Let Me Spell It Out for You

Ya'll. The idea for this post has been burnin' a hole in my proverbial pocket since before I even decided to start a blog. Much like my Southern lady role model, Clairee Belcher, "if you don't have have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me!" 

So in the spirit of Clairee and my other personal silver-haired patron saints of sass, Dorothy Zbornak and Sophia Petrillo, pull up a chair on my lanai and treat yourself to a slice of cheesecake or three while I rant about something that's been stuck in my craw since the first moment I fell down the pregnancy and fertility internet rabbit hole. 

Unpopular opinion: I loathe reading fertility community message boards. Now don't get me wrong; I do love the general sense of positivity and supportive community you find there. I also really love that all of these women have found each other and act as a source of (sometimes misguided) advice and information around a topic that seems to be spoken about in whispers by most everyone else. Quite frankly, these women have come together to share information and experiences in a way that is nothing short of powerful and empowering. But...I just cannot handle the cringe-y way 75 percent of the posts are written. 

Listen, as a high school English teacher, I spend much of my time attempting to decipher indecipherable writing. But when some of these women post a question in the form of a panicked, all caps paragraph without a single piece of punctuation, I start to feel like I'm reading the voice of someone shrieking into the void or maybe through the bars of some maddening yellow wallpaper. (English teacher jokes, ya'll.)

I'm a realist though. I know that my students who refuse to use periods, or think that capitalizing their last names is only for formal occasions, eventually grow up into adults with the same poor writing habits, so I can accept the bad grammar. The thing that is going to require surgery to unstick my rolled eyeballs from the back of my head is the infantilizing jargon used by women on these message boards. "DH and I did HBD last weekend and now I'm TWW 7DPO. Praying AF doesn't show and I see a BFP instead!" Umm WHAT? For those of you who haven't had the privilege of puzzling over posts like this, allow me to translate: "Dear husband and I did the horizontal baby dance [had sex] last weekend and now I'm in the two week wait [time between ovulation and expected menstruation] and am seven days past when I ovulated. I'm praying Aunt Flo doesn't show and I see a big fat positive [pregnancy test] instead!" Holy. Shit.

Dear husband? Gross. Horizontal baby dance?? My own "dear husband" would tell me he has a reverse boner if I ever referred to sex as any kind of baby dance. Aunt Flo??? Am I a 13-year-old in 1957 wearing a sanitary belt? This isn't Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and we aren't school girls passing notes terrified that our deepest, darkest secrets will be revealed unless we speak in code. I'm not saying you need drop the f-bomb every three words, but we certainly don't need to resort to speaking in some childish pig Latin about our experiences. "I had sex with my husband last weekend. Hope I don't get my period next week." Did reading that sentence give you the vapors? If so, maybe childbirth isn't for you yet. Or maybe you're just a teenage newlywed on Bridgerton who's just learning how babies are made. (Spoiler alert, Penelope: if cake got you pregnant, I'd be a Duggar by now, not budgeting for uninsured fertility treatments.)

And don't get me started on DS (darling son) and DD (darling daughter). Unless you answer "yes" to "Are you a robot?" and gave birth to a Nintendo game system, or unless you are referring to your permit-boasting teen who chauffeurs you between wineries on autumn weekends, jut say my son, my daughter, my non-binary kid, my lil' asshole, etc. As for TWW and DPO, are you short on time? Rushing through writing your post to stare at the clock and your calendar some more? If you're in the two week wait, girl, you got nothin' BUT time...better spell out all those words to keep yourself occupied.

I'm just saying, if you can post a picture for the whole world to see of your cervical mucus or evidence of spotting in your underwear (both also things that happen frequently on these message boards), you can use your grown-up words to discuss sex and conception. Be better, ladies (be best, even). In the meantime, while I wait impatiently for the OB's office to finally call with the results of last week's bloodwork (more on that later, dear reader), I'll just be over here snorting baby dust like a hormonal, ovulating Scarface and scouring those message boards to find information, reassurance, and maybe a little hope in the form of cryptic anecdotes and obscure acronyms.