A few alternatives

I passed about 30 of these signs the other day....

The other day I was on my way home from work when I passed a sign just like this one.  Then I passed about 30 more.  These signs lined a road that led to an elementary school that many students walk to on a daily basis.  I'm not opposed to the occasional reminder that encourages safer driving, but these signs seemed a bit over the top to me.  Particularly a whole street lined with them.

So I thought up a few alternatives that could be printed on signs and placed on roads.  All are statements that I feel are more inclusive.  Here are a few:

• Drive safe!
• Watch out for pedestrians! 
• Slow down! 
• Pay attention!
• Yield to pedestrians!
• Safety first!
• Don't drive like an asshole!

Feel free to add a more suggestions in the comments!

July/August reading

One of my 2015 goals was to read at least two books per month and to write about it on my blog.  I decided that all of the books that I read would be just for fun, not job related reading.  I've done a pretty decent job keeping up with my goal.  From January-June I read 14.75 books (links here).  Unfortunately  I forgot to write my monthly post about my July reading until August was nearly over so I decided to save it and combine my July and August reading.  So without further ado, here are the books I read in July and August.

Quinn by Iris Johansen
This was a mystery novel that is part of a trilogy, I think, and not the first book in the trilogy.  The writing wasn't superb, I felt like most of the story was just fluff and was stringing me along.  It also ended in a cliffhanger, which I didn't like, but my disgust wasn't strong enough to read the other books.  Maybe I would have liked this book more had I read the first book in the trilogy first?  I don't think so.  This book was just meh.  I didn't hate it but I didn't love it.

One Plus One by JoJo Moyes
Yep, another JoJo Moyes book.  I really love her writing.  Just enough to suck me in, but an easy enough read that I can polish it off in a night or two.  One of my favorite parts about her writing is that she tells the story from the perspective of several different characters which not a lot of authors manage do do as seamlessly.  If you want a quick, easy, feel good read, pick this book up.  Or any JoJo Moyes book, for that matter.

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith
I read this book at Klara's recommendation.  Well, she read the second book in the series, but I wanted to start with the first (see above for the pitfalls of not starting with the first).  Robert Galbraith is one of JK Rowling's pen names so I had high expectations.  It couldn't be more different than Harry Potter, but I wasn't disappointed at all.  I loved this book.  Intelligent writing.  Excellent plot.  I highly recommend this book and I can't wait to read the next in the series!

Marcelo In The Real World by Francisco X. Stork
This book is in the adolescent literature genre and is written from the perspective of a young man with Aspergers Syndrome.  I read it because a friend had high praise for the book and loaned it to me.  Plus I have an interest in the Autism Spectrum, so it was interesting to read a book from the first person perspective.  I thought it was a pretty good book.  It's probably not for everybody, unless you have an interest in adolescent lit or Autism, but it was good nonetheless.

So I believe this brings me to 18.75 books for the year.  I might have come up a bit short a few months so far, but I think I'll definitely hit 24 books for the year and have my two book per month average!  

Hard is hard

The response to my last blog post has been overwhelming.  Both the comments as well as personal emails seem to indicate that I struck a nerve.  A piece like that has been bouncing around my head for a long time and not being chosen for the article (while expected) was the catalyst that I needed.

The funny thing is that I almost didn't start this blog, for exactly some of the reasons I talked about in my last post.  I was worried that I wouldn't be taken seriously because we didn't try every single possible thing to get pregnant.  I didn't know if I would be accepted.  I wasn't sure that people would take me seriously.  I worried that people would read that my husband and I decided against fertility treatments and write me off.

My fears weren't exactly unfounded either.  You see, right around the time when it was becoming pretty obvious that getting pregnant was going to take longer than we thought it would, I joined a large online TTC forum.  It took a few months but I found my niche and fell into a small(ish) group of really supportive women.  They kept me sane during the hard parts of TTC.  They supported me through testing and diagnosis.  But when they found out that we weren't going to do IVF, many turned their backs on me.  Then when we stopped TTC they just didn't understand how we could do that. When I got the IUD (mind you, for medical reasons, my body did a just fine job preventing pregnancy without assistance) the comments ranged from "you'll change your mind" to "I can't believe you're giving up."  My personal favorite was "you're the worst nightmare of someone who is still TTC."  I haven't been on that forum in probably six months.

But as it turns out, I had nothing to worry about.  This community accepted me for who I was without condition or hesitation.  It's always seemed like a natural fit.  This community understood that I wanted kids, that it didn't work out for me, and that I was having a hard time with it.  My "rap sheet" wasn't a prerequisite for acceptance.  Despite this unequivocal acceptance I still sort of felt out of place.  I was never pregnant.  I never experienced the loss of a child.  I never went through fertility treatments.  I felt like my story wasn't important because I hadn't lost as much as others.  This was 100% me.  Nobody made me feel this way, I completely brought it on myself.  Maybe this is a me thing or maybe other women do this too, constantly comparing themselves to others, with the end result usually being feeling bad about myself.

Admittedly I am stubborn and sometimes rather than just accepting what is, I need a swift kick in the ass to really understand something.  That swift kick in the ass came during one of my insomnia episodes when I read one of Justine's posts at Ever Upward (that I'm too lazy to go and find right now and properly link it) where she pointed out that hard is hard.  That one person's hard isn't any more or less hard than another person's hard.  It's just hard.  All of a sudden it made sense.  Comparing my hard to another's hard would never lead to anything good.  It was a lightbulb moment.

In Justine's post she gave the link a TEDx talk given by Ash Beckham where she touches on the topic of "hard is hard."  If you have 10 free minutes and you haven't already seen it, click on the link, you'll thank me later.  There are so many take aways from it.

Ash said:

There is no harder, there is just hard.  We need to stop ranking our hard against everyone else's hard to make us feel better or worse about our closest and just commiserate on the fact that we all have hard.

I think that pretty much says it all.

As I'm nearing the conclusion of this post I realize that it probably should have come before the last post.  And both of these posts probably would have been a great lead up to my one year blogaversary post.  But oh well.  I've swam against the current for my whole life so why would this be any different?  It's just who I am as a person. :)

Anyway, thank you all for welcoming me and accepting me without hesitation, even when I couldn't quite accept my own hard.  I think that I finally understand why you did.

My story is important too

Recently I was introduced to a reporter for a nationally published women's magazine who is planning to write a story on women who battled infertility but end their journey without children. She wanted to profile a few women in her story and was reaching out to a few people.  I'll be honest, I was scared shitless when I sent her the small blurb about our story and a couple of pictures of myself because, let's face it, if chosen I would go from being relatively anonymous in an obscure corner of the blogosphere to having my name and possibly picture published in a national women's magazine.  But I thought to myself "announcing" my infertility in a national publication would be pretty badass.

The reporter was very upfront that she was gathering blurbs from multiple women and then she planned to take everything to her editor and decide how to proceed from there and that sending her a short blurb was by no means a guarantee that my story would be published.  I knew from the beginning that my story was a long shot to be published. I wasn't chosen to be profiled.  To be clear, I'm not upset or hurt, not even a little bit.  And I'm not surprised.   Lets face it, the goal of a women's magazine is to sell issues, and sensational headlines sell magazines.  Mine headline isn't sensational at all.  In fact, "Infertile Woman Doesn't Pursue Treatment But Still Grieves That She Will Never Have Children" is probably a headline better suited for The Onion than a women's magazine.

Catchy headline or not, I think my story is important to share.  I think that there are a whole lot of women (couples) that fall into the same category as me (and my husband), couples who are infertile but don't or can't seek treatment.  For us there wasn't any one particular reason that we didn't do IVF.  It just felt like the right decision for us.  We went as far as we were willing to go and were willing to accept any consequences as a result of our decision.  We were on the same page from the start.  There wasn't even much discussion.  We just knew it wasn't for us.  This isn't to say it wasn't hard because it was gut wrenching.

Other couples have religious objections to IVF.  Catholicism comes immediately to mind.  Others have ethical issues with IVF.  What to do with any frozen embryos is a question that many are faced with.  Gender screening.  Genetic testing. It's a whole can of worms.  There are no easy answers and there are no universally correct answers.  The right answer is what is right for the couple.

For many couples, the cost of IVF is insurmountable.  Not everybody of reproductive age has a spare $15-20 grand laying around to pay for a medical treatment that, best case, has a 70% failure rate.  In fact I would guess that many people don't have that much laying around without tapping into home equity or retirement.  I'll never forget after we received our infertility diagnosis we were ushered into a room to talk to the IVF nurse and then to another room to talk with the financial manager (notice how I said ushered, at no point were we asked if we wanted to talk to these people, but we were reeling from the news we'd just received and couldn't say no).  The finance manager was talking about paying for IVF and gave us a brochure about financing IVF through a specific company.  Since my sarcasm often comes out at times such as these I remember saying something to the effect of "yeah, that's probably at a 25% interest rate too" to which the finance manager replied "actually I think it's only around 22%."  Now I'm no economist or accountant but that sure seems like predatory lending to me.

But the point is that there are a lot of people who don't or can't pursue advanced fertility treatments.  It doesn't mean that the couple didn't try hard enough.  It doesn't mean that they didn't want it bad enough.  It doesn't mean that it was God's will.  Or that they wouldn't have made great parents.  They are good enough.  They did want it enough.  They would have been awesome parents.  And God (if such a being actually exists) doesn't have a damn thing to do with fertility (or infertility).

At the end of the day I'm grateful to have been given the opportunity to correspond with the reporter.  Doing so took me far out of my comfort zone.  But you know what?  The sky didn't fall.  The training wheels came off of the bike and I didn't wreck.  I grew.  I don't know what this means going forward. On one hand I feel like maybe I have found my voice (or at least my confidence) but on the other hand I don't think I'm ready for an infertility coming out party.  But what I know for certain is that my story is important too.

One year blogaversary

Cheesy, but seems to fit.
Photo Credit: my Facebook newsfeed

I started this blog one year ago today, mainly because I had a lot of "stuff" that I needed to get off of my chest.  Blogging appealed to me for two main reasons: first, there seemed to be a small but extremely supportive community; and second because of accountability-I knew that I couldn't hide behind my grief, fear, anxiety, whatever, if I had a blog.

A year later I can confirm that, while still small, this community is so very supportive and has welcomed me with open arms.  A year later I can also confirm that knowing that people read my words has been a source of accountability, because it forces me to deal with the tough stuff.

When I started this blog, I did it for me.  I figured that a few people might stumble across it eventually, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would get 12,836 page views from all over the world.  I never dreamt that I would get 100, or 1000, or 10,000.  This blows my mind.

My writing isn't the greatest and most of my posts have multiple typos, but this is partially by design. For the most part I sit and write and punch "publish" without much editing because sometimes I second guess myself.  I worry if people will judge me or think I'm crazy or whatever.  So before I lose the courage, I post.  It's what I need to do right now.  Maybe at some point I'll get past this, and if not, that's ok.

I'm really terrible with this sentimental stuff.  Writing it out has been so difficult but so cathartic.  I've grown so much in those 92 posts.  All 624 comments have been read and most responded to.  It means so much to know that people cared about me enough to read my posts and make a comment.  I do not have words to adequately express my gratitude.

Since starting this blog, my husband and I survived our first holiday season knowing that we'd never have our own kids and it turned out to be wonderful, I survived the pregnancies of two sisters and the births of two nieces, I suffered a painful casualty of infertility when I lost a really good friend, I made the impossible decision to get an IUD, I survived Mothers' Day and Father's Day, I turned another year older and celebrated my first birthday where I new for sure there wouldn't be a pregnancy or baby by my next birthday, and so many things in between.

I sense that there's going to be a few rough months ahead with my sister's recent pregnancy announcement so I will really need this space.  I'm so much stronger and in a better place than I was this time last year, and this is in no small part to every person who reads this blog.

And then there was me

I found out one sister was pregnant last summer.  My niece was born in early February.

I found out another sister was pregnant last fall.  My niece was born in early June.

I found out today that my third sister is pregnant.  Due in February.  It wasn't unexpected.  I'm happy for her (them).  It wasn't easy for them to conceive.  It took two years and several IUIs.

Thankfully I do not have any more sisters (or brothers).

I'm taking it hard.

Brain dump

There are so many things I want to write about right now but spare time evades me so I will just do a brain dump, complete with bullet points.

• Over the weekend I read New York Times article titled A Grief So Deep It Won't Die (article link).  The title alone attracted me to the article because, lets face it, I (and presumably most of the readers of this blog) have a bit of experience with grief.  As it turns out, the article was about Complicated Grief.  I've heard the descriptor used in this community and I assumed that someone in our community came up with this term and really it did seem to fit because our grief is so complicated and so unlike anything that most people will ever experience.  I didn't feel the need to do anymore research before the weekend when I read the article but as it turns out this syndrome first began to be described in the 1990s and is actually a pretty well researched.  I actually had a longer post planned on this topic, and maybe I'll still write it, but I wanted to post the article because I can't see any extra time coming my way for a couple of weeks.
• My dog had to get six stitches in his ear last week.  Even though he had to be put under anesthesia to get the stitches, he was completely unbothered by the whole thing.  I wish I had his attitude.
• We had to drop a substantial sum of money at the mechanic to fix my car.  I very much would have preferred to spend that money on something more fun (e.g., a vacation).
• Each year the university that I work at has a ceremony to welcome the incoming freshman before the start of the new semester, and that ceremony was yesterday.  Part of me was struck by the fact that I'll have a chance to have direct contact with and potentially impact the lives of about 10% of the matriculating class, but the rest of me was hit by the realization that I'll never get to drop my child of at college.  Ouch.
• I realized that I forgot to do my July reading post so I'm going to wait until the end of August and do a combined July/August reading post.  :)
• My one year blogoversary is rapidly approaching.  Hard to believe it's been (almost) a year!  
• Fight Song by Rachel Platten has been a really meaningful song to me lately.  The video is quite cheesy, but I love the song!  Have a listen: 

I hope you are having a fabulous week!