Posts from — January 2010

A strange thing happened after the oral surgery.  Though I’ve never really liked oranges or orange juice or anything orange-y, I started craving clementines.  And not just craving clementines–they were the only thing I would eat beyond oatmeal.  In one week, we went through three crates of clementines.

An aside: my gum graft comes from donated tissue (imagine my brother saying in the creepiest voice possible over the telephone immediately following surgery: “Missy, you gots yourself a nice pair of corpse gums”) and I’m wondering if my donor loved clementines.  It’s really the only explanation I have for this all-out, crazy-ass craving.  I literally can’t go more than a few hours without one.

The point–if you sit on your ass and eat 15+ clementines every day for five days running, you will put on weight.  Which isn’t really a surprising discovery though it is a sad one because I’ve been subscribing to this idea that Jendeis taught me which essentially boils down your diet to only eating foods your great-grandmother would recognize.  No chemicals, no strange food substitutes, no added vitamins.  Just straightforward butter and eggs and milk and fruit and vegetables.    It just feels like if you’re giving up Cheez-its, you should get rewarded and not a two pound weight gain even if you replace those Cheez-its with 75 clementines.

The idea of the great-grandmother diet is just one of the 64 thoughts put out by food writer, Michael Pollan.  Yes, I still have to actually read the whole book rather than letting my sister-cousin and Jendeis summarize his books for me.

Josh had a post recently about feeling blah, and the comment I left after reading his words touches on ideas coming out of the slow food movement.

I think it’s so easy to get caught up in what feels like movement–the constant Twitter stream, the email inbox that fills and empties, the mundane tasks that repeat each day–that when we get a breathing space (for instance, when we don’t have weekend plans and nothing is there to occupy us), we both notice that things have calmed and humans don’t love stagnation AND we realize that all that movement we thought was happening isn’t really happening at all. That we’ve been stagnant all along and just thought we were running a marathon.

Honestly, just like the slow food movement has brought back a different energy to eating, I think we need to create a slow information movement that brings back a different energy to taking in news and thoughts.

Within the slow food movement, the idea isn’t to give up all food to get rid of the negative effects of fast food–that would be crazy.  It’s to slow things down.  Think about where your food comes from.  Eat local.  Vary the flavours.  Cook together.  Sit down to eat it.  Elevate food to something to look forward to during the day rather than something shoved into the minutes between something else.  You know, in the same way we constantly check our blackberries or leave email up all day rather than sitting down and giving ourselves an uninterrupted hour to read blogs and write a post.

I’m not anti-Twitter or anti-email.  I don’t believe in unplugging just for unplugging sake.  I’m not impressed when people make declarations that they didn’t check email for three days just to prove a point.  I mean, no one applauds when I admit that sometimes I don’t get the mail for a week at a time (come on, who the hell wants to look at bills?).

Just as the answer to the problems with fast food (too much fat and calories; people not socializing while they eat; no clue what is being put in your body or how it came to be) is not to cut out all food, the answer to the problems of feeling blah in the face of the Twitter race for followers, the blog stat checking, the comment counting, the email burnout is not to cut out technology, but to take in information better.

To not spend the entire night aimlessly surfing the Web, but to come to the computer with a to-do list and check off the tasks.  To give yourself uninterrupted time to read or write.  To sort your emails into answer immediately or get-to-soon and not feel guilty if the get-to-soons don’t get an answer for a few days because non-online life has to happen too.

A few years ago, before the blog was even born, Josh came home from work one day and I told him that I had been researching the concept of sustainability and I wanted to introduce it to all facets of our life.  Which meant making the clothes I could make instead of always buying them.  Which meant taking the twins to the farm and learning where our food comes from and making everything we can from scratch instead of buying it made.  It meant recycling and reusing toys and moderation and library books and trading and borrowing.  And for the most part, we have lived this idea of sustainability for years now from recycled garbage art projects to homemade challah on Friday nights.

The place where we haven’t considered sustainability is in our information intake.  We take it more information, add more ways to take in information, and do it in a way that is not sustainable in the long run unless we also take burnout into consideration.

I love my blackberry, but it has no place coming out of the holster when I’m with people (nor does yours, Josh, achem).  I love my blog, but I need to pace myself with projects and maintenance.  I love to read blogs, but I need to make them their own reading period, just as I do books, rather than shove a post into my eyes (oooh, that sounded painful) in between putting the pot on the stove and the water boiling.

It’s not about not partaking in an ongoing ride on the information super highway.  But it is about slowing down the vehicle.  Not driving at 75 mph all the freakin’ time.  You might not be the winner with all the information in your back seat, you may not be the first person to see the story break on Twitter, you may not get to that steaming pile of emails until tomorrow–but there’s a lot of life to also live offline.

Like all things in life, it’s a balance.  And I am aware that this sounds funny coming from someone who also preaches “comment more!” and “post more!”  But I do think it’s possible to live a full off-line life and a full online life and find the balance that doesn’t make you feel those blahs when you finally unplug for a few hours as we all need to do in order to come to the Web with fresh eyes.

A long post where I repeat myself too much to drive the point home because hot-button topics generally elicit hot-button reactions.

Julie answered and asked a question in a recent blog post about measuring that state of “was it worth it” when considering what was endured in order to become a parent.  I started to answer it there, and it grew into a tome worthy of challenging Dickens in complexity and characters.  So I thought I’d recreate my thoughts over here.

I started, perhaps, with a different understanding of the question.  I looked at it purely from the idea that if a child costs X amount of emotional dollars, is a child worth that exorbitant emotional price of enduring treatments, surrogacy, adoption, etc (please take actual money out of this equation unless the spending of said money is affecting you emotionally).

You obviously can’t put a price tag on a child or an experience, but I took her asking to be in the same vein essentially as the questioning that comes before committing to a purchase.  When you’re about to part with a huge sum of money, you want to know if what you’re spending your money on is worth the price tag.  And with infertility, when you’re about to part with a huge sum of sanity, you want to know if what you’re spending your emotional energy on is worth the high price.  Though, of course, I’m not sure how in either case anyone can answer the question because the worth of everything in this world is subjective.

I guess I don’t really subscribe to the line of thinking that states “if you get what you want, it was worth it and if you don’t, it wasn’t worth it.”

That’s how I saw the question.

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Bear with me for this long story because it does have a point in the end:

The twins have recently become obsessed again with a home movie Josh and I made several years ago at Disney World.  I’m not really sure why we chose Disney World as a vacation destination because we were ensconced in treatments and not really grooving on hanging around with small children.

But I was really drawn to the idea of going to the park because there’s something about that place (for a sentimental person like me) that foments hopefulness.  It is drilled into your brain–definitely through cheerful music and small talking animals (but I wouldn’t put it past Disney to use tachistoscopes to project images of fairy dust into your brain).  I got very wrapped up in the not entirely helpful message that dreams can come true if you just wish hard enough.

I wished really hard when we were there just in case.

I wanted to film the Spectromagic parade for someone–it’s a long story but suffice to say that the person wanted to see the parade years earlier and had missed it by minutes and had screamed out in her frustration, “nothing fucking goes right in my life!” because at the time, nothing was going right in her life.  So I wanted to film the parade and mail it to her to take back that moment of her running through the park with me, jumping over benches, trying to catch the end of the parade.  And missing it.

Josh and I went to stake out our seats for the parade about two hours beforehand like insane people.  Oh, and I should probably mention that it was pouring out.  Not drizzling–pouring.  As in my shoes were ruined, my clothes were soaked through, and I was holding an umbrella.  But still, I insisted that we sit there because I couldn’t believe that the parade would be rained out; not when we had come so far and it meant so much to film it and did I mention that we were infertile?  We deserved to have something go easily.

Josh filmed me a few times as we waited and I sound insane.  You can see in the background that people are walking out of the park in droves, but I’m saying into the camera, “we’re not sure, but they might cancel the parade.  We just don’t know yet.”  Of course we-knew-yet.  There was lightening.  It was pouring.  Spectromagic is an electrical parade.  They are not sending people covered in light bulbs out into the lightening and rain.

When the kind workers on the street gently told me that the parade was indeed canceled, I cried like my insides were going to come out through my mouth.  I didn’t cry in a way that befitted the situation.  I cried because I honestly didn’t understand how I could want something so badly, sit in the rain for two hours, and not get it.  In the same way that I couldn’t believe I could try over and over again, take drugs, have catheters threaded through my cervix, grab happiness and lose it days later, want it so fucking badly, and not get it.  It was an infertility cry coming out as a Spectromagic cancellation cry.

I’m sure Jiminy Cricket would have some excellent advice to dole out that would give a loophole to wishes, but I didn’t want to live in a world where wishes had loopholes.  Some things are sacred, and wishes that are made with your entire being is one of them.  We should all be allowed a small handful of actual wishes to be used at our discretion in this life time, with the understanding that we’d use them on the really big stuff–and that perhaps is how I can answer Julie’s question.

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Was it worth it?  The answer is clear for me because if I had been given three wishes to use in this lifetime, I would have used one to treat primary infertility.  I can answer that emphatically because, for me, parenthood was an at-any-cost desire.  I would have used any means to reach parenthood, I would have spent any amount of money, I would have put my body through anything.  I’m not entirely sure it was a healthy determination.  It was maybe more in the realm of crazy.  Knowing how things turned out, I’m glad I was crazy, don’t get me wrong, but there is always the “what if” in the back of my mind when I think of other possible endings.

There are a bunch of other places in life where I think I would have used a wish and then, on second thought, if I only have two wishes left and I don’t know what else I might encounter in life, I would backpedal and probably decide that it’s not worth using up a wish.  It’s not that I don’t want this thing; it’s just that I don’t know if it’s wish-using worthy.

Please read this carefully and don’t jump down to the comment section and tear my throat out because you misread it.  Those who choose not to use one of their three wishes for parenthood still want to become a parent.  And they may be willing to do a lot to get there and it may be that the cost of using one of those wishes would be too great in balance with other factors.  But I think the willingness to use one of your allotted wishes is a good indicator of how you’ll answer “was it worth it.“

And with that–I have more respect for people who know whether or not they’d use a wish and if they wouldn’t, choose to live child-free rather than put themselves through treatments, surrogacy, or adoption just to “win.”  I think infertility makes us so angry sometimes that we just want to beat the fucking daylights out of infertility just as much as we want to become a parent.  Sometimes, I think the balance even shifts and if we were thinking it through rationally, we would say that it’s better to step back.  And yet, we can’t because infertility is smirking at us and we want to throttle its neck.  I have tremendous respect for those who opt to live child-free rather than try any of the other various paths because they are people who know themselves well.  And that is an important skill so many are lacking.

But just as I have respect for those who know that their best path is child-free, my best path was to try everything.  We literally were willing to consider every possibility to become parents.  Did we want a baby and did I want to experience pregnancy–of course.  But if that wasn’t an option, we had Plans B, C, and D which may have brought us together with a special needs six-year-old rather than a baby, but damn it, we were going to be parents at some point come hell or high water.

And this isn’t commentary on how badly I wanted it–it would be simplistic to boil it down to that.  Two people bidding on the same painting at an auction both want that painting very badly–one doesn’t want it more than the other.  But one is either willing to ignore factors the other can’t OR they simply have means that are different from the other bidder.  In other words, there is no Wanting Olympics.  Please, for the love, do not start a Wanting Olympics to bookend the absolutely pointless Pain Olympics.

Parenthood was worth it for me–wish-using worth it.  That’s what makes it worth it more than the fact that we had the ending we wanted–because parenthood hasn’t exactly been all breastfeeding-cuddles-and-picture-book-reading for us.

Reaching parenthood after infertility isn’t a guarantee that you will answer this question affirmatively.  I know people who didn’t think it was wish-worthy, but plugged away with treatments nonetheless, and ended up with the child in their arms.  Some think it’s worth it.  Others would tell you that it wasn’t worth it.  That parenthood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (and for the love, it isn’t.  I mean, if you’re doing it for the giggles and kisses, stop right now because you also need to be doing it for the possible neurologists and speech therapists).

As I write this, it is also clear (at least to me) that I’m not willing to use up another wish on this round of family building.  Don’t get me wrong–I want it to happen.  I want to have another child.  I am frustrated and weepy and full of yearning AND I know exactly what I’m missing–it isn’t an idea this time around; it’s sitting at my breakfast table.

But if Jiminy Cricket reached his big, almighty cricket-hand towards me and said, “cough up another one of your three wishes,” I’d have to demur.  I’m willing to go so far this time and it has nothing and everything to do with what I owe to that first used wish.

I have to honour what I was given by being careful with my two remaining ones.  And in infertility-land, using a wish is equated with spending enormous sums of money and emotional distress.  My unwillingness to use a wish this round is no reflection on how much I love the twins or parenthood.  But it is a weighing of additional factors.  Which means that if this third child doesn’t come into our family, I’ll be sad.  I’ll be angry and frustrated and bitter.  But I won’t have regrets over the choices we’ve made or any desire to undo them.  I will be wistful and wish that life had turned out differently.

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I was originally going to title this post “Was It Worth It; or Why More People Should Live Child-Free” but worried that people would be offended and miss the point.  The fact is, anyone putting their heart through this should assess the emotional cost and use it to determine worth before, during, and perhaps after the experience.

We unabashedly determine worth every second of our lives–is that cup of coffee worth $3 or should I make one at home?  Is an iPod worth $200 based on how often I’ll use it?  See–you are good at making worth decisions prior to purchase, therefore, I think everyone can make them before they have the event or item in their hands.  There are always places in life where the reality falls very far from the fantasy, but I trust that most people know in their heart whether something is worth it before they’re holding the thing they want.

And that’s why I don’t think it can be boiled down to the idea of retrospect and of course people who are holding their children will say it’s worth it.  I have too much respect for your intelligence and I believe you know right now, before you’ve held a child, whether this is worth it.  And that is separate from whether you get your heart’s desire.

I don’t think it’s a useless question nor do I think that only people who know their outcome can answer it–as I said, that line of thinking is too simplistic.  I think you know (yes, I’m talking to YOU) whether this is worth it for you.  The only thing is that no one can answer it for you.  It is such a personal decision and just as I can’t expect you to agree with me that $3 is a decent price for a cup of coffee, I also can’t decide for you the worth of parenthood nor do I know the cost it will take from you (emotional cost, that is) in order to get there.

Of course, we live in a world where there aren’t granted wishes.  There aren’t guarantees.  You can put your life savings on the line, your body through hell, your heart through a meat grinder–and still not end up with the happiness you were seeking.  We all know–unfortunately too well–that you can wish with your entire being, and it doesn’t stop the world from taking away a child too soon, to not bringing one to you at all.  And beyond that, there are so many factors that go into assisted family building–money, age, health, sexuality–that there probably will be doors that will closed to you by the sheer fact that you are you, no matter how much you tug at them to open.  But all that is neither here nor there when talking about worth.

Because I still believe, when it comes down to it, that if you want to know how you’re going to answer the “was it worth it” question after the fact, you just need to sit quietly with the question right now and answer truthfully–at least to yourself–if you’d use up one of your wishes on this, either knowing what else you could do with those wishes or taking that leap of faith that you’ll be able to endure any other shit life tosses at you once all of your wishes are gone.

I found out this week that my childhood friend’s brother died and it has affected me disproportionally for how close I’ve been with the family in the last 15+ years–sort of like finding out Ramona Quimby was gone…or perhaps the more accurate analogy is Henry and Ribsy.

He was one of my first big crushes (my first crush goes to Danny from nursery school whom I loved because he was so little and sweet.  I loved him so much that I didn’t call him Danny because I didn’t like that name and called him Benny instead).  When I slept over my friend’s house, I always hoped that her brother would accidentally walk into the room and see me changing into my Strawberry Shortcake nightgown.  He was three years older and I’d write about him in my diary, recording the passing things he said to me as he walked through our marathon Barbie games.

I looked up his obituary to see his picture, and he aged exactly as I thought he would.  Still cute.  He had a kind-looking wife, two beautiful daughters.  The last time I spoke to him was about 15 years ago when I was trying to decide whether or not to apply to the grad school program he was currently completing.  The last time I spoke to his sister was probably close to 10 years ago by now.  It didn’t feel that long until I started to do reunion math in my head.

It feels wrong to pop out of the woodwork to offer condolences and it feels equally wrong to know and not send her condolences.  I looked her up on Facebook, and there was an entry, but I wasn’t sure if it was her because she wasn’t connected to any of our mutual friends.  I have her work address and can mail a card there.  It feels both wrong and right.

He’s someone that I hadn’t thought about for years–she is someone I haven’t thought about much either–but hearing the news from my mother made me feel again like that little girl waiting to be noticed in her friend’s kitchen.  It made me wonder about all my other past crushes and when did I age into a space where some of them might not be alive anymore.  My heart is just with his wife and girls, as well as my old friend who is now without her big brother.

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The Weekly What If: Google and Facebook sometimes give you the ability to peek in on the lives of past crushes, though I’ve found that a bunch have seemingly disappeared into the ether.  If you could get a picture and one paragraph biography of any past crush delivered to your inbox (so you won’t have to face your crush–you’ll just get to peek at them from afar), who would it be?

I think, for me, I would choose my sophomore year boyfriend from high school.  I Googled him today and came up empty-handed (though his twin brother is on Facebook).  I found Danny/Benny as well as my eighth grade boyfriend (my first straight boyfriend) who did not age well at all.  At all.

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Creme de la Creme is continuously being updated.  Whenever I update the list, I post the date and time in the top right corner of my blog.  I also try to remember to send out a Tweet.

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Aaaaah, the ring.  As of writing this, I don’t have news one way or the other and without something to actually celebrate, it feels wrong to get the ring.  My plan right now is to wait until Saturday morning (giving myself through tonight) to call the store and tell her to put it out.  I’m going to ask her to write down every detail she can about the ring and order one for me in the future.  If not, I’m at a place of peace to let it go and wait.  She has so many beautiful things in her store that if it isn’t that ring, it will be another one.  I’m actually sort of surprised at my zen-like state right now, but I feel like a ring will be floating onto my hand in the future.  And right now, I’m just concentrating on that feeling.

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And now, the blogs…

I liked this post by The Infertile Breeder about retroactive pregnancies.  In explaining how pregnancy time is counted, she states that she could already be pregnant even though she hasn’t even gotten to transfer yet.  “In the present tense, this is utterly 100% untrue (not to mention physically impossible). But I truly hope that Dr. Snaggletooth will do a little time travel and make it so.”

Barren Albion has a post to mark her five-year blogoversary about how she has changed as a blog writer.  It’s a mellower Ms. Prufrock, one who now approaches her blog as a comfortable friend, one who is constant and enduring.  I love how she has changed and found that peace within writing over the last five years.

This post by Heeeeeeeeeeeeeere, Storkey Storkey touched me for the sheer brutal honesty in it.  In fact, this entire week has been filled with good, angry, venting posts that work through the frustrations of treatments–the equivalent of throwing a plate against the wall.

Serenity Now has a post about the new ideaon her bucket list.  You’ll need to click over to see what it is, but I think it’s the perfect attitude of doing something entirely for yourself, within your control, to make yourself happy.  Anything else after that is just gravy.

Lastly, Six Months (At a Time) has a post about finding infertility blogs.  I’m assuming all of us have experienced this at some point (unless we’re Ms. Prufrock and we were there when the ALI blogosphere was erected 3000 years ago)–that feeling of “holy shit–there are others out here like me who get it.”  She’s right now screaming into the ether for someone to hear her, and it would be wonderful if more people can go over and let her know that her words have been heard.

The roundup to the Roundup: Remembering an old crush.  Answer the Weekly What If about your old crush.  The Creme is still being updated.  No news means no ring.  And lots of great blogs to read.

…of which bothers me more.  The advertisement:

“Hey, guys, I have a great idea for an advertisement for Guiliana and Bill’s next season.  Infertility is so much fun because it gives you free reign to fuck like bunnies!  People love it!  So let’s get a picture of that zany duo smiling on a sofa surrounded by rabbits!  Make sure one of them gets up there on Bill’s head.  And make sure they look happy because we need viewers to know that infertility isn’t a downer.  It’s fun!  You get to have looooooooooooads of sex.  We can make infertility the brand new fad.”

Or the scintillating coverage of her struggle to conceive.

I’m not sure who Guiliana and Bill are, and my heart goes out to them if they’re experiencing infertility.  But damn…

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.

Say what you want about Allison, like the fact that she would willingly live in a state that has flying cockroaches–which are just crickets in my book.  The woman remembers the fine details.

It started almost two years ago, shortly after Zoë died (the anniversary of which is this upcoming Sunday and it would be nice to flood Allison with love right now) when my family walked for hers in that year’s March of Dimes walk and we were Team Lennox and Zoë.

Her thank you gift was a rock.  I’m not sure if I had mentioned it in a post or in an email, but I had once said in passing that I collected stones from various places.  That I had different ones that I carried with me at different times (the first cycle we tried to conceive, back when we were in giddyland, Josh stole me a rock from a restaurant and I carried that one with me until we delivered the twins…so…er…two and a half years it lived in my pocket and I held it during every procedure and test).  Beyond Josh and the twins who have noticed this because they live with me, my niece is the only other person who has ever given me a stone.  We were walking and she bent down, picked up a random rock, and said, “I know you like these.”

So a rock came in the mail, I bawled at her thoughtfulness and the fact that she would remember, and a tradition was born where we send each other rocks from various places.  Her husband makes her steal her own rocks when she sees one in a rock display.  Mine knows I’m a wimp and rolls his eyes and says, “I know, one for you and one for Allison” before doing my dirty work.  We have given each other rocks from beaches and hiking trails.  We just usually pop them in a padded envelope.

Last fall, my postmistress told me a story when I was mailing a new rock to her about how she used to do that with a friend too and how the woman (who is now in her 80s) keeps the rocks in her garden and likes to sit outside and look at them and how she knows if someone moves one.  I told Allison, “Let’s be crotchety like that when we’re older; yelling at people for moving our stones.”  So now we’re committed to becoming bat-shit insane old ladies.

This week, a very special rock came from Allison’s very special place and I am beyond honoured that she would bring me a rock from there.  Those are the best ones–not the ones that are beautiful and smooth and nice to hold, but the ones that come from somewhere meaningful.  Her mother mailed the package for her and included this too:

The twins and I were marveling at it, imagining the size of the bird who built and abandoned this nest.  Josh walked into the kitchen and said, “I just want to state for the record that I am not going to start stealing abandoned bird’s nests for you to start sending back and forth to each other.”

And while that thought hadn’t occurred to me before that point, I think it sounds like a fine idea.  And now I need to go work on Josh since he has those long arms that can reach into trees.

Thank you, Allison (and Allison’s mummy), and my heart is with you all weekend as you remember Zoë.  We’ll be thinking about her too.

What are you showing today?

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