Oprah She Ain’t

WELL.

I was going to post about how I had the honor of meeting the fabulous Erin over at The Vicious Cycle of Cycles and her awesome hubby  last weekend and how fun it was to have them over to meet the babies and see the Twinapalooza in full effect.  I had them come down to watch a feeding so they could get a better idea of what it’s like to have two babies…I wanted to stress the joy and excitement and that YES, it’s a hellava lot of work, but LOOK! Even with an almost crippling anxiety disorder it’s still FUN and aren’t boy/girl just the bestest ever?!?!  But of course BeBop had to open his pie hole and be all, Oooooooooh GAWD, the sleep deprivation!  I wish someone had been honest and warned me!  So I’m warning you…it’s HARD. And I’m tired and waaaaahhhhh! And if we’d been sitting at a table I would have kicked him under it, but instead I tried to divert their attention back to the guacamole and LOOK OVER THERE CUTE BABIES LOOK!

But they were great and I’m so glad we can be friends and I look forward to hanging out together once her babies are born and be the Twin Freak Shows parading around the greater Bay Area with our ginormous strollers that enable the babies to arrive approximately two minutes before we do at any given location.  And, as an extra special bonus you all simply MUST head over to her blog and beg her to post her recipe for the DELISH "enchilasagna" she brought (along with chips and BEER and adorable onesies for the babies, how great is she?!?).  It was so yummy and I thought we’d eat it two nights in a row (YAY! No cooking!) but it was so good we devoured the entire thing that very night.

So, anyhoodles, I was going to post all about that but then I watched the Tyra Show today.  THE Tyra Show, people. The one I was sort of asked to be on and then sort of unasked to be on.  First of all, the title of the show was Motherhood At Any Cost with the tag line, "See how far some ladies are willing to go to have their own biological child."

It was such a weird, uneven show. 

First of all, The Bachelorette Trista Sutter came on to talk about her struggles to get pregnant.  1) I do applaud her for openly discussing the issue.  Not many ‘celebrities’ (and I know, loose definition there) are willing to publicly discuss problems conceiving and I think if more people did, there wouldn’t be such a weird stigma attached to it.  But 2) Trista did get pregnant after an HSG, not fertility treatments per se, which is not to discount how hard her journey to motherhood was for her and her hunky husband Ryan, but STILL, I couldn’t help but think some of the motivation for her appearing was to sell her new line of diaper bags and perhaps that crazy ovulation predicting watch-thing she kept mentioning by name.  Is she also selling that?  I know, I’m such a freakin’ cynic.

And fo’ shizzle they HAD to include a brief but painful (for me) discussion of Trista’s recent US Weekly cover  entitled "How I Got My Body Back!" which is just a hideous and very painful slap in the face (and the still super-sized GUT) to any of us who haven’t gotten our bodies back and don’t have any hope of getting our bodies back within the next century. And by then it will be too late so who frigging cares but…where was I?

Oh yeah. Reality TV stars Trista and Ryan…

Truth be told I would have liked to meet those two in the green room, I can’t lie.  And does anyone else think it’s so weird that Jackson has the same onesie her son Max had on? And that I too opt for the baby layered look by putting on a long-sleeved onesie under the GAP one? And that I swear Max and Jackson could almost be twins despite the fact that BeBop and I do not, unfortunately for both of us, bear ANY resemblance whatsoever to Trista and Ryan? 

No one else thinks that’s weird?  Ok.  My bad.  Moving on…

The next guest was a woman so desperate to have a baby she’s lying to her fiance (who’s not ready for kids) about taking the birth control pill.  Once she made the staggering confession that no, she doesn’t actually take the pill consistently like she says she does, the camera panned to the audience who was all, oooooohhhhhh, and they shot a close-up of a woman with her mouth agape, oh-no-she-did’t practically written across her forehead.  The poor fiance was then dragged out, only to be told on national television his beloved has been lying to him. And then it seemed like Tyra did her best to break them up.  Is it just me, or did you all think that too?

Tyra did speak to a couple in the audience who has undergone some kind of fertility treatments, but they didn’t elaborate, only casually mentioning they had already taken out a third mortgage to pay for whatever it is they did, which they didn’t even discuss.  And their response to the ever-helpful, ‘did you ever think of adopting?’ question posed by Tyra elicited the ever-annoying* ‘we wanted a baby who was a product of us and our love…’

BLECH.

Blech to that annoying and condescending question that almost all of us have to hear countless times during our long and painful journeys to become parents ("D’oh!  Adoption?!?  Why nooooo, we never thought of THAT!  What a convenient, easy and affordable alternative!!  Not to mention speedy and free from complicated paperwork and sometimes even the prospect of international travel.  And totally without risk of heartbreak. GAWD what would we do without you Tyra!?").

To emphasize how totally awesome it is to adopt (even though: see tag line above,WTF?!?), at the very end she paraded out the editor of some magazine who turned 40 and decided to adopt as a single woman.  Who then dragged out her adorable but clearly frightened two-week old baby whose startle reflex was quite developed as she quivered and shook her little baby arms in response to the bright lights and deafening applause she was subjected to.

I can now totally understand why the producer I spoke to asked me if I could say something like, "You have to go on living your life…" to someone struggling to conceive.  Can you imagine?  Coming from ME, the poster girl for NOT living her life while trying to conceive. 

What’s this?  I just received a new text message:

I am a pot.  U R blck.  U suk.  U R an a hole.

They didn’t really talk at all about fertility treatments or the lengths intelligent, well-adjusted women will go to to have a baby.  They didn’t talk about the social stigma attached to undergoing fertility treatments.  I was hoping for a frank and eye-opening discussion of the pain we all go through, month after month.  And what that does to our self esteems, our outlooks on life, our marriages, our lives. And what about an informative conversation about the medical options that exist, without the ‘did you ever think of adopting’ question thrown out there.  I would have preferred not to have been ‘compared’ (as a woman who underwent five years of fertility treatments) with a woman who is lying to her fiance in the hopes of getting pregnant even though he’s made it perfectly clear he DOES NOT WANT KIDS YET.

But I guess that was too much to hope for.

I guess in many people’s eyes, we are the same:  the infertile woman, the single woman who chooses to adopt, the deceitful woman who lies to her future husband.  I guess we all DO go to desperate lengths, but it seems a shame to talk about all of us in the same conversation.  We do share the dream of becoming a parent, but to put all of us in the ‘Motherhood At Any Cost’ box is simplistic at best, insulting at worst.

*And not to be all judgey McJudgey, but I just don’t like people to knock adoption by saying that the only way to have a child who is a ‘product of their love’ is to conceive one.  I think for many people adoption is a fantastic alternative and that a family started this way is still a product of a couple’s love.  But to each his or her own and I shouldn’t be such a buttwipe, I know.  Sleep deprivation makes me more of a witch than normal.  (But don’t tell Erin I said so!)