500

Blogger tells me that this is my 500^th blog on No Kidding in NZ, and so I thought it might be timely to look back on what I was writing every 100 posts, even though most of the time I was completely unaware that they were milestone posts. Even though I started this blog some years after coming to terms with my No Kidding life, there’s still been a journey in the way I think and express myself on this subject.

My 100^th post was a post of celebration, both of the joys of a simple morning in Wellington, and the realisation that despite several possible fertility-related triggers, I was completely unaffected by them – though not so unaffected by the high-pitched screams of a fellow café client.

My 200^th post talked about an article about the fertility industry and some of their unrealistic promises (false advertising?), their financial interest in continuing to push treatments, and the damage done by their (and others) inability to acknowledge that a significant proportion of fertility patients won’t get pregnant or carry a healthy child to term.

At 300 posts, I briefly talked about the frustrating habit of parents saying that they couldn’t imagine their lives without their children, but not making any effort to understand what our lives without our children are like.

My 400^th post complained about being sent inappropriate advertising, and then concluding at the end that rather than being irritated by it, I just had to laugh at their ignorance.

So whilst I can still be (and perhaps always will be) annoyed at those who get it wrong and make no effort to do better, I am in a better position to consider solutions or to suggest what they could do (for example, parents, medical professionals or fertility providers or businesses) to try to understand our lives, putting their own in a more honest context, just as we must try to do in return. I think that’s what understanding and honesty is all about – maybe that’s what my journey here is all about.