I have been thinking a lot about that New York Times article about the importance of family stories; of creating family holidays and creating a family culture.  I think my parents and my larger extended family did a good job of shaping a family culture.  There are stories that keep getting passed down through generations and made-up words and shorthand.  I am close with my siblings and my parents.  I feel as if we all belong to one another, like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces connect snugly.

Some Jewish couples have an engagement ceremony called a tenaim.  We did, and we created two versions of the wedding conditions that we wrote together outlining both what was important to us as a couple as well as promises we were making one another in regards to our marriage.  It contained the lofty (how we wanted to raise the kids) and the mundane (financial decisions).  The first version was made as a piece of art that we currently have framed in our living room, and the other was painted directly onto the pottery that we broke.  We actually had our mothers do the breaking, placing the ceramic tile inside a pillowcase to catch the fragments.  And then we placed a chunk of pottery inside a clear box and tied it with a knotted ribbon to symbolize that idea that marriage will bond us together and to ever part would cause the heart to fragment.  We gave a piece each to our siblings, parents, and grandparents, and we have one in our house too.

[As a side note, family members, no harm no foul if you’ve lost our tenaim piece.  I mean, it’s just the manifestation of our wedding vows…  Um, I am just kidding.  I get that my marriage is important to me, and lots of other people are cheering us on, but I don’t expect everyone to still know where their shard of pottery is in the house.  But, if you have lost your piece and would like a new one, we happen to have the pillowcase in our storage room and we’d be happy to pass along another copy.  And no judgments about all the crap in the storage room — our tenaim is important!]

So, family culture, I think we’re doing a decent job of creating that for the twins.  They know their place in the much larger family story going back many generations (remember the never-ending family tree project from last summer?  We’re continuing it this summer with a family website and oral history project).  We have family holidays and made-up words and stories we tell over and over again.

But I was thinking about how these stories are also one thing that makes death so difficult.  Why we’re gutted even when the death occurs at the end of a long life.  Because for the rest of us who are left behind, that death cuts us off from our stories.  Our chronological space in the family doesn’t change, but the virtual space it occupies does, shifting us around, creating fissures, melding people.  And this thing that we’ve determined is so important — the key to our happiness: stories — is the one thing we can’t ask about anymore.  We can’t go back to that person and ask all the questions that we think of — because don’t we always think up one more question after the person is gone?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this week, the idea of our family stories, and how many times I have thought to call my grandmother to tell her something.  Her phone number is still in our phone, and I sometimes scroll past it when I know I can’t call her just to feel as if I’ve connected somehow.  I have an audio tape in a storage box of her telling me stories about her childhood, and my goal this summer is to go through those boxes and find the tape so I can make a digital copy.

There are questions that I can ask others in the family and get an answer, but there are things that she took with her, that I can never find out now.  Things I hadn’t thought to ask or record.

These are ideas that I played with a lot in Measure of Love, a paper tenaim, our connection to those stories and losing them with death.  I just hadn’t really put together how I had been thinking about this for a long time before I realized that I was thinking about this for a long time.

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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:

• “The Red Carpet” (Something Beautiful)
• “Best Laid Plans” (Blog-o-Holl*ic)
• “My Rose Bush” (Lessons from an Infertile Social Worker)
• “Isolation” (Dreaming of Dimples)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Two Adults, One Child about the wave of anger she is feeling after the loss of her child.  She writes with such honesty: “I’m not even going to try to justify myself today, or talk myself down.  No introspection, no justifications.  I’m not going to start spouting all the advantages of having a family of three, and I’m not going to even think about how exciting it might be to be making a new start now that we’ve given up the infertility fight.  Those things may be true, but they don’t change one simple fact – that this situation is really fucking unfair.”  Please go read the whole post.

Something Out of Nothing has a raw post about mourning after a negative IVF cycle.  She moves in chunks of time, charting the process of letting the news sink in.  It is a very moving post.

Hapa Hopes has a post about a series of incidents at work which reveal how differently she processes her infertility than those around her.  Whereas they see her as cured now that she is pregnant, she knows the truth that not only do children not repair uteruses, but they also don’t erase all that came before them.

Family Building with a Twist has a post about how quickly her son has grown, and how they are culling out the baby items.  It’s a bittersweet post about not knowing what the future holds, but wanting to hold onto the present tightly.  She says it perfectly: “This wistfulness? They don’t mention that in the parenting books.  It hurts. A lot.”

Red’s Wrap has an amazing post on BlogHer about parenting after adoption.  I really can’t do it justice with a description, especially the powerful ending.

Lastly, is it wrong that I laughed through a lot of Bionic Mamas’s post on her uterine news?  Especially, “So. Out it comes, via hysteroscopy. That’s hyster- for “uterus” and -scopy for “you’d rather not be awake for this.”  It was just a damn fine read.

The roundup to the Roundup: More thoughts on our stories, tenaim, and death.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 15th and March 22nd) 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.

Here’s something I’d like to hear your thoughts on.  A bunch of us were just discussing a specific situation about Facebook communications (someone posted something innocuous on another person’s wall and the wall owner got upset), and we ranged widely in how we handled Facebook communications.

Facebook has multiple options for sending out a message to someone.  You can privately message them, which is akin to sending an email, or you can post directly on their wall if they’ve left that option open.

So let’s start with your personal rule for how you decide which form of communication you use.  There are obvious examples — if it could be potentially embarrassing or controversial, then hose clearly would benefit from the private nature of messaging.  But what about other stuff?  How do you determine what you put on someone’s wall and what you keep private?

For instance, if you just got dinner with someone, would you privately message how much fun you had or would you post that on their wall?  What about if they recommended a restaurant to you while you were standing around the water cooler at work (do people actually do that?); would you post on their Facebook wall how much you loved it if you then went to that restaurant or would you privately message your thanks for the recommendation?

The second question is whether you always respond in the same manner in which you were contacted.  If someone privately messages you, would you ever send your response by posting on their wall?  If someone posts on your wall, do you take the conversation off-the-wall and move to private messaging?  What if the topic at hand was something as innocuous as what you’re making for dinner that night?  If the person asked for a recipe via private message, would it be okay to find the recipe and then post it on their wall?

Lastly, most of us have had to remove a wall post at one point or another because while someone else was comfortable with their comment being public, the owner of the wall was not.  So the third question is do you tell the person why you’ve removed their wall update, or do you simply remove and move on without commentary?

So how do you navigate Facebook communication?

The ChickieNob asked me to make her a cake this week. “What do we need a cake for?” I asked.

“Just because,” she answered.

It has been so long since I’ve done something just because.  If I’m making a cake, it’s because it is someone’s birthday or we’re having dinner guests or I’ve volunteered to make a Smith Island cake for a Maryland culture unit.

If I’m going to the mall, it is because I have a specific shopping list or I’ve promised the Wolvog that he can touch some new Apple product or I’m buying someone a present.

If I’m at the library, it is because I need a specific book.

If I’m walking, it’s to get somewhere.  If I’m cooking, it’s because we need a meal.  If I’m driving, it’s to take someone to an activity.

My life is really lacking in “just because.”  And some of it is that life moves too quickly and there is too much to do, and the “just becauses” are the first thing to get dropped because they aren’t immediately necessary.  I mean, yes, they are necessary because I’m obviously feeling the effects of living a life deplete of “just becauses.”  I feel frayed at the edges and stretched thin.

It is impossible to drop things from the to-do list.  I mean, what should I not do?  Skip feeding the kids?  Not turn in work?  But this I could do — throw together a cake and put it in the oven.  Make a drizzled icing akin to a donut glaze.  The whole thing took me about 20 minutes of actual time in the kitchen between mixing the batter and cleaning up the pans.

So I made a cake for no other reason than just because.  And we ate it, just because.  With milk.

Do you have enough “just because” in your life?

 

So A Half Baked Life had a fascinating post about the idea of seeing yourself in your parents or children; not physically, but the traits that we pass one another.  In some ways, I am very much like my parents, and we’ve often jokingly called the ChickieNob mini-Mel because we are very similar in temperament, comportment, and interests.  There are times when Josh will say that he was exactly like the Wolvog when he was the Wolvog’s age.

But sometimes personality trait heredity feels akin to horoscopes in the newspaper which are written just specific enough that the reader thinks, “holy shit, how did it know?” and just vague enough that they apply to everyone.

For instance, this was my horoscope yesterday:

A study of a philosophical or metaphysical concept or perhaps an ancient or foreign culture could take up a lot of your time today, Gemini. Your mind is especially sharp and penetrating now, so you should notice more, learn more quickly, and retain more of what you read. The only downsides are possible eyestrain and a buzzing mind. Take a walk before you go to bed.

Just to cover all bases, it mentions philosophy, metaphysics, or an ancient culture.  Chances are that yes, I popped on Pinterest and saw some quote that stuck with me that I could bend myself into believing was philosophical.  Or maybe I spent time with someone dying and I wondered about the afterlife, hence occupying myself with the metaphysical.  And seriously, eating sushi could technically count as partaking in a foreign culture.  And then the rest of the horoscope pretty much tells me that it’s a good time to learn… as if it’s ever a bad time to do a lot of thinking.

I’m willing to bet that my horoscope applied to you too even if we’re not the same sign.

Image: Calif4beach

Sometimes I wonder if my traits really came from my parents or were passed along to the twins.  Or if the similar traits are vague enough that they could apply to just about anybody.  I say that I got my worrying from my mother and passed it along to my daughter, but… seriously… who doesn’t worry?  I mean, yes, there is a certain percentage of laidback people who aren’t worriers at all, but a healthy segment of the population lies awake at night worrying about the future and mentally tossing around what ifs.  Did I really inherit that or learn that, or does it just seem that way?  If the options are worrier or not-worrier, then there was a 50/50 chance that I’d be a worrier.  Pretty good odds.

Which is not to say that there aren’t unusual traits that we do pass along or pick up from those around us, quirks that aren’t shared by the vast majority of the population around us.  But it’s hard for me to untangle what I gave them and what we coincidentally share simply due to statistics.

I love A Half Baked Life’s explanation of that re-boiling, that transformation of yourself through observation.  I think it flows both ways, back towards older generations and forward toward the ones we’re creating.  I loved the New York Times article yesterday about the importance of family stories.  Of having access to your family’s history.  The article talks about a psychologist who developed a way to measure how deeply connected a child was to their family’s story.

They developed a measure called the “Do You Know?” scale that asked children to answer 20 questions.

Examples included: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family? Do you know the story of your birth?

Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush asked those questions of four dozen families in the summer of 2001, and taped several of their dinner table conversations. They then compared the children’s results to a battery of psychological tests the children had taken, and reached an overwhelming conclusion. The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.

Maybe that is what I’m seeing more than the passing of actual traits.  It’s the replaying of a story that has happened before me, and that I’m still retelling to my children.  We hear about our ancestors and we model ourselves after them in order to prove that we belong, that we’re part of this larger whole.  I come from this long of strong-willed women, but I don’t really know if I inherited this strong-will, or if I created this strong-will in order to mirror the women I saw before me, to give them proof that I belonged to them.

We all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to feel cushioned by it, protected by it.  Aren’t we all just striving to understand where we came from — in both the immediate sense of our families and the larger sense of the world as a whole?  There is something comforting about seeing the traits of my grandmother playing out in my daughter, in seeing that spark that I miss now that she’s gone.  I know that the Wolvog’s neatness has been a comfort to everyone on Josh’s side of the family as they miss his grandfather, who also was known for his impeccable tidiness.  What if we created those traits in them just because we missed those people; so we could feel connected to them?  What if the twins picked up subconsciously on subtle hints and we molded their behaviour so they deliver exactly what we hope to see?

Or maybe it’s all just so vague, like genetic horoscopes.  We tell the Wolvog that he got his neatness from his paternal great-grandfather and his kindheartedness and sensitivity from his maternal great-grandfather, but really, isn’t neatness one of those 50/50 things?  Kindness?  I wanted him to be like those two men because they were mensches, but what if we just subtly shaped his menschkeit so he would emerge like those two men?  And truly, we’re not talking about unusual quirks — neatness, sensitivity — again, wasn’t he just as likely to be that way even if he hadn’t been born into this family with those two men as his ancestors?

Where our behaviours come from and where will they go is obviously a question that so many of us grapple with in the community, especially within adoption, donor gametes, or if we end up living child-free after infertility, all cases where we don’t see where our genes go, and in some cases, where we may be influencing with nurture someone else’s nature.

I don’t have an answer; I just think it’s something interesting to think about.

I know the title of this post probably struck you as strange… isn’t all candy vegetarian?  Well… no.  I’m not talking about the inclusion of dairy, since dairy wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for lacto-ovo vegetarians.  I’m talking about… other stuff.  You may want to stop reading if you don’t want to get grossed out.  I know that I sound a little bit like Mad-Eye Moody presenting the three unforgivable curses to his fourth year class when I talk about food additives.  “Why am I showing you? Because you’ve got to know. You’ve got to appreciate what the worst is. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you’re facing it. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!”

Talking about food additives is enough to make me want to get my own hip flask.

If you keep reading, you’ve been forewarned if you end up learning something nasty about your favourite candy.

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The reason we don’t eat a lot of processed foods isn’t for health reasons, since I’m perfectly fine ingesting Red 40, a dye made from petroleum (yum!).   It’s because some additives are derived from animal sources.  And some of those animals sources, such as dried scale insects or connective tissue, skeeve me out.

I compiled the information below for another family — which is what I understand about food substances and dyes — and thought I’d post it here in case someone else could use it.  Here are a few ingredients to look for along with the various names they go by in food substances.

Usual Suspects

Carmine: (a.k.a. cochineal, crimson lake, E120, or natural red #4) a dye made out of the dried bodies of a type of scale insect.  Though a lot of the time carmine appears red, it can also be mixed with other dyes to produce purples or pinks.  It’s found in a lot of red foods from ice cream to candy and red drinks such as fruit punch.

Shellec: (a.k.a. confectioner’s glaze or E904) an insect secretion, similar to honey, made by female lac bugs and left behind on bark.  It makes everything from fruit and vegetables to candy and pills appear smooth and shiny.

Honey: an insect liquid made by bees from flower nectar.  It is essentially bee vomit — they regurgitate it.  As opposed to shellac, which lac bugs create themselves and secrete.

Gelatin: a substance obtained by boiling the connective tissue and bones of animals.  It’s found in tons of candy (think anything gummy such as gummy bears or marshmallows) and Jell-o, but it’s also in strange places such as breakfast cereal or yogurt.  Kosher gelatin comes from fish bones as opposed to non-kosher gelatin, which comes from cow or pig bones.

Glycerin: a liquid that can be either plant or animal-based (or even synthetic).  It’s a hit-or-miss substance.

Beeswax: (a.k.a. E901) a natural wax secreted by bees.  You can find it in shiny and gummy candies.

The Okay Candy List

Some items on the list contain dairy (especially the chocolate), but they are carmine, shellac, and gelatin-free*

• Airheads taffy
• Almond Joy
• Blow Pops
• Cadbury chocolate
• Dots
• Dum-Dums
• Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews
• Heath
• Hershey Bar
• Hershey Kisses
• Jolly Ranchers (lollipops and hard candy)
• Kit Kat
• Laffy Taffy
• M&Ms
• Milky Way
• Mounds
• Now and Laters
• Red Vines
• Reeses
• Rolos
• Smarties (non-chocolate version in the US)
• Snickers
• Sour Patch Kids
• Swedish Fish
• Sweet Tarts
• Twix
• Twizzlers

The hardest thing is that I constructed this list to the best of my abilities, and I still know that there have been times when I’ve been shocked to learn that something I’ve been eating has contained things I would have never consumed knowingly.  So I apologize if I unknowingly included something above which has an animal-based additive in it.  We don’t eat every candy on the list above since some of them aren’t kosher, but those are the ones that passed when I read the labels.

And, of course, there is the fact that we consume bugs on a daily basis in processed food.  But I differentiate between what I consume unknowingly and what is clearly written on the package.  There are some things that also bother me more than others.  I am vigilant about gelatin and carmine since the animal gave up its life to produce those products.  I am less concerned with honey and shellac.  I’ll have Jelly Belly jellybeans from time to time (they contain shellac).  But I’ll never have Jell-o.

* Since candy companies often change ingredients, please always read the ingredients label.  It goes both ways — some candies I would have never eaten suddenly become okay, and others that I’ve enjoyed have suddenly started using confectioner’s glaze or gelatin.  All these candies are for the US versions.  The same candies can be made with non-vegetarian substances outside the US.

If you have a question about a specific candy, list it below and I can look it up for you.  There are plenty more okay candies that I didn’t list above.