Why it’s fun to have a tiny bit of power
Jul 21, 2005 Infertility
(My writing group people already know this. Distaffers among you, turn your heads away.)
I get a lot of PR pitches because of my job and a pitch showed up in my inbox yesterday that said this:
I wanted to take a second of your time to tell you about [guy's name] and his book The book presents readers with the ability to pick apart their lives and put them back together in a more nurturing, healthy form. Through yoga, [yoga guy] explains how to love, live and learn.Perhaps most interesting is [yoga guy]’s work with couples. He helps to restore intimacy and re-establish relationships - relationships with oneself, others, and the world around. Sometimes his work is geared very specifically at using yoga as a catalyst for a specific goal. Here is an excerpt from his book that involves a couple, and their desire for a baby:
“S and V were a typical “upwardly mobile†couple. They were very busy with their lives of business and fun. Traveling frequently, they vigorously worked out with popular yoga as it was taught in New York to keep well in their busy routines. When S turned thirty-six, they decided to have a baby, knowing that the passing years would be a critical factor in this desire. With no interruption to their lifestyle, they tried. Years passed with no pregnancy. Finally S did conceive, only to miscarry early on. It had been sad for them. And frankly, they admitted, sex was not much fun.â€
It was at this point that [yoga guy] stepped in and began working with the couple. As you can imagine, things looked up. [yoga guy] goes on to say, “This is what happened. The immediate result was that their sexual desire and pleasure with each other dramatically increased. They were now willing to receive each other and be there for each other. This, they agreed, was a satisfactory outcome in itself and validated yoga for them – and their friends! S immediately became more feminine n character and appearance, more desirable to V, who gave her much more attention! He became a little softer, a little less driven in business pursuit. Their whole life of lovemaking became very interesting to them, where previously it had been almost like a job to be done with the added pressure of trying to conceive. Then they did! What job. And this time in their more realized lifestyle, in the pleasure and health of their intimacy, there seemed to be no question or risk of miscarriage. Her belly grew beautifully.†Page 132
I would love to explain what [yoga guy] did with the couple to help in their transformation, and give you more examples of how Yoga can be a catalyst for great changes.
So I wrote back and said, basically, that as someone whose had like a zillion (ok, six) miscarriages I would never ever ever ever feature that book.
So she wrote back and said she was “deeply sorry” for upsetting me and she just hoped that highlighting the “success of one couple” would inspire people.
I wrote back and said that the “just relax” line (not to mention the “get more feminine”) line was deeply offensive and exploitive. I told her that one of the women I work with at my job has a deformed uterus. Did she really think that yoga would fix my friend’s deformed uterus? I suggested she rethink her pitch.
I never know if I should mention my own infertility history or not when I go off on PR people. On the one hand, I want them to know that the person on the other end of the email line may be someone who knows more about infertility than they do but on the other hand, this PR person apologized for upsetting me and not for being a general idiot. So maybe she thinks, “Oh well, that poor editor, no wonder she was sad,” instead of, “God, what was I thinking?!”
I get “just relax” stories in my email box on a regular basis. How I handle them depends on my mood that day but I always write back and tell them why I’m saying no thank you.
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Tags: Infertility
Dawn is getting old
Apr 8, 2005 Infertility
Back when I first started blogging, there weren’t zillions and zillions of us. When I went looking for people writing about infertility, I found about five. Maybe six. One of them was Milenka, one was MizJenna, one was the first incarnation of Jenex (she had another one between her first and this last one, too) and was that it? That might have been it. No, wait, there was Suspenseful over at diaryland but her blog is down. Oh and Mae Midwest.
I know this because I started a webring for infertility blogs and I periodically went searching for infertility blogs.
Then there came Julie and getupgrrl and between the two of them, they inspired so many infertility and adoption bloggers that I could read 50 a day and still not keep up.
Suddenly, the infertility/adoption blog world became a community and that was great except when it was awful. Because where there’s a community, there are obligations and in-fighting and popularity contests and laments about no one commenting, and worries about stats. And one day I read something where someone said that blogs were becoming like those ubiquitous geocities sites and this radical sharing started looking mundane to me. I started losing interest in updating. I started thinking about how many hits I wasn’t getting. I caught myself getting annoyed when adoption bloggers I linked to didn’t link back. I began to get downright curmudgeonly, like Dana Carvey’s grumpy old man character.
“Back in my day, we couldn’t just google our way to a blog entry about Clomid-induced psychosis! No, back then we had to write our own! And we liked it!”
I did like it.
I have trouble with progress.
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Tags: clomid, Infertility
Two review books
Feb 15, 2005 Infertility
Both came in the last week and I haven’t read either (yet). The first is the miscarriage book that was featured in Newsweek: Coming to Term: Uncover the Truth About Miscarriage. One thing about this book gave me pause, the author says that “veterans of three or more miscarriages ina row, become pregnant again, they will, with no treatment, carry to term nearly 70 percent of the time.” I was surprised to read this because it was not the statistic I’d been given (the stat I got was much more dire). So hopefully that will be good news for someone. The second book was just overnighted to me this morning — about ten minutes before I booted up — and it’s When Nature’s Not Enough: Personal Journeys through In Vitro Fertilization.
Edited to add: Mr. Cohen, author of the miscarriage book just wrote to me and said: “Just so there’s no confusion, that statistic of 70 percent success should have an asterisk next to it: It applies to women who have no identified cause for their previous miscarriage.” He also sent along a study to explain this stat further and if anyone wants to see it, let me know and I’ll send along Future pregnancy outcome in unexplained recurrent first trimester miscarriage by K.Clifford, R.Rai and L.Regan
I’m telling you, people, it’s hip to be infertile now. Where is getupgrrl’s book deal? (Actually, I have a theory about this. I theorize that some agent has contactd her — because it’s in the water these days — and either she said no to preserve her anonymity or else she said yes and hasn’t told us. If Mimi can write a book as Mimi, then getupgrrl should be able to still write as getupgrrl, right?)
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Miscarriage is the new black
Feb 9, 2005 Infertility
Points in fact:
– Health > Specialists Trying to Unravel the Mystery of Miscarriage” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/health/08baby.html” target=”here”>It’s in the New York Times
–It was in Newsweek
Finally! I’m gonna go get me a t-shirt!
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It’s nice to be on the winning side
Jan 11, 2005 Infertility
Daily Kos :: Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.
Legislation that would have required mothers who had failed to report fetal deaths to the police within 12 hours of the delivery to face a possible misdemeanor sentence will be withdrawn, its patron said on Monday.“I’ve elected to withdraw HB 1677 from consideration by the General Assembly this year. The language is just too confusing,” Del. John Cosgrove, R-Chesapeake, told The Augusta Free Press.
Cosgrove’s surprise move came after a firestorm of controversy spread across the World Wide Web over the weekend about the possible far-reaching effects of the measure.
