NIAW and Mother’s Day always kick off a string of infertility-related pieces across the internet. Two recent ones that caught my eye: Glamour ran a piece by a woman explaining why she was finally speaking up about her five miscarriages. She writes: “Typing all of this is excruciating and honestly a bit surreal, like I’m talking about someone else’s life. But I think you should know the whole story.”

It is brutally honest. There was so much that I related to in its rawness:

Do you know how many times in four months—let alone four days, four hours even—a woman who wants to be pregnant counts the moments until she could possibly be pregnant again? Until she can start yet another round of IVF? The counting terrorized me. But it also made me feel oddly better, as though I was actually in control of something when my body was making it clear, miscarriage after miscarriage, that I wasn’t. Everything about the baby-making process is numbers.

Yes.

Go read the whole thing.

And then Lifehacker had a piece about supporting someone through infertility. Most of it was sound, standard advice. One piece that caught my eye was asking the person how often they wanted you to check in. They recommended texting on appointment days (that would have made me feel overwhelmed AND loved at the same time), but being frank in asking how to best talk about it at other times. Again, jump into the advice and see what you think.

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

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I strive for zero waste, which is why Josh is often tasked to create a meal for himself that uses all of our recent leftovers, pretty please. So I was drawn to this story on NPR about a brilliant restaurant in Toronto that has turned emptying their restaurant of perishables into a weekly event.

Each Sunday, they set up a chalkboard menu of everything they want to get rid of. When an item is sold out, it’s crossed off the board. So getting there early is key if you want control of the board, and getting there late is key if you want the lowest price. They keep cutting the prices as the evening unfolds in order to move everything out of the kitchen.

There’s a vegan restaurant by me that has dozens of dishes I wouldn’t mind eating at any given time, so I would totally participate if this was a thing at their restaurant. At other places, I only have one or two non-meat options, so the game would become nerve-wracking especially because what are you going to do once all of your possible options are gone? Walk away and find somewhere else to eat that night?

Pretending you can only go to one restaurant for a date night (and not leave if they’re sold out), would you want to do this?

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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 — at least in the United States — Mother’s Day. My friend posted this New Yorker essay on Facebook, and it so perfectly captures the feelings we may have about this day. It’s about losing your mother, but I think many of the words also work for those whose children aren’t here:

It’s nothing, I tell myself. A day for advertisers. So I shrug off the sales and the offers, the cards and the flowers. I press delete. Still, I now mark Mother’s Day on my private calendar of grief. Anyone who has experienced a loss must have one of those.

Private calendar of grief. The days that mean something only to you, mixed in with the days that you acknowledge in a very different way from the rest of the crowd.

And this moment:

Every now and then, I try to recall what went through my mind as I was standing in that hallway, crying my heart out. (And if you think that the cliché can’t be real—well, then, you’re lucky.)

Even different kinds of loss sometimes hold moments in common.

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I lucked out at the library. I walked in on Wednesday, and Normal People by Sally Rooney was on the new release shelf. I had been waiting for it to come out for months. When I finally thought to put my name down on the hold list at the library, I was number 300-something on the list, and that was weeks before the release. Such anticipation.

So I’ll read today. I’ll buy coffee; grind it at the store. I’ll celebrate my mother — I am so lucky that I have her in my life.

Sending good thoughts to anyone who is having a hard day today. May you find time to slip into the library. Find the right book waiting for you on the shelf.

We have a neighbour, and every day, she walks her enormous dog. We’re around the same age, so I’ve tried over the years to befriend her, but we’re still in the “hello” stage of acquaintanceship. She always smiles at me when she walks past, but her body language clearly states that she doesn’t want to slow down and chat. It’s not unfriendly; I just haven’t been able to get a conversation going.

Josh noticed that she hasn’t been walking the dog. She still walks past the house mid-day, but there’s no leash. The dog, if still alive, has to be in its mid-teens, so it follows that the dog may not be alive anymore. Hence the missing dog on the walk.

I want to say something, to let her know that we noticed and express our condolences if condolences need to be expressed. But there’s something weird about starting a first conversation like that. We’ve been neighbours for many years, and we’ve only spoken hello to each other and had one other conversation about the dog. I don’t even know her name. I’m just really sad not to see the dog with her anymore.

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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:

• “She was the ‘queen of the mommy bloggers.’ Then her life fell apart.” (Vox) — thanks, Lori!

Okay, now my choices this week.

Different Shores has a post about not being a mother in your 40s, and how it differs from not being a mother before this point. It’s such an interesting post about being an outlier. She writes, “Now I’m over 40, I’m fairly sure that none of my family or old friends gives a rat’s whether I’m upset or otherwise about not having kids. As I see it now, the only option is to try to own it, or be miserable.” There’s a lot of food for thought.

Anabegins has a post about all the things she’s doing to bring the vacation spirit into her life because she doesn’t have time for a vacation. And I just love this. I too have switched to reading mind candy for the moment. Letting things slide. Sometimes you need to do what you need to do to get by.

Dubliner in Deutschland has a post about keeping up with the news and how it gets under your skin. She explains, “I don’t often write about tragic events in the news on this blog, and sometimes it feels a bit insensitive or shallow to be talking about my day to day life as if I don’t care about what’s happening. The thing is I do care about it all, a lot.” She captures that need to keep informed, and balances it with the emotional reality of hearing bad news.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a post about International Bereaved Mothers Day and why she kept her “literal and cyber mouth shut.” It is for a thoughtful, selfless reason, but it’s also because the world makes it so hard to speak about loss.

The roundup to the Roundup: Sad about the dog.  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 May 3rd and 10th) 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.

“Are you working on a book right now?”

No, I’m not working on a book right now. Not in the truest sense of the word. I have book ideas. I have pages that I wrote months or years ago that I say I’m going to return to and finish. I have the impulse to write and no time to work on my own stuff.

I get asked that question a lot when I’m playing life-catch-up with someone. The question makes sense. Once upon a time, I wrote books. And then I stopped writing books. I got other work that interested me more in the moment, and I went down that road. And those roads led to different roads, taking me farther and farther from book writing until it was something I was looking at from a distance, or, more honestly, looking at in photographs because it was so far behind me that I couldn’t see it anymore.

I feel guilty when I get the question because it feels like other people see that work as part of my identity. So it means that I’m not being Melissa anymore. Whereas I see myself as Melissa, and right now she’s doing X and a while ago she was doing Y, and before that, she was doing Z. But sometimes I wonder if that’s quite right.

I wish I was writing. Maybe that’s the theme for the week: I miss what I used to do. Because what I used to do was part of who I was. So if I’m not doing those things anymore, then I’m not really the same person anymore. Except I am. Or people change, but at the core, I’m still myself.

It’s this thing: I add new things, but I still want to hold on to all the old things. But if I never shed activities or interests or work projects, I won’t keep moving forward. And at the same time, I wonder if I can still call myself a book writer if I’m not actively writing books. And I miss calling myself a book writer, even if that work doesn’t excite me as much as what I’m doing in the moment.

I always think about writers who take years — decades — to write another book. In between, I still think of them as a writer, even if they’re not publishing new work in the interim. Maybe that’s where I am, the interim between books. Or not. I guess I’ll need to wait and see.