Carolyn Hax has been on a roll, providing excellent advice left and right the last few weeks. I ended up bookmarking three posts in the same week. And this one gets to the heart of a common topic of conversation in our community: how much do we tell people our story and is it right/wrong to not educate the people around us about infertility, loss, adoption, donor gametes, and so on. (I’m leaving it as so-on because the list that we could create is long and varied. Please add your personal situation to that list.)

A question asker poses what is the difference between secrecy and privacy? Carolyn answers:

I see privacy as not sharing information with people that isn’t their business.

I see secrecy as not sharing information with people that is their business.

I also think it’s possible for something to fit the privacy definition and still be unhealthy — meaning, you share so little of yourself that you can’t form meaningful connections or you starve the ones you have.

Which gives you the frame. You can share with anyone; meaning, it is your right to tell your story to anyone and everyone you wish. But if you don’t wish to share your story with random stranger you begin speaking to in the grocery store, that is okay, too. That’s privacy.

I just really liked that distinction.

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

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We knew we weren’t going anywhere this summer, but last week, our airline finally canceled our flight, making things official. I had already dealt with the sadness, so I hopped directly to relieved. We’ll try again in the future.

In the meantime, articles about virtual travel keep popping up, but this has been the one that has interested me most. The woman at the heart of the story travels the world through Google Street View, taking screenshots of the sites. She does this because she has agoraphobia and can’t go out, but her method becomes an interesting alternative in this time period when we are all left between a rock and a hard place when it comes to leaving the house.

I tried it, going to places I know and places I don’t know. The images have gotten so much better since the last time I played with Google Earth. She writes:

It’s the opposite of how you normally travel. You don’t have any itinerary, you don’t have a planned holiday. You don’t know exactly where you’re going, you don’t know exactly where you’re going to land. So, many times I would jump in and go, “Oh my goodness, where am I?” and then do some research on the place. Then suddenly you know something about a place that you didn’t know anything about before. It kind of shakes up your idea of travel.

Try it. Start with a place you know, so you can have a sense of how well Google Earth captures it. And then go somewhere new. I’d love to hear where you go. I started in Chincoteague and then went to Corsica.

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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.

It is my 14th blogoversary today, which is a fitting time to tell you this story about how my blog saved my life* this week.

Frost appeared on the contents of the freezer. We tried clearing out the ice in the freezer, but it didn’t fix the problem, and it only got worse—the refrigerator suddenly didn’t feel as cold as normal. We knew we had encountered a similar problem in the past and removed the back panel, but we couldn’t figure out how to do it again. We were stuck, and set up a repair call despite my fears of having workpeople in the house in the time of COVID-19.

Then I remembered that I wrote a blog post about the experience. A quick search brought up the correct post. It didn’t contain many details, but we now had a date, so we could look through files and try to find the video we used. We found that, too, though we still didn’t have instructions for how to get off the back panel. We were stuck.

Except… my blog gave me the date. So I went through my photos taken on that day, and found that we had photographed the location of the hidden screw we needed to remove.

The next morning, we woke early to get started. The video didn’t tell us to unplug the refrigerator, but my blog post did, so we unplugged it to be safe. It took about two hours to melt and clear out all of the ice and unblock the drain tube. This time, we documented the experience in detail with notes in my journal and videos. We’re waiting out the weekend to make sure we actually fixed the problem, but it’s currently looking and sounding better. It comes full circle because I’m now writing about it on my blog once again so I remember what we did.

For 14 years, I have shown up in this space. 30% of my life so far. I have documented the highs and lows, the news articles that caught my eye, the books I’ve read, the freezers I’ve saved. I’ve recorded my feelings about infertility and loss, the people who have come and gone, the changes that have taken place through my thirties and forties. This blog has been an amazing receptacle to hold my memories and return them to me when I need them.

Thank you, blog, for being there for me for 14 years. And thank you, to all of you, for reading it.

* Clearly, I do not live and breathe due to my blog, and the title is more a tongue-and-cheek usage of “saved” as in kept content. Though you can never be too careful right now about COVID-19. And all joking aside, I do believe that the connections I’ve made here have strengthened my mental health and wellbeing. So, yes, I don’t think “saved” is too strong a word.

Josh and the kids cleared the weeds out of the backyard, and it is lovely. Maybe lovely is too strong a word. It is a space to sit and think. I’ve needed to do a lot of thinking this week.

I am looking forward to a quiet weekend. I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep this week, so I am not going to set an alarm tomorrow. I usually do on the weekend because I like to be awake before everyone else (quality alone time with Linus) and feel productive. But I am tapped out. I need to sleep, close out the world, and reset. And it is Father’s Day in the US this weekend, so we’ll see my dad from a distance and thank Josh.

Wishing you peace of heart if you need it. I sense a lot of us need it right now.

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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:

• “Daniel Radcliffe Responds to J.K. Rowling’s Tweets on Gender Identity” (The Trevor Project)
• “Finding Meaning Again” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

In Quest of a Binky Moongee has a post about her niece’s graduation and the movement of time. She writes, “I remember this post that I wrote when she started college. That was when we hadn’t even made the embryos that became our children. I was feeling sad that she was going away for college and it seemed impossible for my future children to know her well.” Of course, many of the things we fear don’t come true. Her children love their older cousin, and she writes: “Infertility and the delay in having my kids didn’t rob me the joy of my kids being close to my niece.” It’s a very sweet post about finding ways to connect during this socially-distant time.

Empty Arms, Broken Heart has a brief post about her child processing adoption. She is working through big feelings that she can’t always put into words. She writes: “I suppose it’s because she trusts me that she pushes me away so hard.” Sending a hug.

Finally, Lavender Luz perfectly articulates how much word choice matters when it comes to discussing adoption. She dismantles a poorly written article, from outdated language to logical fallacies. She explains: “I’m frustrated because people looking for reasons to choose a closed adoption, which some adoptees have called a form of child abuse, will come across this article and consider it fact, permission to proceed in a harmful way.” Keep writing, loudly.

The roundup to the Roundup: I need to reset. 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 June 12 – 19) 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 reason that I really loved Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth is that it inadvertently explains infertility. Maybe not inadvertently—I know nothing about Roth and perhaps she struggled with infertility—but I’m assuming inadvertently. This post contains zero spoilers for the book.

Chosen Ones has a bunch of “primary sources” that you wade through explaining how magic works. They’re tucked between sections of the plot, and you need to read them to understand what is happening in the story. On page 170, there is an excerpt from a fictional book about magic:

However, I would argue that while intent is a component of a magical act, and certainly a significant one, it is not the essence of what distinguishes a magical act from a mundane one. Any man with a hammer can intend to hit a nail—that itself is not magic, and a siphon is no hammer. Instead, it is the argument of this text that the essence of a magical act is what a person wants. Or, to be more specific, what a person wants that is not easily achieved with the realm of the mundane. Desiring that a nail sink into a board is a want, but it is not magic. Wanting the boards to hold together with no nail at all—that is magic. In other words, for something to be magic, it must be an impossible want.

The excerpt continues on page 365:

What, then, is a desire? We may begin by stating what it is not. A desire is not a whim. It is not an idle wish concocted on a sunny afternoon. A desire is a profound want, a deep and abiding craving that cannot be denied. It is for this reason that it is impossible to force someone to perform an act of magic one does not truly wish to do. The magic requires desire, and a desire cannot be threatened or manipulated into being.

That is how infertility felt to me. Like “a deep and abiding craving that cannot be denied.” That desire to build a family couldn’t be forced into being by someone else. But just as it couldn’t be forced into being, it also couldn’t be forced out of existence because of circumstances or obstacles. It couldn’t even be forced out of existence when we finished actively family building.

Building a family beyond the two of us felt like an impossible want. It was almost entirely outside my control. I could set up circumstances where it could happen, but month after month it didn’t. And when it did, it wasn’t an accomplishment; the result of a hammer hitting a nail and a nail behaving as it should after a hammer hits it. It was outside the “realm of the mundane.”

And maybe that is why infertility is so hard to resolve. Why it still lingers even after you’re finished engaging in the act of family building. It sticks with you because it is something deeper than intent. It is an impossible want that cannot be denied, and it changes you once you’ve experienced it.