Not So Happy Announcements

Nothing can ruin my day quite like a pregnancy or birth announcement. It’s something I’m not proud of, and quite frankly, an aspect of my new normal that I downright hate. I’ve had to endure many of them over the past year and a half, and each one comes with pain, shame, guilt, anger, jealousy, and a feeling of defeat. Very rarely does happiness enter that emotional equation, which leads to a type of self-loathing that I have never experienced before in my life.

Celebrity announcements are the worst. You don’t even want to know my reaction to Jessica Simpson and Kim Kardashian. I don’t even know these women, and yet I can feel the bile rise in my throat every time I see a story about them. I don’t wish for bad things to happen to them or their babies (I’m not that terrible). I just want them to go away. I don’t want to hear about how easy it is for them or monitor their baby bumps and cravings. I like my celebrity gossip and read People and US Weekly online every day. Lately, I have to scroll quickly through their newsfeeds to skip the multitude of stories about them each day. You really have no idea how many celebrities are procreating until you’re trying to avoid news about it.

Then there are the strangers on Facebook. The ones where I have to see their announcements, comments, ultrasound pictures, and new baby photos because my friends comment on them, and Facebook thinks I want to know about that (oh how little you know me, Facebook). More people that I don’t know, but can cause tears to flow seemingly from nowhere.

And then there are my poor friends. I have a couple of friends who have had the misfortune of having to tell me in person that they are expecting. Bless their hearts, they tried to do the right thing and tell me privately (which, by the way, is the right thing to do). I remember one friend who had to tell me her good news just weeks after Vivienne died. I can still see the fear in her face at having to tell me she was pregnant. It was the happiest time of her life, but you’d never know it by how she felt having to tell me.

It’s no one’s fault that this happens. I certainly don’t expect people not to get pregnant, or to not be happy about expecting a baby. I don’t expect people not to share their joy in welcoming their child to the world. This is a situation without a good resolution. Unfortunately, some people’s happiness causes me pain. It doesn’t make their happiness wrong, and it doesn’t make my pain wrong. It just is. It’s an unfortunate aspect of how I live my life now, and one that I wish more than I can say I could make go away.

I have to admit that I had a lot of hesitation in writing this post. It’s not an easy thing to admit that you can’t be happy for people when they have good news, but unfortunately, it’s true. I really wish that I could find happiness for them, but if I’m being honest (which I vowed to be when I started this blog), I only feel bitter. And that bitterness cycles into me feeling like a bad person because I SHOULD be happy for them, but I can’t. It’s a spiraling of bad emotions that I really can’t do anything to prevent or stop. Another aspect of this “new normal” that I completely despise.