I am not balancing life well at this moment in time.  I started the week off strong, but then work and obligations overtook me.  I found myself thrashing about in a sea of words and code, with timesuck maelstroms dragging me under.  I would go to bed at 1 am and then wake up at 7 am and try to get more work accomplished and couldn’t get a hold of my life.

This meant that I was incapable of purchasing soap.

Crap, you think as you read that: does that mean Melissa didn’t bathe all week?  No, I showered, using Josh’s bar of soap the first day.  I was then caught by Josh and it was implied through the way he incredulously intoned: “you used my soap?” that I was not welcome to keep using said soap.  I then switched to a travel bar that I unearthed since I couldn’t get my shit together to go to the store.  Until one night late in the week when I was out, and I nipped into the drugstore to grab a two-pack of Dove.

The next day, I stayed in my pyjamas until 4 pm — as did the twins — while I finished a project.  Exhausted and mentally fried, I climbed in the shower to clear my head before I tackled the next task.  And as I soaped up my body, I noted that the soap did not smell like my normal soap.  Nor did it feel like my normal soap.  This soap had flavour crystals or something that looked like little drops of Certs Retsyn. (How horrified am I to Google that and discover that Retsyn is copper gluconate.  I don’t know what the hell that is, but it sounds like metal.)  And it was scratching me.  My soap was literally scratching me.

After the shower, I fished the box out of the recycling pile.  It turns out that I not only forget my pants on long trips, but I can’t purchase soap when I have too many projects going at once.  I apparently purchased an exfoliating bar, so I will be spending the next few weeks buffing my skin since I don’t have time again to buy more soap.

But as a side note: do you have your own bar of soap in the shower, or do you share one with your partner?  I’d love to know the breakdown of how many people share or hoard their soap.  We are soap hoarders here (though I am also a soap stealer when I need to be).

*******

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:

• “Father’s Day” (Our Tiny Angels)
• “Overjoyed” (Finding Our New Normal)
• “And Another One” (For the Love of Baby Liam)

Okay, now my choices this week.

My Lady of the Lantern has a lovely, lilting post about the realities of her life.  About the push and pull of life: she wants the cream on bread, she knows she shouldn’t have the cream on bread.  She wants to return to work, she doesn’t feel settled returning to work.  I loved the simplicity and the rhythm of this post.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about confidence that resonated with me.  The post also provides you with a way to look at your own confidence levels.  She writes, “And the emotions of pregnancy loss and infertility, failure and self-doubt as a woman, all these emotions pulled my self-confidence down.  Initially, I was scared to go out, scared to meet people, in case the tears came, in case the awkward comments and questions were delivered.”  I appreciated the rawness of her confidence dissection.

Lastly, last weekend was Father’s Day in the United States and A Little Blog about the Big Infertility has a moving post about Father’s Day, her father, and a song from the Lion King.  She writes about her daughter, “Even though V is not biologically related, every one in my family notices she bears a resemblance, physically to my dad. And you may think this is weird, but sometimes she stares off into space and smiles like someone is there, and I wonder if he isn’t watching over us.”  The post made me want to reach through the screen and give her a hug.

And a side note because this video is so much fun, from Pretend to Enjoy (a non-IF blogger, as far as I know):

Taste the Rainbow – Stop Motion Candy and Paint from Jennifer Dorsman on Vimeo.

The roundup to the Roundup: Do you share soap, or so you each have your own bar of soap in your house?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 15th and June 22nd) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

And then it turns out that it was a hoax.

Considering that no one sane wants to be infertile, happily chooses to lose a wanted pregnancy or a child, there sure seems to be a lot of people who want to create fake blogs depicting these situations.  A lot is an overstatement, but it certainly seems like a lot if you’ve been around the ALI blogosphere for a while.  I linked to two stories in that last post on being a frier (“sucker” in Hebrew); there have been more than two.

I still believe, for the most part, that the majority of damage is contained in the moment.  You feel foolish for expending emotional energy on a fake story, but I’ve seen this community weather a few of these by this point, and this one was small potatoes compared to one several years back which went on for considerably longer, the blogger deeply entrenched in the community.  Her news appeared many times in the LFCA, her blog was on the blogroll, she participated in community-wide projects, commented liberally.  She was known by many in this corner of the blogosphere, and her hoax brought out a lot of anger.

So I watched us roll through that, and like so many times when we say that an event has changed the community forever, the statement is both true and somewhat false.  A community is never static, so every person entering or exiting changes it.  Every moment changes it.  But this particularly community is also a tough community who came together with a purpose — to trade information and support.  And that need doesn’t disappear just because someone chooses to exploit us.  Therefore, we come back together again and again to fulfill that need despite people performing acts which distract us from our goal to be there for one another and to weigh in with our thoughts on the emotional side of infertility and loss (as well, sometimes, to discuss what worked for us).

There was a blogger a while back — LisaP — who changed my life.  She has since died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but back in 2006, she read my blog and noticed things in my story that reminded me of her own.  So she emailed to ask if my doctor had done a clotting panel, and a few appointments later with a hematologist, I got my probable answer (and possible solution) to my early losses.

That, to me, is the ALI community.  We watch out for each other, we hold each other accountable for what we put into the world, we hold each other up, we give each other ideas.  I stick around to get that and to give that.  My goal in life is to be someone else’s LisaP, to have them think fondly of me once I’m gone and say, “that woman changed my life.”  And to be completely selfish, I’m here because you all get me through my day.  Even the stuff I don’t blog about.  Sometimes I don’t even need the communication; I just need to know you exist and you’re out there.  And other times, I need the hug or the conversation or the advice.  So I hopefully give and I definitely take.  And then the hoaxes come along and they are a distraction, but they ultimately don’t deter me from what I want to do which is the give and take.

The people who do this suck, plain and simple.  They see hurt and exploit it.  They see kind hearts and exploit them.  They want care in the same way that we all want care, but they steal it instead of asking for it.  And like all thieves, emotional thieves make us feel unsafe because if they can take our tears, take our attention, take our empathy, what else can people take?

There are really no good words with these sorts of things.  But know that the people out there who have my trust, you still have my trust.  And to everyone hurting today from this, you have my hugs.

In Hebrew, we have a common phrase that summarizes part of the Israeli cultural identity: ani lo frier, which translates loosely to “I’m not a sucker.”  Being exploited, having someone pull the wool over your eyes, giving away your kindness to someone who doesn’t deserve it earns you that title of frier.  Being a frier, a fool, is one of the worst things you can call a person in Israel.  Here in America, you could call someone an idiot and get away with it.  Call someone a frier in Israel and you better be prepared to be slugged.

A watered down English equivalent would be “I knew that!” when the person so clearly didn’t know that.  Or “I meant to do that!” when they clearly didn’t.  Americans have a hard time admitting their mistakes, but when someone tricks us, we’re okay talking about it.  Pointing out how horrible the other person is.  In Israel, you would never want to admit aloud that someone got you to give them empathy when they were lying to you.  In America, we talk about it, sometimes under the guise that we’re protecting others by spreading word.

I’m not sure where I’m heading with those thoughts except that they’re a cultural difference I’ve noted; these two ways of reacting to our fears of playing the fool.

No one wants to be tricked, but it happens, and with the exception of far-reaching schemes such as Bernie Madoff, it is usually something that affects us deeply in the moment and then fades away.

Once a Mother wrote so eloquently about a situation unfolding in the ALI blogosphere that people emailed me about today, a situation I know nothing about.  She points out that lying about loss obviously happens — Warrior Eli ring any bells?  Little April Rose? — but also that people grieve in a multitude of ways; sometimes ways that don’t make a lot of sense to us.  We can’t always predict how we ourselves will act when the shit hits the fan, much less what rings true for someone we only know through a computer screen.

In grade school, there was a girl in my class who always said and did the wrong thing, and she was teased all the time.  She always raised her hand to answer the question, and she pretty much always got it wrong.  One day, she came to school and told us that she was moving to Korea.  It was decided that we’d combine a scheduled classroom party with a going-away party for her, and we all worked on banners and cards to send her off to Korea.  Living in the DC area, this happened often since many of the students at my school were the children of diplomats or they were administration appointments, and they’d come and go with the postings.  We held a lot of parties, made a lot of cards.

The day of the party arrived, and we brought in our baked goods and our cards and streamers.  We decorated the room.  And we gave this girl her cards.  We all hugged her and told her that we’d love to be her pen pal.  Her mother came by the room towards the end of the party for pick-up when her daughter was carrying out all of her cards and the banner.  The teacher told the mother that we’d miss her daughter, and the mother asked why.  After some awkward dancing around on the topic, we all learned that this girl wasn’t moving to Korea.  She was going to be back in school the next day.  She never told us why she made it up, though I have to guess that it was for the attention, the love, the small pool of days when no one teased her when she said Montana was the capital of the United States.

I think about that girl all the time; what would make a person create a fake story, especially one that would have to come apart at the seams at some point?  When she was still in school, weren’t we going to find out that she wasn’t moving to Korea?  This fake story had a shelf life.

I asked about it last week with Forest Boy.  I think there’s one part of me that is fascinated by the fact a person would do this. (It seems very difficult to me, but Josh also points out that I can’t keep a surprise for longer than 30 seconds.  Secrets — if you ask me not to tell anyone — I can keep forever.  But a surprise I know everyone will find out at some point?  Those things I gleefully shout out within seconds of creating the surprise.)  There’s another part of me that doesn’t want to be the frier and reacts with frustration to the idea of being taken in.  And there’s another part of me that remembers that girl from grade school, and my heart goes out to anyone who could benefit greatly from a few kind cards and a banner, but doesn’t know how to go about getting those things in a straightforward manner.

Thank you to everyone who wrote me, but I really like Once a Mother’s take on things.  It costs nothing to extend kindness.  For instance, it cost my classmates and I very little to make her the card in the long run after our initial reaction — truly, the price was a loss of trust, a few cents worth of increased suspicion, and some wax from the crayons.  And on the Internet it costs us little to trust until proven otherwise and extend kindness.  Or to not be able to do that and to walk away without saying anything at all.

What if my classmates and I hadn’t made cards for the next child who announced they were moving?  And what if that child did move and left our classroom feeling empty and isolated because there was no send off?  I would rather make one extra, perhaps unnecessary card than have people who are leaving and need the card not receive one because I’m caring more about not being a frier than I’m thinking about how to reach out to others, be a kind human being.

There are people whom I have never met (yet), but I care about you and what happens to you deeply.  When you hurt, I hurt too, just as I do for all my face-to-face friends.  We are a tribe here.  I can extend that love when the relationship comes first, the need for support comes second.  That connection is important because the strength of that connection informs my reaction, how deeply I feel about hearing news.

My choice is to continue to extend kindness when I can extend kindness, extend support to those whom I know in the online sense or the face-to-face sense.  It may mean that I become the frier sometimes, but truly, so what?  Isn’t the alternative — becoming untrusting — just as detrimental as playing the fool?  So I choose to trust until I am clearly shown that I shouldn’t trust.  And breathe deeply because we’re humans and we’re fragile and why we do things isn’t always clear.

This is the beauty of the comment section: because I fumbled through a post, feeling something very deeply, but it took the comments before I could understand (1) what I was feeling and (2) why I was feeling it.  There were two comments that captured similar thoughts perfectly: Anon, who spoke about privilege and Sushigirl who wrote about the birth experience.

Both brought me the thoughts that had been floundering about in my mind as I read that article, and it’s the same thing I think when I hear about things such as Ricki Lake’s documentary on birth choices or when people talk about their birth plan.  I am amazed and confused and genuinely in awe of people who believe they can conduct this physical event that takes place inside and outside their body in the same way they plan for things — as Sushigirl points out — like a wedding.

I’ve been attempting to lose weight the last few months, and while I know it’s a simple equation of fewer calories in/more weight lost, it doesn’t really work like that.  I can eat the same menu day-after-day, do the same exercise day-after-day, and some weeks, I lose one pound.  And some weeks, I lose three pounds.  And many weeks, I lose no pounds.  Because it’s only moderately under my control and there is still so much we don’t understand, so many factors that come into play that I can’t account for.  We see the same thing happen with illness.  We can’t control how our body reacts to treatment or surgery.  We can take medications and have them work one day, not work another.  With illness, we spend more time hoping for the best.  Preparing for the worst.

But we get to childbirth, and somehow all realizations that so much of the body is outside our control fly out the window and people start drawing up birth plans.  Not birth preferences, birth it-would-be-nices.  Plans.  And as Sushigirl so eloquently captured, birth does start to feel akin to a wedding, with showers and a babymoons and 4D ultrasounds and all the experiences we’re convinced by magazines and companies and our friends that we should have, including birth photographers and millions of keepsakes.  But birth isn’t a wedding, even if it may also be one of the most important days of your life.  Birth is a physical event that has more in common with losing weight and illness than it does to weddings or Bat Mitzvahs or sweet sixteens.

There was a lot of jealousy in that post, and incredulity, because I want to be that woman who believes that she is in control and can guide the experience, who trusts her body and trusts the universe at large.  And I’m not that woman.  I don’t know if I was ever that woman (Josh lovingly calls this side of my personality a host of famous pessimists’ names), but I know that infertility beat whatever vestiges of it out of me in regards to birth.  I don’t trust that I will have anything to do with a good or bad outcome, but that something will happen and I will witness it.  It makes me a little sad that I think this way, but I own it: I think this way.  And sometimes I think it’s a healthier way to think, to not mix up my ability to control other things with the idea that I could control my bodily functions.  And sometimes I think it’s a profoundly unhealthy way to think because it’s a dark, pessimistic way of seeing the world.  But it’s mine.  And I own it.

I do want to clarify something.  As I wrote in that post, my feelings extend to those minutes after birth, those minutes before death.  Those are the minutes that I don’t know if they should be captured, as Anon so beautifully put: “is it OK to have these intimate moments of birth and death captured on film?”  I don’t have a concrete answer.  Instead of looking at this from the side of birth, I chose to look at it from the side of death and apply my thoughts to both ends of the spectrum:

How would I feel if I were dying and Josh picked up the camera and started snapping my picture?  Would I understand that he needed to do that for his own process?  His own mourning?  If he explained that to me, would I feel at peace knowing my last seconds were perhaps not what I needed, but they were exactly what he needed?  How would I feel if he uploaded those pictures to his blog or Facebook to tell the world that I was dead?  What if he wanted to publish them so he could write a post about how he felt taking those pictures?  Would that disturb me to think about or would I understand where he was coming from, know that it was what he needed to do?

And then I reversed those thoughts, taking the idea of mourning into the idea of using those images in joy.  To celebrate the beginning of a life instead of marking an ending.  Again, I don’t have concrete answers; just amorphous reactions to these two possibilities.

Of course we have images from when I first held the twins — many hours after their birth.  I love those pictures even if I’ve never shown them around.  I wouldn’t necessarily not show them around except that they bother the twins, and therefore I don’t show them to others out of respect for their feelings.  I can also understand that having those images can be empowering, a fuck-you if you will, an act of overcoming.  I loved how one commenter pointed out that having a birth photographer there can free you to stay in the moment knowing someone else is dealing with the act of recording.

I do see a birth photographer as different from your doula snapping a few pictures or your mother jumping in to snap a picture the first time she sees you holding your child.  A birth photographer has no other role than to record the event; they are professional artists who are hired to record the event much in the same way a wedding photographer records your ceremony.  A doula or a nurse or your partner snapping a picture is more akin to your friends taking candid shots at your wedding.  They are there as guests, but they happen to capture a moment with their camera.  So that post meandered through the idea of having a professional photographer in the delivery room as well as the idea of uploading those pictures online or sharing them with others.

As someone who cherishes her photographs, there was so much said in the comment section that resonated with me too.  Even if I can’t wrap my mind around the idea of booking a birth photographer at six weeks.

I’m going to admit first and foremost that I had a very strong, visceral reaction to reading the New York Times article on birth photographers.  So I want to preface this by saying that if you are all gung-ho to use a birth photographer (or if you already have and are in possession of a photo album of your child’s birth), go for it.  Unless you show me the photos, it doesn’t affect me at all.  You can choose to use one and I can choose not to use one, and like Ladyhawke, we’ll just find those bloggy moments together when the camera is neither out nor put away.

By which I mean you may want to click away now if you read that New York Times article and it didn’t bother you.  If you continue reading this post, you’re going to hear my gut reaction.

Not only would I not want to have a birth photographer in my delivery room if I’m ever lucky enough to get to deliver again, but I don’t really want to view their work if they take photos for my friends and family.  Not because I have a weak stomach and can’t view an image of a human being sliding out of my friend’s vagina, but because I don’t feel I have any business seeing said visual.  That’s an intimate moment, a personal moment.  A person’s first second of life.  Don’t people deserve to have a few seconds of their lives — their birth or their death — which are simply lived and not documented?  Or if they are documented, have them documented for the person themselves and not for other people (including the parents of said child) to do with as they please?

Because you know that if people have quality shots as opposed to whatever they snap with their excited, shaking hands, they’re going to be uploaded to Facebook.

I obviously have strong opinions on this, and I know that as I write this, I am possibly offending someone deeply who loves their birth shots and uploaded them to Facebook. (And for the record, I see a birth photographer as different from your partner snapping a picture or two of you on the big day or your child a few minutes after birth.  And for the second record, I did tell you to stop reading if you might possibly become offended.)  I am sorry about that.  But is it such a bad thing to hear a heads up that not everyone in your Facebook feed would be thrilled to get to witness your child’s birth from afar?  Some, I’m sure, would.  But no matter how much I love that child, no matter how divine I think the one-hour-after-birth pictures are, I don’t want to see your child’s first seconds of life.  I don’t want to see them online, I don’t want to see them in your scrapbook, I just plain don’t want to see them.  I want you and your child to own those moments and selfishly not share them with the world.  Those are your seconds; take them.

And to be completely honest, I don’t see a lot of difference between a mother uploading her birth shots to Facebook and a husband uploading his wife’s death shots to Facebook.  Would the latter be appropriate?  And if it isn’t, would the former?  I’m sure some will disagree because they see birth = wonderful whereas death = horrible.  But I see both of those transitions as simply intimate, important moments.  We who are here before or left behind process those events through our own lens based on how they affect us, but to the person going through the birth or death, they are the bookend moments of a life.

The twins’ birth wasn’t an intimate experience.  We had two teams from the NICU, several doctors, and a gallery of medical students all eager to bear witness and take notes.  And yet there was something also magical about being the only two people in the twins’ lives who saw, heard, felt, smelled, and touched what happened there that day.  Would I have paid attention if I knew it was being documented?  I have to admit that there are times when I’m filming something or I know Josh is photographing something and I zone out, knowing full well I’ll be able to relive it the next day.  The first and last seconds of life feel too enormous, too important, too emotional to get to relive the experience again and again.

There were a few lines in the New York Times article that cemented in my mind that this is just a plain bad idea for me.

• “Women who are crestfallen when their births do not go according to plan and C-sections are ordered — not the image they wanted to capture.” [Okay, I have to admit that I judge less if someone tells me they were disappointed with their C-section because they missed out on an experience vs. if they told me that they missed out on the PICTURES THEY WANTED.]

• “In home births, photographers say, the mother calls the shots.” [It really freaks me out that there are people who would opt for a home birth just to be able to get the photos they want.]

• “In Cincinnati, one woman called Melanie Pace and Kelly Smith of Beautiful Beginnings Birth Photography the day she got her pregnancy test results, Ms. Pace recalled. Several have called when they are five or six weeks pregnant.  “I’m like, ‘Seriously?’ ” Ms. Pace said. “Can you go to the doctor first and confirm this pregnancy?” [You know exactly where my brain went with this one, and I know that is more indicative of my own personal experience than of general statistics, but do people really need one more thing to possibly cancel after a loss?]

It’s probably that last quote that gave me so much pause.  Maybe I’m jealous of the hubris, that self-assuredness that birth = baby.  Oh my G-d, I asked myself as I read the article.  Who the hell are these women and what blogs have they been reading?  Because in my corner of the world, shit goes down.  All of my losses have been early, but it is impossible to virtually meet all of you and not have your stories affect me, have me understand that other side of that statistic on late term loss.  It’s not even borrowing pain or premourning-while-pregnant.  It’s just plain cautious common sense.  I won’t plan for a loss, but I will certainly be mindful that it happens.  And not book a birth photographer at six weeks.

Where I think the work that Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep is beautiful, giving parents a chance to have images of their child just as every other parent gets to have over the years, I find birth photographers more conceit than memory building.  In a world where we are constantly asking people to LOOK AT ME on Facebook, Twitter, our blogs, I find the idea of recording this moment to be more forward thinking to a share than it is about considering how your child may want these images in the future.

Or, I can respect the idea of birth photography if the photos are taken and put away for safe keeping, a document handed over to that child in the future akin to other baby photos, a first lock of hair, or a family tree.  But share those photos, and yeah, you get my judgment because you just drew me into your experience.  To witness a moment I never wanted to witness.

The first seconds of birth.  The last seconds before death.  These are the two moments that ask us to put down the cell-phone-Twitter-feed, put down the camera, put down the keyboard, stop trying to record.  And just hold each other.  Bear witness to the transitions.