I’ve been taking a bit of a hiatus from Instagram, and all social media really, to just be at the start of this fall, and it has been delightful, a welcomed pause and stillness from all the noise. It’s still warm enough that we’re straddling two seasons, our oldest is in kindergarten, I joined a homeschool forest school coop after packing up all my homeschooling stuff and giving it to my friend, and our weeks are often full of physical therapy for our youngest. My motherhood season now is one of multiple, school aged children, and I seem more and more removed from that first time mom and even the memories of my first pregnancy as starting to fade.
I read a wonderful piece here (linked below) recently, and it reminded me of a lesson I’ve learned as living my motherhood and womanhood somewhat publicly as most Millennials do:
Disclaimers won’t save us.
Around the time of my fourth pregnancy in five and a half years I had been around the block with pregnancy announcements and the etiquette required. I’d waited the standard twelve weeks, sharing first in person with family, and friends, and then opting to briefly share about our exciting news with a photo we had taken at our local Christmas tree farm. I took special care to share delicately with a friend who was experiencing infertility.
It was also the first time since expecting my oldest that I didn’t offer a disclaimer. I just announced our news and moved on.
Years earlier, I had started offering disclaimers with announcements or any sort of happy news as a way to protect myself. I’ll admit, I didn’t want anyone to be upset with me. I also didn’t want people to think I was prideful or insensitive. I wanted to be happy and have others share in the joy with me of something exciting happening, but didn’t want to experience the reality that my happiness might upset someone. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, too. I was on a fool’s errand.
After all, I’d been taught a powerful lesson about this after I started documenting and sharing about my first pregnancy back in 2017. At the time, I had absolutely no idea or any awareness that disclaimers were somewhat expected, and that by not offering one I could be unleashing malice:
Seth and I had announced the upcoming arrival of our first baby, and I was admittedly excited about blogging and documenting my pregnancy. I had watched countless other moms do this and was looking forward to a bright spot of photography and writing despite the challenging circumstances (surprise, baby before marriage) and the frequent nausea and vomiting that earned me a Zofran prescription. At the time I was running in a different circle of friends, one that included a Christian blogger who wrote devotionals. I had started to distance myself after my in-person announcement warranted a question from her to me about when my boyfriend and I would be getting married.
I wasn’t sleeping well but had started getting up early after taking B6 and Unisom every night at 8pm. I remember the messages vividly; I had pulled out my phone while I willed myself awake one weekday morning. She’d just needed to tell me that her sister had felt it necessary to unfollow me. Her sister had suffered a miscarriage. She then proceeded to go into detail, likely sharing more information that she ought to. I was so uncomfortable. I believe the messages served two purposes— one, to scare me and another, to make me feel guilty. I unsurprisingly felt awful for days. I think I responded that I was so sorry for her sister’s loss, and offered nothing else.
I want to be generous to this person and state that she later apologized to me, but I think the greater lesson here on disclaimers and how women police other women is interesting and pertinent to the culture. Since I didn’t want a repeat of that experience I was more careful going forward. When I shared my first birth story, an unmedicated out of hospital birth I was proud of, I made sure to include a paragraph about how all birth is birth. When we moved into our house after living in a condo I wrote on Facebook that I felt so grateful since many people don’t have adequate housing. As if no one else living in a house had seen an unhoused person.
Ultimately, though, I decided at some point to be done with disclaimers. They really hadn’t saved me. I still sometimes got weird comments about birth or our house. The pussy footing had done me no favors. It was time to shake off the fears, and just embrace whatever joy for the moment. Finding myself and others who could hold both helped me greatly in this.
One of the greatest asks of the Divine, I believe, is the challenge to hold the bitter and the sweet in bold hands. We are asked to make friends with joy and sorrow, as they often seem to travel in pairs. This is a challenge, and I believe in us as collective community to be able to do this work. A disclaimer doesn’t fix the hurt, grant the baby, bestow the husband, double the bank account, or do the inner healing work needed. It just acts as a cheap fix for maintaining the peace, a shoddy vaccine against the hard conversations we should probably be having in person anyway.
Thank you for this!! A great read and a perspective I’d like to carry with me as a new FTM in the world.
I’ve always found the “all birth is brith” discourse a little odd. Out of my three children, two were born via c-section. In my mind, these two were born, but it’s surgery! I don’t have a problem admitting that and it doesn’t detract from my own experience.