Blogoversary #12!

Twelve years!  Today is the TWELFTH anniversary of the day I started this blog, back in 2007!

It's hard to come up with an original "blogoversary" post after 12 years of writing them, lol -- although I have been doing some reflecting lately on how the blogging world has changed, and some of the points I drafted a while back seem suitable for a blogoversary post.

When I started writing here, blogs were mostly personal things. Most bloggers then didn't worry about "monetizing" or "branding" or creating "platforms" or gaining followers. Not that there is anything wrong with this approach... it's just not "me."

As I've said before, I started this blog for two main reasons:  I wanted to add my perspective on childless/free living after infertility & loss to the very few such blogs that existed at the time (Pamela's blog Coming2Terms being one, and one of the very, VERY few from that time that has lasted, albeit in somewhat different form)(Coming2Terms eventually morphed into Silent Sorority).  And I wanted to take part in Stirrup Queen Mel's book club. :)  If you find my posts helpful &/or relatable, if you get something out of what you read here, that's great -- it makes me really happy. :)  But that's not why (or at least the only or primary reason why) I started blogging, and continue to blog.

Social media was in its infancy back then (& basically meant Facebook). These days, it seems most/many bloggers (those who are still blogging!) promote their blogs via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or some combination thereof.  I've toyed with the idea of starting social media accounts for my blog, but decided against it.  It seems like a lot of work, and I have trouble enough keeping up with my personal accounts as it is...! (Or maybe I'm just lazy, lol.)

That said, having only personal accounts sometimes puts me in a bit of a weird/awkward position. I follow a lot of ALI-related blogs/bloggers/sites on social media -- and sometimes I get requests from them wanting to follow me back. If I have had some personal interaction with you (through comments, emails, etc.), I will probably say yes -- but if I don't really "know" you, I'm a little more reluctant to grant access. My personal accounts are generally just that, personal... I don't post a lot of ALI-related stuff there. If you're following me on social media with the expectation that I'll be providing the same kind of content there as I do here on my blog, you might be disappointed.

Anyway.  Blogging, social media & me may have a slightly uneasy co-existence (lol), but I am glad I'm still here, and that there are now so many, many more places people can go to find support for a life without children. Perhaps still not enough -- and perhaps the attitudes of the fortunately fertile have not changed enough for our liking. But I've seen a LOT of progress over the past 12 years, and I'm looking forward to seeing even more in the future. :)

Blogging stats, 12 years later:

Number of years blogging: 12

Published posts (including this one): 1,574

Average # of posts per year: 132 (up from an average of 128 last year!)

Average # of posts per month: 11
(So far in calendar year 2019, I've published 141 posts -- a minimum of 10 and as many as 19 in one month.)

Published comments: Unfortunately, Blogger only seem to be showing 1000 comments these days?? Nevertheless, I am grateful to all of you who comment!

Page views (tracked since May 2010):  almost 806,000

Followers (on Blogger):  149

Past blogoversary posts here.

First blog post ever here! :) 

More odds & ends

• Bracing myself for the onslaught of Halloween photos tomorrow...!  I enjoy them to a point, until it gets overwhelming.  We're not expecting any trick-or-treaters at our condo (haven't had any in the three previous Halloweens that we've lived here), but we did buy some chocolate, just in case... ;) 
• Something else is happening tomorrow that I'll be posting about -- any guesses as to what that might be??  ;)  
• Thank you to Turia for pointing me to this lovely first-person piece about stillbirth in The Guardian. 
• I went to my library book club meeting on Monday night, for the first time since the end of June. I had checked the library website & saw the book for this month's discussion was "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro (reviewed here).  I already had it in my collection, so I didn't bother to go to the library to check out a copy for the book club;  I simply showed up at the meeting, ready to discuss the book. What a surprise, then, to learn we were in fact discussing a completely different book!  Fortunately, it was one I'd already read -- one of the best books I'd read that year -- and was happy to discuss in a group setting: "Educated" by Tara Westover (reviewed here).  
• Just finished off another book (#40 so far this year!).  I'll be posting a review sometime in the next few days. 
• The 28-year-old daughter of a high school friend (am I really old enough to have a 28-year-old daughter? (let alone the 21-year-old daughter I was supposed to have) -- yes, I am...) was in a serious car accident a few days ago. She is in stable but serious condition at the hospital & will be undergoing several surgeries over the next while. Please keep her, her husband & her parents in your thoughts & prayers. :( 

#MicroblogMondays: Score!!

Getting tickets for the upcoming Toronto visit of the touring company of "Hamilton" was an exercise in nerves and patience. I'm just very glad I didn't have to take my blood pressure during the process...! 

First dibs on the tickets went to Mirvish company season ticket subscribers. I know some people who bought season tickets well over a year ago, specifically so they'd be guaranteed their preferred seats again for THIS year, and thus guaranteed access to "Hamilton" tickets. I love live theatre, but season tickets (and I like to get good seats when I go to the theatre, if I can) are pretty expensive, and obviously some productions interest me more than others.

So I passed on that, but got my name on the Mirvish email list. A block of tickets specifically for list subscribers went on sale this past weekend (American Express cardholders got their shot at the tickets on Sunday, and sales to the general public began today) and, as per the emailed instructions, I double-checked my log-in and account information in advance, and then checked into the virtual waiting room before 10 a.m. on Saturday.  When 10 a.m. rolled around, we were all randomly placed into a virtual queue, waiting our turn for the chance to buy tickets (limit of 4 per person).

At 10 a.m., I was #5382 in line, with an estimated wait time of more than an hour. (I posted a screen shot on social media... dh's cousin's daughter told me I was 20,000 ahead of her!! Yikes!  I felt a little less sorry for myself after that...!) I figured I had time to take a shower, so I did (cellphone close at hand!). An hour later, the line ahead of me was down to 3,300 people... and my ETA was just under an hour. I started to feel hopeful.

My turn finally came up around the 1.5 hour mark -- which was really not that bad, I thought. Each page I clicked on loaded soooooooo slowly, though... I only had 20 minutes to choose my dates & seats, and then 10 minutes to arrange payment. I just had to grit my teeth and wait and resist the urge to click & reclick or (suicide!!) try to reload the page.

The available dates on the first page that loaded were all in February... and most had a red or yellow light beside them (no tickets/limited availability).  My understanding was that the best availability would be later in the run (April/May).... so I clicked on page 6 (the last one listed) to load to see where that would take me. It brought up some dates in May (toward the end of the run), and I chose a matinee performance with a "green light" beside it ( = good seats still available).  I was NOT going to pay top price ($499 per seat!!) but I did get tickets (still pricey, but somewhat more reasonable) in the first row of the balcony/mezzanine, left-hand side of the stage. *Should* be pretty good. :)  I breathed a deep sigh of relief as I finally printed off my confirmation screen and shared the "I scored #Hamilton tickets" meme on my Instagram & Facebook, lol. (Personally, I think it should have said something more like "I survived the Hamilton tickets purchase process," lol.)

Later, scanning Twitter & the news headlines, I realized that I'd been pretty lucky (for once in my life in buying tickets!)... lots of people reporting that the site crashed or loaded so slowly that they timed out & had to go to the back of the line and start all over again. (Dh's cousin's daughter, who was 20,000 in line behind me, did get tickets, after 5 hours waiting for her turn to come up.)  The block of available tickets for email list subscribers sold out before the 12-hour allotted window closed.

Maybe the best part? Our tickets are for a certain weekend in May. Mother's Day weekend, to be exact. Happy Mother's/Voldemort Day weekend to me!! lol  ;)

Have you seen "Hamilton"? (Do you care??  lol)

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here. 

Odds & ends

• Our federal election is FINALLY over. I wouldn't say our politics are quite as toxic as the U.S. -- yet -- but they're certainly headed in that direction, and this campaign was one of the nastiest I can remember, with personal attacks and misinformation drowning out even nominally substantial policy discussions. I used to love elections;  these days, I can't wait for them to end. (Six weeks is PLENTY long enough;  I don't know how the Americans do it!!)  
• The fallout from this one has been nasty as well, with disgruntled friends and relatives -- who do NOT share my American friends' fondness for Justin Trudeau, lol -- posting such loathsome stuff on Facebook & the like that I've been seriously considering taking a break from social media until things settle down.  
• I rarely post anything overtly political on social media, but on the weekend before the election, I shared what I thought was an even-handed & helpful article from the Globe & Mail that outlined the platforms of all the political parties on my Facebook feed. Within minutes, I was subjected to a diatribe in the comments about Justin Trudeau -- and when I pointed out that the article was about the various party platforms and not JT specifically, I got blasted again. :p (And this is why I rarely post anything political on social media...!)  
• (On a happier note) I spent a lovely afternoon yesterday at the nearby art gallery where I hold a membership, viewing the exhibits (including a new exhibit of Maud Lewis's work), enjoying the beautiful fall colours and having a delicious (albeit slightly pricey) lunch in the cafe with two of my former work colleagues/friends (coincidentally, also both childless/free).  I don't often get to spend time with girlfriends these days, nevermind in such a lovely setting, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. :) 
• My reading progress has stalled since I got back from my trip west to see my family. Library book club meeting is Monday night, and I'll be picking up our next selection then... maybe that will be the kickstart I need to get back in the groove! 
• "Hamilton" tickets go on pre-sale online to email list subscribers on Saturday morning (that's me!)... dh is "meh" about going (although I am sure he will love it if I get the opportunity to drag him there...!)... wish me luck!  
• I found myself nodding over this New York Times piece on "The Lasting Trauma of Infertility." You probably will too! 
• Note that the introduction to the article refers to an entire SECTION of the Times's parenting website that deals with infertility!  I have added this to the infertility links in the sidebar of this blog. 

#MicroblogMondays: Farewell, Yahoo Groups

Figure skating season kicked off with Skate America in Las Vegas this past weekend, the first competition in the Grand Prix series. After watching the ladies & men's finals on TV yesterday, I went online to SkateFans, a Yahoo Group I've belonged to for eons, to check out other fans' comments. 

I hadn't been on any of my Yahoo Groups for quite a while, so I was surprised (and yet not entirely surprised...) by the pop-up message I found, which apparently went public a couple of days ago. Yahoo Groups is (essentially) closing down.  Not entirely -- group members will still be able to contact each other via email -- but seriously, they might as well be. As of Oct. 28th (one week from today), users won't be able to upload any more content to the site, and as of Dec. 14th, all previously posted content -- including Files, Polls, Links, Photos, Folders, Calendar, Database, Attachments, Conversations, Email Updates, Message Digest and Message History -- will be permanently removed.

As I said, I was surprised, but not surprised by this turn of events. Yahoo Groups has been in decline for years, especially since the advent of (cough) Facebook. Many of the groups I once belonged either disbanded, moved to Facebook or another forum or went dormant years ago -- but there were still several that continued to thrive -- despite increasingly unreliable service. More & more frequently over the past few years, I would try to access one or more of my Yahoo Groups, only to encounter technical difficulties, some of which lasted days or even a full week or longer. There was little to do except wait;  there was no apparent mechanism where we could complain or even find out when service might be restored. 

The sad thing is that Yahoo Groups was the place that several groups I belonged to went to, after other forums elsewhere folded. SkateFans began some 20 years ago;  it grew out a listserv I belonged to when I first started going online in the late 1990s (rec.sport.skating.ice.figure) -- although the number/frequency of posts there has declined dramatically over the years. The small, private Yahoo Group that's been my anchor as a childless-not-by-choice woman for 15+ years began in 2003, after we started having technical difficulties with the Childless Living board on iVillage where we'd all originally met around 2001. (The iVillage board closed in 2008, several years before iVillage itself disappeared.)

The D.E. Stevenson author fan group I belong to was on Yahoo Groups for something like 20 years (since about 1998), and still going strong, with 300+ members -- but the frequent interruptions to our discussion schedule there (because of Yahoo Groups' increasing unreliability) were becoming really frustrating.  A year or so ago, a group of members took it upon themselves to research alternatives. Very happily, we were able to transfer the group's entire posting history, as well as photos, files and databases of collected knowledge, to a new home on Groups.io (founded in 2014 by the guy who started ONElist, which eventually became... Yahoo Groups!).  My Yahoo Group of childless-not-by-choice friends also made the move to Groups.io shortly afterward, happily preserving 15 years of searchable posts my friends there & I have written about childless living (and life in general -- it's the closest thing I've had in recent years to a journal/diary, besides my blog).  So far, so good...!  (In case you're interested, here's a Lifehacker article explaining the advantages of moving to Groups.io.)

A SkateFans group member has set up a new group for members on Google Groups. I am not sure what is going to happen to another Yahoo Group I have belonged to for about 20 years (one that's listed in the resources in the sidebar of this blog), Mullerian Anomalies. The number of posts there has declined dramatically over the years, but it's been a fabulous source of information and accumulated wisdom for women like me who have an abnormally shaped uterus.

Change is one thing to cope with, but what really bothers me is thinking of all that accumulated knowledge and history (on my old groups, and others) disappearing into the ether with the click of some anonymous techie's mouse. But I guess it's the way of the Internet -- change and impermanence.  Blogging is still here, happily, but those of us who have been around for a while know it's not like it used to be. These days, many women who might have gone to message boards or blogs or even Facebook groups to find support for infertility & pregnancy loss seem to be flocking to Instagram instead. And is it just my imagination, or is everyone and his or her dog starting a podcast lately? 

Were/are you a Yahoo Groups user?

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.

"If you don't want to have kids, you don't have to want a career instead"

Jody Day of Gateway Women recently shared an article from Vice on social media that had me nodding along as I read it:  "If You Don’t Want to Have Kids, You Don’t Have to Want a Career Instead."

Many people still equate "childless woman" with "career woman" -- if you don't have children, well, you must have a fabulous career instead, right?  You obviously have more time to throw yourself into your job, work long hours and climb the corporate ladder, right?  (Conversely, if you want a high-powered career, are you really going to have the time to devote to a family? -- This either/or thinking was very common years ago, and still persists in some quarters.)

But what if we don't have children, and don't WANT a high-powered career either?

A few excerpts from the article:

Work can be the thing we do in order to enjoy our free time—it doesn’t have to be a lifelong career, and we don’t always need to be pushing to be the boss. Forget having it “all”—why aren’t women allowed to just have “some,” and be happy with it? ...Perhaps we are finally waking up to the idea that we’ve been conned—that in falling into the optimized lifestyle trap, we’re missing out on the life we actually deserve... 

The biggest barrier women face seems to be the idea that we have inherent worth: that we deserve to be alive, deserve to be happy, even if we are doing “nothing.” [ed note: and even if we don't have children]  [Women's empowerment coach Hueina] Su echoed this idea – saying that If you want to de-optimize your life, it’s critical to believe that you are inherently worthy, and to identify what success and happiness means to you. “We must learn to redefine success for ourselves, instead of letting society and other people dictate how we live our lives,” she said

I've written in the past here about my lukewarm feelings toward my job/career (even before I lost it, lol).  I worked to live, I did not live to work... but I sometimes felt kind of guilty... that I SHOULD want more our of my working life. Supervisors would ask me the obligatory review questions about where I saw myself in five years and what job I wanted to do next... I had no good answers. I was happy doing what I was doing. I had no great desire to manage people, and while I was happy to stretch myself to a certain extent (trying speechwriting & drafting executive correspondence & official messages, after years working on the staff newsletter, for example), making the leap to an entirely different department or area of the company did not interest me in the least.

Losing my job -- at a stage in my life where I was able to take early retirement (a reduced pension, but still a pension nevertheless) -- offered me an "out" -- and I took it -- but I still harboured a lot of guilty feelings:  I was way too young to just retire, I still had a lot to offer (if I could convince a potential employer to look past my age...! -- too young to retire, perhaps, but also too old to be hired for another job...). I should be out there working and adding to our retirement savings for at least another 5-10 years (even though a financial planner assured me & dh that we could afford to do this now), because that's what most people my age were still doing. (So far, he's been right, and it's been working out just fine.)

"What do you do with all that time?" people ask me -- and I feel guilty that I don't have any stories about fabulous trips or meaningful volunteer work or even a full social calendar of luncheons & outings with girlfriends to tell them about. (As one retirement planner pointed out in an article I read, even the fabulously rich will not find themselves travelling 365 days a year... you have to find other ways to fill your time.)  I read, I putter around on this blog & on other social media, I listen to podcasts and watch TV.  Once a week or so, we drop by BIL's house (or they come by here, or we head across the city to visit stepMIL, once every few weeks).  We clean the house and do the laundry and run errands and go to the supermarket and to the mall, and we browse at the local mega-bookstore a couple of times a week. We go out for a simple lunch a couple of times a week, and out for dinner on Saturday nights, a habit we established early on in our marriage.

So the days pass, and while I can't always tell you where the time has gone, I can tell you it always goes by too quickly -- and that I'm seldom bored, and generally happy with my jobless, childless life. When people ask dh "what do you do with your time, now that you're retired?"  he now responds "Whatever I want!"  lol  That usually shuts them up. I think I'm going to adopt it too, lol.

I've had a partially written draft in my draft folder for quite a while now along these same lines. It began a couple of years ago when a childless-not-by-choice/loss mom friend (& past/occasional blogger ;)  ) posted an article on Facebook titled "What if All I Want is a Mediocre Life?"  She confessed that she struggled with the guilt of not being more or doing more or wanting more -- with the idea that "I'm enough."

"Maybe it's the fact that I've been beaten to a bloody pulp by life -- maybe that's why I crave a drama-free, quiet, simple existence," she mused.

I could certainly relate to that... and I'm sure a lot of childless-not-by-choice women can too. Infertility & loss (and the fallout from them) have already provided us with plenty enough drama to last a lifetime, and then some...!

The thought that we need to do more, be more, is something that many people struggle with, whether or not they have kids. But the absence of children in our lives makes some of us feel like we need to do something else, something BIG, as "compensation," to fill that hole in our lives, to prove our worth to society.  Why not climb the corporate ladder (or run off to do missionary work in Africa... etc. etc.) -- after all, we can!

But it's one thing to do something "because we can." Is it something we SHOULD do? Is it something that we WANT to do? Is it something that's right for us personally, for our goals and values?

And by the way, who says that it's a "mediocre life" -- mediocre by whose standards?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject!

Here are a couple more great articles on this theme:

• You’re probably searching for a better life—but what if you already have it? 
• Not Leadership Material? Good. The World Needs Followers. (by Susan Cain, author of "Quiet") 
• Making Decisions and Defending Them (This article specifically addresses the issue of childlessness and pressure from others to have children.) 
• You’ll Never Be Famous — And That’s O.K.
• Living an Ordinary Life (The Stirrup Queen's reaction to the story above) 

Can you help?

There is increasing interest in the experiences of infertile and childless women (and men!) as a topic of serious academic study, which is so great & validating to see! :) 

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Lisa, a PhD student at Dalhousie University in Halifax. She is seeking further interviews with other Canadian women who have experienced persistent infertility for her PhD research.  If you'd like to help too, please read about the parameters of her study, and then contact Lisa at the email address below. :) 

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Research Participants Need for a Study Exploring Persistent Infertility in Canada

I am a Sociology PhD student at Dalhousie University. I am interested in speaking with Canadian women who experience persistent infertility. For the purpose of this research, persistent infertility encompasses: a) women who discontinued fertility treatments when they did not work; b) women who cannot access fertility treatments (due to financial restrictions, ineligibility, geographic location, for example); and c) women whose infertility is untreatable (MRKHS, Mullerian anomalies, or acquired conditions, for example). If you identify with one of these groups and are interested in participating in this research study please contact me by email.  lisa.redgrift@dal.ca