I started listening to a new podcast, Note to Self, which is produced by WNYC and hosted by Manoush Zomorodi.  It’s about the Internet.  It’s nice to hear a fellow Internet naval gazer talk about the way we comport ourselves online.  Sometimes, I pretend Manoush and I are just chatting in the car; two girls, talking about the Internet.  Except that it’s a one-sided conversation.

As I am wont to do, I focused on entirely the wrong thing in a recent episode titled, “Should You Post Pictures of Your Kids Online?”  I already know how I feel about that, so maybe that is why I focused on this one, passing line. It begins at 5:50.

Marcia from Austin admits that she is very hesitant to post pictures of her kids online because she has friends experiencing infertility, and she knows those pictures are salt in the wound.  So she mindfully limits how often she shares, finding a balance between paying attention to her audience and sharing her life.

Very nice, right?

Then a woman (I believe it’s Jen Poyant) responds to it with a story about a friend who miscarried twins, and her inclination right after the death was to not post as much, though she has never asked her friend if she is bothered by the numerous photos she posts of her child on Instagram.

The emphasis is obviously mine.

So the first thing that struck me is that her impulse was to be sensitive only immediately after the event.  I don’t know what your experience with loss has been like, but for me, my feelings linger long after people stop asking about the loss.  In fact, right after a loss, I’m so numb that I’m not sure I would notice anything online.  But six months after the fact, a year after the fact?  It’s a different, but certainly no less relevant type of pain.

So the first thing I thought about is does sensitivity have an expiration date?  Or once we’ve made the choice to be thoughtful, should we continue in that vein indefinitely?  I don’t think it’s possible to never upset anyone else online, but it’s interesting that she had the impulse but it disappeared.

The second thing that struck me is that she says she never asked the woman if the baby pictures bothered her.  She mentions that they’re not close, but they’re close enough to know facts about one another and interact online.  And I wondered why she didn’t ask, and whether that was too forward a question: “do the pictures that I post bother you?”  We’re not talking about asking a general question to her entire list of friends, but instead reaching out to this one woman and asking her a straightforward question, admitting that the reason for doing so is to be sensitive.

I tried to imagine how I would feel if someone asked me if their baby pictures bothered me.  I guess it’s a very complicated answer.  Sometimes they do.  And sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes I seek out baby photos, wanting the cuteness.  And sometimes I scroll past any picture of a child younger than the twins.

This isn’t a judgment on the woman speaking — I think all of us could give some variation of her statement admitting that we know something but haven’t really reached out properly — but I thought it was an interesting moment in an always interesting podcast.

Would you be upset to be on the receiving end of that question?  Or would you welcome it if the person was asking because they were trying to be thoughtful?

The third question (which I almost forgot to post because I’m that distracted — Look!  Shiny thing!  Where?), which loops back around to the first question and ties in the second question, is about shifting reality.  We know that our memories change over time.  We forget details or our brains change details, and the memories still feel correct even if we rationally know that we’ve embellished or tweaked our memories, most of the time without meaning to do so.

Though in some ways, it’s not just our memories that are slippery and shifting.  Our present understanding of reality is just as fluid.

In I’ll Give You the Sun, the author writes on page 369 (and I tweaked this so it would be spoiler-free): “Who knows if destiny is just how you tell yourself the story of your life?”  Maybe everything we do and how we process the world is entirely dependent upon our personalities.  That we shape the story we want to see.

We make ourselves the victim or the victor; and we do so even while someone else in the exact same situation would cast themselves in the opposite role.  Someone sentimental, who wants to find great meaning in a person’s final words, will carry them around forever in their heart even though another person would have forgotten them a few moments after they were spoken.

We tell half-truths, sometimes not admitting our real motivation for our actions, and in doing so, the people around us build their understanding inside that half-truth, growing it until it becomes more fake than real.

We make our own truth, we see what we want to see, we hear what we want to hear.

I guess in knowing this, in knowing how untruthful the truth can be, does the truth even matter?  Because what is the truth?  Is the story we tell ourselves more important than reality, and how do we even being to pick away at reality, at the hardcore facts of our life, when there is so much fluidity, so many tiny facets of our life ever-changing and flowing?

That was the final question the book left me with.  What do 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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Today is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, so I likely won’t be online.  I wrote this ahead of time so everyone else could meet up because I love this weekly gathering so much.  But I also think that it’s important that I go offline and mark the day.

I don’t know why going offline feels like the right thing to do.  I mean, you’re supposed to gather with others as you reflect on your past year and mentally plan your new year.  I gather with people offline, but I also gather with people over the phone and online.  I’m not sure why gathering in one way feels right and another way feels wrong.

Do you feel like there are times when you are supposed to be offline; where going online somehow feels wrong?

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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 posts.

In honour of My Pathway to Motherhood’s daughter, Butterfly, I asked Truman if he would participate in a photo shoot. He barely agreed. He gave me his look that the ChickieNob calls “annoyed lawyer.”

But he reluctantly allowed me to snap a few pictures after I turned the sound off on the phone.

Look at my baby boy.

He is so curious and intelligent.  Look at those eyes.  He is wondering what is this plastic and metal contraption the food-giving lady keeps sticking in my face.  Why does she hold it in front of me incessantly?  Why does she ask me to perform tricks for it?

He is pure love.  With the softest ears in the world.

Side note: Tomorrow is MicroblogMonday.  Get writing!

It’s impossible to get to this date and not comment on its significance, even though I have nothing new to say. There are certain dates that beg everyone to speak up; that tug on you until you do. This is one of them.

It demands that you sit with it, think about it, remember it.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. So I’m sitting with it. I’m thinking about it and remembering.

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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:

• “The Last First Day” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Northern Star and Illustr8d
• “Hard is Hard” (Bent Not Broken)
• “Embracing Life Without Children to Raise” (Still Mothers)
• “Microblog Mondays: Things I Wish I Had Known” (A Woman My Age)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Road Less Travelled has a post remembering her daughter on what should have been her first day of 12th grade.  She writes so eloquently about the far-reaching hand of loss: “People often don’t realize that when you lost a baby, you don’t just lose a baby. You lose the toddler, and the first grader, and the tweener and the teenager, and the high school graduate and the college frosh, and the bride (or groom) and the young employee and the young parent he or she would have become. The children they might have had, too.”  Please go over and read the whole post.

Bent Not Broken has her take on a bit of advice about grief that has recently gone viral on social media.  I first read this advice on Facebook and thought it was very good, especially because when I first read it, it was paired with a quote from Joe Biden’s speech: “There will come a day, I promise you and your parents, as well, when the thought of your son or daughter or your husband or wife brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. It will happen. My prayer for you is that day will come sooner or later.”  Bent Not Broken discusses this idea of waves in regards to infertility, and I love her ability to look at her situation with a clear heart and understanding that she needs to feel what she is going to feel, and one day the waves won’t batter as hard.

I will end on a funny note.  My Pathway to Motherhood has a post titled “Guinea Pig.”  As you can imagine, I was so excited to click over from my feed reader and check out the cuteness.  What I got was something so much better than an actual guinea pig.  I am not going to ruin it for you with a description.  You will need to click over and check out what her daughter did.

The roundup to the Roundup: Thinking about September 11th.  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 September 4th and September 11th) 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.