Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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The wave of pumpkin spice products are out in full force, and the pandemic has made me realize that you don’t need to leave home to be overexposed to it. The ads will find you.

Pumpkin spice instant noodles may have been my tipping point.

I am not anti-pumpkin spice, but I would never seek it out. I considered myself pumpkin spice neutral. But as more and more products go over to the pumpkin side, I may have stepped over the line onto the anti-pumpkin spice side. It’s not who I want to be, but it is what it is.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

I’ve always leaned hard on the IF community for emotional support because… you get it. I don’t need to provide a big backstory or how something makes me feel or put a bunch of disclaimers in place. You get it. We have a shorthand. I can say that I still walk out of my way to avoid the baby department at Target, and I do not have to explain why.

But Carolyn Hax had an interesting column last week where she explains that people outside the experience are sometimes the best listeners. She writes:

I’m not sure you need empathy to be a good provider of sympathy. There’s a case to be made that not going through the emotions yourself enhances your ability to listen patiently and provide a shoulder. Some of the best caregivers are the ones who maintain enough detachment to keep their heads, and keep listening through what would be, for others, an exhausting level of duress.

In other words, my story brings up feelings about your story, and then we’re both feeling duress. Whereas in this other scenario, talking to someone who has never experienced infertility, they can hear and support me without it draining them.

Of course, you can have hyper-empathy without the experience, but it’s food for thought on why people outside the experience are sometimes the best listeners.

I’ve been careful only entering Goodreads giveaways for books I really really want to read, AND I’VE WON ANOTHER BOOK. Yes, I have to scream that. Goodreads giveaways are the best thing ever.

I won a copy of Sophie Hannah’s The Killings at Kingfisher Hill—a print copy that just came in the mail. I have to finish a few other books that I’ve already started, but expect it to show up in a “best books of the month” post. Because, yes, I already know that it will be a best book. I loved her other Agatha Christie books.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “#WorldChildlessWeek 2021 Day One: Our Stories” (Finding a Different Path)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Empty Arms Broken Heart started a story about a foster placement that moved my heart into my throat as I read it. She could use support in the aftermath of a difficult situation.

The Next 15000 Days explains why she blogs. She started the space for herself but she keeps writing because of the connections. She explains, “I just love if there is someone reading the lines I write and she (or he) feels that just reading my thoughts help ease her (or his) pain.” Such a good reason to keep writing.

Lastly, it was World Childless Week, and No Kidding in NZ talks about walking the line of openness. How much should she share online? She write, “I was torn because whilst I want to educate people about the way they view, judge, talk to and think about childless people, I also don’t want to make it see as if I want pity. Navigating that fine line isn’t always easy.” It isn’t, but I love that last line of the post: “I much prefer to say that I am not kidding. It’s the truth, it doesn’t judge, and the play on words pleases me. I am Mali, and I am not kidding.” Brilliant! Go read the whole post.

The roundup to the Roundup: I won another book. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 17 – 24) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week? Read the original open thread post here.

Pre-pandemic, Josh and I plotted out things we would start doing/learning about to build new hobbies to get us through the early months of an empty nest. We gave ourselves three years to find meaningful volunteer work, hobbies that would translate into travel ideas, and projects that would fill the hours normally filled with school events and homework help and hanging out with the twins.

And then the pandemic hit, and pretty much everything we set up before the pandemic is gone.

I mean, not gone-gone. Birding is not gone because birds are still around. And we can go back to that one once we can travel again. But my two volunteer projects are gone—one may return, the other will not and needs to be replaced. Part of me thinks I should get on that. The other part of me feels like maybe I need to accept that I will not be able to buffer myself from my feelings with volunteer work and hobbies.

One of the things we keep looping back to is wine. I know nothing about wine because I do not drink wine. And Josh does not drink wine. But we came up with wine as a hobby while we were in France—looking at grapevines!—because it gives us a lot to learn AND we can build travel into the hobby (visit vineyards around the world), but there are also nearby vineyards AND grapevines are pretty. It’s pretty much perfect, except that we don’t like wine.

It’s not as if I don’t like a type of wine. I don’t like any alcohol. So… that’s probably a problem with this idea.

I’ve looped back to other ideas: what about tea? What about becoming a tea enthusiast and learning all about tea and taking trips to tea farms? Or coffee? What about learning everything there is to know about coffee roasting and visiting coffee roasters and coffeehouses around the world? Both of those sound like a much better fit as a current tea or coffee drinker.

But there’s something about making wine fit that I keep coming back to. As if trying to convince myself that I like wine and will drink wine is more about trying to convince myself that I am okay with this era of our life wrapping up in a couple of years. That if I can swallow wine—something I don’t enjoy and turn it into something I can live with—that I can swallow an empty nest, too.

Nick Cave wrote a beautiful letter to a fan about grieving the loss of his son, Arthur. And it starts with a profound thought:

It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable.

You can also listen to the letter.

I just thought this was such a stunning thought, perfectly capturing why we feel loss so deeply. It’s the inverse of that love.