Okay, so the blogroll is really messed up. This is what happened. As I read, I go through sometimes and move blogs around. So if someone says that they’ve decided to use donor eggs, I’ll move them over from IVF to the donor egg category just to have people more spread out (some categories have many people in them and some categories have only a few) and so people can find similar stories to their own. So, I started spliting up the pregnant or parenting after infertility category into smaller groups when I noticed that some people hadn’t updated their blog in a long time. And my heart stopped.

Because the last time they wrote, they were 8 weeks pregnant and going to a sonogram. And then the blog simply stopped. No post-sonogram update. No goodbye. No I-have-terrible-morning-sickness-and-I-have-no-time-for-a-blog-anymore.

It’s not that I feel like bloggers have an obligation to continue writing if they don’t want to write. And certainly no one owes me details about their fertility or their pregnancy. But it’s a bit scary when someone stops writing abruptly. You wonder if they’re okay. You wonder if the pregnancy is okay. You leave a note in the comments, but they still don’t update their blog. Nor do they take it down. It is simply frozen in a moment of time.

And I’m not sure what to do with these blogs on the blogroll. I often leave on blogs that aren’t being updated or even ones that have a final post saying goodbye because they have good archives and you never know when someone is going to decide to begin posting again.

But I don’t know how to handle the ones where the person has a pivitol appointment looming on the horizon and they stop posting. Do I move them out of pregnancy after infertility because they may have lost the pregnancy? And where would I move them? A new category of bloggers who have stopped posting? Am I the only person who pauses when they see that a blogger has stopped updating his/her blog?

A blogroll with categories makes for brave new world of etiquette questions.

I have been creating new categories including a pregnancy after infertility category because there have been many posts this week on various blogs about how pregnancy after infertility is a whole different bag of fears. So, again, in order for people to find like-minded comrades in order to get through those 9 months, I felt like it was best if they had their own category. If there are categories missing that you think should be created, let me know. A new one I’ve been thinking about is paths to parenthood with health issues since I found a wonderful group of women making their way to motherhood after cancer.

So I’ll be picking at the blogroll on and off this weekend in between Purim carnivals.

But here are some cool things I read this week:

There has been a question circling the blogosphere this week–would you want to return to the person you were prior to infertility? Bea at Infertile Fantasies tackles this question by comparing her attitude when she was young vs. her attitude now by relaying an interesting story about her desire to own a horse. I love this story because it captures the fact that anything can happen. And we don’t know how life will turn out or what will fall into our lap. There are the girls who will get their ponies easily, but we are the girls who will try and try and try. And hopefully–one day–it will work. Either through the path we’ve been trying to walk or on a different path to parenthood.

Samantha at Southern Infertility also tackled this question with a different analogy: her brother’s death and her life after this terrible event. It’s a gorgeous post that carries you through the good and not-so-good lessons that come from infertility. How they have changed a marriage and changed a woman. And…well…it’s just damn good writing.

On that same note, Alexa at Flotsam has a piece that I loved this week. It’s called “Now Let Us Never Speak of It Again” and it meanders through a doctor’s appointment where the doctor called her pudgy. Which to me goes against that Hippocratic Oath to “first, do no harm.” Alexa has a way of taking the heartbreaking and making you smile through your haze of tears and mucous. She sums up that fine line between a second loss and a third like this: “After I lost my first two pregnancies, I had to beg for testing, because two is only one more than one, and everyone who is anyone has one miscarriage, and two is nothing to worry about. But three, apparently, gets your uterus upgraded from ‘unlucky’ to ‘cauldron of DOOM.’ At least, that was the impression I got from Dr. Doctor’s sad, worried face and her intense insistence that we not try to get pregnant again until our genetic testing comes back. We hadn’t planned to try until after the wedding anyway, but it is a bit disconcerting to have one’s normally chipper medical professional looking grim and calling you a ‘habitual aborter’.” But now you need to go over and read the whole post.

Sara at Of Course You’ll Get Pregnant throws out an interesting “what if” about fate. It made me think about who became pregnant quickly after I connected to them as well as who I connected with prior to the cycle that worked. It’s a cool post–go over and read it and think about the first time you came out to another stirrup queen.

Lastly, Bumble at Me and the Bumblebee has a post this week about the teacher who messed up her life as well as an excellent recount of the quinessential home-ec project: caring for a baby. In our school, you had to carry around an actual sack of flour which was supposed to be the same weight as a baby. Bumble has come to the realization that the point of that project was probably suppose to make us run for the birth control, but since flour doesn’t howl at 3 a.m., all it did for me was make me want a child even more. Making me sit and daydream about babies all day long didn’t keep me from wanting to make one. But most of all, this post has a wonderful fuck you to the teacher who essentially sealed her fate and sent her on the road to IVF.

So now it’s back to pruning the blogroll…

Is it just me or does everything seem “off” this week? Not sure where this mood stems, but it feels like everyone and everything has this grey, hazy film over it–both in the blogosphere and in real life. I am not in the mood to do anything nor be with anyone. Perhaps, I should simply crawl back into bed until this mood passes. Sniff.

Today is a fast day.

And I’m currently drinking coffee.

Not only am I not infertile enough, but I’m also not Jewish enough.

But I actually think drinking coffee today is a good thing. It shows a measure of growth. And I came to this decision last night after reading Serenity’s post yesterday.

For those of you who aren’t Jewish, today is a fast day, though it isn’t one of the original four (yes, you guys thought we only stopped eating for Yom Kippur, but there are three more days where you can’t eat) fast days. Therefore, you are not supposed to eat from sunrise to sundown.

The fast is called Taanit Esther or the Fast of Esther and it is the only day on the Jewish calendar commemorating the intelligence and power of a woman. I started fasting on this day when I got to college and was involved in feminist groups on campus. One year, the focus of Taanit Esther was to bring attention to violence against women and it included a Take Back the Night rally. On another year, it was a focus on the plight of Agunot (women who can’t get a divorce) in Israel. Every year, I fasted because it felt like the right thing to do as a woman–to show solidarity with my fellow chickies.

Why do Jews fast? Well, fasting is supposed to turn one inward. To give a person a spiritual space where she can gain emotional strength rather than physical strength. Jews always fast before going into battle with the message being that physical strength doesn’t win the race–it is your spiritual focus.

Infertility is a battle where emotional strength is needed over physical strength. The physical aspects of conception–that is entirely out of my hands. At one point in the month, it is hypothetically in the hands of my RE (at least I am paying him a shitload of money and believing that he has control over the situation) and at another point in the cycle, it is in the hands of my wonky hoohaahooterus. But at the end of the day, all I can do is sit back and wait to find out my beta results.

It seems more useful to focus on gaining emotional strength, which was the point of Serenity’s post yesterday. For a while now, the Fast of Esther has been a remembrance day for me. One year, I miscarried the night before the fast. Therefore, the fast became a true cleansing. And it became my remembrance day for all the shit associated with infertility. The wiping of the emotional slate. I actually looked forward to the Fast of Esther because it was the private commemoration I created to honour my own journey. It felt right until I started thinking about fasting last night.

Serenity was concerned about the hope she feels at this point in the cycle–the Lupron days–and imagining the happy pregnancy after the positive beta. The nursery. And her future work schedule. And replacing leaky storm windows. All for the baby. And I started thinking about hunger. And how you can’t talk your body out of feeling hungry. Either you feed it and you control that hunger or you try to ignore those pangs and still feel them. With hunger, you can feed your body healthy food and feel well afterwards. Or you can feed your body the brownies that you baked for the mishloach manot baskets and feel like crap afterwards. It’s your choice.

But in the end, addressing that hunger is important to me. Ignoring it doesn’t work. I’ve tried that. I’ve tried to tell myself on a fast day that I’m not hungry and I end up spending more time focusing on the fact that my stomach is rumbling rather than drawing spiritual strength. Fasting doesn’t really work for me. It just makes me feel a bit ill. But years ago, I looked forward to using this day for remembrance, therefore, I barely paid attention to the fact that I felt hungry. I was simply happy that it was Taanit Esther and I could do something that felt proactive when it came to infertility.

This year, we already lit a candle to mark our journey. We didn’t need to use Taanit Esther for this purpose. And if I was fasting in order to gain strength before heading into “battle,” I had already determined that fasting doesn’t work for me in that sense. I think hope, like food, comes into your life–into your mind or mouth–when you need it. Maybe hope is what you need to feel to balance out the gloomier aspects of your day. Maybe if you removed hope, all you would have facing you are injections and speculums and transvaginal ultrasounds. Maybe hope is the food that sustains you so you can enter battle. Because not everyone can enter battle with a grumbling stomach.

Thank you, Serenity, for making me think. For stopping me from going through motions without considering the meaning behind them. Taanit Esther has been through so many incarnations for me–from feminist holiday to spiritual powerhouse to infertility commemoration–that I have no doubt that a new meaning will slip over it by next year. I’m looking forward to discovering its new meaning.

The first order of business is to talk about the name of the book tour since not everyone in the world of infertility is a barren bitch. I mean, most of you are bitches (and I only mean that in the nicest sense of the word. You give that fucking infertility hell!), but regardless of that fact, not everyone is barren. Therefore, what do you think of the term Uterina Ballerinas? It’s light. It’s delicate. It says, “I am like an artery bringing blood to the uterus AND I can dance.” What do you think? The Uterina Ballerina Book Tour? Or just keep it as the Barren Bitches? Leave your choice in your comment when you vote for the next book for the book tour!

Yes, the time has come to choose the next book for book tour three. I’ve compiled a list of choices below. Click on the titles to see information at Amazon about each book. We have a mix of fiction and non-fiction as well as new and old books on this current list. Some are literally about infertility and others have infertility or loss as part of the plot.

1. Waiting for Daisy by Peggy Orenstein
2. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
3. Maybe Baby by Lori Leibovich
4. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
5. Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
6. Inconceivable by Julia Indichova
7. Crossing the Moon by Paulette Alden
8. Sarah: A Novel by Marek Halter
9. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

How to Vote:

In the comments section or in an email to me (thetowncriers@gmail.com), write the number of ALL of the books on the list that you would read. If you literally would read any and all of the books on the list, it’s fine to simply write “entire list.” Or even to write something along the lines of “every book but #10” (I know, there are 9 choices, but I didn’t want to curse one by using it as an example). But please don’t put down a book that you wouldn’t join in a book tour to read–really, it’s okay to eliminate some from the list!

The book that receives the top vote will be used for book tour #3. If there is a tie between one or more books, I’ll just randomly assign them out to tour #3, #4, and #5 so people can also plan ahead. It’s nice to know way in advance which books we’re reading so that you can put your name down on a wait list at the library or share copies.

If a spouse wants to join along, they can either post their own write-up on your blog or consider starting a separate blog simply for the book tour (hence what we did with the Annex). They don’t have to post constantly on that blog, but can use it when they’re participating in the book club. Since the master list is up on my blog, people will know how to find their write-up. And it’s a fun way for you to do something with your spouse…that is…if they know about your blog.

Okay–so voting is open until Sunday at noon. I will post the title of the next book on Monday along with the opening post from this current (book tour two) book tour for Children of Men. So many freakin’ books.

And on a side note, completely separate from our book club, I’ve joined Mother Talk and I’m participating in their next book tour. The book is called A Running Start by Rae Pica. It’s great so far. I definitely bring an infertility slant to my reading and I’ve found myself nodding my head along with her ideas on raising kids. So…just more books. At the end of the day, it’s just more books…

Okay–now vote:

On the book for the next book tour AND the permanent on-going title of our book club: Barren Bitches or Uterina Ballerina?

And if you’re part of the current tour for Children of Men, look below to see the list of questions.
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Updated at 3:23 p.m.: forgot to add that even if you’ve read a book already, you can still vote to have it discussed in the book tour. There are a few books on the list that I’ve read and enjoyed, and I’d love to reread them and enter into a discussion about them. Just wanted to add that in case anyone felt like they should only vote for a book they haven’t read!

Welcome, all you Barren Bitches (or is it Uterina Ballerinas?) and our one manpie, Josh, to the question portion of the second tour of the Barren Bitches Book Club. This current leg of the book club is now closed (sorry!) so if you’re reading this and want to join this online book club (or even just drop in for a single book to try it out), look at the post immediately above this one to see the voting process for the third book tour (each book is called a book tour since the club works by jumping from blog to blog).

These are the 22 questions from the 16 participants in the current book tour. Each participant needs to choose five questions off the list and answer them in a blog post. Everyone will post their entry (hold onto it and don’t post it early!) on March 5th. I will send out an email on March 4th to remind you. On March 5th, I will post my own entry as well as the main list. Everyone can jump from blog to blog, reading each other’s responses and commenting in turn. By the end of the week, people should have at least 16 comments from the 16 participants as well as any other random people who have seen the movie or read the book and have something to add to the discussion.

The List of Questions…

1. Though there are interesting female characters in the forefront of the novel, the cast of thousands of infertile women in the background are portrayed as crazy, desperate, and delusional. Did you feel P.D. James captured the emotions of infertility or do you think she merely repeated the image presented in the general media–infertile women are desperate and single-minded and obsessed with babies and pregnancy?

2. Some of the most memorable passages for me were those that described how dolls and even kittens came to take the place of babies for people after Omega. In all of these scenes, it is women who are pushing dolls in their strollers or taking kittens to be christened. Why do you think P.D. James chose to only portray women in these scenes? How does this fit with your own experiences of how men and women cope with infertility insimilar or different ways?

3. One of the story’s responses to mass infertility was that couples stopped having sex since there didn’t seem to be any point in it. How has IF affected your sex life with your partner? Did you have different experiences at different times along the way?

4. Do you think this was based on James’ own experiences with infertility? Also, what did you think of the fact that Julian was a religious person and became pregnant. Is religion her solution, as it were, to infertility? Which is probably two questions…

5. In Chapter 7, Jasper Palmer-Smith says to Theo within a tyrade about society, “Now, for the rest of our lives, we’re going to be spared the intrusive barbariam of the young, their noise, their pounding, repetitive, computer-produced so-called music, their violence, their egotism disguised as idealism. My God, we might even succeed in getting rid of Christmas, the annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile greed.”How do you feel about this statement? Do you agree in certain respects with it (and the rest of his statements, not quoted here)? Do you think this has become a true generalization of the youth in America today? If you have children now, how do you plan to raise your children so that this statement does not pertain to them? If you do not yet have children, how would you parent your children so that this description does not fit them?

6. Would you be able to go through all that Julian went through in order to have her baby in peace and safety?

7. Which male character in the book would you choose to repopulate Britain, if you chose the father of the alpha baby and why? And if you could widen the pool to include anyone in the world, which man would you choose and why?

8. What do you think is the significance of the fact that the two people who are finally able to conceive are both considered “flawed?” (Luke had epilepsy and Julian had a deformed hand)

9. What are your thoughts on the scene with the lady pushing her pretend child or doll? What do you think about the response of the people who react to her?

10. As a global epidemic, infertility creates an environment of desperation and chaos. How do you find this global reaction similar to your own personal reaction to infertily?

11. In describing the world’s “universal bereavement” over it’s lack of children, the narrator tells us, “Only on tape and records to we now hear the voices of children, only on film or on television programmes do we see the bright, moving images of the young. Some find them unbearable to watch but most feed on them as they might a drug.” How is this like your life dealing with infertility? How do you cope when you are confronted with images or reminders that are painful to you?

12. In speaking of Theo’s preparation to attend the Quietus, the author says, “It had been his habit all his life to devise small pleasures as palliatives to unpleasant duties.” Do you have any habits or coping mechanisms that have a soothing effect on days that you expect to be unpleasant?

13. Once Rolf discovers the truth about his child, in his anguish, he rubs his skin raw against the bark of a tree. Do you think he is mourning his wife’s adulturous affair or his new-found knowledge of his own infertility (since he thought he had impregnanted his wife)?

14. If you were living in this time period and were given the ability to become pregnant but knew you would be the only person to do so, would you have that child knowing that they would be completely alone in an empty world for the last twenty-odd years of their life?

15. Some parts of the book were written in first-person narrator and other parts were written as third-person omniscient. Did this make the book more or less compelling? How did this change in narration style impact your enjoyment and/or understanding of the book?

16. One of the reason’s I suggested this book to Mel was because of a very thoughtful article in the NY Times by A.O. Scott comparing the film and the novel versions of Children of Men. Scott closes the article with a quotation by James speaking to the differences between what she normally writes — detective novels — and the world she created for Children…. She says, “The detective novel affirms our belief in a rational universe because, at the end, the mystery is solved. In Children of Men there is no such comforting resolution.” The conclusion she leads us to, of course, is that the universe is not nearly so rational, which I thought very aptly describes the world of IF. At the end of the novel, we really don’t know what will happen next — will they find a cure for the world-wide infertility crisis? Will totalitarian rule come to an end in England? Will Theo wield power more wisely than Xan did or will he fall victim to the same peril he saw in Rolf? The haze of uncertainty resonates as it does with parenting-after-infertility because it’s not all happily-ever-after when the wished-for child is born. Does anyone else identify with that? What does it take to deliver ourselves out from our own dystopias?

17. James’ book makes much of the role of history–what should be (and so, is) kept and what should be discarded. These concerns seem a question never far from the handling of infertility and loss–how we reckon with our bodies’ past failures, what we carry of that into our daily lives, and what we choose, instead, to put away. James’ character Theodore writes in his diary of the “half-demented women” who fawn over dolls as replacement children in this invented, infertile world, but in our real world, infertiles are often cast as desparate, insane, ready to look madly for any replacement for a child. How, then, d
o we make known an “appropriate” history, of our hopes and failures and losses as we struggle to make a child when the body–and seemingly, at times, whole world won’t allow it? How do we keep more than we lose, keep more than we hide, deeply, away?

18. For those that are naturally ambitious (in other words, a type-A personality), do you think it is realistic to fall into apathy or ennui so easily if there are no future generations?

19. In the book, there is a passage (Chapter 16, p 116) in which Theo describes the majority of the population’s attitude towards intercourse. With the decline of humanity’s fertility, there is also a decline in the physical pleasure of intercourse. The State has to actively encourage pornography to get people to “enjoy” sex. In the novel Theo assumes that because people are freed from the act of trying to conceive, people should be “liberated” and more uninhibited, yet the very opposite happened. Sex becomes synonymous with comfort rather than physical pleasure-in fact, it’s relayed that women associate sex with physical pain rather than pleasure. As infertiles, the very act of intercourse suddenly and irreversibly has a different meaning for us-especially those of us who have been raised in religious faiths which stress that sex is for the main purpose of conceiving children. So, here’s my question………how has infertility affected sex for you? How has it affected your relationship with your spouse or partner? And, how have you worked through those feelings?

20. If the world that’s described in the novel were to somehow become a reality, how would you live your life, knowing that there will be no future generations to carry humanity forward? What would you do differently, if at all?

21. Which aspects of the book are fair speculations about the future, and which seem too pessimistic?

22. The Omegas are portrayed as cruel, self-obsesssed and cold. Do you suppose that’s a function of the way they were raised (as the last generation of children) or something inherent in them? Do you think that infertility has an effect on parenting?

Must.

Wrap.

One.

More.

Stack.

Of.

Golden Gamonkey cookies.

The jellybean satchels were what almost broke me. You can barely see one in this picture because it’s hidden by the larger cellophane-wrapped brownie package (with two kinds of brownies–a triple chocolate brownie and a standard brownie with walnuts), but I made jellybean bundles in the leftover pink gauze from my daughter’s Queen Esther costume. By the 15th one, I began chanting, “this was a bad idea” as I tied each string closure.

Purim is a little bit like a cross between Halloween and Mardi Gras. There’s a lot of drinking. And a lot of costumes. And a lot of beads being passed out to women who show their breasts in shul (just kidding about that last one…or am I?). Instead of going house-to-house collecting candy, Jews have set up a much more efficient system of mailing packages to one another during this holiday. And there are rules to giving mishloach manot (as these packages are called). Halloween should take a page from Purim’s book and set up some rules so that kids know that they’re not going to end up with a toothbrush or a walnut if they visit certain houses on the street.

A few of the rules to giving mishloach manot: at the bare minimum, you must send two types of food to one person. The food needs to be ready-to-eat. It can be two forms of the same type of food (such as two types of cookies or two types of noodle dishes–though who the fuck sends noodles through the mail? Or wants to receive macaroni and cheese as a gift?). Two people can send their mishloach manot together who are unmarried, but they need to include double the portion (so four gifts of food). Married people can give their mishloach manot together as a single package (just another reason to join in the fight to make all marriages legal). It is preferable to send the package via a third-party in order to complete the mitzvah (commandment), but if you have to give it face-to-face, it’s okay. You cannot send your package anonymously.

So I spent the entire weekend and first part of this week putting together my mishloach manot packages so they could go out on time. In addition to gifts for kids (because we give our Christmas-like presents on Purim), we’re sending the aforementioned two types of brownies, golden gamonkey cookies, hamantaschen, smarties (the American kind), Hershey kisses, and jellybean bundles. A gigantic mass of sugar. I think I absorbed sugar through my pores–is that possible? Because I feel like I’ve ingested massive quantities of sugar.

So, yes, I will be that woman at the post office in a few minutes, furiously stuffing boxes with a layer of tissue paper and addressing labels at the counter. And I’m sorry. But we have big families. And there are many people out there who need a little box of love this week.

If you’re looking for something to distract you during a wait, may I suggest putting together your own mishloach manot packages? First of all, even though I woke up feeling anxious-as-all-get-out yesterday, I didn’t have time to focus on anything except wrapping baked goods in cellophane or gauze. Secondly, you can obsess, OBSESS, about making the perfect card to go in each package. That will waste at least two hours of time that you would have used to think about an upcoming sonogram or peeing on a stick (I used at least an hour searching the Internet for the perfect quote about imbibing alcohol to kick off our card). The trip to the post office alone can take up to an hour roundtrip. And then you get to pick at the candy and cookies while you package them. The other person feels so good receiving your package and they have no idea that you used this activity to take your mind off your own wait. How perfect is that?