Do you know what doesn’t go together?  The polar vortex and my muscle relaxants.  People kept asking me all week if the cold was making my back feel worse.  My back already feels like hell, so no, once you’re already at too-painful-to-breathe, there isn’t a big difference between terrible and horrible.

But the muscle relaxants made my mind so fuzzy that every time I heard the term polar vortex, my limbic system would send out a warning siren as a mental image of a slow-motion cloud of swirling polar bears descending over our town, sucking all the houses into its core, popped into my brain.  And then I’d have to remind myself that there is no swirling cloud composed of polar bears, just as there is no Sharknado.  My brain would calmly turn off the alarm until the next time I heard the term polar vortex and my brain silently screamed at me to take cover!

Other things to avoid while on muscle relaxants: beat poetry, lava lamps, and strobe lights.  Oh, and Sharknado.  Wait, did I also mention polar vortexes…

Polar vortex [gasp]

Take cover!!!

*******

For anyone keeping score at home, no, my back isn’t better.  We’ve tried massage, muscle relaxants, painkillers, stretches and heat.  I think I’ve actually been throwing too many solutions at the problem, making my back feel even worse.  So I’m going to take the weekend to try to heal just by lying still.

And playing Hay Day.

But mostly lying still.

*******

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:

• “It’s Not Envy; It’s Absence” (The Unexpected Trip)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Torthúil has a post about finding happiness, though the reason I loved this post is for her description of the opposite: “During the quieter times of the day and night I found myself feeling heavy. Not only because of the yummy food.  I felt like I had a hollow empty space right at my center, and every day a drop of something liquid and weighty would fall into it, like a big dollop of cement.”  Isn’t that beautiful?  You need to read the whole post to catch lovely moments like that one.

My Scar Smiles at Me has a post about blogging and conversations.  Or really, reading the blog post after having a conversation via some medium with the person.  Getting to process their words on two different levels.  And how reading a blog post aligns closer to having tea with a friend.  I love this.

When Did I Get Like This asks if blogging is dead?  She writes, “The notion of diminishing returns is also self-fulfilling, of course, because I have less motivation to post when it feels like no one is reading. But why would anyone keep checking my site when I no longer post with any regularity?”  She’s going to keep writing as long as she reaches one person who values her words.  There’s lots of food for thought in the post, even though it’s non-IF.

You will never look at Fawkes the phoenix in the same way again after reading Inconceivable’s “Burning Day.”  It will blow you away.

Lastly, Fruitful Furbishing has a post about recent nosy, thoughtless questions.  I love how the song “Let it Go” from Frozen has been applied to so many situations, and I imagine there are a lot of women walking around right now with it playing in their heads.

The roundup to the Roundup: The polar vortex is not a swirling cloud of white bears.  My back isn’t better.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between January 3rd and January 10th) 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.

So there was a piece in the New York Times this week about how doctors Google their patients, written by a doctor.  Haider Javed Warraich writes,

Doctors do “Google” their patients. In fact, the vast majority of physicians I know have done so. To my generation, using a search engine like Google comes as naturally as sharing pictures of our children or a recent vacation on a social networking site like Facebook.

If my doctor Googled me, well… first he would find Melyssa Ford (uh… and he might be disappointed when I walk through the door in my very unsexy yoga pants and Batman t-shirt)… but slightly further down the results page, he would find my BlogHer page, my author site, my Amazon page, and linked to all three places: my blog.

I don’t know if it makes me happy to think that my doctor possibly know what I’m going through emotionally before I walk into the office, or if it creeps me out to consider that he may be thinking about my dead hamster while he gives me a Pap smear.

Do you always want to know if someone is reading your blog?  Or is ignorance bliss when it comes to certain family members, friends, and doctors?

I make a printable television schedule every Olympics so my family can keep track of the events we don’t want to miss.  For whatever reason, for the last few Olympics, news sites have been creating convoluted schedules that require a lot of clicking.  I need to see it all written out in a simple manner, so I create these printable television Olympic schedules for myself and put them online in case someone else wants it too.

After the last Summer Olympics, someone contacted me and told me that a link to my printable schedule was being passed around the blind community because the format works well with a screen reader.  Which is just so damn cool.  I love the idea of the world coming together over these games.  So a special hello to anyone who is hearing this from a screen reader.

I’ll be keeping the printable schedule up-to-date in case anything changes.  I had to make it as a page, or every time I added to it, it would reset the permalink and you wouldn’t be able to find it again.

You can access the schedule here.  If you want to help spread word, you can post this link on Twitter or Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/2014olympicschedule.

So, which event are you most excited to see in the 2014 Olympics?

The Daily Dot had a post this week about adoption via the Internet instead of an agency.  I clicked over to read it because the title mentioned crowdsourcing, and I assumed they were writing about adoption fundraisers a la Kickstarter on the Internet.  That’s in there too, but it’s more about expectant parents and potential adoptive parents connecting online.  The Daily Dot writes,

Thanks to the Internet, a growing number of prospective parents are connecting with birth mothers directly—outside of traditional adoption agencies. And online resources like social media are helping to push the complex web of relationships between birth parents, adoptive parents, and the kids themselves into something more open and accommodating than in generations past.

What I thought was interesting is that the Internet is the tool for removing the gatekeeper whose purpose is to keep adoption ethical (and yes, I’m aware that there are plenty of agency adoptions that don’t follow ethical guidelines) AND it’s the tool for making it easier for all members of the triad to remain connected.  One tool used in two completely different ways: to drive people out and to keep people close.

The Internet is the key in starting the relationship online and continuing it online.  It can help bring first parents back in contact with children they delivered.  It can help adoptive parents and birth parents stay in touch via social media on a day-by-day basis.  It can help all members of the triad find others in their group in order to gain support.  But this article is about the idea that amid all that connection, the Internet can also nudge out the middleman, the agency.

The reality is that most agencies remove themselves after adoption.  Just as the RE steps back soon after you get pregnant, most agencies step back soon after the adoption is finalized.  There commonly isn’t on-going support such as continuous workshops on maintaining openness within adoption or coping mechanisms when parenting problems unique to adoption crop up, it does call into question whether agencies are necessary anymore if one can do it on their own.  Do agencies need to step up their on-going support for all members of the triad in order to stay relevant?  People are still going to go to REs because we can’t perform our own embryo transfers.  But will people keep using adoption agencies if expectant parents and potential adoptive parents can connect online?

This, of course, brings out the distinction between “can” and “should.”  Should we do away with ethical agencies?  Of course not.  All parties in adoption benefit from ethical agencies.  But it does open up a conversation: beyond keeping the adoption ethical, what purpose does an agency serve?  Can it do more in order to keep providing benefits not found by going about adoption alone?  Do agencies need to be more inclusive as the Internet levels the playing field, making it easier for single parents-to-be or those in a same-sex relationship to adopt?  Do agencies need to lower their administrative costs?  As is, domestic adoption of a newborn is prohibitively expensive, putting it out-of-reach for those who may have enough money to raise a child, but can’t come up with the five-figure agency fees.

Have agencies themselves set up a system where they will be rejected once they’re no longer needed?  Have they made the process so difficult and expensive that people will forgo the good points of an agency in order to not experience the bad?  I keep thinking about how little I even knew to ask before I started parenting.  New questions crop up all the time.  A good example would be breastfeeding.  Most people take a breastfeeding class before they start parenting.  But we still need lactation consultants to guide us on the other side, when we’re actually ensconced in the act of breastfeeding.  Why don’t adoption agencies use this same model?

And then we keep coming back to where ethics fit into this picture.  Is it really an ethical process if there is little support offered once parents have their child?  New questions will pop up years into the future.  Where should those parents go?  Is it really ethical if the birth parents aren’t given continual emotional support to get through the process of placing their child?  What about adoptees — what do adoption agencies provide beyond yearly picnics to celebrate those matches?

I hope as agencies restructure, they start looking at support as a lifetime process.  They have the potential to help all members of the triad navigate open adoption.  They can run on-going support groups, provide the option of check-ins to answer questions, have counselors on-staff that specialize in adoption issues.  The RE is followed by the OB who is followed by the pediatrician, a doctor for every step of the way to answer questions and support that life that the RE helps create.  What if adoption agencies created a similar model, with different professionals on-staff in order to help support all members of the triad?

Your thoughts?  I’d especially love to hear from any member in the triad — what support is given after the adoption is complete?

I hurt my back on Saturday.  Actually, I’ve been in the process of hurting my back for weeks according to the nice doctor at the urgent care clinic.  He hypothesized that working for 12 to 15 hours a day over winter break caused me to scrunch my shoulders toward my neck in stress and hunch over my keyboard, therefore creating this tension in my back which exploded on Saturday.

The irony is that the only position that is comfortable is scrunching my shoulders towards my neck.  So it’s sort of like wanting to eat candy bars because I’m down because my clothes no longer fit me.  There’s that too, but right now, the problem is my back.

The doctor prescribed painkillers and a muscle relaxer — neither of which helped — but I took them over the weekend.  They made me glassy-eyed and drooly, like a zombie.  Except without the pale skin.  Or the penchant for brains.  But everything else was very zombie-like, especially because I’m dragging my body around and groaning.

But I can’t take the painkillers/muscle relaxers during the week because I have to drive the kids places and do work.  So I’m hunched over in pain, trying not to be hunched over because I’m making it worse, and quietly (or sometimes not so quietly) cursing everyone I come into contact with because I’m in a foul mood.  All those smiling people, walking upright without an ounce of back pain.

I wanted to write back everyone who left kind words on my Happy Tears post, thanking them in advance for reading Apart at the Seams, and I’ve been trying to delurk all over the place and leave a lot of comments.  But being in pain makes words feel hazy.  Like I can’t hold onto them for very long before they float away.  So if I owe you an email or a comment, I’m sorry.

I’m off to another lie down with the hot water bottle.  That thing has become my best friend this week.  If you see the book dedication is to my red, rubber water bottle, you’ll know why.