So I got my Facebook movie via lookback, and I’m thrilled to say that the Facebook algorithm deemed that photo I took of turkey vultures picking clean the corpse of a dead deer as one of my most important photos that defined my last ten years.  Thank you, Facebook.  Computers really can do the hard curation work of human beings.  I’m considering hiring the Facebook algorithm to write a few blog posts per week for me.  I mean, it already knows my brain better than I know my brain.  I would think it could be taught to spit out a few coherent words on ovaries, Candy Crush, and blogging etiquette.

*******

Earlier in the week, the sliding doors on the car froze shut.  No amount of yanking could get them open, so the Wolvog suggested that we “clown car it.”

“What would that entail?” I asked.

“We’d climb in through the front seat.  Like clowns.”

So everyone piled into the car via my driver’s door (which is not a sliding door hence why it was able to be opened).  When we got to school, I pulled into the lot and prepared to walk them to the front door of the building.  But I had forgotten that I was wearing my yoga clothes.  This wouldn’t normally be an issue except I was wearing yoga pants that were about three sizes too large that dragged on the ground.  And since the ground was wet and icy, I had tucked the bottom of the pants into my thin socks.  All the kids stared at me as I approached the building, and the twins muttered that they were fine going the rest of the way on their own, thank you very much.

I don’t know when it happened, or how it happened.  The change came at night, like grey hairs or stretch marks.  I woke up this week, and I was that mortifying adult.

*******

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:

• “These Moments” (Mrs. Spit)
• “Stuck” (Inconceivable)
• “Write for Me” (Outlandish Notions)
• “The Grief and the Trauma” (By the Brooke)
• “When Do You Know it’s Your Baby?” (The Chittister Family)
• “Surviving Baby Loss” (MissConception)
• “Addicted to IVF” (Laughter Through Tears)
• “Why She Got a Baby” (Waiting for Baby Bird)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I also had “These Moments” by Mrs. Spit since the post sits on the threshold of both weeks.  It’s an amazing post, where she decides to say what a stranger needs to hear vs. what she needs to say.  And in doing so, splits the universe.  It is gorgeous, heartbreaking… enormous.  About the love we give another human being sometimes.  Even when it guts us a little bit to give that kindness.  And it’s about the what should have beens.

A Woman My Age has a post about parenting after adoption, stating plainly, “I don’t know if anybody realizes this, but adoptive parents are always thinking about the future of their child while simultaneously trying to safeguard their histories and prepare them from a random stranger’s curiosity.”  It’s about the intrusive questions that get asked, and I love the way she phrases her response.

Life of the Barely Sane has a post about getting a tattoo as a way to honour becoming a mother.  As someone who has long thought of getting a tattoo, I always love posts like these.  She writes, “It says everything I wanted it to say and more without a single word on my body. MG is excited because she knows the bug is her and me? Well, I’m just glad to have the worst of the pain over with.”  Plus the post now has a picture!

Bio Girl has a moving post about her sister, counting down the anniversaries from the last year of her life especially as she approaches the big one in this upcoming week.  She writes, “Playing them over in my head, wishing I could focus on the good memories, but instead having my mind decide to relive the heartbreaking ones more often than I would ever choose.”  Sending a lot of love to her.

Lastly, Life and Love in the Petri Dish has a post about the work/home balance, admitting “The fact is that it seems ok to be in my role and be an academic and a mom as long as it appears that my mommying does not infringe on my professional life.”  But you should read this post for her kick-ass response to her question about being a mother and a professional.  Loved it.

The roundup to the Roundup: Thanks, Facebook, for the movie.  I embarrass people.  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 31st and February 7th) 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.

Mommyish has a post titled: “The Adoption Lynch Mob Needs To Take A Chill Pill Before Freaking Out About This Commercial.”  I normally don’t take link bait, but this time, I will.  Because what has people up in arms about the Kay Jewelry commercial is that adoption involves people.  It involves… actually… a lot of people.  The triad is an enormous group that contains a multitude of layers; not just the child at the center of the adoption, the adoptive parents, and the birth parents.  It contains the birth grandparents and birth aunts and uncles.  And the adoptive grandparents and aunts and… well, you get it.  We’re talking about actual human beings here, some with intense feelings.

Not objects.  Like jewelry.

But in Kay Jewelry’s commercial, human beings were reduced to a commodity that can be hand-delivered… like a pizza.  And in the same way that I may never see the person who is being paid minimum wage to make that pizza, nor do I know much about the person who delivers it to my house, that commercial makes it all about the pizza… I mean… the baby.  And the people who make the pizza… or the people who make the baby… they’re completely out of the storyline.  And let’s face the facts: pizza commercials do more to show us the people behind the creation, showing some smiling employee spreading sauce on a piece of dough, than that commercial did to show us the birth parents who were written out of the storyline.  But in any case, human beings should never be delivered.  Like a pizza.

Kay Jewelers took a potentially emotional subject and reduced it to a means to sell a product.  And that’s offensive in the same way that it is offensive when any company uses any huge, emotional event or situation in order to sell a product.

Because when we do that, we take our individual stories and we make them cheap.

The adoption story is a very varied story with a plethora of responses to adoption for every member of the triad.  Like all family situations, a wide range of feelings exist for the members on how they feel about being part of their family or not having members of their family present.  Some are happy or at peace, and others are not.  Kay Jewelers told only one side of it; and really, barely any side at all.  But I don’t expect a lot out of Kay Jewelers.  Their sole goal is to move jewelry.  They don’t actually care about human beings and adoption stories.  But the flip side is that a large group of people wish they had never touched adoption if they couldn’t do it well.  Plus, let’s not pretend that this is a huge step in a good direction.  This is just a company looking for another market.  And the market is saying, “no thanks because you offended us.”

Which doesn’t really make this a lynch mob.  Which is SUCH an offensive term that I can’t believe your editor allowed you to put that in your title.  Do you know what a lynch mob is?  Wikipedia sums it up nicely: “Lynching is murder by mob, often by hanging, but also by burning at the stake or shooting, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a specific sector of a population.”  It’s a means for a dominant group to control a weaker group.

And I think that using this term is doubly offensive — beyond the racial undertones of the term — because we’re talking about a group that has had its rights subverted in the US for years.  There are adoptees who don’t know their heritage; who were part of closed adoptions and cannot get information they want even though it belongs to them.  You admit several times in your post that you know nothing about adoption.  But even without knowing anything about adoption itself, I think you can see how offensive it is to compare adoption advocates to a lynch mob and tell them to “take a chill pill” because they express their displeasure at a commercial.  Kay Jewelers needs to hear that the public doesn’t appreciate this commercial and hopefully they won’t make another one like it in the future.  That’s how progress is made: talking about issues, not telling people to shut up.

So I won’t ask you to not express yourself.  But please know that like Kay Jewelers, you’re incredibly offensive.  And people are going to respond to that.

The sad irony — in an O. Henry sort of way — is that I had set aside work on the family tree project for four months to finish a deadline.  And the day my schedule cleared was the day my aunt died.

The day after the funeral, I unfolded the family tree and started searching again, this time completely on my own which is an odd feeling.  In the past, when I found a lead, I called my aunt and she confirmed or rejected a name or date.  And now I was finding things, piling up names and dates and addresses on post-it notes that I stuck to the tree, and I tried calling a few people to ask if anything sounded familiar.  But no one knew this information like my aunt or my grandmother.

Suddenly, it felt like I wasn’t just creating a family tree.  It felt like I was counting people; putting them in their place.  I didn’t want to leave anyone behind.  And the only thing I could think about was Holden Caulfield as the catcher in the rye field, and my job was to catch all my family members before they fell off that cliff, into the abyss, never to be remembered again.  If their name doesn’t end up on the family tree, there could be a future generation who doesn’t know that they existed, that they were here, that they were part of a large continuum.

At the funeral, I was able to gather the name of a distant cousin from a woman I met, and I Googled him when I got home, feeling such a strong sense of relief that I had his name.  With that name and a few random facts, I found a Facebook page with pictures, and from there, an address and telephone number.  I had five new people that I caught before they went off the figurative cliff, five new people on the family tree.  And through some fancy searching on a new data base at the library, I found five more.  Five brand new people who hadn’t been on the tree before that point, and with a Google search, I found an obit with a dozen additional names I could add to the tree if I’ve indeed found the correct people.

Josh and I have been debating how to reach out to these new people, hoping that they’ll be the key to giving me the rest of the names that I don’t have for their branches of the family tree.  I tried leaving the man with the Facebook page a message, but since we’re not friends on Facebook, my email went into his “other” folder, and I doubt he’ll ever see it.  I’d really rather not pay Facebook a dollar every time I want to message someone that I’m not connected to, and they’ve done away with the feature where you can provide a message WITH the friend request.  So… how to contact these new people without being too creepy?

Here are the options:

1. Send a friend request on Facebook and then message them if they accept the request: would you accept a friend request from a stranger?  I wouldn’t.  But perhaps others would?
2. Write them at work: I have a work address for a few people.  Is it less creepy to get a note at your workplace instead of your home?  For instance, one is a doctor, and I found his office address.
3. Call them at work: Again, is it less creepy to get a call at the office instead of at home?
4. Write them at home: For a few people, especially older people, I have a home address.  Would it be creepy to get a letter at home?
5. Call them at home: Again, for those older people, all I have is a home number.  Should I call and explain who I am and what I’m doing?

And then there was one that I already emailed at work.  I felt like it was fine to spring ahead with an email.  Though he hasn’t written me back yet, so perhaps he was frazzled by this random woman writing him about genealogy stuff.

I don’t think I could sit back and do nothing, which obviously would be the least creepy option, because I’m so anxious to make sure that everyone is counted on that family tree.  So which methods of communication (or any I haven’t considered?) feel like the least creepy/most sane?

US News and World Report covered a study last week that found that women who don’t have a child after fertility treatments (adoption wasn’t mentioned, and I don’t think it was specifically tracked within the context of this study*) are three times more likely to divorce than women who do.  27% of the women overall were not living with their partner anymore, though a larger chunk of that 27% were women without children than women with children.  I didn’t read the whole study to see if the researchers noted that people with children were less likely overall to get divorced in the first place:

For couples without children, the divorce rate in 1948 was 15.3 per 1,000. Where one child was present, the estimate rate was 11.6 per 1,000. The figure thus continues to decrease, and in families with four or more children, it was 4.6. Altogether, the rate for couples with children was 8.8 per 1,000. In other words, the rate for ‘childless’ couples was almost double the rate for families with children.

So the fact that childless couples after infertility divorce at a higher rate than parenting couples after infertility reflects the overall divorce discrepancy between childless and parenting couples without infertility, though I’m not sure if anyone has studied the role children play in the reasoning (or logistics) of couples remaining intact.

Anyway, despite the fact that this is the way statistics go, with or without infertility, the researchers in Denmark were still shocked:

“We already knew that having fertility problems is very stressful for couples but I was surprised that the effect lasted so long.”

Uh… yeah.  The rest of us, the ones living with infertility, sort of already knew that.

Infertility is enormously stressful since there is no way to live your life and avoid triggers that remind you of your situation, such as the numerous children you encounter on any given day.  It puts a huge emotional strain on a person, a huge financial strain, a physical strain.  Infertility is a giant suckhole that takes over every aspect of your life and calendar if you don’t hold it at bay.  And really, how many of us are any good at holding that monster at bay?  I certainly wasn’t.  Take into account, also, that infertility is tied to sex, and sex is tied to relationships, and the whole thing becomes a jumble of conflicted emotions around timed intercourse and having your sex life dictated (or restricted) by a doctor.  There is nothing romantic about making a baby with a half dozen other people in the room.

And yes, that stress follows you beyond the immediate period of family building.  That is because — as we’ve said all along, children resolve childlessness, but they don’t resolve infertility.  Infertility needs to be resolved on its own, and it can be resolved with or without children.

My larger question is what are we going to do with the results of this study?

We now have this information in black and white, but knowing things just for knowing’s sake seems like a waste of funding dollars.  Will counseling be offered as part of fertility clinic services; will it be covered by insurance to ensure that people are given coping mechanisms?  The religious right is keen on keeping couples together: will they do everything in their power to ensure that couples are given the necessary support so they can come through a crisis like infertility intact?  Will people finally understand why asking, “when will you ever be over it?” isn’t helpful?  Perhaps, as is clear from this study, some of us will never be “over it.”  Life will continue, and it will be lived — and it may even be lived very well.  But that doesn’t mean that infertility doesn’t continue to affect a person emotionally (or memories of the time period) long after it is resolved.  Resolution — like many things — is a process rather than a single moment in time.

Infertility is stressful.  I hope studies like these pave the way for emotional support becoming a given along with treating the physical side of infertility.

* In other words, because they were solely looking at people who were getting services at a fertility clinics, and then who had children years later, there was not (as far as I can tell) a specific breakdown of those who conceived via treatments, those who are parenting after adoption, or what role not utilizing treatments at all and going straight to adoption played in the end results.

On days when I miss my grandmother, I say fuck the calories and buy two onion rolls and a Canfield’s Diet Chocolate Fudge soda.

I slice them open, buttering the inside, and eat them in huge bites.  And for five minutes, maybe once a month, I feel like I’m with her.

What do you eat that reminds you of someone?

Thank you for the well-wishes yesterday.  I’m sad; I’m sad for my family and because I miss her.  I think I will make a brisket this weekend because it always reminds me of my aunt.