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

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The twins are both named after great-grandparents. We didn’t struggle with their names at all. We knew we wanted to name the kids after these two people, which greatly limited our list of possible names and made the choice pretty straight-forward.

The ChickieNob’s name was one that I floated very early on in our relationship as the name I would use for any daughter, and Josh agreed. The Wolvog’s name sprang into my head one day — long before we were pregnant — and I told Josh that if we ever had a boy, that would be his name. And… well… he agreed again. Then we had to work for years to actually have the kids so we could use the names, but the names themselves weren’t a struggle.

I like being named after someone. I think the kids like being named after someone, especially when we come across pictures or objects or stories we can tell them about those people. Most of my friends and family members are named after people, too. But my friend list skews heavily towards Jewish, where naming your child after someone is common practice.

Are you named after someone? Did you know the person?

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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.

There was a recent Carolyn Hax that caught my eye, mostly because the title referenced being child-free. Except the question asker wasn’t really child-free. He was the father of a child who had died, and because his child wasn’t here, he was on the receiving end of familiar child-free comments ranging from the “you’re so lucky you don’t have kids” to the “you don’t understand” variety.

Carolyn told him to answer truthfully and respond, “‘I actually do know what it’s like’; or, ‘No, ‘lucky’ isn’t the word I’d choose.'” Which is exactly what he should do, but it made me think about why we ask for permission to tell our story.

The person who makes the comment doesn’t ask permission to make the comment. They just make an assumption and comment on the other person’s life without thinking.

[Side note: I am, by the way, separating out the thoughtless from the malicious. We all make assumptions every single day, believing we know things about the person we’re speaking to and commenting accordingly. Anyone who believes they’re sensitive and thoughtful and aren’t negatively impacting other people on a daily basis are not only fooling themselves but are the worst offenders because they won’t even admit how inadvertently hurtful they are.

I am promising you, no matter how kind you may believe me to be, I am hurting people left and right without knowing it when I post things here or walk by people in the store or––worst of all––engage in one-on-one conversations. I don’t believe there is anything we can do to avoid this except try our best to be mindful and minimize it.

It reminds me of the “Monk’s Story” in Gita Mehta’s A River Sutra, and how Ashok sweeps the ground for tiny bugs so he doesn’t negatively impact their lives by stepping on them. He crushes fewer bugs that the average person walking the same ground, but… you know… they’re tiny. He still ends up crushing bugs, even though he may not know when it happens.]

Anyway, the question asker is asking permission to answer, something that the comment maker never asks permission to do. This is a theme of advice columns: it seems people are more often asking for permission to respond vs. permission to comment. But… why are we asking permission to tell our own story? To state facts from our life?

Food for thought.

We saw The Farewell on Wednesday night. It was fantastic. It’s based on a true story, and it actually made me smile much more than it made me cry; a pleasant surprise.

Plus Akwafina completely transformed herself. She was incredible. I love it when you see an actor in two roles and the two characters are so different that you know the person has completely dissolved into the character. I always feel that way when I see Benedict Cumberbatch. Sherlock is nothing like Hamlet who is nothing like Patrick Melrose who is nothing like Alan Turing. I mean, they all look like him, but I didn’t watch Sherlock thinking that I’m seeing Alan Turing as a detective. Does that make sense?

Whereas some actors are always the same character. It’s more or less the same film after film, so it doesn’t feel like they dissolve insomuch as it feels like they’ve changed costumes.

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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:

• “We Can Imagine What It’s Like When A Baby Dies–We Just Don’t Want To” (An Unexpected Family Outing)
• “For Those Suffering” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Empty Arms, Broken Heart has a post unpacking that often-said sentiment: “You haven’t changed one bit!” She admits it bothered her. “She meant to compliment how young I still look, but her compliment back-fired and made me feel the need to show my growth. I lived and learned through infertility, divorce, and foster-adoption.” Our growth is often internal, not visible to the people who meet us again in passing, but this post will make you think twice about how you phrase the thought.

Life’s Basic Elegance has a post about a planner. Except… you know… it’s not really a planner. It’s a post about the things we stop when we are in mourning, and the importance of restarting those tiny daily rituals that bring us back to everyday life.

Road Less Travelled writes about social media minefields we may not even be aware that we’re stepping on. After her SIL asks her not to post something for fear of offending other people (who weren’t invited), she wonders how many other postings have inadvertently had a negative impact on another person. As she points out: “Life is both richer AND a lot more complicated since social media arrived on the scene.”

Finally, FinallyMyLinesNow has an ode to her partner. They’ve been through a lot together, and she marvels at the new side she is seeing now that they are parenting. She writes, “I never would have guessed that kids would make my marriage stronger, but seeing him care for the babies and me in every sense possible has done exactly that.” It’s a happy story.

The roundup to the Roundup: Go see The Farewell. 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 August 2nd and August 9th) 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.

Modern Mrs. Darcy sent a newsletter in June that was one of those magical notes that you are so grateful that another person wrote. She was commenting on a picture of her library fines receipt and was taken aback that other people were surprised that she ran up library fines. She wrote, “I was surprised that some of you expected me to somehow be above the run-of-the-mill hardships of the reading life.”

She goes deeper into this, explaining that she is a reader, just like all run-of-the-mill readers, and she therefore goes through all the struggles that readers go through. She has to make reading decisions and she’s strapped for time and she finds books she loves and books she doesn’t. She has “should reads” and “want to reads” and sometimes she drops one for the other: “I read four books on vacation, but only one of them did me any good—if you’re talking about crossing titles off my TBR, or racking up books I can talk about on the podcast or Modern Mrs Darcy.”

Thank you.

I really struggle with the should reads and want to reads. There are plenty of books I feel I should read, either because they deserve attention or they contain information I want or I want to support the author, but I’ve written before about feeling guilty turning more often to my Want to Read list. Currently, they’re period-piece mysteries like Her Royal Spyness or The Mitford Murders. Not really mind-expanders but good fun that I feel like picking up at the end of the day. And I felt so down in France because I was slogging through a book I didn’t want too read but felt obligated to read.

I’m grateful she wrote, “I don’t always get this reading thing right, but I know this: rarely does a day go by where I don’t talk to some reader, somewhere, about some aspect of their reading life—and in all this talking I’ve found that we readers can be pretty hard on ourselves.”

That made all the difference. I’m not saying that I won’t feel guilty from time to time, but sometimes we just need to hear, “me too!” and not feel alone.

What are you reading right now?

Many years ago, I wrote about the Wishing Tree at my camp, and how I used my wish (at 8 years old) to make what my friends all said was a terrible wish (it was for a 12-year-old boy at the camp, who didn’t acknowledge my existence in any way, to kiss me) and how it came true years later.

I had to drive through his old neighbourhood last week when we got stuck in traffic coming home from camp. I didn’t think I’d remember how to go, but my hands turned the wheel at the correct times, and we ended up exactly where I wanted, bypassing the traffic. Driving through there made me wistful for my high-school-aged self, even though his parents moved away years ago, and the boy (who is still a peripheral friend) now lives on the west coast.

There is a tree in Germany with similar powers. You don’t run through the split trunk and kiss the air, but the tree has “magical matchmaking powers” and receives dozens of letters per day of people making wishes from afar. The Atlantic article is the best story — you really need to read the whole thing because it will make you cheer and cry and cheer and cry — and it made me think of my Wishing Tree.

The kids asked me if I had any regrets about using up my wish on that kiss. Zero regrets. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t work out and we only dated for a few months. We stayed friends for almost 30 years since that kiss, and beyond that, it just makes a great story.

Sometimes stories are worth just as much as wishes.