The strange coincidence that precedes the story I am about to tell you is important.  As we pulled up to the soccer field, the ChickieNob asked if all the other parents knew about my fear of crickets.  I told her that the ones who know me well already know that I’m a freak, and the ones who do not know me well yet don’t need to know what I freak I am so I’d appreciate her keeping my fear of crickets to herself.

So.

We are watching a soccer game, cheering on the kids, relaxing in the last strains of sunlight.  When I got to the field, I was wearing sunglasses.  Midway through the game, I switched to regular glasses.  By the time we left the field, we were in the gloaming, hurrying through the dim light to our car.

I let the kids into the backseat, congratulating myself for everything going smoothly with the evening.  Then I opened the driver’s door and that is when it happened.

A CRICKET JUMPED INTO MY CAR.

A quarter-sized brown cricket (which looked more like Hummer-sized cricket if you looked at it from the right angle) hopped onto my seat and began jumping around the inside of the car, disappearing from my view.  I internally flipped out, my Plan A being to ditch the car and kids entirely and run home screaming.  Then I realized that if I ran, I would be outside — WITH CRICKETS — so I went with my Plan B, which was to flag down another parent in the parking lot and beg them to rummage through my car until they caught it and killed it.

But in the three minutes since Cricketaggedon began, the lot had cleared out and it had gotten suddenly dark so that I couldn’t really make out if I knew any of the other people.  The only person I recognized at all was a new woman I met that very evening, whose name escaped my mind as I tried to remind myself that Plan A was not a feasible option.  So I did what any deranged, cricket-fearing woman would do.  I called out to her across the parking lot: “Jason’s* Mommy?  Can you come over here and kill a cricket for me?”

Mind you, she has just met me.

And bless her soul, she came over and bit her lip and said she’d have a go at it.  When I opened the door again, the light went on and she could clearly see it against the passenger seat (thank you, black seats).  She smashed it for me and removed it from the car.  And while she may have gotten into her vehicle and explained to her son that some women really are that pathetic and consider ditching a perfectly good car just because it contains a cricket, she — at least — did not laugh at me to my face and reassured me that asking someone to kill a cricket is perfectly normal.

I got in the car after pledging my eternal loyalty and gratitude toward her and then quietly told the ChickieNob, “I just wanted to ensure that everyone knows what I freak I am.”

And to her credit, she only said, “I guess she knows that you’re scared of crickets now.”

Yes, I believe everyone knows.

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

*******

I love the open notes to your old toys.  I’m alternating between cracking up and getting teary.

Toy I most regret not owning still: I had the knight set for Playmobil — the OLD knight set — and mine came with one of those elusive pure white horses with a matte finish.  I loved that horse so much that I would wash my hands before touching it because I was so afraid that I’d transfer dirt to it.  Goodbye, dear Playmobil knight set, I loved you so.

What toy do you miss?

*******

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:

• “Why I Learned to Dance” (Mrs. Spit)
• “That Facebook Thing” (Here We Go Again)
• “The First Year in Our House” (Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed)
• “So What’s a Fertile to Do?” (Yolk)
• “I Never Thought” (The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow)
• “The Unhealthy Truth” (Write Mind, Open Heart)

Still Kicking Your Collective Ass: We did so well two weeks ago with 11.  This week, you could only find six?  There is a whole world of blog posts out there worthy of a little extra attention.

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Infertile Bird has a post about those of us inside the computer.  When things became strained with her face-to-face friends, when no one around her understood, she turned to the Internet and found exactly what she needed: friendship, understanding, support.  She admits: “many of them I know only by their usernames, but their friendship is as real and sustaining to me as any other.”  It’s a beautiful post celebrating friendship.

Dreaming of Quiet Places has a post about hope and whether you’d banish it if you could.  As she says, “Hope gives us reason to get up in the morning, but it is also that Terrible Gray, that not-black-not-white space that won’t allow you to let go of the dream.”  Go join in the conversation happening in the comment section.

Thalia’s Infertility Journey has a tiny, bittersweet post about the grip infertility has on the heart.  It is the vague last line with the “it” undefined — is “it” infertility? hope? longing? — that twists the heart.

Lastly, Uppercase Woman got to meet Tertia from So Close and she has a great post walking down memory lane; the early days of the ALI blogosphere.  It was just fun to read and remember.

The roundup to the Roundup: A cricket pretty much tried to kill me — death by fear.  I love the open notes to toys, and what toy is missing from your life that you wish you could have back?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 9th and September 16th) 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.

Dear Finger Cuffs:

Now that I am grown up, I have dropped the term “Chinese” from your name simply because I have no idea how it got there and the Google machine is not providing me with the answer.  I am simply calling you Finger Cuffs, even though that term has taken on a slightly different meaning over time.

Every so often, when I start doubting myself or my place in life, I have the tendency to tug and tug and tug.  I intuitively know that this isn’t the way to accomplish anything: I am well aware that my own instinct is to shut out people who are tugging on me too hard.  And yet I do it myself: badgering, checking, obsessing, tugging (and not “tugging” in the other meaning of finger cuff sense.  A completely non-pleasureable tugging which is just me trying to drag life or a relationship around by brute force).

The lesson I learned from you is that if I relax, if I can let things go, people and opportunities usually come to me.  Perhaps they were coming to me all along, but I didn’t notice because I was so busy forcing things.

So, thank you, finger cuffs.  I know that I shredded you at the time and called you “stupid,” but you taught me much more than my Rubix Cube.

Love,
Me

*******

Dear Chinese Jax:

You also seem to be Chinese in origin, and according to the packaging, your name is spelled with an “x” instead of the “ck” spelling I used in my Ramona Quimby diary.  I am too scared to Google you and find out that the youth of America have also turned you into a dirty sex term.  I’m not even sure what debase act could be named “Chinese Jax,” but I have full faith that those crazy kids have thought up something filthy to tarnish your name.

I used to love to play with you at recess.  I had dozens of jax made out of the tiny circles of plastic, but my favourite was an opaque black and white one that my sister made for me.  Most jax were translucent, but she had gotten a set that were opaque, which made my jax stand out when I pulled out my set at recess.

That made me feel special.

I have a few circles from it in a box in the basement.

But that isn’t the point, Chinese Jax.  The life lesson I learned from you is that everyone wants to be included.  I would bring you to school, fidget with you inside the plastic bag in my pocket.  I brought you because I wanted to be occupied during recess, which was too amorphous and unstructured a time for a girl like me.  I liked to be confined within clear boundaries.  I liked being told what to do in math class and art class and spelling.  I was very good with tasks and not quite so good at navigating unstructured time.

It is easier to do this as a child; to carry a tangible object that will help you define your time, that will give the half hour meaning.  Generally speaking, if you sit down on the ground with your jax, you will either spend the half hour doing an enjoyable activity alone, or you will spend the half hour joined by others who want to engage in this enjoyable activity with you, but at the very least, it is time better spent than lounging against the wall of the school, your stomach in knots as you try to think of a way to not look like a loser while everyone else plays.

It is much harder as an adult to figure out a way to connect with the other free-floating adults around you.  But the life lesson I learned from you, Chinese Jax, is that it is entirely possible and so I try to jump into that unstructured socializing time feet first, imaginary jax in my pocket.

I also marvel that the plural of jax is jax, which is not quite a life lesson but is a great language quirk.

Love,
Me

*******

Dear Hungry, Hungry Hippos:

I pretty much learned from you that people are greedy and that it is a bitch to clean up marbles once they roll under someone’s bed.

Love,
Me

*******

Name your favourite childhood toy and what you learned from them.

Words.

We say them without thinking, throwing them out from the bottom of our hearts as if they were gum wrappers wadded up for the garbage can.  We clean out our bodies and minds minute by minute, the debris emerging as letter after letter, forming sentences; soliloquies.

We write them, setting them adrift in the great Internet ocean, tiny wobbling boats that we hope will reach a friendly shore.  We have no idea where they go once we release them.  All we know is that we once owned them and now they are out of sight, affecting the people who swim past them.  All we can do is wait to hear back from a tiny voice in the distance telling us that they heard us.  They understand.

I spent my morning telling a person how her words changed my life.

I can’t think of a better way to spend my writing time.

It has taken me thinking about this all week to finally pinpoint what is bothering me about the fake pregnancy Facebook meme as well as the “Win a Baby” contest with the radio station (and just to be clear, my discomfort is on the part of the radio station and clinic — not the people who enter.  I am cheering on anyone who enters from our community).  I can best explain my discomfort through Phoebe Buffay.

There’s an episode of Friends where Phoebe tries to find a completely selfless good deed after she accuses Joey that his participation in a PBS telethon is inherently selfish (because he wants to be on television) while pretending to be a good deed.  He points out that by that definition there is no such thing as a selfless good deed, and she spends the episode coming up with scenarios where she can do something for someone else without getting anything in return.

I agree with both of them (I am such a middle child).  If you’re doing a good deed, what is the big deal if you get something in return too?  Isn’t the point the good deed itself?  And on one level, yes, that is true.

But this is the part that I kept returning to this week:

With few exceptions (as Phoebe discovered) we usually get at the very least a warm, happy feeling of helping another person when we do a good deed.  But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  I don’t think that my happiness with myself negates the good thing I just did for someone else.  But that’s just me; you might be like Phoebe and disagree.

Slightly more murky is when I make a donation but I get a tax deduction.  Again, the tax deduction is a small thing, pretty much a token of appreciation.  An incentive.  Most people don’t donate to charities specifically for the tax deduction, but it does change the nature of the gift a bit to know the giver got something tangible in return.  I feel the same way when we make a donation to NPR and get a “thank you” tote bag.  But non-profits need our donations and most want to have a tangible way of showing their gratitude.

Where it starts becoming a swirling pool of grey (and I can’t really wrap my mind around it) is when someone gains a considerable amount off of another person’s need for help.  So you’re giving aid and someone is helped, but what you are getting in return is something so much more enormous than what you’re giving, that it sort of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  Something like that is what I would call Robin Hood activism.

How am I defining Robin Hood activism?  It’s giving information, comfort, or cash, but at the expense of taking something in return.  The good-natured or those in need are literally used in order to actually benefit someone else.

The perfect example is the fast food restaurant that slaps a pink ribbon on its packaging for the month of October and says it will donate a $1 towards breast cancer research for every hamburger sold. (I don’t know if any fast food restaurant does this, but it doesn’t sound that farfetched.)  Sounds great, right — you get the burger you were going to eat anyway, and a research organization gets a dollar.

But it becomes a feel-good publicity stunt for the restaurant.  They could just donate a million quietly to cancer research and be done with it.  And they may say that they’re doing it this way (the $1 donation for every burger sold) to make everyone involved in the process, but I don’t totally buy that in the case of for-profit establishments (though I think that method is often employed successfully by non-profits).

I think many businesses do things like this to essentially buy goodwill from the public so you will continue to support the restaurant long after breast cancer awareness month is over.  I think they do it because you’ll buy the burger now, whereas you may have skipped the burger if you didn’t think something good was coming from the purchase.  Which sort of feels icky when you think about it that way.  I sort of feel like my emotions have been jerked around for the sake of what amounts to capitalism.

An organization gets a donation, but they’ve literally used breast cancer to sell burgers.

And again, what does it matter if the organization gets a donation?  Isn’t the point the donation or the good deed itself?  It’s a very grey area over what is activism and what is using a group of people.  But I still think it’s important to examine actions, to try to understand the motivation behind them.  At least, it matters to me.

*******

Robin Hood activism is certainly what bothers me about the radio station’s “Win a Baby” contest as well as the clinic that is donating their services.  They both get an enormous kick-back for doing this good deed.  The publicity they receive translates into ad revenue.  The more controversy, the more listeners, the better.  The clinic makes a small donation in the grand scheme of things (my clinic posts their quarterly earnings and if OFC is making even a tenth of what my clinic makes, $35,000 is a drop in the bucket) and will receive more patients in turn, recouping the money they are laying out for three free cycles.  Businesses create projections, they make predictions of how their philanthropic investments will pay out over time.

Most of the time, it doesn’t bother me.  I am well aware when I go see a show at a non-profit theater and I see the list of sponsors in the program, that many of those people made that donation simply to get their name in the booklet.  Some want to present themselves as an involved member of the community.  Some hope that doing so will translate into more business.

And yet, this time, it bothers me.  Mostly because I see the radio station and fertility clinic getting so much more back than what they’re giving.  Yes, one person will get three free cycles, but I would hazard a guess that the radio station and clinic are seeing much more than $35,000 from this.  So through that lens, it feels like the radio station and clinic are profiting off the backs of infertile men and women.

At least with for-profit entities, it’s transparent.  I know that businesses are there to make money.  It just gets murky when they enter the philanthropic world.

It may just be that I’ve spent too much time in Hebrew school internalizing Rambam’s ladder of tzedakah, but I really do think that how we give needs to be considered along with whether or not we give.  We know that there is a big difference between someone handing us something kindly and someone throwing it at us in anger, and I think there is also a difference between the ways one could go about charitable giving.

Was Robin Hood the great equalizer?  Was he just a guy who did a few things wrong, but at least he gave?  Or was he sort of a dick in the way he went about things?

*******

Let’s extend the benefit of the doubt to the fake pregnancy meme on Facebook for a moment and pretend that it actually educates the reader about breast cancer.  At the very least, it jerks around a person emotionally for the moment when they feel elation over your pregnancy announcement and then learn that you’re not expecting.  Is that worth it even if someone becomes educated about breast cancer?  Some would say it is.  I, as you’ve probably guessed, would say that we need to look at whether education (if we’re going to extend the benefit of the doubt and say that education happens at all) in this case is worth the emotional damage.

I really liked the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the Facebook memes last year during one of the earlier incarnations.  They write,

But at some point, it seems even worse to use the cover of breast-cancer awareness to make flirtatious, joking statements on Facebook. And why is it only a women’s health issue that seems to come in for this sort of treatment? Have there been any such memes for prostate cancer? Heart disease?

I’d argue that once again, this incarnation of the Facebook meme is just Robin Hood activism that steals from women.  And come to think about it, the pink-ribbons-on-every-product steals from women.  And wait, while infertility affects both men and women, those posters for the “Win a Baby” contest are  clearly are aimed towards women (as in, “Are You My Mommy?“).

WHY ARE ALL OF THESE ROBIN HOOD ACTIVISM MOMENTS AIMED AT WOMEN?

Yes, I really did need to shriek that.

*******

Robin Hood activism is why I think the creators of the meme do more damage than good (again, my frustration is with the creators, not the people who participate).  What is stolen is the gravity of the situation.  Breast cancer isn’t cute or coy.  It kills.

Back to the radio station, even if we set the money aside, there is more lost along the way if public perception of infertility is further damaged.  We’re angry with the New York Times when they skew public perception and maybe it’s because we get nothing in return.  How furious we would be if the NYT ran an article implying that infertile men and women won babies via IVF.  Which is the message the radio station is putting forth, and yet we’re not up in arms because there’s a prize at the end of this: one person is going to get three cycles.  Yes, the radio station is doing a good deed, but they’re doing it in the crassest way possible.  And for me, that negates some of the goodness of it.

I don’t believe all publicity is good publicity.  I think some publicity can be very hurtful publicity, both to public perception as well as damage to community members.  And it’s on my mind as we slip towards October and the barrage of PR pitches come in asking if I want to write about pink cocktails or pink yogurt containers.  It’s on my mind as I see people posting cryptic Facebook statues and claiming it somehow translates into activism.  And it’s certainly on my mind as I see the hope surrounding that radio station contest.

I think the person who wins the contest has the opportunity to turn the charitable giving around, to bring good from it, in a Phoebe Buffay sort of way, much in the same way she let the bee sting her in that episode.  They can use the platform to educate.  But it is easy for individuals to come at something with a good heart.  I think it is much harder for businesses to convince me that they’re doing things for the right reasons; however you define the “right” before reasons.

Updated at the Bottom:

I wasn’t going to post this.  I wrote it, and then intended to just let it sit in my draft folder.  I wrote it for myself, something I do often.

So I’m not really sure why I’m hitting publish right now.  The release?

*******

This morning, we were sitting in a Starbucks at 9:30 am when I looked at the clock and said to Josh, “Ten years ago, in this minute, my coworker was on the phone with a student’s parent when the Pentagon was hit by the plane.  He just screamed, ‘we’ve been hit!’ and the line went dead.”

I can’t think of many times — of personal or national importance — where I could tell you not only what I was doing, but what other people were doing too in the minutes leading up to the event.  I don’t even know why my brain remembers everyone else’s story too, but it does.  I can tell you who was at work and who was on their way to work and who was on the telephone.

The parent that was on the phone lived.  A parent who was not on the phone with us did not.  It is so strange to know the minute he died; a piece of information that feels so intimate.  I cannot tell you the time anyone else in my life has died; people incredibly important to me.  Days, yes.  Minutes, no.  But at 9:37 am today, I just stared at Josh and said, “I can’t believe that it has been ten years now since this minute.”

*******

My entire marriage is contained within the confines of September 11th.  We got married a few weeks after the planes hit.  By the time I walked down the aisle, we had entered Afghanistan.  Some people drove rather than fly to the wedding.  We wondered if we should cancel the honeymoon.

Before the wedding, the rabbi counseled us that we should sign an additional document which would allow one of us to remarry in the future in our body couldn’t be located.  It was a very real problem facing some 9/11 widows; the inability to produce a body for burial left them in limbo.  It was unfathomable that we had to think about signing such a document, but that’s the way the world was a few weeks after September 11th.  We didn’t know what was going to happen next.

We started our marriage with the world on-edge.

It will be our tenth anniversary in a few weeks.  It is impossible for my brain to untangle the two events because the first so closely informed and guided the other.  We would not have started trying to have children when we did if not for a widow’s story in the New York Times’ Portraits of Grief series.

Josh had left the newspaper on the kitchen table, and I read a few of the portraits.  One stood out for me, perhaps because the girl was around my age and newly married.  She had gotten married in August and on September 11th, her ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract, was still at the framers.  Her husband was gone before she had ever gotten to hang up her ketubah.

After our wedding, I wouldn’t let anyone take our ketubah for framing.  After the honeymoon, before we returned to work, I went to the framer with Josh and my inlaws and begged the man to frame it while I waited.  I explained the story of the widow and since it was right after 9/11, the framer understood and allowed me to hang out near the store while he worked rather than give him the customary week to frame the picture.  We took it home and put it right up on the wall.

Last night, I thought I heard something scuttling on the wall over my head.  Josh turned on the lights, trying to locate the source of the noise.  He took the ketubah off the wall to check underneath, and there was something so frightening about seeing the ketubah off the wall, even if it was just for a few seconds.  I can’t really explain it except that I associate that piece of art with September 11th, with how our lives so deeply affect other people.  This woman doesn’t know me and I don’t know her, but her life has so deeply informed my own.

A few months after our wedding, we decided to forgo the year we thought we would take before we started trying to have children.  The story of that widow kept informing our decisions, and I really have her to thank for the twins.  Without her story, we would have waited.  So in a strange way, her husband lives on with our twins since her words about him are what brought us to treatments to create them.  I wish I could find that story again, look up this widow and tell her how much her story has changed the course of my life.  I am so grateful to them; so sad for them.  I cannot fathom what she is thinking today, ten days later.  But I wanted to send out this thank you to her, even if it doesn’t reach her.

If anyone finds her story in the Portraits of Grief series, I would appreciate it if you would pass along her name to me.  I’ve never been able to find it again.

Update:

Thank you to Sue and Jjiraffe who found the article for me.  I miss-remembered two points that I was using in my Google search over the years — it was in the Washington Post and not the NYT, and her wedding was in March, not August.  I wavered on the decision to write her, not wanting to do anything that could potentially cause her any extra pain, but in the end, sent her a handwritten note.  I wish her only the best in life; my heart is with her this week.