387th Friday Blog Roundup

Pesach (Passover) starts tonight.  We made our own hagaddah (which is the book you read from during the seder, which is the meal/service you hold on the first two nights of the eight day holiday), which sounded like a brilliant plan when I said it one night right before bed (“Hey, Josh! Let’s make our own hagaddah!) yet wasn’t quite so brilliant in actual execution.  Still, our hagaddah doesn’t contain the phraseology I’ve seen in other haggadot that makes my skin crawl including the line about “barren women.”

I’m serving Spanish food tonight — grilled meats and lots of vegetable tapas including a tortilla espanola.  I know it’s not the most traditional fare for Ashkenazi Jews, but it reminds me of my cousin and this night when we went out for tapas during Pesach.  When you take paella, jamon, and shellfish out of the mix, it’s sort of the perfect Pesadic food.  And, if you’ve read Life from Scratch, you’ve probably guessed that I’m pretty comfortable preparing Spanish dishes.  Plus, I am not a fan of kugel.  Or tzimmes.  Or any of the traditional seder foods.  Though I am serving matzo ball soup at my second seder.  Because matzo ball soup is so damn good.

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On Wednesday night, I did my first tripod headstand in yoga class.  I wasn’t even going to try (I was just sitting cross-legged on my mat watching everyone else and had already told my friend that I didn’t feel like trying that night), but then I thought I’d appease my teacher by at least placing my head of the floor.  And then putting my hands in the right position.  And then I pushed up on my toes and paused there for a bit.  I was about to come out of it and sit for the rest of this portion of the class when I decided to try putting my knees on my arms — something that has caused me to collapse in a heap during the last two months worth of attempts.  But that night, my knees rested on my arms and my feet came off the floor.  And then I heard myself shrieking my teacher’s name at a very un-yoga-like volume, thinking I was going to fall out of it within seconds.  But I just stayed up.  For minutes.  Indefinitely.

I came out of it and tried it three more times, each time easily getting into it.  My only thought was that I needed to get home and show Josh.  When I got home, I pulled the twins out of bed, and everyone gathered in the hallway upstairs to watch me get into a tripod handstand.

I don’t know.  The world really does look different upside down.

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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:

• “Change” (MoJo Working)
• “What Did You Give Up, To Get What You Got?” (Truth and Cake)
• “Bearing Witness” (Destined to be an Old Woman with No Regrets)
• “Blessed (children mentioned a lot)” (Project Progeny)
• “Fading Memories” (Once a Mother)
• “Safe Blogging” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, St Elsewhere
• “The Honest Truth” (Unglamourous)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Finding My New Normal has a post this week about realizing that she never found out her son’s blood type, and that this is just one of many facts about her son that she’ll never know.  She tried to find the answer in the postmortem report and endured reading about his death only to discover that the information wasn’t there.  It is about having one of the closest relationships — mother and child — and being unable to know the small intimate details of a person you love, a realization that I think will resonate not only those who have lost their child but those who missed out on any time in the beginning of their child’s life.

Bébé Suisse did NaBloPoMo last month and used the theme — Whether — to look at the last question that occurred to her with the blogging project: whether she would do it again.  She writes, “In addition to giving me a better understanding of myself and my sorrow (and anger and jealousy and …) and allowing me to meet and create bonds with you, it helped me to grow as a writer, and it gave me a structure and feeling of accomplishment my days sometimes lack. All of that is good.”  I just don’t know a better reason to blog.  Period.  Whether it is daily or however often you need it.

Scrambled Eggs has a very moving, raw, and deeply honest post about the way infertility has changed her marriage.   When they took their vows, they thought their early years would be a time of close bonding; not high stress.  She admits, “To say our marriage has been “tested” can seem like an understatement. Some days I feel the universe waltzed up and took a gigantic shit on it. Lately we have been sleeping in separate bedrooms. We are tense and snap at each other. Some days I can’t stand to be near him, and some days he can’t stand to be near me.”  She asks if the damage that infertility has caused can be undone.  This post was written for herself, but in stepping forward and telling these truths, she has opened the door for others in her comment section to say, “me too.”

(In)fertility Unexplained starts the post by warning that it will be incoherent, but I actually found a lot to think about in her writing.  Digging back to childhood, she explores how being taught stoicism has affected how she is processing infertility.  She looks at the pros and cons of being solution-focused rather than exploring feelings.  It just gives a lot to think about.

Lastly, TheStorkDiaries has a post inverting other posts she recently read (this is when I think the blogosphere is at its best — when we jump off of each other’s ideas and give our thoughts on someone else’s thoughts) not framing those who are not here as the ghosts, but instead exploring the idea of herself in the position of ghost, separate from her own life.  She explains: “Every day, I see people.  I hear them.  I think they think they see me too, but they don’t.  What they don’t understand is that it hurts for me to be around them.  They may know uncertainty, but they don’t know my uncertainty.  They may experience despair, but they don’t know my despair.   They have not felt what I have felt; they have not seen what I have seen.”  It’s a beautiful response to the idea of otherness.

The roundup to the Roundup: Pesach starts tonight.  I mastered the tripod headstand!  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 30th and April 6th) 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.