Please Lend Your Support

Another Day in the Chi

Planning is for Suckers

I have been forced against my will to wear a suit today. Apparently because I am such a legal eagle, I must don these oh-so-sophisticated threads. This didn’t used to bother me. In fact, I used to enjoy it. It made me feel strong, savvy - at any moment I was going to walk up those steps from (insert TV legal drama here), pause, turn and say something profound to (insert client, news media, adversary) and leave them quaking in their boots. Lately, however, perhaps because I have to wear a suit more and more, it’s beginning to feel like an annoying chore. And beyond that–I’m beginning to get a tad porky. As I sit here, I can barely breathe, my chest is popping out of my shirt and my pants are suffocating me at the waist. I have been having a pretty constant obsession with my weight these days (OK, who am I kidding? This isn’t exactly new) and I am sure, driving my husband completely insane (who has thankfully never said an unprompted word about it - despite the fact that I have blown up and deflated this past year with as much regularity as a kid’s party balloon). I have told him several times that I didn’t want to try this month, or last month or the month prior because of my weight (I did anyway, however). I site statistics, health issues related to weight, birth defects, labor and delivery complications, hypertension, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes and a higher risk of death for both baby and mother. There’s no guarantee that I will have any of those problems (if I am lucky enough to get pregnant and stay pregnant–not forever, mind you, just the requisite 10 months) and it’s quite possible that I won’t. It’s also possible that I could have some of those problems at a healthy weight. Since we began our "odyssey", I’ve gained about 15 pounds. My husband does not think that my weight is an issue. My sister does not think that my weight is an issue. But I do think that my weight is an issue. Although I do know and understand the formula for weight loss and could write a very thin, unpopular book on the subject (eat less! move more!) I cannot make myself DO IT. I am having trouble motivating myself beyond the momentary delight of cookie dough ice cream (but oh, how I love thee, cookie dough ice cream, with your cookie dough and your ice cream). And so, I complain. And moan. And look sadly at beloved clothes that no longer fit. And I think, should I just try to get pregnant, tubby as I am, and try to lose it later? Should I really MAKE AN EFFORT and try to lose the weight now? Am I ruining my chances of a healthy pregnancy by waiting and waiting? Am I putting myself and an infant at risk at this weight? Am I just trying to avoid something that I am afraid will end badly? When I was in the spring-in-your-steps-twenties, and I thought about having children, I decided that thirty-four sounded like a pretty good age to have children. I would be established in my career, I would have a house (or so I thought), I would likely have spent many years solo with the husband (true). Thirty-four is also the age of my mother when she had me. Despite the fact that many of my classmates thought that my father was my grandfather (he is two years older than my mother), I thought it was pretty cool to have older parents. They were and are very independent. They loved us but didn’t live for us. They had their own lives. Thirty-four seemed pretty good. So, that was the plan. Have a baby at age thirty-four. I am thirty-four. Right now. I will, however, be thirty-five in just a few months. I will never have a child at age thirty-four. And that has not gone by unnoticed.

I've Been Outed

The Cape was lovely. It was cold. We spent a lot of time huddling under the covers at the Inn, listening to the wind whipping about. It felt very, I don’t know, Irish. We took walks through the winding streets, admired the tiny, tiny houses, explored the art museum. Snow came down briefly. And we went running in the dark close to the sea. On the drive home, we argued over a plastic knife (I dropped it between the seats of the car, the husband didn’t want to turn around, I was incensed that he would suggest that I wipe it off or use my fingers) and stopped briefly in Providence. We went searching for espresso and the husband deftly followed the grungy, oh-so-hip looking kid up the hill until we found one. It was a nice weekend.

Today, a few co-workers and I took Jim, who is transferring upstate, out to lunch. A woman I don’t really know discussed her twins, her four IVFs and her four year struggle with infertility. Jim then proceeded to ask if I will need to do IVF. I have never discussed past miscarriages or fertility issues with Jim. He has, however, asked on several occasions why I don’t have kids yet if I want to have kids. He is nosy. And young. And clueless. However, he has apparently gleaned from our conversations that there might be a problem, despite the fact that I thought I had cleverly concealed it. I don’t particularly want to talk about miscarriage and fertility with co-workers. I wasn’t thrilled to have to tell my boss about it the last time--and did so only at the urging of my husband who thought that my sudden and sporadic absences from work was a little suspect. Because I have dealt with insensitive, ridiculous, uneducated inquiries and statements from my own close, dear friends, I’m really disinterested in discussing such things with people at work. As I didn’t know how to respond, I told the truth and proceeded to feel vulnerable, awkward and exposed. The woman, who is nice and kind and smart and well-meaning, asked if I had miscarried due to stress. Actually, I said, I miscarried because I am a vegetarian who runs, has sex, listens to a lot of loud noises, sits in the car too long and likes to lift heavy boxes full of files.

And A Fab Time It Was

The Cape

My husband and I are going to the Cape this weekend. It dawned on me, recently, after an annoyed hotelkeep phoned to inquire about our estimated time of arrival (he asked for the information ages ago), that I booked a bed and breakfast. I did not mean to book a bed and breakfast. I unwittingly, apparently, reserved a bed and breakfast when I was directed there by another hotel in the area. I hate bed and breakfasts. I am not "good B&B people". I do not like having someone flit around asking me about myself. I do not like the prying inquiries of a stranger that I will likely never meet again (I suppose I can nip that in the bud by mentioning my infertility woes). I do not like being told that I cannot make phone calls or play cards after 9 pm. But nothing beats the hostel/B&B in Amsterdam. No sex. Men and women, even if married, were not allowed to sleep in the same room. I slept in a bunk next to a young woman who wore full make-up and a black merry widow to bed. She would lay down, wrestle with the blankets, snooze for a moment, and then leap out of bed, run to the common room, come back, lay down, and start all over again. This went on all night long. Anyway, we are apparently going to a very gay friendly area on the Cape. I’m looking forward to it. Hopefully no one in a black merry widow will be wandering the halls at night. But one never knows.

An Odd Clip or Two

I love my mother. She’s a tad quirky (in fact, she actually aspires to be considered "eccentric." When I told her that such aspirations make her in fact, eccentric, she was delighted). Since my mother has discovered that she can send packages to my office address, thereby avoiding forcing her son-in-law to trudge uptown to the post office before five, I have been bombarded with packages. My mother does not send homemade cakes and cookies or knitted hats. My mother sends clothes that she no longer wears but cannot part with or clothes that I will never wear but she believes that I should, odds and ends that somehow make her think of me and newspaper clippings. Today’s bounty included: 1) a new pale turquoise carpenter skirt with toggles, 2) a very lovely small ceramic vase that I actually purchased myself but couldn’t
fit into my suitcase the last time I was there, 3) an article entitled, "Where Rush Hour Now Lasts 5 Hours", 4) a small torn blurb from a magazine that has been carefully taped together about buying a house, 5) a note about how glad she is that I get to keep my job (I get to keep my job!), 6) an article entitled, "GM Gets Serious about Alternative Cars", 7) a clipping of an enlarged photograph of a monk that says, "The Gift of the Moment: Taking the Time to Just Be", 8) an article entitled, "A Few Ground Rules for Saving the Oceans"; 9) a small pad of paper imprinted with "Department of Ecology Water Quality Program", 10) a clipping from a clothing catalog showing a pair of shoes with a note that they remind her of a pair of her mother’s from the 1920s or 1930s that she used to clomp around in as a kid, 11) a small vial of expensive shampoo, 12) an article entitled, "A Year’s Worth of Wicked Weather", and 13) a supplement to the New York Times, entitled, "Washington Super Lawyers 2006." There was a time I found this highly embarrassing. It was difficult to explain to my then-boyfriend, now-husband why my mother insisted on sending these little packages of clippings by mail when we lived not twenty minutes away. I am now both pleased and amused by these small bits from my mother’s life. I now realize that as she reads through the newspaper or her ten metric tons of magazines she receives each month that she is thinking of me. Who needs cookies and woolen hats when there is interesting reading to be done and odd cargo skirts to try on?

Negatory

I have amassed quite a collection of pregnancy books over the last two years. I take them out (when pregnant). I put them back (when not). I’ll be making the great round-up to put them back on that low shelf sometime this evening. I had a faint positive earlier in the week. I used two different tests on two different days. Today, however, it was most definitely negative. Perhaps those other tests showed evaporation lines. Perhaps it was chemical. This morning, two days prior to when I should really be taking such a test, there was no line at all. I would imagine that the line should be getting darker, not fainter or non-existent. As I have the complication of the Rh factor, I may need to have blood drawn to confirm a negative in order to determine if I need a RhoGam shot or not. I hope, honestly, that it was not a chemical pregnancy. I don’t want to start feeling like the folic acid is simply snake oil.

It’s been a weird week, at any rate. It’s amazing what you can convince yourself of: Nausea? Check. Enlarged Breasts? Check. Sleepiness? Check. Forgetfulness? Check. It would just be too easy to have gotten pregnant and carried to term in the first month of trying (again).

I most definitely believe some cookies are in order.

It Ain't Easy Being Green

I was feeling very green today. As in green to the blog world. I received my first negative comment and thought, “Huzzah! First negative comment. This is cause for celebration!” Actually, I thought, “I don’t really want to get into a lot of controversy here. If I really am pregnant, I need to remain calm. I need to try to stay relaxed.” I deal with controversy and angry people on a daily basis. In my job. I don’t really want this site to be rife with people’s anger and negative comments. On the drive in, before the comment, I was thinking about deleting the post because the episode had already run and it was well, old news. Once I received the negative comment, however, I felt even more convinced that it should just be deleted. I worried that perhaps such a post was inappropriate on a blog about moving on from miscarriage. Perhaps my ones of readers were now turned off and completely disinterested in returning. Perhaps I should have another blog, in which I discuss environmental issues. I felt really terrible that I had offended this person--perhaps someone who had been kind enough to read here on a regular basis. I considered responding but then thought, no, I’m just going to delete the whole thing. So, I did. Later, I checked to find out where this person was who commented. Was she someone who had commented before? Did she have a profile? She did not. And what I discovered was, that “she”, “Grace” was posting from none other than a pesticide company in the D.C. area. A PESTICIDE COMPANY. I checked her Google search (ah, computers, you beautiful things) and she commented on several other blogs as well. This pesticide company is apparently hiring people to search out blogs that reference the episode and then comment in order to dispute any facts it finds troubling. Damage control. This episode must have pesticide companies pretty damn scared. Do they really think that posting on a few blogs will dissuade people from believing that experimenting with unknown chemicals on human subjects is unethical? Especially when so many of these subjects are poor or uneducated? When Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was first published in the 1960s, a book which claimed that there were and are detrimental effects from the use of pesticides, she was said to be a hysteric and unqualified as a scientist to make such claims. Lawsuits were threatened. And who was behind it all? The mudslinging? The lawsuits? Chemical companies. Pesticide companies.

I won’t know for several days about the pregnancy status issue. It is driving me insane. However, something is definitely going on with me emotionally. I don't generally retreat from a good fight. These days, however, I'd rather be sleeping.

“Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” to Highlight Pesticide Testing on Humans

From Panna.org

On Tuesday, February 6th, NBC will air “Loophole,” an episode on the crime drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” that focuses on the controversial EPA rule allowing intentional dosing of human beings in pesticide experiments. Physicians for Social Responsibility – Los Angeles (PSR-LA) and Pesticide Action Network Nor th America (PANNA) are calling for the public to contact NBC to support this type of programming.

In the episode, several children and their families —including a Honduran immigrant family — are unwittingly tested with a dangerous organophosphate pesticide (a class of acutely toxic chemicals) by a fictional chemical company. In real life, EPA’s human testing rule contains loopholes that allow chemical corporations to test pesticides on women and children. A 2005 Congressional report written by Senator Barbara Boxer’s and Congressmember Henry Waxman’s staff revealed human testing studies where pesticide corporations told their subjects they were ingesting vitamins or drugs. No study of the well-documented long term effects of pesticide exposures were conducted in follow-up of those test subjects.

“Loophole” reminds the public of EPA’s all too real life “CHEERS” program, where the federal government proposed in 2004 to offer low income families in Florida $970, a camcorder, and some clothes if they would record “routine exposure” of their one and under infants to household pesticides. The script is careful to point out the opposition of EPA staff scientists to the human testing rule made by EPA political appointees.

Neal Baer, MD is known for incorporating scientifically accurate information on his show to educate the public on important issues.

“It is so important and valuable for the people who are victimized by this kind of bad corporate behavior shown in “Loophole” to be able to understand how they can fall prey to intentional human dosing studies. I think ‘Law & Order’ has done a great job of raising public awareness,” declared Martha Arguello, Director of the Health and Environment Programs at Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles who consulted on the story.

Dr. Margaret Reeves, senior scientist at Pesticide Action Network North America was pleasantly surprised at the scientific accuracy. “Even though they created a fictional pesticide for the episode, it very much demonstrated the harmful health effects we see with organophosphate pesticides.” Reeves heads up a campaign to ban organophosphates. PANNA has partnered with EarthJustice and the Natural Resource Defense Council to sue EPA over the human testing rule.

Reeves and Arguello are calling upon the public to write to NBC to thank them for this show and to support more of this kind of socially responsible programming.

Behold the Lady Thinks She Might Be . . .

Either my husband has become the most annoying creature this side of the Mississippi or I’m pregnant. Don’t get excited. I know nothing as of yet. And besides, a positive pregnancy test for this one does not equal a mad dash to the local targaaa for bunny emblazoned onesies and ruffled socks (or trains and stripes) but an approximate twenty to thirty minute daze where I start counting the lovely white tiles on the bathroom floor. And then begin to contemplate whether or not I should clean said floor because it’s gotten a tad grimy. Last time I found out I was pregnant I happened to be out of town, without my husband, and I actually TEXTED, yes, texted, my husband the words, "positive." And then felt annoyed. He called, elated, happy. I felt . . . irritated. Distressed. For me, a positive pregnancy test fills me with dread. Momentary happiness and then, "Oh, right, Ms. Habitual Aborter, Recurrent Miscarrier, what the hell were you thinking? Did you really think you could get away with it this time?" So, alas, I still have sometime to wait. But this is either one hell of a strange illness, complete with nausea, a disturbed sleep pattern and enlarged breasts or I am in fact pregnant. Again.

Waiting for Daisy - Peggy Orenstein

I was, at the time, searching for information, anything, about miscarriage. Before that bitter cold January I had only the vaguest sense of miscarriage. Someone's sister's friend's daughter, my aunt's step-son's wife. Miscarriage. It sounded awful. And sad. But only in passing. I didn't really understand it, the pain, the loss, the confusion, the hurt, the aching. This is the fortunate part--for most of us will never know it. During all that searching I came across a beautiful, moving piece in the Times by Peggy Orenstein. I wrote her -- and wonderfully, she wrote back. She was kind. She was thoughtful. I didn't know a single person who had miscarried (I would learn later of the silence that attaches itself to miscarriage. I did in fact know many, many women who had miscarried). My sister told me that my aunt had miscarried in the 1970s. But when I asked her about it, she was confused. She had never miscarried. I felt vulnerable, alone. Orenstein's words were a comfort. Her latest book, Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, An Oscar, An Atomic Bomb, A Romantic Night, and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother will be available on the 6th. I look forward to attending her book signing and reading when she comes to New York on March 5th.

Reviews:

"Intimate, funny/sad and remarkably self-revealing." –Kirkus (starred review)

"The story of author Peggy Orenstein's struggle with infertility is riveting, but what really makes her memoir such a compelling read is her refreshing honesty about the complicated emotions many women face on the path to motherhood." ­Parenting Magazine

"Orenstein's nakedly honest account of her decision at age 35 to have a baby and her ensuing struggle to do so reads like a detective thriller." Elle Magazine, Winner, Elle Lettres readers prize, February 2007

"A raw, funny and poignant memoir. She writes keenly and with humor about the difficult road her quest takes. By the time I reached the end of the book, I was crying into my latte. Orenstein's memoir is not just hers; it is the story of a generation of women who dared to wait for motherhood, took risks to achieve it and were brave enough to question their decisions every step of the way." Ann Hood, MORE

WAITING FOR DAISY TOUR DATES 2007

Thursday, February 15
BERKELEY, CA
Cody's 4th Street
Reading, 7 p.m.
www.codysbooks.com

Friday, February 16
MENLO PARK, CA
Kepler's
Reading, 7:30 p.m.
www.keplers.com

Tuesday, February 20
CAPITOLA, CA
Capitola Book Café
Reading, 7:30 p.m.
www.capitolabookcafe.com

Wednesday, February 21
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Stacey's
Reading, 12:30 p.m.
www.staceys.com

Thursday, February 22
DANVILLE, CA
Rakestraw Books
Reading, 7 p.m.
www.rakestrawbooksindanville.com

Friday, February 23
OAKLAND, CA (Montclair)
A Great Good Place for Books
Reading, 7 p.m.
www.ggpbooks.com

Saturday, February 24
CORTE MADERA, CA
Book Passage
Reading, 2 p.m.
www.bookpassage.com

Monday, February 26
MILWAUKEE, WI
Harry Schwartz, Shorewood
Reading, 7 p.m.
www.schwartzbooks.com

Tuesday, February 27
CHICAGO, IL
Women and Children First
Reading, 7:30 p.m.
http://womenchildren.booksense.com

Wednesday, February 28
EVANSTON, IL
Northwestern University
Harris Hall, room 107
Reading and lecture 4:00 p.m.

Thursday, March 1
MINNEAPOLIS, MN
Barnes & Noble, Galleria
Reading, 7:30 p.m.
952-920-0633

Monday, March 5
NEW YORK, NY
Barnes & Noble, 82nd & Broadway
Reading, 7 p.m.
212-362-8835

Tuesday, March 6
NEW CANAAN, CT
New Canaan Library (Books provided by Elm Street Books)
Reading, 7:30 p.m.
http://newcanaanlibrary.org
www.elmstreetbooks.com

WASHINGTON, D.C.
Details forthcoming

BOSTON, MA
Simmons College
Details forthcoming

Wednesday, March 14
BELLEVUE, WA
University Bookstore, Bellevue
Reading, 7 p.m.
(425) 462-4500

Thursday, March 15
SEATTLE, WA
Third Place Books
Reading, 7 p.m.
www.thirdplacebooks.com

Friday, March 16
PORTLAND, OR
University of Oregon School of Journalism
Details forthcoming

Powell's Burnside
Reading, 7:30 p.m.
www.powells.com

Thursday, May 10
LOS ANGELES
Los Angeles Public Library
”Aloud Lecture Series”
Details forthcoming
www.lapl.org