458th Friday Blog Roundup

Okay, I’ll bite.

There is a story going around of an infertile vegetarian who finally ate meat once she became pregnant after IVF and the media credits meat for her ability to carry her pregnancy.

This is the headline: “Vegetarian eats meat, falls pregnant with triplets.”

Unless “falling pregnant” includes doing three rounds of IVF to get pregnant and THEN eating meat, the meat had nothing to do with treating her infertility.  Whether it helped her to carry to term is unprovable.  Certainly a lot of protein is needed to carry a triplet pregnancy.  Even with twins, we had to resort to tricks such as “double the milk,” melting powdered milk into regular milk to up the protein content in the drink.

But meat isn’t the only way to get protein, and I would argue that it’s not even the easiest way to intake healthy protein.  It’s easier to open two lids — one for Greek yogurt with 17 grams of protein and another for a serving of peanuts with 24 grams of protein — for a 41 grams of protein meal vs. preparing a 30 grams of protein chicken breast when you’re already queasy and tired.  Yes, while eating meat may work for a certain person who doesn’t include a lot of other protein sources in their diet, vegetarian-heavy diets that are common in various religions and other parts of the world point to the fact that you don’t need to eat meat to have a baby.

I am so tired of the one-solution-fits-all presentation of ideas in the media.

But the thing is, giving up vegetarianism isn’t something she did because she was willing to do anything including choke down meat to carry her triplets.  The reason she started eating meat is that she had a craving:

“But then my hunger kicked in and despite never eating meat I craved it. I ate about six meals a day.”

She craved it in the same way that I craved banana bread during pregnancy even though I never ate it beforehand and haven’t eaten it since.  Similarly, the woman is back to being a vegetarian.

I think it rocks that this women did something that works for her, but the coverage of it is inane.  It is being treated as one more “just how far will you go to have that child of your dreams?”  Just how desperate are desperate people?  And if you’re not willing to do likewise (whatever that likewise may be: do IVF, adopt, eat meat), then the message is that you must not want it “enough.”

Mark my words: someone is going to have a blog post between now and Christmas where a family member suggests eating more meat in order to become pregnant.  Who wants to take me up on a bet?

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Twitter: the Party EVERYONE was Invited to” (Fox in the Hen House)
• “The Other Woman” (a guest post)
• “This is My Body, Sacred and Scarred” (Five Kids is A Lot of Kids)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Old Lady and No Baby has a post about announcing her pregnancy on Facebook.  After hesitating for a long time, she finally posted the news and got to experience the joy of a (very) long-awaited pregnancy announcement.  The post just made me smile.

Life As I Know It has a post about the blahs, as explained: “You know how when you get overwhelmed with life and you just can’t seem to come up with the words to purge your brain of all the insanity?”  I think it was the line about being tired of fighting all the time that got under my skin and made me nod.

A+ Effort (new name of an old blogger) has a post about how she chose the new name as well as how she chose the gold star for her avatar.  I like this post because I think too often we’re focused on judging ourselves (and others) by the end product and don’t take into account effort.  Effort counts for a lot; maybe even more than the big successes that come easily.

Similarly, Mama Asterisk (another old blogger in a new space) has a post about why she moved places.  I love love love this explanation for the new digs: “Because, you see, this blog is about me. And with the old blog focused on getting to my son, it was really his story. And I no longer feel comfortable telling his story to the world. His story belongs to him. This is my story. He may make some cameo appearances, but this space belongs to me.”

And continuing in that vein, If You Don’t Stand for Something has a post about missing her blog and needing her space.  Feeling unable to write, she takes those bottled up feelings into the face-to-face world.  I love it when she says: “When I woke up today, I just told myself to write anything, any feelings I had, just to put them to paper (er…tablet?) and get them out there and have faith that eventually the words would come again and the feeling of normalcy would slowly make its way back into my life.”  But really, it was this brilliant thought: “I feel like there are all these mountains and each one is something I’m trying to conquer: feeling ‘normal’ again, resolving our infertility, husband, work, family, friends. Each one is its own mountain and I’m trying to climb them all at once.” that made me love this post so much.  No one can climb multiple mountains at the same time, so if those extra problems aren’t like annoying mountain climbing partners, they need to wait their turn.  Glad she’s writing again.

MoJo Working has a post about having one foot in the infertile world and one foot in the pregnancy world and feeling out of sorts.  She writes: “That’s how I’m feeling these days. Like I’m in that shadowy no-mans land. Not happily ensconced in pregnancy, nor railing against infertility.”  I love this post because she so eloquently sums up what so many of us feel when we enter that state of disbelief, unable to give ourselves over fully since we’ve been burned before.

Lastly, Once a Mother has a very moving post on what should have been her daughter’s fifth birthday.  It’s a life that was lived in 28 days, but it is so clear from the love radiating from the words on the screen that Peyton’s mark in this world was enormous.  I couldn’t read this post without crying.

The roundup to the Roundup: Eating meat will [not] get you pregnant.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 30th and September 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.