Logo no-go

Last week I was slicing a perfectly ripe avocado with a chef's knife and carelessly sliced my finger as well, a deep cut right next to the cuticle that bled like a guacamofo.  Charlie, who had been patiently standing by in his tower awaiting his turn with the knife, was concerned.  He followed me upstairs to help me tend my injury.

Cold water first, then soap and a good rinse.  A glaze of Neosporin, and then an adhesive bandage.  He watched it all with a grave expression.  But his biggest concern, as it turned out, was not the blood or the pain.  No, he had only one question: "What picture will your Band-Aid have on it?"

This is only relevant because it's the story I told the nurse on Friday as she was unwrapping a bandage after my blood draw.  She laughed and told me that at her house, when she needs a Band-Aid, her only choices are SpongeBob and Dora the Explorer.  We agreed that it hardly seemed fair that adults have so few options.  Plain, we declared, was boring.  And while sushi and bacon are a very good start, where are the vodka and Cheez-Its? 

It wasn't until I made to pick up my handbag that I saw I had not, after all, been given a plain Caucasian-flesh-colored bandage.  No, it was fancy all right.  But no ninjas or Jesus for me.  The crook of my elbow, the tiny scarred spot that has been the site of hundreds of needle sticks, had become prime advertising space:

Now, I'm as anti-genital-warts as the next girl, especially since I was diagnosed with HPV in college.  It was devastating, and it brought to a grinding halt — or more accurately a grindless halt — my joyful spree as...oh, let's just say that in those days I was what you might call a friendly gal.  The diagnosis, treatment, and subsequent flurry of frequent Pap smears ushered in an era of frigid celibacy so absolute that it took two years for my loins to return to serving temperature.  As it turned out, I suffered no lasting physical damage, not from that STD, anyway, and no recurrence whatsoever.  But the emotional repercussions were huge.  So I'm all for the promiscuous application of a vaccine for human papillomavirus.  But I'd rather say so with my mouth instead of my arm.

Years ago I was deeply impressed by what I found in my primary care doctor's office.  It was papered with the usual informative posters: a colorful map of the human digestive tract, an architectural rendering of the fucked-up tangle of rubber bands that is the human ankle, a lurid touch-'n'-feel guide to communicable diseases of the skin and whatnot.  But where there would usually be a big logo in the corner — "This scratch 'n' sniff poster brought to you by the makers of Monistat" — my doctor had conscientiously placed a plain white shipping label so that no manufacturer would benefit.  "It's good information," she explained when I thanked her.  "I just don't want anyone to try to shill to my patients."

Since then I've been perpetrating my own one-woman campaign of small-scale sabotage.  When I'm in a doctor's office and I see a logo that's easily obscured, I do my best, my non-vandalizing best, to hide it.  This might mean putting a Post-It note over the logo on a poster.  It might mean turning the promotional stirrup covers inside out so that they no longer advertise an estrogen supplement but instead present a fleecy haven for a nervous woman's heels.  It might mean, as it did on Friday, petulantly presenting myself to the office manager, presenting my elbow crook with a j'accuse-y flourish, and bleating, "I'm an advertisement!  I don't want to be an advertisement!"

The office manager only laughed kind of nervously, as if she thought I was joking.  I wasn't.  The nurse thought to comfort me by assuring me that I'd only have to wear it for a few minutes — alas, not true, since my daily dose of Lovenox makes me bleed for much longer than the average pissy human billboard.  I wore that fucker for hours.

I'm still irritated today.  Screw the medico-adverto-adhesive-bandagerial complex.  Next time I'm taking my own.

Birds, bees, FETs...

Early one morning, Nancy Nisselbaum was readying her 6-year-old son Marshall for school and herself for work when he asked: "Mommy, how does the sperm get from the donor to the doctor?"

Nisselbaum, a single mother by choice, I imagine the article continuing, turned an unattractive shade of magenta, voided her bladder in panic, and stammered so convulsively as she answered that she bit off a part of her tongue.  "Well, son, when a man between the ages of 18 and 32 who prefers to remain anonymous and a sterile plastic specimen cup love each other verrry much..."

In a recent article in the Washington Post, Elizabeth Agnvall dips a toe into the question of how to talk to your kids about more contemporary sexual concerns than the ones our parents peed themselves over.  "Forget the Birds and the Bees," commands the article's subhed.  "Kids Are Asking about IVF, Transgender Pregnancy, and STDs."

Despite the sensational subhed, it turns out the experts counsel an approach no different from talking about any kind of value-based issue: Start talking about it early, and keep doing it throughout your child's upbringing.  Acknowledge your own discomfort, if you feel it, but don't let that stop the conversation.  Talk about the emotions involved as well as the mechanics.  And for God's sake leave out the part about the stack of well-thumbed magazines.

Most of this seemed familiar to me.  But then it's not hard for me to imagine talking to a child about such matters when one is on the inside.  I can talk about what it feels like to love someone enough to want to have a family with him.  I can speak with some authority about what leads someone to undergo fertility treatments.  I can explain firsthand what it felt like to read donor 294's profile and know, even with the paucity of information we were given, that she would be the one.

Harder, perhaps, when you yourself are uncomfortable:

Kirstin Madaus, a former obstetrics nurse from Falls Church, said her 9-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter always seem to come up with tough questions while she's driving.  [...]  The most recent car-ride challenge? Her kids have friends with two mommies and recently asked how the babies got there without sperm.

"I just started talking and talking. Half of my brain is going, 'Shut up, shut up.' "

The article did raise an interesting, if now only theoretical, question: What would I have told our kids about their conception?  The question is now purely theoretical because over the last five years I've told our story to everyone on the Internet, and it would be foolish to suppose that one day Charlie's future employer won't ask, in that all-important final job interview, "So!  Tell us how you've dealt with challenging situations in the past.  For example, we see your mother used to think of dirty Led Zeppelin lyrics while she was up in the stirrups.  How did you overcome that soul-deep mortification?" 

Assuming his answer will not be "matricide," it's a pretty safe bet that he'll grow up knowing, at the very least, that Paul and I required medical assistance to conceive him.  And for this baby, now 28 weeks along, there was never any question but that he'd grow up knowing that his existence has been made possible by a generous grant from donor 294.

But if these factors hadn't been in play — my promiscuous disclosure, my ovarian insufficiency — what would we have said?

I am not sure we would have said anything.  I think perhaps not.  When you take the third party out of the equation, what are the truly important parts of the story?  Your parents wanted you.  They loved even the idea of you.  It felt like a fucking miracle when they learned you were finally coming.  And what's so different about that from the way anyone else came about?

Do you think it's important for ART kids to know exactly how they were conceived?  If you have kids, do you expect to tell them, or have you already?  If you're hoping to have kids, what's your plan?  And will one of y'all please hire Charlie one day?  Because nothing you ask him will be a surprise.

Little orphan asshole

"The law," declared Mr. Bumble in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, "is a ass."  He was protesting the legal presumption that he was responsible for the misdeeds of his wife, whom he had just fingered for jewel theft.

That quote is ripe for an update, not least because the very premise is antiquated.  The idea that Paul should be held responsible for anything I do — well, on second thought, I suddenly see certain advantages.  As a matter of fact, Judge Pancreas, I was powerless to resist eating that entire bag of potato chips.  After all, it was my lord and master's Visa card that paid for them, and I can prove it.  I have receipts.  (Gosh, Paul, sorry about that whole jail thing.  As an act of contrition I will bake you a sugar-free flourless low-carb cake and deliver it on visiting day.  Share it with all the nice friends you are sure to make in the exercise yard.)

But I cannot escape the fact that we live in different times.  So I'll amend Bumble's lament slightly: The proposed law is an asshole.  In this case I am referring to H.R. 5889, The Orphan Works Act of 2008 (PDF) and its identical cousin, S. 2913 (PDF).  Rest assured that despite the name, this is not a Twistian bill intended to hound those unhappy workhouse urchins into an early coal-shaft grave.  In fact, it's not related to reproduction or parenthood at all, except in the most tangential sense, so if you are interested mainly in those topics, feel free to click away because I'm about to bore the sooty third-hand rags off you.  But if you blog about your kids, stick around — perhaps this will be of interest.

Now on to the Orphan Works Act.  First let's define our terms.  Currently a copyright is conferred automatically upon the creation of a work.  According to the U.S. Copyright Office, a copyright notice is not required, and registration is not necessary to protect that work.  For blog-related purposes, this means that any original material I post on my site, or you post on yours, is copyrighted, and ours to protect, without any further effort necessary.  An orphan work is a copyrighted work whose creator is difficult or impossible to contact.  Those of us who post through a veil of obscurity — anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers — may well fall into that category by our own design.

As it is relevant, then, to us diminutive-name-for-motherbloggers, the Orphan Works Act proposes the following:

• Just as it is now, no registration will be required for a copyright to be created.  However, if a copyright holder hopes to preserve her right to meaningful damages in the event of infringement, the bill stipulates that she must register that copyright with a certified database, to be created and maintained by unspecified third parties — third parties who would presumably levy some sort of charge for doing so.  The immediate problem with this, as it pertains to bloggers, is obvious: most of us don't make money from our work, and would find registering even a few images, even at a low fee, prohibitively expensive.  So either we stop posting pictures, or we open ourselves to infringement, because...
• If a copyright holder chooses not to register her work with the proposed database, the work could automatically become an orphan and therefore fair game for use by third parties.  (After all, if it's not in the database proposed by the bill, how can "a qualifying search in good faith" find its creator?  And just like that, your work is orphaned.)
• Should the copyright holder somehow become aware of third-party use of that so-called orphan works — a possibility but by no means a certainty — she has the right to bring legal action against the infringer. However, the Orphan Works Act limits the penalties that can be awarded in such cases.  Since the copyright holder is not entitled to any compensation for court costs or legal fees, these costs would likely exceed any award the copyright holder might be given.  So what else could a small-scale blogger do but let an infringer get away with it?
• Current law gives the copyright holder the sole right to derivative works, which is presumably the reason your local independent bookseller isn't awash in titles like Harry Potter and the Black and Decker Cordless Rechargeable Orgasmatron.  But the Orphan Works Act will permit a third party to copyright a derivative work.  Sure, the original work remains mine, but when the American Oven Mitt Consortium decides to use Charlie's naked likeness — modified, natch, by the careful pelvic placement of one of their fine family of products — to flog their wares, I'll be up the creek without a giant floppy heat resistant rubber glove.

The obvious solution to all of these problems is to make sure our personal information is freely displayed and publicly accessible, so that anyone who'd like to use our material can contact us to request permission and — you may say I'm a dreamer — offer appropriate compensation.  But considering the inherent privacy issues, I'd feel a certain sympathy for anyone reluctant to do so, especially anyone who posts about her family.

There are certainly legitimate reasons to be concerned with the problem of elusive copyright holders.  And I have been unable to conect some of the alarming claims made by opponents of the Act with the text of the bill itself.  So I'm not suggesting knee-jerk opposition.  But I am suggesting that if you're concerned about the possible implications of this legislation, or if you have any questions about how you could be affected should it pass, you might contact your Congressional representatives and let them know.  Sure, the law might be an ass, but if you ask me, it's an ass in need of saving.

UPDATE: Several of you have commented saying that if a blogger allows comments or posts an e-mail address, the foregoing won't be a concern.  That's true as far as it goes, with someone finding work on a blogger's site and wishing to use it.  But say, just for the purposes of argument, that the following occurs...

I create something I think is moderately clever and post it on my site.  A reader agrees that it is indeed moderately clever and forwards it to a friend, sans attribution.  They tell two people, and they tell two people, and eventually my work — unattributed — ends up on the desk of, I don't know, the president of American Schlockworks Greeting Cards.

The president likes it and decides to appropriate it for use in his company's forward-thinking new line, "So You Say It Sucks to Be You."  The line is a smash hit and makes a kajillion dollars.

But where's my fraction-of-a-kajillion?  In this case, the good people at American Schlockworks don't have an easy way to find out who created the work.  If I haven't registered my work with the proposed database, under the proposed legislation their liability will be limited: they'll only have to pay me a pittance, and that's if I find out they've used it and if I take the financial risk of bringing suit, a pretty big "if" considering the cost of doing so versus the limited amount I would stand to gain.

Having already seen some of my work passed around the Internet without attribution, it's all too easy for me to see someone's work being ruled an orphan when in truth it is not.  ("Hey, I don't know where this pissy little not-pregnant-yet ticker came from!  I saw it on a message board somewhere.")  It's easy to propose that any creator make sure that her attribution is indivisible from the work itself, but in the case of many works that's impractical — photographs, illustrations, textiles — since it would compromise the visual impact of the original work.

(And I absolutely agree that it's not pitchforks-and-buckets-of-tar time just yet, which is why I calmly suggested contacting your representatives to learn more instead of exhorting you to storm the capitol and simply set the lying bastards on fire.  I realize it is rare indeed that I'm not waving my arms in a panic, so I'm kind of pathetically eager to get credit for it when I manage to refrain.)

Little Boy what now?

Not long before Charlie was born, I issued a manifesto, a list of promises I have mostly managed thus far to keep.  No Lunchables?  Check.  Ridiculous getups?  Check.  No full frontal nudity on display?  Check, although I do have a single photo of him sashaying around the back yard, naked but for his Crocs, a pair of giant rubber oven mitts, and a seraphic whole-face smile.  (I have named the picture blackmail.jpg, and I have backups in two separate places.  Bring on the teenage years.  I am fully prepared to fight dirty.)

I've spent a lot of time marveling at how different this pregnancy has been, from its earliest days onward.  This time, instead of thinking to a baby I haven't yet met, I hold Charlie close and make him more silent promises, a lot more complicated and even more heartfelt.  Knowing him now, I'm much less articulate, and sometimes I count on my body — the way I persist in roughhousing with him, unwieldy midsection notwithstanding; the fact that I still carry him now and then, just because I feel like it — to tell him what's hard to say.  I think he is listening.  He hears me.  "Mama, I always want you to hold me," he tells me, as I hoist him with some effort.  I will is what my grunt says.

...

Charlie is perfectly delighted.  We told him several weeks ago that this summer he'd have a baby brother.  He gets it, as much as a three-year-old can.  "He's growing in your belly," he says, repeating what we've told him.  "He'll come out when he's big enough."  And not a moment sooner, I think, smiling and nodding my encouragement.  And then, inevitably, "Where will he come out?"

Why, the hospital, of course!  Now!  Who wants something delicious?  A little something I like to call...a Lunchable?

...

He's taking this all quite seriously.  He is full of plans.  This time around, he's the one making promises.

"I will sing our baby brother some lullabyes to help him get to sleep," he says, and proceeds to demonstrate.  [Deep breath, bellowing.]  "JOHHHHHHN JACOB JINGLEHEIMER SCHMIDT!  His name is myyy name toooooooo!"

"I would like to go to the toy store," he casually mentions as we pass.  When I tell him that we're not buying any toys for him today, he looks genuinely aggrieved.  "But for our baby."

In the middle of the evening routine, he declares, "My baby brother can share my bathtub."  Rinsing him, I mention that we have a bathtub that's just the right size for a baby.  "But I will wash his mighty hams."  Three and a half years in, apparently I am in no hurry to teach him they're called thighs.

"I will name the baby...Isaac."

"I will name the baby...Little Boy Blue."

"I will name the baby...Natalie."  Because I guess I'm old school when it comes to gender identification, I gently opine that Natalie is usually a girl's name, and he gives me a steely look, then speaks as if I were the three-year-old and he a Prussian schoolmaster unimpressed with my unruliness.  "The baby...will be named...Natalie."

"My baby brother can share my big-boy bed."  I suggest that a baby might need to be more securely contained.  "I'll teach him how to sleep in it without falling out."  I explain that babies don't understand such things, not right away.  "Mama, he'll want to be near me."  And of course I tell him he's right.  Of course baby Natalie will.

Open mouth, insert speculum...I mean foot

When you get right down to it I do feel a little bit sorry for my doctors.  They've been nice people, all of them, well intentioned and caring, but let any one of them utter a single phrase that is less than exquisitely calibrated and I go all lucha libre on their competent white-coated asses.

But only in my head.  In person, I am almost faultlessly courteous.  (I only add "almost" because I know I've allowed myself the odd impolite guffaw here and there.  It's usually been immediately after I've been asked if I'm aware of the risk of high-order multiples, or prodded for a decision about how to handle any leftover embryos.  I excuse myself this lapse in manners only because I think those doctors have been in on the joke, having seen my ovaries in action.  Uh, in inaction.)

Lovely people, all.  If they have occasionally made a gaffe, it has usually been a mild one, kindly meant and easily forgiven.  (Usually.  I make an exception for the doctor I'd asked for birth control pills, who actually leaned in close and whispered, swear to God, "Just in case, or is there someone whispering in your ear?")  Some of them have even been people I think I'd have liked to be friends with, like the long-ago gynecologist who looked at my piercings, regretfully told me I'd have to remove them for my laparoscopy, and then reminisced wistfully about her college days, when she'd had a mohawk and a lip ring.

Believe me, I recognize my great good luck in this and appreciate it, especially having heard some real lulus from some real bozos.  A friend inside the computer pointed out Radar's "Gynecologists Say the Darnedest Things," a list of some of the creepiest things their readers have heard from a professional head tucked between their thighs.  And indeed some of them are weird.  But in my opinion they're nowhere near as cringeworthy as what a doctor, male, said to a friend of mine just before injecting the dye during her HSG: "Let's see if your insides are as pretty as your outside."

The comments at Jezebel about the Radar story are every bit as unsettling and, in places, hilarious: "My doctor once shouted, 'Wow, you are LUCKY! You're really tilted but in a good way. He must not have to work very hard at all!'"  "I mentioned my mother was a dentist. The gyno looks up from between my legs with a disgusted look on her face and says: 'You know, I could never do that. Looking into people's filthy mouths all day long...Ugh!'"  "Mine always tells me to say hi to my dad. Yeah. Awkward."  "The weirdest thing I've had happen after I had an exam was for the doctor to pat me afterwards, right on my mons pubis.  Like he was patting a puppy. A cute vagina puppy."

Woof.

Now I happen to think that given the, ah, emotionally charged nature of fertility treatment, plenty of you must have heard funnier, creepier, or both.  Feel like sharing?  If it makes you feel more relaxed, imagine me complimenting the sweet ballerina pink of your cervix as you type.

I LOVE JUSTINE ELIAS for the link.

SCREEEEEEEEEEAWGGGGGHWWW

The trouble with having had so many legitimate reasons to freak out is that it gets kind of hard to tell the difference.

Two weeks ago I had a scan at my MFM's office.  Everything was fine — great, in fact, with the baby measuring a week ahead of dates, in the 90th percentile for size.

Friday I had a scan at my OB's office.  Everything was fine — great, in fact, with the baby measuring exactly correctly for dates, in the 60th percentile for size.

I am trying to figure out how to type an onomatopoetic representation of that sound a phonograph needle makes when it's suddenly being dragged across a feel-good pop hit from the '60s.  You know, like they sometimes do in movie trailers when they want to signify a sudden upsetting paradigm shift, like maybe that hot girl the camera was following down the street isn't really a hot girl at all, but Steve Buscemi in drag.  Oh, it starts out innocuously enough...

Sugar
Awwww, honey honey
You are my cannndy, girrrrl
And you got me SCREEEEEEEEEEAWGGGGGHWWWWhat the fucking FUCK?

...and, okay, I don't mind having my preconceived notions about the intrinsic nature of human beauty challenged, but once that record is scratched and the soundtrack changes to, I don't know, "Dude Looks Like a Lady" or something, the bottom line is that you're still looking at Mr. Pink in falsies and a Spandex minidress.  And the best you can say about the whole thing is that it could be worse.  It could be Benicio del Toro.

The OB who did the scan seemed unconcerned.  "I wouldn't worry" is what he said.  "You're not the one with a file that reads like Finnegan's fucking Wake" is what I answered.  No, that's a lie; finding myself incapable of speech, I actually just scissored my thighs apart, trapped his neck in an unforgiving viselike grip, and choked him until he turned the loveliest shade of periwinkle, to match his panicked, watering eyes.

No, that's a lie, too.  It was an inverted facelock camel clutch.

The thing is, he is almost certainly right.  Leaving aside normal variations in growth, the fact that the scan was done on different equipment by a different operator could easily lead to discrepancies that may sound significant to the patient — 30 percentile points! — but that are, in reality, mere clinical bagatelles.

Right?

At this point, my sense of when it is appropriate to worry is seriously skewed.  Sometimes a headache is just a headache.  Other times, it's a sign that your brain is about to ooze out of your ears if that baby doesn't come out now.  (My head feels fine, thanks for asking.)  Although Charlie was born at a great weight for his gestational age, the fact that my placenta showed marked signs of age — never normal in a preterm birth — and had an infarct showed that if he hadn't been born when he was, it's virtually certain that he would have begun to suffer from growth restriction.  And that's the best case scenario.  So even the faintest suggestion of slowed growth scares the busty Buscemi out of me. 

Given all this, I have decided to permit myself a small ration of low-grade anxiety.  The OB wants me to schedule a repeat scan for four weeks, pointing out that because of those normal variations, an earlier scan won't tell us much.  I feel sure he would forgive me my skittishness if he remembered that it was he who neglected to request a protein dip at my 28-week appointment with Charlie, and he who gave me cheerful leave to travel.  I don't blame him at all for failing to predict what happened, HELLP being what it is, but the association still makes me twitchy.  Therefore I am keeping the appointment I'd already scheduled for two weeks from now with my MFM, who did the original scan — you remember, the one we were enjoying before the perfectly unobjectionable "Sugar, Sugar" went all SCREEEEEEEEEEAWGGGGGHWWWell, no wonder Tony Soprano shot him with a 12-gauge.