Josh and I showed the twins the Time magazine cover last weekend.  Beyond inquiring if people were upset with the cover because the boy was biting his mother (our conversation: Um… he’s breastfeeding, not biting.  But he’s standing on a chair.  Is that how older kids breastfeed?  No, not exactly.  Then why is the boy standing on a chair?  I don’t have a good answer for that.  Why are breasts sometimes called private parts and we’re not supposed to look at them and other times mommies show their private parts and that’s okay?  Can we get back to the discussion I wanted to have?), we asked them if they would be okay if they were the boy in the picture.  Based on their reaction, we guesstimated correctly when we said we couldn’t imagine the twins being cool with having their picture out there.

And before you get your panties twisted, it had nothing to do with what the boy was doing.  I asked them if they would be upset to have me post a picture of them smiling nicely in the camera and they shouted yes.  Eating a lollipop, yes.  Playing baseball, yes.  Would they ever be okay being on the front of a magazine for any reason including winning a big award, and the answer was no.  The reason being that neither wanted strangers  looking at them, or people talking about them.

They gave us their hard limits, which were what we were already doing: no pictures or videos online, especially in publications and no stories about them unless they were the sort we would tell everyone anyway (the evolution story was fine, medical information is not).  I asked them if they were okay if I continued to tweet from time to time amusing things they said because I use the medium to quickly record these moments for myself, and they gave me the okay as long as I asked first.  We talked through past posts about them from the ones about the Wolvog and Steve Jobs to poor Mr. Whiskers of earectomy fame.  And for the most part, they’re comfortable with what is out there.  They know that all of you know about them, and sometimes you may even talk about them in this detached sense, but you don’t know them unless you have met them.  They were okay with the idea of themselves floating out there but not the concreteness of names and images.  Which pretty much falls in line with a lot of other life choices they’ve made.

Maybe I do know them after all.

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Want to know when I write?  I participated in She Started It’s author series where she asks writers to talk about when they write.  It’s a really cool project.  If you want to see my answer, click here.

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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:

• “Warrior II” (A Half Baked Life)
• “Are You Mom Enough Time Magazine Cover” (Stirrup Queens) – thank you, Lori!
• “On Being Left Behind & Rooting for All Babies to Be” (Writing for Life)
• “Hole to Whole” (Aiden, Baby of Mine)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Waiting for Little Feet has a post about waiting for the first ultrasound.  As she steels herself for the possibility that she could go through the same devastation she felt after her first loss, she also makes a promise to herself: “Although there is nothing I can do to avoid being scared between every ultrasound and chance to check on the baby, I refuse to waste my entire pregnancy feeling as petrified as I do right now.”  It’s a promise she’s now going to have to keep…

Still Life with Circles has a heartbreaking thank you after a recent loss.  She writes so beautifully: “I cannot tell you what the notes, condolences, comments, and the emails we have received have meant to us. We feel held. We feel loved. We know we are not going through this alone. Thank you. Oh, loves, thank you.”  It is a post about the aftermath of a loss, about the grief of a child who wants her sibling, and a family carrying on knowing they aren’t alone.

Write Mind Open Heart has a fantastic post that pretty much everyone should send along to anyone and everyone to read during the months of May and June.  She gives a heads up to everyone who holds a Mother’s Day or Father’s Day celebration about the section of their community they may not be reaching (and, in fact, may inadvertently be needling).  I also love that she admits that she knows the person didn’t know; but after reading this, people can hopefully bring even more compassion to their speeches at this time of year.

A Thousand Oceans wins for best title with “The Grinch Who Stole Mother’s Day.”  Okay, so she admits that it wasn’t her best moment, but I actually think the rawness reflects what so many people are thinking inside their head.  That maybe people do need to hear in order to understand.  Life can’t always been roses and breakfast in bed; sometimes it’s thorns and spilled coffee.

From IF to When has another amazing post about finding resolution.  I think it’s a must read for anyone who is infertile.  Period.  Even if they think they’ve resolved their infertility.

Lastly, An Engineer Becomes a Mom has a post about a shopping trip which was ruined by someone’s insensitive questions.  It is realizing when you’re speaking with someone who is not going to be deterred from their questioning as well as that desire to simply be honest, for your child’s sake.  Since there is nothing to hide; no shame in the multitude of ways people build their families.

The roundup to the Roundup: I guess I was right about my kids not wanting to be featured.  When do I write?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 11th and May 18th) 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.

You know how I asked if social media had the potential to do more damage than good?  Yesterday’s comments were literally the catalyst that set life back on track for myself and the ChickieNob.  There were both the smart words that you handed to me that I could pass along to her in order to help her make sense of the idea of broken promises (and whether to keep hers), but there was also this… intangible wave of support… I’m having difficulty putting this into words.  I guess it’s like this: you know how when you do a trust fall, you have that moment when your body touches down against all the hands and you’re cushioned?  That’s how I felt receiving your comments and guidance.  And once that happened, I was able to take a deep breath, clear my mind, get the next idea for the ChickieNob, and move forward.  I wish I could write more concretely about it, but it involves other people and therefore doesn’t feel quite like my story to tell.  But suffice to say that like Pippin, we’re on the right path.  Because of all of you.

You’ve probably noticed that I’m thinking a lot about external validation lately.  Sort of hard to hide it when you write three posts (1, 2, and 3) about it over a month, not to mention the Ashley Judd post.  It is hard to grapple with the idea of this thing — the Internet — which brings such joy and such tsuris.  That the very same thing can unite us and divide us — sometimes on the very same day.  You can write a post, get ten comments that validate your feelings and make you feel connected to something and additionally get ten comments that negate your feelings and make you feel alienated from humanity.  Or not get any comments or page views at all and feel equally isolated.

It is very easy to feel alone — to feel lonely — amongst the billions of people on the Internet.  It is as if all of us are traveling the same road, the same tubes of the Internet, yet some feel as if they are in a car and some feel as if they are in a bus.  And some of the bus people might wish for the solitude of the car and some of the car people might wish for the camaraderie of the bus (I’m picturing the camp bus more than the public transport here in town), though many are fine with how they’re traveling this road just as long as they are free of blown tires and other obstacles.

On a good day, I feel like the blogosphere is humming.  It hums, at least, for me.  I like dropping in on all the various blogs along this road.  I like my phone buzzing to tell me that people are communicating with me.  It’s all good.  On a bad day, it sounds like out-of-tune guitar strings.  I feel stretched too thin.  I feel lonely amongst everyone else.  But mostly, it feels out of my control — it always IS out of my control, but on bad days it also feels out of my control.  There is nothing I can do to make it right, to make it hum again.  It ebbs and flows even as my actions remain the same.

I realized the finger trap nature to the Internet long ago — the harder I tug, the more stuck I get.  It doesn’t help to tug at the collective Internet.  Sometimes the only thing you can do is step away, or deep breathe and continue to do the same actions knowing that the waning will once again wax.  Or vice versa.

I’ve been turning off my phone for two hours every day while I do yoga or go running.  It started with yoga; the studio just felt like the sort of place where I should shut out all external distractions — even good distractions.  And then one day, I realized that the time I had the phone off had become a sanctuary instead of a stress.  It had a starting point and an end point.  It wasn’t long enough for lots of things to pile up that would need my attention.  It was just this little bite of time where I had no access to this thing that brings me happiness and stress and where the Internet also had no access to me.

I have never had a desire for a long digital sabbatical.  If someone wants to unplug, I think they should unplug.  If someone doesn’t really want to unplug, I don’t see a reason for them to unplug just because there are posts on the Internet saying how great it is.  I don’t think it’s the only way to reach a place of balance where you can allow the Internet to wax and wane without dragging you with it. (Though I think even if you’re cognizant of the movements of the Internet — or friendships or relationships or fill in the blank with anything that has the tendency to change over time — you can’t help but be emotionally affected if you become emotionally affected.  It’s hard to talk yourself out of your feelings.)

It is two years on from when I wrote about the way the Internet can affect my mood.  I am no closer to being in a place where the Internet doesn’t affect my mood.  It feels a bit like the position “crow” in yoga — some days I can get it and some days I can’t, and I don’t really know why that is nor do I have the strongest desire to be master over this position.  Even when I have it, I can’t hold it very long.  And that is how I feel about the Internet and the validation I take from my writing or interactions with others.  I sometimes get it and I sometimes don’t, and I have no idea why.  It sometimes affects me and it sometimes doesn’t, and I have no idea why.  I have been trying to let it go and move with it rather than trying to make it move with me.  Sometimes I am successful and sometimes I am not.

Which is why I start this same conversation over and over again with you.  I keep returning to the same ideas and broaching the same topic with new analogies or new entrances with the hope that one day it will all make sense.  And until then, we can talk about it; acknowledge it.  Allow each other to know that we mostly grapple with the same thoughts just with different specifics colouring them.

I smacked myself in the head with the side of the car door on Sunday.  After the initial writhing around, holding my temple, cursing everyone around me, the pain lowered to a dull throb that lasted for several days*.  All I wanted was to undo the moment, go back in time, not open the car door into the soft space on the side of my skull.  Being in physical pain sucks.  Being in physical pain due to your own clumsiness sucks hardcore.

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I have a tendency to mentally run away on the what ifs.  Not the good, daydreamy what ifs, but the terrible, dark, horrible what ifs that rarely serve a purpose beyond allowing me to feel fear before I need to feel fear.  Borrowing trouble.  Pre-mourning.

It’s not as if I ever run out of these thoughts for myself, but I do them for other people too: people I care about such as the twins all the way to people I don’t know such as Aimee Copeland who lost her leg to a flesh-eating bacteria.  I read the news updates because my heart goes out to this girl and her family, and then I start thinking, what if it had rained that day? What if her trip had been cancelled?  What if too many people wanted to go on the zip line and she never got her turn?  Completely unhelpful thoughts even for Aimee herself to grapple with because what is done is done, and she can only move forward from here.

And yet I can’t stop mentally fiddling around with the future and past as if we are all Playmobil people in a Playmobil town to be manipulated and moved around by unseen hands, stories erased and restarted when they hit outcomes we don’t like.

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The same quote keeps popping up in various places, though I’ve been unable to trace the origin of it.  It goes something along the lines of “worrying is praying for what you don’t want.”

I wish there was a way for someone to tally my daily thoughts for me, every single one that passes through my brain, and tell me at the end of the day if I did more hoping or more worrying (because wouldn’t hope be praying for what you do want?).  I fear if I tried to do it myself, I would skew the results, either thinking more terrible thoughts than usual because they’re the elephant that I’m not supposed to think about or thinking more good thoughts than usual because I want to be the type of person who hopes more than worries.

But it isn’t really a matter of evenness.  Doesn’t worry weigh heavier than hope?  Hope carries us away; it’s the balloon that we’re holding that makes us sail forward.  Worry is like holding an oversized crate that makes your arms and back ache as you struggle to move it to the basement storage room.

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The ChickieNob asked a question recently that I couldn’t answer.  Many people, altogether, had taken a pledge.  The ChickieNob took the pledge to heart, bringing it up from time to time, especially when she noticed other people bending it.  One day, she realized that some people had broken the pledge, this promise that she made that she took very seriously, and she sobbed on our ride home.  She asked me from the backseat why she should ever keep her promises if other people break theirs?

How do you answer that?  Do you give her the cold hard truth that some people are careless at best and cruel at worst?  Do I soften the message and tell her that sometimes people will break a promise, but the broken promise never tells the whole story?

I wanted to pull the ChickieNob Playmobil figure out of that game, and start over, resetting up the plastic town.  I wanted her to unlearn that life lesson, to undo every decision that brought us to that place.  Because what if she takes this lesson to its logical conclusion?  Why should she trust others or make promises herself?

We all grow up and learn through trial and error who to trust and who not to trust; we know there are people out there who have our back no matter what, and we also know that there are people we are friends with as a matter of convenience and some people who we should avoid at all cost.  We learn about all the various shades of grey; that no one in this world is black or white, but that we are complicated, simplistic, wonderful, terrible beings.  And sometimes every single one of us breaks a promise.  And sometimes breaking that promise isn’t even indicative of how much the promise meant to us in the first place.

I know she will be fine in the end, because she needs to be fine in the end.  Because there is no undoing of things.  There’s only forward.

How would you answer her?  Why should she keep her promise to others if those people are not keeping their promise to her?  Is there a big enough difference between a promise and a statement, and should we be teaching kids (and some adults) to make statements instead of promises?

* No, I didn’t go to the hospital.  But I also have never made a promise to go to the hospital when I accidentally smack myself in the head.

Karen made a very interesting point on my post about the drop in comments.  She writes:

Before blogs, we read newspapers, and we did not write a letter to the editor for every item we read, but we talked about interesting stories at work, school, the dinner table or over the back fence. The conversations were no less rich and even more dispersed than in the digital realm. The advantage of digital conversations is that we have not only the means of gathering those scattered conversations but dropping in and participating in them.

Which raises a really important question: is it healthy to have our words and ideas widely critiqued by everyone and anyone?  Authors and poets know that having your work reviewed is part of the act of publishing; though it isn’t part of the act of writing.  You can write for the joy of writing and even allow people to read it, but never receive feedback on it, which isn’t the case with traditional publishing.  Books that are published by traditional publishers are reviewed, newspaper and magazine articles are discussed in letters to the editor, and the author has the potential to see these thoughts (though you can always avoid reading reviews).  It goes with the territory, much like how report cards are part of teaching, though they may not be the thing most teachers think about when they make the decision to go into education.

But those reviews, a long time ago, were written by professionals.  They had a job and understood the responsibility that came with that job in writing honest critiques of published works.  With the exception of letters to the editor written by people who are passionate enough about the subject to do the work of taking out a piece of paper and writing down their thoughts and slapping a stamp on an envelope — things that discourage those who are not passionate from voicing their opinion — most authors never heard anything about their writing except from reviewers and book sale figures.  Sure, there were letters that trickled in or comments made directly to the writer. (I’m assuming usually gushy since how many people have the ovaries to walk up to a writer and say to their face, “I think your work sucked.”)  But the feedback was slow-coming, usually thoughtful (which doesn’t always mean kind, but at least criticism that is usable), and small in quantity.

And now we have this non-traditional publishing medium — blogs — where people receive feedback on their writing almost instantaneously.  And it’s not from people who write reviews for a living, who are keeping in mind the code of ethics that govern their profession.  The comments are written by me and you, and we’re hardly following a code of ethics except in the most personal sense.  Some of the comments are fantastically helpful; so many moments in life were easier because your words were with me.  And some of the comments are hurtful; even without intending to be.

And it raises the question: is blogging really healthy?  Is it always a good thing to receive this much feedback about your words and thoughts?  Have we taken something that is good in small doses and brought it to an unhealthy level?  I don’t really have an answer: I’m asking you.

It goes further: is it healthy to have our lives critiqued?  To have people not responding to the words on the screen but writing about our beings in general?  It used to be that the people who entered the public’s opinion were mostly celebrities who knew — like teachers and report cards — that critique came as part of the job.  But now there are so many people offering up their opinion on celebrities (who they are as human beings; even though we don’t know them) and on a daily basis, regular people enter into the realm of virtual celebrity from computer shooter Tommy Jordan to breastfeeding cover mum Jamie Lynn Grumet.

Again, I don’t have an answer, but it does give food for thought: in taking the conversation that used to be held at the backyard fence and bringing it onto the Internet not only for other people to eavesdrop in on but for the subject to be privy to as well, have we done more emotional damage than good?  Or is the good enough to balance out the potential emotional damage?

One of my favourite movies growing up was The Incredible Shrinking Woman with Lily Tomlin.  The main character, Pat Kramer, is an ordinary woman who gets sprayed by some perfume that causes her to shrink.  Shrink to the point where she tumbles into the garbage disposal in the sink.  Shrink to the point where she becomes microscopic — not discernible to the naked eye.

I liked the movie because what child wouldn’t want to crawl into their dollhouse?  But it was also scary to see her shrink, and as an adult, I watch the trailer with not a small amount of trepidation.  Who the hell wants to watch herself disappear?  Watching things or people fade away can be frightening.  You know, people… blog comment sections…

There has been talk around the blogosphere about comments tapering off; where there were once vibrant conversations, there are now only a few people talking.  And yet the same people report that their overall stats haven’t fallen.  Readership for the most part remains constant, but the discussion has tapered off, almost as if it has been sprayed with experimental perfume and we’re witnessing the Incredible Shrinking Blog.

Like the film, we sort of know what caused it, but we don’t (1) understand how it happened or (2) how to undo it for our own space.  I mean, it’s obvious to the viewer (and from my vague memories, the characters in the film) that the perfume kicks it off.  But we (and they) don’t know how this perfume is causing someone to shrink nor how to reverse the effects and get Lily Tomlin back to her normal size.  Replace the perfume with the terms diffusion and consumption and you have the cause (yet not the how or the solution) to the blog comment situation.

Diffusion refers to all those other social media sites which are absorbing the conversation.  I think places like BlogHer provide the proof in the pudding — they bring the Twitter conversation, Facebook conversation, and actual comments all into a single space below the post.  If only comments were visible, as they are on this blog, you’d think that people weren’t talking much at all.  But if you start seeing the tweets and Facebook comments (not to mention the numerous other social media sites from Google+ to Pinterest), you realize that the same depth of conversation is taking place; it’s just diffused across multiple mediums.

And it doesn’t really matter if you are on other social media sites.  The reality is that a lot of your readers are there, and that’s where they’re talking.  Hence why there is nothing you can do on that front to shunt people back to the comment box; nor would you want to get rid of all those other social media spaces in order to bring the conversation back to a single place.  Social media sites bring conversation as well as take it away, plus they fill other community-building gaps.

Consumption refers to the medium on which people are reading blog posts.  Many people read on their phone or tablet, which makes commenting annoying at best.  Add in obstacles such as auto-correct and word verification forms, and it sometimes feels like leaving a comment is more work that it’s worth.  I have a tendency to read a post, mark it unread so I’ll return to it once I’m on the computer and can comment easier, and then unfortunately let things pile up so I never get to it at all.  Good intentions; poor follow through.  I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only person who is reading blogs in a medium that is not conducive to participation on said blogs in the same way that computers are the perfect medium for jumping into the conversation.  It’s one thing to type out 140 characters from your phone.  It’s another to write a comment with 50+ words, pulling in quotes from the main post to highlight your point.  Blogs were created for a medium (computers) on which they are no longer the sole way they are being consumed.

By the way, this is aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall based on assumption.  But doesn’t it sound like it could be true?

So we know the likely cause — diffusion and consumption — but we don’t know how these things that were supposed to add to the conversation ultimately took it away.  Do blog comment sections need to change in format to reflect our new needs?  Should blogging software pull in all mentions of the post across the Internet and compile them under the post so people can see all the threads of the conversation in one place?  Should we create a method for a person leaving comments from their phone to be able to bypass the need to fill in all the fields such as name, email address, blog url and only focus on the comment box (moving from field to field is one of my problems)?  What about everyone getting rid of comment verification boxes so people don’t have to suffer through captcha guesswork in order to leave a comment from their phone?

And we don’t know how to reverse it, to bring back the conversation to the comment box.  I have to admit that I’d rather have it there than in other places because I like being able to return to other people’s thoughts and see them in conjunction with my own.  Words on other social media sites are great in the moment, but irretrievable in the far future.  But I don’t want to give up talking about blog posts in other social media spaces.  And I’d never want to give up reading from my phone or tablet because the reality is that I also read more now than I did before.  I’m more likely to read a blog post while I’m waiting somewhere alone whereas I used to only read blog posts on the computer.  And if I couldn’t get to a computer, I couldn’t read.

The only thing I think people can do to bring back the conversation is to talk openly about it.  Tell your readers that you also love hearing their thoughts in your comment section so you have it in the future.  Make it easy for people to comment by getting rid of obstacles such as difficult-to-utilize from a phone log ins and word verification forms.  Or, change the way you view the change: accept that diffusion doesn’t mean drop-off.  There may be fewer comments than before, but there is more conversation all around.  The reality is that the blogosphere has always waxed and waned, and perhaps we’re just seeing it at one point of the cycle.  Even without doing anything, we may find that the conversation makes its way back to the comment box on its own.

At the very end of The Incredible Shrinking Woman, the main character — now so tiny that no one can see her — falls into some household cleaners which cause her to regrow to her normal size.  Of course, the movie finishes with the open question of whether she stops growing once she reaches her original height which is answered with the shoe splitting open.

How amazing would that be?  If not only did people figure out a way to reverse the trend and bring people back into the heyday of blog conversations but caused those conversations to grow exponentially.  Think of how much good could be accomplished by people actually talking things out.

Have you noticed a drop in comments through your overall blog traffic remains pretty much the same (obviously, if your traffic has dropped, there are different causes at work)?  Are you conversing on other social media sites about other people’s blog posts?