Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived in Egypt.  She gave birth prematurely to a son who was born still.  He had ten fingers and toes, a gently curving spine, rounded hips.  He was missing bones from the top of his head — anencephaly — and it affected the formation of his brain.  She mummified the baby and  wrapped him in linen and cartonnage, and turned him into a hawk through the magic of paint.

I don’t know why my heart ached so much reading about this mother and the discovery that a tiny hawk mummy didn’t contain a bird but instead the remains of a little boy who died between 23 and 28 weeks gestation.  We didn’t invent infertility; it has clearly existed for millennia.  But there is something that ties us together, cleaving that woman to our community.

The care she took as her heart ached.

Choosing to release him in bird form.

Not knowing that thousands of years later, we would learn about her and her loss; that her son would continue to impact the world.

It’s a really moving discovery.

We are crawling towards the end of the school year.  I’m waiting for the twins to bring home their yearbooks so they can finally show me the people who appeared in this year’s stories.  It’s a strange thing — when they were little, I was in the school all the time, and I knew everyone in their grade.  Now it’s apparently “uncool” for your mother to hang out at the building.  So I know everyone from their elementary school and a handful of kids who have passed through our home.  But everyone else is like a book character in my head.

So I’m looking forward to finally having a face to put with the name for the recurring characters in the stories they tell me after school.

I liked The Atlantic’s article on signing yearbooks and how it has changed over the years.  My high school gave us insert pages that we could carry around instead of the book itself; both for easier transport AND to ensure that people didn’t scribbling over their picture.  This was brilliant except that I never took the sticky tab off the insert pages to put them in the book.  So the pages are somewhere in storage, and the books are unsigned on the shelf.

My favourite signing rhyme from childhood didn’t make the article: “Remember A, remember B, C that you remember me.”  I thought that was so freakin’ clever.  And “May your summer be long and useful, like a roll of toilet paper.”

We were such cards.

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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:

• “Smiling at the Tumbleweeds” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Lori and Northern Star!
• “So Then G-d Spaketh: ‘Let’s give the poor bitch bipolar too!’” (Edenland)
• “While You’re Alive” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Jess!
• “Saying ‘No’” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Something Out of Nothing had her baby.  It is a sweet post about the birth and becoming a family of four.  I loved it because I remember posts before he was conceived.  And now he’s here.  The story continues.

Countingpinklines has a post about her college reunion.  She is currently pregnant and cannot go, but she muses what she would have done if she was still waiting.  She writes, “For all that reunions can be fun, it can also be emotionally painful. Too many reminders of things not working out in life where you see everyone around present their perfect lives.”  I went to my high school 10th while we were doing treatments, and it was hard.

NotMyLinesYet has a post about an encounter with an oracle card deck.  You’ll have to click over and read the post to find out how the cards answered her question, but I love this line (and it will make sense after you read): “So here I sit, expecting miracles, no matter what’s in the cards for us.”

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix has a post about looking at pictures of other people’s kids.  She asks a lot of questions about how to protect her heart and honour where she is at this moment while also interacting with the world around her: “How do I interact in the world that’s full of fertile people? How do I participate in life with others when a lot of basic things are still so painful for me?”  There are no right or wrong answers, but all the questions in the post are good questions.

The roundup to the Roundup: Yearbook is coming.  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 June 1st and 8th) 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.

When I was 24 years old, I was in an awful place during graduate school, and I came home for the summer to mentally regroup and decide whether I wanted to finish my degree.  I had finished all of my course work, so it was literally down to the thesis.  I was that close to being done, but I didn’t know if I had the emotional reserves to go back.

I spent the first month home breaking up with my boyfriend, crying, and staring at my bedroom wall.  I had a job teaching creative writing at a camp, but it hadn’t started yet.  So I mostly did nothing.

One night, my mother coaxed me downstairs to see clips from the Tony Awards.  I’m not a fan of award shows and, at that point, had never been to a Broadway show.  But she was desperate to get me out of my room.  I moped downstairs and sat on the sofa as she ran through all the musical numbers on the VHS tape.

I sat up when she got to Alan Cumming singing from Cabaret, completely mesmerized.  I was spending 24 hours a day being not happy, but the performance held the unhappiness at bay for three whole minutes.

I started watching the clip once a day, giving myself three minutes of happiness.  After a while, I was able to hold onto the happiness for three minutes after the clip, too.  Then ten minutes.  Then I could be happy for a whole hour after watching it.  I could see it before camp and get through the whole day.

Finally, it was August and I felt like I could take the tape back to school and watch it once a day to get through my last year.  It was really scary going back.  But I did it.  And as a treat, I saved up all of my money and bought tickets with my cousin to see Alan Cumming in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club in New York.  Being there, in that room, seeing the whole play made my heart explode.  And I started saving and buying tickets to the show as frequently as possible, watching Alan several more times.

That performance made me interested in other performances, and I started to buy theater tickets as frequently as possible.  We did a lot of same-day tickets for both plays and musicals.  We bought a lot of cast recordings.  I started seeking out theater whenever I traveled.  Finally, I fell in love with a playwright, and, Reader, I married him.

Our lives are filled with a lot of theater performances.

When I was turning 40, Alan Cumming did a revival of Cabaret, and my brother offered to buy us tickets since he had been one of the people I dragged along in the late 90s to the original Broadway performance.  But I decided not to go, feeling like I couldn’t recapture how special that show was to me.  It got me out of a deep well of sadness and gave me the emotional strength to finish my degree.  I felt like I needed to let it rest.

But last week, Alan Cumming was doing a last performance of Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs at a theater gala, and Josh and I went with my cousin.  I felt such a tenderness, seeing this stranger who meant so much to me during this really hard time in life, and being there with my cousin who started the journey out of the sadness with me and the husband who was at the end of that theater-loving beginning.

Afterward, Alan mingled with the crowd, and he took this selfie for us (because my arms are too short to take a proper selfie).  I was going to do the lunge, but there was no possible way to fulfill my lunge fantasy, so we opted to stand and smile.

I hope my huge grin conveyed how much it means to your heart to stand with your arm around a person who unknowingly brought you out of your sadness while at the same time stand with your cousin who knowingly supported you as you climbed out of your sadness and your husband nearby who came into your life because you were finally going back out into the world again after your sadness and your parents (who showed you the tape that got you out of your sadness) with your kids so you could hear a man sing sappy songs.  It was a huge for me.

So thank you to my mum, dad, Josh, my cousin, and Alan Cumming.  A long story for a brief encounter, so I hope the smile conveyed what there wasn’t time to say.

Stop the press!

Right after I wrote yesterday that people want to relive their 40s more than any other decade, I learned that life gets better after 50.  How is this possible?  If your 50s are noticeably better than your 40s, wouldn’t everyone say that they want to relive their 50s?

According to the article:

Academics have found increasing evidence that happiness through adulthood is U-shaped – life satisfaction falls in our 20s and 30s, then hits a trough in our late 40s before increasing until our 80s.

I like the idea of life being U-shaped; of happiness dipping and then rising.  It makes what lies ahead that much more enticing rather than thinking that things are downhill from here.  Down here, nearing the “trough,” is okay.  It fills me with hope to hear that it’s only going to get better.

Though apparently I will first travel through an emotional slump in my late 40s caused by — according to the research — nothing.  Unless it’s caused by something.  But I will only the notice the nothing if everything else is going smoothly.  According to the author, “Those most likely to notice the arrow of time are the people without a lot of other change or difficulty in their life.”

Hmmm.

I have two more years until I hit the nadir — 46.  And while research points out that events later in life such as dealing with health issues, deaths, job loss, or empty nests affects people emotionally, when life is still, we’ll feel happier in the stillness.

It’s a very interesting article about why we feel happier in our 50s and beyond, so read the whole thing when you have the time.

Does it ring true to you?  That happiness increases in your 50s and beyond?

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

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The New York Times recently had a piece about surviving your 40s.  My 40s have been interesting; something initially dreaded and now embraced.  I am sure I will also be dragged kicking and screaming into 50, but I am happy to be a few days into being 44, not least of which because the number is the same backwards as forwards.

The article asks: “What exactly is this not-young age? I hear people in their 20s describe the 40s as a far-off decade of too-late, when they’ll regret things that they haven’t done. But for older people I meet, the 40s are the decade that they would most like to travel back to.”

It’s an interesting idea to be living the decade you’ll most want to return to live again.  It makes you more mindful to slow down and drink in the moments because they are apparently as good as it gets.

Mostly, I like the essay for these lines: “What is a grown-up anyway? Do they really exist? If so, what exactly do they know? Will my mind ever catch up with my face?”

What is a grown-up?  And are you one?

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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.