Whew. With a set up like that, you'd think it would be about Ellie, right? Someone doing her wrong and me leaping to the mommy defense? Of course not. God forfend I post about my dulcet darling.
Nope, it's something else entirely and as I type this I realize it may come back to bite me on the ass. The typing of it.
See specifically, it happened whilst I was posting on my old ww board. And I also shared my blog link with some of the posters to show pics of Ellie. So there is always the chance that a ww member may read this. Having said that I'm not being passive aggressive hoping that one does. It just triggered something in me and I certainly can't discuss it there.
So let's start here. Last year I joined WW in July, and found a fabulous thread of new marrieds/new move ins who were in a Less to Lose group. It was kismet. I adored posting and chatting with them, and of course, definitely had my favorites. In fact, there was no one i didn't like or agree with although occasionally, i did find one particular poster somewhat, for lack of a better word, sanctimonious and more often then not confrontational. I'd post one idea and she always seemed to have a rebuttal. Back then, I cared.
I remember once sharing the fact that I had a
Time passes. The other day I checked in. I left the group while pregnant, finding it all too painful to post about daily life when I was busy on baby death watch. And as I read, I noticed that some people had moved on, and others hadn't changed. Oh sure, I won't ...can't...do a character sketch nor should I but suffice to say that as I was reading along a few times I though "Ah, the naiveté of narcissistic childless people". Okayyyyy. That was a smack.
The long story short is that I posted something and she immediately jumps in with her **conflicting** opinion. I wouldn't care so much but I hardly ever see her do it with anyone else. She's normally obsequious and accommodating.
SMACK again.
I need to cool off.
Basically it all stared when I posted that I thought someone should stay away from those daily boards - like babycenter, etc.
Specifically I wrote:
"I'm begging you, BEGGING you don't sign up for too many of those online follow the baby things. they are AWFUL! All they do is tell you to eat right, do yoga, and not to drink. It's awful awful. They make you feel like a failure if you aren't doing gentle cardio 19 times a day and registering for inane items." And then I added a few more no sequiters. Random but re: being pregnant, weight gain, allowig yourself to be human. Of course I was being tongue in cheek. I’ll grant you, but I believed what I wrote. And I said it in a “take it with a grain of salt” way.
So douche bag, I mean annoying girl, immediately jumps in with this completely sanctimonious rebuttal about how much weight someone should gain, that being pregnant is not license to pig out, etc etc. Then this other annoying narcissist jumps in with her 2 cents about her being in the medical field and that Dr’s say x y and z (Dr's also said thalidomide was a good idea but I didn’t feel the need to bring it up.)
Anyway they were both the archetypal cliché of the typical first new mom circa 2008.
Yet neither was pregnant. Neither had had a child. Frnakly, neither knew what the fuck they were talking about.
But for all their reading that is.
I don’t mean to belabor this, pun intended, but I was just pissed. Hey, don't get me wrong, when I was pregnant I was reading everything ( because I had the time to) and I talked to my two fiends daily, also pregnant. And the simple fact is, those websites??? Well I just saw a really disturbing and sad trend amongst the readers and within my first time mom friends. (Second time moms aren’t as reliant so to speak on outside information!) Sort of a pervasive feeling of feeling bad because no one was doing their pregnancy “perfectly”.
The websites for “moms” (and everyone else frankly) have wonderful advice about walking, eating right, not eating for two etc – and yes, those things are true. But none of the print advice given to moms also allows the mom to just relax – as a simple human being. Pregnancy is treated like something to conquer. Something to master. Something else to be good at. “Managing your stress, how to tell your boss, what to wear, what not to wear, paying attention to your husband, eating for two, breast or bottle” On and on it goes. Or my favorites “Are you sleeping enough? Are you sleeping correctly? Are you still *sleeping* with your spouse?”
Sure, because we are bright, we think "I’ll sift through the advice, and take out what I need." But here’s the thing. The advice - while trite - is so so pervasive and oft repeated, that it becomes fact. It becomes the "norm" when in fact, it's just perpetuated myth.
So am I saying that every single study is bullshit and I and I alone know what's The Truth?
No.
I just feel like we need to remember that we are raised within one culture and all our information comes from similar sources. Even diverging information is still based on a universal shared idea. I personally believe the obsession, yes obsession, with weight gain, exercise during pregnancy, and alcohol consumption are uniquely American obsessions. And just because Drs, blogs, websites, Newsweek all say one thing, b/c they are coming from a shared value base, I'm not sure if you can believe it. It soesn't make something true just because everyone believes it. (See article: Earth not Flat circ. 1492)
My original point in posting to the ww group was to simply say "Listen, you don’t HAVE to follow these rules. It is VERY easy to “fail” to do all the things that you are “told” to do right. As woman, we get inundated with advice on how to be the “perfect” pregnant woman. You are still going to be ok if you don’t. Maybe you're sick, you're tired, you don’t feel like walking, like exercising, you just want to eat something easy. You should allow yourself that."
I ended up quitting the group. I don't have the patience to wait for each of them to have kids of their own and see how pregnancy, in the final analysis, is just not that big a deal.
No comments:
Post a Comment