you’re planning on joining for Inconceivable by Indichova (currently on the side bar as the next book) or if we should jump to the first “pepper” (non-IF) book on the list after voting. If you do not want to leave your vote in the comments section below, you can email me your vote.

With television writers on strike and new episodes of scripted shows indefinitely on hiatus, we bring you the next wave of entertainment to fill the gaping hole left by Grey’s Anatomy and The Daily Show: reality blogivision. Okay, so this post isn’t even remotely as cool as my initial vision of reality blogivision. My intention was to film this, but since I didn’t charge the video camera, you instead get to follow along with this summary…

In the entry I posted on Weebles Wobblog for the Cross-Pollination Project, I mentioned my favourite thing I brought back from a month in Italy–my photograph of a vomiting clown:

This is the story of the little stirrup queen who put her foot in it…

You would think, living in the same house as the film festival director, that I would have some inkling as to the major themes in an opening night film. But I didn’t. I knew it was Argentinian and I knew the director. And that was about it. I have to tell you, that if you’re going to invite a friend to come see a movie with you, you may want to find out the topic of the film beforehand. It’s just a thought.

The lights dim and my friend and I start watching the movie. It is a sweet film about sons and fathers and how we are similar and different from our parents. Midway through the film, it becomes obvious that the father is not going to make it onto the final reel. Which is when my heart begins to pound. Because I’m watching the film with a friend who lost his own father to brain cancer a few years earlier.

Afterwards, I apologize and he is incredibly nonchalant about the whole experience. He told me it was fine and didn’t seem anxious to talk about it. So we didn’t. We went out and got dessert. And we dissected his love life. And we talked about a picture of a vomiting clown that I got in Italy. And we didn’t discuss the film.

At all.

I felt like the biggest ass. If it were me, I would have (1) cried during the film, (2) excused myself afterwards to cry some more in the bathroom, and (3) then wanted to talk about it at dessert. If I have to sit through it, I would at least want to use it a cathartic release.

But that’s just me.

It really drove home the whole idea of men and women mourning differently. I think sometimes because men don’t necessarily cry openly or as frequently as women, we forget that they’re mourning. Or we think that they’re not upset. But seeing his back tense and his chin resting on hand as he leaned forward in his seat reminded me that just because tears aren’t streaming down your face, just because you don’t want to discuss it for hours, just because you can compartmentalize and move away from the emotions doesn’t mean that you’re not in mourning.

If this were a Hallmark card, the outer picture would be an ocean of tears and the inner message would read something poetic in a cursive font about crying and mourning and love and inner connectedness.

But they don’t really make Hallmark cards for these sorts of faux pas.

But I am sorry that I didn’t find out the subject of the film beforehand…

Pamela Jeanne commented: “I opened up and read the comments before I had formed my opinion firmly. I was leaning to Chicklet. Can’t quite imagine Mel with the picture of a vomiting clown … learn something new every day.”

This is how I ended up with a picture of a vomiting clown.

My friend, A, and I made a reservation to stay in a pensione in Rome for two weeks while we did research. After we dragged our suitcases up six flights of stairs, we learned that the woman who owned the pensione had decided to do some renovations that week. “You’ll stay in my apartment,” she told us, giving us the key to her personal home.

Instead of a small room in a boarding house, we now had an apartment in Trastevere, a much nicer section of Rome, complete with a washer and dryer, several bedrooms, and–my favourite part of all–a shower with a window in it. I’ve always said that it is my dream to live in a house that had a window in the shower. Those who have never been in a shower like this usually respond, “it sounds creepy.” But those who have showered in one know the saying, “once you’ve had the window cracked, you can never go back.”

We left our bags and wandered down the street to grab a bite. When A and I travel, we have a tendency to eat at the same place for every meal so we choose a place close to the hotel. The first place we found was on our street and we went inside. The owner was only a few years older than we were, an American originally from Long Island who moved to Rome to run the restaurant with his father. The restaurant’s walls were covered with street scenes that had been specially painted for the restaurant. We were seated the first night next to the picture of the vomiting clown.

It’s a street scene during Carnival:

Notice the clown in the bottom right corner. Can’t see him? Let me help you zoom in for a closer look:

What got me was the other clown, eying the vomit with fascination. We started eating at this restaurant every night, and every night, I could barely breathe whenever I saw this painting. I told A that I had to have a picture of it to bring back with me. On the last night, we were pretty drunk and I got A to take a photo of me in front of the painting, standing far to the side in order to get in the majority of the picture. I have cropped out my drunken-grin-and-messy-haired self from the picture.

“You like this painting,” the owner said.

“I do,” I admitted.

“That’s my mother,” he told us, pointing to the woman standing directly behind our favourite clown. “I had the artist paint her into this street scene. I love my mother.”

“We love that clown,” I said, motioning to the retching man on his knees. “That’s what we’ve been laughing about every night.”

“What do you mean?” he said, turning around to study the picture.

“The vomiting clown. The clown who’s vomiting in front of your mother.”

“He’s not vomiting! What’s wrong with you? That’s my mother. He’s fucking eating pasta out of a bowl. This is a restaurant. Why would we have a fucking picture of a clown vomiting on our wall? I paid to have this painting made. That’s my mother! He’s sucking up the pasta because he fucking loves it.”

I looked back at the picture, suddenly sober enough to ask. “If he’s not vomiting, why is he crouched over the bowl with his hands on the ground? I mean, if he were eating pasta, wouldn’t he have a fork?”

The owner didn’t have an explanation. He just shooed us from the restaurant and slammed the door once we were outside. And we laughed all the way back to our apartment with the window in the shower.