Picking raspberries at the well.

Had I known
that one year olds can pick their own raspberries
reaching out with fat sticky fingers
joyful and sure

had I known the caution-less bliss
no bug checks
just raspberry to mouth
again and again

and had I known
I mean really known

sweet raspberry pulp
smeared haphazardly on baby fat chins

I wouldn't have chosen writing as my outlet

but photography to catch

that.

But then I realize no still camera could capture
the sun's dance in pixie wisps
the way it really is

and so maybe cinematography
until I realize no lens at all
can appreciate
that the wind is better when it's laced with
belly laughs
and chatter untainted by a good grasp of language.

So I'm back to words
and feel like I can't get enough air

until the right word is found

time is slipping away
this will pass
before I've captured it right
and before I'm ready to let it go

presence
beauty
innocence
mine
real
love

and still nothing feels big enough
right enough
or true enough.

Not disillusioned by art
but humbled by life.

Shhhh. Just don't tell Perez.

Around the time that Rhys and Quin were conceived, Matt Damon and I had a very short-lived but passionate affair.

Kyle knows. He's okay with it.

Matt's one of my celebrity freebies.

What? You don't have a list of celebrity freebies? You're hardly living.

Anyway, I definitely probably would never make something like this up.

I especially wouldn't be so crass as to suggest that one of my children is Matt Damon's illegitimate love child.

.

Okay.  Maybe I definitely am exactly that crass.

(Thanks Kevin and Jill for the photographic evidence.)

I don't post as much these days. I'm busy.

Somewhere in a dark corner, Facebook is eating the tiniest morsel of crow. At least for the moment.

Remember the misogyny fan page on Facebook that I recently wrote about?

It's gone.

Just like that.  The only way I know it is gone is because I've been checking in regularly.  Facebook doesn't seem to communicate with the account holders who report offensive content, which seems to be a poor choice in customer service to me, but I suppose that's their right.

Either way, the page is gone, even though I'm not exactly sure how or why Facebook finally chose to remove it.  I think it's reasonable to believe that enough of us reported the page and pushed Facebook to act, so I'm going to count this as a small victory.

The disappointing thing is that originally, I was counting this as a big victory.  After I wrote about  the hypocritical Facebook policies regarding images of women's bodies and showed images of the highly sexualized and objectified pictures of women's breasts that Facebook allows next to my banned breastfeeding picture, most of the objectifying images and applications suddenly disappeared from Facebook.  Since that post had a lot of exposure, I was hoping and believing that the hundreds of people who reported those images had helped to get them removed.  So before writing this post, I decided to check back in and see how Facebook is doing on equally applying their policies regarding images of breasts.  We know they're still removing images of women breastfeeding, so I had foolishly hoped that they're at least also applying their ignorant policies to the content that objectifies women and is actually offensive.  No such luck.  A quick search for "tits" and "boobs" on Facebook brought up many of the images from my original post that had initially been removed.   Even more disheartening were the many new fan pages and applications that go even further to objectify women's bodies.

Maybe I'm just paranoid.  Maybe I'm starting to reek of Facebook conspiracy theory.  But any way I look at it, I cannot find any reasonable explanation for why Facebook would remove misogynistic content when they're getting a lot of negative publicity over it, and then quietly re-instate that content when the buzz dies down.  From every angle, all I see is Facebook contributing to a social structure that allows for violence toward and hatred of women.

Will the misogyny page come back in a few weeks?  I don't know if it even matters.  The real misogyny page is the one that opens when you visit www.facebook.com.

privacy

Using the facilities used to be a private matter in our house.

I liked that privacy.

There was a time in life when I would have assured you that there was nothing, nothing, that would ever cause me to let go of that privacy.

Enter Rhys and Quin.  Both literally and figuratively.  Into the bathroom.  Where I am.

They stagger in teetering like dizzy drunks with big toothy smiles and triumphantly signing, over and over again, POTTY!  POTTY!  POTTY!

I am SO glad we taught them to sign, so that in situations like this when I think that perhaps my dignity is still fully intact because after all, they are so young and still in diapers thus they do not use the POTTY - I can learn that in fact, my dignity is in shreds.  Yes.  Mommy is on the potty.

And I'll be damned if I know what to do while I'm sitting there, otherwise indisposed, and one of them falls and bumps his head on a corner and is now crying to be picked up.  Now mommy is on the potty and Quin is on her lap.

At which time it is only fair that Rhys discovers toilet paper.  And this toddler who is still learning coordination somehow manages to unravel the entire roll onto the floor before I've even figured out how to reach an arm out in a weak attempt to stop him.  Now mommy is on the potty and Quin is on her lap and Rhys is on the floor in a pile of toilet paper that mommy needs and cannot reach.

I've changed my mantra.

It now goes like this.


Privacy is overrated.  Privacy is overrated.  Privacy is overrated.  Privacy is overrated.  Privacy is overrated. I bet Kyle is pooping in peace at work.  Privacy is overrated.  Privacy is overrated.  Would anyone find out if I started stashing a bottle of vodka in here? Privacy is overrated.  Privacy is overrated.  Privacy is overrated.  Privacy is overrated.  Privacy is overrated.

Aftermath

National Infertility Awareness week took place the week of April 25th.

I didn't write about it.

I thought about writing a post on it, and each time I sat down to work on it, I would end up spilling a frustrated mish-mash of words onto the screen.  Sometimes I sounded angry.  Sometimes bitter.  Sometimes resentful.  Sometimes sad, sellf-pitying, and pathetic.  I stopped trying to write about it.

One pregnancy and two babies later, it is sometimes difficult to know where I fall with infertility.

Then I saw this video, from Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed:


What IF? A Portrait of Infertility from Keiko Zoll on Vimeo.

Suddenly I found my words, in the form of many "what if's" of my own.

What if my infertility-inflicted wounds do not heal?

What if a small part of me always feels like a fraud?

What if I forget where I came from?  What if I can't?

What if my sharing the joys and hardships of motherhood is hurtful to those still struggling through infertility?

What if I don't deserve to describe the hardships of motherhood?

What if people never stop asking if twins run in my family?

What if I make the wrong decision for our four frozen embryos?

What if I never stop being angry?

What if it never stops hurting?

I used to think that the cure for infertility must be a baby.  What I didn't count on was the aftermath of infertility; the role of mother has been achieved, but this woman who I have become is not the woman I was when I started on this journey.

Don't get me wrong.  I am beyond grateful that IVF worked for us.  I love being a mother.  Bred into the love I have for my children is the realization of how close I was to never having them in my life.

There are parts of me that just want to live in the moment and forget how I got here.  I know that I never can.

For me, infertility has been about acceptance.  As I sit here today, I realize that my newest task is to accept the fact that while there is necessary healing that will happen, the inevitable reality is that the fabric of my being is forever altered.

National Infertility Awareness week has passed.  

The heartbreak of infertility has not.