Equal pay
"
If I had abilities, capabilities that the male sex did not, then I found it imperative to discover the power of those parts of me, why I was endowed with them, and what they meant. While my professor’s idea of a powerful woman was one who could hardly be distinguished from a man, I wanted to celebrate the differences inherent in the sexes rather than diminish them."
I Am Woman, by Sara Esther Crispe
Man has the requirement (
p'ru ur'vu "be fruitful and multiply") to have children, while woman does not. Women have no obligation whatsoever to marry and have children; it's all on the man's shoulders. I'm not sure where I'm going with this - I think this is more random thoughts than anything articulate - but in my mind it relates to infertility. Somehow. Why do we have the ability to carry and give birth to children (jyah, generalizing here, big time) while men do not, yet men are the ones with the obligation? Wouldn't it make more sense that women are required to have children? In Judaism, one cannot be obligated to do something that can be considered life-threatening, and since we all know that pregnancy and childbirth can indeed be life-threatening (anyone read
Julie's blog?!), women cannot be obligated to have to children.
If only the desire could be mitigated as easily as the obligation.
Charmed, I'm sure
Ugh. One of Hubby's and my guilty pleasures is watching
Charmed. We watch new episodes, and download old eps. We're nearly through Season 4. Again. And - honest! - Hubby doesn't watch for the skimpy "outfits" Rose McGowan and Alyssa Milano wear. We simply have fun with the witches and demons and abundance of continuity errors and silly plot devices.
Based on yesterday's post, you can kinda tell I'm not in the best of moods regarding this fertility stuff (can'tcha?). So we're hunkered down watching Charmed, and of course, there's discussion between Paige and Piper that after 4 months of trying, Piper's not pregnant yet (aw, 4 months? Poor thing).
Guess what Paige said in response? Go ahead, guess.
"So the sooner you stop worrying about it, the sooner I will be an aunt."
Yep, the old "just relax" popped up on the one thing I can always count on to take my mind OFF of infertility. Yet another reason to get rid of the ol' box. TV bad.
To be fair, Piper did have a very funny line just before the "just relax" comment: "Getting flung around by demons isn't exactly conducive to making babies." I think that's what I'll tell people from now on, when they ask when we're going to start a family.
Future tense
Maybe it's delayed PPTSD (Post-Passover Traumatic Stress Disorder*), but all I feel like doing lately is crying. Lots of kids during Passover, lots of beautiful interaction between parents and kids, lots of goo-gooing at the cute baby at the table and all the adults ignoring the other adults in order to goo-goo at said baby, lots of realization that I have some lovely Passover things that a) will never get used, because, not having a family of our own means chances are good we will never conduct our own seder, which means the beautiful seder plate we have will remain pristine, and b) will never get passed on to anyone, may be contributing to this feeling.
Gee, ya think?
Every day, twice a day, when we say the
Sh'ma, we say,
"V'hayu ha-d'varim ha-ayleh asher anochi m'tzav'cha ha-yom al l'vavecha. V'shinantam l'vanecha, v'dibarta bam b'shivt'cha b'vaytecha, uv'lecht'cha baderech, uv'shachb'cha uv'kumecha."
And these words that I command you today shall be in your heart. And you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit at home, and when you walk along the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up.
Every day, twice a day, I am reminded that I don't have any children to teach these words to.
So I find myself dwelling on questions like, Who will conduct the yard sale to sell our stuff after we're shuffled into the old age home? For that matter, who will make sure we're sent to an old age home? Who will say
Kaddish for me when I die?
S'okay, though. Eventually I'll go back to convincing myself that I never really wanted kids in the first place.
* The first person who gets on my case for making a pun on PTSD gets my victim-of-PTSD boot up their keister. I am intimately aware of PTSD and its seriousness. But sometimes, ya just gotta mock the absurdity of life however you can.
Vasectomies. Cheap.
Ironic that it's at a "nursery."
Hm, wonder if they do reversals, too?
hat tip: limon by Laura Lemay
I've been tagged
Jenny is dragging me out of my post-Passover recovery, kicking and screaming (okay, I’m not
really screaming) by tagging me with a meme (what the heck does that stand for, anyway?!). So, here goes:
Six random or weird facts/things/etc. about me:
1. I have a chronic disease that knocks me flat on my rear for a few days if I forget to take it easy or overdo it
(gee, projgen, you mean like spending 2 weeks solid of cleaning like a madwoman because even though your house is clean enough to satisfy G-d for Passover, it’s not clean enough to satisfy your mom and you had to stay in bed for two days to recover? Dope.).
2. I used to have a really cool career that allowed me really cool perks like free tickets to shows, concerts, events, etc. Boy was I shocked when I had to start paying for that stuff myself.
3. I have a photographic memory. I remember things by picturing them in my head. I can look at a list of names and tell you later if a certain name was on the list by remembering where on the list the name occurred. If I take a
tchotchke off the shelf, a month later I can put it back in the exact same spot from which it was removed. On the other hand, I can watch a movie a hundred times, because I can barely remember what I just saw on the screen. I guess it needs to be a stationary picture for me to remember it.
4. My grandmother used to be a model for a large catalog company in the 20’s.
5. I used to hop in my car when I was single and go on weekend excursions all over the country (when I lived in the US). I met the neatest people and had wonderful experiences.
6. I am extremely anal retentive. Seriously. Extremely. My mind is currently exploding because in order to have my videotapes alphabetically, it means different size boxes are side-by-side, so I don’t have a neat, straight line of tapes. But if I arrange the video boxes by size, then they’re not alphabetical. But if I alphabetize them, the sizes are all over the place. But if I make it uniform, then they’re not in order and AAAAAAUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!! (Don't think that I haven't considered buying empty boxes, just so they can all be uniform size!)
There you go. Part of the point of getting tagged is to then tag others, but (and this is sad) I don’t know who to tag. I don’t get so many comments that I can tell who my regular readers are. Um, anyone want to volunteer to get tagged?
Update: I'm tagging Shanna, because I can. And what the heck, let's help her get her mind off baby-feet-in-the-ribs and tag Persephone, too.
We interrupt this blog
...with some really useless (but kinda cool) information:
On Wednesday (tomorrow) morning, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 am, the time and date will be:
01:02:03 04/05/06This won't happen again until 2106. Those of you young enough, may you live to be 120 (
may we ALL live to 120), so you can witness this kinda cool phenomena again.
