The Washington Post has a brilliant opinion piece about regulating pregnancy, which, by default, talks about infertility as well. People don’t understand how pregnancy works. They don’t understand that you can’t move an ectopic pregnancy. They don’t understand that you can’t pee on a stick immediately after sex and know whether or not you’re pregnant. They don’t understand how cycles work or periods happen or uteruses function because they won’t speak about these things. They’ll only regulate them. Or, at the very least, form an opinion within their lack of information.

She sums up the whole problem in a single sentence: “There’s another reason that has nothing to do with the law: If you don’t understand how female bodies work, you might end up believing some really harmful things about women.”

Go read the whole piece. (But not the comment section.)

I ended up needing to go back into my old blogspot website this week, which I haven’t been in since building this space in 2009. It felt like I was strolling through a ghost town, except it wasn’t really a ghost town since all of that old content migrated over here. For three years, I wrote there, and for ten years I’ve written here. Triple the length of time that I wrote over there, but that space feels so much like home still. I’m not sure what that means.

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Speaking of looking backwards, Measure of Love is on sale for the next two weeks for only 99 cents. It’s the same price on every e-book platform. So… grab a copy for the beach? For a friend? For someone who wants to hear about the olden days of blogging?

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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:

• “What Does a Mother Look Like” (Mrs. Spit)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inexplicably Missing has a post about the outer calm and the inner turmoil. She made it through Mother’s Day weekend, but then found herself emotional when she started to pack up her house for a move. She writes, “As we dis-assembled our furniture and took art off the walls, it felt as though we are completely pulling apart our lives. Which actually was the whole idea, I guess… It’s just I’m starting to get cold feet about it all.” It’s about crumbling internally so you can build something new.

Risa Kerslake also has a post about Mother’s Day; though this year she’s pregnant. In the past, she has always had a moment where she cries in the bathroom, and this year she didn’t. She describes that change in Mother’s Day: “There’s a lot of joy and gratefulness and indescribable love that comes with it, but every Mother’s Day, I allow myself those moments in the bathroom.”

Lastly, CD1 Again ties off her blog with a goodbye post. She goes all the way back to 2008, so it’s bittersweet, even if she hasn’t been blogging as of late. She writes, “Thank you to everyone who ever stopped here and said hi or offered support when I was at my lowest, so sure I was worthless because my uterus didn’t work. It meant more than I can ever convey here with just words. I looked back and the anguish I read in old posts just hurts, but it helped shape who I am now. I’m leaving all of the posts here for anyone who needs them.” Go read the whole post and say goodbye.

The roundup to the Roundup: Spending time in the past. Measure of Love is on sale. 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 10th and 17th) 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.

I am a superfan of Carolyn Hax’s column. I differentiate myself from a regular fan because I even read her daily column when I’m out of the country. So I’ll skip the Skimm for several weeks, but I’ll never skip Hax, even if it means accessing her column over super-slow portable wifi.

Here are ideas from three recent columns that I bookmarked.

Advice One

This was an old column they re-ran a month or two ago about trust.

The need to control is really just a failure to trust. You have to drive because so-and-so will be reckless; you have to keep your mate in sight or else s/he’ll cheat; you have to do everything yourself because underlings won’t be as competent . . . stop me when this sounds familiar.

A failure to trust, meanwhile, is really just a triumph of fear. Fear of crashing, heartbreak and failure in the examples I just gave, but it’s all one biggie — fear of the unknown. Specifically, that you won’t be able to handle any outcome that deviates from the one you’ve envisioned.

Which means the person you don’t trust is yourself. Right?

Isn’t that freakin’ brilliant? Need to control = failure to trust. Failure to trust = triumph of fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown = lack of trust in your own ability to cope. Seeing it spelled out that clearly made me understand my desire to control the world.

Advice Two

The next was a few weeks ago. Another trust situation, but this time it’s being upset by someone’s history.

You haven’t changed. What has changed is your girlfriend’s understanding of who you are. That understanding changed because you were honest and transparent about your history. Her response to your transparency was to choose not to be transparent with you. Or trust you … Your history made you who you are, the person who chose her — no small thing — and the person who has been honest with her throughout.

It didn’t make me see the world differently, but I just loved how she led the person through that answer.

Advice Three

This was just a little nugget in a column last week about a person wondering if their boyfriend was losing interest:

Being good to yourself is how you learn to recognize the sensation of someone being good to you.

LOVE THAT. Every single person needs to be taught how to be good to themselves so they can find their boundaries.

What good advice have you read lately?

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.