Recent reading

When something piques my interest, I tend to immerse myself in it -- even when the subject matter is not exactly mainstream. This includes infertility, pregnancy loss and... true crime cases. I read at least four books on the infamous Bernardo/Homolka murders & trials (the Chinese restaurant in Scarborough where Bernardo liked to hang out is just up the street from FIL's house -- although it's now an Islamic mosque)(!), and I just finished reading two books about the Shafia murders, back to back, both written by reporters who covered the trial.

I wrote about this case right at this time last year, just after a verdict was reached in the trial of Mohammed Shafia, his wife Tooba Yahya, and their son Hamed, originally from Afghanistan. The victims were the couple's three (mildly) rebellious teenaged daughters and Shafia's first (polygamous) wife, Rona Amir -- who was infertile, prompting Shafia to take a second wife, Tooba (who treated her childless sister-wife like a servant). Rona nevertheless stuck around and helped to raise the seven Shafia children, whom she loved dearly. (Needless to say, Rona's story, in particular, resonated deeply with me.)  Their bodies were found in a car that was submerged in a few feet of water at the bottom of the locks on the Rideau Canal near Kingston (where dh & I spent our anniversary last summer).

The book by local Kingston reporter Paul Schliesmann, Honour on Trial, is a quick read -- just 207 widely spaced pages, set in large type, with each "chapter" just a few pages long.  Nevertheless, it lays out the basic elements of the case well, and also focuses on the practice of honour killings and some other recent examples of honour crimes in Canada. It would be a good choice for someone looking for a quick overview of the story.

Without Honour by Rob Tripp is a longer and more detailed account -- almost too detailed in some parts. I could have done without the word for word retelling of the police and courtroom interrogations.

But Tripp's eye for detail adds much to our knowledge of the family and the case. He brings each of the victims to life, with help from the neighbours, teachers, relatives, girlfriends -- and boyfriends -- who knew them. He also tells us more about the police officers involved and the techniques they used to investigate and crack the case. The book includes photos, not just of the Shafia family members but of the Kingston Mills site where the car was pulled out of the Rideau Canal, which also add to our understanding of what happened.

Timothy Appleby reviewed both books in The Globe and Mail in December. You can read his take on them here.

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Speaking From Among the Bones by Alan Bradley is the fifth in his series of novels about Flavia de Luce, precocious pre-teen chemist/detective, and her family. Flavia, as one reviewer put it, is "Harriet the Spy by way of Agatha Christie, with a dash of Lemony Snicket and the Addams Family. Who could resist?" Because each book builds on the one(s) before, however, I would recommend you start with the first Flavia novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and work your way through the series.

It's coming up to Easter, as well as the 500th anniversary of the local parish's patron saint, St. Tancred. Flavia is present when the saint's tomb is opened -- and the excavators find a little more than they had bargained for. On the home front, Flavia is also facing significant changes afoot at Buckshaw, the de Luce family's crumbling ancestral mansion.

Beyond the murder that drives the plot, Flavia learns of the tragic death of a child. The absence of her adventure-seeking mother, Harriet, who died when Flavia was a baby, also continues to haunt the family. 

The book wraps up the mystery at hand... but nevertheless ends with a cliffhanger!! -- and it's a doozy, too. Exhilarating & frustrating at the same time. Unfortunately, I will have to wait until early 2014 for the next installment in the story -- tentatively titled The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches -- to find out what happens next. (Arrrrrggghhhhhh....!!)

But there's more than just another book to look forward to (Bradley actually has another five planned).  I remember writing in a review of a previous Flavia book that I thought they would make great episodes of PBS's Masterpiece Mysteries. Looks like the goddesses were listening: I recently stumbled onto a news item announcing that director Sam Mendes (whose latest movie was the critically and popularly acclaimed James Bond flick, Skyfall), has optioned the Flavia books to be adapted for television.

I. CAN'T. WAIT.

Pamela & I meet the "Bitter Infertiles"

I was honoured to be asked by the Bitter Infertiles to chat with them this past weekend (via the magic of Skype) about childless/free living. Even better, I got to share the discussion with the premiere spokeswoman for our little (but growing!) corner of the ALI blogosphere, the thoughtful and articulate Pamela of Silent Sorority. Mo & Cristy asked us some excellent questions and had some great observations, and the hour flew by. The podcast of our conversation is now available for your listening pleasure here. (The podcast & other resources are also on the Bitter Infertiles blog.)  Please let us know what you think!

The sound quality at the beginning isn't that great... but it does improve somewhat after the introductions -- so hang in there ; ) (although for whatever reason, it's continues to be less than perfect on my end -- my apologies).

(And please excuse the coughing in the background -- ummmmm, that was me and my cold. :p  I had a big mug of tea, a roll of lozenges and a box of tissues sitting beside my laptop ; ) but it still wasn't quite enough to maintain total background silence.)

Appropriately, the show was taped (yes, I'm old-fashioned, but you know what I mean...) on Pamela's six-year blogoversary. Pop on over to offer your congratulations!

And if, after you've listened to us, you're still craving more food for thought about the childless/free life, you can watch this hour-long videotaped session from the recent Fertility Planit show in California -- which dares to address the unpopular subject of "Letting Go of Having Genetic Offspring." The panel includes bloggers Lisa Manterfield of Life Without Baby and Tracey Cleantis of La Belette Rouge, and is moderated by Melanie Notkin of Savvy Auntie. Check it out!

And finally, Tracey wrote a great post after participating on the panel, expanding on her remarks & laying out her personal five-step recipe for moving on and letting go. Your own mileage may vary, but I agree with every one of her steps, which mostly reflect my own journey too.

Long ago & far away? Unfortunately not...

(Headline edited, with apologies to Lisa at Life Without Baby....!) 

Confession: I have yet to watch a complete episode of what seems to be everyone's favourite TV show of the moment, Downton Abbey.  When I tell people, I inevitably get a shocked reaction, followed by assurances that I would love it, I really should watch it, etc. I'm sure I'd love it too;  it's just that it's on until 11 p.m., which is generally way past my bedtime (and I'm already staying up until 11 on Mondays to watch "Dallas" -- two nights in a row is too much for this old gal...!), and I've already missed the first 2.5 seasons and catching up on DVD is a b*tch...

Anyway. While I have yet to see a full episode myself, I still can't help knowing all about the show & the various characters, thanks to watercooler & Internet chatter, etc. 
(Spoiler alert!!)

And after last Sunday's episode, my Facebook news feed was flooded with comments of "Not Sybil!!"

Lady Sybil, the youngest of the three daughters who live at the Abbey, died in Sunday night's episode, after giving birth to a daughter. The cause? Eclampsia.

I've been waiting to see what, if anything, the ALI blogosphere might have to say on the topic.  Cecily at Uppercase Woman wrote about how watching the episode triggered PTSD and memories of her own experience with eclampsia, which resulted in the loss of her twin boys, nine years ago. There was also an article in today's Globe and Mail.

My fear, after hearing about Lady Sybil, was that those fortunate viewers who have never confronted high-risk pregnancy or pregnancy loss might think (as I once did) that eclampsia is a thing of the past, that such things would not, do not, happen today. They would be wrong.

In my 20s, like so many naive young women, I didn't think that anybody died during childbirth anymore. Certainly not in North America, anyway. I learned differently soon after I started working on the newsletter for the company that still employs me. One of my first tasks was to contact human resources and compile a list of all the employees and pensioners who had retired or died during the previous month. Imagine my shock when I was handed a death advice for a 35-year-old woman. I had to call her boss to verify one of the facts, and she was only too willing to share all the gory details with me, unprompted. She had died in childbirth. Childbirth?? I was shocked. Who dies in childbirth in late-20th century urban Canada??

I probably shouldn't have been surprised. I came very close to not being here myself, because of eclampsia.

Growing up, I would sometimes overhear my mother saying that she'd had "a hard time" giving birth to me, and was in the hospital for two weeks afterward (which was a long time, even back then,, when stays of a week after a normal birth weren't unheard of). But it wasn't until many years later, perhaps during my own pregnancy, at age 37, that I remember hearing her use the terms "toxemia" and "eclampsia." I'm sure my mother probably mentioned it to me then;  I do remember her asking about my blood pressure. (I never had problems with high blood pressure or started taking medication for it until well into my 40s.) 

In later years, I remember her saying to me that we were both lucky to be here. Just over Christmas, I overheard her telling a neighbour that she went into convulsions while delivering me.

In my 20s, I gave both my grandparents one of those fill-in-the-blanks memory books and asked them to write in them. After they had both died, my mother gave them back to me. Grandma's remained blank, but I was tickled to find that my grandfather had filled in the first few pages, in a shaky hand. Under the question, "Where were you when I was born?" he had written, "Not far away." My mother chuckled ruefully as she read that: "I'm sure he was," she said. My poor Grandpa;  I can just picture him. How worried he must have been for us both.

After losing Katie, on message boards and in our real-life support group, I heard many more stories about pre-eclampsia, about soaring blood pressure and difficult decisions, about emergency C-sections and babies delivered prematurely or stillborn. Yes, it does still happen today. 

And then I gradually started making the connection from the stories I was hearing from other women my own age who had survived the horror of eclampsia but watched their babies die, to the snippets I'd heard from my mother about my own birth story. And realized how very, very lucky we both were.

My mother recently started watching "Downton Abbey." I can't quite bring myself to ask her if she saw last Sunday's episode.

More information on (pre)eclampsia & related conditions such as HELLP can be found at the Preeclampsia Foundation.

Is the unlived life worth examining?

Every now & then I will learn about a new book through a book review... I don't always get around to reading the book itself (lol), but the review alone often provides food for thought (& blog posts!).

One such review was in the New York Times Sunday Book Review a couple of weekends ago. The book was "Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life" by Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst & writer.

Here are a few excerpts from the review (emphasis mine):

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What’s at stake throughout these essays is how we understand the “lives we could be leading but for some reason are not.” Phillips’s clinical practice (he sees patients four days a week and writes on Wednesdays) has shown him that “we live as if we know more about the experiences we don’t have than the experiences we do have.” He refers to these parallel or shadow lives as our “unlived lives,” and says that many of us “spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason” that “they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives.”

It’s hard not to find this embarrassingly familiar: the unloved lovers, the unsucceeded successes. We’re so sure of what our unlived lives would have been like that we feel guilty for not living them — for not living up to our potential. ...

The questions that interest him most — “Why is it so difficult to enjoy not getting it?” “Is there someone ordering us around in our minds to try to get it?” — are purposefully broad, because the content of the “it” is less important than the form of the question. “It” is whatever “it” means to the reader at the moment: a raise, a joke, a girlfriend, a poem. ...Although we’ve been educated to want to get it, there are forgotten pleasures in not getting it...

...he offers us another kind of hope too — not the consumerist one, that all our dreams may come true, but the hope that our frustrations might lead us out of the fantasy world in our minds and into an engagement with what is. After all, “the only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating.”

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There is so much there to chew on. "What was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives.”

The thing about infertility is that you are so focused on the life you so desperately want to be living,  the life that IS possible (frustratingly so) for the vast majority of the population -- a life with babies, with children -- the things you don't have but badly want -- that you neglect to focus on & enjoy the life you ARE living, the here and now (except as it relates to how it relates to getting you closer to your goal, to that other life you want to be living).

And the difficult thing about living childless/free after infertility and loss is that we are so constantly reminded that what was not possible for us is possible for so many others. In a world where the lives of our friends and relatives so often revolves around children and parenting, we hover on the periphery. It's easy to get stuck, focusing on what we don't have and didn't get.

What was not possible -- the children we did not have -- will always cast a shadow over our lives. The question is how much we let that define us. I've always said that I am more than my uterus. When I look back at the end of my life, I want my life to be about, and I want to be remembered for, so much more than the fact that I didn't get to have the family I wanted. I don't want to be immediately identified as "the one whose baby died."  I am proud to be Katie's mom, make no mistake, and there is no denying the huge impact that infertility, pregnancy loss and involuntary childlessness have had on my life.

But I  am not just "the childless one." I am also a coworker, a loyal employee, a writer. I am a wife, a daughter, a sister, a niece, a cousin, a very proud aunt. I am a friend.

Yes, I lost a baby and had some bad things happen to me. But sooner or later, in some form or another, grief and loss come to us all. I have grieved. But I've also laughed & loved (some say grief is the price we pay for having loved someone). I have a nice home, a loving husband and family, a good job, some great memories, and the prospect of creating more.

My life is not perfect. Maybe it could be better. But it could also be a heck of a lot worse.

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La Belette Rouge actually HAS read the book, and wrote about it on her blog (with the same post title as mine -- great minds, etc., lol). You can find her thoughts (much more coherent than mine...!), right here.

Of pregnancy loss, privacy & politics

She was not elected the Liberal Party leader in the province of Ontario this past weekend (& thus will not automatically become Ontario's first female premier). (The leadership was won by another woman, Kathleen Wynne -- who not only became the first female premier but also the first one who is openly gay.) 

I didn't follow the race that closely, and had no strong opinion on the matter -- other than thinking (a) that it was pretty cool that, one way or another, we were likely to wind up with a female premier (at last!) & (b) isn't it too often the way, the only time a political party ever hands over the reins of power to a woman, it's when things can't get much worse for them anyway? 

But I was reminded when reading this profile of leadership candidate & runner up Sandra Pupatello that perhaps it might have been nice to have a political leader who has an intimate understanding of the heartache of infertility, pregnancy loss and involuntary childlessness.:

She’s also known heartache. 

In October 2003, there was a stunning story in the Toronto Star that Pupatello was four months pregnant after seven miscarriages over 13 years. The story resonated because it seemed so painfully private. This was her fourth attempt using in vitro fertilization. While she was over the moon, she hadn’t wanted it publicized, but Star reporter Richard Brennan guessed. He’d known her forever and urged her to let people know about her “miracle.” 

She later miscarried.  

“It changes you,” she says. “It knocks anything other than modesty right out of your system. You have to go through tough things in order to understand other people’s pain. There are things you can’t control and you have to let go.” 

She’s thrown herself into being a good Italian zia to her brother Walter’s three children, taking them to Queen’s Park and acting like a second mother.

I remember reading that 2003 story about Pupatello's pregnancy and previous miscarriages. I already knew she was "one of us" in that respect -- someone I knew through our pg loss support group knew her, knew her story and had tried, unsuccessfully, to enlist her support for our organization. 

But I didn't know she had also lost that baby too. And I didn't realize the story behind the story, either. I feel badly for her -- not just for all her losses, but also because (a bit like Kate Middleton), she was pressured to bare her soul and tell her story and talk about her pregnancy before she was really ready to do so.

The cynical journalist in me realizes that reporter knew a good human interest story when he saw it. (I wonder how he felt later.) The cynical deadbabymama in me also thinks that only someone who has never been through infertility, &/or never lost a pregnancy, could think it was OK for someone who was just four months pregnant, after seven previous losses and four IVFs over 13 years, to talk publicly about "miracles."  Ahh, the innocence of the uninitiated...

And maybe you're just being an idiot...

Did you happen to see the blog post by a woman named Janine Kovac, published this past week on a site called Role/Reboot -- an open letter to a friend she addresses as "Doris," who has not (yet?) had children. "Maybe You Are Ready for Kids, You're Just Not Paying Attention," the post is titled and it all goes downhill from there.

There are so many things wrong with this post, I can't even begin to list them. All I can say is, if you're trying to talk your friend into having a baby, Janine, this is definitely NOT the way to go about it. :p  (Not that anyone can, or should try to "talk" someone into having a baby they're not ready for or not sure they want, anyway...).

A few responses I've run across (hearteningly, many of them are written by mothers):

An Open Letter to Janine Kovac (also on Role/Reboot)

Open Letter to 'Clock-Ticking' Childless Women Makes Moms Look Condescending & Self-Righteous (from The Stir)

Motherhood isn't the path to enlightenment for all women (by Mary Elizabeth Williams on Salon -- the first piece I actually read on this subject). How can you not love this summation at the end:

Take it from a mom, Doris. A very happy one whose daughters are straight up the greatest people in the world. Have kids. Or don’t have kids. But you don’t have to make your choices based on the incredibly condescending notion that raising children is the way to enlightenment, or that the alternate road leads to having nothing in life to care about but your iPhone. The only person who can ever fulfill you is you, Doris. And you have infinite worth and value right now, just as you are. Don’t let anybody ever try to tell you otherwise.

Odds & ends

• I am hopelessly behind on my blog reading. :p But I haven't given up!! ; )
• Saturday was my birthday -- #52. For some reason, the phrase "52 pickup" keeps going through my head. So far as I can tell, though, I am still playing with a full deck. ; ) (For now, anyway...!)
• I had a great birthday weekend -- a LONG weekend. (Yes, I did just get back from vacation too, lol.)  I took Friday off work and (what else?) headed to the spa for some pampering -- dh gave me a gift certificate for Christmas and I decided to use it sooner rather than later. : )  I am glad I did.
• Feb. 1, the countdown begins to Freedom 55. ; ) It's the first day that I'm officially eligible for early retirement. (Edited to add: Feb. 1, 2016, that is... three years to go!! Hence, the countdown...) Whether I actually get to retire then remains to be seen... but it's something to aim for and look forward to!
• I saw this article in yesterday's New York Times, about the parents of the children murdered at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut last month, speaking out and joining forces for change. I was struck in particular by this quote from David Wheeler, whose son, Benjamin, 6, was killed, explaining why he and his wife, Francine, joined the campaign. “What I have recently come to realize is that I am not done being the best parent I can be for Ben. Not by a very long measure," Wheeler said. It says so much about the lifelong relationship bereaved parents continue to have with their children, long after the funeral is over and everyone goes home and assumes you are "moving on" with your life. They will always be your children. You will always be their parents.
• Jody Day at Gateway Women was interviewed last fall for an hour-long podcast called Dream Corner, which profiles inspiring women. Listen in here -- Jody makes some excellent points on behalf of those of us who are living childless/free, for whatever reason. The interviewer admits to being childfree by choice, but I think even she learned a few things from Jody -- demonstrating why it's so important for us to keep speaking and writing about our lives, even to people who are sympathetic to our position.   
• The Globe and Mail has started a weeklong series about the growing numbers of people who are living alone (read the first installment from Saturday, here).  While it's not strictly about childlessness per se, and (obviously) focuses on singles vs couples, life without children is part of the overall picture. There is a lot of food for thought here re: societal assumptions and how and why some of us choose to live outside the established norm.