Web and Community

Aaryn has her newest CityBeat column up, as usual it a good one. She writes of the amazing community she has found over at Flikr. She starts out by writing something I think many of us have felt:

Being a skeptic, I had always dismissed as irrelevant relationships formed on the Internet. Having had no personal experience with this contemporary phenomenon, I couldn't attribute to cyber-bonds the same validity I did to those formed between humans in "real life.

I too was part a web community that impacted my life in a surprisingly strong way. You are probably expecting to hear about some damn liberal hippies that I have connected with, but no. This story happened before I even knew what the word "blog" was.

In the spring of 2000 I finally convinced Eduardo that we should start trying for another baby. I could hardly believe my luck when only 3 weeks later I was standing in my bathroom with a positive pregnancy test! My dear friend Annie had told me only days earlier that she too was pregnant. Her husband Matt jokingly referred to us as "witches". Our 2 year old daughters were 2 months apart and loved each other, how perfect that our next children would be at the most a few weeks apart.

Actually it was too perfect. A couple weeks after the positive test I started bleeding. I bled with Aida, but this was different. When I woke up on June 6th I knew the pregnancy was over. Ironically it was because I had slept too well - no morning sickness. I took Aida to Lydia's house and went to the UCSD ER. {Eduardo was in Mexico for work} By the time I went for my ultra-sound I was no longer pregnant.

I was totally devastated. As time went on I did not become less sad, but more. My period took FOREVER to come back. I saw pregnant people EVERYWHERE. My dear friend Signe got pregnant during that time, my sister-in-law Berta and worse of all on the cover of People magazine a beaming Celine Dion with the screaming headline, "I'M PREGNANT!" I wanted to strangle her. {I know she suffered with infertility for years - but I was in a crazy mental place} Even Caroline got pregnant, and I didn't know her well enough at that time to be happy for her - I was just jealous as hell.

It was hard for anyone to understand what I was going through. I was totally desperate to be pregnant again - it was impossible for me to think about other things. It was difficult for my friends to understand, difficult for Eduardo to understand. He was also mourning and just wanted to move on. Well intentioned people told me that I should just "relax", then it would be more likely for me to get pregnant. {this by the way is a VERY prevalent belief and if you ever know someone desperate to get pregnant it is very bad advice.}

Luckily, one day I stumbled onto Village.com's bulletin boards. I was looking for fertility information and saw that there was a board called "TTC after Miscarriage". When I found out that it was "Trying to Conceive after Miscarriage" I instantly knew I had found the right place. A bunch of woman who literally knew what I was going through and were as OCD about getting pregnant as I was. It was wonderful. We all talked about how many days until we ovulated, how many days before we could take a test, our sadness about a negative test and real happiness for people who got a positive one. Sometimes one of those positive tests would turn out to be another miscarriage and we all reached out to those poor women. Some women thought of their lost pregnancies as babies who became "angels" looking down on them, a belief I probably would think was pretty strange in a normal situation. However, the board was a totally non-judgmental place. If "angels" made them feel better, I was glad they had their angels.

Shortly after I was safely into my 2nd trimester w/ Pablo I started checking the board less often, then I stopped as most of the other women who got pregnant did. I will always be thankful for the group. The "real" people in my life wanted to "distract" me from my pain. However the thing that made me feel better was being able to obsess and not worry that my friends and family were thinking I was a total nut case.

I don't want to make it sound like my "real" friends and family were not there for me - they were. However they simply could not provide the kind of support that a bunch of women that I never will met gave me. I will always be grateful.