Linda Ronstadt had an interesting quote in a recent People magazine article. (Cover-to-cover, baby; I read that magazine with the same care I bring to Foucault.) When asked if she misses being a pop star, she answered, “I miss singing, but not performing.  I don’t miss fame — it’s unnatural.  I like having my anonymity.”

Fame is one of those things that people assume everyone wants, even though that’s not the case.  It’s sort of like blog readership; people assume everyone wants a wide readership, and certainly there is enough advice floating around out there to support why people make that assumption.  But there is something unnatural about your words reaching a wide audience; in speaking with people you would have otherwise never encountered.  That goes for all celebrity, whether it’s reached through music as a pop star or through writing as a blogger.

I guess I know what I mean by unnatural, but I’d love to know what Ronstadt meant.  Does she mean that fame taxes the system?  That in an ideal world, favours and attention would be asked of and doled out to everyone on a fairly equal basis.  But when fame enters the picture, too many favours are asked for a single person to deliver and too much attention is focused on a single person to feel good?  Or does she think our national pastime of reading about celebrity’s lives is unnatural? (They’ll pry People magazine from my fingers when I’m cold and dead!)

With all of that, I have to admit that the recent Daniel Radcliffe article in the New York Times got under my skin and made me feel blue the rest of the day.  What sort of life is that?  Reading a day in his life made me feel trapped, and I’m not even living it.  I don’t think anyone likes to think about how depleted we could become from fame.  Most of the time when we talk about it, we only consider the advantages; the perks.

I guess I’m interested in this unnaturalness, mostly because for all the good points of blogging — bringing together people who would otherwise never meet, spreading ideas like wildfire, influencing another person’s life —  there are also all the drawbacks of a person’s words reaching beyond their small community of family and friends; namely, bringing together people who would otherwise never meet, spreading ideas like wildfire, influencing another person’s life.  Everything positive about blogging can be inverted into something negative about blogging when seen through a certain lens, especially when it comes to certain topics or online behaviour.

A case in point being the recent government shutdown.  Sometimes I think ignorance is bliss when it comes to social media, and I wish I hadn’t read what some people think.  A case in point being that gorgeous post by Blood Signs.  If she hadn’t posted that, I would have never known her thoughts; been so moved by them.  Without blogging, her words would have remained in her state, and I would have remained in mine.  And the barrier of space would have been between us rather than a connection.

Your thoughts?

I’m not really one to change my look.  A case in point: I am turning 40, still shop from the children’s department at Old Navy, and am wearing a coat that is so old that it realistically could have grandchildren by this point.  But I bought a new pair of glasses on an impulse this weekend.

My friend told me this week that she thinks the glasses choose the wearer in the same way that the wand chooses the wizard.  There are a pair of glasses out there meant for your face; you just need to try them on to find them.  And then you know.  You know in a major way that this particular pair of glasses (with a core of unicorn horn and phoenix feather) was meant to be matched with your face, and only your face.

I’ve never had that experience.  I’ve had more of the “are these good enough?” conversations in my head.  That’s how I ended up with my last pair of glasses 12 years ago.  It was this time of year, and I needed a pair of glasses to wear when I walked down the aisle.  So I bought the pair you’ve normally seen me in.  Barely-there rims.  Small ovals.

Please ignore the squint…

This weekend, I was in a glasses store and my eye kept going up to a particular pair on the wall while I was speaking with an employee.  So after I finished my conversation, I tried them on.  And they felt so right on my face that it was like that moment when Harry Potter grips his wand at Ollivander’s and feels the power of the tool.

I had Josh take a picture, and I texted it to my sister from the store.  From several states away, thanks to the beauty of technology, she was able to reassure me that the glasses fit my face.  And even though they were very different from my normal pair, it was worth branching out and trying something new.  We had money leftover in our flex spending account, so I went for it.

Glasses in the store without my real frames, but better than the selfie I just tried to take.

The point of my old glasses were to fade into the background and beg people not to notice them.  And these glasses practically scream at you, “look at my subpar myopic eyes!?!?”  I had a moment of doubt right after I put them on for the first time with my prescription in place.  I mean, my modus operandi is to go through my day without being noticed, so why would I choose something loud and solid that reminds the world that they’re there?  I don’t know.  I guess it was just time for a change.

The story of Angela Maier is horrific any way you look at it.  Over three years ago, in deep grief after experiencing three miscarriages, she poisoned both her pregnant sister-in-law and friend, causing them to lose their pregnancies.  She recently confessed to the crime stating that she couldn’t fathom watching their children grow up while hers were dead.  The two women are currently pregnant again, hence the timing of the confession, and Maier has a three-year-old child.

If we want to, we can enter into the somewhat pointless conversation of whether her punishment fits her crime.  I personally don’t feel that I have the ability to make a statement, since I know nothing about the Austrian legal system, and the only details I know about the case come from the newspaper and blogs.

What I can comment on is the disservice we do to women, compounding the depression after a loss, by sweeping conversations about miscarriage under the rug.

For a fairly common occurrence — anywhere from 15% to 50% of all pregnancies end in loss — it’s somewhat staggering how many women state that they feel alone in their grief.  It’s not just that they weren’t mentally prepared for the possibility, but with 80% of those miscarriages happening within the first three months, pregnancy loss is a very heavy, lonely loss without other people to share the burden.  When a person dies, the weight of remembrance is spread out over all the people who knew them and loved them.  But when an unborn baby dies, sometimes the only people who even knew that he or she was here were the parents.  Pregnancy loss is a death that leaves behind no objects in which to draw comfort, no memories shared with the person to turn to in your grief.

In other words, those who experience pregnancy loss, stillbirth, and neonatal death need to find a new way to mourn because the traditional methods for dealing with grief — speaking about shared memories with others, holding objects, remembering moments — are out of reach for those experiencing this form of loss.

It is our responsibility to talk about this reality as a society and to reach out to those who are experiencing this form of loss in order to ensure that they don’t feel alone in their grief.  I wrote several years ago, and I still think it’s true:

I’ve always thought it was a failure by the medical community to not prepare women better for the possibility of pregnancy loss, stillbirth, or neonatal death.  That it does women a disservice to imply that all children are born.  It’s great if your life follows that continuum: sex = baby = birth = rest of life.  But for anyone who doesn’t, I feel like it’s an extra cleaving: not only is your heart split in half from the actual event, but in addition, you were essentially promised via language choices that this could never come to be.  And suddenly, it is.  How do you trust again after that?

One only needs to look at our language and see the dearth of words that explain loss to realize that we’ve left a lot of people — men and women — walking across family building without a safety net.

For anyone currently going through a loss or who has gone through a loss in their past, I am so incredibly sorry.  The Mayo Clinic has a wonderful webpage to serve as a starting point for the mourning process.  As they state, you may move through all stages, you may move through only a few, and you may double back and go through certain stages more than once.  Every person mourns uniquely, hence why no one can give you a straightforward method for dealing with your grief.  And because grief is personal, you are going to need to find your own path through it unfortunately.  Just know there are many women out here who have gone through something similar, and many of us are here if you want a willing ear to listen to your story.

For anyone supporting someone who is going through a loss or has went through a loss in their past, take your cues from the person in mourning as to how much they want to speak about their loss.  But know that being present, asking questions, and quietly listening can go a long way to help the grieving process.  Be mindful of dates that may be difficult for them — holidays, unfulfilled due dates, anniversaries — and check in on those days.  Be less concerned with trying to find the perfect words as a response; the truth is, there are no perfect words.  But there is perfect listening; just letting the person know you are there, abiding with them, so they don’t have to carry their grief alone.

There is no excuse for what Maier is done, and I’m reluctant to even tie it to infertility because she is no more the face of loss than Nadya Suleman is the face of IVF.  I have no clue what sort of resources Maier had to process her losses.

But there is an opportunity to have a conversation that we need to have about pregnancy loss.  There is an opportunity to ask people to reach out to those who have suffered a loss rather than treat them as a pariah or dismissively expect them to swallow their grief and “move on,” with the unspoken (or sometimes spoken) message that “there’s always next time.”

Let’s stop focusing on trying again or “next time” and stay for a moment to talk about the immediate situation of pregnancy or infant loss.  In doing so, we may save other women out there from processing their grief alone.

The 2013 Creme de la Creme list opened for submissions this week and we already have 40 on the list.  Thank you to all who submitted early.  It makes writing the blurbs that much easier.  Off to do a lot of reading this weekend…

And if you haven’t gotten in your post yet, just know that the December 15th hard deadline sneaks up on you. (No one will be added after December 15th.  When the list goes up on January 1st, it’s complete.)  Put a note in your calender to remind yourself to submit so you don’t miss out having your voice included.  I’d love to have everyone on the blogroll (or could be on the blogroll) represented.

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I’ve been struggling with my Halloween costume this year.  I am difficult to dress because I will only wear costumes that are warm and comfortable if I have to be outside.  No dresses.  No masks.  No makeup.  No crazy hairstyle.  Usually I just wear a sweater and jeans, and then I tell people that I’m a substitute teacher or a college student.

But this year I came up with something that only requires me to wear a hat.

That’s what the fox says!

Thank you, Ylvis, for my cozy costume.  And for including so many animals in your song.  If I can’t make the fox hat happen, I have many backup plans.

What are you being for Halloween?

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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:

• “Surviving Hospital Bedrest” (Home Grown Love)
• “An Anniversary of Sorts” (Family Building with a Twist)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Road Less Travelled has a thought-provoking post on expectations and how they impact our happiness.  But she also asks the all-important question: if those expectations are ultimately detrimental when they aren’t fulfilled, how do we enter something as hugely emotional as family building without expectations?

And then a different The Road Less Traveled (this time with a single L) has a post about waiting and looking for an answer.  It’s about reaching that point where her infertility just is: “I equate it to a little kid who has asked for a toy for Christmas and 37 Christmases have passed without that toy appearing under the tree.   At first it was frustrating, then it was disappointing, then it was depressing, and now it just is.”  It’s a wonderful piece about reframing how she views the wait.

The Barreness admits that she was thrown off by kind words left because it’s pregnancy loss awareness month, touched that someone else remembered her losses.  She revisits who she was back then and who she is now.  I love the end: “As I see that girl who was, I embrace her and whisper in her ear…  you did not do this to yourself.  This was never your fault.  You were never meant to carry that weight.”

A Good Mother has a post about restarting blogging.  I cracked up over the opening: “I debated deleting the handful of posts preceding this one and starting fresh, but I’m a notorious packrat and the thought of throwing anything away, even data, makes me feel…twitchy. So, I’m going to leave them there and just ignore them.”  But it’s really the meat of the post; what this new blog is about after a long time writing about her journey.  All I can say is welcome back.

Thinking Miracles has a lovely tradition of remembering everyone else’s babies on October 15th too.  She takes the act of remembering — something so inward and personal — and extends it outward like a hug.  I love that she does this.

Lastly, Riding the IVF Roller Coaster has a post about how surfaces may not reveal much about the contents below.  Though her life looks perfect on the outside, she’s falling apart on the inside.  It’s a good reminder that we rarely know how much a person is dealing with that they keep tucked away.

The roundup to the Roundup: The 2013 Creme de la Creme opened: is your post on the list?  What are you going as on Halloween?  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 11th and October 18th) 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 been accused, for good reason, of getting obsessively stuck on certain topics.  In this case, the culprit was Candy Crush*.  I’m obviously talking about it again, but that’s sort of a trick.  I mean, how can I talk about my obsessive tendencies without talking about the recent objects of my obsessive tendencies?

Anyway, I’ve been very anxious lately, my monkey mind jumping about and not allowing me to concentrate.  Or sleep.  And I think it’s tied to some of my obsessions.  So I cut back on caffeine and I’ve made some rules for myself concerning Candy Crush: never during the work day (not even one game while I’m thinking since that always turns into using all five lives), never last thing before bed, and trying to limit it to five games total vs. switching devices, resetting the clock, or begging for lives.

I decided last week that I need a treat; something on which to build a new ritual since I was partially removing two things that brought me great joy from my day: coffee and Candy Crush.  On a whim, I purchased a box of Trader Joe’s Harvest Blend Herbal Tea.  I should add that I almost never enter Trader Joe’s.  I was sort of amazed and confused by their vast quantities of pumpkin-flavoured products.  Do people really enjoy pumpkin that much?

Anyway, back to the tea.

It has become the new object of my obsession.  Every day I look forward to my tea time, moving it earlier and earlier, making up reasons for why I need a second or third cup.  It seems to be a seasonal product, which means that it may stop being sold at some point.  I can’t imagine they have Harvest Blend tea on the shelves in the spring.  What do I do?  I try to never allow this to happen: getting attached emotionally to products that will be removed from shelves at some point.  I know it isn’t really fair, saying I can grow bored with a product and stop purchasing it, but a store isn’t allowed to pull a product from me.  But that’s how I feel.

So I’m going tea hoarding this week.  Buying up boxes of Harvest Blend to get me through the long winter.

Here’s the thing though, I’ve never obsessively written about tea.  At least, in almost 2500 posts, I have no memory of obsessively writing about tea.  So I offer up this post as a mental palate cleanser.  For the first time ever, you’re getting my thoughts on a box of tea.

I love this tea.  I know that I haven’t told you anything actually about the tea.  If you really need to know to judge for yourself, it has cinnamon and apple and a bunch of other stuff in it.  Ginger.  Orange peel.  Chamomile (which I normally dislike and somehow missed was in it).  It has a fox with a wan smile on the cover, balancing a steaming hot cup of tea on his misshapen paws.  His paws are like the fox equivalent to Barbie feet.

I don’t promise that there won’t be several more posts about this tea, in the same way that I can’t promise that there won’t be future posts about Candy Crush, crickets, Harry Potter, TOS, or Green Day.  Especially that last one because I get to see Broadway Idiot this weekend.  And I am practically peeing in my pants at the thought of that.  I could not be more excited to see that movie and then blab about that movie.

Wait, no, this post was about tea.  Bringing it back to the tea.

These are the things on the forefront of my mind, that tip out and into my blog.

* I’m on level 254.