I am in deep-hate of people using pregnancy announcements as their April Fool’s joke, but I cracked up reading Techcrunch’s fertility-based April Fool’s joke this morning.

They reported on a new item called “Pokr.”  It’s a silicone “finger” that you insert into your vagina in order to check your cervical mucous.  The other end plugs into your phone and… well… I’ll let Techcrunch explain how it works:

To use Pokr, a user simply plugs it into her smartphone and inserts it into her vagina. Then she shakes her phone so the app can detect her CM and gauge its viscosity using a proprietary algorithm.

As I was imagining how my child would feel if they encountered this in my purse while searching for my constant box of Newman’s Own mints, I got to the punchline at the end.  Oh ho!  It’s a joke!  Making fun of the amount of personal information about our bodies we’re tracking with our phones, and how humans like to take simple daily tasks and make them more complicated by involving technology.  Not to mention the various fertility apps which are aimed to make a dollar off your fertility or aid you in conceiving; depending on how cynical you are about companies such as the creators of Glow.

I was sort of shocked then when I got to the comment section and people were tearing the author a new asshole.  The comments ran a short line between “ew, touching cervical mucous!  Women are nasty!” and “it is irresponsible to make a joke that involves vaginas when the tech industry has a misogyny issue.”  The author is female, which only “makes it worse” since women should know better than to make a joke about women in an area of society that already has an existing and well-documented problem with women.

Secretly, I asked in my head, “what area of society doesn’t already have an existing and well-documented problem with women?”

The author hinted that she is infertile (“I do have health issues that required me to track my BBT/CM daily”) hence why this joke possibly resonated so well with me.  I got it.  I live it, so I got it.  And if you don’t live with this mentality, if you simply have sex when you feel like having a baby, you probably won’t get it.  So I understand the first line of commenting.  You’re a lucky person if you can ignorantly say, “ew, touching cervical mucous!”

What I didn’t get was the second line of commentary because I actually saw this as a tongue-in-cheek poke (no pun intended) at male developers making products for women.  Do they even know what women want or need, or are they just copying off each other like the processed food industry?  Do the people who make fertility apps like Glow truly understand infertility, or are they just copying what Fertility Friend already successfully accomplished over a decade ago, repackaging it for a lady on the go?

What do you think?  Is it a joke for or at the expense of women?

My ghost-child popped up yesterday unexpectedly, like a solicitor ringing the door bell.  She came through a post that showed up in my feed reader.  How many kids should you have?

I took the quiz.

It’s complete silliness, equating a lack of care over your appearance and your home’s appearance as well as your general flexibility with the number of kids you should have.  I don’t fall prey to those Buzzfeed tests that tell you where you should live, or whether you’re a Ron or a Harry. (My G-d, everyone knows I’m a Narcissa, and she’s never one of the options.)  But I took that test.  And I took it to heart when it returned the result:

Congratulations!  Three is your magic number.  Four, if you count the drink you’ll need in your hand.

Oh.

And just like that, my ghost-child was sitting on the floor next to my desk, playing with the twins’ old toys.

I just hadn’t expected to see her.

It would certainly take magic to create her, so it makes sense that three would be my magic number.  It would take a lot of money and someone else’s gametes and Lovenox.  Is that why the quiz wormed its way under my skin?  Because there is so much assumption in the fact that the quiz exists in the first place?  Sure, all people have the potential to make the decision of how many children they want.  But some people will find themselves much more in control of that number than others.  Those who get pregnant unexpectedly or who can’t have children without assistance need to contend sometimes with an imperfect fit.

I do think that we were meant to have a lot of kids.

Could I push my way to three kids?  Yes — that option is always in my control.  I own that; I remember that even as the quiz teases that I could maybe even have… four.  It doesn’t stop it from stinging though.

I let the ghost-child play next to me without comment for the rest of the day.  I left her at home when I picked up the kids from school and read them Harry Potter and dropped them at a class.  I didn’t think I’d deal with her again until after the kids were in bed.

I went to read at Starbucks while I waited for the twins.  A woman came with her brood of children — three of them — and three six-week-old puppies.  She cradled two in her arms while her son carried the third.  They sat down next to me outside and let the dogs explore the concrete by the table.  I stopped reading.  I watched them for a long time; especially when a little boy came over to gawk at the puppies, and he kept shrieking happily and running back to his mother.

In that moment, all I wanted was one of those dogs.  I wanted to pick up the kids with a puppy in tow.  It was the most irresponsible, rose-tinted decision about dog ownership that has ever existed.  I took the woman’s number, even knowing that the breed wasn’t a breed we were considering getting.  I just wanted something warm to hold.

We came home and had dinner.  Watched part of a movie and did tuck-in.  Most of the time, I can’t imagine our family any different.  I love our family just the way it is.

Whenever the ghost-child visits, she makes me sad.  And yet I also don’t want her to stay away.  I would be equally sad if she never returned as a reminder.  Even so, I said goodnight to her after I wrote this post.  Went upstairs to watch the Colbert Report, and left her on the other level, playing by herself.

No April Fool’s joke from me.  As usual, I’m Missy No Fun.

I’m having a lot of trouble concentrating this week.  My work tasks feel big and gooey, like trying to scoop up mountains of marshmallow filling and put it in plastic containers.

Actually, the tasks themselves are not that difficult.  Maybe it’s my brain that feels like a mountain of marshmallow filling (the vegan kind, of course), trying to hold some shape in my plastic skull.

i09 had a post about an online calculator that can tell you how much your time is worth.  I clicked over to fill out the questionnaire and find out my hourly rate, but I didn’t like the terms of service for the site (a heads up to all: read it and understand it before you use the calculator), so I didn’t fill out the questionnaire.  Therefore, I do not know my worth.  I mean, I can guess, but no algorithm has spat out how much I should get paid.

I guess I was also turned off by the calculator creator’s comment on i09:

Greenberg says many of us don’t delegate as much as we should, instead continuing to do tasks — for instance, cleaning, household repairs, or errands — that others who place a lower dollar value on their own time could do at least as effectively, if not more so.

At first, I was like, “oh, maybe I should hire someone to do these menial tasks in my life.”  But then I thought, “wait, why should someone else do these things that I can do?”  It’s one thing if I can’t get X done, and I hire Y to get X done.  If doing X takes me away from something more important,  or if I worked out of the house and could not possibly find time to do X.  It’s another thing to be perfectly capable of getting X done, but hiring Y to do it simply because an algorithm told me that my time is worth more.  It’s not as if I’d use that gained time to make more money.  I can’t just decide that I’d like to use my hours to earn more vs. taking care of unpaid daily tasks.  I would need to find someone who wishes to hire me to work for those hours, and to do so, I’d have to use a lot of hours trying to find work: not the best use of my gained time.

The way Greenberg puts it, it sounds like I should take advantage of some poor fool who doesn’t know that they could put more value on their time. (“Who place a lower dollar value on their own time” — so it’s not that some employers pay less for certain jobs; it’s that those employees have placed a lower value on their own time by doing them?)  I understand that there is a benefit to both parties when you hire someone — you get the work done for you, and the other person receives money for doing the job — and that it is detrimental to people in need of a job if I don’t hire them and provide a job.  But still, the whole thing felt a little Alex P. Keaton-esque.  I almost expected there to be a note within the terms of service that Alex P. Keaton will show up at your house to mock your liberal ideals.

The whole thing made me feel a little sad for humanity if we start looking at the worth of our time in that way.  I liked that the woman in the article spent time thinking about how to spend the gift card.  Maybe she enjoyed considering her options for twenty minutes.  Maybe she was trying to take the giver of the card into consideration and wonder internally what they would want her to buy.  The concept of quick, mindless consumption, just spending the gift card as if it’s some task to check off a to-do list instead of something to enjoy (someone gave it to her as a gift!), all for the sake of some algorithm which told her that she’d be better off clicking on the first item she sees and then getting back to work because… time is money.

The worth of my time has been on my mind a lot because I’m reading Michael Moss’s Salt, Sugar, Fat, and it has drastically changed our life.  We’ve gone back to how we used to eat, and then surpassed that craziness into a pit of insanity that even I sometimes look around in and say, “is this really the best use of our time?”  A long time ago, we ate few processed foods.  I made our bread, vegetable stock, and ice cream.  The kids were home with me, and we didn’t have anything “better” to do.  So I made everything.

And then, when they started school, I picked up more hours of work.  And with that work, I ran out of time to make most things.  I started buying my bread and ice cream. (I still made the veggie stock, but that’s only because I’m very particular.)  Actually, I bought a lot of things.  Most things.  I still baked and cooked, but I took a lot of short-cuts.

And then came this book, and I decided that we needed to stop purchasing processed foods.  Making your own food creates a major time suck.  I’ve managed to boil down bread baking to a minimal amount of time, but still.  Every minute that I’m baking and cooking is a minute that I’m not working.  Or I’m not relaxing.  Or I’m not… virtual farming on Hay Day or wiping out confections on Candy Crush.

Is it worth my time?  To eat better?  To remove a lot of those chemicals from our lives?  Which items are worth buying and which items are worth making?  And is it enough if we eat like this 80% of the time if the other 20% of the time is laden with high fructose corn syrup or azodicarbonamide?

You can see how disjointed my brain is this week: this post began about a time calculator and ended up being a musing on clean eating.

Is anyone else cutting out processed foods from their life?  Would you have any interest in hearing how I’m doing it and sharing recipes/methods?  Creating a small virtual village of Moss’ers (that’s what I’m privately calling all of us who are freaked out after reading Moss’s book and suddenly dumping our nutella), where we can list the homemade mixes we’ve created in order to save time?

A reader called out Carolyn Hax last week on her discrepancy between the way she gives advice for someone infertile vs. someone who is single.  Namely, her advice for those who are single but wish to be married often points towards the idea that they need to be happy with life as is and not wait on living life until they’ve partnered up.  And her advice for those experiencing infertility is less about being happy with what you have and more an empathetic nod towards the shittiness of the situation.

Click over and read the question and response, pretty please.

I in no way want to encourage Hax to treat infertility advice otherwise; I think she usually hits the nail on the head, and I’m grateful for the words she has put into the universe setting clueless questioners on a better, more-empathetic path.  But I do see the reader’s point: there is a lot of overlap in the emotions that accompany being single for an extended period of time and trying to conceive for an extended period of time.  In both cases, they’re situations that come without any promise of a desired resolution.  Where the amount of work expended does not compute into success.  And overall, it’s a reminder that some of the most important things in our lives are completely out of our hands.  Both experiences can make a person feel very. very. small.  And vulnerable.  And question the sanity of ever putting out an effort in anything ever again.

Not that I have any baggage, mind you.

Both experiences have their own minefields — weddings or baby showers.  Both are joyous occasions that attendees are expected to come to with a happy heart despite their own situation.  And sometimes these two unrelated situations suddenly become related as late marriage (finding your partner later in life or going through a divorce) can lead to age-related infertility.

All in all, it’s a fair question.

And I’m not sure Hax answered it all that well at the beginning, though she gets to a decent* answer by the end.

Hax starts out with the idea that single people need to find self-contentment.  Though the same could technically be said for anyone trying to reach parenthood.  Why are you seeking your happiness in someone outside yourself, in the role of parenting?  Why can’t you just be happy with being childfree/less until you’re not?  You need to be satisfied with the life you have and just hope that a child enters your life if you put yourself out there via treatments or adoption.  Live the life you have now and make decisions based on what you know now; not what you hope happens in the future.

And sure, that is decent advice in theory.  But in practice?  I mean, I can only speak for myself, but while tying up my happiness in becoming a parent was technically self-defeating (as Hax says), I couldn’t have talked myself into feeling otherwise.  And… that’s sort of okay too.  We’re allowed to want what we want; to feel unhappy when we can’t get what we want.  And as long as that unhappiness stays within the bounds of unhappiness and doesn’t bleed over into internal or external harm, I think it’s okay.  It’s okay to feel sad; we don’t always need to be happy.  And I think it’s okay to even put yourself into a mindset that makes you feel sad.  To not talk yourself out of that mindset just because it would ultimately make you happier if you could master your feelings.

I wouldn’t have been true to myself if I had calmly and rationally navigated infertility.  I’ve needed to feel everything I’ve felt while family building.

Personally, if I was Hax’s advice editor, I would have had her skip towards the bottom where she points out the difference between the two situations that makes her give different advice: “Thus the long-range, make-the-best-of-what-you-have advice to someone single vs. the short-range, manage-your-emotions-as-you-make-your-choices advice to someone facing infertility.”

It comes from an assumption that childlessness will be** resolved in a shorter amount of time than martial status, but that aside, I get her point that infertility does have a shelf-life whereas marriage does not.  One can get married at 70.  You’d be beyond an outlier if you were entering parenthood at 70.  You need to come to peace with infertility regardless of the outcome by a certain point in life when becoming a parent would be difficult to impossible.  You never technically need to come to peace with singleness since marital status can technically change at any age.

And in that regard, I wonder then if the amorphous nature of singlehood warrants more empathy.  Because what I’m hearing from the questioner is that she doesn’t feel as if her situation is given sympathy in the same way that Hax doles out sympathy for those struggling with infertility.  I’m not getting a sense of curiosity; I’m sensing the asker is feeling as if she’s being told to put on a happy face whereas those struggling with infertility are told that it’s okay to weep into our cake.  And that’s hard.  That’s hard to feel as if your situation is being diminished.  Or to feel as if you’re being held to a different standard than someone else.

So, in the end, Hax amends her own advice (and I like her for always being open to having her advice questioned and then tweaking it):

So that is where I’d amend my advice: Pick a point, and grieve. Grieve what you hoped or planned for that hasn’t materialized — maybe when you first form the thought, “I thought I’d be married by now.” That goes for someone pining for a mate, but also for someone longing for a child, left adrift by an indifferent nuclear family, immobilized by thwarted ambitions. Dodge that baby shower OR wedding OR reunion.

But keep letting grief make your decisions? No.

Sound, no?

* I say decent instead of great because I think Hax missed something that Teendoc pointed out years ago: that infertility is often (though not always) experienced with another person, and it is a powerful thing to have someone on your side, going through it with you.  Whereas being single means that you are — by definition — experiencing the difficulty of the situation alone.  Well, not alone alone.  You have friends and family.  But you know what I mean.  Now, we can also say that sometimes it is more difficult to go through infertility with an unhelpful partner who holds you back or makes you feel like shit, but that is an entirely different post.

** Since we all know that (1) not everyone who attempts to become a parent will become a parent, (2) not everyone who gets pregnant has a living child, (3) not everyone resolves their infertility even if they do or don’t resolve their childlessness.  There are plenty of people out there who still need to come to terms with their infertility even though they are no longer ensconced in family building. (Meaning, they are parenting or they are not, but they’re no longer actively trying.)

I’m going to start by admitting that I don’t really get celebrity hating, specifically Gwyneth Paltrow.  Does she say clueless things?  Yes.  Is she out-of-touch with how the average person lives?  Yes.  Is she a product of her upbringing, as most of us are?  Absolutely.  But she doesn’t really warrant hate.  She doesn’t kill people in order to get attention for her agenda*.  She doesn’t blame certain groups for the ills of the world or deny the existence of atrocities.  She isn’t violent.  She doesn’t rape.  She doesn’t hit or strangle.  She doesn’t abuse her children.  All in all, she’s a fairly innocuous person, easily ignorable.  I know because I’ve ignored her for years so I’m positive that it’s do-able.

That’s okay.  She’s technically ignored me for years too.

Image: WEBN-TV via Flickr

Reading the gleeful deconstruction of Paltrow comments — from her conscious uncoupling to her words about movie star parenting — all I could think of was Blythe Danner.  How Blythe Danner was taking the evisceration of her daughter.

Because the truth is, I can handle (within reason; I mean, I’m not a stone statue.  I have feelings) anything you throw my way about myself.  You can mock me until the cows come home, and most of it will roll off my back.  I can keep it in perspective.  But mock my kids?  I will hold a grudge so long that your great-grandchildren will feel my wrath.  Yes, I am blind to seeing foibles in the people I love, and I will defend my inner circle to the ends of the earth.  And that also means that my heart goes out to Blythe Danner.  Because I’ve got a feeling that Gwyneth can handle her own criticism.  But it is very hard to know that there are people out there talking shit about someone you love.

So… Blythe Danner, whom I’ve also managed to ignore for several years now (seriously, it’s not hard.  I barely remember some of these celebrities exist until they pop up in a news article), my heart goes out to you.  It cannot be easy to have a loved one in the public’s eye and to feel that wave of hate directed at your child.

Back to my GOOP-free existence.

* I’m making a lot of assumptions here, but until I hear otherwise, I’m going to keep assuming Paltrow isn’t mowing down innocent old ladies.