Heads-up, I will be attacking the favourite Facebook comment of every aunt, friend and your mother’s co-worker’s daughter’s cousin. I am doing it. I’m talking about the go-to comment on someone’s picture : “What a beautiful family!”. Easy, kind, and complementary. I freeken HATE it. I cringe and think about deleting my account every time I see it.
If you want to use it or have used it in the past, stop your panic, and think about why you used it. What did you mean by that comment? Was it just that: “You guys are good looking. All of you.” If the answer is yes, then ok, you are almost cleared. The next step would be to ask yourself if you have used this comment to all different TYPES of families? Have you said to your brother and his girlfriend: “Beautiful family”? Have you commented on a picture of a friend and her four cats? How about a couple and their dog? What about a picture of a couple, alone, just them. More difficult to answer I assume? My family is my husband and I, my dog and cats. Then I have my extended family of my brother and parents, then grandparents, aunts, cousins.... Can only some of these types of families be beautiful? As a quick experiment, I decided to search the words : ‘beautiful family’ in my Facebook search bar. After you scroll down past the different groups, random public posts you get to the posts made by my Facebook friends. These are not comments that are put on posts, but just the posts themselves. Out of the 100-200 posts I eliminated those that simply had the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘family’ in the post, but not together. This bring it down to about 50-60 posts in the last year. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE POSTS WERE ABOUT FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN. Here we get to the heart of why this is my most hated comment, and why I am taking the time to write a post about it. What do people really mean when they say : “What a beautiful family!” or “My beautiful family!” etc? I am going to go on the basis of my very unscientific research : this is a comment only directed to families that have children. Whether it’s coming from your great aunt, or it is a comment about to their own family, it is use only when the picture includes children. I have gone through my own pictures of my family on Facebook and Instagram to look at the comments and evaluate them with a different angle. Engagement pictures, wedding photos, pictures of my husband and I, even ones with us and our dog...NONE of these pictures have any mention of the words “family”. Are they kind and loving comments? Yes. Have people called me or my dog beautiful? Yes. The closest comment to “beautiful family” we have received is: “Looking good!” or “great couple!”. By using a reading strategy I painfully teach my middle school kids every year - inferencing- I can’t deduce that society thinks that families without children are NOT beautiful. They are not the ideal, the norm, the wanted, they are not a family. They are incomplete. Family = children. This is the heart of the issue for me. I am sure that every childless couple, whether they are suffering from infertility, child loss or they are child free by choice, knows and believes that what they have is a real family. They feel it, they know it, yet society does not accept it. It is as though everyone is waiting for a child to be born for them to become a family. In our case, as a couple dealing with infertility, it already does feel like our lives are on pause waiting for a child. I know that the last three years, I have not lived as fully as I could have been. Every decision is made through the lens of : "but what if I get pregnant" or "but what if we have a kid by then" or now "but what if we need to do another round of treatment?". Reno the deck? No, we might need that money for IVF. Take a trip? No, we might need that money for treatment. Go on on an out of province conference? No, what if that interferes with treatments? Things have been on hold and it sucks. It's frustrating and I want to take my life back as much as I can. This is a simple way to do that. I don't need society to tell me that my life is not complete, that what I have is not beautiful. I am not here to be a word police or a Facebook comment Debbie Downer. Go ahead and keep saying it. PS. please don't go crazy and comment "beautiful family" on all my pictures now, I don't need it. Just keep it in mind when seeing pictures of all types of families. Yes, there are lots of beautiful families of all types out there! I just want you to remember that mine is too. Me, my husband, my Great Dane and two cats. We are a beautiful family, just as we are. Maybe one day this family will include a child, maybe not. No matter what it looks like, we are a family and damn we are beautiful.
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Author:Sara Collins has always had a passion for writing. Writing song lyrics for the Backstreet Boys, Short Stories, Poetry, and big chunks of half finished novels. Now she is proud to share her writing around her experiences in infertility. Archives |