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 April list is now closed.  The May list will open on 4/27.
  
• 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. A Bliss Filled Life (open adoption, infertility, parenting)
3. Breathe Gently (1st-pregnancy, IVF, PCOS)
4. Life Of An Army Wife (donor eggs, army, crafting)
5. Yet Another Bitter Infertile (infertility, miscarriage, TTC)
6. Elana’s Musings (pregnancy, parenting, randomness)
7. My Journey To Motherhood (unicornuate uterus, ttc)
8. With Just a Little Help (parenting, IVF, life)
9. Donating Hope (donor gametes, IUI, faith)
10. Comatised (life, love, cancer)
11. Waiting for baby (adoption, pcos, ivf)
12. Dear Finley (neonatal death, life after loss, new normal)
13. The Empty Uterus (FET, IVF, Life)
14. Feeling Beachie (life, humor, family)
15. Two Adults, One Child (infertility, loss. moving on)
16. Ready For My Bundle (pregnant after ivf, family, smc)
17. A Crack In Everything (loss, acceptance, TTC while single)
18. The 2 Week Wait (infertility motherhood humor)
19. Old Lady and No Baby (fet, softball, family)
20. Who Shot Down My Stork? (IUI, unexplained IF, life)
21. Rhody Life (wedding recap, home design, diy)
22. Our Pathway to Parenthood (1st pregnancy, infertility, faith)
23. Just T (recurrent miscarriage, unexplained infertility)
24. Just Another Infertility Blog (ivf, ttc, loss)
25. Waiting to Expand (pregnancy, infertility, loss)
26. Team Harries Beats Infertility (faith, holistic, health)
27. Where the bleep is our stork (TTC #1, infertility, struggles)
28. How I Spend My Dash (twins, parenting, life)
29. Thought Provoking Moments (IVF, pregnancy & loss, life lessons)
30. As Good As It Gets (infertility, parenting, life)
31. Punch Today In The Face (PCOS, overcoming IF, #3)
32. Creating a Family (infertility, adoption, adoptive parenting)
33. No Good Eggs (POF, donor egg IVF)
34. From Gutter to Stars (therapist, infertility, adoption)
35. When Is It My Turn? (unexplained IF, IUI)
36. Baby On Mind (infertility, embryo adoption, over 40)
37. Following My Sun (neonatal loss, ttc after loss, gay rights)
38. Living Our Miracle (embryo adoption, premature ovarian failure, motherhood)
39. Infertility Unexplained (pregnancy after IVF)
40. I Should B… (random, infertility, new)
41. Frozen OJ (endo, infertility, taking a break)
42. My journey through infertility, pregnancy & loss (infertility, pregnancy, loss)
43. Poemfish (adoption, parenting, lesbian family)
44. Putter Pie (marriage, pregnancy, humor)
45. Patience is Not My Virtue (waiting for iui)
46. Jenn & Tommy: Figuring It Out (marriage, endometriosis, decisions, love)
47. Wishing on a Snowflake (infertility, loss, seeking donor embryos)
48. Unglamorous (second child, work-life balance, family)
49. The Barreness (art, infertility, musings)
50. Hidden Infertility (infertility, growing, daily life)
51. From Tracie (life, books, parenting)
52. Just T (loss, secondary infertility, quilts.)
53. MissConception (parenting after IF, twin loss, PCOS)
54. Baby Makin’ (pcos, baby #1, infertility)
55. Riding the Rollercoaster – Trying for our Together Baby (infertility, loss, depression)
56. A Greater Yes (embryo adoption donation, parenting)
57. Recipes for Lemons (ttc#1 struggles optimism)
58. TTC Baby E3 (IVF#2, secondary infertility)
59. The Egg Timer Is About To Ring (infertility, older mom, ttc)
60. Sweet Dreams are Made of This (adoption, life)
61. Emma in Mommyland (new sahm, life, new home)
62. One Step at a Time (baby after infertility)
63. In My Garden Grow (ivf infertility research)
64. Journey to the Finish Line (pregnancy after infertility, twins, humor)
65. One day at a time (IUI, adoption, life)
66. Dragondreamer’s Lair (parenting, secondary infertility, life)
67. Whitney & Erick (surrogacy, RPL, advocacy)
68. Life As I Know It (twins, toddler, life)
69. The April list is now closed.  The May list will open on 4/27

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 blue, the next month it will be purple, 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.

From today’s SCOTUS transcript:

Justice Kagan: Well, suppose a state said, Mr. Cooper, suppose a state said that because we think that the focus of marriage really should be on procreation, we are not going to give marriage licenses anymore to any couple where both people are over the age of 55.  Would that be Constitutional?

Mr. Cooper: No, your Honour, it would not be Constitutional.

Justice Kagan: Because that’s the same state interest, I would think, you know.  If you are over the age of 55, you don’t help us serve the government’s interest in regulating procreation through marriage.  So why is that different?

And in one fell swoop, Justice Kagan not only forwards the conversation about marriage equality, but she also gives voice inadvertently to every childless, child-free, or infertile person who has felt marginalized in a procreation-focused society and pointed out that there are a multitude of reasons to marry, and a multitude of ways to lead a good life.

Thank you, Justice Kagan.

May the Supreme Court finally rule what the majority of us already know: that love is love.  That sometimes it isn’t enough to say to each other, “we are a couple.”  Sometimes you need others chiming in with recognition of your couplehood — and this includes family, but it also includes your national and state government — repeating back to you those words: “you are a couple.”  In a world that sometimes attempts to stamp down love while bemoaning that there just isn’t enough of it in this world, our family chooses to stand with love and marriage equality.

So take all the craziness I just brought to talking about colour and kick it up a notch, and you now have how I feel about fonts.

I can only write using certain fonts.  Everything having to do with Rachel Goldman is written in Garamond.  I can only write about her in Garamond, single-spaced (it only gets put into double space when it leaves my hands to go to the agent or publisher).  If computers ever stopped supporting the font Garamond, there would no longer be a Rachel Goldman.

The one exception is mapping for Rachel Goldman books (sketching out notes, scene by scene).  Those all have to be done in American Typewriter.

I recently started writing a new book — a paranormal romance — in Cambria.  It felt like a Cambria sort of book at first.  I got out the first thirty pages, and then decided to tweak the plotline, and with the tweak, I needed a new font.  I’ve tabled it for the time being until I finish Apart at the Seams, but picking a new font will need to take place before I continue writing it.

This blog — Stirrup Queens — is written in Georgia.  Georgia is totally fine, neither here nor there.  It’s like water to me.

I like serifed fonts.  I pretty much only like serifed fonts.  They make me feel as if the word is complete.  Sans-serifed fonts, such as Arial, make me feel as if the words are a little too naked.  Not a freeing sort of naked, but more like forgetting-to-put-on-your-pants-and-then-driving-to-work naked.  To me, it’s not an accident that sans-serifed fonts are sometimes called “grotesque” by typographers (fine, from “Grotesk”).  I find them grotesque.

Let me explain how important fonts are to me: I would rather write a book on a typewriter with a serifed font than write a book on a computer with a sans-serifed font.  I know part of the reason for the typewriter would also be that I like to hear clicks while I’m writing (I can’t use a “silent” keyboard).  But the much larger part would be the font.

I love thinking about fonts and dissecting fonts, and I subscribe to a bunch of blogs that talk about nothing but fonts.  I love words like spine and descender and crossbar.  A good font make me happy.  It’s like getting hot chocolate on a cold day: it invites you in.  A good font invites the reader into a word, and if the words link together well, it invites the reader into a world.

I really care about the fonts other people use too.  I like that most blog readers (such as Feedly), put all the posts into the same typeface.  But I appreciate good fonts so much that I will leave Feedly and read the post on your site, even if I know that I can’t comment because I’m on my phone, just so I can see your font.  A lot of times, I think of bloggers in terms of their font — part of how I process your personality comes from your font choice — and when you change your font, it throws me off.  Massively.

On a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being “I never notice fonts… what the hell are you talking about?” and 10 being “I can name all of my favourite fonts too” where do you fall in terms of font-love?

As much as I said that I don’t decorate, colour is very important to me.  It matters… everywhere.  Not just in terms of house decoration.  For instance, with clothing, I cannot think in certain colours, so while I may wear them to a party, I would never wear them to write in. (I am very much like Beckett: “any colour, so long as it’s grey.”)  Even if all I am writing is a fluffy little blog post like this one.  I only like to wear black, grey, and navy blue.  I can sometimes handle wearing brown, but it’s really hit or miss.  Almost everything needs to be solid — one colour — except that I have a lot of comic book t-shirts.  I am never as productive wearing a comic book t-shirt as I am wearing a solid coloured shirt.

I picked a lot of the paint in the house mostly because I have big feelings about colours whereas Josh has normal feelings about colours.  Our living room is a deep red that Josh calls “the steakhouse.”  My desk is in the living room, and I like being surrounded by red walls.  My favourite red is #CC0000.  Yes, I know the hex code of all my favourite colours, and I have an app on my iPhone that allows me to point my phone at any object and get the hex code for its colour.  Yes, I’m well aware of how all this is making me sound.

My downstairs bathroom is orange.  Orange is my favourite colour, and I actually wanted the living room to be orange, but Josh put his foot down and told me that he could only handle a small amount of orange.  So it went in our bathroom.  My favourite shades of orange all have an undertone of brown for balance.  My brother refers to our downstairs bathroom as “peeing on the sun” because there is a heat vent next to the toilet, and combining it with the orange walls makes one feel as if they’ve entered a ring of fire.  This, by the way, is a perfect orange (#CD661D).

By the way, every wall is coloured with paint.  I can’t stand wallpaper.  I can’t stand prints or designs or patterns on walls.  Just flat colour across the surface; matte finish.

Upstairs, we have morose shades of violet and pale blue in various rooms, all with a grey undertone.  It’s the only way I’ll allow a pastel colour anywhere near my life: it has to have a grey undertone.

Because pastels make me ill.  As does neon.  As do certain shades of yellow, except those with orange undertones.  Turquoise, aqua, a large chunk of the purple family except for plum.  Though there are exceptions to all those statements if the colour comes at a certain time and place, especially in relation to other surrounding colours.  For instance, I can’t stand the colour ultramarine (#120A8F), but I had an office that had an ultramarine carpet, and that carpet in that particular office made me so happy.  Though if you put that exact same carpet in a different space, I probably wouldn’t have liked it at all.

There are books I won’t buy simply because I don’t like the colours used on the cover. (I have been very lucky to work with publishers who work around my colour requests.)  The same goes for kitchen equipment: function doesn’t matter if the colour turns me off to cooking.  And a lot of my food phobias have to do with colour — namely, white.

Where do you fall on the colour-love spectrum, with 1 being indifference to colour and 10 bring excited/bothered by colours?  And, since I told you mine, what is your favourite colour?

There was an article in the Montreal Gazette a few weeks ago that Bleu sent me about womb transplants.  A Turkish woman born without a uterus underwent a uterus transplant (from a brain-dead donor) in 2011, and now she was getting ready for an embryo transfer constructed out of her egg and her husband’s sperm.  The article also mentioned two women in Sweden who received donated uteruses from their mothers.

What bothered me was the second paragraph.  After presenting the lede, before getting to any of the relevant information, the author of the article paused to write:

Human uterus transplantation — the latest coup in assisted baby making — is raising new questions about how far we’re willing to push the outer limits of procreation.

It’s a coup?  Talking a notoriously stingy boss into a raise in the middle of budget difficulties at work is a coup.  Providing a human being with an organ they were born without?  I’m not sure if I would use a term that makes the reproductive endocrinologists and surgeons sound like little scamps getting away with one of their hair-brained schemes.

How far we’re willing to push?  Do we use that language to discuss heart transplants?  Or kidney transplants?  When we’re talking about extending life vs. beginning it, do we ever talk about a practice common for other organs in the body as going too far?

This type of opening creates a bias in the reader.

The questions aren’t unfounded, but they also aren’t unpacked until much later in the article when the doctor points out the ethical concerns:

Who is responsible should something go wrong, he wonders? “What’s the strategy for handling a stillborn baby, (or) a damaged baby?” Is it worth the risks when other options — surrogacy or adoption — exist? “Is it worth taking the risk just to permit the person to deliver the baby? How important is this?”

Those are valid concerns.  Who is responsible?  The patient who made the decision to undergo the transplant or the doctor who agreed to do it?  Are the risks worth it?  Should we keep trying to work out ways for women to experience pregnancy or use their own gametes, if other paths to parenthood exist?  What about the cost — financially and emotionally and physically?  There aren’t easy answers to these questions, nor can they really be debated in a vacuum: there are very real people with very real feelings living out all these hypothetical situations.

It isn’t until much later — again — in the article that we get to the heart of the matter.  Why take the risk?  “While surrogacy would be simpler, Akar said that the practice is illegal in some countries, including Turkey.”  Politics is why she is taking the risk.  Politics, which affect the uterus of every woman in almost every country, just in different ways.

Which made the ending words of the article all the more poignant:

Last year, Montreal researchers developed guidelines for a woman to be ethically considered a candidate for a uterus transplant. The proposed criteria include that the recipient doesn’t exhibit “frank unsuitability for motherhood.”

“If the goal of the (uterus) transplant is to have a child, then ethically we should ensure that that person is capable of caring for a child.”

It’s obviously a sound idea, but how can one not think about the state of reproductive rights around the world, especially in the face of Personhood bills?  In Montreal, they’re suggesting withholding a uterus transplant from a woman if she can’t prove that she is capable of parenting.  In America, we force women to carry a child if they accidentally become pregnant, even if she is seeking an abortion because she knows she is not capable of caring for a child.

So if a woman requests a uterus because she was born without one, and she is willing to go through the physical pain of surgery and the financial burden of surgery and the emotional fallout of surgery, she still needs to prove whether she is capable of parenting, by these Canadian standards.  I’m willing to bet that the average woman born without a uterus who is undergoing something as difficult as a transplant is someone who has given a little thought to wanting to be a parent.  But a woman who is raped in North Dakota and becomes pregnant, if their ballot measure passes, will not be able to terminate the pregnancy if she states that she is incapable of caring for the child.  I’m not impressed with the ideas that either country holds for their women on either side of the need spectrum: either needing assistance to achieve a pregnancy or needing assistance to end a pregnancy.

I’ve always loved the Art Buchwald piece called “Throwing Out the Bath Water” which ends: “I’m with the ‘Right to Life’ not ‘Right to Live.'”

The world is so concerned about making women jump through hoops to have a child if they need assistance conceiving, and we’re so concerned with making them carry a child to term if they become pregnant before they’re ready: but why aren’t we showing that same concern for the children who are here and falling through the cracks while we focus all of our attention on conception and pregnancy?  It feels, sometimes, as if we are obsessed with those nine months of pregnancy, wanting to control it as much as possible with rules and regulations, but then, once the child is here, politicians move to a phase of hands-off.  It’s not that we shouldn’t be concerned with the ethics of conception and birth, but we shouldn’t make it our sole concern without any regard to the 80+ years that come after a birth in a person’s life.

I really hope I live to see the day when women will have control over their bodies, and be able to treat their medical conditions as their doctor’s see fit.