How do you take the world and shrink it?
I’m from a small town and I’m used to word getting around in about five minutes when someone gets hurt or needs help. It’s always a matter of six degrees of separation. “Mary’s niece is trying to adopt a baby, and she’s having a pancake feed on Saturday. You should go.” Talk to a few of the right people and word can get around a town of 5,000 in days. And this was before social media. Now it probably gets around in a matter of minutes! Don’t believe me? Ask anyone from a small town.
It’s different in the big city. I don’t think human nature is any different, people are just as nice and caring, but you don’t have that feeling of connection with someone you don’t know, or only know through those six degrees of separation. It takes more to compel you to act– you have to feel a connection. Otherwise it’s just a sad story you heard about.
There are a few exceptions to this. Events or things that make the world shrink can bring a city together. Unfortunately, tradegy is one of those things that can shrink the world. I’ve traveled to New York pre 9/11 as well as in the months shortly after. What truly amazed me post 9/11 is how New York felt like a small town. The sense of community was overwhelming. Neighbors were helping neighbors and everyone went out of their way to help each other out. New York City became every small town in America. They were the very heart of America.
This also happens in times of joy or celebration. The Royals playing in the World Series in Kansas City, helped shrink our city. Weather you were a die-hard fan or indifferent, for a short time you were from Kansas City and you had a common cause.
This brings me back to the question, “How do you shrink the world?”. What can we do so people will realize that we are their neighbors, their friends? That our story is the story of everyone who has tried to have a baby and wasn’t able to.
This is the true challenge of fundraising in a Big City. Tim and I don’t have a large circle of friends and for me, at least, meeting new people is hard. I’m an introvert who has trained herself to appear to be an extrovert. No matter how often I speak or how many people I meet, my first instinct is to draw back. There’s always a spurt of terror at meeting someone new. To be honest, I’m perfectly content to live in my own mind most of the time; which makes shrinking the world a lot harder.
Tim and I have focused on sharing our story online because we are more comfortable with that, at least I am. It’s hard to strike up conversations with strangers and I don’t tend to speak of the adoption as much in person. Right now, we’re focusing on shrinking one corner of our world — our neighborhood. We’ve put flyers for our pancake feed on every community mail box in all of our surrounding neighborhoods. (don’t worry, my picture is on them, the post office already knows who to arrest contact)
We’ve also gone full-on public with our journey. I’ve created a facebook page, and I blog to share our story and our journey. When I started this blog, we wanted to share our story so that people would want to be part of the journey, to invite people to become part of our world, or as Mr. Rodgers would put ask them, “Won’t you be my neighbor?”. What I didn’t expect was the therapeutic nature of the blog. I never expected to blog as often as I have or feel like I have so many thoughts clawing their way out of me. But we have years of infertility, miscarriages, and treatments under our belt. Our entire view of the world has shifted, and it’s nice to be able to express how that’s changed my life.
I also blog, because bloggers saved my sanity. When you are infertile, at first you don’t share. It’s a shameful diagnosis and you feel as if you are lacking as a person. Everyone else can have babies and raise a family– why can’t you? And later, the hurt from infertility is a raw aching wound. It simply hurts to share. There were times when I thought if I started speaking about it, I would just start screaming and crying and raging. I was afraid if the floodgates opened, I would never be able to close them again.
I desperately searched for stories like mine after our first miscarriage (I found ONE in all of the internet), and as I went went through medicated cycles, IUI’s, and IVF cycles I poured over dosages, levels, and response rates from every available source. Reading those blogs made me feel like I had a friend on our very lonely journey through infertility. Some blogs were old, they’d already found their success and I would pour through every entry on what they had done. All of those blogs made the world smaller. I felt like I knew someone in San Diego or Boston — we were kindred spirits. I had a partner or friend in my journey. Someone who was showing me the ropes.
I hope by sharing our story, that someone else will find it helpful. That a neighbor will feel like they know us, that the world will become a little smaller. And most of all, I hope that a lonely googler who is considering adoption, or who has recently had a miscarriage feels less alone. Maybe someday, someone will find hope in our journey when they think all hope is lost. Maybe someone else will read this as they try to fundraise to make the astronomical costs of adoption manageable, and they will see that it’s possible.
I hope. And I blog.
Cancer Ever After 
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