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

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This is a very weird site. And you will likely get addicted to watching these videos.

The premise is that you are an astronaut, floating above earth, looking down at these moments. The site pulls in unwatched videos: “These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).”

Literally unseen. I tested a few, clicking in the top left corner to go to YouTube, and most had one view.

Go enjoy. (P.S. The site states: “The video switches periodically. Click the button below the video to prevent the video from switching.” In case you want to watch the whole video.)

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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.

Last thought from Blue Ticket because we’ll soon get into spoiler-land. And, I promise, zero spoilers in these posts. But if you read the book and want to talk about it, I have plenty of other thoughts about the end.

On page 273, she reflects on two women she saw—one white ticket, one blue ticket—and the impulse to have a child when you can’t.

I wondered about the old woman in the bed and breakfast, and the woman I had seen at the swimming pool, serene in her childlessness the way you could be serene in your motherliness. They were a chorus, asking me, what do you even want it for? … To pathologize desire into flat compulsion reduces the possibilities of it. Which is not to say that I had not felt compulsion. But perhaps I was learning the difference, finally, between that and conviction … Call it kindness, finally, shown toward myself.

I love that. I love embracing a desire to reach for parenthood, even when it’s hard, as conviction rather than compulsion. As a kindness I’m showing myself by being true to what is in my heart.

I think so many times, our decisions are questioned. Decisions that are trying to help us reach what other people can do easily, and they’re weighted with judgment: we’re hysterical, obsessed, single-minded, jealous… compulsive. But we’re not. Or, as she says, that reduces the story to someone else’s judgment. We’re filled with conviction—whether we reach parenthood or not. Whether we reach it is not the point. The true story is how hard we work to be kind to ourselves.

It’s September 11th. It’s so easy for dates to get lost on the calendar right now when every week feels the same. But I noticed the date and remembered in time. Next year will mark 20 years, right? Time feels so strange right now.

I forgot and then remembered that Rosh Hashanah is coming up in a week or so. Clearly it was in the back of my mind because we’ve taken steps to make sure we have everything in place to attend Zoom services at our shul. But I forgot in the sense that we plotted out the next two weeks of meals, Josh did the food shopping, and then I remembered that we should have planned a meal. We originally had calzones scheduled for that night. We bumped them by a day to make a brisket.

In some ways, Zoom Rosh Hashanah is easier than Zoom Pesach. Remember Pesach? Back in the spring? When I thought it was silly that I had purchased the matzah so early. Surely the stay-at-home orders would be lifted by Pesach. And it’s now the seventh month. And we’re still at home. With zero dreams that Rosh Hashanah will look different.

Which means we can release those old expectations and instead make sure that we’re plotting out something new vs. something second-best.

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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:

• “The Vultures Are Already Flying Above Us” (The Next 15000 Days)

Okay, now my choices this week.

By the Brooke has a post about choices after loss. She explains: “I think most working moms feel some level of mama-guilt, but in my experience, babyloss working moms get a double dose.” She takes the time to explain her thought process—not because it’s owned to the question asker but because she acknowledges that hearing someone’s story can help someone else make a decision.

FinallyMyLinesNow has a post marking the day she lost hope. They’re moving forward with the planned IVF cycles, and she’s doing everything she can to make them successful, but they didn’t have embryos for PGS. My heart sank for her when I read: “I know that adding PGS, while necessary due to the cerclage, realistically lowers our odds even further. Today though, was the first time I felt in my soul that we really have no chance. It was the first time I felt convinced that this is just the proverbial fool’s errand.” The post ends with a hug from her daughter, exactly what she needed in the moment.

Finally, The Road Less Travelled points out how COVID-19 has added to the sting of first-day-of-school reminders. Instead of social media being a week or two of first-day-of-school pictures, it was preceded this year by weeks and weeks of discussion about how school would look, etc. She unpacks how things unfolded in a few bullets (among other small thoughts), and it seems like a good reminder for all other difficult times, such as Christmas, Easter, or Mother’s Day. She writes, “The constant buzz-buzz-buzz is hard to ignore, and adds yet another layer to an already difficult time of year for those of us who are living without the children we wanted.”

The roundup to the Roundup: September 11th and Rosh Hashanah. 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 4 – 11) 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.

Another spoiler-free, you-don’t-have-to-read-the-book-to-understand-this, Blue Ticket quote.

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On page 220, the narrator meets a white ticket woman (Valerie), and the exchange draws a parallel between how infertile women may see fertile women, and how mothers may see women without children.

She writes: “We tried to explain to Valerie that we were intrinsically wary because she had been found worthy all those years ago where we were somehow lacking.”

That was, for me, the feeling that separated me from women who were fertile. I was “intrinsically wary” because they could do what I couldn’t do. The book contains a system of judgment, but even without that in the real world, it feels like the universe stated what it thought of me.

Valerie responds:

I don’t see it like that, she said. If anything, I’m the one found lacking. All my life I’ve been told I can only be complete if I grow something inside of me and bring it into the world. Whereas you are whole and perfect as you are.

I loved that twist in perspective; the white ticket woman stating that she didn’t want her identity wrapped up in motherhood. She wanted to be enough on her own—a complete person—with or without a child.

I loved hearing both sides speaking to one another; unpacking everything they had been carrying in their heart.

Sorry, more Blue Ticket questions. I promise I’ll never post spoilers, and you don’t really need to read the book to have thoughts on these quotes.

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Some infertility has a known diagnosis. Some infertility falls into the unexplained. When infertility is a surprise—when you’ve gone through life thinking you would be able to procreate and then discover you can’t—there is a “why me” element to it.

I mean, the simple response is also “why not me?” No one deserves infertility. Like most things in life, it’s doled out randomly. Our uterus works or it doesn’t. It was a good egg or it wasn’t. The sperm found its way to the goal or it didn’t.

On page 185, the narrator lies in bed, thinking about her blue ticket diagnosis:

As I lay there I thought about what the lottery might have seen or not-seem inside me. What had been recorded and observed and commented upon for my whole life; the times I refused to play, or pulled someone’s hair, or buried dolls in the dirt.

In the book, you only have twelve or so years for the universe to determine whether you’re given a blue or white ticket. But infertility comes after twenty or thirty years of choices. It was very hard for me to not let my brain go to that place: Why was I being chosen for this? What had I done or not done that put me in this situation?

And if it’s this hard, why don’t I stop? Why don’t I accept it rather than fight against it?

A few pages later, on page 189, she answers that.

Because it seemed like everything was telling me it was the right thing to do. Every cell in my body … Having a child is both the most rational and irrational decision possible, in this world. This fucking awful, beautiful world, which I can’t stop loving, though I have considered it, I have evaluated and counted the ways.

The most rational and irrational decision to fight against those clear signs from your body and decide to forge ahead anyway, without knowing how it will turn out.