Huffington Post re-ran a piece where the author talks about a time when she shared a story and the person in mourning lashed out at her. The author points out our tendency to default to sharing ourselves. “When she began to share her raw emotions, I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to say, so I defaulted to a subject with which I was comfortable: myself.”

She wasn’t malicious. She was trying to comfort her by pointing out a connection.

She wanted to talk to me about her father, to tell me about the kind of man he was, so I could fully appreciate the magnitude of her loss. Instead, I asked her to stop for a moment and listen to my story about my dad’s tragic death.

And what follows is a deep look into how she defaults to sharing in general. “I started to notice how often I responded to stories of loss and struggle with stories of my own experiences.” It is just as easy to respond with, “Tell me about him,” as it is to respond with your own story of loss.

Except.

I looked at the shift responses in the post, and the reality is that hearing someone else understands and has a similar story (and maybe even thoughts on how to lessen the emotional pain) has made me feel less alone during a difficult time. I think it’s too simple to say, “always respond with support and never with shift,” and miss the point. In order to make human connections, we need to connect. And sometimes that happens — for me — through a shift response. From hearing that someone else has gone through something, too, when they actually have knowledge into what I’m possibly feeling.

What are your thoughts?

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

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Carolyn Hax’s commenters rounded out her recent answer with additional advice. A woman asks whether she needs to invite her surrogate to her baby shower. Hax answers that she doesn’t BUT asks her to check her reasoning.

But it’s a commenter that provides the idea of sitting with the decision and wondering how you’ll feel the day after, “when it’s too late to change anything.” I would have additionally asked how you’ll feel looking at pictures from the event in the future. Will you be okay explaining your reasoning to your child if they see the pictures and ask why the surrogate wasn’t there?

What do you think of the situation? Personally, I would have opted for the surrogate to attend just so I didn’t have any regrets because this one wouldn’t pass the regret test for me.

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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.

The France trip was great buuuuuut those posts were the highlights from the trip.

I didn’t talk about how we were dripping with sweat while in Paris, and there was a particularly awful train ride from Versailles back into the city where we could barely breathe. There was the night we couldn’t agree on a place for dinner and we ended up consuming what may have been the grossest pizza that has ever entered my mouth. Or how many times I worried about the freakin’ rental car because they made us upgrade and the car stressed me out. (The happiest moment of the trip: returning the rental car.)

I didn’t write about the waiter who HATED us, or how he talked shit about us to our new waiter when we returned the next night, or how Josh gleefully announced that he needed to go back to the restaurant a third time because we were smitten with this waiter who hated us. (We did. We went back. He was still mean.)

I didn’t write about the bird that shat on me in Luxembourg Gardens. It was my first time ever having a bird shit on me. It hurt. It felt like someone shot me with a paint ball. I had to take off my shirt in a public bathroom (after paying 1 euro for the privilege of using said bathroom) to wash my shirt. I became wary of all pigeons after that moment despite being a huge lover of pigeons.

The main point: Yes, it was fun. Yes, I love traveling with the twins and Josh, especially when they are providing alternative titles to art at the Louvre. But behind every pretty picture of Sacré-Cœur there also exists a woman worried about pickpockets.

This Roundup is the 13-year anniversary of the Roundup. The first one went up on July 21, 2006. (Very amused that I mentioned the garden in that post because it was only up for a single summer and it barely grew anything.) I’ve missed or we’ve had special Roundups 25 times over 13 years. But if I average 4 posts per Roundup and there have been 651 Roundups… that means that I’ve featured about 2604 blog posts. 2604 blog posts!

Happy birthday, little Roundup.

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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 Universe Is Screwing With Me, Big Time” (The Road Less Travelled)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Life Without Baby has a story about a woman conveying that she doesn’t have children. “She didn’t pause for people to give her sympathetic looks, she didn’t elaborate on why she couldn’t have children, and she didn’t explain that she’d wanted to have them or tried to. She said it matter-of-factly, as if she’d been telling us she didn’t care for the taste of liver and onions.” She didn’t apologize or explain. It was just one fact out of many pertaining to her life. It’s a great way to live.

The Uterus Monologues has an amazing post about being in an in-between place after her losses. She writes, “Sometimes, like me, you exist in an in-between state. I may not have living children, or even a scan photo, but I’ve stepped over the threshold of motherhood and now I can’t go back. I’ve felt that all-consuming love for something both of yourself and bigger than yourself; the love for a child I thought I would have by now. I can never un-feel that.” Moreover, she’s pulling together posts for a project, so go over and add your voice.

Lastly, Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles has a post about not being on a same page with family building as her husband, and how that’s okay, too. She explains, “Which sounds quite bleak and like I’m not getting what I want out of my marriage, if you only look at this one element, which is not where I’m going with this.” Because it’s one tiny piece of a larger whole, though it’s the tiny piece that she needed to process this week.

The roundup to the Roundup: 13th anniversary of the Roundup. 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 July 12th and 19th) 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.

So yesterday, we left off in St. Malo, which was our first foray into Brittany. We left that city and went down to the Loire Valley, specifically Blois, which is where Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (the father of modern magic) is from.

We did several days of château-hopping including Chambord, Blois, Amboise, and a boat ride under Chenonceau. We also saw quicksand for the third time. Isn’t that bizarre? I went 45 years of my life without ever seeing quicksand, and then we saw it in three different regions of France.

But what made the Loire Valley really special is that we spent a day with our friend from home (and the twins’ former French teacher) because she was there visiting her family. She showed us around her town, and her mother made us a five course lunch. (Which was followed by an enormous dinner after our walk.) And it was just such a fun day to watch our kids run around the yard while we drank Birlou and ate crusty bread.

We realized while we were there that sticking to our original plan to head next to Toulouse wasn’t possible due to the heat wave. Carcassonne was 103 degrees with few indoor spaces. The whole reason we were heading to Toulouse was because I’m obsessed with Occitan, so our friend suggested that we instead head back to Brittany where (1) it will be cooler, (2) it also has a local language — Breton, and (3) IT HAS PUFFINS!

We had no clue that France also had puffins, and since we are obsessed with puffins, we headed to Perros-Gueric (and the rest of the Pink Granite Coast) for a few days to read on the beach and watch seabirds. We learned, once we got there, that the gannets are the same flock we saw last year in Scotland, and they travel between Perros-Gueric and Bass Rock off of Berwick.

So we hung out in Perros-Gueric and ate galettes and tried to learn some Breizh. (Plijet bras on oc’h ober anaoudegezh ganeoc’h!)

And finally we returned to Paris for a few days to do a bunch of neighbourhood walks, including Montmartre and Saint Germain des Prés. Oh! And we went down into the Catacombs. And I returned to a scarf store that I loved 19 years ago and got myself a bunch of scarves for winter. While we didn’t go to any of the soccer games, we were there for all of the World Cup fun.

And then we flew home, to a land that has ice cubes but a severe lack of creperies. And, at least in our area, 100% less quicksand.

We need to go back to do the eastern side of the country in the future, though we may aim to go somewhere a little colder on our next trip.