I don’t have my ears pierced.  The reaction that statement usually receives makes me feel as if I am the only 30-something on the planet who has never had a hole in her earlobe.  A few times someone has been talking to me, and they pause from what they’re saying to squint at my earlobes and ask apropos of nothing, “do you not have your ears pierced?”  Why, no, I don’t.

On numerous occasions, I have received earrings as a gift, which makes for a very embarrassing situation when the person hands me the wrapped box, gazing at my ears perhaps to see what I’m wearing in the moment, and then realizes in horror that they’ve gotten me the most useless present ever.

I’m not a fan of bracelets.  I can obviously wear them, but I prefer not to.  I don’t like anything around my wrist.  For a long time, I wore a watch on my right wrist because my mother got it for me and I liked to look down at it and think of my mother.  The watch broke last year, and I decided that I didn’t want to replace it.

But necklaces and rings?  I wear those every day.

For the last few months, I’ve worn the typewriter key necklace Josh bought me just because.

On my left hand, I always wear my engagement ring and wedding band.  On my right hand, I wear another ring — one that I switch from time to time.  I’m currently wearing “mischief.”

Though I take off all my rings in order to write.  I don’t like to type wearing rings.

What jewelry do you wear daily?  What jewelry do you not like (or can’t) wear?

Dedicating this question to Persnickety Chickadee.

I can’t help it; I sometimes read Samantha Brick’s infertility posts, which are just as brash as her statements on beauty.  Sometimes I like that, other times, her inconsistencies or emphatic statements grate on me.  But her latest post contained an idea that has been discussed in various forms throughout the ALI blogosphere: what if IVF hadn’t been invented?

You usually see the writer take the path of gratitude: if not for IVF, I wouldn’t have kids.  If not for IVF, I wouldn’t have options.  We muse on what life would have been like — usually concluding more difficult — if we had struggled with infertility prior to the advent of IVF.  I know I have certainly written a post or two like that, grateful that I live in a time and place where there are numerous options for family building.

But Samantha Brick takes the other path, and it’s one I’ve read too: if not for IVF, I could have moved on easier.  If not for IVF, I wouldn’t have people second-guessing my choices.  If not for IVF, I wouldn’t be $50,000 in debt.  She writes,

For every woman lucky enough to fulfill her dream of motherhood, there are many more disillusioned women like me who remain childless.

Lives have been destroyed as well as created. Frequently, marriages do not survive the turmoil unleashed by IVF. There are also those who, years after their IVF has failed, are still paying off the cost of their extortionately-priced treatment. 

I admit that I wouldn’t be writing this if IVF had given me the child I longed for — but it hasn’t.

She lost me with that last line, because her argument is reduced to sour grapes with it.  It makes me write off a lot that comes after it, especially her statement: “I also believe that there are some things we simply shouldn’t meddle with — and artificially creating life is one of them.”  It’s not that people aren’t entitled to try IVF and then become uncomfortable with it once their feet have been in the stirrups.  But it’s difficult to swallow a statement like that when it comes after her earlier admittance that the whole post wouldn’t exist if her last IVF cycle had been successful.

Which is not to say that overall, the idea that IVF = positive progress is true either.  Take success or failure with ART out of the picture (since few who end up with a child are going to complain, and few who do not end up with a child are going to say it was a great experience and well worth their time and money), we can look at the bare facts and see that the existence of IVF causes all kinds of issues depending on your personality type.  Which is why I fully support anyone who takes a look at IVF and decides that it isn’t something they’re willing to undertake.

Even if I personally am grateful that IVF exists and feel comfortable with the risks, I can’t deny that it’s a procedure that comes with a high price tag — financially, emotionally, and physically.  It really isn’t an option that fits everyone, and I’m not just talking about people who don’t medically qualify to do IVF.  Which is why I don’t think people should think of IVF as a simple solution akin to slapping a band-aid on a bleeding knee.  It’s a big deal; and it deserves to be treated like a big deal.

If the option wasn’t there, you wouldn’t feel guilty for not trying IVF.  I mean, yes, that clunky sentence assumes that you feel guilt, and perhaps you don’t, but I have read on more than one blog an internal debate made external explaining why the writer couldn’t progress to IVF or why she needed to walk away from it, and the overriding sentiment in the post is almost always one of guilt.  But why?  Why should we ever feel guilty for taking care of ourselves or listening to our limits?  Probably due to the reactions of others, or this myth perpetuated by the media (and secretly believed by some of us as we judge ourselves) that IVF is as easy as pie.  So if you’re struggling with treatments, there must be something wrong with you.

[A side note: there is nothing wrong with you.  The media lies.  IVF isn’t as easy as pie.]

But if IVF didn’t exist, you wouldn’t feel the pressure to save up your money.  If it didn’t exist, you wouldn’t build your life around your cycle, forgoing all other opportunities.  If it didn’t exist, you wouldn’t have to overcome your fear of needles and anesthesia.  How many people enter treatments without really wanting to enter treatments simply because they think they should want to do treatments?  I don’t know — I don’t have an answer to that question.

I wrote in my manifesto many years ago:

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.

I remember a friend telling me that she was overwhelmed by choices when she came to America.  She would stand in the peanut butter aisle and have no clue which brand to buy.  In her country, there was one peanut butter option, and it came with a generic white label printed with the word “peanut butter” across it.  If you wanted peanut butter, you purchased this tub of peanut butter.  I can see the appeal in having a lack of choice even if I personally embrace my deluge of choices.  It can take a long time to get through a food store in America with all that choice.

The same is true for infertility.  It can take a long time to resolve your infertility* with all that choice.  Plus, we keep adding to the choices, and those choices have greater risks and price tags than peanut butter.  Do we opt for a womb transplant now that it’s a possibility?  Freeze our eggs?  Try IVIg treatments?  Will we have regrets if we don’t take options that are out there?

I am personally grateful for the options, and for me, a world without IVF wouldn’t be a plus.  I will fight until the end of time for all people to have access to fertility treatments.  But even while feeling only gratitude for Robert G. Edwards work, I can hear the other side that points out the problems that have come with this solution.

Are you glad for choices with family building, or do you think the numerous options cause more problems than solutions?

* As I’ve said before, it’s different – resolving your infertility vs. resolving your childlessness. You can have a child and never resolve your infertility, and you can resolve your infertility before you have a child. Unfortunately, it is also possible to never resolve your infertility nor your childlessness. And it sometimes happens simultaneously, childlessness and infertility resolved at the same time.

Very early into the coverage yesterday, long before we learned that an eight-year-old had died or that the injured were in the hundreds, long before Obama made his statement and newspapers had rehashed minimal amounts of news, I shut down the computer and set down the cell phone.  It was too much.  Too many status updates and too many Tweets and too many blog posts and too many CNN alerts.  There have been plenty of times when I’ve felt as if the Internet offers too much information, though usually in a crisis, when I am starved for information, I welcome the deluge.

I just couldn’t read anymore.  I couldn’t read the positive affirmations of Mr. Rogers nor could I see one more meme about how we’re all runners today.  Normally these types of things would make me feel connected to the larger world.  But yesterday, they just made me feel quiet.

The ChickieNob and I baked banana muffins and then sat on the floor with our legs out, feet touching, allowing Truman to run back and forth between us.  She knew what had happened because she overheard me speaking to my mother.  She didn’t want to talk about it.  She was quiet too.

I don’t know what makes that stream of conversation loud or soft. I don’t know why it’s comforting sometimes and not others. All I know is that yesterday, it didn’t help to keep talking about it or reading about it. All those words did was turn up the volume in my brain.

I had been following the Boston Marathon from home as I wrote.  My niece was along the route, cheering on her father who was running his first marathon.  He had been training for a long time, running smaller races as he built up to this.  Better him than me, I thought, over the idea of doing anything for 26.2 miles.  My niece texted me an update; he was doing great

I left the computer and telephone to pick up the twins from school along with their friend.  I walked into the house not knowing that anything was wrong.  I only learned about the marathon when I walked to the computer to switch it to the Wolvog’s log in so the boys could use the computer.  Explosion at the Boston Marathon.

And in a split second, everything changed.

My ex-brother-in-law is okay, he wasn’t finished with the race yet.  So many people are not okay.

My body feels ill, heavy, as if there is something viral coursing through my veins.  The last time I felt like this was during the Newtown shootings, when the day went from unremarkable to devastating in a matter of seconds.  What kind of world do we live in where there are no safe spaces?  Where a race, meant to raise money for charities, can be ripped apart by bombs?  When elementary schools can be shot out?

I’m just speechless.

This post is for anyone who self-hosts or who may self-host in the future or is on the free version of WordPress.  Though I would love to know if my site’s loading time has slowed down considerably for you since Friday.  It is being hit by a wave of spam, and while my spam program has done a decent job keeping most of it out, I may need to play with the security plugins.

You’ve probably heard right now that WordPress is under attack by bots.  They are attempting to break into blogs that still have the admin username that came with your space when you set up WordPress.  There are two simple things you can do to protect your blog right now:

Get Rid of the Admin Username

• Go into “users” on your left sidebar.
• Click “add new.”
• Create a new user account with a username that only you will know.  In other words, don’t make your username your blog name or your real name.  Make the name (different from the username) anything you want.  The name will show up at the bottom of your posts, so make it different from the username.  Give this account administrative privileges.
• Log out of WordPress.
• Sign back in with your new user account.
• Delete the admin account and reassign all your posts to the new account.  It is important to get rid of this admin account.

Install a Security Plugin Such as Wordfence

• Go into “plugins” on your left sidebar.
• Click “add new.”
• Do a search for Wordfence (a similar plugin is Better WP Security), install, and activate it.
• Run a scan and correct any problems the program finds.
• Click on “live traffic” and choose the menu for “logins and logouts.”  Check this daily to see if people are trying to log into your account and what username they are using.  If they ever get the username correct but the password wrong, you may want to return to those instructions above and change your username.  If they get the username and password correct, you will see the IP address of the person who logged into your account.
• Go into options and sign up for alerts.  Get notified whenever someone logs into your site.  You’ll get one whenever you log in that you can delete without reading, but if you haven’t logged in and you get that email, you’ll know someone has been in your site.
• You can also lockout IP addresses that attempt to break into your account, though bots will keep switching IP addresses, so not all that helpful in an attack.

I think of plugins like Wordfence akin to a security alarm.  It will let you know that someone is trying to break in, though it won’t necessarily keep everyone out.  It just makes you a harder target.

Make sure you are always updating and running the most up-to-date version of WordPress.  Don’t install plugins that you haven’t done diligence and checked out.  Yes, even if WordPress has vetted them. (Case in point: there were problems with both a Google Analytics plugin and a social media widget plugin last week.) Delete plugins you’re not using.  Use two-step verification — there are plugins for installed WordPress and you can also get it for any WordPress.com account.

And that’s one to grow on…