This New Yorker article is, hands down, the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time.  I say that even though I’m supposed to be offended… I think.  At least, I’ve been told that I should be offended.  It takes all the ridiculous of the Mommy Wars, the mother pandering, and mom-focused advertising and rolls it into one neat parody.

Are you a mom? No? Then you don’t need to read one more word. Go on, shoo! I’m not trying to be mean; it’s just that you probably won’t understand a lot of what I’m going to say. It’s a mom thing. If you’re a mom, you know what I’m talking about. Right, moms? Go, us!

I’m not saying that moms are better than other people, but there is, well, something different, something special about us.

That Jenny Allen is a funny lady.  Part of me wants to print this out and tape it to the inside of the kitchen cabinets so I can crack myself up as I’m cooking.  Thank you, Jenny — seriously, this made my day.

*******

Rosh HaShanah — the Jewish New Year — starts this weekend.  It kicks off a string of big deal holidays — Yom Kippur, Succot, Shemini Atzeret, Simchat Torah — that pop up one after the other all the way between now and mid-October.  I am hosting a family dinner on Sunday night where I am making a whole roasted chicken, mushroom stuffing, and green beans.  But for dessert, I’m making Kveller’s Apple Pecan Galette with Salted Peanut Butter Caramel.  Seriously.

On Rosh HaShanah (which translates to “head of the year”), we say “shanah tovah” which means “a good year” (שנה טובה) or the longer “shana tova umehtookah” which means “a good and sweet year” (שנה טובה ומתוקה).  So shanah tovah, y’all.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Enoughness” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Keiko!
• “Men and Infertility” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “The Grandmothers I Know” (Creating Motherhood)
• “Surrogacy in the News — Written by Me” (The Smartness)
• “No Woman Came Up to Me” (The Infertility Voice)
• “Imagine” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “Why Not Me?” (A Glimpse Inside)

Okay, now my choices this week.

From the week before (but I only read it this week, so I’m counting it), Searching for Our Silver Lining has a powerful post how part of you dies during the navigation of infertility, and how she is choosing to live at this time.  She writes, “One of the cruelest things about infertility is that something begins to die as you go through the process. With each passing month, with each BFN, with each round of treatment, with each and every moment of worry and fear. All of it killing you slowly and leaving you in a corpse-like state. Some call this process the ‘deathless death,’ reflecting on all the pain and grief that comes from being a victim.”  Please go over and read the whole thing: it’s amazing.

Also from last week (I got caught up with reading over the weekend), The Barreness has a post about a fight with a friend.  I guess I loved this post because she takes you through the whole roller coaster, all the way through the end of the ride.  The friend, frustrated that she has pulled away and judging her for how she deals with infertility, needs to hear how her judgment has affected the friendship.  After the explosion, they are able to come to a new place together.  I thought it was an important read for anyone struggling with a friendship.

I read a bunch of moving posts on September 11th, but Stupid Stork’s story of what happened that day stuck with me long after I stepped away from the screen.

Lastly, Mojo Working has a gorgeous post about what she believes in, which illustrates the similarities behind our differences.  I especially love the final thought: “If we want a better world, a better future, we are going to have to stand up and create it ourselves.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Best parody of all time.  Rosh HaShanah starts this weekend.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 7th and September 14th) 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.

Adoption seems to keep showing up this week in non-relevant places, as is so often the case when people are told that they should “just adopt.”

A while back, when the deal was first announced, I wrote that I didn’t think I wanted to read Breed, a horror novel about… infertility.  Since, you know, fertility treatments need cannibalism and blood shed in order to spice them up since IVF isn’t exciting enough.  I’m usually a fan of infertility making an appearance in a book — anything to place reality into the minds of the general population — but horror reprolit felt like the wrong way to do that.

And then I heard a piece on NPR that changed my mind for a moment. Chase Novak (pen name for Scott Spencer) was on All Things Considered, and said that he wrote the book after watching friends struggle with infertility.  From All Things Considered,

Spencer says Breed is based on the struggles of friends he’s seen go through round after round of fertility treatments. “The pathos and the difficulty of that, and the toll that it took on their personal lives … stuck with me forever,” he says.

Horror doesn’t have to be silly, Spencer says; in fact, serious issues like infertility make great fodder for horror. “It pushes it to the edge, and you explore the darkest possibilities of the story … in any good story, something important should be at stake.”

Oh.  Hearing it described like that, I started to see the possibility in horror reprolit.  It isn’t meant to mock or extend judgment: it is taking the hypothetical monster and making it infertility.  In my personal story, there has never been a darker time in my life than when I went through treatments the first time, and I could see it being fodder for horror.  I experienced the darkest, ugliest sides of myself during that time.  Sometimes I felt like the monster even more than infertility, especially in my singular focus.  I thought that maybe I was wrong and should give this book a chance.  I’m not a huge horror fan, but I’ve read the mainstays of the genre and could probably get through this one.

So I went online to hear the interview again, and then I found this paragraph, written by NPR in their description of their interview.  It isn’t clear whether these are the thoughts of the author, expressed off-microphone or edited out for brevity, or the thoughts of the NPR employee who provided their own colour to the write-up of the interview.  It is clear from the quotes within the post that more was said than what appears in the 6 minute interview.  Though not knowing which one it is, I once again became very uncomfortable with the idea of this book.

Spencer says he also wanted to write a comic take on the narcissism of parenting. Alex and Leslie Twisden have enough money to go to the ends of the earth to get pregnant — and they do just that, when adopting closer to home could have solved their problem. “The idea that they wanted some extension of themselves is the roots of their undoing,” Spencer says. “I wanted to keep this whole highly privileged world of Manhattan parenting very realistic.”

I should start by saying that I don’t really buy the whole “parenting as narcissism” argument, mostly because while there are certainly parents with narcissistic reasons for reproducing, the vast majority of humans operate in the same way as all animals in the natural world: we choose the cheapest and easiest forms of perpetuating the species.  No one calls hamsters narcissistic when they fuck like hamsters and have their millions of hamster babies.  Their litter is not a statement of their vanity, but instead is recognized as a biological drive.  In the same vein, it would be insane for the hamster (or any reproductively healthy human) to opt for the risk and price of IVF over sex if IVF isn’t necessary, but once assistance becomes necessary, then all choices become equal possibilities, with one rising to the top for each individual because it best fits their physical, emotional, and financial limitations or needs.  It is rarely as simple as considering genetic connection or no genetic connection.

But the thought that bothered me came later in the paragraph: “adopting closer to home could have solved their problem.”

It dismisses the idea possibility that people choose IVF for reasons beyond the genetic connection, such as — let’s say — financial reasons.  Instead, unless the line is the subjective opinion of the NPR employee, the book trots out the “just adopt” argument, a cautionary tale to infertile men and women that if you’re going to be so vain as to utilize treatments, you’re going to invite the monsters into your home.  The fact that they wanted a genetic connection becomes their undoing.

I don’t know Scott Spencer’s personal life.  Perhaps he is an adoption advocate who knows first-hand the reality experienced by those in the triad.  Perhaps he is speaking from personal knowledge; maybe his life experience has shaped a view that he wishes more people would consider adoption.  Though as he says in the interview, the topic of infertility “comes not from my experience as a father.”  Which leads me to believe that he knows little more than the average commenter on a New York Times article about infertility who suggests people adopt without knowing the first thing about the emotional or financial realities of adoption, especially exploring the viewpoint of each member of the triad.

And if that’s the case, I think I’ll hold off on horror reprolit for the time being.

This is not about politics.  Set that aside for a moment.

People get things wrong from each other’s lives.  The details which seem so obvious to us — that define us — are glossed over by others when they speak to us, speak about us.  How many people who have lost a child have been introduced as someone without children, as if that human being never existed?  How many people have had aspects of their identity erased — their partner described as a boyfriend or girlfriend?  So that part of this quote didn’t exactly shock me.  It’s part of human nature; as we collect up and file information in our brain that we get bytes of it wrong, misplaced.

What did shock me was Romney’s insertion of the adjective “adopted” when talking with Julie Goodridge, the biological mother, whose partner at the time, Hillary, was not allowed visitation rights in the hospital following the birth of their daughter, Annie.  Goodridge was meeting with Romney over the topic of same-sex marriage,

“I looked him in the eye as we were leaving,” recalls Goodridge. “And I said, ‘Governor Romney, tell me — what would you suggest I say to my 8 year-old daughter about why her mommy and her ma can’t get married because you, the governor of her state, are going to block our marriage?’”

His response, according to Goodridge: “I don’t really care what you tell your adopted daughter. Why don’t you just tell her the same thing you’ve been telling her the last eight years.”

The adjective was wholly unnecessary, and in its glaring extraneousness, it feels inserted as a statement.  About what, I have no clue.  But when the sentence begins, “I don’t really care…” I don’t think the insertion of that adjective is accidental, non-meaningful.  It is a rewriting that is more than a rewriting.

Goodridge was upset that the details of her daughter’s life were completely rewritten by an adjective, but — to me — these recorded moments speak to something so much greater; the way the general public views assisted family building.  And it shocks me perhaps most of all because Romney is on the front lines of infertility: his sons have used IVF and surrogacy to build their families.  And when we can’t even get a modicum of understanding and sensitivity from someone who is staring down assisted family building six inches away from his face at home, how can we expect someone with no tie to infertility to understand the enormity of being responsible for explaining your child’s unusual origin story to them?  And, for that matter, to others when they ask why your child doesn’t look like you or do twins run in your family?  How can they understand the enormity of balancing two families for your child in the case of open adoption or an on-going relationship with a gamete donor or surrogate?

We are a generation that more than any other generation is charting a new path through assisted family building, and we’re doing this with only a flimsy framework of support  and research in place.  Other generations will be able to use the knowledge we glean, but right now, we’re passing it from mother to mother, from father to father, from hopeful soon-to-be-a-parent to hopeful soon-to-be-a-parent.  It is all linear, without the benefit of retrospect.  And we do this because it is the way we reach parenthood if we want to reach parenthood; the traditional doors to parenthood closed to us either due to physical limitations or circumstance.  I am speaking about myself, and I am speaking about you.  I am speaking about the millions upon millions of people around the world who cannot build their family without assistance.

The support comes from within, we are shored up with information that comes from within and is used from within.  I am still waiting for the day when our strength comes from having billions of points of support coming from outside the ALI community, knowing that every person we bring into the world or raise becomes another member of society down the road, so it is within all our best interests to aid in their creation or existence.  That child you ignore today will become the adult who will affect your life down the line.  That is why we should care, and why I don’t believe anyone should begin a statement with “I don’t really care…”

Please do not reduce this to a political post.  This is not about Romney or Obama or any other candidate.  This is about humanity; about asking for a tiny corner of understanding in the general world where family building comes easy.  In giving us support when we ask — quite plainly as Goodridge does — please help me.  Because what she is saying with her words is that reality is hard enough for families who have come together with assistance without having something simple — such as marriage — withheld to create yet another layer to add to the story.  Overcoming the limits of biology is hard enough; we don’t need to add insensitivity to the burden.

I was reading about how Blag Hag is closing her blog for an indefinite amount of time.  I have no feelings about her blog one way or the other — I simply don’t know it well enough — but it’s always sad when a voice leaves the blogosphere, especially for the reasons she states she is leaving.  She writes,

I love writing, I love sharing my ideas, and I love listening to the ideas of my readers. But I simply no longer love blogging. Instead of feeling gleeful anticipation when writing up a post, I feel nothing but dread. There’s a group of people out there (google the ironic term FtBullies to find them) devoted to hating me, my friends, and even people I’m just vaguely associated with. I can no longer write anything without my words getting twisted, misrepresented, and quotemined.

I know she is a controversial writer who holds strong opinions, therefore, it doesn’t shock me that she is met with a controversial response — sometimes eloquent and sometimes simply nasty.  Again, this post isn’t really about Blag Hag because I am not familiar enough with her blog but is instead on the general vitriol on the Web, which ranges from admonishing comments on the low end to death threat bullying on the other end.

It’s not as if hate is a new entity, created by the Web, but the anger online and in the face-to-face world feels like it has been building for the last year or so.  Prior to this point, I joked with Josh that it was all part of the Mayan’s predictions for the world ending on December 21, 2012.  It feels like we’re always tottering on the brink of implosion, with people quick to jump to an angry response, either in a comment or a tweet or giving you the finger on the road or muttering things under their breath as you pass (since I find that most people don’t speak as loudly when they are being rude face-to-face as they speak emphatically online).

Myself included.  I find myself quick to anger when I read a headline that is clearly meant to provoke the reader to click over.  I mutter to the twins how other drivers are idiots who should have their license revoked.  Things that would have provoked an eyeroll in the past have been making me feel rage-y.  And I don’t know if I’m feeding off of the anger that I’m observing around me (anger begets anger?) or if there really is a shift in the universe turning us all into inflexible, unforgiving assholes.  Again, myself included.

I have been getting rude comments — about three a day — on old posts; always from first time commenters who are writing to let me know that I am a loser who must have no life if I have taken the time to write X post.  My rage-laden internalized response is to think, “aaah, and you are obviously not a loser even though you have taken precious minutes from your important life to write me a rude comment on X post.”  They are entitled to their opinion, so I read their comment, file it away, and go on with my day.  There is no point responding because it’s obvious from the name-calling that they’re not really looking to form a lasting friendship with me where we’ll hold hands and run off through the bucolic fields of the Internet together, giggling as we read posts and weave daisy crowns.

I was telling Josh about the Blag Hag post just as another rude comment popped up on yet another old post (seriously, people feel inclined to tell me I’m stupid on posts that were written in 2008.  Shouldn’t we all feel that enough time has passed on a 2008 post that it’s not worth going backwards to it to tell the person they’re a horrific human being?), and I read it aloud to him before filing it.  If I held strong opinions, I would understand receiving the harsh responses.  Tit for tat?  But I think long time readers will agree that I’m not really known for having strong opinions.  Some might call me wishy washy, but I prefer the more complimentary description of seeing the world in greyish hues which amounts to asking a lot of questions and soliciting a lot of opinions.  So the anger in the comments in a post that was spoken in a conversational tone, recounting a story from my life, doesn’t seem to warrant being told that I am stupid.  Again.

And then I wondered aloud if the answer wasn’t to close down ones’ blog and stop writing altogether (as Blag Hag is doing) but to close down the comment section.

I know, that was probably the LAST thing you thought you would ever read on this blog.  I started the Commentathon, which morphed into IComLeavWe.  I have been championing for the almighty comment for six years.  It would be like Gloria Steinem saying, “feh, women’s rights, let’s stop fighting for them.”

Josh looked at me strangely and pointed out that this wouldn’t really solve the problem because people would just email me instead.  He suggested turning on comment moderation, but (1) the comments that are making me tired aren’t hate-filled, they’re just rude and (2) I would still see all those comments even if no one else did.  Comment moderation protects the blog readers from seeing disturbing things in the comment section, but the blog writer still needs to sift through all those rude words.  I’d still be affected.  I would use comment moderation if I had a spam problem but not for rude comments.

I know I have angered people in the past by leaving up comments that upset them that they thought I should remove, but here’s the thing, unless the comment is hate-speech or harmful, I’m not going to censor someone in the comment section.  That’s just me.  And hate-speech or harmful is sort of on a I-know-it-when-I-see-it basis, and it has happened twice that I can ever recall.  In one comment, the person wrote something horrific about another blogger and I worried that it would be damaging to her emotionally if she ever saw it.  The other comment held such flat-out-wrong information that I wrote back the commenter that I’d be happy to post it if they could show me research that supported their claims and they never wrote back.  I kept it off my blog because — in my opinion — it could do more harm than good if someone read it and believed the information true.

Other than that, the comments that remain standing that bother me fall in that rude category.  And those I’ve never considered removing because rudeness is often in the eye of the beholder.  What is opinion to one person is anathema to someone else, and I’ve also realized at this stage in the game that I can’t please everyone.  There will be people who will be upset by this post and people who will love this post.  And there will be people who will be upset by the comments and others who will say the comments made them see blogging in a whole new way.  And I can’t win, stuck in the middle of all of this, but I’ve also ceased trying to make everyone happy and simply accept that this is the way it will be: what brings one person clarity is annoying drivel to someone else.

And perhaps that is why I had the thought to close the comment box.  I love writing posts, and I love receiving comments that agree with me or disagree with me, politely in both cases.  Those are discussions, which — to me — is the point of the comment box.  They follow the same path as polite discussions in the face-to-face world.  A friend says something and I say, “me too” or I say, “really?  Is that how you saw that?  I saw it this way…” and through those talks, we either feel supported or have our world view enlarged or we confirm our first opinion once it is put to the test.  And all of that is good.

The rude comments are more akin to giving someone the finger as you drive by them; not necessary nor does it invite a back-and-forth that serves a point.  And yet is it our place to censor the middle finger when we’re amongst adults?  I really don’t know.  My gut tells me no — it’s not okay to censor something that is rude but not hateful or harmful.  Part of it is not wanting to lump giving the finger in the same category as painting a swastika.  One is rude, the other is hate, and they’re not equal in nature and perhaps that is why I’m remiss to treat them equally.  The other part is that what I find rude may not be what you find rude, and vice versa.  And my time is limited.  Something would have to give if I was spending all my time weighing the rudeness quotient in every comment.  Plus, it becomes a very slippery slope: if I start censoring comments, should I also become a gatekeeper determining who gets to participate in IComLeavWe?  What about have someone list their blog in the Roundup comment section?  Where does the gatekeeping stop?

So closing the comment box.  Or in the case of Facebook, cutting off the ability to post comments to your status or post on your wall.  By the time I got to Twitter, I started to realize the whole flip side of not needing to ever see these rude comments; I’d miss out on actually holding a conversation.  I’d be talking at instead of talking with, which isn’t very appealing to me.  Shutting out the hurtful would mean also shutting out the helpful.

There is a line in the new book (the sequel to Life from Scratch) where one character tells another that inviting a single person to a wedding without a guest is like writing a really thought-provoking blog post and closing the comments.  Weddings bring out big emotions.  They make us think about love, and to ask someone to stand there and witness it and not give them any receptacle in whom to express that love they’re sensing is like writing something that will bend people’s minds and then not give them any outlet through which to express everything that is now coursing through their brain.

We have come to expect the comment section to be at the bottom of a blog post.  Just as humans got along fine before electricity (and some people don’t have electricity today), those of us in the western world who do have electricity have come to rely on electricity, to expect electricity.  And that’s sort of how I feel about the comment section.  Before the advent of blogs, we had op/ed pieces and we were fine not giving our thoughts back to the writer unless we were so moved to write a letter.  And that was the norm then.  But the norm now is to be able to give that instant, less-time-consuming-for-the-responder reply right under the post.  When it isn’t there, it’s surprising.  Though a favourite blog of mine used to not take comments at all, and it didn’t bother me because I also had that expectation on her blog: there was never a comment box.  And perhaps rude comments are why she didn’t have one.

Those last thoughts are how I dropped the idea of closing the comment box, even though I can see the benefits of doing so.  It is exhausting to wade through rude comments.  They are disheartening.  And yet, commenters are also equally capable of leaving words that give me clarity on my life, that hold me up, that give me energy.  Such as yesterday when I was feeling very much alone in my response to the twins returning to school.  So I’m leaving it open.

It has been made clear to me already how some people feel about my decision not to censor comments on my blog in the past so I don’t know if we need to rehash that, but I would love to hear from people about how you feel — in general — to the idea of a comment box being closed or what you’ve observed about rudeness on the Web in general.

I wrote this and then debated whether or not to post it.  I know the onslaught of back-to-school posts are difficult for some to read.  I also know that I haven’t read a post by the parent of an older child who had difficulty with the return to school and I would love to bond with anyone else who has trouble with change.  To post or not to post.  I opted to post, you do not have to opt to read.

I waited until Josh and I got back in the car after the first day of school drop off before I started crying.  I feel this was a step up for me considering how I behaved with the first day of kindergarten and first grade.  He dropped me off back at home and went to work, and I filled the silence of the house by cleaning.  The sort of cleaning where even drains were disassembled and scrubbed.  When the rest of my world feels out of control, you can find me with my spray bottle of bleach and my sponges and my purple rubber gloves.

I went to the food store midway through the day to get ingredients for brownies I was baking for some friends of ours, and when I turned at the end of the baking aisle, there was this father pushing his toddler twins in one of those car-shaped shopping carts and I lost it.  Unfortunately, the aisle I turned blindly into to avoid said twins was the baby-food-and-diaper aisle.  A poor choice.

I sometimes feel as if I (and one other friend — she knows exactly who she is) are the only people in the world who are not thrilled on the first day of school.   I was the only person who didn’t have a Facebook update about how happy I was that the kids were out of the house again.  A bunch of parents were jumping up and down excitedly on the sidewalk outside the school, joking around that they were finally free.  While there may have been another second-grade parent who went home and cried, I have yet to meet that parent face-to-face.  I have to be honest; it makes me feel like a freak.

Please don’t misunderstand me; there is not a chance in hell that these parents love their children less than I love mine.  I am putting that in italics because I want that very very clear.  The fact that they’re jumping for joy doesn’t speak at all to the love they have for their child.  And who doesn’t enjoy a return to a normal schedule after a summer of juggling?  But those parents seem better equipped to weather milestones.  And I sometimes wonder how I became so poor at letting go.

Because I wasn’t always this terrible at letting go.

I should end this by saying that I was ovulating, which always makes me feel like crap emotionally.  I am an evolutionary enigma.  You know how women are supposed to become more desirable and alluring around ovulation, believe themselves to be more beautiful and intelligent?  My brain does the exact opposite.  My self-esteem tanks.  I want to curl up in a ball and ignore the rest of the world.  I feel unattractive and unintelligent.  It’s almost as if my brain gets the message from my ovaries each cycle: “little point, sweetie.  I mean, your reproductive organs don’t work correctly anyway, so why bother plumping and preening when it will NEVER GET YOU PREGNANT.”

So my sadness over the start of school is tempered by the time of the month.  But still, I am writing this post for myself and for any other person out there who saw people jumping for joy on the sidewalk and wondered why they didn’t feel the same way as the majority; as the average parent.  Know there is one other person out there who struggles with the start of school.