The twins spent the week at a camp housed in my old elementary school.  I hadn’t been back to the school since my brother transitioned to middle school over 20 years ago.  It’s really been closer to 30 years since I had walked through the building.  The night before, I had dreams about the school, though I couldn’t really remember where anything was located in the building except the front office.

Until I got in the building.

And then we walked past the place where I was standing when the Challenger exploded.  And the library where Jonathan and I declared that when we grew up, we’d live together in Albania.  As we turned the corner to the old 4th grade pod where their camp was located, I looked up on the wall and there was my SIXTH GRADE PICTURE.  A little sixth grade Melissa in her Live Aid t-shirt staring out of the frame with the rest of my class.  After I dropped them off, I swung through the rest of the school; down to my fourth grade classrooms where my teacher said inexplicably inappropriate things to us until it was discovered late in the year that she had a brain tumour that affected her personality.  And the lunch room where I spent lunch trying to sit as far away from this one boy because his lunch bag was a mishmash of my worst food phobias all in one place and he accidentally spat food when he spoke.

It was too far to go back home, so I went through my old town trying to find some place to work.  I swung by my old old elementary school, the one I went to before my old elementary school, which closed when I was in third grade and was turned into a community center.  In the center of the main room, near where the shelves should have been that held the copy of the Phantom Tollbooth (that the librarian claimed I never returned), they had set up a welcome desk and the woman told me that the best she could do for me in terms of space was to set me up on a wooden bench near where my eighth grade boyfriend and I played pool in the summer.  He would kiss me reciting the vocabulary words his mother was making him learn that summer.

So I left there (after peeing in the bathroom where I learned the word “fuck” which was written on a piece of toilet paper in my stall back when I was in kindergarten, and I brought it out to an older kid to ask them what it meant before asking my mother just to make sure that the older kid had it right) and went outside to walk around for a moment and see where we played Chinese jump rope (and I got to kneesies one-foot highsies before knocking the rope) and the place of my first kiss.  He was a sixth grader and I was a third grader, and he had to bend down to kiss me very lightly on the lips after I blew those weeds at him that we used to call angel dust (angel dust in the PCP-sense, not in some beautiful ethereal sense).  I wanted him to kiss me because he was one of the boys who would jump from the top of the red tower, and that seemed like the scariest thing in the world when I was eight.

And then I drove through my old town, past my parents’ old house, and took the long way past my eighth grade boyfriend’s old house (his parents have since died, and last I heard, his brother took over the house and is raising his children there) and the path through the woods that connected our two houses where we’d meet and stand halfway between the two houses filled with adults.  And finally swung into the town center, down the one-lane road that always backs up with traffic, and noted that they had cut back the shrubbery near the cemetery revealing more headstones, and took the shortcut past the new library (remembering when the library used to be housed in what is now a bank building) to settle down in the Starbucks to work.

It was weird to be back there.  To know everything but not really belong.  It felt like speaking a foreign language after years of disuse, realizing that I now refer to it as a foreign language instead of my mothertongue.

Have you ever been back to your old elementary school and what would you remember there if you did?

Heads up: this post may have triggers for you if you’ve experienced pregnancy loss, stillbirth, or neonatal death.  Tread carefully and skip the first section if you are raw.

So a few hours after I posted that last post, the ChickieNob witnessed another woman and I dancing around the “are you Jewish” question once we stated our last names.  People don’t actually come out and say, “hey, are you a Jew too?”  Instead we mention something like which camp we went to or drop hints about holidays.  Once enough clues were laid bare, the woman came out and said, “I’m Jewish, and we’re looking for a Hebrew school.  Do you know one?”  Which gave me the opportunity to tell her that I’m Jewish too and recommend a few shuls in the area.

When we got in the car, the ChickieNob asked why (1) she didn’t just come out and ask, “are you Jewish?” and (2) why we even cared.  Which led to a discussion of that blog post and how sometimes it is nice to acknowledge those commonalities.  How sometimes people are shy to volunteer information not knowing how the information will be accepted.  I could see the gears turning in her head, especially once she admitted that she sometimes feels out-of-sorts at school where there aren’t many Jews.

The ChickieNob rarely goes deep the first time around.  She likes to bring up a conversation topic, feel her way around it for a bit, retreat to think about it further, and then pull it back out when you least expect it and unload a series of enormous questions.  So our conversation about Judaism petered out, and I thought we’d return to our favourite topic of conversation: Hogwarts and people who go to Hogwarts.

But instead she matter-of-factly asked me as I was about to bring some pan-fried noodles into my mouth how a woman knows when a baby dies inside her belly.  I told her about sonograms and fetal movement and asked if there was a reason she was bringing this up right now.  No reasons; she had just shelved the Judaism conversation to delve deeply into later and she was ready to return to speaking about mortality.  She wanted to know what a miscarriage felt like, how I knew that I was miscarrying (and strangely, whether I kept the panties I had been wearing or threw them out), how the baby is delivered if he/she dies in utero, if the parents get to hold the baby after death.

I’m not sure how I felt about the frankness, the calmness, the space in which we were talking about things.  On one hand, we were speaking about it as we would any other part of life.  It wasn’t swept under the carpet or sanitized except for the fact that I put things in terms a seven-year-old could understand/fathom.  On the other hand, we were in a noodle shop, and it felt discordant: this hugely emotional topic being discussed calmly over pasta.  I really wasn’t sure what I thought about the whole thing.

*******

Today is Friday the 13th.  As I wrote last time this occurred:

Though I’m usually fairly anxious around certain dates, allowing my imagination to run towards grotesquely disturbing scenarios, I’ve never had big feelings concerning Friday the 13th.  Even if I live … like … 2 miles from Camp Crystal Lake and I totally know someone who knows someone who is the cousin of the counselor who decapitated Mrs. Voorhees.

It’s one of those dates that I feel like I should have big feelings about.  If I’m not worried, then I must be a fool.

You know how girls pinched each other’s arms with a Cootie Shot to ward off boy germs?  Mentioning that it’s Friday the 13th feels like a horror Cootie Shot.

Do you care about Friday the 13th or are you not superstitious about the date?

*******

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:

• “Getting Past Writer’s Block” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Lori!

Whoa, seriously, I’m honoured and all, but only one post?  There was only one post that anyone read last week that deserved to be recognized?  Come on, what did you read this week that rocked your world?

Okay, now my choices this week.

Detour to Motherhood has a post about having a goal again.  After making the decision not to try to conceive anymore, she writes, “I can’t remember what tipped me from ‘maybe I’ll try again’ to ‘no way in hell,’ and it felt weird putting it all out there.  But it also felt like a great release.  I’ve found that all kinds of good stuff happens when you open up.  Like finding people to talk about adoption with.”  There is such joy inside the words of this post — I loved it.

Many Many Moons has a really interesting post about her relationship with her twin, and how pregnancy and adoption fits into that picture.  She explains, “In this case though of this pregnancy I don’t feel any of those old feelings.  I am just plain excited for her.  Of course I would love to be pregnant and get to have that experience, but I also know that I couldn’t love our baby even one drop more than I do if she came from my body.  I just want her to get to experience this crazy love that I’m feeling and I’m glad it didn’t take moving mountains to make it happen.”  The fact that they are identical makes this post ten times more interesting, and it was already a must-read for me.

Lastly, Mrs. Spit has a post of wonders.  It is a heart-stopping post, to read what is traveling through her brain in that moment.  And I couldn’t do it justice to describe it.  You need to click over and read it in full.

The roundup to the Roundup: A conversation with the ChickieNob.  It’s Friday the 13th.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 6th and July 13th) 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.

As much as you were surprised that their counselor didn’t know the term “kosher,” I was shocked by how many who said they did.  Well… not exactly.  I mean, I’ve written about kashrut enough times on this blog that I expect anyone who frequents here knows the term, but my general life experience has ranged from people who have never heard the term to people who only know it as a section in the grocery store and something pertaining somehow to Jews (to obviously people who know a great deal about kashrut or who keep kosher themselves).

I grew up in an area that had a substantial Jewish population, with kosher grocery stores and a wide range of shul options.  College was the first time I met someone who had never met a Jew.  The girl was in my dormitory, from a relatively large midwestern town. (A quick Google search just confirmed that her town had 37,000 people.)  And yet, she had never met someone Jewish.  It was like Napoleon Chagnon meeting the Yanomamö; she was my pesky bee.

Two things she couldn’t get over was my comfort in not being baptized; she was very concerned about my soul and couldn’t understand how I wasn’t equally worried.  And she couldn’t wrap her mind around the idea that I didn’t have horns since her priest told her that all Jews have horns.  One night, she offered to cut my hair; and being at an age when people make poor choices and regret it once they look in the mirror, I thought this was a dandy idea.  I wet my hair and sat down in a chair in her dorm room.  She combed out the knots in my curls, but after a while, I realized that she was detangling already untangled areas of my skull, and I realized that SHE WAS SEARCHING FOR MY HORNS.  She was patting my skull, feeling to see if there were any telltale lumps.  And when I called her on it, she burst into tears and said, “why would my priest lie to me?”

When I was eighteen, I laughed hysterically about this with my friends from back home, but in retrospect, it really isn’t funny.  The girl had a true crisis of faith, questioning the truthfulness of her priest.  And for me, it kicked off the first time that I was really and truly the “other.”  Back home, there were obviously many non-Jewish people around me — more non-Jews than Jews — but this was the first time that I felt as if someone was noting the otherness; was looking at me as odd and really didn’t understand this huge part of who I am.

This otherness is a strange beast because on one hand, being Jewish in a non-Jewish world is a source of pride.  I love the religion, love the language, love the culture, love the history, the identity, the ideas.  I am grateful for this otherness.  And on the other hand, it is a source of loneliness when you are surrounded by people who are mentally noting your otherness.  This type of otherness is very different from how I feel when I’m overseas and I’m the only American.  Or how I feel when I’m the only vegetarian.  Or how I feel when I am the only infertile woman in a sea of pregnant bellies.  All of those feelings of otherness are not pleasant, but they lack this key element that drives my reaction to being Jewish in the greater non-Jewish world.

Race, colour, religion, sex — these are protected classes based on their history of discrimination.  We didn’t arbitrarily decide the definition of anti-discrimination law; we created the laws to protect groups that have a history of harassment.  Where grotesque and unfair stereotypes exist that create a skewed and dangerous public perception of a group.  I know the majority of Americans know that Jews exist.  They know we have a holiday called Chanukkah in the winter.  They know we don’t eat certain things, and this is called keeping kosher.  They know there is some tie between Jews and the country of Israel.  And on one hand, do you really need to know much more?  I mean, there are plenty of things that are probably very important to you, and I know basically the same level of information on those topics.  But I’d answer that yes, people need to know more, and that moreness is based on that history of discrimination.  Because the discrimination is based on the stereotypes and stereotypes only exist when there is a dearth of factual information and our brains are trying to fill in the blanks.  If there was no history of harassment, would I still say that people need to know more than the basics?  No.  But there is a history of harassment, and that history comes with me every time I stand up and say that I’m Jewish.

I’ll continue to say I’m Jewish… mostly because I am Jewish.  And I’ll continue to write about Judaism here because this is my space and it’s on my mind.  But every time I write about Judaism, when I smile and tell someone in the winter that I’m actually not stressed out about preparing for Christmas because we don’t celebrate Christmas, when I tell people that we keep kosher or we don’t send the kids to school on chag or that I have to prep for Shabbat, it comes with this little niggle in the back of my head, this little twinge that comes from the otherness.

There has been more than one time that someone has told me that I’m the first Jew they’ve met.  I even once had it happen online — that the person told me I was the first Jew they emailed with (meaning; they still haven’t actually met someone Jewish face-to-face)!  Which is why I wasn’t surprised by the counselor who didn’t know the word “kosher.”

I just want to end this by making it clear that I’m in no way stating any shame over being Jewish.  I love being Jewish, and I’m fine shouting it loud and proud.  But I know I’m not the only blogger who brings their minority with them into a greater topical blogosphere.  I’ve heard this before from GLBT bloggers who write about infertility, from an African-American blogger who writes about parenting.  There are topical blogospheres where we bond over common experiences or interests: ALI, parenting, cancer, cooking, travel, crafts, DIY.  And in all those topical blogospheres, there exists minorities.

Most of the time, our minority status is a footnote, a coda.  I write most frequently about infertility.   But sometimes, that minority factor gets pushed to the forefront of a post.  And I love it when people face it head-on rather than pretending this element to my being doesn’t exist or isn’t important.  It’s just as much the lens through which I see the world as infertility.  And I’m really freakin’ in love with that Jewish lens.

Updated:

Like all times that I bring up Judaism (or rift off a Hebrew word), I had Josh read this beforehand and sat on it for a few hours to think about it before posting.  With infertility topics, I hit publish upon completion and with Judaism topics, I wait.  It’s indicative of what I discussed above, but beyond the thought that you might judge me, with this post, it was also that worry that I’m going to make someone else uncomfortable.  That I’m going to offend people by pointing out the truth: that people who are in the minority (especially when that minority comes with a history of discrimination) sometimes feel uncomfortable when their otherness moves to the forefront when they’re in a topical community.  When they stray from writing about the main reason they’re in the community — whether that is infertility or cooking or craft projects — and they write about their otherness.  I never worry about what you’ll think about my thoughts on infertility, but I’ve often wondered how something about Judaism, Hebrew, or Israel is going to be received.

If it were the other way around, if I was primarily a Jewish blogger operating inside the Jewish blogosphere, I may worry about writing about infertility.  But I am trying to explain the difference with this post: it can be nerve-wracking to come out about infertility, but infertility doesn’t carry with it the same history of discrimination.  Were there infertile women who were called witches and burned at the stake?  Yes — but even so, I don’t think infertility brings with it quite the same history as being Jewish, black, or gay in America.  And that’s okay — two things don’t have to be the same, and I’m not saying one is easier or harder than the other; just different.  It is an explanation for why it may be uncomfortable to be a Jewish blogger mentioning your infertility and it may be uncomfortable to be an infertility blogger mentioning your Judaism, but those two discomforts are different since they bring with them different baggage, different history.

I almost didn’t post this because I didn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable, but that’s sort of the crux of the situation – we’re so worried to speak frankly about race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion that we politely don’t talk about it, and that’s how situations like this exist: the discomfort comes from the silence.

Even though I grew up in a major metropolitan area, and I can’t say there is any race, ethnicity, sexuality, or religion I didn’t encounter prior to adulthood, I still don’t feel I have a true grasp on other groups beyond my own.  We’re a product of our upbringing, and while I have been exposed to more of Christianity than you have probably been exposed to Judaism due to the fact that Christianity is the majority religion in this country, I still can’t say I understand large chunks of what it means to be Christian even though I’ve read all four Gospels, attended church numerous times, and celebrated a slew of Christian holidays with friends.  I think it’s okay to admit that we don’t know groups other than our own; and I’m just always grateful any of you stick around and read my blatherings about Judaism.  I take it as a sign that you want to learn, want to move closer to understanding.  The reality is that the people who my mind conjures up that make me pause before hitting publish aren’t going to read this post anyway.  Those who discriminate rarely stick around to actually participate in a conversation.

Which is a long way of saying that I love all of you who not only take the time to read, but who admit that they don’t know, that I’m maybe the first person they’ve met, and they’re happy to hear more.

The twins are in robotics camp, and their counselor led them through an engineering exercise utilizing pretzel sticks and marshmallows.  They were told that they’d be able to eat their constructions once the lesson was understood, a point that informed the conversation that the ChickieNob relayed to me while we drove home in the afternoon.

ChickieNob: I told her that I couldn’t use marshmallows because we keep kosher.  But she didn’t know the word “kosher.”

Me: Well, most Americans don’t…

ChickieNob: (interrupting) So I told her that they were treyf, but she didn’t know that word either.

Me: As I was saying, most Americans don’t.  You need to just tell them that you’re vegetarian.  They understand that.

Wolvog: I am seven years old, and I know the word treyf.  And my counselor is 27, and she didn’t know the word at all.  I’m a kid, and she’s an adult.

Me: It has nothing to do with age or intelligence.  It’s not an English word, and even some Jewish people don’t know it.  You only know it due to life experience.  You know, you could have used the marshmallows.

ChickieNob: No, I couldn’t.  They’re made with dead fish bones.

Me: I mean, just make it so you can do the activity, and then don’t eat it.  Or do eat it if you want to try it.  You need to make your own decisions about that.

ChickieNob: I am not putting dead fish bone candy in my mouth.

Me: For the love.

ChickieNob: I told my counselor that we don’t eat candy like this, and then she bent down and whispered, “why?” and I told her because of the dead fish bones.

Me: Fine.

ChickieNob: But then everything got a little crazy.  Because the other kids noticed we weren’t using the marshmallows and asked us why, and I told them that I knew something that they didn’t know, but I wasn’t supposed to tell other people if their parents hadn’t told them.  And then they freaked out and kept shouting, “what is wrong with marshmallows?” and my counselor got very concerned and told the kids to go home and Google it if they really wanted to know but that we weren’t going to talk about it at camp.  She had to say that a lot of times.  I guess I just don’t understand why parents don’t tell their kids about the dead fish bones.”

Me: Because other children don’t read labels and say, “what is gelatin?”

Wolvog: It’s dead fish bones.

Me: Seriously, why couldn’t you just use the marshmallows?

ChickieNob: Because of the dead fish bones.

Me: Then how did you do the activity and learn the engineering lesson?

ChickieNob: (dreamily) I just imagined it in my brain and that was enough.  And then we ate the pretzels.

Apologies to all other children who come in contact with mine.

I was reading through a backlog of posts in my Reader from during the power outage, and I came across this gem from the Huffington Post about a new app that tells you — down to the second — the moment YOU WILL BECOME INFERTILE.

I screamed that because I wanted to scare you.  But then I remembered that all of you are infertile too, so it probably didn’t work.

The post begins as such:

Is your biological clock about to run out? Not sure? A new app promises to tell you. It’s called “The Wonder Clock” and it uses your date of birth to calculate — down to the minute — when you’re going to become infertile, the Daily Mail reported.

There is the small problem that (1) your fertility is not tied to your birth date; in other words, there isn’t a set day that you will become unable to conceive based on the day you’re born and (2) your fertility is not like a kitchen faucet that is either running full stream or shut-off.  Fertility –without a catastrophic ending such as a hysterectomy — has a denouement.

So, you can be young and infertile, and you can be older and fertile.  The reality is that no one knows their fertility status until they attempt to procreate and find it impossible (not counting those who have a known fertility issue such as a lack of uterus, or situational infertility).  There are plenty of issues that indicate an increased possibility of infertility, but even factors such as PCOS or endometriosis do not point towards certain infertility.

The reason for the app?  Mira Kaddoura “created the app to confront her own fertility insecurities.”

I’m not sure what fertility insecurities are, though I am smitten by this phrase from her site: “We are women, and we are ticking.”

Ka-boom!

Again, the reproductively healthy, average woman (I’m talking about everyone who doesn’t fit into the 12.5% since we’re all reproductively-diseased outliers) is someone moving from fertility to non-fertility.  I separate the word “non-fertility” from infertility, which I use to mean people who should by every definition be fertile and yet are not.  The grandmothers of Boca Raton are non-fertile; the nubile twenty-somethings at the clinic waiting for their morning blood draw are infertile.  It is normal for a fifty-year-old woman to not be able to conceive.  It is abnormal for a thirty-year-old woman to not be able to conceive.  And yes, while it’s technically a grey zone, it does point to a larger problem than just time when a forty-year-old woman is not able to conceive with assistance.

I know that the general public loves to point at people waiting to build their families as the reason for increased infertility, but that isn’t a very scientific approach to exploring a problem.  Occam’s razor points to delayed family building just as easily as it points to environmental factors (which also explains the rise in occurrence of other diseases) or genetic factors.  There are too many causes of infertility that have nothing to do with age.

So this mixing up of two ideas is perhaps the biggest problem with this app: infertility and non-fertility.

All women will become non-fertile with age.  Only some women will be infertile.  It’s sort of like how all khakis are chinos but not all chinos are khakis (or however that works out).

Kaddoura wants the app to be a tool for dialogue, but that’s where it fails as a conversation opener: infertility isn’t really about time, per se.  Non-fertility is, and that is what Kaddoura is probably concerned with, but for this to be a dialogue about infertility, we’d need to have talking points about clotting disorders and egg quality.  We’d have to talk about azoospermia and CBAVD.  We’d need to debate IVF protocols, have thoughtful discussions on donor gametes and surrogacy.  And if we talk about infertility and family building, we’d have to discuss adoption realities as well as women who live child-free after infertility.  To talk about infertility, we need to talk about pregnancy loss; we need to have a frank discussion about how babies sometimes die.

We NEED a dialogue about infertility in this country because there is a deep lack of understanding about the financial, emotional, and physical realities of infertility while there are simultaneously lawmakers continuously working to place limits of an area of health they barely understand.  And please don’t get me started on public perception.  A dialogue about infertility would take days.  Weeks.  Years.  It would be like falling into a black hole where time would seem to stop because of the enormous mass of what we have to say.

The conversation about non-fertility is actually fairly brief.  It goes like this: “Healthy fertility has a shelf life, and you should attempt to procreate sooner rather than later.  Sooner is based on a host of factors beyond time such as desire, financial stability, and emotional support.  But yeah, forget every message you’re getting from the media about how IVF is a panacea for all fertility issues, because it’s not.  And forget every message you’re getting from Hollywood about how easy it is to have a baby in your forties, because it’s not.  Um… so I think that just about covers it.”

People should be more conscious of the fact that fertility isn’t a given.  Time is important because all infertile women will also one day become non-fertile women; meaning, success rates drop with age because fertility drops with age.  But again, for this to be a useful conversation about infertility, we need to address the lack of insurance coverage which wastes time as couples wait to cycle for financial reasons.  If we’re concerned about time, let’s talk about the far-reaching and seldom-considered effects of time instead of placing an app on our phone which serves the same purpose as your Great-Aunt Jane telling you at Thanksgiving that you’re not getting any younger and you may want to squeeze out a grandchild and make your mother happy.

So, that’s what I think of this app.  Though hell yeahs to the conversation, Mainstream Media.  Infertility is a dialogue we should be having.  When you’re ready to listen, we’re ready to talk.

* Going to add that the Wonder Clock is $1.99 in the app store.  Thanks for capitalizing on people’s fears to turn a buck.