Posts from — January 2010

I am having oral surgery this morning, and by the time I read your responses, I will be on Vicodin.

Someone found my blog this morning by googling “crying sperm facials.”

How have they found yours?

P.S. I wonder what sort of additional Google searches this post will bring. I’m almost giddy to find out.

P.P.S. For those who clicked over expecting a different story, I decided to go with the second strangest thing discussed in the last 24 hours because the other story deserves more time than I can give it now.

Updated with a P.P.P.S. Y’all are supposed to be distracting me from the pain with your own weird Google searches. Prize for the winner? Off to the oral surgeon now…sniff…

Trying not to get in a habit of relaying my dreams, but…

I was at my old clinic last Tuesday and woke up Wednesday morning from terrible IVF dreams.  The strange part was that the majority of people in my dream were not people I associate with my clinic, though they all insisted that they were treated there.  And my doctor wasn’t my normal doctor, but instead I was being treated by Michael Tucker, the embryologist who helped create the first ICSI baby and the first baby from frozen eggs (what?  You don’t own a complete set of the Topps All Star Embryologists and Reproductive Endocrinologists trading cards with all of their SART stats on the back?  I’m just missing two–Pak Chung and Eric Surrey keep evading me no matter how many packs I purchase).

In my dream, we created six embryos that cycle and he kept telling me that it showed that I obviously wasn’t infertile if we could create embryos, and I kept telling him, “but our problem is implantation and the clotting factors.”  So in my dream, we were down to our last two embryos and we were about to transfer them and I had cold feet about the whole thing, wondering if our family was better as is.  A non-IF friend (who in the dream was an IVF vet) kept cheering me on and Michael Tucker told me he’d let me remove the straw from the cryopreservation tank which was all kinds of not-possible in the manner that I drew it out of the liquid smoke.

So we transferred the two in my dream and I was silently depressed about it and everyone was massively pregnant around me.  And then Michael Tucker told me that it was important that within a half hour of transfer, Josh drive down to Richmond, VA to have a session of Alexander Technique.  I kept asking people if this was truly important considering the embryos were in my body and Josh’s part was over, and pointed out that this wasn’t even possible since we’re probably 3 hours from Richmond.  But everyone kept agreeing that Josh needed the Alexander Technique session for me to have a successful IVF cycle.  I woke up before beta day.

I’m not sure what this dream means except that I had just been at the clinic the day before giving a speech and in real life (distinguishing reality from the dream), I met up with some of my favourite nurses and staff and sonographers (and saw one of my old doctors in the audience).  I haven’t seen some of them in six years.

I didn’t think that I would be so sentimental about visiting with people who remind me of one of the worst times in my life, yet we keep going back to visit the NICU staff yearly and I cried hugging my old sonographer last week.  It was a little bit like Alice revisiting Wonderland, except that the clinic wasn’t a happy space with talking rabbits and tea parties.  It was a really sad place where I often felt a mix of frustration and self-hatred.  I can’t understand why I want to go back to these places.  I can simply say that I do.  That I like revisiting the past, even the sad parts of my past.

If you’re done with your clinic, have you ever gone back to visit?  Do you want to?  If you aren’t done with your clinic, could you ever see yourself wanting to return years later and visit everyone again or is it good riddance to that experience once you’re on your way out the door?

Before we went to Hershey last week, I had this bizarre dream where we were raising chickens and keeping them in these small boxes and the boxes were filled with a liquid that resembled uncooked egg whites that the chickens had to sit in and floating beside them were these diseased eggs…

…do you think I’m having anxiety over anything in particular?  Freud?  Freud?

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I need to preface this story by telling you that a few days before the trolley ride, we bumped into an acquaintance and her husband, whom I private call Arthur P Fuckstein because he always says such fuckstein-y sorts of things, informed me–APROPOS OF NOTHING WE WERE TALKING ABOUT AT THE MOMENT–that my daughter’s name was not a real name.  In front of my daughter.  I just smiled and said, “I have a birth certificate that might disagree with you.”  Because guess what, Arthur P Fuckstein?  I named her it, therefore, it’s real.  And I can point at hundreds, nay thousands, of other people with her name and it’s in every Hebrew baby naming book.

But then we encountered Santa.

Hershey’s Chocolate World holds a special Christmas-themed trolley ride in the winter and we decided to surprise the twins and drive them up to Pennsylvania for the day to gorge ourselves on chocolate and listen to carols and spend time with the other non-Christian families who for some reason have come to Hershey to celebrate Christmas.  When we were buying our tickets, the staff asked the twins their names and I didn’t think much of it because they generally attract attention simply due to the fact that they’re twins.

We sat down to eat lunch before the ride and Josh admitted that Santa would be coming on the trolley at some point and passing out gifts and the staff worker wanted to know if we were cool with this.  Josh had agreed to the gift giving because he thought it would be more awkward for the twins to decline it, but we prepped them with the idea that though we’re not Christian ourselves, when in Rome (by which, when in Christian America, by which I mean, every day of your life), we’ll do as the Romans do and politely pretend that we celebrate Christmas unless otherwise asked.  And then, if asked, we can talk about the fact that we don’t celebrate Christmas.  In other words, the average person we pass on the street doesn’t need to be corrected; a person we’ll interact with again is worth the explanation.

We got on the trolley and the actors were dressed in Christmas-themed clothing and we sang carols and talked about Christmas back in Mr. Hershey’s time and the ChickieNob stared at me incredulously as if I had just announced to the trolley car that I enjoy raping nuns.  She kept whispering, “how do you know these songs?” and I had to keep whispering back that you just get to know them if you live long enough.  That while Christian people will never know the words to “L’cha Dodi”, pretty much every Jew in America can sing “Jingle Bells.”

About 2/3rds of the way through the trip, I look out the window to see Santa traipsing through the woods and sure enough, he soon boarded the trolley with a jolly “ho, ho, ho” which made the ChickieNob start to rock back and forth like she needed to pee.  “I have to tell him I’m Jewish,” she whispered to me.

“You don’t,” I whispered back.

“I have to do it.  I have to tell him I’m Jewish.”

“You don’t,” I promised.  “I mean, you can, but you don’t need to do it.  It’s meaningless in his world.”

“I have to shout it,” she said, now in a normal tone of voice, loud enough for all the surrounding families to hear.  “I have to get it out of me.  I have to tell him I’m Jewish.  I have to scream it.”

This went on for a while, with me trying to convince her that she doesn’t need to act as if she just had the Holy Spirit enter her body, shaking and quaking like someone who has to give witness.  The way she was moving her body, I half expected the ChickieNob to yank a poisonous snake out of her pocket and start waving it around in the air while she screamed out her matrilineal heritage, tracing back her Jewishness to Sarah herself.

Santa walked up and down the aisle, calling out the name of each child on the trolley from a long scroll and suddenly, the ChickieNob’s fears changed.  “Santa isn’t going to give me a present because I’m Jewish.  He’s going to give a present to everyone on the trolley but me and the Wolvog.”

The burning need to shout her faith to the 19-year-old kid playing Santa gave way to a lament about being left behind continuously in a season that points out what every other child gets.  She has seen the commercials, she knows the drill.  Christian kids get presents, but no one comes to her house.  We shlep her downtown and make her volunteer while other children are eating sugar cookies and playing with new toys.

This new fear was whispered over and over again until finally, the whitest Santa in the world got to her name.  By which I mean he sort of got to her name because he COULDN’T PRONOUNCE IT.  Four-part Sanskrit names rolled off his tongue seconds earlier.  He didn’t even stumble over the monikers of the siblings from Pakistan seated a few seats ahead of us.  He gaily laughed at the sibilance created over Suk-Chul’s name as he handed the Korean boy his gift.

But he got to my daughter’s name–a tiny wisp of a name–and couldn’t say it.  And not only did he not pronounce it correctly–dayenu–but the name he did say was absolutely ridiculous, containing letters that weren’t there to form a word that as Josh has pointed out, no parent in America would name their child.

For example, imagine you had named your child Fusilli because you love the pasta shape so much, and now imagine Santa walking down the aisle pronouncing your child’s name “Fuck-silly?  Fuck-silly?”.  There is no “ck” in that name!  There is no parent who is going to knowingly give their child a name that starts with “fuck!”  Fusilli may not be a common name in your circles, but still, someone playing Santa should not get it so terribly wrong that he is turning your name into a sexual act.  A ridiculous one at that.

So Santa was saying her name wrong, and the ChickieNob finally couldn’t hold back any longer, the tumultuous feelings running through her body for the last 5 minutes, and she screamed to the whole trolley, “SANTA CAN’T EVEN SAY MY NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME!”

Santa was a little stunned and very apologetic, and she told him how to say it and he repeated it and apologized several more times while she stopped crying and accepted his gift, a Christmas ornament.  All of this tsuris for a Christmas ornament.  I think it put everything in perspective for her because she deep breathed and stared at it with an expression that said, “all of that for this?”  Santa miraculously got her brother’s name right–a name that almost everyone mispronounces on a continuous basis.  I will admit that it can be a hard name to say correctly on the first try if you’re reading it off a piece of paper.  But Santa got that one right, though the Wolvog was terrified of Santa, didn’t want him to come near, and breathed afterward that he couldn’t believe people were excited for that man to come INTO THEIR HOUSE.  It would be like me welcoming in a little cricket family.

When we got off the trolley, they handed out pieces of candy and the ChickieNob once again told me that she needed to tell Santa that she’s Jewish.  I shrugged my shoulders, and watched as she took the chocolate and said in her tiny voice, “I’m actually Jewish and we don’t celebrate Christmas.”  But Santa, who was looking longingly at the 20-year-old caroler, possibly thinking about how he could jingle her bells later, didn’t hear the ChickieNob and we walked back into the building to for a family trolley ride debriefing.

There’s a lot to learn here; sometimes even Santa can make mistakes.  That it rocks to participate in someone else’s culture or religion, but we can’t expect it to be a perfect fit–it’s like borrowing a friend’s jacket where it may keep you warm, but it will never hug your body quite like one in your size.  That we don’t need to get ourselves worked up over nothing because yes, things generally turn out be nothing no matter how much emotional energy you invest.  Sometimes you think you’re getting a ballet Barbie, but you end up with a cheap, mass-produced ornament and a Hershey kiss.

And it’s all good if you let it roll off your back, even if Santa can’t say your name.

Welcome back, Little Roundup.  Oh how I missed you last week when you were preempted by the Creme de la Creme.

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This is the story of a New Year’s kiss one decade ago:

I broke up with my boyfriend right before it turned from 1999 to 2000 because I was trying to do the right thing by releasing him once I realized we had no future rather than hold on to him so I could have a date for New Year’s Eve.  Except now I had no one to kiss at midnight AND it was pretty much the most important New Year’s Eve ever.  Millenniums, after all, only come around once every 1000 years…

My friend and I went to a party that night downtown and an acquaintance, M, offered to kiss me at midnight.  Around 11:45, I couldn’t find him and I started panicking that he had forgotten his promise, but at 11:58, I felt his hand on my shoulder and we counted down the last seconds until midnight when he gave me a great kiss right at the turning of the millennium.

Immediately after, he took my hand and led me up to a fire escape and we climbed out onto the roof.  We were completely alone and it was freezing, but someone was setting off firecrackers, so we had the city below us, and the firecrackers in the sky, and he gave me a long kiss up there as well.

He checked to make sure that I had gotten the moment I wanted to have, and when I agreed, we went back to the party, and life went on as usual.  I started dating Josh a few weeks later, we often bumped into M at parties, and the rest is history.

Or is it?

A few months after I became friends with Lindsay, she sent out a mass email for a New Year’s Eve party and M’s name was on the list.  I immediately wrote her about it and it turned out that M was a close friend and now I see him from time to time through her.  He is currently engaged and I couldn’t be happier for him.  I hope his wife-to-be knows what an amazing man she is getting–one who didn’t mock me for needing a pity kiss at midnight and who delivered a great moment ten-fold (fine, he may not have arranged the fireworks, but leading me up to the roof was a stroke of genius).

But that’s not even the end of the full circle.  When I told Lindsay this story, she told me that her millennial New Year’s kiss was also a just-friends kiss with the best friend of a fellow TOOTPUer.  How crazy is that?

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Weekly What If: Who was your millennial kiss if you had one?  What if you could pick anyone in the world to share a millennial kiss with and have that story to tell for the rest of your life, who would it be?

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I am still updating the Creme de la Creme.  I’m finishing up some work (you know, actual work that I get paid to do) so I’ve been sidetracked, but there are still over 40 posts that need to go up so I will keep rolling them out.  Whenever I update the post, I also update that note in the top right corner of my blog (under “Today”) with the time updated, the number of posts on the Creme, and the number of posts in the queue.

My goal is still to hit 300 by March 1st.  As of writing this, there are 236 on the list or in the queue.  Which means 64 of you still need to step forward with a favourite post from 2009.  If you haven’t submitted, do it for the sake of the new record if not for the love of being part of the community.

The Creme has made me massively behind on actually reading blogs in the here and now instead of trekking back to random months of the year.  So forgive me if I get my life under control and start commenting on three-week-old posts from Reader.  You’ve also probably noticed that I’ve been posting the LFCA the night before.  I’m not sure how long that will go on for–I’m easing into a new schedule, trying to get in a daily workout, and everything is getting shoved around for a bit.

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Skip this section if you don’t want to read about the twins:

For those invested in the story of Befana’s request (that saucy, audacious minx!),  tonight is the first night that they can leave their binkies on the top step for pick-up.  The ChickieNob has pointed out an obvious hole in the story–why would other children want used binkies, especially since she knows she’s not supposed to put someone else’s things in her mouth.  Well played, ChickieNob, well played.

After they held a post-bedtime meeting on Wednesday, they returned with negotiations: they may decide to give up the binky tonight, but only if she will promise to trash the binkies instead of giving them to other children.  They can’t stand the idea of someone else enjoying their binky when they can’t.  Since we make them do so much volunteer work, we told them that it was okay to leave the poor, binky-less Italian children high and dry this one time, but they may want to give extra tzedakah that week to balance out the binky wastefulness.

I know it’s time–I mean, three years ago was time–to give up the binky, but it’s the last babyish thing they have/do.  It’s hard to watch them give it up, though I’ll also be holding my breath tonight at bedtime to see if the binky stays in the bed or goes on the step.

Stay tuned.

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And now, the blogs…

Little Footprints has a post about missing Maddie and what she thinks when people lament that terrible mothers have their babies when AKD no longer has her Maddie.  She writes: “how does someone else losing their child make Maddie less gone? It’s not a bargain – their child being born healthy isn’t what caused Maddie to pass on.”  It is not a post condemning this line of thinking; but more why it doesn’t work for AKD and I loved the way she twisted the thought on its head.

BYOB–Buy Your Own Bean has a post about a meltdown after an ultrasound; not just because it was painful, but because it also felt like a bodily violation, even if it was in the medical sense.  She writes, “I felt like a kid being punished and I just wanted to pull up my pants and run out of there, never going back.”  As Mom Genes states in the comment section, it is a relief sometimes to hear someone ask the question aloud: “Do I really want to do this?”

The State That I Am In has a post about how her blog has evolved over time.  I think viewing yourself as a diarist, perhaps with a leaning towards one or two topics over others, is the healthiest way to allow a blog to stretch and grow rather than continuously uprooting and building new homes.  She writes: “So many blogs simply die out when life circumstances change.  My blog and I have evolved together, and I’m so happy that we have.”  I love how she discusses this idea in blogging and I think it’s a helpful post for so many who find themselves as a life circumstance crossroad.  I have thought about how my title essentially ties me to infertility forever unless I become a horseback rider, but I’m fine with that too.  This is the community where I think my heart will still belong long after family building is over.

Lastly, on the side note of community, The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow (I Hope) has a post that made me smile about our commonalities despite our differences.  Unafraid to figuratively sing a little stanza of Kumbaya, I think it’s an important reminder to return to when we’re feeling as if no one understands us.  Of course they don’t–no one can ever perfectly know the life of another person.  And it’s ridiculous to make statements about what any other group does or doesn’t know because we’re all lacking information about any life outside of our own.  Coming from that spot, we can still support one another through listening, head nodding, and as she says, remembering “that commonality. Our situations are all different, but the emptiness is the same.”

The roundup to the Roundup: return to your millennial kiss.  Answer the Weekly What If (who would it be, who would it be?).  Read and participate in the Creme de la Creme (and forgive my tardiness with everything else).  Befana’s request update.  And lots of great blogs to read.

Delurking Week has been brilliant fun, but something I noticed was that there were a lot of people who commented who had blogs that were not on the ALI blogroll.  So, as a way to have a mass stampede onto the blogroll, if you are currently not listed and would like to be, please leave your blog name, blog url, and the best category (the blogroll is divided into rooms and in each of those rooms are anywhere from 1 to dozens of subcategories) and I will add you at the beginning of next week.

The blogroll is always open and people add themselves daily by emailing me (anyone who has an ALI family building blog can be on it), but since I saw so many new blogs all at once, I thought I’d make it easy and extend the offer this way.

If you’re already on the blogroll and this note just reminded you that you’ve been meaning to write me about a move to a new category or the like, please email me.  It’s easier to make the changes that way.  It also speeds things along if you tell me where your blog is currently located (category and number in that category).