I was given some advice years ago on something unrelated to infertility that has always stuck with me: don’t look at your life too closely or you’ll see that it all seems impossible.  That budget you constructed based on your needs against your income — impossible.  Getting everything on your to-do list accomplished — impossible.  Surviving the suckhole that is infertility — will not happen.  Or surviving the sleep deprivation of an infant — it will never end.

And yet, you know that it always does because you can think back to dozens of difficult times in your life, times that seemed impossible to endure, and you are no longer enduring them.  You may even be at peace with that time period even though events were suffocating you back then.  By which I mean that now you can breathe as you think about it.

Which means that you will also be able to breathe in the future, even if things seem too overwhelming in the current moment to believe that there will one day be an end point to how you are feeling.

If you don’t believe me, write out all the things you are stressed about in this moment and then tuck this away in a drawer for a year.  Write out a new list at that time and then look at the old list.  How many of the stressors were survived even though they seemed overwhelming a year ago?  I’m aware that a year is a long time to wait for proof.

I think one of the drawbacks of blogs is that we write out the details of our life, and whenever you look at the facts of your life in black-and-white terms (or for those of you with godawful layouts, pink-and-purple terms), listed out on the screen, they have a tendency to either look much larger or much smaller than the size they appear in our head.  This can obviously be a good thing if they shrink and become more manageable as you list things out.  But this can equally be a terrible thing if the facts of your life on screen loom larger than a monster poised to swallow you.

If you are going to keep a blog and you are going to have your words grow teeth and gnash them at you, all monster-like, you will need to take that step back and remember that all difficult moments in life look impossible in black-and-white.  How can a person ever survive a loss?  How can we wake up in the morning knowing that we’ll have to carry that void the whole day; a void that is heavier than even the monster itself?  Even gains can seem impossible to deal with when you write about it on the screen.  How can a person long for something for so long and then feel so suffocated by the weight of responsibility to it once it arrives?

Life is hard; but you will get through it.  And I know this because you’ve gotten to this point, which means that you have gotten through so many other moments you didn’t think you could get through.  Yes, perhaps one day there will be one that will do you in, but let’s hope not and see the fact that you have a past be the proof that you will have a future (and yes, I am aware that my reasoning isn’t very scientific, but life is more magic and art than stone cold fact).

Heading into a weekend that is impossibly difficult for some, blissfully joyous for others, guilt-laden for many, it’s the only message of love I can give you to tuck into your back pocket — a piece of advice that fits neatly into surviving Mother’s Day as much as it fits into surviving everything else:

You will not always be here; you will not always feel as if Mother’s Day is a punch in the stomach, and you will not always be beaming at a newborn, and you will not always feel anxious for wanting breakfast in bed.  You will get through this time if it is your valley, and you will get through that future time if that turns out to be your valley.  And you know this is true because you can look back and see how far you’ve come.

Look back for a second.  I’m serious.  See how far you’ve come.

This post is dedicated to It Is What It Is.  Though I wrote it as much as a reminder for myself as it is for you.

Photo Credit: Horia Varlan from Flickr under a creative commons license.

The focus of my Tuesday yoga class is hip openers.  Every week she tells us that our emotions are held in our hips (oh, she can’t even comprehend how many emotions I’ve held in these hips, in that wonky space between my hips), and I believe her because how much of my emotional energy of the last ten years has been focused on that space?  Working with that space?  Yelling at that space?  Worrying about that space?  I know that in yoga, mens’ hips hold the same emotions, but part of me wonders if the first person who came up with this theory was a woman.

I wanted to cry today.  I have been holding in tears for a little over a week now, frustrated and unable to release them.  Rather than dealing with an issue, I have been trying to convince myself that I don’t care.  Forget about it.  Don’t deal with it.  And I thought this was the healthier option.  The ability to remove myself, to walk away, is not something that comes naturally to me.  I had to learn how to let go and not try to change the things I cannot change.  To not own everyone else’s emotions as well.

So I kept waiting to cry throughout class, pushing myself hard into the three dragon poses we held for three minutes each.  My hips were open; they were so loose it felt as if my legs were sliding around on threads like wiggling baby teeth in an elementary school child’s mouth.  But I didn’t cry because it was too hard.  Isn’t that strange?  It felt harder to cry than it did to compartmentalize and shut out everything I was thinking.

And then I got in the car and turned on my phone, and an email came through from a friend telling me that Maurice Sendak died this morning.  Where the Adele and hip openers failed, the passing of a great artist and writer made me cry like Tzippy at the end of Where the Wild Things Are,

Oh please don’t go – we’ll eat you up – we love you so!

She has always been the monster I related to the most.  Her name means “bird” in Hebrew, and she to me is the one who feels so deeply cut when people take flight.  I completely understood her outstretched hands at so many points in my life, grabbing at those who choose to leave and those who have the choice made for them.  I wrote about her a while back in a story about how I came to own the copy of the book we read to the twins when they were in utero:

The wild things, after all, are terribly misunderstood. They don’t gnash their teeth and roll their eyes out of hate. They do this out of love. Out of a love that comes from an enormous well of pain because life–as well as our love–is so deeply out of our control. If the wild things actually had the power to stop Max, they would have. But like too many of us know, we can shake our fist at the world all we want, and it can’t bring back what is missing; what has never come.

The overriding message I got from Sendak’s books is a simple word that the narrator gives as the moral to Pierre’s story: CARE.  Whether it was the subtle recognition of Tzippy’s pain, practically begging the reader to take pity on the Wild Things, or the more blunt tale of Pierre and the lion, Sendak constantly tackled the theme of caring, and always fell to the side that caring is good.  It is good to put yourself out there; good to put your heart out there; good to hope, even if your heart comes back stomped on and bruised by people and events.  It’s an important message that he gave to children, perhaps hoping they would take it with them into adulthood: people are fragile, and we need to remember that when they reach out.  We need to nurture their care as much as we need to nurture our own.

And we don’t.  We forget the lessons of Pierre even though the subtitle is “a cautionary tale.”

So I’m going to encourage you today, in honour of Maurice Sendak, to care deeply.  To take the thing you’ve been trying to convince yourself doesn’t matter and put it front and center in your heart.  To pay attention.  To listen to someone else as they’re speaking instead of writing them off.  To consider how your words will be taken.  To send out into the universe all of your deepest wants, to own them and hold them and realize that you cannot convince the heart not to care even if you are capable of convincing your mind.

And then, because what we should have learned from his books is empathy and care, go out today and do a random act of kindness for another person.  And then think to yourself, that’s what I got from my childhood books.  We don’t have to forget those lessons.

For Mr. Sendak: This is Where the Wild Things Are.

Can we return to the idea of validation?

Josh pointed out one night that the reason the Wolvog had such anxiety over the idea of an Internet blackout on March 31st (was that seriously a month ago?) was that he couldn’t fathom why someone would choose to harm the Internet.  There was no point a person could raise that would be worth it in the Wolvog’s eyes.

Computers are his cake and the Internet is its icing.  The iPad without Internet service is still fun but add in a wifi connection and you will see his tiny body start quivering.

The idea of hurting his favourite thing — even to make a larger point — is unfathomable.  It would be the equivalent of strangling kittens to protest the use of animals in medical experiments or beating people to make a statement about violence against women.

It freaked him out.

*******

I think it’s a human trait to assume that people will like what we like; or while we can understand that people have different tastes, we think to ourselves anyway, “they are really missing out.”  Meat eaters have told me that I “don’t know what I’m missing.” (This is true, I don’t know what I’m missing, but I think the point is also that I don’t care about what I’m missing.  I don’t consider myself missing something.  Whereas someone who likes meat would definitely feel themselves missing something if they were in my shoes.  Though I feel nothing of the sort being me in my shoes.)  And let’s be blunt: we’ve seen it in our own online community in regards to people’s choices in resolving their infertility, especially when it comes to resolving by living child-free after infertility or loss.

And yet, as rational human beings, we also know that just because someone looks at the world in a different way doesn’t mean that it negates our choices or our likes.  You can like vanilla and I can like chocolate, and neither fact makes a statement about the quality of either vanilla or chocolate.  My lack of meat eating doesn’t change your meat-eating world; doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat meat nor does your eating it mean that I should eat meat.  We can each make vastly different choices and not have it be commentary on what we think about the other option.

It is entirely possible to choose one thing without making a value statement about the other choice.

And yet, in our emotional world, we want people on our side, to see the world our way because it validates our choice.  If people choose a different path, it’s very easy to get caught up in wondering about the hidden meaning behind that choice.  Did they choose to not eat meat because they believe meat-eating is bad?  Because they think it’s cruel to animals?  Do they think I’m cruel to animals if I eat meat?  I’ve had people try to convince me to try meat, and it becomes clear very quickly that it has nothing to do with what they believe is best for me, but because they want us to be in agreement, standing on the same side of the meat-eating divide.

*******

I can’t fathom why people wouldn’t like blogging, though I meet people who say it all the time.  Not that they don’t want to write one, but that they don’t even want to read one.  It’s not a judgment call — they think it’s fine that I blog and that I like to read blogs.  They just can’t imagine spending their time on it much in the same way other activities that people love don’t appeal to me.  I don’t ski, for instance.  I have and didn’t enjoy it, so I haven’t gone in years.  I really only went in the first place to be with my sister and father who both enjoy skiing.

It’s taken well into adulthood to stop doing things for the wrong reasons.  I was that teen who would have jumped off the cliff if others were jumping just because I wanted the connection; even if we already had ten places where we already connected.  I always needed that eleventh place; didn’t want to feel left out or that I was missing something (even if it was just cliff jumping).  I can still sometimes catch myself doing it now, going somewhere I don’t really want to go just for the sake of not missing out.

Sometimes I think we unconsciously go along because we want to validate someone else’s idea.  People like people who support them, who confirm their good ideas.  We rarely wonder why people agree with us though we spend a hell of a lot of time dissecting possibilities for why someone disagrees with us.  So we say yes to the activity even if we don’t like it or we do like it but it doesn’t fit into our schedule at the moment because we want to be that agreeable person; we want to have the other person see our similarities.  We validate them and they validate us at the same time — we were chosen for the activity (They really like you!  Validation!) and they chose the activity (I have great ideas!  Validation!). It’s a great big validation party.

We’ve talked a lot about people being validated, chosen, noticed in the other two posts (Validation and Being Counted) a few weeks ago, but I think it’s equally important that our choices are valued and confirmed.  We want to hear from others that we’re spending our time well.  We’ve chosen worthy activities.  We’ve accomplished something by how we’ve spent our time.  We want people to not only respect our decisions, but to respect us for making those decisions.  To agree with us that the decisions we’ve made are the best ones we could possibly make given the circumstances.

A lack of comments or page views isn’t just about not being noticed.  It makes us wonder if we’re using our time wisely.  Our rational brain can tick off all the things we gain from blogging that are not tied to numbers — a few quality relationships, maybe an interesting opportunity, some information we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.  But then our emotional side kicks in and we start looking at those numbers as validation for time well spent.

If people visit our blog or respond to our words, it’s confirmation that I’m using my time well.  That I am producing something of worth.  Time is spent well on creating things of worth ergo, I’m doing something rockin’.

And I am drawn to other bloggers because they confirm my choice of activity.  They blog which means I’m on the right path if I blog.  If I was the only blogger, I would wonder if I was doing something worthy of time or if this was a complete waste.  But I’m not the only blogger; there are millions of us.  So I look at those millions as being part of my confirmation that I’m doing something that has some value even if the value is not monetary.  The value may be the friendships gained or the self-esteem obtained.  Millions of people can’t be wrong.

It takes a lot of emotional yanking to stop your mind from going to the place of “there is something wrong with my activity choice” when people say they don’t like what you like.  We all know that it’s entirely possible to not enjoy blogging and not have it be a statement on the worth of blogging.  To have it simply be a matter of taste.  Because it feels so personal, this idea of someone not liking what you like.  It doesn’t just have to be our activities.  It’s anything — our ideas, our values, our religion, our political beliefs, the way we have chosen to resolve our infertility — that are an extension of our self, of our being.  The things that make me, Melissa and the things that make you, You.

*******

The Wolvog can’t wrap his mind around the idea that someone could harm his favourite thing.  He can’t wrap his mind around the idea of hackers wreaking havoc.  He can’t wrap his mind around the idea of spammers cluttering up his inbox.  In the same way that an environmentalist can’t fathom why a person would litter and mess up a gorgeous landscape, the Wolvog cannot let go of his belief that the Internet is a wonderful and vast playground that should be treated with reverence.  The boy has been known to stand in front of the modem just smiling at the blinking lights.  He’s the sort who would jump at the chance to cuddle up with a Mifi.

It scares him to consider this idea of someone not loving the Internet the way he loves the Internet.  Because it’s a commentary on how he spends his time?  Because he doesn’t want something he loves defiled?  Because how could someone not love something so absolutely fantastic and fascinating as the world wide web?

Because if someone can choose something else, especially the inverse of the thing he loves, does that make a statement on the worth of what he loves?  That is a very scary thought — we’re on earth for such a short period of time, no one wants to use their time poorly.  We all want to hear that we’ve made the best choices, that our decisions are cherished since they’re an extension of our selves.  We all want to believe that we’ve picked the best for ourselves given the choices at our disposal.

It’s a hard lesson; that not everyone will agree with you and that by holding a different opinion, it doesn’t mean they’re against you.  It can sometimes just mean that they’ve chosen something different and they are equally struggling with the fact that you aren’t standing with them just as much as you are struggling with the fact that they aren’t standing with you.  It’s a hard lesson to learn that our confirmation and validation needs to come internally rather than externally.  That if we love what we’re doing, we should just keep doing what we’re doing.  And not worry about the rest of the world or what their choices mean in connection to ours.  I don’t know many people who can consistently tune the external world out and merrily go about loving what they love regardless of what anyone else thinks.  I know I certainly can’t.  So I’m not sure how to teach it to the Wolvog.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work.

Let me guess what happened last week.  On the first day, you created a character.  On the second day, you couldn’t find time to do it.  On the third day, you made two characters and started on a third one just in case you missed another writing day this week.  And that’s what you have now because you did end up skipping the rest of the days — three and a half characters.  It is hard to find time to write.

I dated a guy back in graduate school who was inflexible about his meditation time.  He meditated twice a day for about a half hour each time.  He meditated some time between 7 – 8 am and again between 3 – 4 pm.  And guess what, he always got to meditate.  Most of the time, it didn’t affect me — I just read a book or I’d meditate with him.  But sometimes, I’d want to go to an afternoon movie or I’d be antsy and not want to sit inside.  And those were the times when I’d point out things we were missing because of his meditation schedule.  And he’d shrug and say, “I’m still meditating.”  Not because he was an asshole who didn’t care about my feelings, but because it was that important to him.

And that’s how writers (yes, YOU) have to approach writing.  You need to set a time to do it and hold it sacred regardless of what other people need you to do too.  This is how you’re going to do it:

You’re going to start with fifteen minutes, and fifteen minutes only.  You get no extra points for writing for a half hour or an hour.  Fifteen minutes and then stop.  Before you start doing this, you will need to pick a time of day that works best for you, that is consistently good with few exceptions.  Then you need to go explain to everyone who may need you during those fifteen minutes that you no longer exist for a quarter of an hour — you know, the amount of time it would take to shower and get dressed.  Not a lot of time.  But they need to understand that you are (1) writing and cannot be disturbed and (2) need them to support you so you can write uninterrupted.  I’m going to assume that most people are going to write at home rather than use their lunch break.  Therefore, carve out your time in the morning, mid-day, or evening, but explain to all the people who live in your house (yes, even the two-year-old that you need to plop down in front of the television for fifteen minutes) that this is your sacred time and you cannot be disturbed.  If you need to, hand them this post and say, “this is what I’m doing and this is how I need you to help.”

And before you start saying how you can’t possibly find fifteen minutes every day, I’m going to tell you to stop talking.  Eat your three meals five minutes faster, go to bed ten minutes later and wake up five minutes earlier, cut out a television show, ask your partner to take the baby for fifteen minutes.  If you want to find fifteen minutes (and it’s only fifteen minutes because you don’t even need to use time to commute somewhere), you can find fifteen minutes.  And I promise you, it’s the only amount of time you’re going to need.  I am not going to ask you to go beyond fifteen minutes.

After you have found your time, take away other possible distractions beyond humans.  Disconnect from the Internet.  No, you can’t check your email first for a second.  No, you can’t check a fact online for the story you’re writing.  Turn off your smartphone, don’t answer the home phone, and literally cloister yourself.  By the way, I often will leave a string of gibberish letters in the middle of a manuscript in order to come back and plug in the fact later.  BUT I never just go online for a second because — I’m sorry — that’s the fastest way to become derailed.

So fifteen minutes — that’s it.  And when fifteen minutes is done, you walk away.  Guess what — it will seem as if you’re accomplishing nothing.  Maybe you spent the whole time staring at the screen.  Maybe you only wrote three sentences, and you don’t feel very good about them.  It wasn’t a waste, I promise you.  Come back again tomorrow and the same thing will happen, and perhaps the next day too.  Some people — like me — sometimes need four or more Channel Days before they actually get into the heart of a writing project — a place that we’ll call finding the pulse.

To understand the concept of Channel Days, we need to take a page from yoga.  Yoga isn’t an end-point: it’s merely a way to train the body so the mind the meditate.  According to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, yoga is a pathway to somewhere else, and some yogis stop the physical practice of yoga once they can train the mind to meditate for long periods of time and the body is strong enough to sit still.  Channel Days within writing are also a pathway to somewhere else — the rhythm or pulse to a project — which means that they aren’t a waste of time.  They are a very important exercise you need to go through in order to get to that pulse.

Most people can’t jump in and out of writing with ease.  If you step away from a project for a bit, you need to spin the dial on your internal, mental radio and tune into the words again.  If you think you’re not getting anywhere and step away, you’ll forever be stuck in Channel Days.  If you work through them and sit with the project, realizing that these days are far from “wasted” time and necessary for getting where you want to be, you’ll come through them into the pulse of the project.

For the first few weeks, you’re going to stick to fifteen minutes a day.  After you’ve had about three weeks of this and you’ve established an expectation with others around you, you may increase to a half hour, though you don’t have to.  Consider the sustainability: It is better to write fifteen minutes every single day, than to write at varying lengths of time three times a week.  Better to stick forever at fifteen minutes a day than to miss days, and since you need to take other people into account and don’t want them cranky with you, it’s better to fulfill their expectation than to give them a sense that writing is a flexible thing for you.  Feel free to commit to fifteen minutes every day but grab a few longer days when you can.  But never skip.

If you are going to increase you time, do it in fifteen minute increments over the course of a few weeks.  So fifteen minutes a day for a few weeks, a half hour a day for a few weeks, forty-five minutes a day for a few weeks, to an hour a day.  Just as you wouldn’t run a marathon without training, don’t make your brain and body sit for an hour when it isn’t trained to do so.  That’s a recipe for frustration.  Fifteen minute increments to increase your writing time.  Though, again, don’t feel you need to stretch beyond fifteen minutes.  Better to drain every last drop of concentration for those fifteen minutes than to poorly plod through an hour.

At fifteen minutes a day, even once you find your groove, you may only write a paragraph or a page a day.  You’re certainly not going to churn out a chapter in that amount of time.  But think about it — if you write a page a day, you will have a 365-page book by the end of the year.  Not too shabby.  Also, this isn’t a race.  You are not competing against anyone else.  You’re not even competing against yourself.  You may have wanted the project or post to have been finished yesterday, you may be chomping at the bit to hit publish or start sending something out, but deep breathe.  This really isn’t a race, so panting as if you’re in one.  Slow and steady writing reaches the finish line, and if you look at the big picture, it doesn’t matter the date you cross that finish line.  It just matters that you’ve created something; that you have something in hand that wasn’t here on earth before you pulled it out of your brain.

I gave you the character development exercise last week and the time budgeting exercise this week because I needed you to see how hard it can be to devote uninterrupted time to something that you love.  Maybe you believe that only published writers have the right to demand writing time because then it’s not a hobby, it’s a job.  If you want to hold on to that belief, you can, but it will always limit you.  This is why you deserve time to write: it’s important to you.  It makes you feel good, it centers you, it is your mental exercise, which is just as important as physical exercise.  You take the time in your day to eat and you take the time in your day to sleep; this is important to you too: you should take time in your day to write.

So now go backwards to week three and try your hand at creating seven characters, working on them for fifteen minutes each day without distraction.  You may only get three and a half complete within that amount of time, and that is fine.  This is your Channel Week.  In yoga, you learn how to breathe in and out, slowly and calmly.  And in writing, your Channel Week is that time period where you learn to steadily work without distraction.  For just fifteen minutes each day.

Homework: Choose your time of day, talk to your family, and start writing fifteen minutes every day.  In the beginning, start making a checkmark on a calendar after you complete your fifteen minutes to serve as a visual reminder.  You better have seven checkmarks when I see you here again next Sunday for the next writing lesson.

A bunch of celebrities and bloggers have gotten together to make a video for a movement called No Mother’s Day, which asks for women to not celebrate Mother’s Day this year in order to bring awareness to women who die from childbirth throughout the world; 358,000 women each year.  It’s a worthy cause, and I certainly support it.  BUT.

Babble’s article about the video and movement states:

It also brings awareness to infertility and the would-be mothers who have struggled to conceive on their own.

Now watch the video and tell me where the video brings any awareness to infertility.

Can we please not neatly wrap up reproductive health issues with a shiny bow?  Can we not mix our talk about fertility treatments with abortion?  Or talk about abortion with mammograms?  Or talk about maternal death with infertility?

Unless we are literally bringing awareness to all the various issues, can we not pretend that women’s bodies and the issues surrounding them are not complex and messy?

It is one thing to be supportive of all reproductive health issues, standing together not only for strength but to not negate each other’s arguments.  To not contradict ourselves.  But it’s another to believe that we can talk about one and educate the world about the others simultaneously, without doing the hard work of presenting the actual issues at hand.

Because talking about maternal death does nothing to educate the public about infertility.  It would have been lovely if the videomakers had added infertile women to the mix, pointing out how they too will not get to hold children if we don’t work to overhaul accessibility to fertility treatment through things such as the Family Building Act.  Not expected in the least, but lovely nonetheless.  BUT since they didn’t add infertile women into their video, it would behoove Babble to not pretend that this does anything to educate the public on how infertile women are approaching Mother’s Day this year.  Because I don’t get a sense from this video that anyone is walking away with any type of consideration to the childless woman or the mother experiencing secondary infertility.

Truly, I can get behind No Mother’s Day and support it.  I think the world does need to be better educated about maternal death, especially preventive measures.  But please, TIME magazine, don’t think that infertility = a lack of desire to celebrate Mother’s Day as you imply in your article:

Urging moms to boycott Mother’s Day is kind of like asking patriots to burn the flag. It seems sacrilegious. Like it or not, Mother’s Day has achieved a singular spot in the American calendar.

But there are plenty of people who don’t look forward to the occasion — those who might be battling infertility or have lost their mothers come to mind — and it’s that latter group that may feel a particular kinship with what model-turned-maternal activist Christy Turlington Burns is trying to do.

Believe me, we want a reason to celebrate it, and our problem with the holiday is more about the sting out outsidership.  And I would love for the public to be educated about that; to understand what a mixed bag Mother’s Day is in the infertile world as we straddle our relationships with our own mothers with our desire to have children, and all that comes after whether we achieve parenthood or not.