Other People's Lives

Prepping for our trip's got me thinking. I'm SUPPOSED to be getting our stuff ready so it'll all be in piles and ready to just 'throw' in a suitcase, cuz the husband's doing a whole lotta last-minute cramming for work so he doesn't get fired before we go (or fired after we come back and they've had time to discover the things he didn't do), but I've done half my list and I'm A.D.D.'ing all over the place, and well, whenever I have any spare time these days, the first thing that comes to mind is this crap.

This one though isn't about the crap I'M dealing with, it's about the crap OTHER people are dealing with. The crap I've maybe been insensitive to in OTHER people's lives. The crap I didn't know was going on when I made some stupid excited announcement about something materialistic or exciting in OUR lives.

Where I'm going is this. Over the past year and a half to two years (remember, I claim I'm not counting so I use generic vague #'s), I've made a very long list of people I'd like to punch. Some of them for the way they've reacted to my infertility, some of them for the way they announced their pregnancy, some of them for the way they announced their wife's pregnancy, and some of them pretty much just for existing because honestly, on some days, that's all it's taken to make me want to punch them.

But I think about the announcements I'VE made in the last ten years for example, and I realize I made a lot of them without really thinking about the impacts they might have on the people I'm telling because of the things going on in THEIR lives that I really have no clue about. Announcements about cars and jobs and trips and all sorts of other stuff I'll NOT list here because I'm actually thinking about it this time, but all those typical things you expect you can announce and gloat about, and have the person you're telling be just as excited FOR you as you'd be for them, because hot damn, it IS exciting ISN'T IT???

But I don't know that until today I thought about - I mean REALLY thought about - how it might have made some of them feel. I didn't know the financial, emotional, familial, physical, or whatever other goings-ons of everyone I told. Yet I announced those things anyway, and I announced them without a lot of regard or thought as to what was going on for them. Yes there are some who I picked and chose very carefully to tell or not to tell, or to tell in a particular way, but those are the people closest to me because I knew what was going on in their lives, and I knew how to approach it - with thought and caution.

Yet when I think about most of the people on my "People to Punch Today" list, most of them are people who are acquaintances, co-workers, friends I haven't heard from in a very long time, or friends of friends. Most of them aren't the people closest to me. Most of them aren't people who would ever know what was going on - what was REALLY going on - in my life. My mother unfortunately has made it on the list more than a number of times, but our relationship is very much that way anyway so it's not like it comes as a surprise - and I don't say that in a bad way, it's just her, and while it drives me batty sometimes, I accept that she'll often make the 'punch' list.

So future posts where I'm talking about other things going on (and by "other", I mean non-kid stuff because lately everything falls into two categories - "kid" and "other"), I'm going to try and think about Other People's Lives. I don't know who's reading this yet - most likely not a lot - but I want to try and treat any other topic the way I want to be treated re anything baby or pregnancy. I don't want to get all politically correct or extremely cautious to the point of changing what I write, but I do want to put a little more thought in than I did this morning. This morning for me was more about where my head's at than what we're doing, but it still just dropped what we're doing without even a second thought. So second thoughts, here I come! Then I'll probably write about it anyway, but at least I'll have thought about it, and I'll have come up with a way to include a warning or something along those lines.