the annals of pregnancy, part three

In my family we have a joke: when someone asks you how something went, like a job interview or a date, or even just your day at work, and you don't really want to talk about it, you can shrug and say, "I played and played and played." The joke is about me as a little girl—when my parents would ask me at dinner how school went that day, I would shrug and say, "I played and played and played." According to my parents, I said this every day. Getting more details out of me was difficult. 

I'm pretty sure I just didn't have more details to share. Seems reasonable to me that kindergarten wasn't that interesting, but I guess my sister had a lot more to report? In any case, it was probably the first sign of a clear character trait: I'm not good at sharing personal information. From the mundane, like what I did in school that day, to the profound, like the fact that I'm going to have a baby.

Despite being pregnant during a global pandemic, moving, and having a fairly stressful job, the biggest source of anxiety for me during my pregnancy (so far) has been having to tell people I'm pregnant. I agonized over telling my parents, my friends, my boss, my coworkers. At least a couple people who know me well joked that they were glad I told them I was pregnant before the baby was born. And honestly, if it wasn't considered extremely weird, I might have been tempted to do just that.   

While I was agonizing over all of this sharing, I also spent some time agonizing over why I am so strange. Sharing personal information appears to be a source of joy for most people. Gender reveal parties are a cultural phenomenon! Baby showers are definitely a thing. The entire industry of social media revolves around the sharing of personal information! 

The weird part is that I don't mind people knowing I'm pregnant—I just don't want to have to tell them. And now that almost no one sees me below the shoulders, sharing this information without words is quite hard to achieve. Blurting out news over Zoom is my personal nightmare, and that's pretty much the only method of communication these days. 

I'm sure there's some deep psychological reason for this strangeness that would be revealed by $20K worth of therapy, which I would gladly do if I had the money or the time. (Seriously, I think therapy would be fascinating.) Whatever the reason, though, it clearly runs in the family, because my mother has a great story about going into my Dad's office when she was 7 months pregnant with me and finding out he hadn't told anyone they were expecting another kid. My parents met at work, so all his coworkers knew my mother, and they were pretty surprised he hadn't said anything. (My mother, who loves to share personal information, was pretty mad.) It's kind of comforting to know that I am, at least, not alone in my strangeness.