Last Friday, the twins and I were having dinner out together before we went to see a play.  The ChickieNob was asking for specific stories: Tell me about the time there was a tornado while you were in class, and how the world looked when you walked outside after.  Tell me about the time someone threw a police road block through your apartment window.  And then she said, “tell me a story I’ve never heard.”  Suddenly this story popped into my head, a story I had never told almost anyone before about something that happened back in high school.  I told them this long tale of what had happened which ended with me yelling at the boy in the story.  I admitted that I let out a long string of curse words at the top of my lungs while in the mall.  And then I did it again when he tried to call me later to apologize.  The ChickieNob was aghast.  “Did you apologize?”

No, I admitted.  I hadn’t apologized, though I certainly had come to feel sorry about how I reacted once I calmed down.  “You need to write him an apology.”

“It’s been over 20 years,” I pointed out.  “He may not even remember.”

“You have to apologize anyway!” she admonished.

She didn’t forget.  She asked me the next day if I had written my apology.  I hadn’t.  She told me to write myself a note so I would remember to do it.  So I wrote myself a note, and then, in the middle of the week, I found the boy on Facebook and sent him a note.  I didn’t know if he would remember me much less the incident, but the ChickieNob was satisfied.  “Good! That is what you should have done 20 years ago!”

But in the end, he wrote back.  He remembered the incident, and we got to have a great conversation about it.  It was so nice to swing back to that moment, continue the story so it didn’t end on that sour note but instead had a long pause and ended with this conversation 20 years later.

He commented that the ChickieNob seemed like a very compassionate person, and I told her that.  She gave this secret smile and did this dance step and said, “I am!  And I’m glad he noticed that.”  Then she proceeded to pretend to be a zombie, dragging herself across the floor, grunting and groaning.  She is compassionate, yes, but she is also the strangest person I’ve ever met.  Like Mother Theresa meets Wednesday Addams.

*******

The kids weren’t really phased, even when I greeted them on Valentine’s Day by reminding them that their stuffed animals and kidneys were mine.  It’s as if they’ve developed an immunity to my shenanigans.

*******

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:

• “Gender Differences and Why They Don’t Matter So Much” (Science-Based Medicine)
• “On the Pain Olympics and Why I Don’t Think It’s a Dirty Term” (A Thousand Oceans)
• “From the Ashes” (Viva la Vida!)
• “Tik Tok Tik Tok 1-1-1” (While We Were Waiting)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Following My Sun has a heartbreakingly brief post that stunned me into a state of quietness.  It is a gorgeous post about loss; about those hours that most people sleep through and miss.

Bio Girl lost her sister Missy this week to brain cancer, and her post in the aftermath stayed in my mind for days.  She describes the fear the numbness brings so perfectly.  My heart is with her family right now as they grieve.

Mojo Working has a very angry post, which is a must-read for anyone wishing to see the far-reaching effects of a reproductive disease.  She states so honestly, “Sometimes it feels overwhelming, impossible to bear. And yet, somehow, I bear it. I wish I could say I bear it gracefully, but I do not. I bear it, but with a deep and unforgiving anger that bubbles just beneath the surface. I do not hide it well.”  Read this post.

An Expat’s Journal has a post recounting an important conversation she had with her husband.  It is about realizing that not only does she need a game plan in order to proceed, but she needs to know where her husband stands on the various paths out of infertility so they can plan together.  It is about knowing in the back of her head that one day she may hit her limit, and she needs to know what will happen next.  It is a beautiful post about two people planning a life together, one that weaves both their ideas, hopes, and limits.

Almost lastly… FrozenOJ’s Concentrated Life got me with a cartoon that states: “Sometimes I really hate my vagina” but she kept me as I cringed through a day in the life of OJ on her period.  She begins, “Watching feminine product commercials really make me jealous.”  And while none of us run through a field of flowers while we’re on the rag, our hair blowing back in the breeze, her reality is such a harsh contrast to the girls in the commercials who run and jump and go to the beach… all while bleeding profusely.

Really lastly, the amazing list of writers who stood up and were their own valentines this week (well, they were possibly other people’s valentines as well, but they were also their own valentine).  Please read and enjoy these great posts:

• Have sex. If you can. And if not, don’t stress and have it later.
• Letting Go Of…
• FTAW Day 2: It Takes a Village
• Mental Checkup
• Sleep Shenanigans
• AdoptLit Book Tour: The Sound of Hope, an Adoptee’s Quest for her Origins
• A Day in the Life
• Time Warp Tuesday: Heart
• Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
• Helping Out Our Aunt
• Past, Present and Future News
• Random Thoughts
• Everything I Love About Justin Timberlake’s “Suit & Tie” Video(s)
• Love, Sex and Rock n’ Roll: Happy Valentine’s Day.
• Why I Hate February
• I Am Angry
• My Worst Nightmare
• In Honor Of My Favorite Bees
• Due Date 2013: The Actual

The roundup to the Roundup: An apology 20 years in the making.  The twins don’t even react to my teasing anymore.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between February 8th and 15th) 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.

The ChickieNob and her friend have branched out from their original magazine idea to include a bunch of book spinoffs that they work on after school.  They use up a lot of my staples.  And a lot of paper.  It’s almost as if they hate trees and are attempting to single-handedly fell an entire forest-worth of trees by consuming more paper than thought humanly possible.  But this is not a post about how trees are clearly not the ChickieNob’s valentine. (Of course not; she also sent out dozens of paper valentines to friends.  And beyond that, it would be cruel to send a paper valentine to a tree, you know…)

It’s about how much she loves her work.

It is amazing to watch someone who is unabashedly in love with their work.  She should be in love with her work.  She has invested care and time and energy into producing these stapled-together books, and they are the best ChickieNob-produced stapled books.  She doesn’t look at them and say, “they don’t look like the books on our shelves.” She isn’t comparing because there is no comparison: only the ChickieNob can make a ChickieNob-like book, just as whoever writes the Magic Tree House books is the only person who can write Magic Tree House books in the way that she writes Magic Tree House books. The ChickieNob brings her stapled-together books into the kitchen where I’m baking and tells me that they’ve made yet another fabulous book, and I may want to get an envelope ready so we can send it out to publishers.

It is very easy to be someone else’s valentine.  It is easy to see their good qualities and want that person in our life.  It is easy to describe why I love Josh or the twins.

It is much harder to be my own valentine.  To see my good qualities and want to celebrate them.  It is hard to describe why I love myself, if I love myself at all.  Maybe it’s more like than love.  Or maybe, on some days, I just endure myself.

It is very easy to be impressed by the way another person does whatever they do that you do too: say they are a great doctor, rock climber, wife, student.  It is easy to see where someone else excels in their work or the way they lead their life.  Frankly, it’s easy to see it because we look for it, trying to find the comparisons to ourselves.  Sometimes we notice these things and feel like the other person deserves more accolades because they have something we don’t have, and sometimes we are confused as to why that paper got an A when ours only got a B.

An aside: I love the way A Half Baked Life says it: “I can do this when people experience joy in things that I don’t want; now it’s up to me to practice joy even when the achievement is something I would have wanted, too.” (See, easy to be a valentine to AHBL’s words.)

It is much harder to be impressed with your own work, to say that I’m a great doctor, rock climber, wife, student. (By the way, I’m expecting in this space that you are filling in whatever actions or roles are important to you.)  It is sometimes hard to write a resume without wondering if you’re boasting; if everything you’re saying is true.  I mean, yes, you know you can lead a team because you’ve done it before… but… are you really a good leader?  See, it’s easy to second-guess yourself.

It is very easy to love someone else’s blog posts.  To highlight a turn-of-phrase or suck in your breath over an a-ha moment of having similar thoughts explained in a perfect way.  To state all the reasons why you love someone else’s writing. I’ve done it every week for almost seven years with the Friday Blog Roundup.

It is much harder to love your own blog posts.  To sit back after you write something and say, “well that sure as hell is perfect.”  To state all the reasons why millions should check in daily to see your thoughts.  To state why you love the way you write.

So.

I’m going to ask you to do something hard today.  I’m going to ask you to look at your space and say, “hey, I wrote something worth reading this week.”  Because I promise you; you did.  It may not be the most fantastic thing you’ve ever written; it may not be the post you’ll pick next winter for the Creme de la Creme, but there was something you said this week that is worth a person’s time to look at.  Because they were your thoughts; just that.  And your thoughts have value, even when they’re not perfectly polished.

I’m going to ask you to be your own valentine and choose one of your posts written between February 8th and February 14th (and if you haven’t written this week, it’s fine to whip something up, post it, and submit that).  I’ve already picked my posts for the Roundup tomorrow, but this list will take the last slot; a collective effort of the ALI blogosphere for a week when more than one person has said they feel disconnected.

A catch: so that the list can go up on the Roundup tomorrow, it will close to submissions at 10 pm EST tonight.

So fill out the form below (don’t leave the post name and URL in the comment section) and check back tomorrow to see the list.

The submission form is now closed. Check here tomorrow to see the list.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

My fellow bloggers, a bunch of years ago — the date and context of the quote missing since this is, after all, the Web — Bob Dole said: “The internet is a great way to get on the net.”  And now, it’s time to look at the state of that net.  Today, thanks to the many many many posts by various writers, there is much progress to report.

I actually love the State of the Union because I like the idea of a check-in.  I sort of wish it weren’t one person delivering a speech, telling all of us the state of our union.  I sort of wish it were more like a procession of people all stepping up to the microphone and telling us in three sentences how they view America from their vantage point.  Do things look tense?  Hopeful?  Are they struggling?  Standing on firm footing?  Do they feel supported or wandering around in the dark?

I wish the State of the Union was less polished and more verbal diarrhea.  Not cruel.  Not taunting.  Not thoughtless.  But more emotion and less control.  More messy and less neat.  I know that wouldn’t project the strong leadership we wish to show to the world on America’s public face.  But still, I’m scared yet hopeful when I think about America.  Sometimes I just want to see scared and hopeful reflected back at me too.

I don’t think it would actually be helpful in the least for me to sum up the state of the ALI blogosphere.  It would only be my point-of-view, which is entirely dependent upon the blog posts I read and the emails I receive and the Tweets that pop up in my stream.  Beyond that, our corner of the blogosphere is too diverse in experience.  How could I ever speak to how adoption bloggers or donor gamete bloggers or child-free bloggers view the ALI blogosphere?  Or moreover, how longtime bloggers view it vs. newer bloggers?

But I think if everyone contributes two or three sentences, we could get a pretty fair panoramic view of the state of the ALI blogosphere.  I’ll place my thoughts in the comment section below too.

How does the ALI blogosphere look from your vantage point?  And moreover, how are you overall?

On Saturday night, I got together with a group of DC bloggers to remember Susan, who died a year ago last Thursday.  We picked the date of her death to get together, but we were really coming together to talk about her life.  To recount the stories; the touching ones and the funny ones and the ones some of us had never heard before and the ones some of us had forgotten until we were reminded.  I told the story of how Susan collected formula coupons for me after the twins were born early, ensuring that I never paid full price for formula.  For an entire year.

She was a pretty amazing woman.

It was also a time to touch base with friends, and in a few cases, put a face to a name I conversed with via email regularly but for whatever reason had never met.  In one case, a woman recognized me and came over to introduce herself.  We’ve talked for two years or so via email, trading writing news.  I always imagined her as an African-American woman with shoulder-length hair that she straightened.  In my mind, she was about 5 foot 10, willowy.  With a melodic voice and deep laugh.

In reality, she was a short white woman (I can say “short” because I beat her by an inch and a half!) with a totally cute ponytail and mid-Atlantic accent (I’m guessing New York or New Jersey).

Could not have been farther off.

And because I have oral diarrhea, I had to tell her just how off I was in imagining her.  I fear I freaked her out a bit.  I have no idea what in her emails or writing made me picture her the way I did.  There were probably accurate physical descriptions that I tuned out because it didn’t match what was in my head.  Though I couldn’t tune out reality when she was sitting right in front of me.

I was also extremely off in imagining Aerotropolitan Comitissa. In my mind, she was a petite woman resembling a young Joan Chen back when she was on Twin Peaks.  In reality, she is… well… picture the opposite of that.  She doesn’t have an image of herself on her blog, so I don’t want to paint a verbal picture for you.  It should suffice to say that she is quite pretty but in an exact opposite of Joan-Chen-in-Twin-Peaks sort of way.

I was a little bit off with Serenity.  After I met her the first time, I went back to imagining her as I imagined her as I read her blog before meeting her.  In both versions, she had brown hair.  Though a different face.  And different clothes.  Over time, I slowly allowed my mental image of Serenity to be replaced by the real Serenity, and now when I read her, I think of her as she actually looks vs. how I thought she looked.  But that was a much smaller jump to make, from verbal image Serenity (how I imagined her based solely on her words) to actual image Serenity (how I know she looks either due to meeting her face-to-face or seeing an image).

How good are you at guessing what people look like based on their words?  As you can probably guess from this post, I would probably rank somewhere near D+ if we were graded on this sort of thing.  Do you prefer to know what someone looks like and have an accurate mental image, or do you like painting your own mental image based on the words as you would a character in a book?  Sometimes I wonder if seeing the Harry Potter movies ruined the books a bit since I started imagining the characters as looking like the actors vs. as I thought of them before the movies came out.

Until last week, the ChickieNob had exactly one haircut in her eight years on earth.  It took place in May 2010.  She has now had two.

We talked about it for a while before it happened.  I would bring up the idea of a haircut, and she would wholeheartedly agree to it.  And then an hour would pass, and she’d come back into the room crying about it.  Or she’d come downstairs after bed to tell me that she couldn’t stop thinking about it.  So we kept putting it off.  Until I hit a wall and decided that it had to happen.  That day.

So I picked her up after school and she told me that she hadn’t any homework, which I replied was lucky because then we had our afternoon free.  And I wanted to fill it with a haircut.  She started to suck in her breath so she could howl out all of her arguments against the haircut, but I gently told her that we were going for a trim; something small, barely a change.  She agreed.

She was so scared that she held both my hands in her two hands while the woman washed her hair.  She couldn’t keep her head tucked down because she had to watch the woman at all times in the mirror.  But she got a lovely cut, an evening out of her tresses, and it now looks healthy.  Snappy.  Fun.  Her hair bounces again like a puppy.

The next morning, when the salon opened, I went by myself to get my own trim.  I too haven’t cut my hair since that day in May 2010.  I’m not a huge fan of change, but I realized that I usually have a drastic cut.  I go from hair at my waist to hair above my shoulders, and perhaps if I just had a trim to even things out, I would roll with it better.  So I told her I also wanted a trim; something to take off the split ends so it looked healthier.

As I sat down to have my hair washed, she asked me if I wanted to also cover up the grey.  This is a sensitive topic for me.  On one hand, I am older now, and I believe in looking my age.  I’m not ashamed to be in my late thirties and not in my early twenties.  It’s just a fact; time has passed.  On the other hand, I don’t necessarily love the grey in my hair.  I don’t love looking at it when I look in the mirror.  It is very different from the strange blond streak I have in my hair, mismatching all the brown around it.  Back on the first hand, I don’t like the idea of putting dye in my hair.  I don’t like the smell, don’t like the way it changes the texture of hair, would not be able to change shampoos in order to protect the colour. (I am really really particular about smells and at this point, I can’t switch shampoo or conditioner because having a different scent in my hair throws me off.)  Back on the second hand, I wonder if I look like I don’t try (I mean, I don’t try, but do I also look as if I don’t try?).  If I look dowdy.  If everyone else is wondering why I walk around with that much grey in my hair.

And somewhere in the middle, Josh has told me that he finds my grey streak sexy.

So I shrugged and said that I’m thinking about it, but that I hadn’t decided what to do yet so I wasn’t going to colour it that day.  I added that my husband liked it.

As she washed my hair, she proceeded to tell me that he’s lying.  That no man actually likes grey hair.  That it’s just something men say because they are too polite to tell their wives that they now look old and it’s unattractive.  She told me stories about other women who heard the same thing from their husbands but chose to cover their grey anyway, and then their marriages heated up because now they really looked attractive and their husband’s were happy.  As she talked, I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t start crying.

I had to sit there for the rest of the hair washing and then the haircut, which I asked her not to style so I could get going quickly.  It was a decent cut.  An inexpensive and easy one in the sense that it was not time consuming; close to home.  I went home and called Josh to tell him what the hairdresser said, and he sighed, especially when I started crying.

“Melissa, who are you going to believe?  A random stranger cutting your hair who has never met me, or your husband?”

It reminds me of how sweeping statements on the Internet can get under my skin.  When someone loftily tells people they know better.  They know the truth.  They know what people are thinking, and they know what words really mean, and they know how they or you are perceived.  And you read their statements and think, “well, that’s not true at all.”  But it gets under your skin anyway and you start to wonder if maybe you have it all wrong.  That is, until someone reminds you that no, they don’t know you.  They only know themselves.  And they either have a swollen ego to think they know what an entire group of people think, or no self-esteem unless they can convince you that they are correct.

I went upstairs and took a shower, washing her touch off my hair.  I used my shampoo to cover up the smell of her shampoo, and then styled it so it looked the same as always, just a little bit shorter and a lot neater.  It really was a good haircut.

It is odd that across cultures, we’ve chosen this one feature on our body to place so much emotional emphasis.  I don’t worry about the wrinkles around my eyes or my posture, but I worry about what my hair conveys about me.  Is it telling the story I want to tell?  I worry about cutting it too short and not feeling like myself, or one day losing it all together.  I worry about the colour and the texture and the length and the smell.  I worry about the curl and the smoothness and the way it catches the light.

But mostly I just worry that it is the first place that people look at to judge a person.

And how will people judge me with this haircut?  With this length?  With this curl?  With this grey?