“Are you planning to have kids?”
“When are you planning to have another?”
Do these seem like a highly personal questions to you? They didn’t seem so to me a few years ago, but now I have a different perspective.
Now, y’all know that I’m not the most secretive gal. It’s not just the blogging, I’m like this in person, too; when I meet another chatty extrovert like me, we can have our life stories out within 20 minutes of meeting (and yet keep gabbing for days). So a question like this, meant to encourage small-talk, would not have given me a second thought in the past.
Since the miscarriage, though, I have a dilemma. Do I simply say, “Yes, we’d like more children,” and feel that I am lying by not telling you the pertinent fact that by rights I ought to be pregnant this very moment? Or do I say, “Actually, I had a miscarriage recently” and make you feel terrible for asking the question, which you suddenly realize must be one that is pretty emotional for me. I’ve gone both ways on this one, depending on how charitable I’m feeling. (Or just because I felt like sharing. Or not.)
But it’s not just about me.
Some time ago, I was in a restaurant with a couple of friends who had been trying to get pregnant for years. They were in the throes of deciding whether to attempt the physically and financially demanding process of IVF. An acquaintance they hadn’t seen in years wandered in and they briefly caught up on each others’ lives, before the guy dropped the bomb. “So, you guys don’t have any kids yet?” he boomed. “You ought to have some by now!”
It’s unfortunate that he was particularly insensitive in how he put it, but even if he’d asked simply, still I would have the same reaction, which was to cringe inwardly, knowing the bitterness and pain the question no doubt induced in my friends.
So, no matter if I am burning with curiosity, I would never ask this question of anyone unless I was starting to get to know them pretty well. (And with a chatty extrovert, that can happen pretty fast. Well, a chatty girl extrovert, anyway.)
What do you think? Have you been in this situation? Are there any other seemingly innocent questions you would add to the “Just don’t ask” list?
