I know I shouldn’t let it get under my skin, but I really can’t let Jezebel’s post about 3-Person IVF go.  For those who haven’t heard, there was a recent ruling on the ethics of 3-Person IVF in the United Kingdom, hence this obnoxious article on Jezebel.  3-Person IVF is different from donor egg (sometimes confusingly called third-person reproduction) and is meant to circumvent certain genetic illnesses instead of using preimplantation genetic diagnosis or PGD (or when PGD isn’t finding useable embryos, which is what happened to my friend recently.  She created many embryos, but when they tested them with PGD, they all carried the fatal genetic illness she and her husband were both carriers of and none could be transferred).  3-Person IVF replaces the mitochondrial DNA inside the woman’s egg.  So there are three sets of DNA — it’s your egg with someone else’s mitochondrial DNA.

So let’s start with the irreverent title.  I always think it’s sensitive to harken a sexual proposition in the title of an article about a life-saving procedure, don’t you?  How about New Procedure Gives Hope to Parents Who are Carriers of Fatal Genetic Illnesses instead of calling it a genetic ménages à trois?  You know, just to be thoughtful.

Next, while 3-Person IVF is only utilized by those with the financial means to do so, 3-Person IVF — and IVF in general — isn’t “very, very rich people problems.”  Genetic illnesses can affect anyone, and the only thing that’s a problem here is the fact that we have a system where the wealthy can afford to treat their medical issues and the poor can’t.

This — “And as long as all parties agree on genetic penetration rules beforehand, amirite? Sex joke! High fives for everyone.” — is what makes you an asshole.  Thanks for belittling the incredibly difficult decisions that those who need to utilize IVF face whereas the rest of the population never need to worry their pretty little heads.

Wait, I thought that line made you an insensitive asshole.  I was wrong.  This is the one that really makes you an insensitive asshole:

The 3-parent IVF method takes one mommy egg and one daddy sperm, but intervenes in the fertilization to replace the mitochondrial DNA of the original maternal egg with the mitochondrial DNA of a donor’s egg (“daddy’s pretty friend Stacey”). That’s because many inherited genetic diseases — liver failure, heart disease, and probably Norman Bates-ism — are carried in the mitochondrial DNA and only passed along to offspring via the maternal line.

Before you then go on to belittle it further, pointing out how infertility and the passing on of genetic illnesses isn’t on par with fistulas and malaria, you mention how 3-Person IVF “will give couples who would otherwise have to adopt other options.”  Apparently you weren’t aware that there already are other options including DI, DE, and PGD.  You may want to do a little research into IVF BEFORE you write about it.  Just saying.

And just when I thought you were getting close to wrapping up your garbage coverage, you hit it out of the park with this ending:

Any chronically ugly couples rich [SIC] who were hoping to pull the genetic equivalent of copying a smart person’s homework and turning it in as their own are going to have to hope that eventually an unscrupulous doctor acts totally unethically in order to cash in.

Let’s not pretend to be a real news outlet and cover pieces such as medical ethics.  In the immortal words of John Bender in the Breakfast Club, Jezebel: “So you just stick to the things you know: shopping, nail polish, your father’s BMW, and your poor, rich drunk mother in the Caribbean.”  You can replace “poor, rich drunk mother” with any number of celebrity fluff pieces you run daily.

This is EXACTLY what I meant when I wrote this yesterday.  Jezebel, you love to voice your uninformed opinion.  But actually listen to the reality of 3-Person IVF or the need for IVF at all?  Not so much.

Every year, at the end of the school year, I take each child aside to give them my prepared speech and question: “Daddy and I have not heard of any reason to keep you apart next year and we have no feelings about it — there are benefits and drawbacks of being in the same classroom or different classrooms.  So we turn the decision over to you: do you want to be in the same classroom as your sister/brother or two separate rooms next year in school?”

Once we get their initial answer, we go through some of those benefits and drawbacks just because they may not have thought through the decision fully, and then we ask them one more time.  Once we have each of their individual answers, we make them sit down with one another and have a conversation about what they want collectively.  The reason we do it this way is that we want to be as close as we can to certain they are giving their own, personal answer and not saying what they think the other one wants to hear.  If they emerged out of the room with a different answer from the one they give me individually, I would know that some coercion has taken place and we’d need another conversation with a moderator (who is… um… me).  So far, we’ve never had an individual answer differ from the collective answer.

And then once we have that single, collective answer, we go to the school and advocate on their behalf.

My answer to the “should you separate twins* in school” question that all parents of multiples grapple with at some point is that unless it falls within the four reasons for forced separation outlined by the Department of Education, the children themselves should be allowed to decide.  They can decide they want to go into two separate rooms or they can decide they want to remain together, but ultimately, that decision needs to be left to them because they are the only ones truly affected by the decision.

What are the four reasons for why the adults (the teacher, parents, principal) should be overriding the wishes of the multiples?

• Classmates cannot distinguish between the children and treat the individuals as a single, interchangeable unit.
• Disruptive behaviour inside the classroom with each other.
• One twin speaks for the other twin.
• They are not able to maintain friendships outside the twinship.

If they don’t fall into any of those categories but they want to be apart, you should separate them.  And if they don’t fall into any of those categories and want to be together, you should keep them together.  And twins who are not in agreement should have adults counsel them through the decision so they come to a place of agreement.

I don’t have strong feelings about separating twins in school mostly because I am personally not a twin and therefore, I will never personally have to be separated.  I do have strong feelings about placing low-stakes decisions in the childrens’ hands so they’ll learn how to make high-stakes decisions down the road.  By two, they could tell me which toy they wanted.  By three, they could pick an activity for us to do.  By four, they could choose what to eat when given a menu of possibilities.  And certainly, by kindergarten, they knew whether or not they wanted to be in each other’s presence.

When it isn’t life or death, when it isn’t financially untenable, we let them have their say.  What they eat, what they wear, where they go, and if they’re in the same classroom — tiny decisions which make them feel like they have control over their lives. (Which makes me feel like I should do an evil dictator laugh right now and say, “‘feel’ is the operative word.  You have no control, fools!”).

I have to admit that even before becoming a twin parent, I never really understood this desire for adults to separate twins.  I don’t know about you, but I love going somewhere with a friend or my husband, and I become anxious when I’m seated apart from my friend or husband at an event.  I once went to a wedding where the bride and groom placed everyone at a random table in order to “generate conversation.”  Not only did they not get their wish, but most of us agreed that it was the worst wedding we had ever attended.  I didn’t get a chance to catch up with friends I actually knew at the wedding.  Instead I spent time with the groom’s 80-year-old great-uncle.  We had nothing in common, exhausted the conversation in five minutes, and I spent the rest of the evening thinking more about how I wasn’t talking to my friends rather than getting to know this stranger next to me.  It’s the difference between choosing for myself to leave the person I came with for the moment and flit across the room to talk to someone vs. having someone else tell me that I can’t sit with my friends/husband.

I think there are benefits and detriments to any separation.  I separate out from Josh during the day.  I don’t live in my parent’s house anymore.  I spend time apart from the twins when they’re at school or sleeping.  There are obviously benefits to separation.  But just because there are benefits doesn’t mean we should ignore the fact that there are also detriments.

Our twins are strongly individuals with individual preferences, and they naturally separate out based on that fact, mostly in the form of friends or activities.  They are also fiercely connected to one another, and name each other as their best friend.  They genuinely like to play with one another and support one another.  I hope they never lose that; it’s an incredible thing to go through life with someone who has your back no matter what.

I really wish this wasn’t a question every single year, and I’m still not sure why it’s such a hot button topic within the multiples community.  I would actually love to hear the other side and understand the desire to separate twins.

On my mind as school wraps up and the decision needs to be made.

* I use the term “twins” throughout this post because those are the multiples I have.  The same thoughts apply to triplets and beyond.

Like Paul Revere on his fated ride between Concord and Lexington, the Wolvog brought me news of the updates to the Apple operating system coming this fall.  iOS6 will bring Siri to the iPad (unless you were one of those kids who got the first round of iPads, and then sucks to be you).  You’ll also be able to put her dulcet voice on the newer iPod Touch.

He couldn’t sit down at the computer to read the news article.  He stood a few feet away from the table, falling to his knees in excitement every two lines or so.  I half expected the boy to pick up snakes or speak in tongues.  You have literally never seen bliss inhabit a person’s body like the Wolvog reading about the new features on iOS6.

Though the strange thing is that the boy claims he can wait patiently until fall for the operating system to become available, whereas after he spent the afternoon crooning about Siri, I found that I was the one feeling antsy about the wait.  Is it sad that I’m looking at Siri like a new friend moving into our house?  I mean, yes, I talk to Cozy Jackson all the time.  Tell him my feelings as he curls up in a furry ball and sleeps.  But Siri, that chick can answer back.

While the Supreme Court discussed the fate of the Affordable Care Act, the White House continued the work of implementing the law, knowing that to pause to wait for the ruling would mean losing out on precious minutes for keeping to the timeline that runs until 2014 when the entire law comes to fruition.  The Department of Health and Human Services, headed by Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, held a Women’s Health Town Hall at the White House last Thursday, bringing together about one hundred people in the building (and many more online) to discuss the state of health care in America.  And when I say, “bringing together about one hundred people,” what I really mean is that they brought together about one hundred women.

In other words, the group brought together to discuss the state of women’s health in our country was comprised almost entirely of women.

If there had been a town hall for men’s health care (which would have just been called… health care town hall), I have a feeling the room would have been a little more mixed.  Of course BlogHer would have sent a woman to cover it — we’re a women’s online site — but what reason does every other media outlet and health organization have for sending a woman?  Because only women are interested in women’s health?  That if we’re going to be discussing women’s bodies, only women are interested in discussing them? (Except for the times when men want to make laws concerning our bodies; they seem happy to talk about my uterus then.)  The panel was 100% female, the room was almost 100% female.

It was just a lot of women talking about the state of health care for women.  And while men are always around when they want to put limits on women’s health care coverage or limit what women can do with their bodies, here they were quite plainly absent.  Where were the men?

No, seriously, where were the freakin’ men?

Our health certainly affects men.  The financial side of our health care certainly affects the men in our lives.  If we don’t take preventative measures to protect our health, our illnesses certainly affect the men in our lives.  If we stay out of the work force because we don’t have adequate support in balancing work and parenting, or if we lose work time due to health issues, it certainly affects men.  So it was incredibly distracting, and frankly, disheartening, to see the room entirely filled with women.

Because women’s health affects everyone, just as men’s health affects everyone, and we need to start looking at health care as health care instead of looking at women as a separate entity from humankind who should be subjected to different rules and regulations.

Men, show up when we’re discussing keeping us well and not just when we’re discussing holding us back.

That said, it cemented in my mind something that has always bothered me about lobbying and infertility — or, for that matter, public opinion and infertility.  The people who care about infertility are those who are directly affected by infertility.  It doesn’t matter that such a large percentage of the population is affected by infertility (12.5% of child-bearing age) that there is a good chance that someone you care about is affected by the disease, in the same way that men are obviously affected indirectly by the health of women, even if they’re not directly affected themselves.  People don’t show up, don’t listen, and don’t care if it’s not about them.  I found that attitude sometimes in the lawmakers I met on the Hill when I went for Advocacy Day.  And that’s also the attitude I see every day in the world — either you’re affected by infertility and then of course you show up to talk about it.  Or you’re not affected by infertility and the idea of actually pausing to talk about infertility and learn about it is practically self-verboten.  People almost don’t want to learn about what affects anyone else, as if we pride ourselves on remaining unknowledgeable.  At least, that’s my take-away from the comment section of the New York Times.

I don’t expect non-infertile people to step up to do the education, but I expect them to show up and listen, especially when they voice their opinion so loudly on infertility issues.  In the same way that I don’t expect men to step up and educate the public on women’s health, but I expect them to show up and listen when we speak, especially when they voice their opinions so loudly when it comes to covering contraception and abortion rights.

Towards the end of the meeting, I asked Sebelius what could be saved from the law if the Supreme Court overturned it?  What strides forward would still be in place, and what would be lost?  And the answer was all of it.  All of it.  I repeat that because I don’t think people truly understand what that means in terms of practical life.  You know how your workplace has to legally give you a place and the time to pump breast milk?  If it’s overturned, they won’t.  You know how one million women who were denied health insurance prior to this point due to a preexisting condition were able to get health insurance because it became illegal to deny coverage to someone for a preexisting condition?  They will lose their insurance, and you will go back to picking up the cost for their health care usage (since part of medical billing covers the fact that some people won’t pay).  People who made decisions based on the fact that there was a removal of a lifetime insurance cap will now be screwed because all those medical charges will once again count towards that lifetime cap.

And, again, this made me think about the way it’s one step forward two steps back when it comes to popular opinion on infertility and the media.  We work so hard to convince those around us the reality of infertility and loss, and then a story such as Octomom comes out or an expose on surrogacy, and it feels like we’re not only starting over from scratch, but we’re actually farther behind from where we began because we thought we were getting somewhere.

This isn’t a post about politics; this is a post about humanity.  About people showing up to discuss women’s health, as opposed to only women showing a vested interest in our well-being.  This is about the media educating rather than trying to drum up a sensational story to sell issues.  This is about asking others not to undo the hard work we do in creating change.  This is a post about giving a fuck, even when you’re in a position where you technically don’t have to give a fuck.  Because today your situation looks like this; but tomorrow may look very different.  And when we only listen, when we only care, when we only pause to hear someone out when we’re directly affected, we can’t complain in the future when we find ourselves in a situation we never thought we’d find ourselves in and no one cares about us.

Go out today and care about someone else’s issues.  Listen to them even if you don’t have to.  Not because you’re going to get anything out of it yourself, but because understanding is what separates us from other animals.

Makes us human.

*******

If you want to watch the town hall, it was livestreamed on the White House site, and they uploaded it to their channel on YouTube.  I asked my question around 1:22:50.

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, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

Last week, we started looking for your writing accent, the small quirks that you use in your writing which make it undeniably yours.  It goes beyond your writing voice; it is about the tiny inflections you pepper into your writing that people respond to on an emotional level without realizing it.  Sometimes within your writing accent, we’ll also find your writing mistakes.  The goal is to clean up the mistakes without cleaning up the accent.  What you want to look at is intent: why are you utilizing that writing quirk/error?  Does it enhance or detract from your writing?

We’re going to define mistakes as anything that doesn’t bring the reader into the poem, post, or story.  That serves as the vinegar to their oil.  In other words, these things pretty much only detract from your writing.

Let’s begin with the most concrete ones that are easy to see and fix.

Concrete Mistakes

• Passive Voice Instead of Active Voice: active voice is simply more interesting than passive voice.  From Alexicographer below: “Passive: She was run over by a car. Active: A car ran over her. Ooh, that sounds really bad. Let’s change it: Her umbrella was run over by a car. OR A car ran over her umbrella. Did the subject of the sentence perform the action? Active. Or was the action performed on the subject? Passive.”

• Past Tense Instead of Present Tense: present tense is a little more interesting than past tense because it places the reader into the story.  The story is unfolding around them and they respond accordingly.  It’s not always possible to play with tense, but past tense keeps the reader on the outskirts of the story at times.  At the same time, I see this as a minor point that I bring up simply to challenge you to look at your writing.  There are plenty of engaging stories — Harry Potter comes to mind — that are written in past tense.

• Boring Sentence Structure: do all your sentences begin the same way or close to the same way?  Mix it up in terms of structure and length.  Read the first paragraph in this post underneath the weekly opening (the paragraph that begins, “Last week…”).  Every sentence begins in a different way, and they all vary slightly in length (though I could have done better with that too).

• Too Many Rhetorical Questions: your reader can’t actually answer your questions; plus, the reality is your reader is approaching your work to get information or a story.  A few questions that make them think are fine.  Too many becomes a chore.

• Incorrect Words, Grammar, or Punctuation: quick fix once you familiarize yourself with the three billion grammar and punctuation rules in English…  But you get my point; incorrectly-used words, grammar mistakes, and punctuation errors take the reader out of the story because they create confusion.

• Too Many Analogies or Metaphors: this is another one of my common mistakes.  It’s about trusting that your reader “gets it,” and using analogies sparingly.  Which leads us to…

• Don’t Overwrite: don’t use more words or more sentences than you need to use in order to make your point.  This isn’t Dickens’ time period, and you’re not paid by the word (he wasn’t actually paid by the word, but since that myth exists, I thought I’d exploit it).  Sometimes it helps to strip out every unnecessary word, and then tuck back in colourful words that add to the idea.  But at the same time…

• Don’t Underwrite: your storytelling capabilities are the doorway through which readers walk into your imagination.  Have you left that door wide enough open for them to fit through?  Do they understand the story?  Too many times, writers expect us to know what is inside their head (and makes perfect sense to them) without giving us access to the content of their brains.  Make sure your mind doesn’t fill in what is missing on the page, but instead note what parts seem confusing and explain them better.

• Go Easy on Modifiers: make your word choice do the work of modifiers which are a quick (and albeit lazy) way to tell your reader how to read something.  Sometimes they’re necessary, but see if you can rework your word choice to clearly convey whatever is contained in the modifier.

• Transitions: are you transitioning well between ideas, characters, scenes?  Take a look at your transitional moments because you need flow instead of jarring movement.

• Repetitive Words: this applies both to using the same word too many times too close together as well as using an unusual word or phrase or metaphor too many times in the same piece.

Less Concrete

• Focus: are you keeping a close focus on the subject matter or story; or is your reader being dragged away on too many tangents?  Tangents should only exist if they add to the understanding of the main story.

• Foundation: you can’t build a house without a strong foundation because it will collapse in on itself, and you can’t build a story without a strong foundation and structure.  Do you clearly know your storyline and characters?  Have you clearly set the time and place?

• Pace: you want your poem, post, or story to read at a good clip.  Not too fast so that the reader is confused and can’t process what is happening, and not too slow that the reader feels as if they’re plodding along.

• Exhaustion: some long pieces — especially novels — are coated in writing exhaustion.  It’s clear to the reader that while the author started out confident with the story and characters, he/she lost focus somewhere in the middle and didn’t know how to get the story from Point A to Point Z.

• Hollow Dialogue: make sure your conversations ring true.  That they sound like something someone would say.  By which I mean that they contain the meat of the conversation, not the piddly extras we throw into real conversations.

• Show, Don’t Tell: oy… this one needs more than a sentence or two explanation.  We’ll have a whole lesson soon on show, don’t tell, but I wanted to put it in this editing list so you remember to check for it.

Things You May Have Been Told are Mistakes But are Probably Just Part of Your Writing Accent

• Fragments: nothing wrong with a little fragment when used well.  Especially for impact. (A ha!  Like that fragment!  Or this one!)

• Prepositions: I try not to end sentences in prepositions, but sometimes it works depending on where you’re coming from.

• Splitting Infinitives: to unabashedly split your infinitives, place a word such as “unabashedly” between the “to” and the “verb” in the sentence.  Be a bad-ass.  Splitting them can have an impact.

• Conjuction-led Sentences: yet there are so many good reasons to begin a sentence with a conjunction.

• Or peruse this list of non-errors.

Homework: Choose something brief — perhaps a blog post — to practice self-editing.  Look at the information above and apply it to your piece, and then examine the before and after side-by-side.  What writing mistakes keep cropping up in your pieces?  Does it feel easier to stop yourself from doing them in the first place, or would that stilt your writing and is it better to edit them out later?  Are you starting to see your writing accent?