Hey There.

I am feeling cranky and fatigued, easily irritated, contemplative, turned inward.  This article didn't help: "But the question is, at who's (sic -- and seriously, can the Times not afford a fucking proofreader?) expense? How will the bloggee feel, say, 16 years from now, when her prom date Googles her entire existence?" and "The baby blog in many cases is an online shrine to parental self-absorption" chafe like a denim swimsuit. Oh, those selfish mothers. How we do hate them! Won't somebody please think of the children?

See, this is the thing about the blog world: it is a microcosm of The World, its goodness, its humor, and its ugliness as well. The prejudices of the world -- parenting is boring; focusing on children is dull; writing about children is selfish; not writing enough about children is selfish -- all are magnified. Cliques and angers and petty slights are enlarged; gestures of kindness are amplified. It is at once raw and open to the whole world, and an artifice more elaborate than the "face to meet the faces that you meet" T. S. Eliot wrote about in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." 

This was true of the bulletin board world, too, back when I read HipMama and Mamatron. Blogs are a little more personal, and the etiquette is less defined: if a board is like a party, is a blog like your living room? A booth at a street fair? I think it's like a front porch: it feels like a part of your house; you put furniture on it, plants. But it's right there on the street, and the only thing stopping someone from walking away with your hanging ferns is social convention. The sense of it being private and owned,  well, that's illusory.

No one in the media seems to be able to agree on what blogs are for, exactly, and I think that's a good thing. Blogs are for lots of different things, as varied as there are bloggers, and what I use mine for fluctuates. When I first started writing here, more than a year ago, I just needed to be able to tell my story to someone. I needed someone to hear me. I meant to get back in the habit of writing, because there are so many things to tell. The support I've gotten has been wonderful, but a totally unforeseen aspect of this project. Even better, I've been able to meet people in real life, make contacts for our next city. Now I like the conversation aspect of it; I like the offloading of unpleasant baggage; hell, I just like to yammer. I like to tell stories and I suck at it in real life; I stammer and forget where I was going, ramble off somewhere else. Not that I don't do that here. In writing, though, it seems slightly more artful; anyway, there are fewer um's and pauses.

Lately I am feeling a little Prufrockish: past my prime a little. Somewhat out of place. Cognizant of my eventual fate. You know, "I do not think that they will sing to me." I don't think this was ever really an "infertility blog" -- I tend to meander, talk about so much other stuff. Mostly I've been writing about pregnancy now, since I'm using one hundred percent of my mental energy to process it; I have been barely able to read other blogs for the past few months, barely able to read anything more than whatever catalogs show up in the mailbox. I'm getting my groove back a bit, and feel capable of talking, of thinking about other things. I read a book yesterday: About Grace, by Anthony Doerr. It was singularly beautiful and electric, exquisite like a blood orange when you've been living on ramen. I finished it in a day; I couldn't stop. I was starved for it.

When things change hugely, when you find yourself infertile, adopting, pregnant, a mother, you have to take some time to recalibrate. To find your center of gravity, to learn how not to fall over every time you take a step. To call yourself by a new name, maybe, to define what is important and what can accrue dust bunnies. Right now I am waking up from the worst of the tiredness, recalling whatever part of me can think about things outside the boundary of my own experience.

I don't feel, so much, like I belong anywhere right now, and I don't know why. It is an area in which I am especially tender, that of belonging, of being included. I never feel I do belong even when I am included, and I compensate for it mostly by not caring. Fuck 'em in the ear, I say. Kind of like the way I hate contests because I never win -- so I find them tiresome and don't participate. It's easier, and gives a certain impression of self-sufficiency, I suppose, but the underlying belief is still there: I won't win. I shouldn't be here. In some ways I don't like belonging, because I don't trust it: if you fit in somewhere, it follows that eventually you will cease to do so,

This sounds unhappy, and I really don't feel that way; I actually feel very good, and okay about all this, and am merely observing it from a distance. I just need to figure out where I fit, or make a place for myself. What do you do, when you get like this?

Comments

[Kinneret]

You said:
"I don't feel, so much, like I belong anywhere right now, and I don't know why. It is an area in which I am especially tender, that of belonging, of being included. I never feel I do belong even when I am included, and I compensate for it mostly by not caring."

The inbetweens, I call it. I live this way, truly, I know no other way. Some times it gets overwhelming and I rely on a swift kick in the pants from an understanding friend to straighten me out, even when I say I don't care.. But mostly? I accept that this is the way it is.

Or in other words:
...You are you and I am me
of that there is no doubt or loss
but what scene's seen of bright chaos
and meaning's mean meanderings
is not what's there or here
but what's there in between...

[Cat]

Hi there. That article was so obnoxious. I read a few of the parenting blogs (to remind me what I'm working for!) and there was a lot of talk about this article. For interesting commentary, see these:

http://tomama.blogs.com/mubar/2005/01/thanks_to_andi_.html
http://themommyblog.com/

And what I do when the ground shifts underneathe me is think think think think think about it until it starts to make sense and I adjust to the new reality. For better or for worse.

[Lisa]

Jo the NYT article was bad.
Tony Doerr used to be a professor here, maybe he still is- he took a big sabbatical for awhile. He actually attended one of my little book club meetings- one of our members is his friend- and talked about The Shell Collecter.
I think you are a great writer and I don't think you need to be in a category. I have found insight on so many subjects from you.

[Annie]

I hear you on the t'ain't situation (t'ain't one thing nor t'other). Generally when it happens to me, I go and hide in a bookstore for a few hours. Watch movies by myself. In extreme situations, I go to an art museum. I find that I feel like that when I've lost acquaintance with myself, can't figure out the boundaries of my head. So it helps, just to sit and do my favorite things.

[Brooklyn Mama]

I don't really have any advice or tips to share. But just today I was thinking how much I like your blog and your "voice," even though I don't comment much.

I've been reading the account of your pregnancy with interest, but without any experience to offer. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we all have a lot in common even if our individual experiences vary.

I think blogging is actually quite social, conversational, and generous - even if we do benefit from it personally. We're all trying to share our stories and connect with each other.

Anyway - you're in a time of transformation, as you said. Take the time to adjust and get your bearings (as the mama of a two-year-old, let me tell ya, it may take a long time!), then settle into your new role and a new sense of belonging for a while before your life changes again.

[Sonetka]

Jo, I can sympathize with the Prufrockian feeling - I'm pretty much where you are. I don't really feel like I belong anywhere (not to mention being fucking terrified, but hey, so was Prufrock). Also been spending a lot of time in bookstores.

Stupid article, yet another cheap sneer at bloggers' expense. I wonder if they ever considered the fact that a lot of bloggers use pseudonyms? Our child (bio or adopted) would have one hell of time finding him/herself online because first of all I have a friends-only journal and second of all I don't write under my real name. And even if they could, I doubt it would be as traumatic as all that. Was I traumatized when I discovered old college letters from my parents' friends, revealing that they had lived before I existed and led blemished lives? Yes. For about five minutes. Then I got over it. I imagine the kids will too.

[Sarah]

I think of blogging like pen pals and the 'chain letter' that my grandmothers and her sisters used to send around to each other to keep up on their news. Now, I'll admit it was more about how many 'beans were frenched' than their deep innner thoughts, that they saved for face to face. I want to tell you that you belong, but I so want to belong. But you seem ok with your in between place, so I won't rescue. I'm awfully glad you are in a place to have these in between feelings.
Sarah

[Mollie]

A year ago, I found blogville (IF blogville, at least) to be a very, very, VERY different place. Less populated, more intimate, better able to zig and zag with the mercurial shifts in topic, mood, and humour without becoming bogged down by misunderstandings and over-explanation.

I guess I am lucky: back then, I really needed my online world. It became my only consistant source of conversation with trusted friends as I went through several major changes in my life. And now, luckier still, at this moment when I need to start reaching out "in real life" and nurturing my new friendships in this new place, I find that my blog and what used to be my tiny little circle has become far less able to compete with flesh-and-blood, here-and-now... I think it is all for the best, at least for me.

I hope you and I will always be friends, Jo, and I am ever, ever, ever so grateful for every damned word you've put out there for me to read. I remember your first couple of posts, and how they left me agog and incontinent from laughter and awe. I remember your process and progress through IF treatments and the subsequent decision to adopt, with its attendent elation. And now, here we are, a few months apart on a similar journey.

I'm so rambly, too. What the hell am I saying? I'm saying that I love you, Jo. And thank blog for blogs, whether I write them or read them or not.

[susan]

I have had this same sense of not belonging since college. I had been to several different schools, changed my major 2 or 3 times, etc and just didn't know what I wanted to do - or to be. So I gave it all up and took any job that grabbed my fancy. I had some fun jobs and some boring jobs but finally I went back to school after 10 years of playing around. On a professional's advice, I tried to get in to Yale. To my surprise - I got in...only I never felt that I belonged there. There was always a sense of being "other." Even on graduation day, it felt strange and surreal. To this day, when someone asks me where I went to school I usually say, "New Haven," and let it go at that. There was, and still is, a sense of not belonging that I don't know how to fix. I think in this one instance that being aware of the issue is not necessarily a good thing. Maybe if enough time passes we'll both lose that feeling. It's been 5 years since I graduated and it took me almost 7 years to get through school part-time. Twelve years is a long time and still, I feel this way...If you find the way out of it, let us know.

[Sarah]

When pregnant with my first, who is now 12 months, and for quite some time after, I climbed inside my head and didn't come out much. Like you, I was using 100% of my mental capacities to dwell on being pregnant. I obsessed, and enjoyed obsessing. Some social relationships lapsed, but the ones that counted were still there later when I could think of something other than babies. Only recently have I felt the need to connect with others, to climb out of my head and take back some of my "old" self.
When I had a baby, I felt like I had been carbon copied. Like a chain of paper dolls that now has one more doll on it - the "mom" doll. Maybe it's a cliche, but giving birth to another person makes you give birth to a new part of yourself at the same time.

[suz]

I think "exquisite like a blood orange when you've been living on ramen" is one of the best lines I've read anywhere in a very long time, and I am always reading something.

I think the NYT article was insulting and condescending. We don't want parents thinking they actually get to have a voice, do we? That would be awful. And, goodness, what happens if all those people start talking to *each other*? Chaos! Catastrophe! Mahem!

And I've always felt like an "in-between"- never quite part of the crowd, whatever crowd it was. That feeling kept me quiet and meek and scared for many years. But now? I think there's a lot more space to stretch outside than in; you get to make up your own rules rather than follow anyone else's. That's fortunate, since I am really lousy at following other people's rules.

[Maayan]

I recently saw a piece at the Carnegie International (an exhibit of what has been considered by some critics to be the most "important" or most relevant contemporary art) where the artist had gone to a village in Turkey and videotaped 40 different people, just talking about their lives. The piece was a room with 40 televisions, each with a chair in front of it, each one showing the video of a different person's interview. It was subtitled in English so that the viewers could understand.

This piece just blew me away. I walked into the room, sat down in front of a TV at random, and was just mesmerized as I watched a woman talk about her problems with her marriage and how it had impacted her relationship with her family and her community. Then I watched an elderly couple talk about their happy marriage. Then I watched a little girl talk about her step-mother.

Everything those people talked about was ordinary. They were all just normal, human stories, but I couldn't tear myself away. Every time I sat down at a new TV, I came in at the middle of someone's narrative, and I left it after a few minutes, and from each one, I got a new little snapshot of one piece of one person's life.

My point is, people are interesting. And it's natural for us, as human beings, to be interested in each other's stories.

I feel the same way about blogs. I don't know you, or Tertia, or getupgrrl, or chayyeisarah, or renegaderebbitzin, or Mousewords, or any of the other people whose blogs I read. I'm coming in, in the middle of your story, and eventually I'll drift out again. But in the meantime, yours is one more fascinating, unique story, simply by virtue of your being a human being, living your own individual life.

Thank you for sharing it with us.

[dish]

I'm another of the in-between people. I sometimes find a sense of belonging, but, as you said, it will tend to drift after a while. I normally have so many different things going on in my life that when I start to get that sense of not belonging in one aspect, I will put a lot of my energies into another aspect where I still "belong." I suppose it might be more productive to try and focus some energy into rekindling the sense of belonging in the place where I have drifted, but I get more pleasure from taking it to a "good place." If I am really, really feeling out of touch, I'll turn to a book, or to a solo hobby so that I can get back in touch with me before I come out of my shell.

[wix]

"I don't feel, so much, like I belong anywhere right now, and I don't know why. [...] In some ways I don't like belonging, because I don't trust it: if you fit in somewhere, it follows that eventually you will cease to do so,"

i could have written that passage (though not as eloquently). as to what *i* do about it, about feeling that way, it just doesn't bother me anymore. it did, for a moment, when i was newly pregnant. my pregnancy was filled to overflowing with anxiety, all based upon what one gynecologist with the bedside manner of a broiled sturgeon said to me when i was 21: "with PCOS, you'll never get pregnant without medical intervention."

and then i did! and that put me in the same class as someone who cut in line, in my mind, rather than someone who beat the odds. i didn't fit in with other pregnant women, but i also didn't *know* any other pregnant women. by the time i met some, in our childbirth class, i was still different: swollen almost beyond recognition with edema, teetering on the edge of preeclampsia, complicated and unable to wear anything but flip-flops in the middle of winter.

and now, as a mother, i'm the only one among my few friends with children to practice the kind of parenting we practice. i don't have a mother of my own to confer with, so i'm making it up as i go along. i *do* feel a connection to the other mothers of the world, where ever they are, but this is something on a primal level, not an intellectual or social connection.

i guess my strength is connecting (or not) with people one at a time, instead of 'belonging', or even feeling marginalized on the outskirts of one group or another. i came across one of my mom's performance reviews some months ago while i was doing some intensive cleaning, and she was repeatedly described as a good employee but a 'lone wolf'. i guess the nut doesn't fall far from the tree.

[CT]

So, I think I suffer from the same syndrome. And its corollary: even when you look back on times when you did belong it seemed like not enough then. Somehow it's to do with not living up to the ideal of belonging (I'm still working out what that might be, of course). When I feel so much like this I can't get out of myself I read the Joy Luck Club. Don't know why but it helps. I think I remember the good times I was having when I first read it, and think about expectations and the reality of life.

[Jen/VintageUterus]

"Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself"
(The Way of Zen)

I know, I know, not what you'd expect to hear from me. But I thought it was apropos to your feelings right now.

You belong as my friend, and you belong in this community, no matter where you are on the road.

[afrindiemum]

knit. definitely learn how to knit. lots of good thinking time there. booties, hats, scarves, baby bikinis - the possibilities are endless. the results satisfying. feeling like you fit in is overrated, in my opinion.

[Kay]

I don't belong here. I'm actually a fertile - who is looking at age 35 and wondering "what if" as I comtemplate trying for a second child. I'm here reading, crying, cheering, praying for all of you. As an outsider, I empathize with the people "left behind" as others move on to pregnancy or adoption. But I feel extra for those of you who do finally succeed, b/c it's like you're the kid who goes off to college. When you go back home, you find that life has moved on without you. Sure, you are happy for your experience. You should be. But a part of you mourns the world you "knew".

I don't know what I'm really trying to get to here - just that I am here reading. Cheering for you and hoping beyond hope that everyone else will too.

[Cecily]

I'd only been part of the infertile blogging community a few months when I "fell pregnant" as Tertia would say.

I found myself feeling that same sense of displacement. Many women have written about it--about being an infertile mother, and how difficult it is to find a new place for yourself. You can't really hang out with the nomral moms-to-be (I remember trying to investigate joining a local Moms to Twins Club while I was pregnant--and I couldn't imagine hanging out with those women) because of the whole babydust issue. And your infertile buddies feel awkward being around your pregnant self because they are "hapvious" in the words of Danae.

On a larger scale, I think all women go through these stages during their lives--like when you make the transistion from planning a wedding to being a wife, or when you go from being a woman to being a mother. It's a treading water place, and a retrospective one.

In other words, you're probably normal. In my freakish opinion.

[Anna H.]

Sitting and letting it all wash over me is the only way that I'm able to come out the other side of changes like the one you're in the middle of right now. Inevitably, I chafe against it at first (and sometimes my pushing and pulling and struggling lasts for a long, long time), but I'm slowly learning that for me, at least, nothing becomes clear or feels really right until I stop and sit and breathe.

It's not giving up, it's listening and opening up to whatever's happening -- it's a way of clarifying what's going on and eventually seeing a way through the fog. And then, for a while, it clears.

And writing helps to guide me, too. I hope that yours will continue to nourish you Jo, will help you to chart your way into the unknown (but wild and wonderful!) territory ahead.

xxoo

[Danae]

You belong right here, my sweet friend. I couldn't imagine it any other way.

[wavybrains]

This may be my favorite post of your's yet. Not only do you reference once of my favorite poems of all time, but you also express all the ambivalence I feel about blogging and my place in the world so much better than I ever could. I love how you write "When I first started writing here, more than a year ago, I just needed to be able to tell my story to someone. I needed someone to hear me." Yup. That pretty much sums it. My blog pretty much exists in obscurity for the audience of me, my mother, and my dog, but the idea of putting it out there, of someone, somewhere hearing me--that amorphous idea is what helps to fill some need in me. I think you belong write (pun intended) here. I don't think you have to fit into some category--a mommy blog, an infertility blog, etc to belong. It's the bloggers like you that are so much more than a category that are truly worth reading. I'm sorry I don't have any words of wisdom for what to do when you feel like you don't belong--I feel like this way too often, but I do like telling myself that I really like being unique. Maybe "belonging" is overrated :)

[Moxie]

Seriously? What I really do when I get all inside myself (especially at this point in pregnancy--it's happened both times) is eat ice cream. It's dumb, but it keeps me calm and docile. Then when I come out of the ice cream coma, something's happened and I'm ready to get going again.

The supreme idiocy of the Times article is that the guy who wrote it has a toddler. I wonder how *that* kid is going to grow up.

[Karen]

Well, I'm coming into this discussion rather late, as I've been playing hide from the blogging world recently (I need to once in a while, you know?). And I know just what you are saying here--I've always, always written about how I don't feel like I belong. Even once I have my child, I will still be marginalized as "the woman who adopted," and my child will still be "the adopted child" to many people. And although I am trying to join the moms group, there is so much that goes on there that is about pregnancy or bio-kid stuff that it's hard to have those conversations at all without making it all about "me."

Beautiful post, and you belong more than anyone.