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

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Atlas Obscura had a post on mystery hikes in the 1930s.  The opening says it all:

On March, 23, 1932, crowds descended upon Paddington Station, London after paying expressly for the privilege of being kept in the dark. They enthusiastically waited for a train with no known destination. Even the conductors had no idea where they would go. They were going to be passengers on London’s very first Hiker’s Mystery Train Express.

They boarded a train with no clue where they would end up.  This activity became very popular in several countries, and it was viewed with the same regard as today’s glampers.  It’s hiking, but it’s not really hiking.  The point is not knowing where you’ll end up.

I peeked at the current travel companies that do this sort of thing, though the first involved flights and the second involved places I didn’t really want to go.  I think I would love this if it was low-commitment, like the mystery hike.  A single day, ending up who knows where, with a bunch of other people who are all in the same situation.  Not so much if it’s a trip for multiple days.

Would you go on a mystery hike?  A longer mystery trip?

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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.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to emotional immune systems since reading No Kidding in NZ’s post about her internal bad guys.  (How is that for convoluted?  I’m responding to a post that is a response to one of my posts.)

So we have our actual immune system that protects our bodies by fighting off disease-causing entities.  But then we also have an emotional immune system that protects our emotional health by fighting off negative-feeling entities.

Infertility (and all trauma) compromises our emotional immune system.

You know how when your actual immune system is compromised, your body can’t fight off simple infections and what is usually manageable becomes possibly deadly?  I think the same thing happens with our emotional immune systems.

When you have a robust emotional immune system, you can handle rude questions or friendship slights.  But when your emotional immune system is beaten down by a trauma such as infertility, you can’t fight off feelings or bounce back from moments as easily.  When your defenses are down — and infertility brings your defenses down — you get emotionally sick.  That could manifest as an emotional cold lingering much longer than it would if you were emotionally healthy or it could be a more frightening emotional illness.

I guess it helps me to think of it that way because just as we’d never say that someone with a compromised immune system is weak or they should just stop getting sick so damn much, it makes no sense to say those things to someone with a compromised emotional immune system.

And beyond that, it helps a person to be gentle with their own heart.  Be kind to yourself, will you?  Especially as we approach Mother’s Day.

Image: Stuart Webster via Flickr via Creative Commons license

The bathroom renovation continues.  In some ways it feels like it will never end.  I know that isn’t possible; one day the guys will have to pack up their drop cloths and leave.  But right now, I cannot imagine a day when someone doesn’t show up at my house at 8 am and start hammering.

We are at the point where I know their coffee preferences and start pouring the cup before they’ve gotten out of the truck.

Being around people all day makes me tired.  Even when they’re upstairs and I’m downstairs, I am on alert, ready to answer questions or give an opinion.  I am accustomed to being by myself since my only in-office co-worker is Linus.  Every night after they leave, my nervous system feels inflamed from all the togetherness and noise.

One day we will have a functional bathroom again.  Right?

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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:

• “MicroblogMondays: Life Storybook” (A Woman My Age)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Look No Tubes has a post about romance and IVF after reading a quote in a tabloid.  She explains: “A couple who are having their second child naturally after a first IVF baby have claimed that IVF is ‘just as romantic’. Really.”  She has her own list of what makes IVF unromantic, but I’m sure people could find plenty to add.

Mojo Working is back with an update and a sad post.  She writes, “It’s tempting to just walk away from this blog without an update, to leave my happy ending intact for those who may stumble upon this later. But it would be disingenuous at best. Because my happy ending at the birth of my second child didn’t signal a happily ever after, not in any sense.”  I know people will want to circle the wagons if her post didn’t pop up in your feed reader.

I really love how Res Cogitatae breaks down what is working and not working in her life right now.  Mostly because of the matter-of-factness about it; whether something is or is not working isn’t the focus.  It’s more that there are these various pieces of life that are all fitting together or bumping into one another.  It makes failings feel less like failings (and winnings feel less like winnings) and more just facts.  Great way to look at your month.

Lastly, ending on another sad post.  Kmina has a beautiful post about grieving her father who recently died.  It begins: “Years and years ago I had this silly (but otherwise strong) opinion that important things that happened to a person were visible to the other if only the others had paid attention.”  Meaning, that even when we don’t tell people what is happening in our life, they should be able to know what is going on because those moments are too large to be contained inside the person.  Those feelings come out through our pores.  Except, of course, they don’t know.  The line that gutted me: “No one knows how it is to be me missing my daddy. They know how it feels to miss their own dad.”  Go over and read the whole thing.

The roundup to the Roundup: The never-ending bathroom renovation.  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 April 28th and May 5th) 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 Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick, and, no, you don’t need to have read the book to be able to understand this and have thoughts on the matter. Because today we’re talking about quitting.

Not quitting the book, though that may end up being someone’s answer. Just quitting. In general.

In the same scene in the coffeehouse, the author (remember, it’s a book about a book) asks the main character on page 18: “Don’t you ever feel like you want to quit doing something everyone else makes you feel like you’re supposed to keep doing? Didn’t you ever just simply want to… stop?”

And later: “What do you want to quit more than anything else in the world?”

I was drawn to the word “quit” because it’s very different from the word “stop.” We stop the car, bringing it from movement to non-movement. We don’t quit the car. But when we talk about stopping forward movement; changing direction in our life and stopping movement in one space in order to start movement in another, we call it quitting. Not stopping. Quitting.

Which has negative connotations associated with it. Quit a job. Quit on their marriage. Quit calling. Whereas pain stops. Sadness ceases. Stories conclude. Life ends.

Words matter.

I think those of us experiencing infertility know that. We hear the word “quit” quite often; both in terms of being admonished for stopping trying something and for not stopping trying something. And in both cases, the word “stop” is more accurate. You are stopping doing this so you can do that. Or you are not stopping doing this because it is not the right time to stop.

I can’t think of anything I want to quit, though there are plenty of things I want to stop — that I will stop doing because I always shed a few activities going into summer so we can pick up new ones in the fall. I’m not quitting these things; walking away in a huff. I’m just stepping away so I can try something new.

It’s like I reached a stop sign, I’m pausing, and then I’m going to turn left and start down a new road.

And there are things I want to stop because they don’t serve me in any way: fears, frustrations, and looping thoughts. But even these I want to stop, not quit. Maybe they deserve the word “quit;” but I still think about them in terms of stopping.

Do you want to stop anything?

Josh and I had to clean out our bathroom so the contractor could gut the space and make way for a new vanity.  The old vanity had chunks of paint missing from the time when I taped the drawers shut so the Wolvog would stop opening them as he crawled around the bathroom during my shower.  How was I to know that the tape would take the paint along with it when I finally peeled it away to put tot locks on the drawers?

We dug down into the dark recesses of the vanity, unearthing birth control pills.  Birth control pills, people.  These were not from treatments; in fact, they expired back in 2002.  Why did I keep them?  I don’t know.  Maybe because they were a tangible reminder of a different time period in life, a time period when I thought I needed birth control?

We threw out an expired peestick.  An unused peestick.  During the height of my addiction of urinating way too early, I went through several peesticks per cycle, and it felt like an insult to drop this one, unused peestick into the trash simply because the box said it expired in 2014.  (Please do not tell me that I could have still used it because I will go to the dump to get it back.)

There were the hotel soaps (you take them, too) and stretched-out ponytail holders and whimsical hair clips that I wore through college.  Numerous opened containers of Q-tips because we somehow always lose the box underneath the sink.  A cartoon Daredevil with a voice bubble saying, “Not in my bathroom.”  So many tweezers.  How did I end up with that many tweezers?

And then two things: the positive peestick and the faded hospital bracelet that I cut off my wrist and stuffed in a drawer when the twins came home.  The lines are still dark pink.  The words are entirely missing from the band.  Two ends of a journey I waited a long time to take.

I could have thrown them out.  I don’t need them; they serve no purpose.  But I slipped them into a box to pack away.  They mean something.  They’re just useless things.  They’re everything.