A friend jokingly accused me of having "baby fever" yesterday. I don’t, honestly. I am just super excited for Laura and Jon, since they wanted a baby, and now they have one! After all, they just grow up and become really sarcastic and eventually go to Oberlin and become vegan, am I right?
(Carrie, don’t get annoyed. You were a cute baby.)
I do get a lot of comments as a violin teacher, and as a now married woman, about when I’ll be having my own babies. People say, Oh, you’ll understand when you have your own! or "You’ll be a better violin teacher after you have your own children" (that made me almost homicidal) or simply ask, when are you having children? And in my facebook newsfeed it seems that just about everybody I went to college with is now a mother or is pregnant (as in, in the last week I swear at least a dozen people have announced pregnancies). I’ve gotten facebook messages saying, congratulations on your wedding, next comes babies! I’ve had parents (of my students) tell me that I should have 4 boys, that it is the greatest.
Chris with our baby
The thing about baby pressure is this: it will never end. It will absolutely never end. Once I got married, people no longer ask me when I am getting married. Once you have a baby, people don’t stop. They just keep bugging you "when are you going to have a brother or sister for your child to play with?" Plus, I consider asking a woman when she is going to get pregnant fairly insensitive. What if the woman has been trying with no luck, or has perhaps had a miscarriage or two that people just don’t know about?
But I do the same thing to my friends! I’m such a hypocrite. Right after I got married I found myself "joking" to people in serious relationships about whether they’d be next. At the gym there is a day care room, and if Mike starts waving or smiling at one of the kids I tell him I can hear his biological clock ticking.
The other question we could visit is why this bothers me. Why do I care whether people think I want a baby or not? But we’ll leave that one for the therapists!
Actually they do eventually stop. Once you have a little brother or sister for Junior, they rarely ask when #3 is coming and, in fact, often blanch when you inform them #3 or higher is on the way. People should keep their ideas about baby-having to themselves…unless asked 🙂
I like to randomly post “CONGRATS ON GETTING PREGNANT!!!” on the FB walls of my friends. Because I’m an asshole.
It IS pretty rude, I think, when people bombard you with those questions, too. I mean, how do they know you haven’t already been trying or maybe lost it? I know I’ll have some someday, and it’ll be great and wonderful…but in the meantime, I’m totally loving my freedom! When our friends who already are leading crazy lives with babies make semi-rude comments about “better get started before you get too old” type remarks, my husband and I just throw it right back in their faces by saying “You certainly don’t make it look appealing to us right now” half-jokingly. [although, we’re more serious than we let on….our peers definitely make parenthood look like hell, and we know it doesn’t have to be that way.] For now, I’m enjoying the peace and quiet, going out whenever we want, and sleeping in.