Since you asked

Over at The Hand Mirror, Julie raises the question of what a citizen’s to do when encountering personal questions about one’s fertility, pregnancy, and family plans more generally, and the general social judginess and boundary-crossing such queries often evoke.

At five months pregnant, I am somewhat in the thick of such experiences myself; hence using my own webpages rather than posting a comment on-site to consider the matter.  My impression has been that conversations around fertility and natality fall into two broad general groups.

The first of these is perhaps less problematic: when one is the interlocutor of someone with whom one shares a relationship of equal status and intimacy, and in which that person is making a genuine, well-meant inquiry.  The equality of such relationships acts as a check or a balance against inappropriate or invasive questioning, and often means that anything asked will be expressed with relative tact.  This can encompass quite a wide group of people.  In my life, it includes the señor and our close friends and family, but also people with whom we interact in a wider circle: some of our workmates, even some of our acquaintances.  When I miscarried our first pregnancy, it was of tremendous help and support to know from all kinds of people that they had been through the equivalent experience of their own, for example, and we were fortunate in that no-one who shared this with us offered any pat responses or advice.  This was a sustaining, widespread kindness.

It is the second group, I think, that can be the source of frustration.  These are people for whom talking about fertility and natality is part of the general phatic communion, and who will engage on these issues not with the intention of sincere exchange, but rather as a way of passing the time, or of opening up the conversation to them sharing their own opinions, which tend to general social platitudes or judgements.  These kind of exchanges happen, of course, in so many areas of life and society and are part of that process of social evolution whereby we feel interested in other people’s business as examples of general social and even moral phenomena.  Where the person turning our lives and experiences into grist for the mill of small talk has higher status than us (bosses, for example, or older relatives), or is a stranger to us, it’s a galling experience.  This doesn’t make it any less widespread.

So what do I do, when people casually inquire or comment about intimate matters (What names have you chosen?  Have you found out the sex — oh, you shouldn’t have done that; Of course, you’ll want to get rid of the dogs; How is your husband going to support you both?) and I want to put some distance between myself and the question?  I am using a combination of demurral and flippancy as my response.  It’s risky, and it’s skirts the edge of rudeness, but it’s the best signal I can give that I’m uncomfortable with my current gravidity being dredged through a phatic driftnet.

What names have I chosen? Family names, or, alternatively, Jesús the Gay Baby (the latter best not used at work).  Have we found out the sex? Yes, we are intractably nosey and like to know everything.  Of course we’ll want to get rid of the dogs; in fact no: when the baby’s born, we intend to shut her in the living room with the dogs and come back in three weeks (curiously, no-one has taken offence at that response).  How is your husband going to support you both? Same way he’s always done — his income, time and labour in conjunction with mine.  (The señor’s response to this is blunter, to the effect that he’s the one with the Sugar Momma in this relationship.)

If I feel strong effrontery, which can be influenced by context and my momentary feelings as well as the question, I mention my daughter’s ghost.  When first we told people about the pregnancy, I didn’t want its predecessor forgotten.  Are you excited? Yes, particularly since we lost our first pregnancy last winter.  This has proved most effective at separating out my conversationalists into those who are asking genuinely and those for whom it’s small talk.  The latter, I infer, are the ones with no further questions.

You can see that in my feelings of being judged, I feel entitled to judge right back, and I acknowledge that these judgements are subjective and may at times be inaccurate.  Small talk and polite conversation is a minefield, or maybe a battlefield, full of feints and parrying.  The habit of social judgement is long ingrained in many of us.  I offset these challenges by refusing to be personally or lastingly offended by much of what people say.  This is a hard habit to develop for a sensitive person, but it’s been worth it for me.  Whenever frustrating conversation can be recalibrated as an example of a social trend, it loses some of its power to pique.  And of course, the persistent inquiry and judgement will never stop, not now that I’m bringing into the world an individual who will be both emblematic of the future (a taxpayer and consumer in the making!) at the same time as her existent is viewed as a subjective personal choice on my part (many of you, I’m sure, remember Prebble’s “If you breed ‘em, feed ‘em” in Parliament as the nadir of this kind of view and its expression).

In many ways, planning a wedding was excellent preparation for this whole experience.  My engagement was the time during which all manner of individuals revealed a surprisingly passionately-held range of opinions about what the señor and I should do during our secular civil ceremony, from not doing it at all to wearing full bridal white because It’s Your Special Day.  (The amount of boat-rocking in the planning caused by having neither flowers nor professional photographer was quite something.)  It was my first time in the head-winds of unexpected opinion since my student days, when the social evil of my being “an eternal student” was somewhat offset by the specificity of my thesis topic.  The close following-on of our second pregnancy to our wedding has given the current conversational whirlwind the quality of dejà-vû, or, if I predict the future accurately, the eternal return.

Yet, at some level, I don’t mind about any of this, in a way that just a few years ago I would have minded profoundly and bitterly.  The pleasures of privacy during my long spinsterhood were always offset by the low-level suspicion of strangers, for whom a single person of any stripe is not easily classified, and the undue, unnecessary public validation of the decision to marry and breed comes with the cost of the loss of some of that privacy.  None of these situations is ideal, but they are real.  In our small talk we come at each other with a mixture of hope and fear, continually sounding out who is an ally and who is a threat to our views of the world.  We classify, we revise our classifications, we opine seriously or idly.  I carry the weight of my unborn child, and go home to my husband and our dogs.  These things are mine, and his, and hers.  They are material, they are actual, they resist , for the most part, the stumpy barbs of passing scrutiny.