This question is part of the GRAB(ook) Club, an online book club open to anyone and everyone.

There are two types of teen characters that seem to pop up in books and movies — the realistic, everyman who stands in for tons of kids that you could actually point out at your school (for instance, the students in Breakfast Club) and the kid-you-wish-you-were (for instance, the kids in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars).  There is nothing realistic about them.  They are too witty to be actual people, too self-actualized, too lucky, too unlucky, and too much the creators of perfect movie-like moments.  This seems to be a running characteristic of John Green characters: they are the people you wish you were or you wish were your friends, therefore, it is a joy to hang out with them in paper form on the page.

Do you tend to gravitate towards books with realistic characters who remind you of people in your day-to-day world (or you could see being an actual person you might encounter one day) or characters who have almost super-human personalities that allow you to escape from all those regular people around you due to their cleverness?

After you answer my question, please click over to read the rest of the book club questions for The Fault in Our Stars.  You can get your own copy of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green at bookstores including Amazon.

This is a post for the GRAB(ook) Club. Like the idea of a book club where you don’t have to leave your living room? Then read more about the GRAB(ook) Club which holds the book discussion on blogs, a Facebook group, and a GoodReads group.

July’s Book is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  You can jump into the discussion by clicking any of the blogs below (links will appear when the post goes up), or joining the Facebook or GoodReads group (links to those groups are in the information post).

• Stirrup Queens
• Me Plus One
• Are You Kidding Me?
• The Road Less Travelled
• Adventures in Writing, Reading & Bookcrossing
• Lavender Luz
• Two Bees in Love
• CD1 Again
• Amy (on GoodReads/Facebook)

NEXT STEP: sign up for the August book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (discuss August 15) by leaving a comment below telling me that you’re in, the name and url of your blog, or whether you are blogless and will be discussing on the Facebook/GoodReads groups.

If you haven’t yet read Tess Vigeland’s brilliant speech from the World Domination Summit, I can wait until you’ve looked that over.  It’s right here.  It’s long because it’s a written version of a spoken speech, not a blog post, but it’s worth dedicating the time to get all the way to the end.

You finished it, correct?  No?  Then go back and read the whole thing so I can talk about it.

The speech focuses on that concept of leaping without a net, of leaving what outsiders think of as an incredible job to do… what?  She doesn’t know.  She left without a game plan in place, and while everyone cheered on her bravery, she tells the true story of what it is like to step into nothingness, not knowing where your future is heading.

Hint: it’s really scary.

There are parts of the speech that many of us will never be able to relate to — for instance, the hold her old celebrity has over her:

But will anyone want to listen to me if I’m not some national journalist anymore? What if I decide to follow what I think might be another passion and go work for the Red Cross… admirably, but relatively anonymously? Do I lose all my Twitter followers and all the fans – strangers — who’ve friended me on Facebook? Will I disappoint all those people who think I was really great at what I did? Does it matter? Why do I care what other people think? I KNOW I’m not supposed to care – but I do.

How do I get back to remarkable?

But she also veers into very familiar territory such as knowing your passion and being denied your passion, a topic that most of us with infertility can easily relate to.

She tells a story about applying for a job with All Things Considered, a job which should have been a lock for an already successful radio journalist.  She interviewed well, she performed well, she got excellent feedback all around.  But she didn’t get the job.

I didn’t spoil that part of the speech because I told you above to read the whole thing.

She knew exactly what she wanted (the All Things Considered job).  She was well qualified for the job, so it wasn’t a pipe dream.  She did everything one would need to do to get this coveted job including exercising patience.  Throughout that section of her speech, I kept saying in my head, she is so going to get this job and this is going to be a speech about always trusting that things will work out.  And she freakin’ sucks for writing that because for many of us, things don’t work out.

Or they work out but at a very high cost.  Or, yes, it works out, but it certainly doesn’t look like what you thought you would get in the first place.  Sort of like applying for a job at All Things Considered and ending up with a job at Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.  Fun in its own right and prestigious too, but not the same thing at all.

That’s the NPR version of Waiting for Holland: you apply for a job at All Things Considered but end up at Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.

So she didn’t get the job.

And my heart — the same one that was cursing her for having things be so easy moments earlier — was now sinking on her behalf.

It’s not a things work out speech at all.  It’s a sometimes things don’t work out and how are you going to deal with that speech.

The job I wanted to get wasn’t one that anyone else could apply for.  I wanted to be a mother to my future kids.  There were no other applicants I was competing against; just my own uterine competency.  I did everything one should do once they get their heart set on being a mother and begin defining themselves by that position.  I took prenatal vitamins and had sex at the correct times and ate well and slept well and jogged on the treadmill.  And did my kegels.  And when I didn’t get the job of mother, I couldn’t even look at another person who got the job of utilizing my uterus and say, “fair enough; they were good too.”  There was no one else, just me.  Just me not getting the job.

Thanks, universe.

It’s not exactly the same thing except that having been through publishing, which is just like applying for a job again and again — you constantly need to apply to keep the job of writer by writing more publishable things — and infertility, I can tell you that the rejection (by a publisher or your body) feels frustratingly the same.  It really doesn’t matter why you don’t have the job.  What matters is that you don’t have the job.  And that sucks.  Hardcore.  And is very scary because you don’t know how many times you have it in you to apply to another dream position or to attempt again to make a baby.  By which I mean, emotionally have it in you.  It hurts a lot to be denied something you really want, something you thought you’d get.

I don’t get a sense that Tess Vigeland (and this is an assumption from the speech, and I apologize if it’s completely off) feels the immediacy of needing a job.  She is taking on freelance work to skate by, and there is (likely) a second income with her husband.  In other words, she doesn’t need a job because of the money, she needs a job because a job defines her, as it does for many people.  While, yes, she obviously needs money at some point, she can hold out for the best position.  She is not exactly in the same place as someone who leaves a job and now needs to scramble as quickly as possible to land a new one so there will be bread on the table.

Her urgency in getting a job comes down to happiness: not having a job makes her unhappy, and having a job brings her personal fulfillment.  And perhaps that is how I could leap from job search to infertility; because while infertility is not life threatening, it is certainly lifestyle threatening.  It is hard to be free-floating in that experiencing, not knowing when or how it will end.  The urgency that comes with treating infertility isn’t one of saving your life; it isn’t cancer or a staph infection or something you need to treat now.  And yet, for our own emotional comfort, it has the same immediacy of those diseases.  Because that urgency comes from alleviating the emotional pain that comes from being kept from something you know is right for you in your deepest heart.

I hope Tess Vigeland finds the job of her dreams again.

I hope everyone experiencing infertility gets the resolution they crave.

Battlefish posed an interesting question to me a few weeks ago.  Her wristwatch broke, and it made her wonder how many people actually wore wristwatches anymore since phones (which tell the time) are so commonly in people’s hands nowadays.

I had to admit that my watch died last year, and I decided to stop wearing one.  The jeweler was replacing the battery when he informed me that the watch still wouldn’t start.  It was just too old.  While the parts could be replaced if I was willing to send it away (I wasn’t), I could buy a new watch for much less than what it would take to fix the current watch.  The current watch had sentimental value, and I would rather have an unusable watch in hand than risk possibly losing it but having it fixed.  So I went home and put my watch away.

I considered getting a new watch, and we looked at a few.  But I never found one that I loved as much as the one I was no longer using.  And then it started to feel redundant with the phone.  The phone was like always having a watch in my pocket; one that could hold hundreds of alarms throughout the day.  I couldn’t see spending money on something I clearly didn’t need.

So I’m now watch-free.  I’m also datebook-free (paper calendar was replaced by phone calendar), camera-free (I usually just use the camera in the phone), and book-free (sometimes I have a paper book with me, but usually I read whatever book I have loaded on the phone).  So I’m lighter.  But I also sort of miss my wristwatch.

Do you still wear a wristwatch, or do you use the clock on your phone?

Who was to know the future of the wristwatch when I begged my parents incessantly for my pink, plastic Swatch?

It was the perfect emotional storm: coming down from a perfect memory-creating day at the White House with the kids, the movie This is 40, and a New York Times piece on Mommy Guilt and reading the accompanying comments.  I ended up letting a cup of ice cream melt while I sobbed.

I will unapologetically admit this: in the middle of every single moment whether it is checking out books at the library or eating soup at Panera or taking them to cover an event at the White House or volunteering at their school, I mentally check out of the present and project myself into the future, wondering if what I’m doing is helping or damaging the case all adults silently make with their full-grown children: please still have me in your life.  Of course, I can’t know the answer until it happens.  And it doesn’t really help to read the comments on something like the New York Times piece because you realize just how little we are able to guide the situation.

Oh, and you also realize how much human beings like to belittle another person’s feelings.  But that’s sort of par for the course with any New York Times piece.

There are small things I can do to try to have a good relationship with the twins because of their obvious cause-effect.  Put down the phone and listen to them, for instance.  And no, this doesn’t mean being available to our kids (or any other human being) 24/7 when all things are equal.  I check my email in front of the kids, and I’ve even been known to lie and tell them that I’m changing into my swimsuit while taking five minutes to myself to play Candy Crush (and then lying even more when I am called out on it by the Wolvog, and I shriek, “you are not a woman and you don’t know how long it takes a woman to put on a bathing suit!  We have straps!  We have straaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaps.”)

So I know to put the phone down in front of them (it’s like customer service — the person in front of you is always more important than the person on the phone) and give them undivided attention when they are sharing part of their life with me.  But, as I said, that’s a small thing.  Even putting my phone down indefinitely by chucking it out the window won’t guarantee that they’ll feel I did a good enough job parenting them.

They — not the general public — are really the only review board I worry about.  So you can call me a crap parent or a good parent, and it really makes no difference (well, I mean, yes, it does make a difference in the sense that when you say cruel or kind words to someone, it affects their mood.  But you know what I mean).  What matters is how they process it since they will be the ones issuing that important future decision: am I in their life in a big way or am I shunted to the outskirts.

So it’s not Mommy Guilt because I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong as a parent.  By which I mean that I don’t think any of us are doing anything wrong or anything right with a few exceptions for the outliers.  It’s more Parenting Groping in the Dark and Feeling a Little Scared About the Lack of Control.  That the reality is that there isn’t a secret, single recipe to raising a child well and turning them into a functional adult that people want to be around and who still want to be around us.  When people write pieces like that writer’s guilt piece, they’re not really talking about guilt but more fear over how little we can know about how our actions are affecting another person.  That we have this chance to build a relationship, and once it goes off-the-rails, it’s very difficult to get it back on.  And frankly, life has a way of pushing relationships off the rails whether it’s through hormonal changes that turn us into rage machines to busyness that makes us overlook each other.

Sometimes it’s tiring thinking about how hard it is to keep two people (or more) on track.

I love the kids.  I love spending time with them.  I love having a front row seat to their lives.  I see what my parents have — their kids and grandkids still heavily involved in their lives — and I want that too.  I have no idea how my parents did it.  I think some of it was choice; choosing to volunteer in our school or be at our dance recital instead of somewhere else.  And some of it was just the luck of the draw; that our personalities were such that we stayed close and meshed well.  That if we had different personalities, it wouldn’t have mattered what they said or did.  I could have pushed away through no fault of their own but because it was what I needed to do, and we can’t live our lives for other people.

I worry that I smother too much.  I know I smother, so it’s a matter of degree.  I accept that is part of who I am, and I don’t really want to change it (so no guilt there).  I’m a work-at-home mother with my office in the living room, so there is always a balancing act where things have to give in order for something to take immediacy over the others.  I accept that part of who I am too (so no guilt there either).  I know that adolescence will happen, and we’ll be told that we’re the worst parents in the world.  And I know that adolescence is a single moment in time and not the final verdict.

I know all of those things with my brain.  It’s just sort of hard to remember them in my heart when I pull back from a moment and wonder how things will turn out in the future.

And then I do something silly like rent This is 40 (oh my G-d, I’m turning 40 this year) which is one of the most depressing comedies out there.  It really brought us down.  Like massively brought us down.  And you read something like the comment section on a New York Times piece about how parents have messed up the commenter’s life.  And you make yourself a cup of ice cream and eat it with one of their baby spoons because you miss their babyhood so much.  And you find yourself curled up in a little ball, sobbing, while you contemplate your life down the road.

I want to control it so badly.

It really sucks that I can’t.