[Melissa clinks on her glass in order to get everyone’s attention and then begins to speak.]

Welcome back everyone.  I am so glad that you’re here at the fourth annual virtual ALI Thanksgiving meal – an online meal that is a yearly tradition before we scatter to our respective actual Thanksgiving tables.  Is it held during American Thanksgiving week instead of Canadian or another country’s thankfulness celebration?  Yes, and I apologize for that, but at least I didn’t hold it on American Thanksgiving so hopefully everyone will feel comfortable participating regardless of where you live.

[Polite laughter from the non-American contingency while they secretly think about how Americans flood the Internet with Thanksgiving posts this week.]

The Thanksgiving myth is that people who had nothing more in common than simple humanness stopped looking at each other’s differences on this day in history and sat down at the table together for a meal.  It’s a meal about survival; about going into the winter knowing the odds are stacked against you and still pausing for a moment to think about the here and now.

And truly, what better myth to describe our own virtual Thanksgiving table, where donor gamete bloggers are sitting next to those living child-free after infertility, and the adoption bloggers are seated next to those starting their first IUI.  We have nothing more in common than our humanness and a desire to build our families.  Some have crossed the river and are standing on the opposite bank with the families they struggled to build.  Others are still wading in the water.  And some are left on the original bank, not able yet to move ahead or deciding to stay out of the water.  We are straight or gay, old or young, men or women.  And yet, we place aside our differences – wait, not place aside: we learn from our differences, we utilize our differences – to create community.  We all have the means to support one another.  It is as simple as a word, a kind gesture.

I would like to start off the festivities by making a toast: to thankfulness.

I say this every year, and I’ll say it again: I will always be incredibly grateful to this online community, a community that has grown to more than 3000 people currently, not to mention those who have slipped away from our community over the years.  It is difficult to put into words how it feels to know that there are people around the world connected to you emotionally.  You are tied to their story and they are tied to yours and together, those threads intertwine to make a web strong enough to hold all of us who walk over it.  It’s not a spider web meant to ensnare; it’s more the netting below the trapeze, there to catch you and cushion your landing in case you fall.

I asked all of you to bring a dish to this multi-culti potluck meal – there is no need to stick to traditional Thanksgiving fare when you have such a diverse table spanning the entire globe.  Please share with everyone at the table what you brought and why.

This year, I brought mushroom stuffing.  I make it with a crusty French bread that I learned how to make when we were in our first round of treatments and Josh hinted that I needed to get a hobby to distract myself.  So I’m placing my dish of stuffing on the table.  Feel free to dive into the main dishes or nosh on the appetizers or skip all the healthy stuff and head straight for dessert.  There are no rules here. 

So what did you bring and what do you want to say to the community?

And please, start eating as everyone is introducing their dish.  We don’t want the food to get cold and there are so many of us at this table.  Thank you so much for coming, and I’m going to carry the warmth of this meal with me for the rest of this week.  In fact, I just might print out this post and the comments below and carry it with me in my pocket to my actual Thanksgiving meal to have all of you there and feel free to do the same if you need the fortification or simply want the company of a few thousand bloggers at your table.

One of my favourite bloggers had to close her blog.  She admitted, as many do, that she wasn’t even sure what her blog should be or where it even was, calling her exploration of social media and the way it changes constantly as feeling like “an old dog wrestling with a new trick.”

Blogging both feels as if it plods along, always the same if you’re eyeore-ish about it, as I seem to be.  You will still find me here, years from now, with (most likely) the same layout and the same type of content.  I have not Pinterestized my blog and I don’t vlog and I don’t have a lot of fancy schmancy plugins like a good blogger should.

This space is just an audition room for my words and ideas.

I don’t think any of us truly know the dimensions of our blog.  We don’t know where our blog ends and the audience begins.  We don’t know where we end and our blog begins.  We have no sense of the depth of our ideas or the reach of our words.  If you think about it too much, it’s like jumping into a sink hole without any knowledge of when your foot will touch bottom; a scary concept.  But just because we can’t touch all the walls to be sure of its form doesn’t mean that we can’t understand aspects about the shape of the space.  My blog is a harbour, it’s a refuge, it’s a dumping ground, it’s an information gatherer.

And mostly, it is, as I’ve already said, an audition space for my words and ideas, a place to try them out before I state them elsewhere, if at all.  Things you read here end up later in books, usually in an altered yet similar form.  If you squint at paragraphs, you can see places where Rachel Goldman is taking thoughts from my blog.  I try them out here with you so I can understand them better myself.  I take these ideas out of my head, place them on the screen, and after we speak about them, I place them back into my head, slightly changed.

I don’t usually convey ideas well when I’m speaking aloud.  This is the place where I can explain myself, where I can build myself out of words.  I feel confident here, and we all need a place where we feel confident because everyone struggles with some aspect of their world whether it’s their workplace relationships or their marriage or their friendships.  Everyone needs a place that they can come to and feel understood.  For others, that place is the yoga studio or a conference room or a local store.  For me, it’s this blog.

I’m sad this writer is losing her space, even if she didn’t fully know her space, because I get a sense that she loved it even if she didn’t understand her blog at times.  And because, selfishly, I loved getting a chance to see her words.  I hope I get a chance one day to read them again.

My great-aunt died this week.  She was very old, but I wasn’t expecting the call so when it came, I spent a few hours feeling very numb.  I still feel numb.  It took two hours for the words to sink in before I started crying.

I don’t even know how to write about it.

*******

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:

• For the first time ever… there were none.  Can we do better this week?

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Road Less Travelled has a post about why she doesn’t like November.  It’s not just the passing of her unfulfilled due date.  It’s the greyness, the cold, the rush to Christmas.  It is about the way grief has of anchoring you to a time period.  She writes, “Sometimes I feel a bit funny, mourning the baby who never was born — the child who never drew a breath, let alone grew up —  the future I looked forward to that never came to pass. I know my grief is real and legitimate. But sometimes I feel like I’m still stuck back in 1998… while all around me, more and more of my peers are not just in the thick of parenting, but becoming grandparents.”  There’s a beauty amid the melancholy of her annual post.

Glow in the Woods has a post by Still Life with Circles about visiting fortune tellers.  It begins: “I root for each fortune teller I meet.  Say her name. Lucy. Lucia. Say it. Mention her.”  It is about finding those tiny moments of comfort when you’re in mourning, grabbing them from whatever direction they come.  And the one she finds at the final psychic is amazing.  You will read the end of the post with your breath held.

Kmina’s Blog has a post about her lack of blogging and how it ties into a difficult time she’s having with her son, but it is so much more than that.  It is about giving yourself permission to feel what you’re going to feel.  For everyone who has sensed that they’re not up to the task of parenting or who feels guilty complaining based on promises you made yourself before you got into the situation, this post is for you.  Because it’s actually one of the most brilliant, honest things I’ve read this week (and yes, I know it was from the week before, but I didn’t read it until last Friday afternoon).

Lastly, Aerotropolitan Comitissa has a very funny, heartfelt post about teaching her son patience (and discovers that she has a budding little blogger on her hands).  I especially loved this moment: “At this point we have a little musical lesson centered around that well-known prayer – ‘Lord, grant me the serenity…’  I point out to him that this case falls into the ‘things I cannot change’ basket rather than the ‘things I can,’ because he does not yet always have ‘the wisdom to know the difference’.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Saying goodbye to my great-aunt.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 9th and November 16th) 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.

I’ve written a post like this every year, bringing together all the advice from the years before (my own and what appeared in the comment section) and then opening it up to additional ideas (which will be brought next year into the new post as well). Because this time of year can be both impossibly difficult or impossibly wonderful depending on which side of the happiness line you fall, and I say that even as a non-Christian who doesn’t need to do anything more than participate in a volunteer project and eat a bunch of candy canes on Christmas.

Holidays are a lot of pressure — to get them right, to coordinate schedules/needs/wants, to navigate relationships, to travel. For some people those pressures are additionally pressed down by the knowledge of people missing from the table — either those who were once here or those who haven’t been brought into your family yet. And compounding it all is this ongoing message that holidays must be fun! They must be a happy time! Families must draw together and eat a spiral ham in front of a roaring fire with a sparkling tree in the background!

Even if they’re out of work.  Even if they don’t have the family they want.  Even if they’re in mourning.

For people who are happily moving through the holiday season, especially those finally celebrating after many dry years, I lift my virtual glass of champagne to you and send you off to enjoy it. Don’t apologize for being happy — just soak in this time.

For anyone else still sticking around to read this, remember that everyone experiences something in life that makes a particular year or set of years difficult for them. That for every holiday season that you enjoy and look forward to participating in, there is also a time in life where you dread all the reminders that come with a holiday season and wish you could avoid the whole thing. And this year may be that time for you, but it won’t always be that time for you. Things change; both for good and bad. This too shall pass.

You can sit out of the festivities if that’s what you need to do, but a survival guide is sort of like holding your breath to eat (you know, so you don’t taste anything) when your mother asks you to try lima beans. Like slimey green lima beans, going to events is usually good for you, and it’s important to be around people who care about you when the going is tough. You just may need a trick for getting through family time just as mouth-breathing (and not tasting) works for choking down undesired foods.

I’ll offer up the same advice I gave the last year four years with additional notes from comments that came on those old posts:

• Create your own incentives and treat getting through the holiday season as your job. Pay yourself in whatever will make you happy. For instance, after a trip to the local mall to have your picture taken with your niece and Santa, pay yourself with a manicure. Attending the holiday party from hell may win you an entire bar of chocolate. It’s worth setting up small incentives and budgeting for your own happiness because it can be something to focus on during the task at hand.
• You know the idea that you can take a large school and make it small but you can’t go the other way around? Flip that concept when it comes to the holidays: take a small part of the holiday and make it big. Focus on something that you can do and make it your contribution to the holiday season. If you know celebrating Christmas will be too much, make sure you throw yourself wholeheartedly into helping prepare Thanksgiving (and then develop an unfortunate case of the stomach flu on December 24th). If you can organize the family gift but can’t fathom how you’ll do Christmas dinner, make sure you send out an email to your siblings early asking for photos of your nieces and nephews so you can design a great picture calendar for your parents. And then skip the ham.
• Do all your shopping online instead of subjecting yourself to walking past the displays of toys and Christmas baby clothes at the store. Keep it simple this year – you have a lifetime to plot out the most fantastic gifts of all time. This may be the year that you need to buy a DVD or book for each person your list and be done.
• Leave a note in your pocket: write a note to yourself, ask a friend to jot something down, trade letters with your partner, or simply leave a list of names (therapist, fellow bloggers, the friend you’ll drink with the moment you get home) in your pocket to touch as a reminder that someone has your back when you begin to feel overwhelmed at the holiday table. I can’t be with you at your Christmas dinner (the whole Jew and vegetarian thing aside, I just don’t think your family is going to be cool if you drag along a random blogger), but I can give you a note right now to keep in your pocket. Simply print this out and whenever you get overwhelmed, touch it and remember that there are people out there who get you. And change the line about mini hot dogs if you’re a vegetarian:

Hey Sweetie:

I know it was really hard to come to this party/dinner/get together but now that you’re here, you’re even closer to it being over. Try to enjoy yourself, but if you can’t, nip into the bathroom for a cry or bury yourself at the buffet table and do nothing but eat mini hot dogs for the rest of the night. There is no shame in enduring rather than enjoying and you need to do whatever you need to do to get through this without ruining any relationships. Make sure you take time for yourself today/tonight after you get home. I’m here on the other end of the computer if you need me.

Love,
Mel

• Pick and Choose: there is no rule that says you must attend every event during the holiday season – even if you’ve gone to everything in the past. If it’s going to cause more grief than it’s worth, just attend the event. But if you can get your partner to “surprise” you with a holiday trip, all the better.
• Book: I actually include a lot of ideas like these in Navigating the Land of If to get through life in general; not just holiday. I’m just saying.
• I will tell you the only trick I have up my sleeve: the holiday card. Most holiday cards we receive are either generic package-of-12 types or pictures of kids/families. We send out cards every year that routinely get responses that it was the best card they’ve gotten all year, or sometimes the best card ever. Sometimes one fabulous photo of us in some fabulous locale; sometimes a whole series around the world (which it will have to be again this year). We used to just have a normal photo card, but now we include a newsy update of career progress and travels. The people with kids (or limited funds, or limited outlook) say, “Wow, your life is amazing. I’m stuck here at home.” I’m not trying to make them feel envious of us, but envy is way better than pity. –Baby Smiling in Back Seat
• All of our friends have been sending photo X-mas cards in the past years. In previous years, we’d send an awesome vacation photo. Like- heh!- we still had fun this year! –Mrs. Spock
• One tip I figured out early on: If you can’t shop online & have to go to the mall, find out what hours Santa will be there — & then go when he’s not around. There won’t be as many kids & babies around to deal with then. –The Road Less Travelled
• I manage to work in a reference to Katie in every edition of our Christmas letter … usually in relation to our volunteer work. But I like being able to remind people that she was real & is still a part of our lives. My Christmas card itself usually has either an angel or Classic Pooh theme (which was also the theme of her nursery). I know other people who use angel stamps on their cards as a subtle reminder of their lost baby(s). –The Road Less Travelled
• This year I solved my problem in the cowardly fashion … I offered to work. I work at a domestic violence shelter, which is open 24/7 … So I figure I might as well. I can get paid double time as well, so it’s all sorts of awesome. –An Unwanted Path
• I started listening to holiday music in August this year. I’m using it as my own private technique for connecting with the joy of the season early enough that I won’t suddenly get trampled in the crush of child-centric images, events, and conversations coming my way during the actual season. I want this year to be different! –Lisa
• Instead of focusing on what I can’t handle, I’m heading into the season excited about the possibilities of the new traditions TH and I will make this year. I’m just going to roll with the punches. If I’m really excited about putting up the tree, we’re going to do it and not wait. If I can’t handle being around our nephew, TH can go and I can stay home. I’m not going to force myself into any situation, and I’m just going to accept where I am and be there. –Kim
• I just bought three bottles of my favorite wine yesterday to take to my mom’s… and I don’t plan to share any of it. –Guera!
• I think I’m going to plan something for just me and my husband so we’ve got an event during the holiday season to look forward to. It’s either going to be going out to a really nice restaurant or going on a trip (or possibly both!). —Sushigirl
• I’m a big fan of lights. Lights inside and out of the house. But putting up the tree where cute handmade kid ornaments should be was always too hard. So I just put up lights – it goes back to finding out what you can do to enjoy the season and doing it. —BigPandMe
• Two years ago at Christmas right after my 3rd miscarriage I was in a really bad place and dreading the holidays. My mom suggested that instead of our normal Christmas Eve meal we make homemade Chinese food – egg rolls, stir fry, etc. It turned out great and for whatever reason not having to face the traditional meal made it so much better. Don’t get me wrong – it was still really hard – but I got through it and was happy that I spent time with my family instead of avoiding the whole holiday. –Becky
• And “work” can also mean volunteer work. Nobody is going to get mad at you for selflessly devoting your time and skills at a soup kitchen instead of sitting around the family table (or for rushing from the family table to do said work). Or they might, but they’ll end up looking like the bad guy, not you. —Bea
• Remember it’s just a day. It has no power. You don’t have to enjoy it. Lots of people don’t. —Mali
• Sometimes things suck, and sometimes, you have to feel what you’re going to feel while things suck. It’s okay to mourn and it’s okay to cry and it’s okay to not pull yourself up by the bootstraps based on someone else’s timetable rather than your own. And that sometimes, when you push yourself to do something, you find that you actually derived a great deal of peace from the experience. Such as sitting down at the Thanksgiving table when you’re sort of dreading being around people. –Me (from last year)
• By refusing to stay over, so that I know we can go home when we’ve had enough. Oh sorry, we’ve got the cat to feed, we can’t possibly stay longer… —Rebecca
• As someone who had (is having) a happy IF ending that resulted in children, I find myself very aware of the depression of holidays past. So this year, I’m doing two Christmas cards: one for family and other friends who experienced a happy IF ending, and one for those who are still waiting with empty arms. The first will, of course, include a picture of our family and children and all the enjoyment of the past year. The second will be less “kids in your face” and more “Happy Holidays, we love you.” I remember how much it stung to get Christmas cards in the mail of new babies and young families that I wanted so badly for myself. I just can’t do it to my friends how I KNOW are enduring the same heartache. —Amy
• Lots of wine and a sober husband to get me home. When everyone is so busy doting on kids or passing around gifts, its easy to just be in the room, but just off to the corner, on the outskirts, enjoying drink after drink. And I also let hubby tackle the “so when are you guys gonna have kids” questions. —Kimberly
• We’ll have a big breakfast, then go out for a real long walk (10 miles), then we’ll come back and cook a sumptious dinner for the two of us, then in the evening, we’ll head out to the in laws when the children will be in bed and we can just stay an hour or so before being tired and heading home for our beds. –Flowergirl

How do you get through the holiday season when you’re feeling less than your best?

I am reading an interesting book about magic (uh… see the last post for more on that piece of nerdiness) and one of the discussions I had with a magician about it is the idea of secrecy in regards to revealing tricks.  This is one of those very grey areas that magicians seem to have strong opinions about and the boundary lines are fairly slippery, and it reminds me a lot of the discussion that comes up within the ALI world every so often about another person discussing our infertility.

Information about magic is usually passed from person-to-person, with those further in their study giving advice to those earlier in the process.  Sounds family, right?  When I received my diagnosis and went online, I spoke before my first IUI with other women who had already gone through that stage of treatments, and they gave me a heads up on what to expect (much as we constructed years ago with Operation Heads Up which is still used daily).  They taught me tricks on how to make injections less painful, they helped me emotionally process hormone level results, and they debated the various pee stick sensitivities. (Oh no, my friend, they are not all created alike.  FRER used to have the lowest mlU levels and EPT used to have the highest, though these things change all the time.)

While magic is mostly discussed quietly, with information passed from person-to-person, there are also magic textbooks and magazines and videos that anyone can pick up and learn from.  Showing how a trick works becomes a grey area.  Revealing your own tricks is generally accepted EXCEPT in cases when explaining how you did something could potentially out another magician’s illusion.  In those cases, the magic world seems passionately divided.  The book I’m reading also began with a very stern lecture on never revealing another person’s tricks, and then proceeds to explain the intricacies of dead magicians’ routines.  While I’m aware that the dead can no longer perform card tricks, I’m not sure how many of them wanted their secrets revealed postmortem.

Infertility seems to be similarly grey.  Revealing your own infertility is generally accepted EXCEPT in cases where your partner (if you have one) sees it as a breech of their privacy.  Is it okay for Josh to tell other people about our infertility considering we have female factor so the problems are all with my body?  Is it okay for me to reveal our infertility since it’s my problem if Josh doesn’t want people to know that we did treatments.  And there is an additional level to consider here: is it okay for me to speak about doing treatments when in doing so inadvertently tells people about the twins’ conception — does that information belong to me or to them or to both of us, and do we need to be in agreement about sharing it?

Is it ever okay for people to pass along news of my infertility to another person without my expressed permission?  I’m going to preface this by saying that everyone in this world has my expressed permission by this point because I’ve spoken about it so openly here and in the book.  But that wasn’t always the case.  There was a time when news about a miscarriage was passed along to various other people, and I was furious that I had to talk about it with people I would have never chosen to discuss my fertility.  The person spread the news about that miscarriage out of concern, but was it her place to ever share it — especially if she didn’t first ask us permission?

Is it okay to tell someone else for a “good” reason (vs. as gossip), such as if you passed along the name of someone you knew doing treatments to another friend who was newly diagnosed so they could connect and talk?  What about as an explanation to comfort someone who believes they’re the only person experiencing infertility?  Is it okay to tell them about others so they don’t feel alone?  What if the two parties will never meet?  For instance, if you told me about your infertility, is it okay for me to tell local friends knowing that they’ll never know who “Jen” is (and even if they went online and typed in “Jen + infertility,” they’d never know which one because there seems to be 2756 infertile Jens with blogs in the ALI community)?

The revealing of magic secrets postmortem has an almost reverent feel, as if the other magician does so in order to honour the dead, to point out brilliance that may have gone unrecognized until that point.  Is that okay then, if you’re doing it to teach the younger generation and honour the intelligence of the magician who has died?  I could see someone making the same case for revealing someone’s infertility after death; to point out what the person went through while alive; to honour their journey and tenacity.  Or does reason never matter — are there no “good” reasons to reveal another person’s private information?

Where is the line for outing a fellow infertile?  For outing yourself when your infertility involves the lives of (perhaps) a partner and (perhaps) children and (perhaps) even birth parents, gamete donors, or surrogates?

And truly, how do we decide what we will consider private information?  There are plenty of things that are not visibly apparent about myself that I don’t think twice about when other people pass along these facts.  No one would blink a myopic eye if someone else revealed they were nearsighted (unless, perhaps, the revealing of that information negatively affected their life as is the case with the pursuit of certain professions).  So our eyes are fair game, but our uteruses are off-limits?  How did we divvy up our organs to decide which would be covered under the umbrella of privacy and which medical conditions would be fair game for public explanation?

Or is infertility private information?  And how far does that privacy go?