First of all, I’m not entirely sure what the point of the fertility/birth announcement post is, honestly. I have lots of friends who have had kids by now. In some cases, I knew exactly at 12 weeks, or whenever the couple felt like announcing. In some cases, I knew via the hospital photo. In a few cases, I knew of the child when I saw them in a picture at age 1. Across those three situations, regardless of my connection to the parents, nothing changed for me. It was still a child, whether I knew about it at 12 weeks in-mom, out-of-mom, or already-walking.
Now, I understand the couple having the child wants to announce, and at this point there’s a whole ecosystem around pregnancy, including gender reveals, birth announcement posts, showers, sprinkles, baby-moons, and the like. It’s a big deal for people. I got a friend in Kentucky tells me “It’s a completely normal time, but also the weirdest time of your life, so you feel the need to share it with everyone.” I get it.
That leads me into the point/question herein: that same friend, actually, she had a few miscarriages and she’s pretty open about it. She, and a few people from my church, inspired this post about fertility journeys a few weeks back. Now, while she was having miscarriages and the like, she worked with a lady who smoked, drank Diet Coke religiously, etc… and that lady was just popping out babies, 3-4 at a time seemingly.
Human nature is human nature. At some point there will be resentment and comparison. We can claim that won’t happen, but it happens. People are people and they want things from their life and they want generalized notions of fairness in how people get those things (which is why it’s ironic that diversity initiatives literally can’t go anywhere, so I think what I meant to type was “They want what they want in the way they want it”).
OK, back to this topic.
Let’s say you’ve got a girlfriend — I feel like this would be a bigger issue with women, but it might apply to men — and the girlfriend is having a tougher time with fertility, like it’s taking a while, or whatever whatever. And you’re on Baby 3, 4, 5 and the hits just keep coming on, beautiful Jessie Anne Dawson Winchester IV ready to be welcomed by a four-digit IG like count.
When you get to Baby 4, Baby 5 … if you know your friend over here is struggling and maybe that would slap/sting a little, do you bomb out the baby announcement on group text/social, or do you go 1-to-1 on your girlfriends?
Because if you go 1-to-1, you can tell “this lady with also 3 kids” one thing — “Expecting again, bae!” — and tell “this lady who is maybe struggling” another thing — “Hey, I know it’s been a hard time, and I didn’t want to flash this out there all over the place, but Tim and I are expecting. Let me know if you want to talk about anything, and thinking of you.”
I would think the latter (1-to-1 plays) is closer to standard definitions of friendship, but everyone is different.
These are the same issues in corporate, right? People attempt to communicate 1-to-many, as in execs-to-peons. That doesn’t work because the message is internalized 1,000 different ways by the peons, which leads to resentment of the exec, but you have no mechanism to do anything to the exec except leave, and that’s hard because the economy is a chicken fart unless you’re investor class.
Now, on the guy side, I can tell you broadly guys communicate like abject shit about anything major life-wise, or at least guys I have known do. I got a friend for years, ride or die, who had about three miscarriages and I learned it via one random drunken night years later. Got another friend who had been engaged for about 16 weeks, and invites were hitting the mail for events related to that, when I found out in an ESPN edit room doing a Pacers game highlight. Ha. HA! I still kinda remember that Pacers game….
On the fertility side in terms of male friendships, it’s not discussed whatsoever. I spent most of my 30s drinking too much, and my “levels” are kinda low. Aside from mentioning this in this blog post that maybe 300 people will ever see, I have no one I can discuss this with. My dad? Please. Guy friends? Hardly. It’s a very lonely, isolating experience aside from talking to some doctor dudes. It makes you feel emasculated and shamed and like you can’t give someone what she wants, and there’s almost no one to discuss it with.
Hard.
So that loops me back to like, weeks ago, I got some friends from church — close, not super close — who announced they were pregnant. Context of the deal is, within our small group just this couple and my couple didn’t have kids, so I knew their announcement would slap at some point, and I’d probably have a reaction. I didn’t have much of a reaction, which is good, but there’s part of me that wanted them to maybe approach me (us) 1-to-1. Then there’s part of me that says who gives a fuck, we’re not that close. Then there’s a third part of me that says “Why should I impose ground rules on their announcements because my dick isn’t as effective as his dick?”
So I come to three paths, and I am not sure which one I believe. I lean 1-to-1, but I think the others have value.
You?
Hi Ted,
I read this – twice – and I don’t see that it has a point to make.
Life is, at the top and bottom, just life. Evolution. The planet. Some animals don’t have young. Some do. In the better educated countries / populations the birthrate is dropping. Thankfully, it’s dropping to a level where ‘we’ will stop flooding the planet with more mouths than it and we can feed. The less educated people / populations / countries that are still in the era of maximising children because they are your old age security are still at the stage of babies every year. That’s a bad thing, because most of them survive, unlike 500 years ago, when most died.
Where does that line of thought take us – it says that it’s pretty selfish to condemn my children to a world of overpopulation, survival struggles for water, for food, for working antibiotics. One or two = population stability, more than that, and the world will run out of everything.
So if you, and a partner, aren’t producing, then good for you. If you really want to bring up a child and imprint it with your beliefs and religion then there are plenty needing adoption.
Maybe what I’m saying is that you are not being hard done by. You mention church aa few times – Ask your God why he/she has visited this on you – and why the global plague hasn’t worked this time round and most people are left standing. You won’t get an answer though, because the answer is the same as always.
It’s just life. It used to be that your babies died before their birthday, and everyone accepted that. Now our lifestyles, drugs/chemicals/pollution and interest in careers is doing the self limiting.
So get over it, stop feeling sorry about it. It is what it is. Use all that energy and time and resource to make the world a better place for the next generation.