Apparently, just in case you’re interested, it is totally normal to be sad on your birthday.

The best birthday still contains one inevitable sorrow: it reminds you of the separation between past and future, the one-way nature of time, that there is no going back to the you of last year.

As someone who is often sad on her birthday, and this year felt very sad on her birthday, I liked hearing that other people thought about how “one day all our birthdays will run out.”

I don’t think it would help to ignore my birthday and celebrate a different day. It’s marking the day in general; realizing I’ll never be able to say I’m 44 again. Milestones remind me that time has passed.

When I started this blog, I was 32 and I thought that was old. 45 felt impossibly far away. And now it’s here.

Come sit with me if you’re also sad around birthdays.

Is your fertility app funded by an anti-abortion group or individual? It is 2019. We actually need to ask that.

It has been a long time since my days on FertilityFriend (which is now an app, too!), but it feels like a really simple time where websites were owned by humans you could reach and your data kept private and no one was trying to manipulate your emotions, with the exception of that one girl who would always sprinkle everyone with baby dust. (You know that every site had one.)

Something else: I was moved that Nick Foles announced the reason he was absent from practice was because his wife had a pregnancy loss at 15 weeks. I love that he was upfront about it, and that the family took the time they needed to mourn. When people talk about it, others can give support and comfort AND it makes it easier for the next person to speak up, too.

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inconceivable! is hit by a wave of sadness when she considers her upcoming (and final) transfer. She writes, “That’s life, though, isn’t it? At least after a certain point? Where the most extraordinary exists among the prosaic of every day and the deepest, darkest muck that can be dragged up?” It is a gorgeous, bittersweet post about all of life’s “ands.”

Dreaming of Diapers has a post about her uterine lining. It’s one of those posts I want to send to people when they say, “But you can always do IVF.” Um… this is what IVF is like. These types of difficult moments and emotional highs are part of the process. She writes, “I’ll be honest. It terrifies me to think about transferring one of my precious embryos into my uterus. I mean TERRIFIES. I just want to give it a chance. But maybe by confirming that my uterus is actually ‘receptive,’ that will give me some confidence? Even if I have extremely thin lining?” Sending her so many good thoughts for the transfer.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a book that has been on my TBR list forever. (I secretly keep waiting for it to go on sale as an e-book.) Her post is about finding those IF connections in non-IF spaces and stories. The book is a reminder that “We don’t always know the full story. Sometimes, we need to skip the speculation and the judgment, and just give the other guy a break.” Which book is it? I guess you’ll need to click over to see…

The roundup to the Roundup: Check who funds your fertility app and other news. 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 31st and June 7th) 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 post about Normal People that is not about Normal People. There was a post on Longreads in which a woman wrote about posting on social media after her mother died. Her mother died at 4 am. By 8:30 am, she had posted her news. She writes,

Now she was gone, and it seemed appropriate, even convenient, to let people know through these broad, digital strokes … Relatively speaking, I took to social media quite soon after Mom breathed her last, and when I consider this, it feels — at least immediately — both crass and bizarre.

Is it crass? Is it bizarre? Isn’t it where we’re going to go to mourn if it’s also where we go to celebrate? Those who don’t spend a lot of time online, it would be bizarre. For people who spend a considerable amount of time online, it makes sense.

It ties into a part in Normal People. There is a death, and a character goes on the Facebook wall of the person who died. They write,

Lots of people from school had left comments on his wall, saying they missed him. What were these people doing … writing on the Facebook wall of a dead person? What did these messages, these advertisements of loss, actually mean to anyone? What was the appropriate etiquette when they appeared on the timeline: to “like” them supportively? To scroll past is search of something better? … Thinking about it now, she can’t understand why it bothered her. None of those people had done anything wrong. They were just grieving. Of course it didn’t make sense to write on his Facebook wall, but nothing else made sense either. If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.

Is there really any right way to mourn? And just because you mourn one way for one person, do you have to keep mourning that way for others?

I’ve never gone on someone’s Facebook page after death and written them a message (that I can remember), though I have read other people’s messages. I once spent a whole night, scrolling back through messages that people left an old friend after he was gone. It made me feel connected to something. Less alone with that grief that had nowhere to go. Isn’t that a small good thing?

I read Normal People (Sally Rooney) a few weeks ago, but this isn’t really a post about Normal People. (It was good, by the way. Very good.) It’s a post about infertility.

There’s this part in the book where one of the characters is going through a depressive episode. During this time period, they go out to a book reading and end up having a nice evening. They go home and re-read old notes they made about a story they wanted to write, and the character describes this moment of happiness inside the hell that is depression “like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything” (p. 228).

Despite everything.

The words felt familiar because there were moments like that with infertility; moments where I felt this break in the heaviness and I got a full ten minutes of feeling happy before the other feelings started flooding back in. It reminds me of painted photographs. Do you know how people take black and white photos and use paint to dot in colour in one tiny section of the photo? Like a black and white photo of a woman, but the rose she’s holding is a dusty pink. Or a black and white photo of a child holding a balloon, and the trailing balloon is a cheery yellow.

Spot colour photography. It’s like that. Unexpected colour; unexpected happiness.

So the words felt familiar, but I couldn’t actually pull out any happy memories from that time period. I could remember a lot of not happy moments without needing to consult a diary or photo album to remember. But I couldn’t think of moments of joy like that despite knowing that they must have existed since the words in the book felt so familiar.

Maybe we just remember sad moments during sad times more vividly.

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

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If I worked in this office, no plant would choose me to be their friend because they would immediately pick up on the fact that I don’t like them. Even if they were a flowering plant. Actually, especially if they were a flowering plant. I dislike flowers, too, especially when they’re brought into a building as cut-flowers or a flowering plant.

I would be irritated beyond all get-out if I had to take care of a plant.

But an office pet? THAT I would be all over. If my boss gave everyone a hamster or a turtle to live on their desk and care for every day? I would be a very happy employee. Animals = happiness. Plants = irritation.

How do you feel about plants?

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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.