This is the nineteenth installment of Barren Advice. You can ask questions that are fertility or non-fertility related.

Barren Advice is posted each Tuesday-ish. If you have your own question for Barren Advice, click here to learn how to submit. Please weigh in with your own thoughts in the comment section and indicate which question you’re addressing if there are multiple questions in the post.

Dear Mel:

I’ve got a strong hunch that my best friend and coworker is pregnant. I know I should be happy for her but I am not. Of course I want her to have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. Of course I know that she deserves to be pregnant whether or not she’s had to suffer through agonizing monthly disappointments and painful and expensive procedures. Of course I wouldn’t wish infertility on my worst enemy but I still find it hard not to be a little jealous of people who get pregnant right away – especially when they did it the fun way and it didn’t cost them a dime. Am I normal to feel this way?

When I read about similar situations it seems like everybody makes a point of saying that they are happy for their friends. Do you think they really mean it or are they just trying their best to convince themselves? I’m only one year into my infertility nightmare – is being happy for pregnant friends a point of arrival that I can look forward to later? Am I just a selfish and petty person? I’m hoping its a point of arrival because I really DO want to be happy for my friend. If she is pregnant, she deserves a friend who is genuinely happy for her and who will enjoy talking about her pregnancy. I know that I can’t do that right now and I don’t want to try to fake it. Its already too hard to think about seeing her get bigger and bigger every day at work for nine more months. Can I expect her to understand this and how do I tell her in a way that won’t hurt her feelings?

—Lucie B.

Think about it this way: it is possible for you to have sunny weather and for your friend to be in the same country and be in the middle of a huge storm. Her weather doesn’t really affect your weather. Your sky is still sunny. You may appreciate your sunny day a bit more knowing that it’s raining elsewhere. You may spend time not appreciating your sunny day because you’re worried about a weather change. But, regardless of how you react to your weather, what is happening over someone else’s house does not change what is happening over your house.

You are, by the way, currently in the middle of a downpour.

When you’re in sunny weather, you can hear about someone else’s rain and while it concerns you, your reality is actually quite good. A light breeze. Warm sun. Flowers blooming. It’s very different when you’re in shitty weather. You’re cold and wet and miserable. You have to consider so many things just to move from Point A to Point B. You can’t forget weather because it’s always there–affecting everything you do and everything you can’t do.

Now extend this analogy to infertility and pregnancy. It’s very easy to be sympathetic to someone who has had a failed cycle when you are rubbing your own baby bump. You can give them a hug and wish them well and cluck at their situation. And then, you can go back to your happy, sunny world. It is much harder to move in the other direction: to stand in the figurative rain with your empty womb and jump for glee over someone else’s good news. Can it be done? Sure. But there are also people who don’t mind the rain and run around outside in the middle of a downpour happily. And then there are the rest of us who carry around a soggy umbrella. So it’s important to remember that there are different types of people who are capable of very different reactions.

Do I think people truly are happy for their friends? Sure–I can be happy that they have sun and aren’t struck in this storm while still feeling rather miserable for myself. My happiness for them doesn’t occupy my whole world–it’s simply part of my whole. I am cognizant of their happiness and I acknowledge it and even jump around with glee at their house for a bit. But then I have to return to my own rainy world and I soon forget about their happiness while I try to navigate my own weather.

I am the sort who doesn’t like the rain; who doesn’t see the silver lining and remind myself that rain makes the flowers grow. I’m the sort who wants to get out of the rain and spend the afternoon mapping a plan to move to sunnier climes. And I have to be true to who I am while also balancing out the type of friend I want to be. I always acknowledge the other person’s happiness and sunny weather (especially if they return the favour by acknowledging my rain). But it would be out of character to gaily announce that I love the rain because it gives me a chance to wear my cool rainboots. And it sounds like you need to feel what you’re going to feel: a little jealousy; a little “why not me?”; and a little happiness that your friend has managed to find a sunny space.

How to tell her? I would recommend by not telling her. You can make it about you without telling her that you’re making it about you. Discreetly take the space you need, bow out of events you can’t bear to attend, and treat your friend the way you would want to be treated if the situation were reversed. It will be emotionally painful to stare at a dry person bathed in sun while you are beside her with your soggy umbrella. So give yourself the space and permission to cry and set some firm boundaries in your mind (eg. “I can go to her shower, but I sure as hell can’t throw it).

I hope your weather changes soon–it almost always does unless you live in Seattle or San Diego.

No really, the beauty of a blog advice column is that you get to weigh in with your two cents too. Let the questioner know if you support the advice, add to the response, or dispute it completely.

Leave a comment in the reaction box below–only keep in mind that conflicting advice is embraced and rudeness is not. Want to ask your own question? Click here to see what you need to send in order to be included in a future Tuesday’s installment of Barren Advice.

There have always been adoption showers–baby showers thrown after the person is paper pregnant–but we have kicked off a brand new tradition (and I know because I just googled it and there are zero hits–thank you Google): the Paper Pregnant Party. The idea behind it is not to focus on the baby but the pre-adoptive mother herself. You know, give her the love and fawning that pregnant women get to enjoy for a few months once they’re showing (and don’t smell so strongly of vomit). Shower her with love and items to distract her during the wait.

So we did that for Lindsay this past weekend and you can see the pictures and stories below (as well as find out how to make the Tom Waits cookie).

Want to throw your own? Here’s how you do it…

1. Invitation

Send out an invitation to all of her friends (perhaps grab an email list from her husband). Have it say something like this:

As everyone knows, Lindsay is now “paper pregnant” as she waits for her adoption match. Let’s have a small get together to shower Lindsay with love and support as she waits. This is not a baby shower–this is a “Lindsay” shower (so please, no baby gifts).

Please bring with you a sealed letter written on nice stationary (or a card) for Lindsay to open in the future when she is en route to pick up their child. She will not read these letters until she is on the road (or in the air) so keep that in mind as you write it. I will collect these letters when you arrive and bind them together with ribbon so she can pack them in her suitcase when she gets the call.

The point of this party is to give Lindsay the same attention and fawning pregnant women get to enjoy for 9 months (okay, more like 5 months while they’re showing–but damn, that was a nice time in life). If you want to bring a gift at all, please bring something for Lindsay to help with the wait.

Here is the time, date, and place.

2. Games

In addition to collecting the letters for her to read when she is en route to meet her child, we also planned a game to play at the party. Each guest wrote out something they love about Lindsay on a slip of paper when they entered the room and one person collected all of the slips and read them aloud. Lindsay had to guess who wrote each sentiment. In the end, she also got to keep all of the love notes.

3. Food

We went with a coffee-and-cake approach so we had quick breads and cookies and cake. And, of course, we had the Tom Waits cookie. Get it now? Josh and I were brainstorming names and I wanted it to have something to do with “waiting” since being paper pregnant is about being in the wait. We chose Tom Waits because Lindsay loves music and it’s something we always associate with her. And since she is the recipient of the first Paper Pregnant Party, she should have a cookie named after her. I hope that if you throw your own, you make it too.

Triple chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal-apple sauce cookies, cashew-caramel cookies, and the Tom Waits cookie

4. Everything Else

Make sure you bring a camera so you can record the event for the guest of honour. We threw on some music and Lindsay opened some gifts. We even played a little Wii.

Voila!

A Paper Pregnant Party.

I would like to start out by saying that I did warn Lindsay back on August 20th so if the lady isn’t going to pay attention to her comment section and then watch her back for several months, she’s going to end up shocked.

It was reeeeeeeeeeeeally hard not to scream out the party plans like a lunatic when I saw her this week. I’m not very good with keeping surprises and I like to mention A LOT that I have a secret, therefore ruining the effect. Josh says this is the worst thing–the gloating when I have a secret. In fact, he messed with me with the engagement and made me think I was throwing a surprise party for him when in fact, he was going to propose. As we rode up the elevator I gleefully said, “I know something that you don’t know!” because I couldn’t contain myself any longer and he sang back, “I don’t think you doooooooooooooooo.” And I was jumping up and down on the inside because I thought I had tricked him so hardcore with the surprise party. Oh well.

But we did surprise Lindsay.

She thought she was going over to a friend’s apartment for a Wii tournament and she looked sort of confused when she first walked in the door and saw all of the people she was expecting on one side of the room though there were clearly people on the other.

Then she noticed that I was taking photographs of her and she put it all together and started laughing.

Because it was close to Lindsay’s birthday, I also made her a Smith Island Cake because that’s seriously the greatest birthday cake in the world. Plus, Josh hates washing the icing pot afterwards and I wanted to create as much work for him as possible.

Afte
r we played our Love Notes game, we all shmoozed.

I just loved this picture of Leah, Jen, and Bean.

And then Lindsay opened a few gifts which were all Pre-Adoptive Mum related–not baby stuff. Jen made her this fantastic throw blanket that we all coveted (but she’s teaching us how to make them at the TOOTPU cookie exchange whether she likes it or not). She got a lot of fantastic distraction stuff such as books and wine and Vitamin Water to drink after the wine and candles and coffee.

And then we all went home and the ChickieNob accosted me for the remains of the Smith Island cake insisting that Lindsay really wanted her to have it because she looooooooooooooves her.

So that’s it. Personally, I think every pre-adoptive mum should have one. In Judaism, we don’t do baby stuff such as showers prior to the baby arriving. It’s just superstition, but I can’t seem to overcome it. This is so much better because the day is all about the mother-to-be and celebrates her. Gives her the petting and loving that pregnant women get to enjoy in small drips and drabs every time they venture out in public and give her the attention in one huge blast. But with lots of memories to hold with her through the wait.

And now, I’d like to open the next part to all of you. We took care of the letters for Lindsay to read when she is going to meet the child. We’d like you to write the letters that she’ll read on her first night as a mother. It can be very empowering to know that you have a huge stack of mail to sort through all cheering you on during those first days. If you’d like to participate, email me your letter and I will print them out, place them in an envelope, and seal it for her to open on that first night. Make sure you leave your blog name and url if you have one.

Oh, and the recipe for the Tom Waits cookies so you can throw your own Paper Pregnant Party…

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.

This is a tale of the wonderful Internets (you know, those tubes where people shoot messages). I am quite vocal in our love of the Wonder Pets. I have been known, let’s say, to Twitter about the episodes (as well as attempt to mention the word sex 100 times in a single day. Though not in the same Tweet. I mean, I am not looking for Wonder Pet Sex. Which would be furry or carry salmonella).

Kristin from the Fertile Infertile sent us 18 episodes of Wonder Pets and we have been Wonder Pets gluttons, devouring all the new episodes (well, new to us–prior to this point, we only had about 8 episodes on a well-worn tape). She has been raised to goddess status in our family. We speak about her with the reverence usually reserved for a religious figure.

The Wolvog was so excited that he was telling people this week and some boy told him that watching Wonder Pets is babyish (um…hello, little boy. Babyish? Perhaps you haven’t heard of the drinking game I concocted for watching Wonder Pets. Bottoms up every time one of them uses the word “serious”). The Wolvog was understandably hurt and asked me if I thought this was true. We had a long talk about following our bliss and doing what we enjoyed regardless of whatever anyone else thought. And then we curled up for a Wonder Pets episode, which is a manly and brave thing to do. That little boy can suck it–Linny rocks.

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 name). The list is open from now until late Tuesday night and a new one is posted every week.

If I didn’t make you wet enough from all my talk of chocolate and sex, I would like to present the new cookie I invented this week (many thanks to Josh for trying prototypes and no hard feelings over the version that you spit out into the trashcan).

It’s called the Tom Waits.

It is a shortbread-based cookie drizzled with caramel and chocolate. Yes, I’m going to make a batch for the TOOTPU (The Order of the Plastic Uterus) cookie exchange–the DC girls all get together at Leah’s house in the winter to do a cookie exchange–but that’s not why I spent all week inventing a new cookie. The name and the reason and the person they are dedicated to will all be clear next week. I do love having a delicious secret, though I’ll also post the recipe and how to assemble the cookie pre-Thanksgiving so you can make it for your dinner if you wish. They are so good and there is a person who is literally going to piss in her pants (so she should bring an extra pair over to the computer when she reads this next week) when she reads the explanation.

Did I mention that I love having a secret? I love having one so much that I’m liable to ruin it simply by mentioning over and over again that I have a secret. Okay, you have to humour me and guess. Your clues are Tom Waits and the recipient is a woman.

Exactly one week until 97.1 FM switches over to 24-hours-a-day of Christmas music! What? I’m Jewish? I should get my own music? I have my own music. I just like yours too.

We’ve lost a lot of vacation areas to location casualties and we were really skimming the bottom of the bucket for a semi-local spot to celebrate our seventh anniversary this past weekend. We could have gone to the beach except that Josh didn’t want to go to the beach off-season. We looked at a town in West Virginia when we went out to visit some friends in Shenandoah but feared that we’d be bored after a day or two of touring the seventeen churches on Main Street in the seemingly most devout town in America.

Right as we were in the throes of settling on a staycation, I spoke with this woman at a party who told me that they had just been to Hershey, Pennsylvania. “It’s fabulous,” she said. “All you do is eat chocolate and go to the spa.”

Which sounded like a fine idea.

So we dropped off the twins at my parent’s house (thanks, mum and dad!) and drove the two hours up to Hershey. Our goals for the weekend read like a Chili Pepper’s album except replace the “blood” and “magik” with “sleep” and “read.” Which sounds infinitely less interesting now that I’ve written that sentence.

When we got there, we ate lunch and then collapsed in bed only to be awakened by the suckiest dad in the world and his howling elementary-aged child (seriously, I can handle the squalling baby who doesn’t know proper hotel etiquette but I have no qualms about beating senseless a ten year old who wakes me up from my afternoon nap).

Bill at the front desk became my favourite person in the world when he switched our room away from poorly negotiating dad (“um, sweetie, you got to stop screaming. I want to hear an apology. I don’t think that was a real apology. I want to hear it again. Sweetie, you’ve got to stop screaming”). We saw Rachel Getting Married which was fantastic but extremely depressing. Our evening was pretty much about lounging around and drinking coffee and watching bad television.

In the morning, we rolled out of bed close to noon and headed over to Chocolate World where these characters will forever haunt my nightmares.

We saw the 3-D movie because I am such a sucker for a 3-D film. I have dragged Josh to no fewer than 874 3-D movies over the course of our marriage. And this was one of the finest. I was the only person in the theater screaming when the Whoppers shot out of the cannon.

It was in the moments right before the doors opened to the 3-D movie that Josh commented, “we are the only people here without children.” And while you probably already thought about this fact the moment I mentioned Hershey, Pennsylvania, it literally didn’t occur to us how child-infested this town would be until we were trapped in the theater lobby with twenty other families and their large broods.

Apparently we forgot about that whole children and candy marriage.

But here is the interesting part: Milton Hershey and his wife were infertile. After a few years of trying, they decided to live child-free (not that they had many other choices back in the early 1900’s) and they founded a school with their tremendous fortune. The school still exists today and houses 1500 students. Their tuition, room, health care, clothing, and food are all covered by the Hersheys.

So how did this infertile couple come to create a town that is so incredibly child-focused? An amusement park and zoo. A children’s garden and chocolate. An enormous school. The town literally revolves around children. Wasn’t it exquisitely painful for them regardless of how much joy the school brought them? It is this strange mixture where there are these open nods to their infertility all over the town right next to these child-focused exhibits. Of course we’d not only randomly choose the most child-infested place in the world BUT also the most infertility-drenched one as well.

We went up to the school after Chocolate World and stood overlooking the park. I love amusement parks even though I don’t like going on rides. It was raining and the park didn’t seem to be open, but it was really beautiful to see the roller coasters and Ferris Wheels peeking out over the fencing.

We read by the fire at the Hershey Lodge and ate our way through the several pounds of chocolate that we picked up at the Chocolate World gift shop. If I look sleepy in this photo it’s because…well…because I was sleepy reading Elizabeth McCracken’s memoir.

Scattered throughout was a lot of sex. What? We’re all adults here. We were celebrating our anniversary–what do you think we were doing? Playing Scrabble?

Now we are back and I am trying to recreate the chocolate-balsamic vinaigrette we had at dinner on our last night there. I’ll post the recipe once I figure it out.

I am stil
l in love with Josh after seven years of marriage. He is my heart and bones. He is the reason I bake cookies (because how else do you express the sweetness someone brings into your life?). He is the master of the paddle boat, the giver of positions, and he will always split the extra Reece’s Whipps he swiped. There is no one else in the world I want to wake up with every day and no one else in the world who will let me start discussing all of my messy feelings at 11 p.m. when he wants to watch the Daily Show. I love you.

Oh–and just to prove that y’all are never far from my heart, as I was peeing at Chocolate World, I was thinking about how much Julie would love this toilet because it sends a clear message to use your hand to flush instead of your foot. Don’t say I never brought you back anything.

Fine, fine, I’ll figure out a way to disseminate some chocolate too. Not that you want it after looking at this toilet.