Posts from — April 2012

Taking time away from making a tortilla espanola for the seder tonight to respond to Samantha Schoech’s post on Babycenter about equating miscarriage with baby death.  Mostly because I need to take it out of my head in order to cook.

She’s entitled to her opinion; thought it is just that: her opinion.  Just because she doesn’t believe in looking at miscarriage as the loss of a baby doesn’t mean that others can’t.  The simple solution — the one I choose to take — is to not read her posts anymore.  And frankly, to not visit Babycenter so I don’t have to encounter her posts.  It’s a big Internet.  If Schoech chooses to write that, she can and if Babycenter chooses to publish that, they can.  But I also have a choice here: not to support the site and not to read her work.

By which I mean that when I get a sense that someone is writing something inflammatory solely for page views and not to release something important from their mind, I tend to be turned off and stop reading.  I personally dislike having my feelings fomented for no other reason than to increase page views.  And my foment-o-meter which measures things that are written only to upset people is on red with this post: I believe that Schoech believes this, but I believe that Babycenter latched onto it because they want page views:

Not because they want an actual conversation.

I base this on the judgmental nature of the language used in the post.  Schoech writes in the comment section: “I care very, very deeply about language. It matters. I influences everything form emotions to politics to… everything.”

Language matters, which is why she used phraseology such as:

• “A familiar pet peeve. If one more person calls a miscarriage the “death of a baby” I’m going to lose it.”
• “I have living children now and I can say that losing one of them would make my three miscarriages look like mosquito bites in comparison.”
• “The attitude that equates miscarriage with the death of a child bothers me because it is hyperbole and hyperbole bugs me.”
• “It bothers me because it’s what my grandmother would have called ‘ghoulish,’ that weird delight we all take in recounting stories of horrible misfortune.”

And then, of course, she goes on to misappropriate the term “nazi” a few times for effect.  Even though hyperbole bugs her.

My reaction to her post comes solely from this thought:

You know those conversations you sometimes get into where it just becomes one person after another upping the ante on untimely deaths, awful illnesses, and hideous accidents?

Well, this “death of a baby” thing strikes me as the same thing. It’s reveling in its own melodrama.

This post does exactly what she finds repulsive, reflecting what she despises and in doing so, creates her own melodrama.  Instead of trying to top each other in the Pain Olympics by having the worst story possible, this post aims to negate the emotional pain of miscarriage by dismissing it — pointing out all the ways it’s not-as-bad-as.  It’s a mosquito bite, after all.  It’s ghoulish.

I do despise the Pain Olympics because comparative pain is only hurtful.  It’s using your hurt to hurt another person.  It’s called the Pain Olympics because there are winners and losers.  There can’t be two people on that gold platform.  Though the problem with the Pain Olympics is that there is always another person who can knock you off that podium.  Who has it worse.  Who can negate your pain if you want to enter into a contest with the world.

I much prefer the Pain Campfire, where we’re all gathered around in a circle sharing support for each other’s stories with the understanding that we’re not there to shoot each other down but rather to collectively lift each other up.  It may be my kumbaya-ness coming through.

I think we can all agree that there are varying degrees of pain, though I believe the degrees of pain are processed in such a personal way that we can never truly define what is “just as bad.”  This morning I got my period and without even taking a pain killer, I went to a 75 minutes flow yoga class and sweated my ass off.  And THEN I went home and took the Alleve.  Because that’s where my pain was — for me.  My friend gets her period and she cannot walk around the house doing common tasks.  She needs to take the Alleve immediately.  It doesn’t mean that my pain is less and her pain is more.  It means that we both have pain and we both process it differently.  One way is not better or more natural than the other.  I’m not a goddess because I can do yoga through the pain and she is not a wimp because she can’t move.

We are two separate people with two separate pain thresholds who have two separate pains.  We are not two people who share a pain threshold who are experiencing one pain.  Do you see the difference?

I find the Pain Olympics so disheartening because it is about negating the worth of another person’s pain by telling them that you’re going to put their pain (you know, the one you don’t know about because you are not them) in perspective.  It’s about telling them to shut-up; and in doing so, the speaker feels better.  And this is how I saw Schoech’s post.  She isn’t starting a conversation: she’s telling people to shut-up.  And perhaps it makes her feel better; maybe it’s a preemptive band-aid that she is placing over her fear of (G-d forbid) ever losing a child.  Maybe she needs to do this for her own emotional well-being because she is so terrified of losing someone now that they are born and this makes her feel better.  But that doesn’t excuse the fact that her point is to make other people upset or uncomfortable in order to relieve her own emotional discomfort.

I really have to question why seeing someone else processing their emotions is her pet peeve.

Do I believe a miscarriage and neonatal death is the same thing — of course not.  If they were the same thing, they would share the same term.  But just because I see them as apples and oranges doesn’t mean that I don’t also see them as fruit.  They are both loss.  Letting someone experience their emotional pain over a miscarriage doesn’t take away from another person experiencing their emotional pain over a stillbirth which doesn’t take away from someone else experiencing their emotional pain over a neonatal death.  Because what is the trump card — the worst loss that wins you the gold medal?  At what point does the hill start curving downward and we say, “feh, it isn’t as bad” again?  Is the death of a one-year-old worse than the death of a baby?  Does preschooler trump infant?  Does elementary schooler trump preschooler?  Do you see the insanity in this?  Why should someone try to determine the worst pain?  Why do we bother giving attention to someone who is shouting “your pain isn’t bad; this pain is bad”?

I am totally willing to concede that there is a pain continuum in this world, though I believe it is only rankable by the person themselves.  In my world, menstrual pain is somewhere near a 3, hitting my head on something is near a 7, child birth is near a 7, and an HSG is a 10.  In your world, menstrual pain may be an 8, child birth may be a 10, sex may be a 9.  So yes, there is a pain continuum, but it is personal, unique to each experiencer.  And I cannot tell you the order of your pain just as you cannot tell me the order of my pain: whether that be emotional or physical.

Those are my two cents.

And now I can go back to chopping potatoes.

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.

*******

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.

*******

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.

Every ten years, there is a census taken in America.  The last one was in 2010.  The next one will be in 2020.

The census is just a tool to gather information.  You can look up your state afterward and see what percentage of your population falls under the age of 5, is a Native American, has been living in the same house for more than one year.  It certainly isn’t the only way we count people: there is the issuing of birth certificates and death certificates.

But once I learned about the census, I always thought about the six years of my life that weren’t counted.  I was born in 1974, and the next census wasn’t until 1980.  If I had died in 1979, I would have slipped through the enormous cracks between censuses.  I always pictured it like wooden slats, with gaps between them where miniature human beings were tumbling into blackness.  Because it would only be children who would experience this — the lack of counting.  You would need to be under ten years old to never become a number in one of the censuses.

*******

And yet, all those children clearly existed.  They don’t in terms of this one government tool, but they clearly existed for every family who lost their child.  One only needs to read a loss blog for a few entries to get a sense of how much that child is missed.

*******

The story of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke starts with a census (so says the little Jewish girl).  The census of Quirinius was taken at regular intervals for tax purposes.  All people needed to travel back to their ancestral city to be counted, regardless of where they lived in the moment, so Joseph and Mary went from Nazareth to Bethlehem, which is about 96 miles according to Google Maps.  Since that is by car and Joseph could have shaved off some time by traveling straight on camel, let’s put it at around an 80 mile trip.  I don’t know if you’ve ever rode a camel — I have — but 80 miles is a long way to ride atop a camel through the desert.  Without ice cream kiosks by the side of the road and an Egged bus to hitch if it gets a little to warm for comfort.  Nazareth is in the northern section of Israel, by Lake Kinneret, and Bethlehem is in central Israel, a little south of Jerusalem.

Other Gospels differ from this account of Jesus’s beginnings, but this is the one I always latched onto because it played into my visualization of our census, of people falling between.  It’s not as if people had a choice; Joseph and Mary were traveling because it was sanctioned by Rome.  But to me, that 80 mile journey shows how deeply we also want to be counted.  We want to count others and we want to be counted ourselves.  This part of the story appeals to me because it is such a human moment; the desire to mark down every single person under your domain.  To know them by numbering them.

 *******

In Judaism, you are not supposed to count people.  It’s minhag (which means “tradition” as opposed to halacha which means “law”) to not count people before they’re born — no baby showers or purchasing items for the baby, for instance.  But it’s halacha to not count people in general.  The main idea is that we aren’t supposed to count people just for the sake of counting people; to satiate our own curiosity.  It’s okay — according to some rabbis — to count the people in the room to make sure you have the required minyan (ten people you need for prayers) because you’re counting people for a good reason.  But it’s never okay to count just to know the number; for instance, to count your guests at a party.

There are different ways around this; for instance, King Saul collected a shard of pottery from each soldier and counted the pieces of ceramic.  As a camp counselor, we used to make sure we had our whole group when we went on field trips by counting them as “not one, not two, not three…”  Even though those two examples would both fit into counting for a good reason — to see if you have enough soldiers, to make sure you’re not leaving a child behind.  Counting the kids in the camp just to see if you have more kids this summer vs. last summer and if that advertising campaign is working would not fit in as a good reason.

So where do blog comments fit into this concept?  Every comment is representative of an actual person; they’re written by real people with real feelings and not robots.  So if we count them, are we inadvertently counting people for all the wrong reasons?  Are we getting hung-up on a number?  And what about stats?  If we look at our stats daily — numbers that count all the individuals who look at our blogs — are we counting to satiate our own ego?  Because there really isn’t a good reason why you would need to see that number beyond how it makes you feel.  That it’s a measure of progress, of feedback as to what resonates.  What doesn’t.

*******

I was folding laundry while sitting on the living room floor.  The twins were playing on this computer programming social media site for kids that they both geek out on daily.  The kids program their own games and app-like things, upload them to their account, and then they can leave comments/questions on each other’s projects.  Yes, I am well aware that my children have more computer skills than I do.

ChickieNob was logged in, checking comments on one of her projects and the Wolvog was standing next to her, running through his usual monologue.

(He is always her greatest cheerleader; he likes to stand by her chair while she works and murmur encouraging things: “You are the smartest girl in the world!  That was such a fantastic idea!  I am so proud of you for doing that math in your head!  This project is going to be wonderful!”  Seriously, I sometimes wish we could bottle him and send him to every person in the world, especially when he stands next to me as I cook and says: “Mommy, you are the best cook in the world!  You are so creative with food!  You make the best pizza!”)

I was in the middle folding a shirt when I heard him say, “and you got 80 comments which is fantastic!  That means you are very popular!”

Something in that made me very uncomfortable.

Melissa: Is it important to be popular?

Wolvog: (prying his eyes away from the screen as if the Mac literally grasps his corneas every time it springs to life) No.

Melissa: But you just told her that it was great that she got 80 comments.  Would it mean the project wasn’t as good if it got 60 comments?

Wolvog: No.

Melissa: What if it got no comments?

Wolvog: But she got 80 comments.

Melissa: I’m just asking, what if the project got no comments.  Does that make it a bad project?

Wolvog: People comment on projects that they like.

Melissa: Do they?  What about the projects they don’t find?  If no one finds the project and therefore no one leaves a comment, does it mean it was bad?

I think I blew his little mind.

We ended up having a great conversation about it.  The Wolvog leaves dozens of comments daily on other people’s projects.  He loves talking about computer programming, and he excitedly makes his way around the site, unabashedly leaving comments everywhere.  He doesn’t look at a project without leaving a comment.  Which means a lot of people know him (and by default, his twin sister since she is the only friend request he has accepted.  It’s an interesting dichotomy — he comments everywhere but he loudly proclaims to a social media site that he is only friends with one person; his sister.  Whereas from what I assume, a lot of people leave few comments but collect many “friend” connections).  They visit his projects because he has visited their projects.

I worry about him latching onto computer-based validation this early in life.  We all know as adults how much meaning we put into comments and page views.  If you comment on this post, I assume that means it resonated with you.  If you don’t comment on this post, I fall into this grey area of wonder — were you busy, reading the post on a phone, did you hate it, was there nothing to say?  If you visit my blog, I assume that means there is something of value you can read here.  But I also know that if you don’t visit my blog, it doesn’t mean my writing or ideas aren’t good enough to hold someone’s attention.  There could be dozens of reasons for why you don’t come.

The rational adult knows not to hold so much stock in numbers.  There are fantastic writers who few know about and there are terrible writers that everyone knows about.

But the emotional adult is like the Wolvog — excited by the number.  Today, 80 comments seem like enough.  But we all know how this goes — 80 views is good, but 90 is better.  90 is reached, the person feels good.  70 is reached the next day and the person wonders what is wrong.  120 is reached and the person wonders how they can do that again.  30 is obtained and the person wonders what is wrong and changes a bunch of things.  20 is obtained and the person changes more things.  80 is obtained and it no longer looks as good as it did.

Humans like to gather information, we like to make sense of things.  We like to count people just for the sake of counting people to know how many people exist.  We like to know how many people read our words, how many people took the time to tell us that our words affected them even minutely.

As humans, we like to be counted.  We like the idea of being recognized, of our existence being marked.  We all aim to leave something behind in this world — a child, an invention, a book, a business — that marks the fact that we were here after we’re gone.  We want to know that we’ve been counted, noticed, noted.

The census, the comments, the page views — these are all examples of externally sourced validation of our existence, our importance.  Numbers matter  to us, as much as we say they don’t.  If they didn’t matter, we wouldn’t tie up our self-worth in them, in the amount of money we make vs. the fact that we make money.  The size of our house vs. the fact that we have a house.  The number vs. the quality of our friends on Facebook.

With few exceptions, numbers matter to people: that is a self-evident truth that we can’t dismiss.  We may focus on different numbers — how many times we have sex per month vs. how many people bought our book vs. how many people attended our presentation — but we all focus on numbers somewhere in our life because they’re the measuring stick for our self-esteem.  They’re the concrete example we can point at that say “I matter.  I am here.  I am noticed.  I am counted.  I have worth.”  We don’t count the things that are meaningless to know; the blades of grass on our lawn instead of the number of bathrooms in the house.  We count what matters to us, and that is often people and our connections to them.  Humans want to connect.

What do you count?  What numbers matter to you?

*******

I have, I fear, at least one more post in me about external validation all based on the Wolvog and his love of the Internet.  Coming soon.

On Friday night, Josh mentioned an NPR piece he heard about Anonymous shutting down the Internet on March 31st.  The Wolvog immediately started to panic: Why would someone do this?  And how could they do it?  And would they do it?  What would happen to his blog or his favourite sites?  The same questions again and again in a loop, like a panicked drop of water circling the drain.

We alternated between reassuring him — Mashable says it won’t happen — and giving him some perspective — It will be like a blackout.  You’ll just do whatever you do during a blackout.

We actually had a blackout last week for a few hours and he didn’t do very well with the concept of no Internet at that point either.  It didn’t matter that he wouldn’t have been on the computer anyway because we were eating dinner during the bulk of the outage and doing homework during the rest.  Just the idea of not being able to go on the Internet was terrifying.

His first words when he woke up Saturday morning were, “do we still have the Internet?”

*******

A few weeks ago, I walked out of the house without my phone to run errands.  I was walking across the parking lot at the library when I subconsciously touched my hip to check for my cell phone (unsnapping the seat belt sometimes knocks it off in the car), didn’t find it, and then realized that I had left it on my bed.

My first thought was to go back home — a long drive — and retrieve it, which would mean not having time to get to most of my errands.  I justified it with the idea that the twins’ school would be unable to reach me if there was a problem.  But let’s be honest.  If there was truly a problem, they’d call Josh.  They’d call my mother.  And what were the chances that a problem would happen in the next half hour?

I wanted the phone because I wanted access to email.

Because emails coming in make me feel connected to the world.  People need to reach me.  They need to ask me questions, they need to tell me things.  Comments from posts are emailed to me and Facebook messages.  I like the feeling of the phone buzzing to let me know there are emails because each buzz means that I am someone that people want to speak to; to interact with.  If they’re speaking to me, I exist.  If they have something to say to me, I must be of some importance.

I know; once I realized this I slapped myself and went in the library, my figurative tail between my legs.

I got out books, ran to the food store, went to the school for pick-up, and drove home.  I survived, and even took extra minutes before walking upstairs to retrieve my phone to prove a point.  I can quit you anytime, technology.

Who am I kidding?

*******

I’m a random towner.

A long time ago, I was sitting with my boyfriend (now, ex-boyfriend) and a few of his friends and my friends combined.  We had just driven up to New York from D.C.  In the car, we had talked about how one of my favourite things to do when driving somewhere is pull off the road in a random town.  My boyfriend (1) refused to do this on our drive up (admittedly, there are very few exits off the highway between D.C. and NY that I haven’t already explored so I didn’t really need to do it again this trip) and (2) thought it was strange enough to bring up as a discussion point with our collection of friends.

He asked who else did this: who else was a random towner vs. a non-random towner.

I started doing it when I first got my license.  I drove down River Road, and when I got to the end, I made a right.  I found an old general store and some farms, and then the road wound around to a small shopping district that I never knew about.  Later on, I took River Road to the end and made a left, and followed it for almost an hour.  I just liked to see where roads went; but moreover, I liked getting out of the car and walking around knowing that (1) no one knew me and (2) no one could reach me.  It was almost like disappearing.

I still do this all the time, usually dragging along the twins.  Except now it doesn’t feel quite like disappearing.  If I can’t find my way back home, I can always use the map function on the phone.  And people can call me or email me.  I am always still connected to the rest of the world.  When I did it back in graduate school, before I had a cell phone, I felt like I was completely erased in those moments when I was off the road I was supposed to be on and in this random town.  Even a few years ago, when I had a phone that made calls but didn’t receive email, I could still feel like someone made out of ether, not really noticed or retained by the people around me because I’m a random stranger just passing through.  No one of consequence.  But now, I have the cell phone on my hip, buzzing buzzing buzzing to let me know that people are trying to communicate with me.  It is comforting — it is actually more comforting than not.  But it’s also a tether.  Tethers have a way of limiting our mobility even while making us feel part of something.

*******

A long time ago, all my validation came from face-to-face interactions and the telephone.  I got email in college, but it was something I checked once a day like the post box.  There was usually a message or two in my inbox.  Ten years ago, I got most of my validation from face-to-face interactions and the telephone and a bit of my validation from email.  Five years ago, I got some of my validation from face-to-face interactions and some of my validation from email, and that is where it has remained in a precarious balance.

People interact with me in the face-to-face world and it lets me know that they see me as important, worth attention, someone of consequence.  They make plans with me for playdates for our kids or to join me at yoga or to ask my opinion on something.  We grab coffee and talk, or we stand outside, chatting on someone’s driveway.  Josh shows me in twenty thousand ways every day (wait!  It’s the $20,000!) that he loves me, he chose me.  Out of all the girls in the world, he picked me to be his wife and that action proves my importance; I matter to someone.  My friends picked me to be friends with and that action proves my importance; I matter to them.

I exist.  I’m important.  If I disappeared tomorrow people would notice.  They need me to reshelve books at the library or they’ll sit on the reshelving cart!  The twins need me to buy them yogurt at the store!  My friend needs me to watch her kids after school!  The girl scout troop would be leaderless without me!  I believe all humans need to feel this validation one way or the other — we need to know that we couldn’t slip off the earth unnoticed.  If we never returned to the main road we’re supposed to be on, people would miss us.  The random town is a vacation from the tethers of reality, a chance to disappear for an hour only to reappear again.  A magic trick under my own control.

I think the problem the Wolvog revealed to me is how much we are dependent on the Internet to bring us our validation.  That we’ve stopped noticing that we get a lot of it in the face-to-face world, or we devalue that validation, or maybe we plum don’t have it. (I know too many people who have great connections online but are underappreciated in their face-to-face world.)

But the Internet is a delivery system that is subject to outages.  That isn’t accessible at all times.  The Wolvog heard the Internet was going away for a day and he heard it as his validation was going away; his messages from friends on the kid’s social networking site he frequents, his games he plays online that display his high score for others to see.  The Internet makes him feel important, needed, noticed.

I worry because the twins will never remember a time when they didn’t have the Internet that they can return to during times when it’s not accessible.  The power goes out and unless I have a deadline at work, I shrug and read a book.  There are plenty of non-electricity-based activities I enjoy doing just as much as I enjoy using the computer to connect with people.  I think it is much harder for this upcoming generation to do that — to feel okay being unconnected to people through technology, even if it’s only for a day.  My son experiences what I felt in the parking lot but doesn’t have the history to create perspective and walk into the library to finish his errands.  He mentally stands in the parking lot thinking over and over again: I’m untethered, I’m untethered, I’m untethered.

And I also think, as I saw with my ex-boyfriend, that there are people who never enjoy being untethered, whereas there are those of us who like the disappearing magic trick as long as it is within our control.  It’s just two valid yet different ways of seeing the world.

*******

I don’t want you to think this topic ends here.  There are a few additional roads off of this one, random towns.  And I want to pull off the main road to explore them too.  It’s just taking me a moment to get my thoughts unjumbled.  Sometimes they feel like puzzle pieces and there is a hand in my head bringing the picture together.

I just wanted to pause here to let you know how grateful I am to you when you let me know that I’m here, that I’m heard, that you’ve considered my words, that I’m important enough to communicate with, that I exist and people have noticed that.

Pesach is coming up, which means that I have to flip the house, which is a fancy way of saying “spring cleaning when you’re also getting rid of all of the grains in your house.”  A long time ago, someone told me that once I had children, I would stop flipping my house.  Which has only made me more hardcore in my house flipping.  Scrubbing between the shower tiles with a toothbrush and bleach?  Check.  Taking apart the vacuum and cleaning out the vacuum parts?  Check and check.

A person does not need to get to this level of cleaning in order to get the house ready for Pesach, but I do love having a reason to clean this thoroughly, to get rid of the piles of paper and the bits of clutter and make the world feel orderly again.

The way I do it is that I declutter the weeks leading up to Pesach and do a semi-deep clean over a long period of time.  I’ll do the baseboards one day, clean out drawers another day.  I never clean for longer than an hour.  Then, once the house is completely decluttered and prepped after what I like to call the Slow Cleaning Phase (SCP), I do a two-hour Hardcore Cleaning Phase (HCP).  It’s like a slow stretch moving into a sprint.  Except the sprint isn’t taxing because I’m not trying to declutter and clean at the same time.  See, it’s just a little bit brilliant.

The other thing I do is leave a set of cleaning supplies in every room.  I go buy the four pack at Costco and open all four Clorox wipes containers at once.  That way, I don’t have to consciously set aside time to clean.  I just grab the wipes and start cleaning surfaces as I move into the room, and five minutes later, everything looks (at least surfacewise) better. I’m not just talking about in the spring — I do this all year long.  But it makes the SCP that much easier.

Can you tell that I’ve put waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much thought into my cleaning routine?

What are your cleaning tips?  Especially for keeping baseboards dust-free, but truly, everything else too.

In cleaning, I found paid apps that I haven’t downloaded and I am turning them over to you if you want them.  All I have to do is send you the download code (a string of numbers and letters) and you can go into iTunes and hit “redeem” (if you’re in the iTunes store, the redeem button is at the bottom of the screen).

So here is how this will work.  I’ve put a number next to the apps I have and linked them to their iTunes description page.  In a comment, leave the numbers of the ones you want (for example, 1 and 3) and if you’d take any of them, write “all.”  I’ll randomly pick the winners on Monday evening and send that person an email with the code.  Sound good?

1. Tetris (you know, the game with the falling shapes and you have to line them up and… we all know Tetris, right?)
2. Bejeweled (the gem game that everyone describes as addictive, but I can’t figure out)
3. Chocolate Fix (one of my favourite games of all time)