Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Someone is missing a trick

My name is Dr Spouse and I am a forum-aholic.

There, I've said it. I am addicted to several fora, including a very nice community of women which is primarily a UK-based forum. It has a bit of a history, and has come into being via another well-liked but creaky forum and a rather political sideways move into a parenting forum. Lots of the women are mothers, but not all, many many of them have had miscarriages, including recurrent miscarriage, and I love them all. Apart from the ones I have healthy debates with about vaccination (I'd be happy for it to be compulsory in the UK except for medical exceptions) and letting your husband give you housekeeping money that he expects accounts of (why? it's your joint house/kids so your joint money, no? we are not in the 1950s). And I love them too, really.

I still drop in to that forum but there are some things I'd usually ask there but can't. Where do I get fair-trade undies in the US? What about Hershey's seasonal flavoured Kisses, which stores have people seen them in? What's a good cookbook for Southern California? Do you need to cook the lasagna you buy here before putting it in the oven or did I just pick out a duff recipe that doesn't know you can get no-pre-cook lasagna? What can we use to air out our cold and poorly ventilated bathroom? How do we find out if the gas heater in our old rented house is safe? What are good clothing brands for women of my more top-heavy shape? What about running shorts, where can I find the kind I'm looking for?

Someone (perhaps the publishers of the magazines I seem to be reading here - mainly Real Simple but also Redbook) needs to cater for addicts like me. Sunset has a forum but it is poorly laid out and hardly has any recent posts. I found one "women"s forum but it hurt my eyes - if the signatures can be five times as big as the message, why would you read it? (it looked a lot like Babycenter and no, I am not going there either). There do seem to be lots of mothers' fora. Shame you have to be a mother to be a woman, isn't it?

1 comment:

Samantha said...

Hi Dr,

How are you? Thanks for your comment today. And what are fair trade undies? Do tell. :)

Are you already on IVFConnections? I spent a lot of time on that one when I was going cycles. There are lots of different sub-groups.

Still want to plan a get-together! :)