I’m happy you’re having a baby— but why do you want one?
You really think you know someone, and then it turns out they’re a mom girl.
Lately, I’ve been feeling like PopCrave, grasping at the air to find something interesting to say. Only there’s no strike to choke out my news cycle, just a life without any real landmark changes. Each time my mom calls me she asks me how things are, and I have to piece together the inane details of my life, looking for a highlight reel that I think might satisfy her half-hearted curiosity. My top-breaking news stories were (in this order): On Thursday I went to the wrong Whole Foods, I bought a bag of second-hand ribbons from a craft store, and my neighbors had a BBQ. Meanwhile, I can’t spend five minutes scrolling through Instagram without seeing another pregnancy announcement or sepia-tinged engagement photoshoot.
A friend of mine from high school has been speedrunning her own American Dream checklist. She married her college boyfriend in October, signed on their starter home, and announced her pregnancy in July. In that same amount of time, I dropped a baby carrot in the crack between my sink and my fridge, and it petrified into a fuzzy grey Lincoln Log that I only just had the courage to remove this week. (I should tell my mom about that.)
I know we shouldn’t compare—that everyone's lives are different, but at times it feels as though I am operating on a completely different axis than those around me. It’s not as if we are simply playing different games, it’s that everyone is playing Monopoly and I’m dressed for Bubble Bay at Watercountry. While my friends and family are picking out baby names and remodeling their kitchens, I’m searching “male bangs” on Google Images and trying to learn the dance from the Rush music video.
Throughout high school, my friend and I shared a lunch block that bifurcated third period. That meant I only had to endure forty minutes of Honors Global Studies before I was released to the cafeteria. For a chubby boy whose food obsessions were just starting to take off, this offered a brief respite from the hyper-fixation on the turkey sandwich and clementine in my backpack. I only needed to make it forty minutes. Once I got lunch over with, I could redirect my attention back to my exams and classwork, I could go back to thinking straight, well normally. I so looked forward to logging the clementine (35 calories) and turkey sandwich (360 calories) into MyFitnessPal. It was, pathetically, often the highlight of my day.
For the app generation, MyFitnessPal was our Fen-Phen or Snackwell’s cookies. There’s an almost unspoken trauma bond amongst anyone who put their belief in these products, the mere names of which can still send us into a tailspin.
My friend, who first showed me this app, assured me there was a quasi-educational tilt to its use. I think she truly believed you could intellectualize yourself into a thinner body. As if, merely knowing the nutritional makeup of each item in your pantry would somehow make their voices quieter. Her mind, with all its complicated reason and measure, allowed her to maintain this worldview. She was intelligent in a way that I can only imagine brings complete peace. You know how people say you can simply stop having hiccups, because it’s just a mental thing? You just have to think stop, and you will. I believe she was truly able to apply that logic to all things in her life. There was no problem too big for her to handle. She was never thrown by the minutia of high school drama— always able to view the bigger picture. When I get hiccups I have to cancel my plans for the day, and high school minutia has more than just thrown me, it practically consumes me. (See: this essay)
I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked that someone who, from the outside at least, always had their life together was now collecting accomplishments like infinity stones. But it all seems so eerily traditional. As I watch her baby updates from afar, Malificent-ing about, I couldn’t help but feel confused. Were these the same aspirations she had always had? Was she always wanting this? We were outsiders, this is paramount to my own understanding of self. Yet, the way she is living her life now suggests otherwise. That’s something I struggle to level with in my mind. Neither of us were very popular in school. Shocking, I know. So much of our identity stemmed from the inability to fit in. It honed my sense of sardonic humor, made her work harder, and brought us together in a time when we both needed one another. I thought, wrongly it seems, that we had thrown away those tentpoles of success, the ones we were always taught to aspire to. I thought we were working on creating our own markers—or maybe I thought those were just things I could never have.
If I had to describe my friends at the time, I would probably call us a ragtag gang of misfits (I was a theater kid who spent too much time on Tumblr if that wasn’t abundantly obvious.) We weren’t like the other kids in our town, we were going to get out. I firmly believed we were going to be better than the rest of them and they’d one day grow to regret treating us badly. But in the years since, all my friends have paired up, settled down, and stayed in our hometown. And the worst part is, they seem genuinely happy.
Too often we look down on townies. Even the name feels paternalistic, infantilizing anyone who chooses to stay in their hometown. We treat this choice like it’s something small, simple, and deserving of disdain. Meanwhile, our dreams of shirking off the norm are more valid. We move to big cities, have near-constant casual sex, and consider ourselves intellectuals and tastemakers. It’s harder to move through life without the gutters up, and through this inferno comes great art and “fulfilling lives.” The difficulty makes us more interesting. In our radical refusal of safety, we are made into tougher stuff than the coddling comfort of conformity afforded to townies. However, this is baldly an act of self-defense and self-preservation.
The truth is, forging your own path can be extremely lonely. So we create narratives that pillow this pain. We’d rather say it is cringe to marry your highschool sweetheart than to imagine a life in which we were even allowed to have one. We mock the curated baby announcements, with their beige wooden beads and felt letterboard messages. We look down on their wedding themes, and turn our noses up at their lives. We try to feel superior, so we don’t have to feel.
Perhaps if I could, I would choose a similar path as my friend. But that’s simply not the life I have. There are times when this feels like bitterness, and there are times when it just feels like acceptance.
Maybe my path isn’t traditional, maybe I won’t have 2.5 kids and a wife. I’ll probably never aspire to a vacation on the Cape, or want to wear matching themed Mickey Mouse ears. Maybe there are just some things that were never meant for me. But, I haven’t used MyFitnessPal in years. In fact, I had actually forgotten how many calories were in a clementine and had to look it up earlier. I’m proud to say there are days when food isn’t my primary focus. There are days when I call my mother and she tells me about another classmate who is getting married, and that information doesn’t cause existential dread— doesn't make me spin out in a jealous rage or feel inferior. Maybe it’s small, but to me it feels like success, and I am starting to be truly ok with that.
This hit home. Beautiful, Gregg!