Reality Chick

In Backspace’s STET! column, I ask:

Can a Writer NOT Embrace Social Media? 

My name is Christina. I’m a published writer and a blogophobic. I’m also Facebook-averse and Twitter-terrified.

I’m a long form writer, I subscribe to egghead foreign affairs journals and ten thousand words is about the right length for me to read about or explain a complex issue like the financial crisis or the AIG bailout. I used to be a research analyst, author of in-depth executive white papers, and find that the quick take on an issue is usually a dumb take.

I don’t like chatting in public, I’m paranoid about people spying on me and listening in. When I’m on Facebook I feel like I’m stuck in a stalled New York City subway, a crowded elevator, or my high school cafeteria, looking at and listening to things I’d much rather block out.

 There’s a comic I love called Andy Kimler who does a nice riff on what he calls “Fritter.”

 I’m a person who’s always had a very few, tight friends with whom I communicate deeply and at length, and I hate small talk. Small talk and mean talk is what I find on many blogs and some online communities. (Yes, I understand the irony of me saying this online .)

The writers I hold in greatest esteem don’t even have web sites, let alone Twitter their every thought. I tend to lose respect for writers who promote themselves a lot online. If someone’s sending me a Twitter and FB update every day, I think: pathetic. Monthly is fine, but daily or weekly – unless they’re doing something phenomenal like plugging up the BP gusher – looks a bit desperate. 

 I don’t like airing my work and its aims too early – because it changes. It changes every day. Nor do I think it’s useful to share my, or read about another writers’ creative process. It’s a mystery, and I like to keep it that way.  I’d rather get more and better fiction from my favorite writers than an ode to their cat, or a riff on their back garden. I want the magic, not an explanation of how they did the trick.

An essayist and author I great admired — please note the past tense — has fallen on hard times, and blogs her every misery: an ugly divorce, homelessness, bankdruptcy and just plain bad attitude. I wish she didn’t. I wish she could sit on these thoughts while she works some of her problems out, instead of spewing them into the world unprocessed.  I’m not her shrink, I’m her potential audience, a future buyer of her books, if she’d only stop blogging and get back to work.

 That said – does anyone know of any services that could help me with my online promotion? Because as much as I rant about it, I understand that it’s here to stay. 

http://backspacewriters.blogspot.com/2010/07/can-writer-not-embrace-social-media.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

http://backspacewriters.blogspot.com/2010/07/can-writer-not-embrace-social-media.html

This week in Drinking Diaries.com, I write about the bar to end all bars that cured me of  night-clubbing forever — at least in Connecticut.

          Freshman year in college, when Saturday Night Fever came to the tiny, provincial Pennsylvania town of  my small, private, pseudo-elite college, my friends contemptuously declared that no one could possibly look and act like the people in that film. It had to be a gross exaggeration.

They were wrong.

Down the Post Road in Fairfield County, Connecticut, since the age of fourteen I’d frequented a number of “theme” bars that catered to a disco clientele: a place where every table had a telephone, another with tiger-patterned rugs on the walls, a different one that sponsored dance contests.   These discos were full of young men with driven-back hair, polyester shirts and flared designer jeans with contrasting threads and platform shoes; girls with “precision” blow-dry hair cuts, glittering green eye shadow, boob-baring Danskins, and heels hanging off their wooden Candies.  

 Bars came in and out of fashion for mysterious reasons. Good Times Café in Norwalk was located in the bottom half of the back of a strip mall far down the Post Road, at least forty minutes from my home town, but which inexplicably became an instant hit with people from New Haven to Brooklyn, mixing everyone from Bronx street kids to millionaires sons from Greenwich.   

It was expensive, with a two dollar cover and $1.25 bar drinks, and you always had to wait in line, sometimes for hours, to get in. When you did, it was a nightmare of flashing lights, over-made up girls and scary men – the aura of Weimar Berlin with the added trauma of disco music blaring from speakers, or bad metal from a live band.

            I only went because my friends wanted to go, I never actually met anyone I liked there, but I loved to dance. The few times I was persuaded to go out with one of the Tom, Jerry, or Elvises who accosted me, the dates were duds. Men who looked glamorous under the mirror ball turned out to be: policemen, factory workers, rich college boys from Darien who all wanted a real girlfriend.

            I preferred to dance. I was there a minimum of three nights a week, every week, during the summer of 1979, arriving to stand in line as early as 7 p.m., and generally staying until it shut its doors to the strains of  My Sharona at 3.

Good Times wound down sometime in the mid-1980s and its former space is now a fitness club, but it lives on in cumulative memory. Searching in vain for an historical Google image, I came upon  Facebook page titled, “I Partied My Single Life away at Good Times Café in Norwalk, CT.”:

Thursday, 25-cent drinks. Wednesday-male stripper night. Closed Goodtimes and then it was off to Portchester NY to continue. Does anyone remember the X-rated hypnotist?

          Ah, yes, I remember it well.

One commentor’s experience best reflects my own: I was there so much, my parents had my mail forwarded. I remember such great times, and probably forgot even better ones.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47601104631&v=wall

                                                           www.drinkingdiaries.com/2010/07/19/

 

 

http://www.drinkingdiaries.com/2010/07/19/

This week I’m prominently quoted in the Society for Human Resource Management news magazine on the effectiveness – or not – of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

“Many of our fellow citizens with disabilities are unemployed … they want to work, and they can work,” said President George H.W. Bush when he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law on July 26, 1990.

Nearly 20 years later, President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 30, 2009, National Disability Employment Awareness Month proclamation, “We must seek to provide opportunities for individuals with disabilities. Only then can Americans with disabilities achieve full participation in the workforce and reach the height of their ambition.”

Yet for some the dream of meaningful employment remains as elusive in 2010 as it was in 1990. And there is some evidence that the ADA might have made things worse.

“Analysts have noted a decline in the employment rate of people with disabilities in recent years, and some evaluations of the ADA indicate that, rather than increasing employment, the Act may have reduced employment for those with disabilities,” noted the November 2008 edition of the Monthly Labor Review published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

“Although the ADA was intended to increase employment opportunities for people with disabilities by prohibiting discrimination in the workplace and by requiring employers to accommodate the needs of workers with disabilities, economic theory is more ambiguous,” the BLS publication continued. “The major argument economists have made is that if employers perceive the costs of accommodation to be high, they will refrain from hiring workers with disabilities.”

As of June 2010 less than 22 percent of people with disabilities of working age are employed—compared to 70 percent of people without disabilities—according to BLS statistics.

Individual Experiences Vary

In the late 1980s, while working as a public relations director for a well-known Wall Street firm, Christina Gombar was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS)—a condition characterized by incapacitating fatigue and problems with concentration and short-term memory.

“When I got sick I was given a choice of long-term disability or a severance package,” she told SHRM Online. “As I was young and didn’t think the illness would be permanent, I took a package, which I used as a springboard to a downscaled career. This was great for improving my health, but didn’t provide enough income or benefits.”

When Gombar was able to return to work full time she sought accommodations, such as the opportunity to work from home a couple of days a week, a “perk” that was resented by some of her peers: “people just didn’t return my e-mails or look at the work I sent in,” she said.

“No one seemed to ‘get it,’ ” Gombar said. “When people think ‘disabled,’ they think: blind or wheelchair, not rosy-cheeked and mobile. I looked healthy and I did stellar work so they couldn’t let go of the idea that I freelanced part time by choice, not necessity.”

Deborah Lewis, a warehouse manager at a big-box retailer, experienced a similar reaction when she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a chronic condition characterized by widespread muscle, ligament and tendon pain and fatigue. Though Lewis’ co-workers knew her to be a hard worker prior to her diagnosis, she said their attitudes changed after her physician placed restrictions on the type of work she could do as a result of “a condition they had never heard of and couldn’t see.”

“Some people actually told me I was putting on,” Lewis told SHRM Online. “I have been dealing with that attitude from a lot of people now for over 20 years. People won’t believe what they can’t see.”

Neither Gombar nor Lewis is employed today.

“Here is the issue for many disabled people: they may be well enough to work part time, but the ‘Catch 22’ is part-time work doesn’t come with the benefits they need, and people with chronic illnesses always have higher medical costs than the healthy,” Gombar explained. “A few private insurance companies allow disabled workers to earn something like 5 percent of their original salary on top of their disability pay. My policy forbids any earnings.”

“I was unable to find any kind of job for over four years,” Lewis said. “The little box on a lot of applications that asks if you have any limits or can you lift, bend, reach and so on, put me out of the race every time.” She now teaches art classes at her home-based studio.

Yet Gombar and Lewis want jobs.

“I would give anything in the world if I could work, but now it’s much more obvious that I am disabled,” Lewis said. “I can’t even get an application. No one wants to take a chance that something might happen to me and that I would sue them.”

“So many employers are missing out on well-educated people just because they don’t fit into their image of what an employee should look like, act like or sound like,” she added.

“I would love to go back to work … but no one wants to hire someone with a health/work history like mine,” Gombar said. “I would love to just freelance, but again—not enough income and no health benefits. I’m stuck.”

An Employer’s Experience

Susan Loynd, SPHR, director of human resources for Washington County Mental Health Services (WCMHS) in Montpelier, Vt., an agency that helps people with disabilities find employment, has first-hand experience employing people with disabilities. Many of WCMHS’s employees have cognitive impairments, developmental disabilities and mental disabilities and work as “client-staff” offering peer support and a positive role model for other clients.

“Our client-staff are some of our best employees because … they’ve been marginalized … they’ve been treated really badly,” Loynd said. “When we hire them they are so thrilled to be given an opportunity, to give back to their community, to be paying their way.”

“Employers need to see that people with mental disabilities are just like everyone else,” Loynd added. “People have these stereotypes about disability [but] until they work beside someone else they just don’t know.”

Loynd, a member of SHRM’s Workplace Diversity Special Expertise Panel, said the stigma surrounding mental illness is an ongoing barrier for some individuals. “People are fearful that someone is going to yell and scream and behave badly,” she told SHRM Online. Yet when crises occur in her community, Loynd said their clients are not usually the ones to blame. “It’s people who are not aware they are experiencing some sort of psychological issue,” she said. “Our clients have been in the system for many years so they know what triggers them and know what the resources are,” she explained, and are “usually in a better place to manage that kind of stress.”

Many Face Bias

Individuals with disabilities face the same biases today that they faced before the ADA was enacted, according to Mike Purkey, executive director of ICON Community Services, an employment service that specializes in placing people with disabilities. “We’ve come a long way baby, but we’re not there yet,” he told SHRM Online. 

The ADA was “a much needed piece of legislation,” Purkey said. “It made people a lot more aware of people with disabilities and the fact that they are in the workforce.” But he said that many employers lack understanding and hold preconceived notions about people with disabilities—whether they acknowledge them or not.

“I don’t think the employer wakes up in the morning and says ‘I am not going to hire people with disabilities because they are trouble,’” he said. “But [the ADA] scares businesses, who fear they will get sued.”

Kate Cullen, a human resource professional in the Washington, D.C., area, said ongoing education can help hiring managers overcome ignorance and risk-aversion, which she said are the biggest obstacles to the full employment and integration of people with disabilities into the life of an organization.

Competitive Advantage

Companies lauded for achieving high performance from large numbers of employees with cognitive disabilities—such as Walgreens and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital—started with a clear vision of what they wanted to achieve, and believed that even those with cognitive disabilities would be assets.

And, as SHRM has reported previously, they were right.

Such success stories can motivate other businesses to follow suit.

Nereida “Neddy” Perez, vice president for inclusion and diversity at National Grid, one of the world’s largest utility companies, said that in 2009 her company began making “a concentrated effort to establish strong external partnerships with professional associations interested in the advancement of people with disabilities.”

“We established two new employee resource groups (Veterans and Enabling),” Perez added, “to help increase awareness about career advancement opportunities within the company as well as help us identify areas where as a company we could eliminate obstacles/challenges.”

And the company anticipated the needs of applicants and employees with disabilities by completing a facilities audit and by developing a team approach to workplace accommodations “to ensure that we address all of the needs of the employee,” she explained.

But Perez, a member of SHRM’s Workplace Diversity Special Expertise Panel, said there was more her organization could do. “We will look for ways to connect our internship program to any organizations that provide interns who are disabled,” she told SHRM Online. The company plans to train managers on interviewing skills for working with people with disabilities as well.

Some Mostly Positive Experiences

Cynthia E. Kazalia, a placement specialist for New Directions Career Center, a Columbus, Ohio-based nonprofit organization that assists individuals in career transition, said her bone tumors might impact her range of motion and balance but they haven’t affected her career.

“Is it possible that I did not get a position over the course of my career due to the bone tumors?” she asked. “Sure. But an interviewer might have also turned me away because I laughed too loud or reminded them of their ex-wife.

“That said, I am not unenlightened about the existence of prejudice,” Kazalia told SHRM Online. “Once, on a summer job, an attorney told a joke that ended with, ‘That’s what happens when you hire the handicapped.’ A horrified look then crossed her face as she focused in on my presence. ‘Oh, Cindy,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ The apology left me baffled until it occurred to me that she considered me disabled.”

“John,” a mid-fifties senior engineer with a congenital birth defect of the spine, said he has had no difficulties gaining employment throughout his career because people with his degree were in demand and employers were willing to “look past” his disability, which requires him to use braces, crutches or a wheelchair to get around. He requested anonymity for this article because he said his employer, a major defense contractor, “thinks they are doing what is best for me and I don’t want feelings to be hurt.”

“With my latest job change my employer has probably gone out of their way more than any other to make physical plant changes to make my life easier,” he noted. “However at the same time, in some areas they don’t seem to listen to my true needs and as a result money and time is wasted changing things that don’t need to be changed while ignoring things that do. This all seems to fall under the category of ‘I think I know what’s best for you and you don’t,’ ” he added.

Though his experiences have been largely positive, he too has faced a few challenges.

“For the most part my input and work efforts appear to be respected and appreciated,” he said. “However there are those who, for whatever reason, appear to be very uncomfortable with and around me.”

And in some cases, he said, he is treated like “the poster child” for those in the facility with disabilities.  Therefore I end up with trying to deal with the often uncomfortable task of speaking for all those in our facility with a disability.”

The Legacy of the ADA

Loynd said the ADA was a good start. “I think there are a number of folks who, but for the ADA, may not have had an opportunity at all,” she said.

Paul Miller, program director of the Green Mountain Workforce supported employment program at WCMHS, said that the ADA helps “keep bigger companies honest” and helps to create a dialogue: “It’s like having the big guy on the block standing behind you while you’re asking the kid next door for your $5 back.”

Perez said the ADA has “helped to raise awareness of the challenges faced by people with disabilities and establish guidelines that help businesses better understand what is expected from them.” But she said more work is needed, and that HR professionals “need to take the lead in addressing and eliminating the unconscious biases that exist in our work environments that sometimes impede the hiring of people with disabilities.”

This means holding leaders accountable for recruiting people with disabilities, she said, as well as challenging leaders’ perspectives about people with disabilities “the moment that someone makes an inappropriate comment or exhibits a behavior that is not professional.

“As HR professionals we have a responsibility to ensure that we effectively leverage the talents and skills of all employees,” Perez added. “If we see and know that there are barriers in the workplace that prevent an employee from being successful then we have a responsibility to address the issue.”

“Given the anticipated labor shortages that are coming up, look to a nontraditional workforce,” Loynd said. “Don’t back yourself into a corner when you are looking to hire people.

“Instead of putting an ad in the paper and talking to the first three people that walk through the door, widen the net,” Loynd said. “I guarantee if any one of these HR professionals called [WCMHS] and said ‘I need a couple of employees’ [agency staff members] would fall out of their chairs. We have a backlog of people waiting to work.”

An Open Mind

“Half the battle is having an open mind. Realize that you have many folks working for you who have mental health challenges right now,” Loynd said. “I work with these folks every day—there is no difference between folks that have a mental disability and anyone else.” 

“While we should not let disability be a barrier to employment, we also need to be mindful that we don’t hire an applicant ‘because’ of their disability,” Miller noted. “Applicants are not their diagnosis.

“We need to remind all staff and community members to think outside of the disability,” Miller said. “Ideally, we should be treating everyone the same. Everyone is important, but not necessarily unique or special.”

When Purkey meets with business leaders he sometimes asks them what a person with a disability looks like, or to name a person with a disability. He then uses examples such as former Sen. Bob Dole—whose war wounds left him with limited use of only one hand—and Sen. John McCain—who cannot lift his arms above his shoulders—to illustrate that people with disabilities are everywhere and can hold positions of power.

“If we stop looking at disability as something scary, abhorrent, we can look at it as ability,” he said. “We all have things we do really well and things we don’t.”

 http://www.shrm.org/hrdisciplines/Diversity/Articles/Pages/HastheADAMadeaDifference.aspx

This week I’m quoted in Match.com’s Happen magazine on how I got over my committment-phobia.

“I am so counter-dependent, I am always like the elusive guy in a relationship, but I’m a woman,” says Christina Gombar. “I was the ultimate ‘heart of stone’ girl. I wasn’t promiscuous but I was always the remote, cold fish emotionally, with guys sending up their hearts on platters to me. I never understood it. But I think because I was a little tough, I attracted the opposite, emotionally needy guys.” It took a very persistent and communicative man to break down what Gombar’s self-preserving distancing strategies. “I’m ‘recovered’ but only because of my husband,” Gombar says.

Read the whole article here:

http://www.match.com/magazine/article0.aspx?articleid=11558

Therese Borchard struggled with manic depression during her college years, but went on to earn a master’s degree and establish a stellar career in journalism and book publishing.  But the hormonal shifts of motherhood, a geographic move, as well as the switch from sociable on-site office work to an isolated, home-bound freelance life, created a perfect storm of factors for mental illness to burgeon once more.

After a harrowing, months-long stay in an institution, she returned to home and children and went on to become the author of the hit blog, Beyond Blue on Belief.net, where she shares her continuing struggles with anxiety and manic depression, from her own particular Catholic perspective. This year she published her memoir, Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression and Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes, along with The Pocket Therapist: An Emotional Survival Guide, which offers concise techniques to help anyone living with a chronic illness get through the demands of a day.

I interviewed her for Working with Chronic Illness on how she manages to work, raise a family and keep her manic depression under control.

 CG: What are your biggest challenges in navigating your health condition, your job and your home life? 

TB: I suppose my biggest challenge is managing my health in a way that I can concentrate enough to meet my work deadlines. Fortunately, my schedule is flexible enough that I can write extra blog posts on a day where I’m feeling good, and bank them for the days my head isn’t good for anything. But I’m always nervous to commit to a meeting in person, because I don’t know how I will be feeling that day. So I fake it as best I can. I’ve had to do that a lot lately with the publicity efforts for my books: I’ve had to plaster a smile on my face and spit out nice sound bites all the while I am thinking that I wish I were dead.

 What is a typical work day like? 

I drop off the kids at school at 8, and usually work out for an hour. From 10 to 2 are my golden hours, where I try to get the posts written, or follow up on a story I was supposed to write for other magazines and newspapers I write for. If it’s sunny outside, I will take 20 minutes and eat outside, because it’s crucial that I get that sunshine and fresh air. By 2:30 I usually need to pick up the kids, start homework, get organized for lacrosse practice, etc. My work window is fairly small, so I try to get as much done as possible in the hours they are at school. And two days usually go to doctors’ appointments, blood work, and therapy.

What, if any accommodations do you/your employers make for yourself? (I know you have to stop yourself from overwork sometimes!)  

My editor, Holly, is very understanding that things like Twitter tutorials and SEO (search engine optimization) training can sometimes activate my inner energizer bunny that I want at rest. It’s difficult, especially in the blogosphere, not to make my writing my life and tweet all hours of the day. I need boundaries between work and home life. I try my best to shut off my computer when I’m not working, and to leave it closed during the weekend. I find that when I ignore my sensitivity to online chatter, that I will have to invest a lot of time into getting myself well again … so I try to be as prudent as possible. 

 Your blog is about coping with mental illness, so your employers knew of your condition. But your illness is “invisible” — you look super healthy, you run, etc. Did they really know what it entails, how hard it is, that it could ever become overwhelming?    

 That’s a good question. I think Holly is as understanding and empathetic as any editor could be. And the manager editor, Michael Kress, and the editor-in-chief, Ju-Don Roberts, too. They want me to publish the real stuff – like the video where I sobbed and said depression wasn’t always pretty – as that is what best speaks to people in the throes of depression. So if I can’t stay as up on current events or celebrity gossip as some of the other bloggers, they are fine with that. Sometimes I need to write pieces a few weeks in advance, to give myself a little time of rest in a depressive cycle. That’s not a great formula for search engine optimization—as you want to write on all the hottest search terms—but if the content is authentic and resonates with folks, that’s what is important.

 You started out with great qualifications, a masters degree, a magazine career and book publishing. After you had your kids and a breakdown (no connection there!) — you had to rebuild. Can you detail those challenges a bit? How did you negotiate with your prospective employer?

 All I can say is I had to take it in very small steps. I was unable to produce anything for about six months. Every time I sat down to write, it was awful. I would just cry and cry.

 So I relied on my great aunt’s advice to just take it very slow, one step at a time. I first signed up to be a writing tutor at the Naval Academy, because I wanted to see if I could concentrate for three hours a week. Getting through some of those first papers was more challenging than getting my masters degree. But, at the end of that, I had the confidence to ask an editor if I could have back my assignment of bi-weekly columns. Twice a week I had to come up with something coherent on paper. That was quite a challenge, too! But together, the tutoring and bi-weekly column, gave me the self-assurance to pursue “Beyond Blue,” the blog, and then later, “Beyond Blue,” the book.

 Negotiating is VERY hard, especially when you are feeling so unsure of yourself. What I did was to speak with anyone I could who might have information that would help me negotiate. I then pretended I was them … my friends who had just gone through this and came out with favorable working agreements. I told myself that it wasn’t me who would be doing the talking, but my friend, and that somehow made it easier.

 http://workingwithchronicillness.com/2010/06/not-just-surviving-but-thriving-while-living-with-depression/

http://blog.beliefnet.com/beyondblue/2010/06/working-with-chronic-illness.html

 

    http://www.exhalezine.com/magazine/?page_id=521

In 2002, the renowned author Ann Hood lost her five year old daughter Grace to a rapid, freak, strep infection.  A novel, The Knitting Circle (2004) and a memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief ( 2008) stand as testaments to that loss, and are gifts to everyone who has or will suffer in kind.

 CG: Some people who have lost a child have found books helpful and cathartic. But to a great extent, words failed you immediately after Grace’s loss. Why do you think some people are helped by reading/writing of others experiences, and others not?

 AH: As a professional writer, writing was impossible because I could only view it with a writer’s eye. I think journaling or writing your own loss story can help healing if you are not constantly editing, reviewing and dissecting like a writer would. 

CG: What, if anything, has changed for you since publishing the Knitting Circle, then Comfort – finally addressing in words what was unspeakable.  Have you had a great response from those in similar situations? 

I’ve received literally thousands of emails expressing the very thing I hoped the books would accomplish:  validating the feelings of grief. You are not crazy. You are not alone. You are heartbroken.

 CG: You open the book with the comments you are forced to endure: people telling you what to do, how to respond to your tragedy.  But some bereaved parents judge those who kept their distance after hearing of a still birth. Others prefer to be left alone, like a wounded animal, fearing the force of their rage will make them incapable of monitoring a response. If there was one thing you could tell the world to do for a person who has lost a child, what is it, if anything? 

Don’t presume to know what we are feeling. When someone says ‘I can imagine how you feel,’ — it’s almost insulting, though not intended as such.  It is true that losing a child is one’s worst fear. And it is unimaginable. Better to listen to how we feel than to tell us how we must feel, or how you would feel.

 CG:  You’ve written of the intense joy you experience while holding your new adopted Chinese daughter, Annabelle, while concurrently, and equally intensely, still feeling the anguish of losing Grace.   

 AH: Every day I am struck by feelings of joy beside my grief. Even in small things: laughing with a friend, the satisfaction of completing a project, a beautiful day. Yet all of it is juxtaposed against losing Grace, against her absence. C.S. Lewis wrote about the death of his wife: her absence is like the sky. It covers everything. 

  Ann Hood’s new novel, The Red Thread, will be published by W.W. Norton in May.

http://www.annhood.us/

 From Comfort:

 ”I have been there. I am the one woman standing in the street on a Thanksgiving afternoon, screaming and pulling out my hair. That is my mother coming out the door, yelling my name. That is me, running from her, running down the beautiful street where houses wear plaques announcing how old and important they are. That is me making that sound which is both inhuman and guttural and the most human sound a persona can make: the sound of grief … That is me running, zigzagging, trying to escape what is inescapable: Grace is dead.”

 

Copyright 2008, Ann Hood, Comfort, A Journey Through Grief.

This week on  SilentSorority.com I tell how a trip to Russia cured my tunnel vision:

 

I consider myself less a survivor of infertility, than of the fertility industry. 

Let me explain. As far as I know, I wasn’t infertile during my childbearing years. But when I was married and 30 and ready to start my family, I came down with a life-upending chronic illness. You realize you’re not parent material when you can’t recognize a box of Cheerios, forget how to use a phone, and unintentionally set fires in your own home. And, oh yes, I was taking experimental meds that were in no way pregnancy friendly.

Before that, on the scale of wanting a child (1 being “No Way!” and 10 being “I Have No Purpose If I Don’t Have a Child“), most of the time I was probably a four: “If it Happens, it Happens” was my philosophy. I’d already had a premature taste of maternity, when, at 13, my mother had a fourth child and I was designated chief babysitter. Unlike many “infertiles” and even new Moms, I knew how hard the job was, and how important it was to be fully there for it.
   
For several years, as I worked to get well and fully employed again, we were a happy family of two. In my mid-thirties, I succumbed to societal pressures – some might say enablers — a generous fertility benefit at my job and a clinic just down the street.  No doctor red-flagged my health condition, but as I walked down to the little clinic at the bottom of the hill in my picturesque suburban New York village, I knew I was giving myself a toxic dose just as surely as if I were scoring smack on the Lower East Side. I wound up seriously disabled after a brain infection. This time it took me years, not months, to read, write, drive and cook safely. End of Act I, I was 38.
 
If my husband and I’d stayed in New York, I’m certain further fertility treatments would never have crossed my mind. Because of my health, I had to be realistic. Rather than being preoccupied with my fertility, I was forced to figure out how to accommodate this new semi-sick person who’d invaded my once-healthy body.  Instead of grieving a baby, I grieved the sturdy, dynamic self I’d lost to illness. I was so overwhelmed by financial challenges, I often thanked God I didn’t have a child to provide for. But when we moved to Rhode Island, we were a complete anomaly as a childless couple.

I tapped into the last few thousand dollars in my company’s benefits piggy bank.  “You have the numbers of a 25 year old!” My doctor enthused.  
   
This time I wasn’t working full time, so I didn’t get sick. I didn’t get pregnant either. I was 44.

I was never desperate until this final IVF frenzy. But in order to continue gambling with my mental, physical and emotional health, I had to define my future life without children in starkly negative terms. Terms that that were just plain false. But stuck in the fertility tunnel, I developed tunnel vision. Years later, I recognize it as a kind of mental illness.

How did I escape ? I’ve always come alive with travel. In 2006, I won a fellowship to attend a writers’ conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.  While I’d once considered traveling to Russia to bring home a child (a plan nixed because of my health and financials) I instead brought back myself. The self I’d pushed aside in my quest to become a parent like everyone else, that I couldn’t even see from inside the tunnel.

Once in Russia, I was no longer the semi-sick, middle-aged childless, purposeless person I felt at home, but someone who plunged easily into international life, knew how to get by in a strange city, picked up a foreign language in days. I was at one with the 15-year old exchange student who’d been so shy speaking English she often didn’t open her mouth all day at school, but when forced to speak only in French felt instantly at home in a foreign country.  On the streets of St. Petersburg I was taken for European, and when I explained I was American, I hastened to add, a New Yorker.

Upon returning to Rhode Island, it dawned on me I might be in the wrong place, pursuing the wrong goals. I began traveling more often back to Manhattan, and realized how much of myself I’d left behind there. I have a history there that means something profound to me.  My husband and I met in college in November of ‘81 and moved to the city June ’82. New York was the foundation not just of our adult lives, but our relationship. It is our family.
   
We went to New York in the middle of a recession worse than the current one, found work in the fields of our choice against all predictions, paid all our bills on our own, and retraced the footsteps of our immigrant, tenement-dwelling grandparents as we lived as minorities in minority neighborhoods that were often unpleasant, even dangerous.  I worked in the World Trade Center for all the big firms making news today; my husband was at the center of the dot.com boom and bust.
   
Having children, being part of the direct genetic chain of generations, is one way to be in the stream of life. It was easy to see myself as a dud in those terms.  But, being at the center of history, I realize, merely walking the streets of a great city like St. Petersburg or New York, is another way of feeling connected to the chain of of history. Understanding this restores the parts of me that that our fertility-frenzied culture said I lacked.    

http://blog.silentsorority.com/

This month I’m quoted in Elle.com on how I’ve managed to stay married so long:

“Many friends who witness my husband and me sparring say, ‘I don’t think you are going to make it.’ But in fact, our constant conflicts have kept us together,” explains Christina Gombar, 50, a writer. “Nothing is sat on, it all comes out right away, and it’s gone.” Fighting beats fuming quietly and is a great way to air problems. It’s also an excellent way to take a stand, empathically defend an important position, and provide essential information about yourself.  Gombar and her husband can safely be blunt with each other. “We don’t take offense because it’s the norm for us,” she says. “All of our friends who worried about our disagreements are divorced!”

 Gombar sees her husband, Peter, as sort of a hedonist, with a passion for good scotch, fine cigars, and fancy steak houses. “He loves to spend money,” says Gombar, who tends to penny-pinch. Although she tried to rein him in early on in their marriage, she realized over time that she couldn’t change his fundamental nature. “Live and let live,” says Gombar, who has discovered that her frugality and his spendthrift ways seem to balance out. She recognizes that spending money, as long as it doesn’t bankrupt them, is his way of feeling safe and secure.

          In fact, limiting what someone spends can create a deprivation mentality, according to Steven Stosny, PhD … “Knowing that you can’t have something creates an unconscious longing for it,” he says.

http://www.elle.com/Life-Love/Sex-Relationships/How-to-Make-Your-Marriage-Merrier

My short memoir on  life at AIG named runner-up in the Manhattan Media Contest. Read it here:

 

                                    Elegy for an Organization

“In the federal trial, AIG alleges that ousted CEO Maurice ‘Hank’ Greenberg left AIG in 2005 with 290 million shares of illegally seized stock, since sold for an estimated $4.3 billion …” 

 

I could tell you about AIG.

That I was one of the no-name people, not the elites who screwed up.

That I made $20,000 a year.

That my office was on the narrow crooked end of Wall Street.

Where on the most glorious sunny day, it was dusk out my manager’s window.

That my own office was three mustard-colored walls and one grey, free-standing partition.

 

I could tell you that I was terrified.

Of the big buildings, the air of mystery, the sub-CIA cowboy culture.

Of the numbers I didn’t understand.

I could tell you that our P.R. policy was Don’t Talk to the Press.

That the building foundations shook when USA Today named our chief, Hank, the  seventh highest-paid CEO in the nation, or was it world?

I could tell you that not only in the company, but all over Wall Street, everyone knew that A.I.G. meant All Is Greenberg.

I could tell you that if Spitzer hadn’t forced Hank out, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

That AIG’s been brain-dead ever since.

I could tell you I have a soft-spot for Hank.

 

I could tell you that this company was a family when I had none.

The year people died, went mad, out of business, into rehab, into nursing homes.

I could tell you that for years I ignored the half page ads in the Help Wanteds

With the tall letters that said WALL STREET.

That I only answered AIG’s because it didn’t.

That when I learned it was Wall Street and didn’t answer their calls.

That they kept calling.

That my boss at AIG was the first man I worked for who didn’t harass me.

That he was a blue collar New Jersey newsman.

That his staff called him Bambi behind his back.

 

I could tell you that this was the year the stock market dropped.

That a rising tide lifts all boats, but hurricanes stir up gold.

I could tell you I made the best friends of my life there.

That we drank vodka in the morning but worked through the night.

That AIG’s unofficial motto was “We shall pay no claim before its time.”

That it didn’t need a diversity program, its workers came from over the world.

Its interns from housing projects.

 

I could tell you we were proud of the sub-CIA cowboy culture.

 That I came to have more respect for financial people than writers.

That the Ivy arts grads I roomed with after college couldn’t hack the real world.

That they left their jobs and lived off their parents.

I could tell you that people on Wall Street don’t take money from their families.

They support them.

That AIG didn’t care about pedigrees.

Just work.

 

I could tell you that on my floor Jews and Arabs were friends.

            That there was a transsexual, a platinum punk rocker, and a girl with purple hair, (me.)

I could tell you all about the married closet queen and his 400-pound secretary.

 

I could tell you how I learned to use a personal computer there.

That on the computer cube wall hung the Leviathan company chart.

For internal use only.

A complex web of holding companies, limited partnerships, and wholly-owned subsidiaries.

Chilean pension funds, Indonesian customs bonds anyone?

Four hundred boxes, cross-linked, to outsmart the auditors.

 

I could tell you that when Hank made a joke people were afraid to laugh.

That his oldest son Jeffrey was overworked.

That his second son Evan looked like a movie star.

That he fired both sons, or they left of their own volition.

And became CEOs elsewhere.

 

I could tell you that when Hank entered a party, he scattered crowds like a smoke bomb.

That he was five foot six, or looked it.

That he was 60 and looked 40.

That the one time my work brought me within feet of him, he winked.

 

I could tell you that I remember what I wore that day and what it cost.

That I walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge.

 

I could tell you that my whole life flowed from that building.

That it split me in two and broke up my home.

That when I worked there, I moved to a seedy hotel.

That AIG was more home than hotel.

That it was both prison and refuge.

           

I could tell you that I couldn’t afford to leave the hotel till I got a better job.

That I left AIG after 18 months for a $10,000 raise.

That I’d have stayed for $5,000.

I could tell you that I understood why AIG was cheap.

That by the time I left I understood numbers.

About shareholder value.

About managing risk.

I could tell you that AIG wasn’t like other Wall Street Casinos.

 

I could tell you that once a week Hank went through his rolodex to call someone in.           

And rip his face off.

That I wasn’t important enough for this to ever happen to me.

That the old Chinese waiters were equity millionaires.

That the upper echelons lived in a culture of fear.

            That they worked with Golden Handcuffs.

AKA Deferred Compensation.

AKA Holding on for the Retirement Bonus.

 

Now the disintegrating company’s news Googles into my inbox, like jagged rocks down an avalanche.

I could tell you that when Spitzer kicked Greenberg out, he parted the golden pot from the people who’d earned it.

Or were promised it.

That none of this was on paper.

All on trust.

I could tell you that most likely the company chart, with its 400 cross-linked boxes, made this perfectly legal.

Is life ever fair?

 

I could tell you more.

I could tell you all policemen are pigs, all soldiers murderers, all men are rapists and all Wall Street workers evil.

 Or I could tell you that Hank Greenberg gave me a job when no one else would.

That the company saved my life.

Or I could tell you I left my soul back there, locked up in a grey metal desk drawer.

 http://www.nypress.com/article-20328-non-fiction-contest-runner-up-elegy-for-an-organization.html

Should IVF Coverage Be Mandatory?

           A couple of Decembers ago, I got an email from Resolve, the national infertility organization — a plea for end-of-year, tax-deductable donations. “Imagine a world where fertility treatment didn’t exist …”  began the missive.

            It had been years since I looked to Resolve for aid in my finally defunct effort to have a family. The organization claims to serve a dual purpose: to prove information and support to those pursuing children, and reconciliation to those who wind up without. But the overwhelming number of communications and services, and the only lobbying activities – urging Congress to pass laws to make insurance coverage for fertility treatment mandatory — were geared towards the baby quest.

              So I deleted their emails after a quick skim. But having planted the idea of a world where fertility treatments didn’t exist, I couldn’t resist an honest answer: “I honestly wish they didn’t!” 

           This spurred an instant response, offering a plea for my “healing” – as if only a wrong-thinking person could even question the fertility system.   

            I hit the reply key, and then typed in: “The fertility industry makes those of us for whom the system didn’t work even more of an anomaly than we already are.”

            Within minutes, a Resolve staffer called. She stressed that Resolve was there to listen to people like me. 

            “Good. All I’m saying is — if infertility is defined as an illness, then that makes those of us without children sick and abnormal, right? I can’t reconcile to my situation if society can’t reconcile itself to me. Plus – I have a real illness – having infertility over the age of 35 isn’t an illness, it’s biology.”

            The staffer was dumbfounded.

            I continued, “I’ve worked hard for the little financial security I have, so I’m really cheap and risk-averse. I knew most IVF’s in my age group failed. If it were a stock, I wouldn’t have bought it. But because it was someone else’s financial risk – I gave it a shot. But I’d never have gambled on it with my own money. I’d never have got sucked into the emotional maelstrom. And if no fertility treatments existed at all, I’d have much more easily accepted my childless state. And so would the rest of the world.”

            A lengthy conversation ensued. I insisted on a precise definition of infertility. At 28 it’s an illness that should be cured when possible, and paid for by medical insurance. At 48, IVF is an artificial prolonging of the motherhood timeline. Was it fair to make other policyholders in the insurance risk pool subsidize that? The Resolve staffer was shocked.

            But this year, the once-taboo arguments I raised are coming out in the open.

            In July, Salon’s Broadsheet column backed the Family Building Act of 2009, which calls for insurance companies to provide IVF coverage. Fifteen states currently require it, and Resolve would like to make it a national mandate.

            The financial logic behind insurer-provided IVF is that those who can’t afford the more expensive and precise IVF procedure use the cheaper fertility drug clomid, which may cause the release of too many eggs, resulting dangerous multiple births that tax the health care system more in the long run.

            Of infertility, Broadsheet columnist Lynn Harris declared, “It appears that we can no longer afford to treat its treatment as a luxury.”  

            Some commenters disagreed, with the predictable advice: You can always adopt. Which prompted corrective replies from other readers who pointed out that adoption is often more expensive and risky than IVF.

Other responder’s put the argument in the context of the larger health care crisis:  “When society can afford insurance coverage to provide life-saving treatments for all the children already here who need them, then we can spend more money creating new children.”

http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2009/06/24/ivf_coverage/

  

Consider Yourself Warned

          In Britain, authorities recommend giving a fertility test at 30, seeing it as an awareness tool. Fertility counseling should go hand in hand with other kinds of sex ed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/09/fertility-mot-children-nhs

             A former chairman of the British Fertility Society said it was crucial to tackle a “widespread misapprehension” about the success rate of fertility treatments. The chances dip sharply with age: from 31% for women aged under 35, to below 5% among women over 41.

 Mommy Oldest

            This summer, the death of a Spanish woman who gave birth at 66, leaving a toddler orphaned (she was unmarried) spawned heated debate on the blogs over whether or not there should be a ceiling-age for fertility treatments.

            In Newsweek, African American writer Raina Kelly spoke out: “Sometimes for the sake of the children-to-be, we may have to put away our longings and grieve for the children we might have had rather than go to the ends of the earth to get them. We have to think about the children, not just the having them.”

http://www.newsweek.com/id/208022

Some feminist voices argue that the reproduction playing field should be leveled – that if men can become parents at sixty, then so should women. Personally, I wonder if this is something to envy – but I’d hate to see reproduction outlawed for one sex and not the other. 

The Motherlode on Stillbirth

In her New York Times Motherlode column, Lisa Belkin asked readers how to respond to a family who’s experienced stillbirth. Again, sparks fly in the comments section, with one commentator saying that words like “tragedy” should be reserved for mass events, like the Holocaust or Hurricane Katrina.

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/when-a-full-term-pregnancy-ends-tragically/

Which button do I push for a dead baby?

            Stillbirth is more common that Down’s Syndrome, SIDS and HIV – one in every 160 pregnancies. Few expectant parents are aware of this, and so come to it completely unprepared — in an increasingly impersonal medical environment with no protocol for addressing it.

            NPR’s Tell Me More recently ran a segment featuring two parents of stillbirths who are trying to do something about that.

http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=111063912&m=111063895

Guest Sherokee Isle, who suffered a stillbirth in 1981, is trying to make sure hospitals have on hand a copy of her book, Empty Arms: Coping After Miscarriage, Stillbirth and Infant Death.

            She and fellow guest Alan Goldenbach, who recently wrote of his wife’s stillbirth in The Washington Post  (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/06/AR2009070602918.html) point out that parents-to-be aren’t told that when movement slows down near due date, it’s a danger sign. They are lobbying for more research to find out why stillbirths occur.

In June of 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama introduced the Preventing Stillbirth and SUID Act of 2008, but it was unable to gain much traction. (”SUID” stands for “sudden unexpected infant death.”) Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) continues the effort, “We need to know more about stillbirths to help increase awareness and prevention,” Lautenberg said. “We are crafting legislation to improve data collection so we can better understand what’s causing stillbirths and help parents looking for answers.”