A Teachable Moment - Well, It Could Have Been
So, I just returned from a two-day business trip which included a detour on the way home to the world famous Gravity Hill, which was quite a treat.
As my co-worker and I were cruising home in our adorable rental car, listening to a stack of CDs she brought along, Brittany Spears came on. A fabulous piece of pop candy. Pre-craziness, pre-KFed, pre-babies. Celebrity gossip ensued.
“Did you hear she might be pregnant again? Can you believe that?”
(me) “I know crazy, right?”
“It just seems so unfair. I mean, do you know how many women try years and years to have kids and here she is just popping them out like it’s nothing.”
(me) “Yeah….Crazy, right?”
….
Are you angry with me? I’m a little angry with me. This could have been a perfect segue into a conversation about why I had been popping pills every six hours like clockwork, why I didn’t have wine with dinner, what I was doing in her mom’s bathroom for ten minutes the night before (attempting to self-administer my PIO shot).
but I didn’t take it.
Why? Could it be because we spent most of the ride the day before talking about how annoying little kids and their parents can be? Or the fact that I supervise her and I don’t want to bring this issue into our work dynamic?
I think I just wanted to listen to the song.
What would you have done?
Tags: , , Brittany Spears, fertility, fertility blog, Gabrielle Sedor, Gravity Hill, infertility, PIO, reproductive health, womens healthRelated Stories
POSTED IN: celebrities, living with infertility, motherhood, pregnancy
3 opinions for A Teachable Moment - Well, It Could Have Been
Pamela Jeanne
Mar 13, 2008 at 11:37 am
The supervisory position thing would have probably made me hold my tongue, but what a perfect segue it was…maybe another time without the restrictions.
Megan
Mar 14, 2008 at 10:35 pm
It depends.
In a lot of ways, I think people should stop being so quiet about PG losses. Once I start talking about mine, I often find out that friends had (at least) one as well. You feel so alone when you have a m/c, but you’re actually a member of a club of millions.
But I know that’s not what you’re asking. For a while, I would inform people who asked questions like “when are you and Steve going to have kids” that, hey, funny you ask, it’s not going so well because I have half a uterus. It was great at first — shut people up out of shock and taught them a valuable lesson about why you should never ask questions like that. But then I had a situation where it went wrong. The chick I told (who’d just had a baby) went way overboard trying to relate to me and I couldn’t get out of the conversation. That was the last time I pulled that trick.
So I think it depends on who you are talking to and how you feel at the time.
And I agree that it’s BS that people like Britney can get PG while huffing glue under the boardwalk, while upstanding citizens like us have to work at it. Oh, the money I wasted on birth control through my 20s.
Gabrielle
Mar 15, 2008 at 10:39 am
Megan, you make me laugh. I know what you’re saying, though, and it is what I wanted to hear.
Depending on the situation, the audience (and my mood), I seem to vacillate between confrontation, sarcasm, silence and an honest and sincere reply. Lately, when folks as “so, when are you having kids?” (which seems to be happening a lot more recently) my response has been a lighthearted but not, “Hey, we’re working on it. It’s not that easy, right?” Sometimes I get, or maybe just imagine, a glimmer of understanding.
Reason #25 why I love the Internet: the number of people that I know that have emailed me privately after finding this site and talked about their own struggles (and sometimes successes) trying to build a family.
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