Yom Kippur begins tonight, and my plan is to spend the day cleaning and getting my home and life in order so I can go into the holiday concentrating on the reason for the holiday. I love that our new year falls in autumn with the start of school. It always felt like the holidays were fortuitously positioned as a space to get your life in order before classes kicked into high gear.

We went down to one shul membership this year. For many years, we belonged to two shuls, but we left one, so we’re down to one. It doesn’t quite feel correct to say that we switched shuls, but we’re back with old friends and old services, albeit via Zoom.

The thing I’m looking forward to most tonight is something that I have no clue will happen. For many years, our shul had this gorgeous melody for “Adon Olam,” that is only used this one time each year. It’s not a common tune, and I’ve never heard it anywhere else, so my only chance to hear everyone sing it is this one night per year. (Admittedly, the man who brought the tune to our shul made me a recording of it years ago, so I can technically listen to a single person singing it any time I want, but this is the only time to hear everyone singing it together.)

I have no clue if they still use it, and it’s the final song in the service. But it’s a good kind of anticipation, sprinkled with hope, that I’ll hear it tonight.

Kymberli died this week, and the world lost a really awesome person. I keep erasing this sentence because… it’s hard to sum up your experience with a person with words. If you knew Kym, you know exactly what I mean by an awesome person. And if you didn’t, it’s hard to convey her humour and wisdom and kindness in a flat blog post.

Instead, I’m going to point you to one of her old posts from 2012. Partially because I love it. Partially because it hurts to know how the story really ends. Partially because maybe you’ll get a feeling for the woman if you didn’t get a chance to meet her.

She noticed a spike in pageviews, and she tied it all back to the same reader. She writes:

Someone out there is reading my story. I mean really reading it, all 756 posts. She started at the beginning and is working her way up, post by post, through my life.

I didn’t notice how she managed to find her way here. Was one of my posts a search result and she got so sucked in that she had to see how it all started? Which angle of my life is it that keeps prompting her to click Next Post?

Is it the story I’ve told as a mother? As a mother-after-infertility? As a gestational surrogate?

I feel like a character in someone’s good book that she can’t put down. As I am the author, I am flattered that someone is so gripped by my narrative that she’s spent literally hours a day here reading.

I can’t help but wonder, “Does she already know how the story ends?”  

An explanation was going around this week about how Jews don’t say rest in peace in regards to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Instead, we have a say amongst other things, “May her memory be a blessing.” And it’s appropriate here. May Kym’s memory be a blessing on the world, and may we all carry ourselves with a little extra kindness this week in her honour.

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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:

• “Feeling Gaslit Again” (Infertile Phoenix)
• “Hollow” (Stirrup Queens) —thank you, Jess!

Okay, now my choices this week.

Bereaved and Blessed captured Kym in a blog post. And she said it best: “I am better off for much of what I’ve let into my life, especially dear bloggy friends like you.” This strange new medium, this way of connecting that came about when we were more accustomed to making friends offline. We all found each other and let each other in. It’s a tribute to Kym, and it’s also a tribute to the friendships found online.

FinallyMyLinesNow has happy news before her retrieval: a euploid embryo in the freezer. The nurse delivers the news, and everyone tears up. And, well, you will likely tear up reading this story, too. And smile.

Lastly, In Quest of a Binky Moongee writes about the Bunny and Okra’s third birthday. She comments that the last three years have gone by so fast, but I was thinking about before they were here—all the hoping and waiting. I love this—I love that the kids in our community grow up, and we get to continue hearing the story. Happy third birthday!

The roundup to the Roundup: May your memory be a blessing, Kym. 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 18 – 25) 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.

One of the hardest things about the pandemic is the uncertainty of when it will end and what life will look like when we finally declare it over. Like infertility—I knew that it couldn’t literally last forever, but I had no clue when/if we would reach parenthood and what that would look like. So I spent a lot of time struggling to know how to make decisions. And I’m mentally back there again. The pandemic cannot last forever (right?), but I have zero clue what our lives will look like or what we’ll have/need when it ends.

I recently read a great piece on Substack about knowing relief is coming is sometimes more powerful than the relief itself. Evie Ebert tells a story about keeping jellybeans in her bra during a long distance run to explain how having a plan in place to get through work and lack-of-daycare gave her the mental strength to keep going.

When she would hit a wall while running, she would eat the jellybeans: “The first bite of those jellybeans, half-melted by tit sweat, gave me the thrust to keep moving. I needed the sugar but I also just needed to know relief was coming.”

Relief is coming.

If we could just know for certain that relief is coming—that we will be taken care of as humans on this earth (artificially national boundaries be damned)—we could gain a burst of energy. But that isn’t what is happening. And I don’t have a lot of faith that the world is going to actually come together as Team Earth and weather this.

I’m voting this fall for Biden because I believe he has the greatest chance of getting us a nationwide (and hopefully, worldwide) plan, though I also know that my local elections are just as important as the decisions that impact us nationally. Get a voting plan, everyone. Know how you’re going to cast your ballot this fall.

Anne Bogel, Modern Mrs. Darcy, wrote a post years ago that she recently linked to again about boundary setting. Some people are great with setting firm boundaries. I am not one of these people. I am good at the initial impulse to set the boundary, but then I start to worry—either about how the boundary will impact the other person or my future self. Or, more often, I don’t even realize that I’ve crossed a boundary point I should have set until I realize that things have become too much.

Which, she explains, means I’m a sponge.

She sums up a section of the book The Highly Intuitive Child: A Guide to Understanding and Parenting Unusually Sensitive and Empathic Children, explaining the difference between ducks and sponges. Ducks allow “other people’s emotions roll right off them, like water off a duck’s back. These people may be warm, caring, and sensitive, but they still have no trouble distinguishing other people’s emotions from their own.”

Their anger doesn’t have to be your anger. Their frustration doesn’t have to be your frustration. They can think and feel what they need to think and feel, but you don’t have to carry their feelings with you.

Sponges absorb other people’s emotions. They “soak up other people’s feelings, experiencing them as their own, and physically registering those emotions. This isn’t a choice; it happens automatically.”

And then she gives an example which I recognize in myself.

There are strategies in the book for navigating sponge-hood, which, like Modern Mrs. Darcy, I didn’t even realize was something I did until I read her post and narrowed my eyes thinking, “This feels very familiar.”

So are you a duck or a sponge?

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

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There is a meme going around saying something like if you (a woman) has a credit card in your name or your own credit history or rented an apartment, etc, thank Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And all these things are true—her work during her career (before and during the Supreme Court) greatly impacted our lives.

But the point is… the woman who worked to get us these rights just died. Meaning, this is super recent history. 1974. As in, when my mother was single, she couldn’t get her own credit card. Older rights feel stable—if they haven’t changed in 100+ years, why would they change now? Younger rights feel tenuous, like they could be snatched away at any point.

I was trying to put into words why the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg feels so much larger than the loss of a single person. Anne Helen Peterson said it well: “If someone has only been granted rights in recent memory, it’s easy and understandable that a lot of us are imagining just how readily those rights could be taken away.”

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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.