30 Posts in 30 Days: The master list!

Sweet Pea has started doing this meme & has invited her readers to do the daily posts along with her. I've decided I'm going to try! Let me know if you decide to play along -- I'd love to see what you have to post!

Here' s the master list:

Day 1 - your favorite song
Day 2 - your favorite movie
Day 3 - your favorite television program
Day 4 - your favorite book
Day 5 - your favorite quote
Day 6 - 20 of your favorite things
Day 7 - a photo that makes you happy
Day 8 - a photo that makes you angry/sad
Day 9 - a photo you took
Day 10 - a photo taken over 10 years ago of you
Day 11 - a photo of you recently
Day 12 - something you are OCD about
Day 13 - a fictional book
Day 14 - a non-fictional book
Day 15 - your dream house
Day 16 - a song that makes you cry (or nearly)
Day 17 - an art piece (drawing, sculpture, painting, etc)
Day 18 - my wedding/future wedding/past wedding
Day 19 - a talent of yours
Day 20 - a hobby of yours
Day 21 - a recipe
Day 22 - a website
Day 23 - a youtube video
Day 24 - where you live
Day 25 - your day, in great detail
Day 26 - your week, in great detail
Day 27 - your worst habit
Day 28 - what's in your handbag/purse
Day 29 - hopes, dreams, and plans for the next 365 days
Day 30 - a dream for the future

Award: Happiness Today, Hope Tomorrow

Miss Ruby was kind enough to pass along an award to me recently... here are the rules, just as she posted them:

all you have to do is

put that picture
yup that one up there
on your blog

and

blog about one thing you're happy about
right now
and
one thing that you're hoping for in the future

you acknowledge something that's making you smile right now
and
also putting out there that you have hope for thing
one amazing thing
to happen in the future for you
to bring you even more happiness!

oh
and
then
you have to pass this award on
to
anyone who you believe would benefit from
looking at their surroundings, their life now
and
finding happiness in it!

One thing I'm happy about right now: Dh & I are going on vacation soon! & it will be the first vacation of more than three or four days that we've taken in a very long time where we haven't stayed at home, gone "home" (out west) to visit my family, or travelled somewhere with my family.

I know some people think that's weird... but for the first several years we were first married, we only had two or three weeks of vacation each. A week at Christmas, a week or two in the summer, maybe my mom would come here to visit for a week, & there goes the vacation time. Most of his immediate & extended family all live in this area so we don't have to travel to see them; all of mine are back west. (I don't think people who live within an easy drive from their families and get to see them often really understand or appreciate the implications that living far away from your family has for your vacation time.)

When you come from a large(r) family, siblings can take turns spending time with Mom & Dad. I am one of only two children (& neither of us has kids). There's not a lot of us to share the guilt, lol. So I feel sort of obligated to spend time with my parents.

But it's not just a matter of obligation. I LIKE my parents. I WANT to spend time with my parents. I like spending time at "home" (even though it's not a house or town that I grew up in, it's Mom & Dad and many of the old familiar things).

In a few more years, I will probably HAVE to spend more time with my parents, as they get older & need more assistance.

But believe me -- as much as I enjoy spending time with my family, I am VERY much looking forward to spending some time just with dh, exploring new places. I've always wanted to travel more -- here in Canada & elsewhere -- & for a variety of reasons, we haven't. We're at the point in our careers where we've both built up lots of vacation entitlement -- we have some money. I'm so glad we are finally starting to do it!

I promise to tell you more about it when we get back!

One thing I'm hoping for in the future: (Besides good weather on our vacation, lol.) More of the same, once we are finally able to retire (& time is not so much of an issue). Just lots of time to travel to some of the places we've always wanted to go, & see & experience new things together.

I'm passing this award along to: anyone who reads this. Who among us couldn't benefit from taking a good look at our life right now & finding happiness in it?

Odds & ends

• If I have to endure one more of those sappy friggin' iPhone TV commercials ("You're going to be a dad!!"), I swear, I'm going to throw up....
• In the "another one bites the dust" category: the wife of a coworker sent out announcements to the entire office today: they are adopting a two-year-old little girl through the local children's aid society. They were matched a few weeks ago, had some visits & she is coming home with them for good in a few days. I am very happy for them... but it was another one of those, "Et tu Brute?" moments. This guy is perhaps not quite as old as I am, but I think he's in his mid-40s & I assume his wife must be 40ish too. It's always a comfort to have someone else around (particularly someone who is closer to my own age)(i.e., not one of the young singles or newlyweds in the office) who doesn't have kids for whatever reason (& I have no idea what their story was).
• Survived the annual get-together with dh's cousins last weekend with little incident. The only time I really flinched was when everyone was fussing over our hostess's 12-year-old son & exclaiming over how he will be starting Grade 7 -- junior high! He was born in April 1998 -- I was newly pregnant & "out" at his mom's shower. (Couldn't bring myself to go see him until his first birthday... I apologized to his mom for not coming sooner & she gave me a huge hug & told me she understood.) Katie was due in November 1998, and would also be starting Grade 7 next week. (Another cousin has a son born in April 1999. One six months older, one six months younger, & Katie would have been right in the middle. Can I say, & probably not for the first nor last time, how very glad I am that they are both boys???)
• My new boss (who has two young boys) actually inserted the words "As a parent" into a speech for one of our executives (he was speaking about saving for children's education). Pamela, if you're reading this, I thought of you immediately!!
• I was in a store the other day & heard a semi-familiar tune on the speakers. It was Cyndi Lauper's classic girl power anthem"Girls Just Want to Have Fun." Only THIS was a hiphop/rap style remake by a GUY. Whining, "you know you're still number one, but girl, I wanna have fun." I took it to mean he was trying to justify playing around on her. ARGGGGHHHHH.... talk about twisting the original meaning. I generally hate remakes of classic songs, but this one took the cake.
• Somehow, the three fillings my dentist told me HAD to be replaced over two separate visits has turned into six or seven (!!) fillings/replacements over three visits (visit #3 coming up in a few weeks). My mouth is still recovering from visit #2 last week -- very sensitive to both heat & cold now. I'm brushing with Sensodyne, but I'm told it will take 2 weeks to do any good. All I can say is thank God for good dental plans. :p
• I'm sure I had other stuff I was going to write about, but that's all I can come up with for now, lol. Vent over!

Steal this meme

I'm "stealing" this meme from Rebecca at A Long & Winding Road, who likewise "stole" it from another blogger. Feel free to do likewise, lol. ; )

1.) If you could live in any country but the United States, where would you live?

Well, I don't live in the United States, I live in Canada. ; ) I am a very proud Canadian, & I really can't envision living anywhere else, at least permanently. But I wouldn't mind spending some time in a few other places. England comes to mind -- so much history there, so many books I've read that were set there (& at least I speak the language, lol).

2.) Why did you title your blog “The Road Less Travelled”?

Because the road I am on -- living childless/free after loss & infertility -- is not one that gets written or talked about much (although I suspect it is a much more commonly travelled road than many people realize). Also, I love the Frost poem. ; ) Another title I gave serious consideration to was "Childless Mother."

3.) How many “in real life” people know about your blog?

My dh, and that's about it -- I think? (I hope??) ; )

4.) Why did you decide to start blogging?

I was fortunate to have found support on a couple of (mostly small & not that active) message boards for women in my situation, early on after we made our decision. They are still a huge source of support for me, but I was intrigued when I started reading loss & infertility blogs. I had been reading Stirrup Queens, & checking out the childless/free blogs on her blogroll. Aside from a few brilliant women such as Pamela Jeanne, there weren't that many women out there blogging about the childless/free option. I liked the idea of exploring loss, infertility & childless/free themes in a blog format. And I loved reading the book club posts. I was dying to add my own $.02 to some of the discussions and so, with some encouragement from Mel, I started this blog in October 2007. : ) This was nine years after our daughter's stillbirth, & six years after making the decision to stop infertility treatments, which may seem odd, as most blogs seem to begin shortly after a loss or as people are beginning IF treatment... but I found that I still had plenty that I wanted to say/write about on the subject!

5.) What kind of clothes do you wear?

At home, you will mostly find me in jeans, shorts (in the summer) or yoga pants with a T-shirt. I'm fortunate that I can wear "business casual" to work. I can't remember the last time I wore a dress or skirt to work (actually, I do have a couple of sundresses I will wear when it gets REALLY hot & humid outside, paired with a cardigan for indoor office wear). I shop frequently at Reitmans & the Gap, and also frequent Cleo, Laura, Northern Reflections & Cotton Ginny (although the last two are getting harder to find these days!).

6.) What are you having for dinner tonight?

Shake & Bake chicken with brown rice & peas.

7.) Where do you “blog”?

On my laptop, usually sitting on our loveseat. Sometimes, if inspiration strikes me at the office, I will draft a post & e-mail it to my home address for further elaboration & publication later from home.

8.) Do you like to cook?

I don't mind it -- but I like to do it when I'm not rushed or tired & hungry, as I often am when we get home at night. :p Hence, dh does most of the cooking on weeknights! ; )

9.) What’s your beverage of choice at night?

If you mean alcohol, dh & I are not big drinkers. We drink a lot of water. I try not to keep pop in the house, unless we have company coming. The exception being Oscar night, when I will get a bottle of Coke to have with popcorn. ; ) I also love tea, but not at night, because of the caffeine.

10.) What would you most like to know about your fellow bloggers who read this?

Like Rebecca, I’d like to know how they found my blog, and what keeps them coming back. And what, if anything, they’d like to know more about me.

Fall into the gap

So I was having a really stressful day at work today (actually, a stressful WEEK...) and what did I do on my lunch hour?

As the saying goes, when the going gets tough, the tough go... shopping, lol.

But in this case, the going just got tougher, because I went shopping at... Baby Gap. (Really smart, eh?) I realized it was Friday, we are seeing FIL & stepMIL tomorrow -- & stepMIL's grandson's 2nd birthday is next week. We are not invited to the party (not that I wanted to be...!) but I knew we should probably get him a little something. Not many toy stores in the vicinity of my office, & I have no idea what sorts of toys would appeal to a two-year-old boy (never mind one who already has a gazillion toys). And I was walking by Baby Gap and for some reason, went in. It seemed like an easy buy.

And I did walk out 20 minutes later with a cute fleece hoodie in a gift box in a Baby Gap bag (which is so cute & classic you don't even need to buy a separate gift bag, I think), 30% off. Unfortunately, I also walked out feeling even more battered than when I walked in. (Are you surprised?)

I used to LOVE Baby Gap. Shopped there all the time for baby presents for friends & relatives. Used to joke I should buy Gap stock, since I spent so much money there. (I didn't, but I did follow the stock in the pages of the newspaper for awhile.) Dreamed of the day that I would be shopping there for my own wee ones.

When I was pregnant, I saw an adorable little white cotton summer dress there. I fingered it wistfully, and thought about how cute our daughter would look in it. (By then, we knew we were having the little girl we had always dreamed about.) We knew we would be attending a wedding in July 1999, & would at least be bringing the baby to the church ceremony. I briefly considered buying it now, but there were already clouds hovering on the horizon of my pregnancy, & I knew I could probably find something similar closer to the time. So I never bought the dress, to my eternal regret.

(We attended the wedding with empty arms, & visited the cemetery between the church ceremony & the reception. Thinking about how differently we'd pictured the day. Three other women had been pregnant at the engagement party the previous year; they were all there with their babies, of course.)

I used to have to trek up to the Baby Gap store at the Eaton Centre on my lunch hour. And then, in the spring of 1998, when I was pregnant, a sign went up in a vacant storefront in the office tower across the street from mine (easily accessible via the underground PATH): COMING SOON: Baby Gap. Needless to say, I was thrilled!!

So you can imagine how I felt when I returned to work after Katie was stillborn -- & there it was, open already. I had almost forgotten about it, & seeing it there was like a sudden, unexpected slap in face.

Needless to say, it was a LONG time -- years -- before I could bring myself to enter a Baby Gap store again. And my visits have been far less frequent than they once were.

Sometimes, it hasn't been too bad. And then there are days like today, when I'm greeted by an adorable dress like THIS

hanging on a rack right near the door as I walked in, paired with a little black cardigan. (It looks dark pink right now on my screen, but it was red in the store.)

Absolutely adorable.

Absolutely perfect for Christmas, & Christmas/November birthday portraits.

Absolutely heartbreaking.

I don't know why something like that still has the power to bother me so much, 12 years later. For one thing, if Katie were here, I certainly wouldn't be shopping for her at Baby Gap. She'd be a big girl now -- almost 12 years old -- going into Grade 7 -- GRADE 7!!! Junior high!!!

But that's just the point. She's NOT here. She never will be.

She never got to wear adorable little dresses from Baby Gap (or fight with me over the skinny jeans I'm sure she'd be insisting on having to wear back to school this fall). She never got to have dh's cousins buy stuff for her, the way that I bought stuff for their kids. She never got to have people fuss over how adorable she looked, the way I fussed over their kids.

Baby Gap will never be just another store to me. It will always speak to me of another gap in my life -- of broken dreams and unfulfilled due dates and a little girl who never drew a breath.

And little white dresses, never bought.

(Like this one.)

Article: "Coping with crises close to someone else's heart"

There was a fascinating article in today's New York Times on a subject that is near & dear and very familar to many infertiles/bereaved parents -- how the people around us cope -- or, perhaps more accurately, don't cope -- with the crises we must live with, every day.

In recent years, the author has coped with with the serious illnesses of both her daughters, and then the illness & death of her mother. She writes:

For the most part, we were blessed with support and love; friends ran errands for us, delivered meals, sat in hospital waiting rooms, walked, talked and cried with us.

But a couple of friends disappeared entirely. During the year we spent in eating-disorder hell, they called once or twice but otherwise behaved as though we had been transported to Mongolia with no telephones or e-mail.

At first, I barely noticed; I was overwhelmed with getting through each day. As the year wore on, though, and life settled in to a new if unpleasant version of normal, I began to wonder what had happened. Given our preoccupation with our daughter’s recovery and my husband’s mother’s illness, we were no doubt lousy company. Maybe we’d somehow offended our friends. Or maybe they were just sick of the disasters that now consumed our lives; just because we were stuck with them didn’t mean our friends had to go there, too.

Even if they were completely fed up with us, though, they had to know that my husband and I were going through the toughest year of our lives. I would have understood their defection if our friendship had been less close; as it was, I couldn’t stop wondering what had happened.

In the wake of 9/11, two wars and the seemingly ever-rising tide of natural disasters, we’ve come to understand the various ways in which people cope with crisis when it happens to them. But psychologists are just beginning to explore the ways we respond to other people’s traumas.

“We all live in some degree of terror of bad things happening to us,” said Barbara M. Sourkes, associate professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “When you’re confronted by someone else’s horror, there’s a sense that it’s close to home."

After you've read the article, check out Tara Parker-Pope's Well blog for comments.

Aaaacckkk!!

The end of an era arrived for me this morning, when I heard, on CBS Sunday Morning, that Cathy Guisewite has announced the end of her comic strip, Cathy. The final strip will run on Oct. 3, after almost 34 years.

I was in high school when Cathy began running in the newspapers in the late 1970s. By the time I got to university, I was hooked. I had Cathy posters on my dorm room walls, a Cathy wall calendar & agenda book, & Cathy mugs (which I still have). My mother & I would trade Cathy clippings, especially those involving Cathy & her mother, whose relationship sometimes eerily mirrored our own.

I spent one summer living with one of my girlfriends, who was juggling several boyfriends at once. In one storyline that summer, Cathy had every man she ever dated show up in her living room at the same time. I would clip the cartoons & leave them on the table for my girlfriend to read, between dates. I remember both of us giggling over a classic Cathy line -- after listening to an unwanted suitor proclaim his undying love, Cathy mourned, "Why do the right words always come out of the wrong mouth??"

Not everyone shares my love of "Cathy." Most guys I knew didn't like it ("Feminist stuff," sniffed a former (male) head of my department, upon seeing my Cathy calendar in my cubicle) & some women don't either, saying Cathy's constant battles with food, bathing suits, etc., were demeaning to women. At the same time, it's undeniable that the strip was groundbreaking for its time, & reflected the tension most women of Guisewite's (& my) generation felt between the feminist ideal & the reality of being female. Which, like it or not, often included (and still includes) struggles with weight, body image, relationships, parents...

One headline I found online read "Cathy Comic Strip Ends - Readers Reminded It Still Existed." Once carried in some 1,400 newspapers, it's now in just 700 or so. (I've actually been having it e-mailed to me every morning for the past several years, & have several printed out & thumbtacked to the walls of my cubicle.)

I can't blame Guisewite for deciding to throw in the towel -- after 34 years, it must be difficult to find something fresh to write & draw about the annual swimsuit shopping expedition (although I still find she manages to come up with some really great observations, & I still find myself sending strips to people -- most recently to my husband, when Cathy & Irving's very different approaches to packing for vacation had me cracking up over the obvious parallels). The strip probably "jumped the shark" when Cathy finally married her longtime on-again-off-again boyfriend, Irving, five years ago.

So how should the strip end? According to some Wall Street Journal readers, with a baby, of course (see the comments section). Apparently Guisewite, who adopted a baby 18 years ago, has said she has wavered over the years on the question of whether Cathy & Irving should have children.

Well, if marrying Irving was seen as a betrayal by some readers who looked to Cathy as an icon of single femaledom, you can imagine how THIS married but childless reader would feel about an ending like THAT. Cathy Guisewite, if you're reading this, please, I beg you -- DON'T DO IT.

But I'll miss you, Cathy, just the same. Thanks for the laughs & the memories, & may all your chocolate be calorie-free.