1st Birthday Insanity

Today we had the pleasure of attending the first birthday party of my best friend's little girl. One year ago, I was recovering from surgery to remove cancer, and my best friend was starting to go into labor...I think hers was the harder of those two paths! The results were equally momentous--me being totally cancer free and her having the world's CUTEST little girl to bless the world with for the last year.

We are friends with their extended family as well--they're the kind of family you can get drunk with, talk about sex with, get-into-a-bar-fight-and-you-know-they'll-have-your-back kind of peeps, so we were looking forward to seeing everybody and having a wonderful, relaxing, totally happy time celebrating little miss S's first year.

What we didn't expect was all the other babies.

There were five other babies there all within spit-up range of 1. It was like a big baby party. Which is awesome, unless you happen to be the only couple there who is 1.) not with a kid, 2.) not pregnant with a kid, and 3.) straight. We felt like interlopers, like we suddenly didn't belong to a group we had always belonged to.

To make matters worse, I was directly asked "Are you pregnant?", "When will there be a little TH running around?", and other variations of the same questions no less than five times...all while around a bunch of other people. Normally that question is fair game considering our level of comfort with the family, but I didn't realize that they wouldn't realize that maybe the other twenty people standing around us might make that topic of conversation slightly awkward for me. Instead of being able to give them the candid answer I would have normally, yes, we're trying, it's been a couple of months, can you believe with perfect timing and everything there's only a 20% chance of success, it gets hard at times, especially with the way society talks about it as if it's a simple thing, but we're doing a pretty good job of keeping a good attitude about it, I had to respond with a repertoire of lame, metaphorical spin-offs, We're still preheating the oven, There's no bun cooking yet, but we're mixing the batter, etc.

To top the experience off, I was surrounded by the kind of ignorant statements that lately have started to drive me insane:

man 1: yeah, we didn't expect the house to sell in the first month, and we didn't expect M to get pregnant in the first month, either!

man 2: ehhh, atta boy! Way to get her on the first month!

and

woman 1: oh, it's so good that you're due in March--you get to avoid the misery of being pregnant through the hot summer.

woman 2: yeah, well, that was on purpose. We planned it that way.

The first conversation broke my heart on TH's behalf. He's surrounded by friends who "got their wife pregnant" on the first try, and it makes him feel like there's something wrong with him that he didn't. I want to scream "only a 20% chance even in perfect conditions" when people say things like that. It's about luck and probability, not a guy's virility or ability to do something better than others. Unfortunately, that machismo attitude is so prevalent in our society nobody even thinks it's an insensitive and totally illogical thing to say. I used to say things like that and didn't know any better. Now I do. And now I have to listen to people saying things like that all around me, and I die a little inside each time because I know how it crushes my sweet husband, who is doing everything right, who is healthy, who is just as much a man as any of those other ignorant idiots.

The second conversation made me just want to snap, "Oh please. You can hope for for certain timing, but it's luck when you do get it. Don't take so much credit for making it happen that way. Be thankful, not haughty."

So the birthday party turned out to be an exercise in social control, a battle in self-confidence and humility. I was so completely overjoyed at little S's awesome first year, and so utterly thankful to have such good friends and to have been able to be around to see their family transition from two to three.

At the same time, I could not have gotten out of there fast enough, back to a world where I don't have to smile through anger, embarrassment, and, ultimately, sadness. Sadness that we didn't have a little one to add to the melee.