Baby Blues
Having babies is the in thing at the moment. Even Charlie Brooker is doing it, waxing lyrical in uncharacteristically chirpy tones about the joys of parenthood. Looking on my Facebook newsfeed yesterday I found four consecutive posts related to babies: two well-selected pictures of smiling offspring intending to induce “awwwws” a-plenty from 400-odd potential viewing acquaintances, one of a 12-week scan in what is now standard “Breaking News!” style, and a post about the pros and cons of reusable nappies. Further down yet more posts proudly announced the various achievements and milestones reached by more assorted prodigious sprogs (“Alicia rolled onto her front today!” “Sebastian slept through the whole night!”) and my latest friend to successfully breed confirmed mummy and baby were safely at home after a week in hospital. Everyone, it seems, is at it. Except me.
My mooch to work further verifies this: hoards of huge, glowing women seem to be constantly walking past me, taunting me with their fecundity. All around me the world seems to be saying “Oh! You haven’t done this yet? You mean you’re not having a baby? No?” and the unspoken implication is that you are not quite a whole, complete woman. How can you be, after all, if you have not yet accomplished that most crucial of female roles and reproduced.
I am happy for all my friends with children, and hope all goes well for the many who are pregnant. I am unashamedly partial to cutesy baby pictures, and excited about births-to-come. But what I and surely many other women find very difficult is the interference and constant pushing on the subject of my own fertility. What, exactly, does it have to do with anyone else? A married woman aged thirty, I seem to be constantly and unintentionally giving others cause to make unwelcome comments on the topic. To give one example, a recent post about being ill elicited not one but two posts implying this must be morning sickness (winking smiley face). So I was left still ill and now also an implied failure to my gender and God-given purpose on earth as well. Another post about my year looking potentially interesting (because, as I was later to tell people, I had a possible trip to India coming up and an application to the Camden Fringe awaiting approval) drew similar remarks. Worst of all a light-hearted announcement that I was not drinking resulted in one public and two private messages asking me outright if I were pregnant. On being told no, one somewhat tersely reminded me that my biological clock was ticking, and that I couldn’t wait forever.
Thses comments were, of course, all light-hearted and from people I know (with the exception of one, from a Christian friend who told me that to keep refraiing from having children was a grave sin as it was against God's plan, which begs the question, why is God telling HIM and not me?!), so I want to make it clear before I go on that this isn't a swipe at any particular individuals, but rather at a bizarre societal norm that makes such comments the obvious response to certain pieces of information when the original poster is young and married. I know I am capable of committing the same offence myself in reply to a friend once, so I'm not gazing down from my moral highground. But taking the comments in isolation, I'm almost stunned by their insensitivity, not to say the downright nosiness, which are bad enough when asked with anticipatory candour by relatives, but simply intrusive from others bar the closest of friends.
For a start, if I'd wanted the world to know of a forthcoming life-changing event I wouldn't have posted some sort of cryptic Facebook status, keeping everyone guessing, but would have announced it outright – the preferred method these days, as I mentioned above, is, I believe, to put one’s scan on the status alongside some jokey remark about putting on weight and staying off the booze. If I haven’t done this then chances are a.) I am not pregnant or b.) I don’t want you to know yet, not least because another societal norm dictates that I don't do so for twelve weeks. (I also think this is daft, as it is often precisely those twelve weeks where you need a bit of support and understanding, but that's a discussion for another day.) Prodding me for information is, for want of a better word, rude, and potentially unintentionally but deeply hurtful. Pregnancy is a massive deal, with all sorts of mental and physical health implications as well as economic considerations before you even get to the minor inconvenience of actually having to raise a person at the end of it all. It’s a massive decision, and a complicated matter. People should consider before prying that there could be any number of reasons for my not effortlessly following the example of my contemporaries. I might not want to, for a start, and that is up to me and my husband, and not something on which others should be speculating. Many decide that they do not want children at all for an abundance of reasons, be it career, money, or simply the fact that they are quite content with things the way they are, and they live perfectly fulfilled lives in spite – perhaps even because – of this decision, without any regrets or lamenting the limitations of the “biological clock”. More painfully, though, many women desperately long for a child but, for whatever reason, are not able to have one; there could be some awful genetic reason to choose to remain childless (a friend of mine has Huntingon’s in their family, and does not want to risk passing this on); I could, for all my cheerfully pestering friends know, have been trying for ages, but to no avail; there might be health reasons that complicate matters – there are certain common drugs – anti-depressants, for example – upon which you are advised not to conceive. If any of these apply, then pressure from even the most well-meaning of friends is distinctly unhelpful. It is also worth remembering that an estimated one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage – cheekily teasing someone about an impending new arrival could be deeply painful if, unbeknownst to you, they’ve recently lost that very thing.
And finally, even if none of the above applies, it does seem incongruous to be effectively asking someone about their sexual habits. By asking if someone is pregnant you are ultimately asking “so, are you having lots of unprotected sex?” There is no other context in which most normal people would dream of asking such a question! And, conversely, as long as the answer to the “maybe baby?” question continues to be “no” you are basically questioning my breeding abilities, which, I’m sure you’ll agree is more than a little impolite. I can't think of another area so personal that invites such conjecture: you wouldn't speculate over someone's health or income on a public forum, or indeed ask them about it privately unless you were very sure of what you were asking and they were a very close friend. So why is it that the female body seems to be public property?
Interestingly it is often my childless friends who make this inadvertent faux pas – my pregnant and parent friends are perhaps all too aware of the problems and pitfalls involved. One of my dearest friends has a beautiful baby who I hope to meet very soon (they live in Italy), and she has been the model of discretion, saying only that she hopes that what happened to her will one day happen to me. I hope so too, but in the meantime, to misquote Embrace, my fruitfulness is none of your business.
My mooch to work further verifies this: hoards of huge, glowing women seem to be constantly walking past me, taunting me with their fecundity. All around me the world seems to be saying “Oh! You haven’t done this yet? You mean you’re not having a baby? No?” and the unspoken implication is that you are not quite a whole, complete woman. How can you be, after all, if you have not yet accomplished that most crucial of female roles and reproduced.
I am happy for all my friends with children, and hope all goes well for the many who are pregnant. I am unashamedly partial to cutesy baby pictures, and excited about births-to-come. But what I and surely many other women find very difficult is the interference and constant pushing on the subject of my own fertility. What, exactly, does it have to do with anyone else? A married woman aged thirty, I seem to be constantly and unintentionally giving others cause to make unwelcome comments on the topic. To give one example, a recent post about being ill elicited not one but two posts implying this must be morning sickness (winking smiley face). So I was left still ill and now also an implied failure to my gender and God-given purpose on earth as well. Another post about my year looking potentially interesting (because, as I was later to tell people, I had a possible trip to India coming up and an application to the Camden Fringe awaiting approval) drew similar remarks. Worst of all a light-hearted announcement that I was not drinking resulted in one public and two private messages asking me outright if I were pregnant. On being told no, one somewhat tersely reminded me that my biological clock was ticking, and that I couldn’t wait forever.
Thses comments were, of course, all light-hearted and from people I know (with the exception of one, from a Christian friend who told me that to keep refraiing from having children was a grave sin as it was against God's plan, which begs the question, why is God telling HIM and not me?!), so I want to make it clear before I go on that this isn't a swipe at any particular individuals, but rather at a bizarre societal norm that makes such comments the obvious response to certain pieces of information when the original poster is young and married. I know I am capable of committing the same offence myself in reply to a friend once, so I'm not gazing down from my moral highground. But taking the comments in isolation, I'm almost stunned by their insensitivity, not to say the downright nosiness, which are bad enough when asked with anticipatory candour by relatives, but simply intrusive from others bar the closest of friends.
For a start, if I'd wanted the world to know of a forthcoming life-changing event I wouldn't have posted some sort of cryptic Facebook status, keeping everyone guessing, but would have announced it outright – the preferred method these days, as I mentioned above, is, I believe, to put one’s scan on the status alongside some jokey remark about putting on weight and staying off the booze. If I haven’t done this then chances are a.) I am not pregnant or b.) I don’t want you to know yet, not least because another societal norm dictates that I don't do so for twelve weeks. (I also think this is daft, as it is often precisely those twelve weeks where you need a bit of support and understanding, but that's a discussion for another day.) Prodding me for information is, for want of a better word, rude, and potentially unintentionally but deeply hurtful. Pregnancy is a massive deal, with all sorts of mental and physical health implications as well as economic considerations before you even get to the minor inconvenience of actually having to raise a person at the end of it all. It’s a massive decision, and a complicated matter. People should consider before prying that there could be any number of reasons for my not effortlessly following the example of my contemporaries. I might not want to, for a start, and that is up to me and my husband, and not something on which others should be speculating. Many decide that they do not want children at all for an abundance of reasons, be it career, money, or simply the fact that they are quite content with things the way they are, and they live perfectly fulfilled lives in spite – perhaps even because – of this decision, without any regrets or lamenting the limitations of the “biological clock”. More painfully, though, many women desperately long for a child but, for whatever reason, are not able to have one; there could be some awful genetic reason to choose to remain childless (a friend of mine has Huntingon’s in their family, and does not want to risk passing this on); I could, for all my cheerfully pestering friends know, have been trying for ages, but to no avail; there might be health reasons that complicate matters – there are certain common drugs – anti-depressants, for example – upon which you are advised not to conceive. If any of these apply, then pressure from even the most well-meaning of friends is distinctly unhelpful. It is also worth remembering that an estimated one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage – cheekily teasing someone about an impending new arrival could be deeply painful if, unbeknownst to you, they’ve recently lost that very thing.
And finally, even if none of the above applies, it does seem incongruous to be effectively asking someone about their sexual habits. By asking if someone is pregnant you are ultimately asking “so, are you having lots of unprotected sex?” There is no other context in which most normal people would dream of asking such a question! And, conversely, as long as the answer to the “maybe baby?” question continues to be “no” you are basically questioning my breeding abilities, which, I’m sure you’ll agree is more than a little impolite. I can't think of another area so personal that invites such conjecture: you wouldn't speculate over someone's health or income on a public forum, or indeed ask them about it privately unless you were very sure of what you were asking and they were a very close friend. So why is it that the female body seems to be public property?
Interestingly it is often my childless friends who make this inadvertent faux pas – my pregnant and parent friends are perhaps all too aware of the problems and pitfalls involved. One of my dearest friends has a beautiful baby who I hope to meet very soon (they live in Italy), and she has been the model of discretion, saying only that she hopes that what happened to her will one day happen to me. I hope so too, but in the meantime, to misquote Embrace, my fruitfulness is none of your business.
posted by RLS at 9:16 pm
1 Comments:
THIS. A hundred times. Having come off my ADs to try to get pregnant, established reasonably well that I couldn't, and then not had the support of the ADs when something devastating crashed onto my radar. In fact, the only relief of that something devastating was that it led to me being single enough that when I have an orange juice because my drugs don't mix with alcohol, no-one asks any more. Still find it hard enough to look at other people's babies, though, and probably the most painful thing after concluding I couldn't was all the people who thought it was funny to joke about it every bloody time I ordered a drink.
MSB x
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