Show and Tell. I was able to read every post and comment so far and it had an added side benefit. I usually start pulling together the Friday Blog Roundup on Thursday night, currently prime blog reading time, so now I can come for the Show and Tell post but stay for the incredibly moving post below it written about an upcoming appointment and get two things for the price of one click. I listened to the class member and I rounded out the Roundup. See, added benefits to the move. And I Kirtsy’d one of the Show and Tell posts this week. When I read them on the weekend, I wouldn’t remember them for the LFCA during the week, but here I could just open up the post and pop it in there. See, change can be good. And the list is still open. Which means that if you have missed out on the fun up until this point, it is not too late to write your own post and show something to the figurative class. And if you can’t get your act together today, there is always next week or the next week or the one after that. Show and Tell will always be held on Wednesday to Friday from this point on. The thing I love about Show and Tell–and the whole basis for starting it a year ago–was that sometimes you have something that you just want to hold up and show everyone, but you feel strange making a whole blog post about it. But here is this built-in space for that random sign you saw or the purse you bought or the song you heard on the radio that reminds you of this story. Just like you stood in front of your kindergarten class holding a random Barbie and saying, “this is doctor Barbie and she’s a doctor,” come stand in front of your figurative class and show us a random thing since you have our rapt attention. And if you want to participate and can’t get to a computer during the day, send me a link to your post and I will upload it to Mr. Linky for you. See, no one needs to miss out by the move.

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I wanted to upload some more of the pictures from lunch last weekend. Not as exciting as pens and breasts, but still, some lovely pictures of Katie’s purse.

Our Family Beginnings, telling a story

The Happy Hours and B, listening

Body Diaries by Lucy, Sell Crazy Someplace Else, and The Happy Hours

Chez Perky, A Little Sweetness telling a story, and my new cousin, Hoping for Another Lovebug

A Little Sweetness and Hoping for Another Lovebug

B

Our Family Beginnings, Chez Perky, and A Little Sweetness

The purse is made out of seat belts. Seat belts! What will people think of next. I think if I owned that purse, I would never stop touching it because it felt so smooth and nice. Can you imagine the photo journal you’re going to get from BlogHer this summer now that I have my new, fun camera? It’s going to be candid blogger photos 24/7, bay-bee (I mean, after I’ve asked if I could take the picture because I’m all anal like that).

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Remember my obsession with Smith Island? Oh, it’s still there. We’re going on holiday with another couple soon, which is totally going to be a Vampire Shabbos (as opposed to a werewolf seder) complete with Buffy episodes. I am trying to sell them on coming with us to Smith Island for the day. It is brilliant fun to have a four-year-old drive you around the island in a golf cart. But my new obsession is Sapelo Island in Georgia. I got sucked into a “news” story on Yahoo that had great islands in the US and saw a picture similar to this. Beyond the sheer beauty of the place, two things drew me towards it. (1) You cannot visit the island unless you live there or are part of an organized tour. I love places that are difficult to visit and fussy. (2) There is no school on the island. Which sounds like the anti-me. I mean, I loved school so much that I became a teacher just so I wouldn’t have to leave the warm bosom of the classroom. But I love the rhythm to a school-less day. I have been waiting months for summer vacation and have big plans on spending it on trips to the farm and swimming and car dealerships (the Wolvog likes to sit in the cars and pretend to drive). We’re going to go to Harpers Ferry and have playdates and take wrong turns to see where they go. I know they go to school on Sapelo Island; the school there closed in 1978 and they head off every day to the mainland. But there must be days that they can’t go to the mainland, where they get an extra home day or two. It’s my new goal. Sapelo Island or bust.

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The Weekly What If: What if you were given an all-expenses-paid trip for a month to the place of your choice (imagine going to Fiji on someone else’s dime for a whole month!) but the drawback would be that on the last night, they get to break your arm. They’ll take you immediately to the hospital to have it properly set, but you know…you’ll have to endure a broken arm. Would you do it? And could you ever think well of that place again after having your arm broken there?

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More thank yous for people who have up the Navigating the Land of If badge on their blog. I know I must have missed people again, but that’s the good part about rolling thank yous; I will catch them the next time.

A View on My Life
Baby, Interrupted
Beyond the Palemother
Building Heavenly Bridges
Eggs Benedict Arnold
Eye Heart Internet
Fertile Hope
Happy-Go-Lucky
Helping Make Sense
Here We Go Again
Hydrangeas are Pretty
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Pampers
Little Pieces of My Life
Not the Path I Chose
Our Own Creation
Parenthood for Me
Portraits in Sepia
Secrets of an Infertile Mom
Slaying, Blogging, Whatever
Somewhat Ordinary
Sunny in Seattle
The Hairy Farmer Family
The Jauss Haus
Trying for a Baby
Working on It

What? You want the code too because you’d love to help me spread the word about the book? Well, you can get it right here.

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And now, the blogs… An Unwanted Path has a post about wishing for impossible things. It is about the unused spaces in her house and contains this gorgeous line: “there are people out there envious of all this free space… but I can’t stand it. It’s so empty.” I love this post because it literally aches. There is still hope inside of it–she knows she will become a mother one day–but you feel as if the rooms are literally surrounding you as you read the post, visually facing the effects of someone’s infertility. It is a really beautiful post. Bottoms Off and On the Table has a post about how she views a statement now that she is on the other side. She mentions a comment on a bulletin board written by an IVF vet and how when she first read it, she felt guilt and then pity. And now, life has changed her understanding of the words. She states: “I understand how it feels to transition from infertility that is treatable to infertility that may be terminal.” I found her words incredibly moving.

MLO Knitting has a post about how infertility cuts ties and how we need connections too. I think for me, the brilliance of this post comes with the juxtaposition of the cancer diagnosis with the infertility diagnosis: “Cancer has made me want to see my friends more – even as my energy has waned. Stupid painkillers make me drowsy while screwing up my internal clock. Infertility just made me want to curl up in a ball and not have to talk to anybody. Getting ovarian cancer that led to a hysterectomy has just made me mad, sad, and needing to reach out.” Please go read the post in full. Lastly, My Pathway to Motherhood has a post on sensitivity. Not just insensitivity or the things we do and say without thinking about how the receiver is processing the moment and not just the sensitivity that can come from being rubbed raw by loss and passing cycles. From a series of unconnected moments, all tied together by the making of gingerbread men, she states with deep honesty: “And maybe this post is about me not believing I will ever be a mother.” Your heart breaks, maybe due to your own sensitivity to those words, from the contrast of the sweetness of the cookies to the bitterness of the acts. Gorgeous writing and thoughts.

Four posts, all a little sad this week. It’s not that the funny posts didn’t make me laugh, but all four of these made me think deeply and stuck with me for a long time. It’s strange when it works out that they’re all the same note rather than a few funny, a few angry, a few sad. Maybe what I needed to read found me. The roundup to the Roundup: Join in Show and Tell on its new day. More pictures from TOOTPU. Sapelo Island rocks! Answer the Weekly What If. Many thank yous for the book badge. And lots of great posts to read. Hope you have a wonderful start to the weekend.

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

First and foremost, welcome to Show and Tell at its brand new place and time. The list will go up every Wednesday evening and will close on Friday night–a big window for adding your own item to the mix. How do you participate? Just think of something to show and tell the class; it’s just an old school, standard, fidget-in-front-of-the-class presentation. You can do it with pictures or simply tell a story. It is not too late to participate unless it’s after Friday night and then…well…it is too late for this week. But save your post for next week because this happens every Wednesday night.

My item? This past Sunday, the women of TOOTPU got together for lunch. Afterwards, we took a picture outside the restaurant, clogging the walkway for all the people trying to get into the nearby mall.

From left to right: Sell Crazy Someplace Else, Me, A Real Life, Hoping for Another Lovebug, B, Our Family Beginnings, Hopeful Mamma, A Little Sweetness, The Happy Hours, Two Hot Mamas, Body Diaries by Lucy, Chez Perky

I’ve always had a bond with Hoping for Another Lovebug that started via email and finally culminated with meeting face-to-face through TOOTPU about two years ago. This weekend, we discovered that we’re actually related. Her husband is first cousins with my first cousin’s husband. Which means that not only did she gain honourary Jewish status by this connection, but we are now family forever. Do you see what starting a blog can do? It can bring you new family members.

My new cousin who is also my old friend–isn’t this like a preteen-girl’s fantasy come true? Her friend turns out to be her cousin? And then we start sharing a pair of jeans and talking about boys and crying because of something we read written about us in a popular girl’s slam book?

Lastly, boobs.

I was signing a copy of my book when Katie mentioned that she had wanted her book signed too, but she had lent it to her MIL. She told me that her husband said that I should sign her boob instead. I have always wanted to sign her lovely lady humps, so I jumped on this idea.
Oh–and I should mention that we’re standing outside the swankiest mall in Virginia.

At this point, I can’t remember how I turned the pen on A Little Sweetness’s lovely mammaries (maaaaaammaries, in the corners of my bra, misty signature scrawled mammaries, of my fellow TOOTPUers).

Fine, so it was less Girls Gone Wild and more a statement about how much I love my girls. I love my TOOTPUers. I feel so lucky to have met a group of women where we can sign our boobs AND celebrate our victories AND commiserate during our disappointments AND become family members AND eat a lot of chocolate.

Oh, and of course I got mine signed too. Like that shit-eating grin? You may need to click on the picture to enlarge to see it.

Josh and I saw UP that evening and as I left the theater, sobbing, Josh said, “I am trying really hard to take you seriously right now, but you’re walking around with a woman’s name across your breast. It’s just hard.”

Saving the rest of my TOOTPU photos for the Roundup on Friday. No more breasts, but some fun photos from the day.

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (hint: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name). The list is open from now until late Tuesday night and a new one is posted every week.

Last thoughts on resolution…I sort of promise?

I know we’ve all taken sides on whether or not relationships/marriage work as an analogy to the infertility experience, but I really do think that it lends itself well to discussing resolution within infertility. At least, it helps me to think about it this way in explaining why Domar’s book and therapy and a lot of crying worked for me in resolving the infertility, and how–for me–the two sides happened separate from one another. I think they can happen at the same time–resolving the infertility and the childlessness–but, for me, they happened separate from one another.

So you have five scenarios:

1. Resolve infertility and childlessness at the same time (removing the childless state removes the feelings about infertility)
2. Resolve the childlessness, but never resolve the infertility or resolve it later (you have a child, but you’re still stuck in the same emotions, self-hatred, and depression you experienced during infertility–whatever form your personal struggle with infertility took)
3. Resolve the infertility, but never resolve the childlessness or resolve the childlessness after resolving the infertility (come to a place of emotionally coping with infertility separate from whether or not you have a child)
4. Never resolve infertility or childlessness.
5. Infertility doesn’t affect you emotionally beyond some basic disappointment, frustration, or sadness and therefore, you’re not really on this list.

And the way I would phrase this idea in terms of dating is that partnership resolves singledom, but it doesn’t resolve relationship issues. Meaning, you can get married or enter a partnership and that will take away your state of being partnerless. But having a partner doesn’t magically cure whatever baggage you have been carrying with you emotionally. If you don’t resolve your emotional baggage, you are going to have that baggage affect your relationship or marriage.

Healthy is a relative term. We all have our quirks and issues and we’re talking about two separate people coming together. Of course there will be friction when two people need to navigate a single world together and constantly interact. You may not always be on the same page and you may fight and you may have times where things are quite boring in your marriage–but that is different from having problems in your partnership. Healthy couples argue healthily (sort of like absolute power corrupts absolutely?).

What I mean by unhealthy are the larger issues we bring to a relationship when we date knowing that our minds and hearts aren’t really ready for dating; that we have personal work we need to be doing for ourselves so we can bring trust into a relationship. I think that lack of trust plays a big role in ruining relationships and it plays a big role in life after infertility. Because a lack of resolution with infertility usually goes hand-in-hand with a lack of trust in other places–a lack of trust with your body, a lack of trust in happiness (how many people talk about waiting for the other shoe to drop? I know I do), a lack of trust in your own abilities.

I was doing that with family building–trying to do the physical side of treatments without taking care of the emotional side. I will obviously always choose to plow ahead and work on the family building and emotional stuff at the same time because they’re separate issues but entwined. I think it’s also possible to move forward and date while working on your relationship issues at the same time because the two are entwined as well. It’s only helpful to a point to work on resolving your relationship issues without being in a relationship. But I don’t think it’s healthy to move ahead with either dating or family building without also addressing and working on resolution with the emotional issues. By which I mean, putting coping mechanisms in place. In both situations, there needs to be new outlets for emotional stress or that stress will keep manifesting itself in the same way. With dating, you may keep entering abusive or unhealthy relationships. With infertility, you may keep entering a state of self-hatred and depression.

I think Anonymous spoke a valid point for her–the book didn’t work for her. And this is true for every method out there for removing stress or coping with emotions: therapy, religion, yoga, medications, gardening, art, basketball. I think the way a person resolves their infertility is very personal. I was only stating what worked for me; it really really won’t work for everyone.

I think that it was very telling when I was pregnant with the twins that my therapist didn’t release me from the sessions because there was still work to do. I kept going until a few weeks after the twins were born, when she told me that she trusted that I was in a better space, with coping mechanisms in place. For me, the visualization techniques and return to Buddhism and therapy worked which is why I said that I got the brass ring. I got to resolve my infertility and I got to resolve my childlessness, and I count myself lucky that both happened because it could have been otherwise.

And by resolution, I don’t think I’m at a place of absolute peace with it. I bumped into an old peripheral friend a while back and she was late in her pregnancy. I hadn’t seen her in almost a year and I didn’t know that she was pregnant. And I felt such a seething jealousy looking at her belly, knowing how easy it comes to her. That’s not resolution, but it’s better than where I was so I count it as progress. Aren’t we all just a work in progress, stumbling around, trying to find our way?

Even though there were more votes than people who actually participate weekly in Show & Tell, I’m going to go with the majority and move it to Thursday. Which means that from this week forward, the list will open on Wednesday evening as well as the Mr. Linky box for participants that week and people can post what they are showing and telling any time between Wednesday and Friday. The participant list will always close on Friday night and reopen the next Wednesday night.

So what are you showing and telling about this week? I have one planned that features many other bloggers, a long-lost cousin, and boobs. Lots of lady boobs.

The final part of our trip to New York came on Tuesday night. After mooching some free wifi off of Lindsay’s brother–thank you!–we went back to my brother’s apartment to get dressed and got caught in a torrential downpour where the streets flooded and our clothes were sticking to our body (and the ballet flats that shredded the back of my ankles were ruined, which may have actually been a good thing, but is a point worth making because it features later in this story).

My brother told us to leave our clothes in the bathroom and he would dry them for us so we could pack when we returned that night. We quickly got showered and smeared on some make-up (me…not Josh) and Josh called a car service because I was unsure I could do the subway in heels due to the aforementioned shredded ankles.

The Night of Hope was held at Tavern on the Green, which had this fantastic hallway with chandeliers and mirrors that made me miss the ChickieNob. Every time I walked down it, I thought about how she really would have sucked the marrow out of this event. And while I hope she never experiences infertility, I hope that she attends the Night of Hope one year in the distant future just to give respect to the organization that helped her parents so much.

So, here I am, smiling a little wanly outside because I am shy as all get out and I’m terrible at shmoozing. Then we went inside and Erica from Parenthood for Me found us. She was the only other blogger there. It made me feel better to have someone from the blogosphere in the flesh.

They had a great program where they talked about the enormous blogroll. When the program was written, the number was about 1700. When I went on stage that night, the number of blogs on the blogroll was 1828.

I got very emotional right before I went on stage to accept the award. I don’t know why. I think it just felt very surreal to be there and all I could think of was this night many years ago when we discovered that there were books on infertility out there and we dragged a pile to a table at Borders, trying to figure out which ones to buy. And one of the books was Resolving Infertility, which was written by Resolve. And I remember crying at the table and putting my hands up on either side of my face like blinders and my shoulders shaking so hard as I tried to cry quietly and not fooling anyone else in the cafe area. Just wanting to wail because we had done the gleeful bookstore trip for baby books almost a year earlier and there was no baby. And here we were buying Resolving Infertility and this just wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.

So as I was standing in the wings, I missed everything the host said as an introduction because I was thinking about that night and how far I’ve come, how surreal it is to think about the night I started the blog and to now be having the blog honoured or how surreal it is to think about the night where I bought infertility books instead of baby books–I lost the glee long before that night, but certainly, it could not have been a more different trip from the one we took to the bookstore when we first started trying. Resolve has been there for me for so long–for so many years–and it was crazy to think that I was now there for them. If that makes any sense. It was like finding out that your professor in your 400 person introductory seminar class knows your name. You have learned so much from them; you can’t believe they would reach out and know who you are too.

The award is lovely. This picture really doesn’t do it justice. But it is hard to photograph crystal when you don’t know how to use your camera. I missed everything the host said about me, but this is what I said about you as my thank you speech.

There are currently 1828 blogs on my blogroll and that number grows daily. My thank yous need to begin with them. To the people who are unafraid of sharing their story and connecting with others in order to provide support, take comfort, and disseminate information. I am so proud to be a part of the blogging community and I encourage every person in this room to Google stirrup queens when you get home to find my site, click on that blogroll link in the top left corner, and peruse the blogs. It is an invaluable resource to understand what those experiencing infertility think and feel.

I thanked Resolve and the ChickieNob and Wolvog and the doctor who helped make them (who was my tablemate that evening!). And, of course, Josh. “And, as always, my most enormous thank you goes to my husband, Josh, who does everything with me as an equal partner, from infertility to parenting to the book/blog. You are my heart—thank you.”

After the award ceremony, I met the third celebrity of the trip. Perhaps she is not on television like Mario Batali or Judah Friedlander, but she means a lot more to me than those people. What have they done? Made people feel full? Made people laugh? This third person has brought calm, and I cannot think of anything more important than helping a person find peace of heart.

The same night that we bought Resolving Infertility, we also bought Conquering Infertility by Ali Domar. In hardback. Josh asked me if I thought I could wait for the paperback edition and I looked at him and said, “do you think I can wait for the paperback edition?” Had I not just cried in a Borders cafe? We bought the book and I still use one of the visualization techniques to this day. In fact, I taught my visualization to the twins to use for our afternoon meditation times until they can come up with their own.

I was too nervous to go up to her until Josh dragged me to her at the end of the
night. She was so gracious, so grounded, so funny and smart and straightforward and bad-ass. The best way I can describe speaking to Ali Domar is that you feel as if you’re on a sound stage and this is the movie about the therapist who saves all of these people and you’re in the final scene where the music is playing in the background and you think about all of these people who wouldn’t have made it to the other side without her; what would have been lost. Too much? It was such a huge experience for me to meet her; her book helped me so much. Hence the huge, nervous smile on my face. It was this strange night where I felt like I was yanking at my infertile roots and here was this person who had brought such calm to me when I felt like I was in a storm that I just could not find a way to weather.

At the end of the night, we decided to take the subway back to my brother’s place because the car service seemed to take forever. Plus, my ankles had someone stopped their bleeding due to the fact that my heels are too big that my foot isn’t really against the back of my shoe. Though it begged the question: how would I get home tomorrow with the ballet flats ruined, my ankles bloody, and tottering along in heels with a long walk ahead of me?

We stopped by the CVS and examined the most atrocious flip flop display imaginable. I had my pick of florescent pink flowers, beads, or feathers. I went with the flowers even though they barely fit. They were the $7 I had to spend in order to get home.

And after 48 hours away, all I wanted to do was go home, shnuzzle with the kids, and get in my own bed. And while this was not a single perfect moment, it was a string of perfect moments and therefore, I think it qualifies for Perfect Moment Monday.