You don’t understand, so let me explain.

We thought we’d be able to have children and then we couldn’t.

It wasn’t a choice to enter into treatments/adoption/donor gametes; it wasn’t an option.

Having a child may feel like a choice to you, but it isn’t to us.

You and I will need to disagree on that, because you’ll never change our feelings about having a family be a need over a want.

When we’re cycling – whether we’re trying naturally, doing minimally invasive treatments, or doing invasive procedures – I am riding on a roller coaster of emotions.

I am angry. I cry a lot. I am frustrated. I am told one thing and another happens. No one can give me straight answers. No one can make real promises. We pay A LOT of money for the chance to have a child. This money does not guarantee that we will have a child at the end of the day.

We get pregnant and we are elated. And then we lose the pregnancy.

Or we get news that the pregnancy isn’t taking and we never get a chance to feel that elation – we only get the depression on the other end.

Even though I’m a pro-Choice feminist, I also love my children when they’re only embryos.

And that is a difficult thing to wrap your mind around.

You think that you know what we’re going through based on the small amount of information you know.

You think you know how I feel or how I’m reacting based on what I present to you.

You never see the full picture, but you make a lot of assumptions.

You are impatient that we plan our lives like this.

You think you need to make parenthood seem less enticing – this doesn’t make me feel better. This just makes me feel like you are belittling the thing I am putting myself through hell to obtain.

You say that you feel like you can’t support us. And you can’t. Not really. Or not in the way that you want to offer support.

Infertility isn’t linear. It’s a wavy line and you can’t know if you’re entering on a crest or a dip. I don’t expect you to get it right.

I don’t expect you to run in like a cheerleader and accompany me to appointments or help me raise money for treatments/adoption.

What I want from you is actually quite simple.

Ask me how I am and want to hear the answer.

Ask me about treatments and where I am in the process.

Ask me to explain to you more of what I’m going through.

Let me vent.

Don’t try to change my mind or see the world from your eyes.

I used to have your eyes too before this happened. And I know you mean well, but even if you say that you went through infertility or loss yourself, my own experience is unique.

I try very hard to be proactive. I do this not only by seeking treatment, but gravitating towards other infertile men or women or other people using assisted conception/adoption.

We are a supportive community.

They take care of my emotions – I rarely have to explain myself to them. They understand with few words. I enjoy being with them because it’s easy.

I also enjoy being with you. Sometimes I like being with you because I don’t have to speak about infertility at all. Other times, I like being with you because I can talk it out and explain and hear my own words and make sense of this myself.

Infertility is so different for every generation. When our mothers and fathers were experiencing infertility, they had few choices. They had fewer answers.

Now, we have many choices–maybe too many choices. It makes it difficult to step away.

I believe that I probably won’t understand much of what my children are going through if they experience infertility. I’ll try to be there for them and I’ll do my best. But I also know that they will have opportunities or choices to make that I never had. And it will affect them in a way that I will never understand because I didn’t go through it myself.

And that will make me sad because I really want to be there for them. That’s the closest I can come sometimes to understanding how you feel when you are dealing with me. So, I’m sorry. I know it really sucks to watch me be sad and feel like there’s a wall between us.

Infertility makes some women want to sweep it under the rug. It has made me want to be an activist – not only for infertility, but for all the taboo topics still out there. I talk about infertility a lot – not because I’m obsessed with the topic, but because it has shaped who I am and it is a large part of my life. It has to be – so much of infertility is a day-to-day monitoring that it becomes impossible to set it aside fully.

It makes me want to reach out to other people – and that is something I am extremely proud of that I do. I think I used to lead a life that was very focused on self and I think I lead a life that is now focused on others – the children I have, the children I want, the people I reach out to comfort or help. You may think I focus too much on self because you may not understand the intricacies of what I do. What I put myself through because I have a burning need to parent. You may think the choices I make are selfish. Or self-indulgent. You may think that I like being sad or that I should just move on. You may think that I’m making unhealthy choices. I can’t really do anything to change the way you think and frankly, I don’t have the emotional reserves to focus on you.

We can’t take you to the edge where we stand – we can only tell you about it. And hearing it is nothing like living it.

But if you want to stand over here and watch me at the edge, you may find that everything you are scared that I am or becoming isn’t true at all. And if you opened your eyes, you would see that I’m not at the edge to jump, but I’m at the edge because I trust myself and my choices so completely and I know this is where I need to be if I want to fly.

*******

In honour of NIAW, because I do want to say something (and if you haven’t added your link yet, please do), I’ve rerun that post above that I wrote back in 2007.  It was written in a fit of rage as a response to someone who didn’t understand why we were fighting infertility rather than just throwing up our hands and saying, “okay, the family we want obviously isn’t in our cards.  We’ll just dedicate ourselves to… fill-in-the-blank.”  They just didn’t understand why we didn’t take our infertility as a sign from the universe that we weren’t meant to procreate. (In the same way that people should get rid of their glasses and just accept the fact that they weren’t meant to see.)  I realized when I quoted from it a few weeks ago that I still feel the same way, six years later.

Three years ago, I started the Bloggers Unite project with Resolve for NIAW — National Infertility Awareness Week.  It came out of a conversation I had with Barb Collura in New York about a blogging project another non-profit had done.  They’re talking about their issue; why aren’t we talking about ours?  I mean, yes, of course as bloggers we were talking about infertility, but I meant in an organized, saturated way.  So we ran with it and planned the project at a Starbucks meeting or two.  And it’s great, this week where we have people speaking collectively about infertility.

And it’s also terrible when you have nothing to say about infertility.  I feel — personally — a lot of pressure to participate because it’s an idea I believe in; the power of words to change public thought.  But there are times when I have a lot to say about infertility such as during coverage of Dr. Robert G. Edwards death, and other times when I have nothing to say about infertility that hasn’t already been said before a dozen times in my archives.

So I wasn’t going to participate this year beyond liking other people’s Facebook status updates or highlighting posts in the Friday Blog Roundup.

And then I read Sarah Dopp’s post about the Boston Marathon called “We Used to Speak in Essays.”  She points out the important work we can do on our blogs, work that really isn’t conducive to other forms of social media.  Blogs give us space to stretch out, to speak with circumspect, to try to change minds one brain at a time.  Instead of throwing out a bomb of words on Facebook or Twitter and seeing what happens, blogging is about carefully constructing an argument that builds up understanding.

Broadcasting distilled, emotional battle cries without background context to our entire Rolodexes is further polarizing us as a community. And aren’t we polarized enough as it is?

I want us to speak in essays again, to connect compassionately over our differences, to listen, to be respectful, and to learn from each other. The fact that our audience has broadened to everyone we’ve ever met makes it that much more important to be real, human, and long-form about where we’re coming from and why we feel the way we do.

I’m writing this on a blog that I haven’t contributed to in a year, because Facebook was easier. Speaking in essays is hard work.

But what if we tried?

What if we tried?  What if?  That was, after all, the first theme of Bloggers Unite.

*******

As I stated last year, every week is infertility awareness week for me.  And the same thoughts that I had last year are in my brain this year:

Every week is Infertility Awareness Week in my world.  I don’t have weeks where I’m not aware of infertility; where it fades into the background.  It is still something that I think about on a weekly (if not daily) basis.  Maybe I’ll feel differently down the road and will be grateful for this yearly kick in the ass to talk about infertility.  But right now, it’s still the lens through which I see the world.  It is so present that it is like a third person at our table having coffee with us, someone tangible who can turn my head and point my eyes towards a toddler boy hiding behind his father’s legs.

But this week is NIAW — National Infertility Awareness Week — and we are asked to write about infertility; even if we have spent the whole year writing about infertility.  Some years, it is exactly what I need.  The awareness week almost serves to recharge me.  And then you have years like this year where through no fault of its own, I am not feeling the energy.  Though the theme is a very apt Don’t Ignore.  And I can’t ignore NIAW even if my heart isn’t feeling it this year.

Because I owe it to everyone who is affected by infertility to speak about it as best I can.  Because I am comfortable speaking about it (whereas I know that many people are not, and I don’t fault them for that).  Because I agree with Resolve — no good can come if we’re going to ignore the problem; the problem being not just infertility itself but how the world perceives infertility and family building options.

I can’t think of a problem that has been solved by not talking about it.  By not slogging through it with words.  Seriously, name me one.

But then I read Sarah Dopp’s post about speaking in essays, and I realized that I needed to write mine.  I needed to do more than hit “like” or leave a comment.  I needed to participate in putting good ideas out there.

Maybe my role isn’t to say something.  Maybe my part is to encourage you to say something.  And by you, I mean everyone who is reading this right now who is wondering if their small voice really has the potential to change another person’s mind and bring awareness.  The answer, of course, is yes.

So say something.

And if you are posting about NIAW, leave a comment below with a link to the post so we can round them all up, show the power of numbers, and celebrate the idea of speaking in essays.

Other Posts for NIAW

1. An Unwanted Path
2. Inconceivable!
3. One Step at a Time
4. My Cheap Version of Therapy
5. From IF to When
6. Searching for Our Silver Lining
7. Bereaved and Blessed
8. Shutterbug Wife
9. Not When, But IF
10. Battlefish
11. The Adventures of an Infertile Myrtle
12. Beyond the Parentheses
13. The Loveliest Way
14. Mommyhood After Fertility Frustration
15. Brownies and Onion Dip
16. Silent Sorority
17. The Great Big IF
18. From Wine to Whine
19. Our Misconception
20. Stupid Stork
21. Wonderfully Ordinary
22. Are You Kidding Me?
23. If You Don’t Stand for Something
24. My Journey Through Infertility, Pregnancy, and Loss
25. An Engineer Becomes a Mom
26. My Preconceived Notion
27. Something Beautiful
28. Actual Jenny

Elissa Strauss had a great post in the Forward about the Sabra Parent* — the Israeli parenting norm to join the pantheon of other culture’s parenting norms such as the Tiger Mom and the Parisian Mom.  There are two differences though between all those other parenting norms and the Sabra Parent.  (1) This form of parenting is not confined to mothers, hence why it is a Sabra Parent vs. a Sabra Mom.  The expectations for men and women are the same.  (2) You do not need to actually have children to be a Sabra Parent.  There is a role in Sabra Parenting for every aunt, uncle, grandparent, cousin, and friend that comes in contact with the child.  Because you don’t just Sabra Parent your own children; you Sabra Parent other people’s children.  Hence why you do not need to actually be parenting in order to participate.  This is how I was able to test my parenting skills and enjoy some of the perks of parenting while we were going through infertility treatments.

When I read her post, I knew exactly what she meant, having observed it and practiced it myself.  It’s that sense of dual belonging prevalent inside Jewish communities.  You watch your kid, but you also watch everyone else’s kid.  You interact with your kid, but you also interact with everyone else’s kid.  You belong with your family, but you also belong to a larger whole.  You teach your kids to be responsible adults by bringing them everywhere with you, seeing them simply as a family member who can and should go — within reason — everywhere with the rest of the family members.  You teach them to listen to all adults, knowing that the more eyes on your kid, the better.  Exposing them to many people and ideas, since asking questions and seeking answers holds utmost importance in Jewish culture.

With Sabra Parenting, anyone can step in and help out in protecting and raising children.  You don’t need to be a parent.  My kids know that my brother’s words weigh just as heavily as my own, and they need to listen to his advice as much as they need to listen to mine.  Friends without children, teachers, family members, friends’ parents — they all get lumped together in one pot of supervisional soup, and children are taught to depend, engage, and listen to each adult that comes into their life.

But what I think separates Sabra Parenting from other forms of parenting is the lack of apologies.  When I’m around other people who have a sabra attitude, I don’t apologize for my kids acting like kids, nor do I expect apologies from other parents.  I’m not phased by kid-appropriate behaviour.  I apologize for rudeness.  I apologize for bad decisions.  But I never apologize for a child acting like a child, since other Sabra Parents realize that expecting kids to act like adults is ridiculous.  We intuitively know that adults do not act like children, and we even deem some adult behaviour “childish.”  We don’t expect elderly people to want to act like preschoolers, but we expect preschoolers to comport themselves like elderly people.  Sabra Parents allow kids to be kids while simultaneously not viewing kids as a separate species from adults that should quarantined away from the public or barred from certain places.  It’s about not setting your child up for failure, but also not seeing every child-like behaviour as “failing.”  See, it’s a fine balancing act.

And make no mistake: Sabra Parenting is not a lack of parenting.  It is not okay to allow your child to run around unchecked like a vilde chaya — it’s parenting on steroids.  It’s uber-parenting; panoramic-parenting.  You are never “off-duty.”  It’s watching out for my kids and helping mold them, and watching out for other people’s kids and helping mold them.  Not by yelling at them or snapping at them or lecturing them.  But by carefully modeling the behaviour I’d like them to follow, talking through errors, and providing the tools necessarily to do it better the next time, especially in the form of knowledge and understanding hows and whys.

The only place I disagree with Strauss is the idea of encouraging other people to try their hand in this style of parenting.  I don’t think it crosses cultures, and with that culture clash, what you’re going to find is that it’s like eating sushi prepared in an Italian restaurant — I just would be a little bit wary of that raw fish.  Because Sabra Parenting is not about allowing others to do the work of parenting for you, nor is Sabra Parenting about foisting your worldview and how you think children should behave on someone else’s child.  It’s about collectively and intuitively enriching and molding the lives of the children around us — not just the ones that live in our house — and I think the separation that exists in American culture, this “mine” and “yours” attitude, isn’t conducive to creating this type of parenting situation.

You need to be willing to get on the floor with kids, ask them questions, treat their ideas as interesting, get your hands messy, give up a lot of your time and share whatever snacks you have lurking in your bag.  The motto of a Sabra Parent is “pitch in.”

You have to be willing to give as much as you take with Sabra Parenting.

* Sabra is a term for an Israeli, much like New Zealanders are called kiwis.  Sabra is a cactus fruit (I think in America, it’s called a Prickly Pear) that defines the stereotypical Israeli personality — prickly on the outside with a sweet “heart of gold” on the inside.

It showed up as a meme on various blogs this week: writing advice by Elmore Leonard. Writing advice tends to pop up on blogs, the artistic medium of choice for those who like to play with words. I am drawn to these lists like spiders seeking warm rooms in winter.  Who knows when someone will discover the magic key that unlocks novels, or figure out a way to make a positive post (that does not contain baby animals) go viral every single time?

But so far, I’ve left every single list of Blogging Dos and Don’t or Ten Best Writing Tips with the same thought:

Break the rules.

Image: Chickspirit via Flickr Some of Elmore’s advice sounds useful on the surface: “avoid detailed descriptions of characters.”  Except I immediately thought about Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly and how her character is built on the streaks in her hair.  As a reader, we discover a lot about what type of woman she is when we learn about the “ragbag colours of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light.”  He then enters a long paragraph of physical description, from the now-iconic black dress and pearl choker to the ruddy health in her cheeks.  I’m really glad Mr. Capote ignored Mr. Leonard’s rule.

“Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.”  Again, can you imagine reading the Harry Potter series without those in-depth descriptions of Hogwarts?  What if JK Rowling had merely left it as a stone castle, and that’s all you knew about it?  Good writers draw with words: they don’t add in superfluous details, but they also don’t expect readers to hold up skeletal works and keep them intact.  Bone structures, without connective tissue and muscle, have a way of falling apart.  And the same is true for a book.  So again, Elmore Leonard’s advice doesn’t hold up.

Ignore Mr. Leonard’s advice.  You should use prologues, modify with adverbs, and throw in a suddenly or two.

It is possible to do all these things and not have them harm your book in any way.  I find it sad to think that a generation of writers believe there is something wrong with adverbs.  There isn’t, if you use them sparingly.  The only problem comes when you use adverbs like teenagers use junk food — in place of a real meal, or in this case, thought.  I find the fact that people are being taught to carry all dialogue on the word “said” damaging.  I want people to call things out.  I want people to scream.  I want people to ask.  Mostly, I want people to use all the words in the dictionary and not be told that some of them make them “bad writers” or “weak writers.”

The same goes for every blogging list I’ve ever read.  If you want to be a successful blogger, you’re told you need to have an active social media presence on every social media site.  You need to comment more.  You need to write every day.  You need to respond to comments.  Do not use a cluttered layout.  Do participate in blogging carnivals…

Break the blogging rules.

The frustrating thing about these rules is that they’re pretending to be a formula.  They’re telling you what you should do to be a success.  But the truth is that you can follow all those rules and still have a blog that no one reads.  Or you can follow none of those rules and have a blog that a lot of people read.  With the exception of “check for typos” and use a layout conducive to easy reading, there are few rules that need to be followed when it comes to blogging, and certainly no formula that makes people want to read a blog. (Except, perhaps, hooking up with someone who has a big social media presence who is going to feature your work.)

It follows that if you don’t post, people don’t read (since, you know, they have nothing to read).  But you don’t have to post daily.  You don’t have to post at the same time of day.  You don’t have to have an ongoing series to have people want to tune in regularly.  If you get something out of Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest or Goodreads, jump right in.  But if you’re only on those sites to build traffic, drop them.  They’re not worth the stress or your time if you’re only on those sites because you read that you need to be on those sites in order to succeed as a blogger.

I’m not saying to ignore all the helpful advice that people offer each other along the way; I know that I will read the next top ten writing tips list when it makes the rounds on people’s blogs.

I’m just saying read it all, and then break the rules.

Forge your own writing path, whether it is for a book or blog.  Because enjoying the process is important, and you can’t enjoy the process if you’re stressed over following what everyone else thinks.

So ignore them.

Cross-posted on BlogHer

Almost every day, I allow myself one meal of Special K.  I picked Special K because it has a lot of protein for a cereal.  I picked cereal because it requires no prep.  Just pour in a bowl, drench with milk, and eat.  One bowl, one spoon, complete meal.

It is also always exactly the same.  Sometimes, you buy a cucumber, and when you get home and chop it up, it tastes… off.  Not bad, per se.  Just off.  Even though it looks and smells fine.  But every box of Special K is exactly the same.  There are no surprises.  Every bowl tastes the same.  It doesn’t matter that it tastes like wet cardboard; sometimes sameness trumps taste for me.

On particularly stressful days, I allow myself two meals of Special K.  This week had a lot of two-meal Special K days.  Days when I phoned in making a real meal for myself, and instead poured it from a box and thought, “this is good enough.”  One bowl, one spoon, complete meal, lather, rinse, repeat.  There was something comforting in the sameness, in having a lack of surprises.

What do you stress eat?  And if it’s cereal, suggest another one to me so I can at least mix it up a bit.

*******

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:

• “Antilamentation” (Edenland)
• “My Obituary” (Fertility Alphabet Soup)
• “The I Ching of Jerry Maguire” (Too Many Fish to Fry)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Riding the Roller Coaster has a post about why she hates Tuesdays.  The ticker that had been counting down her pregnancy always changed on a Tuesday.  She writes about this time period following her D&C, “In some ways it feels like forever.  In some ways it feels like yesterday.  My jeans and bras fit again.  I don’t have the big appetite or the scary moods.  It seems like now all evidence that I was even ever excited about Tuesdays is gone.”  It’s the layers of loss, and the hidden meanings we hold for certain days on the calendar.

Adventures for Four also has a post about a recent loss, and how it has unmoored her, leaving her drifting.  It’s a lovely, brief post about having to let go of that alternate universe that contained that wanted future.

Lastly, From IF to When has a gorgeous post processing the events of this week.  She compares the feelings to those that bubbled up after 9/11: “9/11 was so large and distant for many of us. At least for me, it was unbelievable. Watching it felt like watching a movie or listening to a story. It didn’t feel real until I stood at Ground Zero a year later and saw the destruction where the towers once stood.”  It was a perfect piece to sit with and contemplate the week.

The roundup to the Roundup: A two-bowl of cereal per day week.  What do you stress eat?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between April 12th and April 19th) 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.