Lawyer Mama

Forever Friends

I have a hard time making friends.

Acquaintances are easy to make. They come and go. Hell, so do friends sometimes, but those aren't the lasting relationships I'm talking about. A Facebook friend used the term “forever friends” the other day and it so perfectly describes what I mean that I had to lift it. Forever friends are those special people that aren't related to you but that you know will be there for you, even if it's been 2 months, or 2 years since your last call. If you live close by, you can call your Forever Friend anytime, for anything and she'll be at your door in 30 minutes. With vodka. And ice cream.

Forever friends. Those are the hard ones to find.

When I was a teenager, my 11^th grade English teacher told me that at the end of your life you will be able to count the true friends you've had on one hand. If you're extremely lucky, you'll move on to the second hand. I scoffed and looked around at my circle of high school friends and actually felt sorry for the guy. How sad was that? Only 5 real friends in all his ancient years? (In actuality, I think he was in his late 30's at the time, an irony that is not lost on me now.)

Although I've spent my entire life moving – the curse of the Air Force brat – and making friends, I am an introvert. People laugh at me when I say this, but let me be clear; I'm not shy. I'm not shy at all. I am reserved, but I have no problems talking to strangers, networking or making … acquaintances. Of those many acquaintances, some with shared backgrounds or interests or children or ideas do become friends. Of course. But those friendships often fade away through time or distance or because what once brought us together, whether it be children of the same age, a job or a photography class, isn't as important or immediate. I call them situational or superficial friends. Yes, they are still my friends. They riddle my Facebook page and we exchange cards and, on rare occasion, visits.

Forever friends. Those friends are very rare.

My forever friends, women and men alike, they get me. I get them. And it doesn't matter if we have completely different political ideologies or careers. It doesn't matter who has children or if they're even close to the same age. Geography is irrelevant. These are the friends I will keep my entire life. I will watch their children grow up. I will cheer on their careers and love lives. I will wipe their tears, even if I need to have the ice cream and Grey Goose delivered via Fed Ex on dry ice. I will go to their weddings. I will mourn them when they die or they will mourn me. Because, you see, we will be friends forever.

I can count these people on one hand. On less than one hand.

A few times in my life I've met someone that I thought would become a forever friend only to discover that I was … wrong.

We've all had friends like this. You talk and talk for hours and hours. You have so much in common. You really seem to click. But after the initial charming rush of doing many things together, you slowly begin to realize that you are the one who is usually making the calls, doing the inviting, suggesting the outings or waiting for the phone to ring. It's not deliberate or vengeful or malicious. You just aren't … the first friend who comes to mind.

It hurts. We've all been there.

For the introvert, however, I think it hurts more. You see, we introverts, we live very much inside ourselves. We keep the best parts of ourselves inside; the funny; the snark; the big ideas. Not many people ever get in there. Not really. So when we let someone in, when I let someone in, it's kind of a big deal. A really big deal. And I don't think that most people realize this about me; that I'm not really a thick skinned extrovert with tons of friends. I'm actually a quivering mass of goo who will sometimes even cry if someone forgets to call.

I'd much rather keep myself closed off until I know someone is a forever friend. But that's not possible. Because every forever friendship develops precisely because we get to see that quivering mass of goo inside another. And we manage to keep from running away screaming. Forever friends always start out as superficial or situational friends, but it would be so much easier for ME if they could just come stamped with a nice big F on the forehead. So I'd know.

Superficial friendships drain me. They're exhausting for an introvert. They're exhausting for me. I never know if that offer to have dinner, or get the kids together, or have an outing is a real one or if a superficial friend will just forget about it. I struggle with whether to tell Hollis that he's going to do X with his friend Y because I have no idea if Y's mommy will actually follow through. And that's where this whole friendship thing gets even more troublesome.

Because, you see, the kids are involved now.  And Hollis is just. like. me.

If Y's mom doesn't call or follow through, then I'm the one left picking up the pieces when Hollis's heart is broken. Because I can't tell him that I'm sure Y's mom just forgot or lost track of time or was really busy. No matter what lies I tell him or how many times I tell him that things just didn't work out, or we couldn't get schedules to mesh or even take the blame all on myself, Hollis will take it personally. No matter what I do, he will have his little heart smooshed because some thoughtless person didn't realize that the offhand comment she made was taken to heart by a little boy who was listening.

When this happens, I sometimes feel like I don't have any real friends here at all, although that certainly isn't true. It makes me want to move. Somewhere where I have ties, and roots and all my friends and family. Somewhere where I know that my children will always have friends and family they can count on.

But that somewhere doesn't really exist. My forever friends and my family are flung all over the country. I'm a military brat. I don't have a home. Well, this is home now.

Usually, it's all fine. Ninety-eight percent of the time, it's fine. But when my heart hurts and it's all caught up in the pain my little guy will feel and in figuring out how to make the blow as soft as possible for Hollis, it's not fine. No matter how small or insignificant this all may really be it's not fine today. And I find myself cursing my high school English teacher because he was right.

I need to call one of my forever friends. Send vodka. Don't forget the Chunky Monkey.

How to Make People Instantly Uncomfortable: Tell Them You're Infertile!

Last weekend, at the BogHer 2010 in conference in New York, I had the chance to attend a panel about blogging grief, loss and tragedy on the internet. One of the panelists was Cecily Kellogg, who blogs as Uppercase Woman and is a noted infertility blogger. Cecily was on the panel to share her experiences after she developed preeclampsia and was forced to terminate her twin pregnancy at 23.5 weeks to save her own life. The stories of all of the panelists, including Cecily’s, were heartbreaking, but they were hopeful as well.

Many people are uncomfortable hearing or even reading about someone’s grief. As people undergoing infertility treatments or with the infertility diagnosis, we are all acutely aware of this. We’ve all suffered through those uncomfortable moments where well meaning family and friends joke about how you’re not getting any younger and you’d better think about having kids before your ovaries shrivel up. If you explain that you’ve been trying for several years and start mentioning ovarian reserve testing and male factor infertility, people just don’t know how to react.

Despite the inability of onlookers to process open grief, everyone on the panel indicated that blogging and the online community they’d found, saved them in many ways. Listening to the women on the panel discuss their grief and loss openly was refreshing. You see, when my husband and I were struggling to have our first child, I wasn’t blogging yet. I kept a diary and it helped to write about it, but we weren’t really sharing our experiences with anyone we knew. The very first time I got pregnant, we told everyone. After I lost the baby, we decided we weren’t going to be in that position again, openly grieving in front of everyone.

Read the rest of this post on the Attain Fertility blog....

Just a reminder to everyone (and to make the FTC happy), I'm a paid outside consultant and Community Manager for Attain Fertility. But I did not attend BlogHer on their dime.

The Wish Tree: Please, Happiness

We’ve all tossed a penny into a fountain or blown out our birthday candles with a wish.  If you’re like me, you’ve done that and you’ve wished on a shooting star, kissed the blarney stone and blown eyelashes all over the place; every time hoping for a baby.

These days, I’ve stopped wishing for a baby because it seems too hard and too certain to disappoint me.  Instead, I wish for happiness and inner peace with my life as it is.  Happiness is a big goal, but somehow it seems smaller than a baby and, after so many disappointments, more attainable.

One way that I try to keep myself peaceful and happy is by writing about my life, my experiences and my feelings about infertility; but not just writing, blogging.  You see blogging gives me a community of people like me.  You may not look like me, act like me or think like me, but you get me.  We have one very important common experience – infertility.

This weekend I attended the BlogHer conference in New York. It’s the largest conference for blogging women in the world and a great source of inspiration for me.  This year was no exception.  During the conference, I attended an event at the Museum of Modern Art and saw Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree in the Sculpture Garden.

I was struck by the tree, not just because its poor branches were weighted almost to capacity with tags, but because of the large number of people who were waiting to add their wishes.  As I watched, hundreds of people waited, wrote and tied their deepest desires to the tree for everyone to see.

It was amazing.  And it reminded me so much of what infertility bloggers do every day.

Infertility has taken me to some dark places.  I was depressed, scared and felt alone, despite the friends and family surrounding me. And while my quest for my first child happened before I began blogging on Lawyer Mama in 2006, the legacy of my depression still lingers.

Read the rest of this post on the Attain Fertility blog....

Just a little reminder to everyone that I am a paid consultant and Community Manager for Attain Fertility.

Infertility: Putting it all Out on the Table

I've made a few veiled references to the fact that T and I are trying to have another baby.  The reasons I don't talk about it on here much are actually pretty silly.  Conventional wisdom says that you should never share such information in case there are problems.  But we were already well into "problem" territory when we tried to have a baby the first time around.

If you're a regular reader here, you know something of my infertility history.  If you're new to my little psychodrama, you can find the major pieces here:

Part I: The Opposite of Fertility is Infertility

Part II: Baby Chase Part II

Part III: 'Tis the Season to be Depressed

Part IV: A Black & White Clock

Part V: A Sidetrip to Iceland

Part VI: Blunt and Blue

I've said in the past that I've never really sought to become an infertility blogger. I started this blog in 2006, after my second son, Little H, was born.  That's not to say that I've ever forgotten, or even really recovered, from the many disappointments we had along the way.  But the past was the past and I realized how lucky we are.

Now, we're trying again and we know it won't be easy because we've been trying for a year now.  I'll be documenting our journey from here on out, because I'm now an outside consultant and Community Manager for Attain Fertility.  I'll be managing the Attain Fertility Blog and Facebook and Twitter Communities online. 

To be absolutely clear for those lovely people from the FTC, I am being paid to be Attain Fertility's Community Manager and to post on their blog.  They are not, however, paying me to write about them on my personal blog, Facebook or Twitter accounts.  So rest assured, I'm only doing so because I think Attain Fertility is wonderful.  They offer some wonderful ways to finance infertility treatments for those of us without unlimited funds and health insurance that only cover infertility testing, rather than treatment. If there was a clinic in my area, I'd go. However, the closest Attain Fertility clinics are in North Carolina or the DC area. That's actually turned out to be a good thing. You can rest assured that I'll be speaking honestly and openly about my treatment experiences because it won't affect my bread and butter in any way.

You can find my inaugural post, Yes, I'm an Infertile Klutz, on the Attain Fertility blog and a bit from my second post below:

The Box of Paddington Bears

Paddington Bear makes me think of childhood.  My mother adored the orphan bear.  I knew the story of Paddington from an early age and my mother’s fascination with that adorable British bear passed on to me.  Adopted by a family when he arrived at Paddington Station with a mysterious, “Please look after this bear” tag on his blue coat, Paddington was cute, fuzzy, and he loved marmalade.  I didn’t know what marmalade was, but I had to try it just for him.  When I pictured myself as an adult with children, I always seemed to be reading them bed time stories featuring my beloved Paddington.

Of course, life doesn’t always turn out the way we hope.

I had my first miscarriage when I was a 27 year old law student.  My husband and I weren’t trying to have a baby and I was equal parts terrified and thrilled to discover I was pregnant at about 10 weeks.  Only a few days later, it was over.  My doctor said there was no reason to suspect there was anything wrong, it was just “one of those things that happen.”  I still thought about the baby that might have been, but I didn’t worry.  I went on with my life.

Fast forward a few years.  I hit 30 and we decided it was time to start trying to have a baby.  Because I’m a Type A person, we had to do everything the “right” way.  We had a preconception appointment; I started taking prenatal vitamins and stopped taking birth control pills.  I ate right, I exercised, and we got pregnant on our very first try.  Morning sickness hit me like a ton of bricks.  I started collecting Paddington Bears for our baby’s bedroom.

Then there was no heartbeat.

Read the rest of this post on the Attain Fertility Blog....

Adorable Retro Shoes for BlogHer 2010

I got some new shoes that are so adorable, I had to share them.

 

This photo made possible by the wonder of my life that is the iPhone.

What are you wearing to BlogHer?

I'll be speaking on a panel on Friday afternoon, Creating Tangible Social Change: How to Move People to Action. It's at 1:15pm, so don't miss it!  I'll be the one in the really cute shoes.