Unsolicited Pregnancy Advice Is Literally More Annoying Than Being Pregnant
Expectant parents need support, not gleeful warnings
If you have a friend or family member who is pregnant or may become pregnant, do I have some advice for you: give less advice.
The other week, I was waiting for my number to be called at the fish market, minding my own business, looking at a bag of Kewpie brand Japanese mayonnaise and thinking about all of the foods it would taste good on, when my food brainstorm was interrupted by a stranger.
It started out pleasant enough. They asked when I was due, whether we knew whether we were having a boy or girl, whether it was our first baby. I think it's sweet when strangers say kind things. I've always wanted to live on Sesame Street.
But then, as if driven by a force bigger than either of us, they started giving out advice. "Make sure you get the epidural!" they said, not knowing anything about my health or birth plan beyond the fact that I was planning on giving birth and was currently conscious.
"You're what, six months? Oh, just wait until you're eight months pregnant. You will be too tired to do the grocery shopping! And then when the baby comes, forget it!"
My number was called before I could get receive any more pearls of wisdom from this person I'd never seen before. But I was low-grade irritated the entire drive home, and not just because I regretted not buying the mayonnaise. This wasn't the first time a person nobody fucking asked felt the need to speak to me as though I should have googled "how is pregnant" or "what is baby" before getting knocked up, as if I didn't know that childbirth hurts or that parenting is hard work. (Had I known, I could have chosen another path, one that would have saved me a ton of money on something known as “diapers”, a thing another woman I barely knew informed me I’d need a lot of.) If a side effect of pregnancy was a spontaneous lobotomy, I'd be grateful to people who point out the obvious.
But pregnancy did not make me stupid. I was exactly this stupid before I was pregnant.
Coco Chanel famously said that before leaving the house, one should remove two items from their outfit. The general public should consider applying that fashion advice to the things that come from their mouths and that are aimed at pregnant people and parents-to-be. If you're thinking of giving advice, before you simply let it burst forth from your mouth like the Kool Aid Man, ask yourself:
Did this person ask me for advice?
Is it my job to give this person advice?
Does this person need to hear this from me right now?
Do I know enough about this person's specific health, emotional state, and philosophy to give out advice that is appropriate for them and welcome at this moment?
If you cannot truthfully answer "yes" to any of these questions, consider shutting the fuck up.
And say nothing especially hard if your advice to a person you don't know that well is: "Just wait!" or "Enjoy it while you can!"
Beyond assuming that pregnant women and new parents have no idea what pregnancy or parenthood is, both "Enjoy it while you can!" and "Just wait!" assume that both experiences are joyless slogs into hell. "Enjoy it while you can!" takes the glass half-full approach of encouraging me to cherish the now in the face of a bleak future, whereas "Just wait!" takes the glass half-empty approach of reminding me to to brace myself for my life to get shitty in identical ways to the person urging me to do the waiting.
Different experiences of friends and family members have given me the impression that pregnancy and new parenthood are a little like air travel. Very few weirdos actually love it, most people tolerate it, some people hate it. Every airline is different. Every flight is different. It's more inconvenient and annoying than it should be in Los Angeles. Sometimes you get an upgrade, sometimes you spend the whole time battling airsickness. I do not need advice from a person who has only flown Emirates first class if I'm flying Frontier. I do not need a person who has only flown SpiritAir to scare me before my Delta flight. And I don't care what airline I'm flying, I do not need to hear all of the ways that a plane can malfunction as I'm about to board.
Part of the reason I was so apprehensive about pregnancy and parenthood for so long was that when I would so much as mention thinking about having kids, so many people felt a need to give me "advice" that actually consisted of telling me to brace myself for all of the ways that having a baby is the worst. Now that I'm going to be a parent myself, I'm tired of having "Just wait!" and "Enjoy it while you can!" and other gleeful warnings flung at me like miserable confetti.
The first question that arises from hearing “Enjoy it while you can!” is: what is the “it” which I am being ordered or advised to enjoy, for a limited time only? In some cases, the enjoyment-advisor is referring to “sleep,” or “sex” or “having a social life.” Or, perhaps "it" is my entire pre-baby personality, and the advice-giver is predicting that the things that are enjoyable in my life are about to go away permanently, and that somehow I'm unprepared for my own erasure. Or it could be that "enjoy it while you can" refers to having a newborn baby, since apparently one of the things that people who don't have babies don't understand about babies is that babies get bigger and cease being babies eventually. If tending to the bowel movements of a screaming nonverbal person I met mere weeks before is not something that brings me joy... perhaps I should try harder. If I am not "enjoying it while I can," I will be doing it wrong.
Both "Enjoy it while you can!" and "Just wait!" make it sound like the person bestowing the platitude is somehow privy to something that is about to happen to me, because they have already had all of the life experiences that I will have because they gave birth to a child first. It assumes that the experience of all pregnant people and all parents are similar.
It's insensitive to assume that any pregnant woman should brace for her life to get worse. It might already be pretty bad. What if you're talking to somebody who has health concerns that will go away once the baby comes? What if she has gestational diabetes or preeclampsia or eczema flare-ups? What if she's depressed? What if her partner is dropping the ball in supporting her? What if she hasn't had a good night's sleep in weeks and hasn't had a bowel movement in days? Can you confidently tell what a person is going through by looking at them? Wouldn't it be safer to air on the side of assuming that you know very little about a stranger or casual acquaintance's life?
Because modern medicine is more comfortable telling pregnant people to suck it up and deal with it than they are researching ways to actually improve mothers' quality of life, people unlucky enough to have difficult pregnancies don't have many options that actually fix the problem. Being rich or privileged can help some, but throwing money or a positive attitude at a pregnancy won't necessarily make it "easy." Take the issue of nausea, for example. It's pretty common during pregnancy, but there's not much doctors can do to fix it beyond wait for it to pass and throw pieces of ginger candy in a pregnant woman's mouth from a safe distance. Kate Middleton, who has access to more resources than just about anybody on the planet, spent all three of her pregnancies puking her royal guts out, thanks to a somewhat rare but very unfortunate type of morning sickness by the appropriately warlocky name of "hyperemesis gravidarum." Treatment for HG is by replacing vomited liquids with an IV; it doesn't stop the constant vomiting, only the dehydration that results from constant vomiting. All of the pregnancy books I have (and it is... not a small number) suggest that women combat less severe nausea by "eating small meals," as though a pregnant lady yakking plain yogurt through her nostrils would be overcome with the desire to house a turkey leg and a pile of mashed potatoes. Just enjoy it while you can, am I right?
Things can go the other direction, too. For reasons I am attributing entirely to luck, I've felt pretty good physically for most of my pregnancy (mentally it's been a different story, but we can get into that at another time). During my first trimester, I sometimes got tired earlier than usual and didn't want to eat fish, but that was it. I didn't throw up once. The worst thing that happened to me, nausea-wise, was that I felt woozy on a boat ride after a day of kayaking in the waters of Channel Islands National Park when I was about 22 weeks along. Josh and I hiked both Mt. Whitney and Mt. Baldy around that time, and neither of us keeled over. I know that I lucked out, and that my comparatively easy physical experience with pregnancy thus far isn't the standard. But it's still my experience. Did I ever need to be reminded that things were going to get harder? For me, all of the "just wait!" has amounted to empty threats made by people who seem bizarrely jazzed about my impending discomfort.
Not every woman spends the first trimester clutching a toilet and going to bed at 6 pm. Some do--But not all! Not every pregnancy results in months and months of poop issues and attendant hemorrhoids. Some do! But not all. Stretch marks, abdominal pain, varicose veins, gas, enormous nipples, antenatal depression, post partum depression, placenta previa, edema, anemia, dizzy spells: none of these things are guaranteed to happen. Most women experience at least some unpleasant effects of pregnancy, and some women experience a lot of unpleasantness. But very rarely does one person experience the entire kaleidoscope of bizarre symptoms human reproduction can bring along with it. And, unless you're close enough with a pregnant person to know what they're dealing with, if you try to gauge just how difficult their pregnancy is, you'll probably get it wrong.
We don't Debbie Downer most non-pregnancy life changes. It would be considered weird to remind a friend that is moving across the country how annoying it is to unpack boxes in a new apartment, or how hard it can be to make friends in a new city. Informing a new bride that statistically, her husband is likely to die first, so she should "enjoy it while she can" before she's a widow is a good way to get asked to leave a reception before the poached salmon is served. I would never say "Just wait until you're old!" to kid who just turned five. Why do people do this to expectant parents?
So, the next time you're making small talk with a mom-or-dad-to-be, consider not replying with the unwelcome implication that they have no idea what's about to happen to them, or that their life is about to turn into a flaming bonfire of diapers and regret. A lot of us chose to be parents in part because we know it's going to be hard, and we are going to do our best to meet the challenges as they come. And for those rare parents-to-be who have no idea what they're getting into, why ruin the surprise?
Original Illustration by Tara Jacoby/ Instagram