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

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I read a bunch of stories last week concerning Amal Alamuddin taking her husband’s last name, as if this was earth-shattering news.  For example, The Stir wrote, “She, arguably, has an even more successful and lucrative career than her new husband, but that hasn’t stopped newlywed Amal Alamuddin from changing her last name after marriage and becoming Mrs. George Clooney.”

Beyond the judgment in the author’s word choice (so if you have a high salary, you should keep your name, but if you’re a poor, unknown sales clerk, it’s understandable if you want to head on down to the social security office?), it made me wonder why anyone is astonished by anyone else’s choice of whether or not to change their last name.  My friends are a pretty even mix of three options (keep last name, change last name, or create new last name that both people in the marriage use).

If you’re married, did you (or your partner) change your last name with marriage?  If you’re not married, do you know what you would do?

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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.

…And it looks fantastic.  Plus it lights up.

At least, I think it looks fantastic.  And the Wolvog flipped out over it.  I would love to be able to tell you how I made it except that I don’t know the names of any of the parts I used beyond washers and toggle bolts.  And a lot of super glue.  And random parts from the plumbing section at Lowes.

I love it so much that I’m making two more — the parts cost me next to nothing and the whole thing took me about 10 minutes to assemble.

By which I mean 10 minutes of assembling while wearing a shit-eating grin:

Trying to have a good Halloween and spend very little money at the same time.  Putting that MFA to good use.  Finishing the TARDIS t-shirts next…

Look at this post!  It’s tiny!  Miniscule!  And it’s not even Monday.  But what are you doing reading this?  Go prepare your post for #MicroblogMondays!

P.S. I fashioned the screwdriver using these two images, but I couldn’t find a template.  So it’s a little wibbly wobbly.  But also took less timey wimey than following instructions.

Last year, I opened the Creme de la Creme for submissions on October 15th to give you (and me) two full months to create the list which goes up on January 1st.  This year, the task has been on my to-do list with a little question mark next to the word.  Creme?  Yes?  No?

I think all things run their course.  Certainly the Lost and Found has fallen by the wayside from lack of use.  I post it as often as I have stuff to post.  I am trying to get that project to a nice, round number, and then I will shutter it.

And I wondered if the Creme had reached a similar fate.  If you got enough out of it anymore to make it worth doing the work, and if I got enough out of it anymore to make it worth doing the work.

I decided that yes, it still had enough juice in it to make it through this year, the 9th time constructing the list.  So I will open the list for submissions on Tuesday, October 21st.  A few days later than I would have liked, but still plenty of time.

I know there are people who like to be towards the top of the list, so I give you this heads up so you can peruse your archive this weekend and choose a post.  If you’re new to this blog and have no clue what I’m talking about, you may want to familiarize yourself with the Creme de la Creme by looking at old ones.  Because it would rock if we got a wide range of voices on the list.

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Raise your hand if you read this section.  Okay.  Now raise your hand if you ACTUALLY DO A BACKUP.  People, it doesn’t help to just think about doing it.  Go do it.  Make your backup.  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:

• “Moving On” (Coffee and Tea)
• “Golden Afternoons” (The Nelson Family Blog)
• “Two Years Later” (Baby-Making Merry-Go-Round)
• “I Am (Not) a Face of Infertility” (Waiting for Baby Bird)
• “The Other Quiet Mom” (HuffPo)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Persnickety Chickadee has a brief post that packs a punch about books.  She always worried that she would have a child who wouldn’t love books as much as she does.  She didn’t realize she had to worry about whether or not she would have a child at all.  It’s a moving post in its brevity.

Another small post: Days of Grace has the most absolutely perfect response to the idea of whether or not you should blog: “Write for the future you.  She won’t let you regret it.”  Go read the whole post.

Small is big this week: Created Family has a heartbreaking post on processing her loss while still under the anesthesia for the D&C.  With four small words, she sums it up perfectly.

A Little Bit More has a post detailing her Thanksgiving weekend that looks at the good in between the hard.  She talks about a moment when she was starting to feel down, and then she observed something that brought her back up.  And I love this line: “So God has a sense of humour and was reminding me that there is so very much to smile about, laugh about, love and be thankful for.”

Lastly, I love the distinction A Fifth Season makes when she says she isn’t blessed, and why she has a problem with that word.  She bluntly states: “Blessings, you see are relative.  One knows to call something a blessing when one knows the antithesis. I live the antithesis so that others know what to call their blessings.”  It informs how she views the world, and why she refuses to look at her life as a comparison.

The roundup to the Roundup: The Creme de la Creme opens this week.  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 October 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’ve written before that I don’t go to the mikveh every month.  I’ve only been twice: once before my wedding and once after a miscarriage.  When I went for my wedding, it was a joyous, somewhat raucous event.  I remember laughing a lot.  When I went back a few years later to try to reclaim my body after a miscarriage, I sank under the water, sobbing.  I remember opening my eyes underwater and watching my body float, my knees drawn towards my chest.  A little ball.  I was so lost.  So lost.

I can’t even get through thinking about it now without crying.

We were out running errands on Tuesday when Josh broke the news.  A rabbi in town — not our rabbi — had been arrested on charges of voyeurism.  He was being accused of rigging up a camera in the mikveh.  Not our mikveh, but one that family and friends use.

Danya Ruttenberg said it perfectly in the Forward,

Picture a woman returning to the mikveh for the first time after a miscarriage. She’s swimming in grief, still, maybe. Judaism doesn’t traditionally have a formal ritual to mark the loss of a pregnancy — except the mikveh. Her first immersion after first a time of hope, and then one of what’s all too often an unnamed bereavement is her ritual to mark what’s happened inside her body and her heart, everything she’s feeling and everything that’s different now.

Now picture a woman coming back to the mikveh after her third miscarriage.

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I don’t know what percent of the water in the mikveh is actually made up of women’s tears, but I suspect it’s a lot. The mikveh is meant to hold vulnerability.

There has, understandably, been a lot of discussion of the event here in town, and beyond my feelings about the situation itself is the comment — made thus far entirely by men — that it is lashon hara (gossip; literally “evil tongue”) to speak about another person in this manner and we should stop.  Even worse than having a sacred space desecrated is being silenced.

Especially when I think rabbis and congregants need to hear how women feel about the mikveh.  They need to read Danya’s piece and understand how miscarriage affects their congregants.  They need to hear what women say when they feel violated.  We need to talk about this so there can be comfort and guidance.

Eyes have certainly been used in this case and others to violate.  I’d love to have all of our words read so that eyes can contribute to having women heal.

Especially on a day like today, National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day.

Let me start by saying that I think the invention of egg freezing is a great thing.  It’s being misused, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that its mere existence is awesome.  As in, inspiring awe.

A woman about to head into cancer treatments that may ravage her fertility?  Absolutely — a wonderful use of egg freezing.  Is it a slam dunk that she will be able to have a child with those eggs later?  Of course not.  But the key point here is that she can’t have a child now: she is about to enter treatments.  She will be taking drugs that would affect a growing fetus.  And since treating cancer can’t wait 9 months or longer, the next best thing she can do is freeze her eggs (or utilize another similar option).  She’s done what she can, and she can enter treatments with that what if out of her head.  There has been a similar option for men to freeze their sperm for a long time.

Fast forward to today where the option is being dangled out to healthy women.  Apple and Facebook announced that they would be covering the cost of egg freezing for their employees in order to attract more female workers to tech.  We want you to be able to focus on your career now, so here is a solution that will allow you to work now and have a family (maybe) later.

I think it’s great that a company is thinking how they can provide services that benefit its workers.  That’s a good thing.  But this feels a little like a PR stunt.  How many other aspects of their benefits do you know beyond this one?  None, right?  And I can’t get behind the false hope that is being held out to women.  This feels less like a triumph of science and more like an inferred promise that people will live to regret.

It feels a little bit like Pinocchio and the Land of Toys, which is held out as a haven where boys can “act as they please without recrimination.”  Lampwick tells Pinocchio that boys can go there and have fun and not worry about school or work.  But what happens after they’ve been there for a while?  They become donkeys.

I see the same thing happening to women if they buy into this idea that they are at the wheel when it comes to their fertility.  It’s a different story when you are facing a health crisis and egg freezing is the best option out of a bunch of bad options.  But when we’re talking about a healthy woman who knows beyond a doubt that she wants a family created out of her own genetic material, she needs to know that there are very real consequences to putting family building on the back burner.

There is nothing simple about fertility treatments, even if you enter them happy to have the option at your disposal.  Jezebel (of all places) put together a decent breakdown of the success rates for egg freezing, which is actually a fairly successful medical procedure since pregnancy itself in a healthy 20-something woman doesn’t have a 100% success rate.

Women up to age 35 can expect a 50% chance that her eggs will be functional to make a baby. Women 36 – 38 have about a 35%. Most IVF programs report pregnancy statistics of about 15% – 20% per attempt in women 39 – 41 and freezing one’s own eggs at that age won’t improve those chances.

There is nothing easy about the financial side of treatments.  According to NBC, it looks like Apple and Facebook are capping the amount they’ll contribute.  $20,000 doesn’t go very far at a fertility clinic if you run into a problem.  There is no mention of what will happen if the frozen eggs are unusable and they need to do a fresh cycle?  What about employees who need to utilize donor eggs in the future because they run out of frozen eggs?  Will there be coverage for all the what ifs that we know — too well — become a reality for many women once they start to build their family?

Will these employers cover counseling since fertility treatments often carry a heavy emotional weight?  What about the physical side of treatments?  Will there be coverage if there are complications such as OHSS?  I mean, they’re looking to get at least 6 eggs per harvest, with more being optimal.  Sounds like a situation ripe for overstimulation.

Egg freezing is like telling women they can act as they please without recrimination, whereas we know that biology and the universe more often than not turn us into donkeys.

I am all for insurance plans, but I choose my insurance wisely.  I don’t want to pay for a plan that will not cover me if/when I need to utilize the insurance.  And while we never truly know what we’re paying into until we need to use insurance (all insurance plans seems great when the money is flowing towards them rather than away from them), we often get a sense before we sign the contract based on other people’s experience.  In the case of egg freezing, women can look at those who have used this service in the past as well as the people who are living through fertility treatments now.  Women don’t need to spend time hearing a pitch from HR and they don’t need to go to an egg freezing party; they need to spend some time in a clinic waiting room speaking to actual people who are going through IVF.

I am so grateful that egg freezing exists, and if a person wishes to enter with all the facts at their fingertips, more power to them.  Perhaps I have more comfort with an individual choosing to finance this option on their own because they need/want to delay parenthood whether that be because they want to build their family with a partner that doesn’t exist yet or whether they want to focus on their career.  I trust that when people are spending their own money (especially this much money!) they’ve done research into whether or not the option is really feasible.  But an employer dangling out egg freezing as a benefit for choosing a career at their workplace?  That feels like the Coachman taking advantage of Pinocchio, convincing him that there are no consequences to his actions, just as Apple and Facebook are trying to convince women they can delay all these wish and the world will still be their oyster in the future.

I hope it will be.  But I really fear that it won’t.