Welcome back to IComLeavWe. It stands for International Comment Leaving Week, but if you say it aloud, doesn’t it sounds like “I come; [but] leave [as a] we”? And that’s sort of the point. Blogging is a conversation and comments should be honoured and encouraged. I like to say that comments are the new hug–a way of saying hello, giving comfort, leaving congratulations.

Here is the vital information, pure and simple (a more detailed set of rules follows below the list):

• The list opens the 1st of every month. It remains open until the 21st. You can add yourself at any point. The list is open to everyone in the blogosphere–blog writers and/or blog readers.
• Add yourself to the list by filling out this form after adding the icon below: The October list is now closed.  The November list will open on 10/27.
  
• Click here to cut-and-paste this bit of code to add to your sidebar (if you have the old code from another month, remove it and replace it with this one). You need to add the icon or a link to the current list on your blog (see below) and will not be added until it’s up.
• Commenting kicks off every month on the 21st. Please mark it somewhere (calendar, post-it note taped to your computer…), though I will be sending out an email reminder on the 20th. Commenting week runs from the 21st to the 28th. Every day, leave 5 comments and return 1 comment for a total of 6 comments. You are highly encouraged to choose the blogs you comment on from the participants list below, but this is not required.
• I will send a second email on the 28th to remind you to remove the icon from your blog.
• Read below if you want to find out about Iron Commenters.
• The commenting ends on the 28th. We catch our breath and the whole thing starts again the next month on the 1st. Drop in and out according to what is happening in your life between the 21st and the 28th.

1. Stirrup Queens (twins, books, writing)
2. The 2 Week Wait (infertility humor motherhood)
3. Breathe Gently (new-mum, IVF, PCOS)
4. Baby On Mind (embryo adoption, infertility, 40+)
5. One Step at a Time (baby after infertility)
6. Feeling Beachie (life, humor, family)
7. Dangled Carat (life, relationships, love)
8. Waiting for Baby (pregnancy, PCOS, thyroid)
9. A Little Bit More (PCOS, infertility, life)
10. Alphabet Salad (life, writing, creativity)
11. Stupid Broken Eggs (marriage, infertility, IUI)
12. Our Journey to Cameroon (pregnant after loss, faith, ministry)
13. Frozen OJ (health, life, puns)
14. The M House (adoption, parenting after loss, family)
15. Meant to be Mommy (infertility, IUI, endometriosis)
16. Comatised (love, life, happiness)
17. Punch Today In The Face (life after infertility)
18. My journey through infertility, pregnancy & loss (pregnancy, loss, infertility)
19. Faire Faire (second iui, life)
20. In Due Time (faith, hope, health)
21. Creating a Family (infertility, adoption, adoptive parenting)
22. Emma in Mommyland (pregnancy, sahm, life)
23. This Foxy Mama (parenting, politics, privacy)
24. Ready Now To See it Your Way (loss, marriage, kids)
25. Amateur Nester (infertility, home, faith)
26. Life of an Army Wife (embryo adoption, donor eggs, army)
27. For This Child I Prayed (parenting after infertility, faith, being a sahm)
28. This Hampton Life of Mine (secondary infertility, PCOS, surprise pregnancy)
29. Hidden Infertility (infertility, multiple losses, hope)
30. Creating Our Miracle (TTC#2, FET, male factor)
31. The Barreness (infertility, art, reflection)
32. Dogs Aren’t Kids (infertility mfi rants)
33. Penguins of Mine (infertility, loss, drawing)
34. Oh Baby, Baby (infertility, faith, patience)
35. Old Lady and No Baby (pregnancy, twins, infertility)
36. Who Shot Down My Stork? (IVF, miscarriage, ICSI)
37. Birds, Bees, and Medicine (infertility, PCOS, hope)
38. The October list is now closed.  The November list will open on 10/27.

Q: What if I miss a day?

A: Catch up the next day by doubling your comments–12 comments instead of 6.

Q: What if I have two blogs? Can I sign up twice, listing both blogs?

A: Yes, but you also need to double your comments. If you have two blogs listed, you should be leaving 12 comments per day.

Q: What is an Iron Commenter?

A: Not for the faint-of-heart. People who wish to be an Iron Commenter and be entered on the Iron Commenter honour roll need to leave a comment on every blog on the participants list (exceptions are blogs that require you to have a special log-in, such as some LiveJournal accounts or other similar situations). You can spread out this commenting any way you wish over the whole week, but the final comment needs to be left by midnight on the 28th (EST). Reaching Iron Commenter status is done on an honour system. Please email me if you earn Iron Commenter status so I can add you to the wall of honour.

Q: Why do I have to add that bit of code to my sidebar?

A: The code is the latest icon (the icon changes colour every month so you know that you’re on the right list). This month, the icon is orange, the next month it will be blue, etc. The reason is two-fold: (1) it enables more people to find out about IComLeavWe and (2) it gives you easy access to the current list once the commenting week actually begins and better ensures that you’ll use it. Too many times, people sign up and forget to actually do IComLeavWe and this icon gives you a daily reminder (with the dates on it) every time you open your own blog. The icon is linked back to the current list. On the 28th, remove the icon from your blog. A new one will be created for the next month.

Q: It’s the 23rd and I just saw this for the first time on my friend’s blog! I want to join the list–why can’t I?

A: Because IComLeavWe happens every month, once the list is closed, it’s closed. If you’re finding out about this on the 23rd, you can’t join the current month. But leave yourself a note to check back in a week on the 1st and you can sign up for the next month.

Q: You said the list closes on the 21st. Well, it’s still the 21st where I am. Why aren’t you moving my information onto the list?

A: All dates and times are U.S. Eastern Standard Time (UTC/GMT -5 hours). The list closes around 11 p.m. EST on the 21st.

Q: What if no one comments on my blog and I have no comments to return?

A: Well, that really doesn’t happen for the most part, but in that case, simply choose another blog and add an additional comment. The goal is to hit 6 comments daily as a minimum. Going over that is fantastic and encouraged.

Q: Mel, my question wasn’t covered at all. What do I do?

A: Email me; I’m quite friendly. It helps to place “IComLeavWe” in the subject line. You could also check this post which contains the history of IComLeavWe and see if you can glean anything there.

Looking for the comment section? It has been closed on this post. Use the form in the directions to add yourself to the list.

So I rounded up all the answers from my Candy Crush questions last week, and I posted the results over in an article on GeekDad.  It was interesting that the worst level of the 10 worst levels (meaning, 18% all said the same level was the worst level, and then 9 other levels were chosen by multiple people) was the same for people who were still in levels below 100 as it was for people who had gotten to the end of the game.  Almost 1 out of 5 people all said the same level sucked.

I would like levels to come with a rating similar to knowing the par on the mini golf course.  I want to know the average amount of tries it will take to pass a level.  If I knew it took the average person 40 tries to pass a certain level (I’m looking at you, 201), I would go into playing that level with a different mentality.

By the way, I tried Pet Rescue.  I’m not sold on it yet.  I didn’t really get it.

So… yeah… hardest levels of Candy Crush posted over on GeekDad.

*******

My friend and I get coffee once a week or so at Starbucks, and last spring, I downloaded the app for my iPhone and started collecting stars.  This week, I officially became a gold member:

I wanted to write about the grotesque consumerism that grabs us as we move through our week, but instead, I need to comment on the capitalization on the congratulations notice.  Why are these words capitalized: stars, gold, and gold card?  Other words in those sentences are not capitalized.  I want to Start randomly capitalizing Various words in my sentences too.

So… I’m solid gold now: solid freakin’ gold.  I wonder if I will get to learn a secret handshake.  Any other fellow gold star members out there?  Feeling very Sneetch-like today, mostly because I have stars upon thars.

*******

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:

• “A Look at Loneliness” (Peesticks and Stones)
• “What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day” (Hide and Seek)
• “A Shrinking Room” (The Empress and the Fool)
• “Infertile Does Not Equal InCOMPLETE ~” (Confessions of an (In)fertile Mrytle)

Okay, now my choices this week.

It probably will shock no one that I love MoJo Working’s post comparing infertility to Candy Crush.  She had me with the title.  I don’t think I’ve ever clicked over from my Reader so quickly.  Feedly got whiplash.

Barren Mare returned with a post about… life.  About being away and then returning to her blog.  I love this post not just because it contains this line: “But I’d like to leave you with this in the meantime: I think we’re having a happy ending.”  I love it because it feels good when someone who has been gone from their blog for a long time pops up and speaks.  They don’t have to say anything profound.  It’s just nice to hear their voice, as the saying goes.

Lastly, Me Plus One has two interesting questions on her blog tied to being a single parent by choice.  This is why I love blogs; because they give you insight into someone else’s world.  I found the comments to be just as thought-provoking as the post.

The roundup to the Roundup: The 10 hardest levels of Candy Crush according to you.  I’m a gold star member at Starbucks.  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 20th and September 27th) 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 finished Gone Girl, and now I need to comment on something that bothers me in books.  When I mentioned it to someone else this week, they weren’t bothered by this type of plot hiccup at all, so I guess I’m writing this to gauge how the general public feels.  But I don’t want you to read this post if there is any chance you will read Gone Girl in the future because what I’m about to say will ruin one of the twists in the plot.  So, click away if you haven’t already read Gone Girl (or feel free to stay if you have no intention of ever reading the book).

I’m giving you another chance to click away.

And then shoving the meat of this post even further down the page with a series of asterisks.

*

*

*

Good, everyone left should be people who have either read Gone Girl already or have no intention to do so.  First and foremost, I thought the writing in this book was brilliant.  It is a gorgeous, gorgeous book.  I was interested in both characters, and when the twist came in the middle of the book, I was totally taken by surprise.  I thought Noelle’s husband had killed her.  I was obviously a little… off.

That said, when we first got a mention of fertility treatments on page 294, I was momentarily distracted.  We’re told that Amy lies about how long they’ve been trying in order to jump directly to fertility treatments.  Okay, I could buy that.  I mean, yes, they’ve just gotten to Missouri, and it sounds as if they don’t have health insurance since neither one has a job.  But I’m willing to suspend disbelief and go along with the idea that they just happened to find a doctor to refer them immediately to a clinic, and that clinic in St. Louis had an opening.

I was even willing to ignore the fact that we’re told nothing about any testing that was done.  They just jump immediately into treatments.  Sort of.

For some unknown reason, Nick makes three donations of his sperm, presumably for an IUI since the sperm is being frozen, not tested.  I have no idea why he’s not being tested before they start treatments, but he’s not since we’re clearly told that the clinic is saving these samples (and apparently notifying him after a year that they will destroy the samples if he doesn’t pay the storage fee.)

We can assume it’s for an IUI since we also know that there is nothing wrong with Amy since she’s lying.  Which means that I can’t imagine a doctor telling her to skip straight to IVF without at least trying an IUI or two since she is young-enough and their infertility would be unexplained.  Plus, in a moment, we’ll read that Amy has pills (Metformin?  Clomid?) which would align with an IUI but be highly unusual for an IVF cycle.  So Nick is going in and banking sperm for an IUI (fine, maybe IVF… it really doesn’t make a difference in this case).

Why?

What doctor would prefer to use frozen sperm instead of fresh?  The only people I know who have ever banked their own sperm for treatments they’re currently doing are people who are deployed or who work in two separate states.  Why would a doctor purposefully choose a method of insemination that has a slightly lower success rate?

Isn’t that odd?  Did anyone else have a situation where their partner went to the clinic long before they were ensconced in treatments and for no reason froze three sperm samples for future use?  What clinic wants to use storage space on a current patient who has not actually scheduled treatments?  Please correct me if I’m wrong and you know of a time when a clinic has suggested that a person bank their sperm even though they would be available to be there physically the day of the IUI or retrieval.

Even with all that strangeness, I was willing to suspend that disbelief (I’m a forgiving reader) again until we got to the part where Amy has a vague series of pills she is supposed to be starting on any random day of her cycle.  Is it Metformin?  Clomid?  Why wouldn’t these drugs be timed to her cycle?  Why are there so many pills in the bottle?  Let’s assume it’s Metformin because there are more than 5 pills in the bottle.

“I visited the room on three separate occasions — they like to have a lot of backup — while Amy did nothing.  She was supposed to begin taking pills, but she didn’t, and then she didn’t some more.  She was the one who’d turn over her body to the baby, so I postponed nudging her for a few months, keeping an eye on the pill bottle to see if the level went down.”

So… they have a clinic in St. Louis that is collecting sperm from Nick without anything scheduled for Amy, and she is taking an oral medication willy-nilly as part of her treatments?

I was distracted reading this passage, but I was able to set it aside because it was a small blip.  I don’t expect Gillian Flynn to know the intricacies of fertility treatments, fertility drugs, or clinic protocols if the only place they’re being mentioned in the book is this tiny description of their life.

Really, I barely even remembered how much it bothered me until I got to the end of the book.  And then, when the banked sperm became the plot twist, I put down the book hugely disappointed.

I was willing to suspend disbelief when I thought it was a tiny blip in the plot line, just a research mistake.  It would only be noticeable to someone who had done treatments.  So I was willing to let it go.  Fiction gets things wrong all the time; my own books included.  And infertility is complicated.

BUT.

When that tiny moment becomes the turning point of the book, the spotlight idea that changes everything, then I get pissed off when it isn’t accurate.  You’re hinging the entire book on fertility treatments: do the work to make them believable.  Because frankly, it isn’t believable that your husband, who owns a bar and has no travel on the horizon, would need to bank sperm rather than give the donation in the morning before the IUI.  It isn’t believable that she is given a bottle of pills that she can start whenever she wishes.  Oh, and she doesn’t even need any monitoring to boot.

Because with that, I also didn’t believe that Nick would ignore his wife’s actions just for a child.  I never believed he was so in love with the idea of a child — mostly because it’s just peppered in there every once in a while.  You never see him interact with a kid in the book and get a sense that he’d really love to be a dad.  We’re just told that he wants it on one or two occasions, and then we’re expected to believe that he’s planning to live the rest of his life with Amy and this child she is using to “trap” him (though, of course, we’re told that he wants to be trapped if it’s trapped-by-child).  And the final twist is that Amy is obviously plotting something with those final lines.

So I left the book with mixed feelings.  I loved the writing.  I loved the twists (except for the infertility-related ones).  I loved the plot and the pacing.  The book changed my mood.  It affected how I felt.  I loved it.

Until the very end.

I am completely willing to forgive mistakes related to infertility when it is a tiny, throwaway part of the plot line.  But when infertility is front and center as part of the plot, as it is in Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner or Gone Girl, I find that I can’t enjoy the story when I’m distracted by the inaccuracies.

How do you feel when infertility (or treatments) rears its head in fiction?  And did the inclusion of fertility treatments ring true for you as a reader when you were ensconced in Gone Girl?

By the way, Gone Girl is the November book for the GRAB(ook) Club if you want to talk about it with others.  I still have plenty more to say.

We decided to go to the beach last weekend.  We waited until last minute to make the reservation to make sure the weather would behave.  Waiting until a day or two ahead of time usually isn’t a problem, especially off-season.  But when we called our hotel to make a reservation, they told us that every room was booked.

Well that was odd.

We called the hotel across the street, which was also booked.

“Is something happening on the island this weekend that we don’t know about?” Josh asked, since we had carefully picked this weekend around popular yearly events such as the Oyster Festival.

“There’s a huge duck decoy auction happening!” the man at the second hotel told him.

Oh.

This is how we came to stay at the Coraline Hotel that contained the man wearing the offensive t-shirt.

*******

We’ve stayed at the same family-owned hotel on the island for twelve years so I had mixed feelings about staying at a different hotel.  I wanted to go to the beach, but it felt odd to turn into a different parking lot.  To lighten the mood, as we walked into the building, I told the kids that like Coraline’s Other Mother, this was our Other Hotel.  It would be equally as sinister and equally as difficult to escape.

Upon reflection, this was probably not the best joke to make.

It definitely tinted our experience of the space beginning with the too-excited-to-see-you-smiles of the people at the front desk.  They were a little too welcoming.  Too eager to tell us about their exciting hotel pool policy.  Too happy to stuff us with an afternoon treat of cookies and lemonade. (Why do you want to fatten us?  So you can eat us?  It’s to eat us, right?)  The lighting was a little too bright, the elevator a little too convenient, the whole place white and clean as opposed to the rustic, track-in-the-leaves-and-sand feel of our normal space.

I know — craziness.  I mean, it was clean, safe, and fully-functioning.

Scary.

*******

When we walk into our usual hotel, whoever is working the front desk usually calls out, “the twins!” as a way of greeting.  It’s a simple statement: you are you!  As in, we remember you from visit to visit mostly because you two dart around like minnows through the lobby.  At the Coraline Hotel, after we dropped off our bags in our room, we stepped into the hallway and encountered a member of the staff who paused to stare.

“Are they twins?” she asked us, as if my children existed in another dimension and couldn’t hear her to answer themselves.

We nodded and smiled politely.  “They look like twins,” she told us.

We nodded again, still moving towards the elevator.  “I could tell that they were twins,” she said.

“Why did she want to know if we were twins?” the ChickieNob asked once we had moved away from her.

“Because she collects kids to hold in captivity at the hotel, and she’s the one who sews on their button eyes.  And she was just excited because they’ve never been able to capture twins of their collection of childrens’ souls.”

Why did I say that?  Why did I make this hotel even freakier than it already was?

My stomach started to scurry around in my abdomen like a rat navigating a maze.

*******

We drove past the duck decoy auction.  It was packed.  As in, people brought trucks with trailers attached so they could haul home lots of wooden ducks.

“All these people are duck murderers,” the ChickieNob commented as we parked our car at the bike shop.

“Or hunters,” Josh corrected.  “They’re actually called hunters.”

We biked out to the empty, secluded beach the twins and I found during our trip this summer.  We were pretty much the only people on the sand except for an older couple fishing in the ocean.  There was an eery quietness under the crash of the surf that usually comes in the horror movie before the unsuspecting family encounters an army of sea zombies.  Not that I’ve ever seen a movie with sea zombies, but I’m fairly certain that’s how it would play out.

We left the beach and returned with a picnic dinner, eating it in the cold wind that blew over the sand.

On the very empty beach.

Just like the unsuspecting family would do in a horror movie.

*******

At night, we watched Hugo with its creepy automaton.  And then we tucked in the kids and I went back to reading Gone Girl.  I could feel my stomach clenching as I read it, so I put it aside and started surfing the Web.  Except that led me to the anxiety-producing mystery of 77 Days (which turned out to be not so scary in reality, but I didn’t know that at the time).

By the time I was ready to get in bed myself, I half expected the walls to burst forth with a wave of black beetles.  Or for snakes to rise out of the carpet.  Or for the woman from the hallway to slip into our room with a needle and thread, crooning, “Ooooooh, we have plenty of singletons, but we sure would love some twin souls.  It’s time for your eye buttons, dearies!”

Even the friendly plastic sign on the bathroom counter took on a sinister hue.

Why do they want to make sure I’m comfortable?  Why do they want to be so helpful?  Have they poisoned the complimentary toothpaste?  Put acid on the shower caps so I’ll singe off my hair?  Help meeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I really wish I hadn’t combined Coraline jokes with Gone Girl with the 77 Days thing.

*******

The whole thing made me wonder why I found good, old-fashioned friendliness so creepy.  It reminded me of the Truman Show, how he was surrounded by these smiling, helpful neighbours and friends, which made the whole premise more unnerving.  Why is friendliness so often employed as the foil in the horror movie?  The kindly character who turns out to be a cold-blooded killer.  Is that why friendliness from strangers puts me on edge?  Not the sort of friendliness that comes about after 12 years of staying in the same place, but the sort of friendliness that feels too bright, too slick.  The smile that doesn’t actually extend to the eyes.

“It’s called customer service,” Josh commented when I told him that I felt unnerved by the Coraline Hotel.  “What do you want them to do?  Curse you out as you walked in the door?”

Uh… maybe?

All I know is that I triple checked the locks before I went to sleep.

*******

Am I the only person unnerved by extreme friendliness?  Of course I would always choose friendliness over rudeness, and I know calling kindness creepy sounds a bit odd.  But that perfect Coraline mother is really scary.

Dear Man Wearing the “Everything I Need to Know about Islam I Learned from 9/11” T-shirt in Our Hotel Lobby:

Through a stroke of luck, my husband saw you when he went downstairs at the hotel to get a cup of coffee before we took our kids to the breakfast room.  It gave us a chance as parents to talk to our twins about you before they saw the t-shirt themselves and asked about it.  Because, believe me, kids notice all the shit you don’t want them to see.

When my husband told the kids what your t-shirt said, knowing they might encounter you when we all went downstairs a few moments later, they were confused.  Why would someone wear something like that?  Well, that’s a good question, kids.  Who the hell proclaims their ignorance across their body?  A college, yes.  A favourite sports team.  Even hipster sayings such as “this is not a t-shirt.”  But hate-mongering?

This is what you taught my kids with your t-shirt: they learned that there are terrible people in the world, and I’m not talking about terrorists.  I’m talking about the sort of people who they are statistically much more likely to encounter, people like you.

The ones who will have already formed an opinion about a person before they open their mouth and interact with a person based on their religion. Or their skin colour.  Or sexuality.  Or the amount of money or education they have. Or their age.  The ones who will judge people before they’ve done anything — uttered even one word — to show what sort of person they are.

And that sucks.  It sucks as a kid to learn about that.  And learn about that.  And learn about that.  There have unfortunately been many opportunities in their young lives to talk about this with them, whether it was overhearing adults talking about Trayvon Martin or seeing some flippant remark in my Facebook feed during the last election. They get it. They know.

But it doesn’t suck any less every time it is reinforced.

Because they know, they will change the way they navigate this world. Instead of being themselves, they will hide essential parts of their being that they can hide, or their posture will be an apology for the things they can’t hide.  They will tuck a mezuzah necklace into their shirt in order to not be judged.  They’ll say they’re going on a vacation rather than taking off for a holiday.  They’ll not volunteer openly who they love or they’ll vaguely answer questions about their ethnicity.  Whatever it is that the yous of this world will judge them on, they’ll figure it out and adjust accordingly.

And the world will be worse for that.

Because all of our kids are learning this horrible message: that there are people out there who hate them and they’ve never even met them.  The answer some of them arrive at is “don’t be myself.”  The way they interpret this message — from quiet self-hatred or low self-esteem all the way to suicide — differs from child to child.  But most of them get to “don’t be myself” eventually: at least, all the ones who find themselves on the receiving end of someone else’s hate.

So thanks for wearing your t-shirt into our hotel and reinforcing once again what my kids have already figured out: that some people would rather approach the world in a state of hate instead of a state of love.  I am sorry that your experiences in this world taught you to move through the world this way.  But I really don’t want my kids to learn whatever you learned.

So next time you book a room at a large, chain hotel, please think for a moment before you pack your wardrobe.  And dress in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the people around you.

Signed,

Mother who wanted to vomit that she had to have this conversation yet again with her children