Just a heads up — this post is not going to be nearly as funny as Julie’s post on it (which just might be my favourite post ever).  By which I mean that it won’t be funny at all, but I was giving a quote for an article and it made me think through the whole situation.

WashPo did an article about Facebook updates and infertility a few weeks ago, and many places did a follow up post, and — as you’d expect — the comments were a mixed bag of “thank you for reminding people to be sensitive” and “these damn barren bitches need to get over themselves.”

Because apparently, asking someone to practice circumspection is a little bit too much to ask.

Circumspection is very different from not speaking about it at all.  Circumspection means that you think about how your words may be perceived and you tailor them to the person.

I gave news of my engagement differently to different people:

• Some people got: “Josh proposed and we’re getting married in November.”
• Other people got: “Josh and I got engaged, and this is how it went down…”

In other words, single friends who I knew might be happy for me but sad for themselves got the bare facts.  I gave the news, they processed the news, and if they wanted to know more, they asked for it.  Add widows to that category too.  I wanted them to know what was happening in my life, but I have to believe that it’s painful to hear about someone else’s happiness when you’re grieving your loss.

Oh, and add everyone not particularly close to me in that list as well: my co-workers may think I’m swell, but few needed to know more than “Josh and I are getting married” even if I was so excited that I wanted to talk about it incessantly.  It wasn’t about me, you see.  It was about me operating within a larger whole, where it can’t all be about me.  Just because something is exciting in my world doesn’t mean that everyone else is going to find that news exciting enough to hear more than a cursory amount of facts.

But here’s the thing, engagement announcements rarely come out of the blue.  You know the people are dating and you know it may be coming in the future, so if you’re sensitive to those sorts of announcements, you brace yourself for it.  Pregnancy announcements are different because most of the time, you don’t know when your friends are ovulating or if they’re trying to procreate.  Pregnancy announcements can come at 5 weeks or they can come when the person is 6 months along — you just never know.

I like to think of engagement announcements like spiders — when you see them on the wall, you know they’re going to move up or down or left or right.  Whereas pregnancy announcements are more like crickets: they jump out at you and you never know where they’re going to land.

Part of what people are missing with the infertility example is that — like most health issues — it’s wholly outside of your control.  Think about it this way: if your friend just lost her legs, would you put up a status update that says, “I just ran 5 miles and it feels so good.  It’s amazing to have legs and I’m so blessed!”  Or would you put up this more sensitive update: “Just ran 5 miles.  Going to shower now.”

In both updates, you convey the information, but with Facebook — unlike a blog where you might not know the audience — you do know who is possibly reading your feed.  You can save the detailed, gushy news for personal emails rather than broadcasting it to the larger audience.*

Which is also to say that if infertile men and women want a little sensitivity thrown their way, they need to be upfront.  People only know what you tell them.  And beyond that, there are other options beyond schooling someone when you’re unhappy with the way they deliver news — you can hide their feed or unfriend them on Facebook (though hopefully keep them as a friend in the face-to-face world).  It has to flow in both directions with people realizing that the way they deliver news may affect how the news is taken AND people realizing that if we all walk around on egg shells around each other, the world will be a very uncomfortable place.

And what people need to understand about the WashPo article — WashPo ASKED infertile men and women how they dealt with their friend feed.  Infertile men and women didn’t go to WashPo and say, “please let the world know this because we think they need to change.”  Instead, WashPo wrote the article, people were honest in their quotes, and now, it’s up to people who read the article to decide how they want to comport themselves.  They know the truth about how people are reading their feed.  Or not reading their feed.  Which is very different from your friend calling you up and saying, “you, Person X, need to change the way you write your feed.”  WashPo’s article was simply presenting how people approach Facebook.

And on that note, posting an update to Facebook is just about the worst way to deliver important news.  Some people are on there daily.  Some people go on monthly.  And some people on your friend list don’t actually go on at all.  If you have important news to share, share it directly.  Send an email or make a phone call to ensure that the person knows rather than posting it to a social media site.  If the news is so important that you want people to know about it, then take the time to actually ensure that they know about it.  The only people who should be finding out important news (such as the fact that you’re pregnant) via a social media site should be peripheral people that you wouldn’t mind if they stopped reading your friend feed.

So why get your panties in a twist if they stop reading it?

* This, of course, assumes that your Facebook friend list is a mixed bag of people.  If everyone on your list is in your family, carry on as if you were sending a group personal email.  If your list is made up of a few co-workers, a few old college friends, a few random people from your neighbourhood, and your great-aunt Rose who happens to be an Internet junkie, then treat your status updates like the subject line of an email — you don’t gush all the news there; you just provide a taste.

My keynote for the New England Resolve conference yesterday did a 180 from where I thought it would go.  I could talk about what it was going to be, but perhaps, instead, I should just post what it was.  Here is my address if you weren’t at the conference to hear it:

My husband called me one morning and told me that Carla Cohen, the owner of our local, independent bookstore, Politics and Prose, had died. The news came on a day when I was already hurrying, behind on a deadline, and at first, I was angry that he had shared the news with me then and there when he knew how important it was that I got this work project done. Her death was like a punch straight in my heart.

And maybe that’s where it first felt like infertility. Because — as you know — news never comes when you’re prepared to hear it. There were calls from my nurse with negative betas where I had to brightly smile and go face the students in my classroom without missing a beat. Nurses never called when I had an hour free period stretching ahead of me. They always called three seconds before the class bell rang so I had to jump off the phone, a fist-sized hole in my heart, and pretend nothing had happened.

Sometimes the show has to go on.

Back to the death of the bookstore owner; what else could my husband do? He knew how much she meant to me. Her store had served as my community during some very difficult times in my life. It was a refuge of sorts. And she had given me one of the most important pieces of advice, one that I promise I’ll share with you today (this is called the big build up – where I keep hinting about this awesome advice, ensuring that it will be a let down).

Again, her death reminded me a lot of infertility itself because I had many of the same thoughts and feelings. I didn’t feel right mourning so deeply because she wasn’t my mother or my best friend – she was simply a person who meant a lot to me. I gave myself the same talking-to often during treatments or after a loss – what right did I have to mourn so deeply?

During my first round of treatments, I wanted life to stop for me, to let me pause, but again, no one recognized what I was going through as a reason to pause. Cancer, of course, or the death of a family member excused one for a short period from life. But infertility? It’s a silent mark – you often don’t share the experience with others, and when you do, they usually don’t understand how deeply it cuts.  My day 3 bloodwork would suck, and I’d have to pretend everything was okay during work hours or out with my friends. And here, I had lost someone who meant a great deal to me, and my editor was not going to understand if I didn’t turn in that manuscript as promised.

So what was Carla Cohen’s ever-brilliant advice – words that can apply to every facet of life?

Just wing it.

Let me explain. It was my first reading for Navigating the Land of If, and it was special because I was at my favourite bookstore, this place that meant the world to me. My publisher didn’t have great luck booking readings there, but Carla made a special exception because she knew what the space meant to me.

The night before the reading, I typed up a page of things I wanted to talk about in terms of the book and blog. I printed it off, folded the paper, and tucked it into the book, proud of myself for being so freakin’ prepared.

The next afternoon, I am waiting in the back office with Carla Cohen prior to the reading and we’re chatting. She asks if I’m prepared because we’re about to walk out to the podium. I pull out my book and notes and unfold the paper to find myself looking at a blank page. The printer must have spat out two pieces of paper — a blank sheet and my notes. And I grabbed the blank one.

My first instinct was to hide inside the office until it was safe to sneak out to my car and drive home, crying all the way. But Carla’s answer to this problem was “just wing it.” And what she meant wasn’t that I shouldn’t take this seriously or feel embarrassed. But that the only way through it was … well … through it. That stopping wasn’t an option. And that I needed a lot more fortitude to get through the problems in life.

So, I winged it.

Just wing it is an attitude that takes into consideration that life doesn’t always go according to plan, but regardless, we need to keep going. We need to keep pretending that we have our shit together, that we can do this. Pausing from life isn’t an option just as returning to your house with your tail between your legs when you show up for a book reading without your notes isn’t an option. Carla Cohen’s advice points out that life goes on because life has to go on. And this attitude shift is imperative for getting through infertility because often life feels like it can’t go on.

This attitude is there to wrangle those thoughts back into their place. You are allowed to curl up on the bathroom floor and cry. You are allowed to sit out a baby shower or two. You are even allowed to hide all pregnant people from your Facebook feed. What you aren’t allowed to do is let infertility stop you from living. You can’t allow infertility to become like one of Harry Potter’s dementors, sucking your soul from your body. Conjure up whatever Patronus works for you to chase that infertility dementor away.

Just wing it is the anti-just relax. “Just relax” dismisses the problem. It says: it’s not such a huge deal, just relax about it. It’s negating the problem: it’s not a medical issue; it’s just your stress getting the best of you. It’s belittling the problem: that infertility can be solved with a vacation or a good massage.

Where as “just wing it” acknowledges the problem and reminds the person that they need to find it somewhere within themselves to cope. The only way out of infertility is through infertility. You have to resolve it; you can’t live here indefinitely.

But “winging it” takes a leap of faith, one that is perhaps impossible when you’re not in a comfortable situation. If the same thing had occurred at a different bookstore, I probably wouldn’t have been able to pull myself together and walk out in front of that podium faking it. I was in this space that had been essentially a refuge to me. And beyond that, I was amongst friends – albeit friends that were in a sea of strangers, but friends nonetheless.

So I leaned on that, and that is what got me through it, and the same can be said, as you’ve probably guessed, for infertility. Going it alone; not having understanding people around you; it’s impossible. You need fortitude that most people just don’t have naturally. And frankly, infertile people live in an un-infertility-friendly world. Few of us naturally have people around us who understand that it’s not a disease you can leave for a few hours. Medications are timed, appointments are frequent, and toilet paper examination goes on hourly.

But the way we wing our way through infertility is by making connections such as the ones that are going on in this room. It’s about going online and finding your virtual tribe; whether it’s other parents-to-be going through the adoption process or others beginning treatments or others utilizing donor gametes. No one will have your exact story; but there will be places that you overlap and in those venn diagrams of life, we find support.

And I challenge everyone here, if you don’t already have a blog or a bulletin board or a face-to-face support group, get one. Go home tonight and start a blog; many blogging platforms are free. Within ten minutes, you can have a short paragraph up announcing yourself. Read other blogs, and leave comments. Add yourself to my blogroll at Stirrup Queens – you can find a link in the top left-hand corner. There are over 2500 blogs on it right now. People will find you if you go out seeking them. And now you have a refuge, a place to go when people tell you to just relax. These people will know that while “just relax” is bunk, “just wing it” is the way you really get through infertility.

Having support – whether its online or face-to-face – will not cure infertility. But it will certainly make tackling infertility easier. It is always better to plow forward knowing people have your back if you slow down, to know there will be people there to show you the way if you get lost, or to simply hold your hand when you don’t want to be alone. Having support doesn’t erase the terrible parts of infertility or loss; those still exist. But what it does is give you the refuge to take a deep breath and move forward rather than continue to stand in the storm, becoming increasingly battered.

Having support allows you to just wing it: to go back to work after a negative beta knowing that you will vent to your friends that night. To get through that upcoming Thanksgiving dinner where your Great Aunt Jane is going to ask you when you’re finally going to have kids. To pick yourself up after a terrible loss.

I wanted to say something funny about infertility today. And there are times when we can be sarcastic and bitter and list all the horrific things people say to us in the name of “helping out.” We can list our comebacks and snicker over people’s ignorance. But in the end, sort of like black coffee, there’s no sweetness to it. It’s not the kind of the laughter that leaves you smiling. It’s the sort of laughter that is the precursor to tears.

So instead I give you the best advice I’ve received in a while, one that applies to book readings as well as infertility. It’s a way to honour Carla Cohen, a fellow infertile woman who died way too soon, one that taught me the importance about plowing ahead. And how you can do that when you have supporting hands behind you.

The Creme de la Creme opened this week, and it’s already trucking along with 65 participants in the first 4 days.  And hopefully, a lot of people (hint, hint) will take the weekend (hint, hint) to look through their archives and choose their favourite post from 2010.

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I will probably not update the IComLeavWe list between this morning and Sunday night because I’ll be busy with the Resolve conference.  Rest assured, if you add yourself to it between now and then, you will be uploaded the next time I sit down at the computer.  You don’t need to sign up again.  In fact, please don’t sign up again.  It causes all sorts of problems with updating the list when there are duplicates.

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I am in a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad mood.  And it is making all food taste horrible.  Have you ever had that happen?  Where everything just seems disgusting all of a sudden based on your mood?  Which, did I mention, is absolutely foul?

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The Weekly What If: Think of your least favourite food.  Now what if you were promised that eating 4 ounces of this food daily would put you always in a good mood.  Not that bad things wouldn’t happen to you, but you’d be able to approach them with this great frame of mind.  And when things were the status quo, you’d feel exceptionally cheerful.  The catch is that you need to keep it up every day to have this effect.  So would you eat your daily 4 ounces, and what is your least favourite food?

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And now, the blogs…

Mutemockingbird’s Blog has a post about jealousy as well as what she does to cover up her overwhelming feelings of jealousy.  And how those actions have now backfired terribly.  In the vein of “no good deed goes unpunished,” poor Mutemockingbird is now drowning in baby reminders.

The Inadequate Conception has a wistful post about Halloween.  She writes, “I know that behind the scenes not all of these families were leading the charmed lives that appeared in that two-hour moment at the Halloween festival, but it sure looked nice. And, we were a little jealous.”  I loved how she caught that moment — that even if it wasn’t perfect behind the scenes, the moment she was observing “sure looked nice.”

Yolk has a post about distractions.  She explains, “These days all those things: exercise, my job, my hobbies, etc. all just serve as distractions to fill time while I wait for the only thing that matters to me anymore.”  Go cheer her on as she explains the two distractions that are keeping her going at the moment.

Find Joy Now describes how it feels to be part of two different worlds.  She doesn’t want to hurt the readers who have stuck by her by talking incessantly about her child, but she also doesn’t really relate to other parents.  That isn’t the part that struck me though.  It was this: “This was what I was ultimately working towards.  This was something I could control.  I couldn’t control when a baby would come, I couldn’t force myself to become pregnant, and I certainly couldn’t force a birth mother of father to choose me to parent his or her child.  I could only control my outlook on life and my attitude.”  It’s sort of one of those times where you come to read about the situation, but you walk away thinking about how you approach life.

Lastly, Relaxing Doesn’t Make Babies has her take on Halloween through the lens of loss.  She explains, “Graves and ghosts and horror all take on a different meaning when you have lived through a horror story, when a grave marks the body of your child. I pass houses that have fake graveyards in front of their house and I frown. Not that I think it is wrong that they do that, but I see it from a different perspective now.”  Please go over and read the whole post — it will change the way you look at the world.

The roundup to the Roundup: The Creme de la Creme is now open.  I won’t be on the computer much this weekend.  I’m in a horrible mood.  Answer the Weekly What If.  And lots of great posts to read.

If you’ve been following the story between Justin Long and the reviewer, Michelle Orange, you know that it kicked off an intriguing post from Orange about our responsibility as writers in a Googlable medium — or more, it raises the question of writing without guidelines in a world where the subject can (and will) read the piece you’re writing.

I suggested on BlogHer that we draft an Internet Writer’s Oath and kicked it off with an opening statement.  People over there are now invited to add amendments, and I wanted to throw this out here too.  Please add your thoughts and voice — what you think is important to promise as someone who writes in a Googlable medium.

The Internet Writer’s Oath

As writers, we need to take a long look at the concept of nonmaleficence, that maxim doctors utter (primum non nocere) and apply it to our use of words: first, do no harm. Which does not mean that a surgeon can’t cut the skin, obviously bringing the person’s life into danger, but instead, having writers thinking like doctors means that we take into consideration that we are all humans, we are all emotional beings, and for the love, words hurt.

So in that regard, we promise that whenever we hit publish, we will think about how the Internet is Googlable, and in this world of Google alerts and searches for our names, that we understand that anything we write can and will be read by the subject. When we have a problem with another person, we write them directly rather than posting a critique for the world to read as a first step. And that we will stick to critiquing words and ideas and not the people behind those words and ideas.

We know the Golden Rule isn’t really applicable — that sometimes we have nothing nice to say, but we must say something, and sometimes we can’t write the review we’d want to receive ourselves if we were the creator of the art. But we can take into consideration how the subject will receive the words and write accordingly. We write with honesty, with circumspection, with thoughtfulness — never straying from the subject at hand into personal attacks.

AMENDMENT ONE: This oath also applies to all social media such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as applying to posting pictures online.  All people will act with circumspection, considering how the other person might feel (and asking when it doubt) before hitting the publish key.

Take the oath in the comment section below (or explain why you think we don’t need an oath at all).

The sound system at the Rally to Restore Sanity kept cutting in and out, so I caught the first half of the keynote, and missed the more meaningful part until I got home and watched it that night on C-Span.  I have to admit that as fun as it was to be there on the Mall, it was sort of like potato chips.  Good while you’re eating them, but afterward, you sort of think about the lack of nutritional value and wonder if it was the best use of your caloric intake.  It was like a giant party on the Mall, and that’s all it was for me as I was walking off the Mall, because I didn’t hear the actual message until I got home.

And frankly, even though Jon Stewart repeated several times prior to the event that this wasn’t a political rally — it was strictly a message of reasonableness, people still brought their political messages with them.  If it wasn’t about legalizing marijuana or lowering taxes, it was about how Sarah Palin is the devil and Obama sucks.  It didn’t matter if people spoke their message sensibly and reasonably.  They missed the whole point.

It wasn’t a political rally, it wasn’t a place to make a statement about your beliefs — it was a place to make a statement that you are willing to be open-minded and listen to other people without trashing them due to their ideas.

I think sometimes we’re pushing so hard to be heard that we feel as if we can’t take a step back.  How many times do we blog not because we have something to say, but because we want to be heard? (For the love, I post almost daily.  Can I really have that much to say?)  And how many times when we’re arguing with someone do we stop formulating our argument, sit and listen to them without interrupting for however many minutes they need and then consider their words before responding?  I sure as hell know I’m guilty of formulating arguments in my head while the other person is talking (sorry, Josh).

I went to the rally because this community is one of my lens.  We fight — in the comment sections and in blog posts.  We’re not one, happy family who lives in a daisy-crown world where I am singing kumbaya while I strum my guitar.  We’re one messy family.  We’re a sobbing, raw-nerves, emotional family.  We are gay and straight, male and female, married or single or widowed or divorced.  We are young and old, male factor or female female or unexplained.  Some are choosing adoption and some would never consider it.  And some are doing IVF and others wish they could.  Some have living children and some are missing their children.

And most of us would never have met one another if not for our situational or biological infertility.  Most of us simply wouldn’t have met if not for loss.  And most of us wouldn’t go beyond politeness if not for infertility or loss.  I mean, look at me?  How many socialist, short, Jewish, vegetarian women do you have in your day-to-day life (Anat, don’t answer that one)?  I’m going to guess that for many of you, the answer is few.  But we both have infertility, and somehow, we throw all of those things out the window to hold tight to one another.  We are each other’s support system and we know each other’s inner-most fears and foibles.  We are sometimes more real with each other than the people we see in the face-to-face world.  I count many of you as good friends.  And we make these connections  because infertility is hard, and it is only easier with another person.

Make that life is hard and it’s only easier with other people.

I went to the rally because of this community.  Because we have nothing in common, and yet, with the few exceptions of flare-ups from time to time, as a whole, we get along.  We support one another.  We take a second to tell someone who has suffered a loss that we’re holding them in our heart.  We take a second to cheer someone on when they get a positive peestick. (Fine, so we also sometimes curse them in our heads, but outwardly, we get along.)

And we have the Creme de la Creme each year to prove it.  It’s a tapestry of words; it’s a quilt of experiences.  There are common themes that run through the posts, but each one is unique.  And yes, five years on, I am still stunned as I read the posts and reflect on how diverse our community is, how much we have in common emotionally despite the other characteristics we use to define ourselves.

So that’s what I took from the rally — the fun of being there in the day, and the profound message I got at night.  And synthesizing those two realities to bring you one request:

Please participate.

As of this morning, the Creme de la Creme has 32 participants (not bad for the first 24 hours of the list being open).  Please take a moment to add your voice to the Creme de la Creme.  You have a lot of time; you don’t need to get on this immediately.  But in the next few weeks, read through your archives and make sure your voice is part of the project.  Let’s show the world how a diverse community can come together to create one project.  We can all read one another and hear one another and learn something from one another.  And have our unique experience heard too.