A few weeks ago our two adult nephews came over for a short holiday and during that time I saw the connection between them and my husband. They're all into online gaming and just last night they were talking about scheduling time to have an online gaming session together.
I think among the three brothers, my husband is the only one that spends the most time gaming (I think his dream profession would be to be in a team of creative people who create games). He babysat the two boys every now and then when they were young (before they moved away) and now they have this connection together and last night I was just thinking of the other side. That if we had a boy, they may be able to connect this way (though there's always the possibility that the boy wouldn't like games, but let me just daydream a bit). It brought a smile to my face. :-) I'm glad that he can have this bond with the boys, because they're the only heirs that we'll ever going to have.
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The other week I realized that I was finally released from the expectations I had towards a group of close friends. I knew already since the beginning of the year that I had to let go, but the process took long (I was kicking and screaming all the way). The bottom line was that I had to downgrade them in order to keep my sanity and our friendship intact.
FB gave me pretty good slaps on the face because even without trying to find any proof, it was clear as daylight how people tended to react more to baby/kiddo photos than any of my statuses/photos. In the real world when I share something directly with someone else, that person is bound to respond right away, but in a virtual world like FB, those things that aren't your priorities get swept away among all the overwhelming number of links and photos and statuses. Thus it creates an illusion that a life without kids is "less than" because the minute a baby photo is up (along with many other cute kiddo moments like the M-Day or F-Day's creations made by the kids), many would rush over to comment and/or share their own stories/moments. I get it. It's nothing personal. It's the bond that connects them, but during the time when I had too much expectation from a certain group of people, it still hurt. It stung.
I confronted my friends at one point because I felt that they weren't responding to any parts of my email (and they also didn't respond too much in my FB compared to the baby/kiddies' photos). Mind you, at that time they were busy talking about a pregnancy/birth story/parenting in their emails and I felt left out (almost no response to my emails during that period of time - my acute brain couldn't help detecting these details). Again I knew it was nothing personal, but it still hurt. From the confrontation, they said that they had given me everything they could, though they did admit that the pregnancy/birth story did get too much airing time at some point because of the freshness of it all, but the only possible option was for me to downgrade them.
I felt some resentment and anger for months. I thought it was sick that I had to be the one downgrading them, even though I still wanted to give them more time and energy, but if in the end it only made me feel resentful and it may make them feel guilty for not being able to give me more time, then what's the use?
Mind you, some of them did tell me that they sometimes felt guilty for not being able to give me more time because of life's busyness and their priorities and that really shocked my system, because I never intended to make anyone feel that way. I just wanted to give as much time and effort as I wanted because they were that important to me (and because I'm the only one who has the most free time - at some point I also cursed myself for having the most free time because then I got tempted to want to give more time and attention to them, which in retrospect only resulted in making my expectation go high). To put it simply, I had put my eggs in the wrong basket.
So I took a break from FB and focused more on my group of women who are childless-not-by-choice like myself and on my writing/photo challenges. I haven't written them an email in a long time, though we still communicate in bits and pieces via FB. All these things helped. Months passed by...the resentment gradually grew less and less and finally one day when I logged into FB again and saw some activities among them, I didn't feel any resentment anymore. That was the moment I realized I had succeeded in downgrading them.
I had never thought that I would have to do something like this, because they had always been my go-to group, core group of friends. We'd known each other for at least half of our age (I've known half of them even slightly longer than that), but there's no stopping it now. I've done it. This is for our own good. All of us. No more hard feelings. I feel relieved. Much lighter. :-)
Is it possible to be inclusive? I've been wondering about this matter for a while now. I think in this fast-paced world, it's easier to feel left out or excluded, especially with online medias where people keep on posting and reposting sentiments such as "You'll never know real/true love until..." or "There's no greater joy than..." or "You'll never be a real woman/man until..." or "I feel so blessed because of..." or "Thank God for..." or "I have the best mother/husband/dad/wife...repost this if you have them, too" or "Breastfeeding is best" and the list goes on. And it becomes worse when the same kind of sentiment keeps on being spread from one person to another in your circle at different times.
It's all good when you're "in the club" when you read all those sentiments, but what if you're not in the club? It gets problematic when you have this invisible grief that people don't acknowledge and on bad days, those exclusive sentiments hit you like the sharpest spearhead thrown right at you from a place where you least expect and it split your heart in two, leaving you reeling in pain and wanting to ask the person who threw the spear at you, "How could you do this to me?!?!?!?!?! Look at what you've done!".
On the other hand, the person who threw the spear didn't even know that it was a spear. In his/her mind, he/she was throwing you a candy in hope that you'd also agree that the candy was tasty or interesting or inspiring.
In the old days, sentiments like the ones I wrote in the first paragraph didn't really show up right in your face the way they do today. Here's my point:
OK, try to imagine that you have to address a group of people in the streets from different backgrounds, but you have to make sure you take into account every single one of their life stories (even if you don't know them, you just have to use your imagination). The topic can be anything, but try imagining saying things that wouldn't hurt anyone at all to the best of your ability. Try being aware that each time you're thankful for something, that very thing may be hurtful for someone else in the group.
You know what? Just thinking about every possible scenario gives me a headache. So I think it's pretty much impossible to be inclusive, because it's just impossible to know each person's tender spots. I'm not saying that one should be crass and insensitive, but I think if we expect people (in the social media) to be sensitive, then we're in for a lot of disappointment.
I want to stress again that I'm NOT saying that people shouldn't give a damn about what other people feel/think, but each of us has to deal with what we feel and then decide on the best possible ways to manage our feelings and the impact of what other people post/say to our psyche (whether it means hiding some people, staying away from certain online medias, taking a break from certain online medias, etc.)
Anyway, enough talk about heavy stuff. Let me share with you something that I enjoy watching instead:
Infertility, PMS, and friendship. Not a good combo, eh? Surely not. Especially when one of the friends is pregnant. Especially if the introvert in the group hasn't realized the important difference between herself and the rest of the group. It took several emails back and forth as well as a few days of pondering what went wrong before I finally felt a huge weight lifted off of me.
To cut the story short, my main problem (blown up by PMS) has been the fact that I'm the only one in my group of closest friends who relies on writing as the best/most fave kind of communication. Not writing SMS or short texts like in Twitter, mind you...but writing emails and blog posts. I just LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE writing in details about what I've been through and what I've been thinking about and I love finding out why I feel a certain way and in return I LOVE LOVE LOVE reading in details about other people's lives.
In the past, I noticed that I had a high expectation on this type of communication and when I found out that my friends couldn't cope with it, I tried to lower my expectations and I tried my best to shorten my emails (and leave the details to my blog posts). However, despite my best efforts, I still had too high an expectation it seems. My PMS brought it forth this time because one of us is pregnant and I FELT that she had received more responses (yep, jealousy attack being blown up by PMS!).
glitter-graphics.com
After pondering on what the problem was, though, I realized that it was foolish of me to expect that people whose main form of communication wasn't writing to respond to me the way that I had tried to respond to them. It's like asking them to keep on watching horror movies with me and comment on those horror movies. As much as they love me and as much as they want to meet me halfway, the best thing I can expect from them is to watch a few of those movies and comment on a few of them, but I can't expect them to do more than that. Why? Because if the situation were reversed, I wouldn't be able to do the same.
Most of them prefer live chats or face-to-face interaction or phone calls. And I have been blindly thinking that because we all live in different cities and countries, emailing is the most preferable method of communication. How wrong I was! Lately they have preferred talking in WhatsApp or live chats because their lives are much busier than I am and I'm the one who can't cope with WhatsApp chats because they exhaust me so much (because I'm more of a detailed person and when- due to time difference - I'm left with hundreds of live chat messages, I'm overwhelmed and I don't know what to do because I tend to want to reply to every single one of them - or at least the important ones and it takes a LONG time to read through all the messages and figure out which ones need replying). This is why I prefer emailing, but for them, emailing takes more time and effort to reply, whereas during live chat when some of them are online at the same time, they can get responses ASAP.
Anyway, the second problem was infertility thrown in the mixture of all that. In my PMS-loaded brain which was already full of confusion because of my own expectation, I thought of the not-so-distant future when my pregnant friend's baby would be born and how there would be so many more bonding moments between the mothers in our group and this freaked me out because I could just imagine how many times in the future would I be reminded of my own losses (the birth story, the baby room, the first smile, the first word, etc.) when many of them would naturally be ooh-aahing all the lovely moments and sharing their own kids' moments. I know, I know, my overworked PMS-loaded brain couldn't stop thinking way too far ahead!
So all those feelings made me reach out to them, asking if it was too much to ask if I asked for a little bit more response (honestly, I felt like a cranky little child begging for attention when I wrote the email), but in the end the emails between us back and forth made me realize that the only possible way to sort this mess is for me to step back and let go of my expectation (all of it, not just a part of it). I need to remember that for them, emailing is tough to follow and that they've given all they can. I know that they'll be there for me when the going gets tough (they've always been there), but it's unhealthy for me to expect them to respond the way I have responded to them. You see, for years I've always tried to respond to as many little details of their emails as possible and I've just realized that they don't even expect me to do so!!! Talk about a shocking moment for me! In my mind, I was respecting their time in their busy lives by responding to as many points in their emails as possible, but it wasn't even necessary! Yep, major doh moment!
For all it's worth, though, I'm just glad that I've sorted through all the mess. Phew! Now I just hope that I haven't damaged this friendship too much by making them worried about what to write (esp. when it's about their kids), because I DO want to know about their kids, though I have told them that I can't deny that on bad days (PMS days), the stories remind me of my own losses, but on good days, I'm very happy to read about their kids. But anyway, after the stormy mess, here's what I feel now:
