mean girl

Thanks, everybody, for your so-very-kind comments on my last post. I feel all snuggly.

I've been thinking about the times I'm mean, and how it makes me feel like a total shit, even if nobody notices I am being mean.

I should preface this story by saying that all my friends are moms. Pretty much everybody I call a friend has children, and most of them are little kids and babies. I have a few acquaintances and old friends that are childless, but among my true friends that I see regularly, they all have little kids. So if I want to have friends, I need to be immersed in that world. For a long time that was totally fine with me - I'm comfortable around kids and I genuinely like them, and I grew up around lots of kids in an environment of breastfeeding/natural birth/attachment parenting, so I'm pretty knowledgeable and understanding about parenting stuff. A number of my friends have come to me with questions - I'm glad to help, I guess, but the irony is definitely getting a bit much,

But lately it's been getting harder to be around moms and kids - not always, but sometimes. I never know when my fragility is going to come to the surface. Last week a friend, T, asked me to come to a small gathering of women (all moms) who were nominating another friend, L, for a community award. I had seen my counsellor that day, and that always brings things to the surface, and by the time evening came, I was not really feeling like being around a bunch of moms. Just not up for sitting there, smiling blankly while they talked about how hard it is to be a mother. But I had committed to going, and I did want to do what I could to support L's nomination, cause she rocks super hard and totally deserves some glory for it.


So what do I do? I figured that if I was going to have to be around a bunch of people who all have what I want and don't have, I was going to flaunt what I have and they don't. So I made my hair look good, and put on makeup, and wore funky clothes that showed off my fairly thin self. And I went into it with the attitude of, "If I have to be jealous tonight, then so do you."


Naturally, a lot of the conversation went just as I thought it would. And I don't mean to suggest at all that what they were saying was in any way contrived or untrue. I know that moms need to share their experiences with people who understand, just like I need to talk to other infertiles. It's just really hard to hear right now.

But things started taking a turn for the "I-am-a-total-shit" when T, who was talking about how hard it is for her to accept her aging, post-2-kids body, said that her daughter often talks about me, saying that I'm pretty and I have makeup (I think it is the latter that excites her the most.) T said that it hurts that her daughter doesn't see her the same way. And of course I start to feel bad, realizing that my getting sort of dressed up had exactly the effect I wanted, only it wasn't the effect I really wanted. You know?


And later I found out that one of the other women there, someone I didn't know before, has been trying to get pregnant with her second child for 2 years, and is really struggling with it. And then I really felt like a shit, because even though she's one of them, she's also one of us. And without knowing it, because she's one of them, I wanted to make her feel bad.

I guess I need to learn how to balance my own need to protect my little old heart with some compassion for what other people are going through. It sucks to be primarily infertile. But it also sucks to be dealing with secondary infertility, or to be trying to be a single parent and entrepreneur and still have a life to call your own, or to be grieving the loss of your youthful body and all the things that go with that.

I really hate that IF has made me pretty myopic when it comes to other people's pain. In some ways, I feel like I have ignored my own suffering over our infertility for a long time and so now that I have a community of people who share and understand my experience, I am free to recognize that suffering and accept it, which has been so amazingly good for me. But I also need to remember that I'm not the only one in the world who hurts, and to make sure my armour doesn't wind up taking someone else's eye out.