Posts from — April 2010

If you’ve got time to read, you’ve got time to write (it doesn’t quite have the same ring as “if you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean”).  Right now, close this post, open your own blog and write your damn Project IF post!  There are only two more days.  Two days.

WAIT–I mean…after you read this…go and write your post.

And don’t worry about whether your post is gorgeous or eloquent or creative–it is about being real, and raw, and honest.  Every single person who writes an ALI blog has the ability to educate.  You do it every day.  You let people into your world every.damn.day (well, except for those of you who write once a month or so).  Open the door for a moment and say–even if it’s only one paragraph–what that “what if” means to you.  You don’t need to be fancy–you just need to be yourself.

Over 100 people are already on the list and it’s climbing.  Have you seen Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed’s video?  Or read the raw honesty of LutC’s post?  Mrs. Hope came out of hiatus to participate.

I keep hinting that you really really really want to be part of this project–that it’s not just something happening now that will be over at the end of NIAW.  That this project is something that is moving and traveling and influencing over the course of the next year.  You will want to be part of it.  I seriously can’t stress that enough.

And it also has to have an end date because Resolve is going to be choosing the Hope Award for best blog from the blogs that participate.  The list closes at 11:59 p.m. EST on May1st (Sautrday)–the end of NIAW.

So please, relax a bit more and hear about Charlie the caterpillar (so named after the man who owned the chocolate factory), and then, stop reading blogs and go write!

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When I went to pick up the twins from their grandparent’s house, I was told about the newest member of our family, a caterpillar named Charlie Sammy Ford.  My mother knows me–she raised me, speaks to me daily, and shares a People subscription with me.  But someone must have clocked her on the head and made forget everything she knows about my core personality traits because she HONESTLY THOUGHT THAT I’D LET THE TWINS BRING THE CATERPILLAR HOME.

This happened, by the way, the same day that I picked up a bottle of Raid’s new barrier spray.

I know caterpillars are not crickets, but frankly, they are a close relative and live in the same general vicinity as crickets.  Please, do not tell me about how you’d let people bring a whole caterpillar army into your house and feed them croissants at your kitchen table.  That is your house.  Mine is a caterpillar-free zone (thanks to the aforementioned Raid spray).

We left Charlie at my parent’s house, and my father emailed the twins updates about their pet caterpillar through the evening.  And I shuddered.  I just shuddered and shuddered.

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The Weekly What If: what if (disregarding all safety issues) you could have any animal in the world as a pet who would live in your house?  For the sake of this what if, let’s not get into an argument about how taking an animal out of its natural habitat is cruel.  Let’s pretend the animal would love it.  So would you want a dolphin swimming in the big pool you’d magically have in your kitchen?  A lion sleeping at the foot of the bed?  A monkey coming along on the family road trips?

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And now, the blogs…

The Road Less Traveled has a post about feeling invisible, in particular “the visibility of pregnancy versus the invisibility of loss and grief, the visibility of the childed versus the invisibility of the childless, the visibility of the young & beautiful (& presumably fertile) versus the invisibility of the aging (women in particular).”  She uses two other posts in the blogosphere to explore a feeling of invisibility as well as a discomfort of being in the spotlight.  It’s a really interesting read.

Maybe Momma Some Day talks about coming out about her infertility on Facebook and the virtual crickets she heard from the majority of her friends.  She writes, “There are about a half of a dozen friends who have commented, all showing amazing support, and everyone else has been silent.  I wasn’t really expecting a barrage of comments, but I was expecting more then I got.”  Coming out also means that she walks the fine line between scaring someone who hasn’t even started trying to death while helping them to understand why they shouldn’t waste time.

Moving on to the Next Plan has a post about two different instances where she cried.  The first, an off-hand, thoughtless joke brings her to tears and the second, the kindness of a parent who will do anything to help his child also makes her cry.  It’s a really lovely balance of both ends of an emotional see-saw.

Lastly, Expecting the Unexpected, has a post about helping a friend as only one who has been there in the deepest trenches can.  She talks her through the fears of her next IVF cycle.  Later in the post, she tells of something her friend’s friends did: “Her girlfriends took her out for a lunch a couple of weeks ago and called it her sending fertile wishes lunch which I loved, I mean what a great idea and to me that does show that they are thinking about her even if they fully don’t understand.”  I also loved that idea and tucked it into a mental pocket.

The roundup to the Roundup: for the love, go write your Project IF post!  Caterpillars…need I say more?  Answer the Weekly What If.  And lots of great posts to read.  Plus, I got to meet Little Steps to Baby Steps while she was in town this week!  Go give her good thoughts for the wait until her beta.

This is how I look a few minutes after speaking at the Capitol.  Look at how my mere presence makes the sky look ominous and stormy.  Look out America–infertile people are teaching Congress a thing or two (or maybe even three).

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Truman Capote came a’knockin’ at my internal door 10 minutes before I was set to leave, adding a new layer to the day.  Not just emotionally or logistically, but is also changed the nice outfit I had chosen for the occasion.  Damn you, Capote, showing up with your Justerini and Brooks scotch (never J&B, please) and cigars!  But we rolled with it and dressed in black and headed downtown.

Moments before I leave the sweet bosom of our car and brave the wild Metro.

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I can’t really describe how powerful it is to walk through the hallways at the Capitol and realize not only the history of what has happened in that building in the past, but my G-d, what is happening in this building right now.  And that I was sewing myself into that history by participating.  That it happens every day–ordinary citizens making requests of our government officials and our government officials listening to them.  Not always doing what we wish, but giving us their ear if we write, call, or sit down with them face-to-face.

That’s a pretty amazing thing for an enormous country.

Though I’ve spent my entire life in this area save for a few years here and there in school, I don’t think I’ve ever been inside the Capitol.  On the steps to watch the fireworks–sure.  Across the street, using the Library of Congress–too many times to count.  But I can’t even remember a school field trip to the Capitol.  So I think, the most overwhelming part for me, was to be inside that building.

As was seeing real live senators and representatives.  Which again, shouldn’t be that momentous since I grew up in this area and went to school with the children of real live senators and representatives.  But now I was seeing them in their natural habitat–sort of like seeing a lion on the savannah vs. seeing a lion at the zoo.

Even if you can’t travel to Washington, D.C. to physically be in the Capitol, there is a way (beyond emailing or calling your representatives yourself) to turn your words into action inside the Capitol: participate in Project IF.  I have hinted before that there will be more to this project than NIAW and the Night of Hope award.  Trust me on this.  You have at least two more days to participate (May 1st, 11:59 pm EST is the cut-off).

The three speakers: Me, Dr. Maurizio Macaluso (Chief of the Women’s Health and Fertility Branch of the CDC) and Dr. Rafat Abbasi (doctor at Columbia Fertility Associates)

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I felt like you were all with me in spirit yesterday, and I was so touched to read through the comments once I got home.  I actually left my blackberry on vibrate and stuck it in my bag, and placed my bag against my foot.  So I got this buzzy reminder every few minutes that I am connected to something so large–a support system, an electronic grassroots system, a group of kick-ass brilliant ladies and gentlemen.

I was asked yesterday by someone there if I felt nervous coming out so publicly about my infertility.  And I was nervous about a lot of things, but not admitting that my body doesn’t work properly and I need help to build my family.  It’s not a fact about myself that I’m proud of, but it’s something that is, and when we talk about it, we help others to see a larger world than their own experience, we help people get to a doctor before they run out of time, we help people feel less alone who share the same problem and feel isolated from the norm around them.

When it was done, all I wanted to do was sleep.  I skipped breakfast and missed lunch and didn’t eat until 3:20 and I think the lack of food combined with Truman’s visit combined with the huge emotions of the day all made me crash by 5 pm.  So I apologize for the lack of LFCAs this week and can tell you that an enormous one will be up tonight.

I’ll leave you with this while I wait for the video and pictures taken at the Capitol to be sent my way once the Resolveniks recover.

4 minute clip from Fox News where Barb Collura spoke about the congressional briefing and NIAW

And the first coverage that I’ve seen from the newspapers on the briefing: The Washington Times.

If you are reading this Wednesday morning, I am currently at the US Capitol speaking at a congressional briefing with Senator Gillibrand and Representative Wasserman Schultz about infertility to help get money appropriated to the CDC to set up a National Action Plan.

I know–if you had told me four years ago that I would be doing this today, I would have called you crazy.  Blogging has opened up the most amazing experiences.

And I can also assure you that I am quaking in my 9 Wests.

I didn’t talk about this up until this point mostly because I thought thinking about it too much would make me nervous and because it also still feels surreal as I write this the night before (and schedule it to post so you can read this while I’m shleping downtown).  Tomorrow or tonight, I will post whatever pictures I was able to take.  I was also told that it will be videotaped, so hopefully, I’ll be able to post at least a clip from that.

But I wanted you to know what I’m saying on the Hill.  Partly for you, because you should know what is being said on your behalf and partly for me, so I can feel like y’all are there:

27.

Newly-married.

I was reading the obituaries being run in the New York Times after the Twin Towers fell and there was one that changed our family building plans.  A woman, my age, only two weeks married herself, just back from her honeymoon, lost her husband on September 11th.

I knew I had all the time in the world biologically–after all, women had children into their forties and I was only 27.  But I didn’t have all the time in the world emotionally, not in a post-September 11th world where everything felt so fragile.

And so, our decision to wait a year into marriage was thrown out the window and thanks to that widow in New York, we entered into family building with a mixture of giddy excitement since we were certain it would work on the first try (after all, my eighth grade sex ed teacher wouldn’t steer me wrong), and heavy hearts for all the people who lost their partner before they had a chance to build their family.  I was not yet 28.

But it didn’t happen.

I told a few friends we were trying to conceive either because I knew they were trying too or they had just become mothers and I thought I’d be joining them soon enough.  But one by one, all my friends moved on to the other side while I still tried, reading books, browsing the Resolve site despite also receiving the message from my gynecologist that I had nothing to worry about and I was just being anxious, and asking everyone who had been successful my numerous questions–what did they know that I didn’t know?

In 2002, blogs were barely in the toddler stage, therefore, you couldn’t go online and read the experience of another woman, measuring her stats against yours.  You could go on bulletin boards, and believe me, I did, asking my thousands of questions to faceless women who verbally sprinkled me with “baby dust” during our interactions.

And it’s sort of scary when you think about it because I was taking my advice from people I didn’t know.  Thankfully, none of them steered me wrong and I moved from the trying-to-conceive boards to the infertility boards, gathering everything I could on my way to what I knew in my heart was going to be a diagnosis.  But what I wished at that point was that my doctor or my friends were doing a better job of guiding me.  Because I wasted a lot of time and a lot of pregnancies on the way to the clinic.

7.3 million Americans are infertile.  1 in 8 of child-bearing age.  You would think that I’d have a few infertile friends with those statistics, and I did.  They just weren’t talking about it.

Beyond my mother, who herself experienced infertility, only one person came forth and told me that they had used Clomid.  Later on, I discovered that numerous women in my monthly women’s social group either experienced recurrent pregnancy loss or had done IVF to conceive.  I found out that five friends were at the same clinic when I finally had my first appointment.  Until I received my diagnosis, my peers and doctors didn’t speak with me about infertility.  After my diagnosis, it was like I had joined a secret, underground club.

Starting treatments was a fairly sickening experience–not just the physical side of learning how to give myself injections or the emotional side of receiving negative after negative pregnancy test despite having spent the month enduring those injections–it was the financial side that was possibly the most distressing because it was impossible to build our family via any of the options available based on the life choices we made.

Despite my ability to earn a lot more teaching at the college level with my graduate degree, I chose to work with children (big mistake for an infertile woman!) because I wanted to make a difference in their lives writing-wise before they reached the college level.  My husband could have equally pulled in a different salary, but he chose to go into community-building work at a non-profit.  Our jobs were about serving others and because of that, we weren’t able to help ourselves.  Our choices were either to forget the ethical commitments we made to building a better society or to forget our desire to have a family.

I am lucky that my clinic understood that we were between a rock and a hard place financially and did everything in their power to help us utilize the technology out there that could circumvent our female factor infertility.  Our clinic even went so far to give us a free IUI during a month where it looked like our chances were good but we didn’t have the ability to pay the IUI costs.  I don’t just think my experience has been extraordinary–speaking with the 2300 men and women on my blogroll these past four years has taught me that my experience is the exception rather than the norm and that is also due to the fact that my enormous clinic, with numerous satellite offices in the area, has the financial ability to stay afloat while still helping patients.  Smaller offices are not as helpful, not because they don’t want to be, but because they can’t.

During treatments, I woke up every morning around 4:45 a.m. to have enough time to go for a quick run and shower before my blood draw and sonogram at the clinic.  I then drove to school and spent the day trying not to think about the fact that I can’t conceive while simultaneously waiting for my nurse’s phone call to give me my injection instructions for the night.  I had to pretend nothing was amiss while I chatted with other teachers in the lounge because infertility is secretive.  Infertility is hidden, and not mentioned, lest people get uncomfortable.  I would then go home and obsessively try every idea under the sun to make treatments more successful including drinking Robitussin and green tea–not because I was baby crazy and wanted a baby NOW!  But because I needed the emotional pain of infertility to stop.  And the only way it was going to stop–at least in my experience–was to resolve my childlessness with parenthood.

I got the happy ending.  My twins are the product of a lot of information gathered, injections endured, doctors who cared, and a nameless widow in New York who set my family building process in motion.  I can never thank her enough because her loss and the telling of her story gave me the gift of time.

My story could have ended here if we weren’t so damn eager to add one more to our family after knowing just how good parenthood could be with these two.

Four years ago, I went online seeking community as we entered into family building again.  My face-to-face world was just too damn silent about infertility.  And what I found was a network of 2300+ bloggers all writing out their experience, exchanging information, giving support.  And this number keeps growing.  Somehow, I became the hub of this network, and the stories flowed through me and came out in the form of a book, Navigating the Land of If.  I am so grateful to be in a position where I can absorb such a wide-range of experiences.  It has opened my eyes enormously.

This is what I’ve learned: we need to talk about infertility more–not just with each other, but with those outside the experience so they’re not fumbling in the dark towards a diagnosis.

We need to learn more about infertility–there are just too many physical problems that can’t be overcome with regularity with the existing technology.  Medicine is an art, and its practitioners need information to practice their medium.

We need to do more about infertility–7.3 million, 1 in 8 Americans of child-bearing age–these numbers are too enormous to be ignored.  There are countless Americans making the best decisions they can with limited access to good reproductive endocrinologists, instead relying on gynecologists who aren’t trained to treat infertility.  They have limited finances to build their families–with most roads of assisted family building priced outside the capabilities of the average American.  We have people who would make fantastic parents unable to experience parenthood due to a medical condition.

I urge you to take a few moments and peruse my enormous blogroll, a collection of over 2300 personal stories.  Read what the average person experiencing infertility goes through in the course of a day–emotionally, physically, and financially.

If the children are indeed America’s future, we’ll do more to ensure that they get here.

Thank you so much for your time.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise even to new readers that I believe it should be a woman’s choice to have an abortion.  Personally, I think it would behoove any person who wants the family building side of reproductive rights protected to also support termination, after all, if you don’t want your government making fertility treatments illegal, it would make sense to spread that protection to all aspects of reproductive rights.

It other words, my uterus is not a pu-pu platter when it comes to rights–it’s a one meal organ and that meal is a steaming warm helping of choice.  I don’t want someone who doesn’t know me or my doctor to make choices in regards to my health whether that be physical or mental.

So imagine my distress when I read about the two new laws passed in Oklahoma today.  The first requires all women having an abortion to watch a live sonogram of the procedure prior to the abortion, with the doctor pointing out the various limbs and organs.  There is no exception made for those who are the victims of rape.  All women will be subjected to the same ultrasound, regardless of circumstances, if they need to have an abortion.

The second law “protects doctors from malpractice suits if they decide not to inform the parents of a unborn baby that the fetus has birth defects. The intent of the bill is to prevent parents from later suing doctors who withhold information to try to influence them against having an abortion.”

In other words, if your doctor suspects that you are on the fence about terminating the pregnancy and they know that there is something physically wrong with the fetus, such as a genetic disorder, that doctor–as of today–is protected under law and does not need to give you those test results.  And there is nothing you can do about it if your child is born with a disorder that was technically diagnosed (and that information withheld from you) in the womb.

My heart goes out to women who live in Oklahoma, who will be subjected to these two laws.  And I hope the state has also appropriated enough money to mental health services to combat the damage they will do.

Four days ago, I received an email from a Facebook friend inviting me to Boobquake. Boobquake? I filed it without exploring further. The next day, I received an email from a friend sending along a Salon article, asking what I thought about Boobquake. Seriously? Boobquake? What the hell was this? And now, this morning, I opened up Twitter to find the trending topic #boobquake staring at me from the sidebar. Third times a charm and it got my attention. And now I’m trying to figure out the point.

The project, the brain-child of Blag Hag, was started in reference to a statement made by an Iranian prayer leader that “Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes.”

Offensive and not-very-well-founded, yes. Victimizing men because evil women are their downfall (and if not for women, they would be moral, damnit!), yes. But Blag Hag didn’t respond with an impassioned and well-reasoned argument. Instead, she suggested that

On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that’s your preferred form of immodesty. With the power of our scandalous bodies combined, we should surely produce an earthquake. If not, I’m sure Sedighi can come up with a rational explanation for why the ground didn’t rumble. And if we really get through to him, maybe it’ll be one involving plate tectonics.

In other words, if the tits don’t make the earth quake, give that idea a shake, paraphrasing the immortal words of Johnny Cochran.

Some people gleefully took the opportunity to show the world their breasts in the name of women’s rights and others pointed out the problems inherent in Boobquake. But I really need to ask the point of the project. If an earthquake occurred, Americans would still write it off as a coincidence. If an earthquake didn’t occur, the Iranian prayer leader wasn’t going to say, “aaah, I was wrong. Please, dress immodestly ladies.”

Because what Blag Hag sort of missed was that modesty is a core belief of this Iranian prayer leader’s religion. And core beliefs are not dismissed because a bunch of women placed pictures of their breasts online. Because, when you boil down Boobquake to its core, it was a bunch of women placing pictures of their breasts online. And frankly, with porn doing that too, as well as every girl gone wild on Spring Break, I’m not sure how we can separate the wheat from the chaff. To hold up Boobquake as a feminist movement, but Girls Gone Wild as a misogynistic spectacle.

Um…since both seem to also have commemorative memorabilia to boot.

Which makes me think of an interesting protest that takes place in Judaism every spring during Passover. Susannah Heschel, a Jewish feminist scholar, was the founder of the idea of placing an orange on the seder plate to combat homophobia.

Heschel was visiting a college in the Northeast where she learned that some of the students had started placing crusts of bread on their seder plates as a way to express the exclusion of women and homosexuals from Judaism. Heschel thought this was great. But since it violated the Passover dietary restrictions, she decided to modify the act, placing an orange on the plate instead of the bread crust to represent both women and homosexuals. “The first year I used a tangerine,” the mother of two revealed to the packed room of mostly women and some men. “Everyone at the seder got a section of it and as we ate it we would spit out the seeds in solidarity with homosexuals — the seeds represented homophobia.”

Heschel makes the point to the students, who had their heart in the right place though their execution was flawed, that their protest spits in the face of all established beliefs. Bread is forbidden on the table during Passover and putting it on the seder plate isn’t getting the message to the people it is meant to educate because the only thing those people will focus on is that the act is wholly unJewish, with the same offensive nature as peeing on the Torah. If people want to change Judaism, they need to do it while respecting the laws of Judaism. If not, it’s the equivalent of someone screaming at you. You don’t hear the words because you’re so taken aback that someone has accosted you.

Boobquake was sort of like a big, honking slice of bread on the seder plate. What Boobquake needed was Heschel’s gentle hand guiding a protest that reaches millions while transgressing none of the rules held dear by the people she aims to educate.

Strangely enough, I think the Facebook stats speak an interesting story. As I write this, 207,803 are saying they’re participating with an additional 68,028 maybe attending. But 307,525 took the time to hit “no” on the Facebook invite and reject the idea and 538,164 are like me and hit file without answering, hence they are marked as “awaiting reply.”

Did you participate? Did you reject the idea for a particular reason? Or are you one of those half million who don’t know what to think of the event?  Or is this the first you’re hearing of the event that launched at least a thousand boobs?

Cross-posted with BlogHer…