New moms, especially the stay at home type, have taken to their Facebook status updates as a means of letting the world know every detail of their spawn's daily developments. Those developments range from the earth shattering napping schedule to the awesomeness of little Jaden's first poopy in the big boy potty. While these updates might not be news, the reaction to those updates by the non-babied community probably is. For real, '[redacted] is smiling at her baby because she is using a fork' is driving us bananas. . . .Fortunately, the ones showing up on my stream have been more banal than gross. But it has spawned a new game that my husband and I play, "Where do I know them from?" I read the facebook status without the name, and my husband will guess whether I know the person from elementary/high school or from law school/work. It is frightening how accurate his guesses are! For example, insightful comments about the S&P are always the latter category, as are exciting posts about foreign travel and breaking news of world politics. Meanwhile, posts about going to the zoo, taking naps, and going to the gym are inevitably the former category.
Technorati Tag: childfree
7 comments:
It's miserable isn't it? I know I can stop people or groups of people seeing my status updates, but I wish there was a way I could block myself from SEEING all the high school breeders' updates.
Maybe I should just start doing updates on my plants: "Julia is watching her Blechnum tabulare photosynthesising. What a clever little plant it is!".
Interesting assessment on the "guessing where you know them from by status" game; I unfortunately am actually not finding the same in my circles. It is my very well educated friends who leave baby-centric facebook statuses and I have wondered if there is the guilt at missing big moments factor (daycare), if they are letting their family members know, or if going to school in the South yields a greater number of breeders.
While everyone is up in arms at the recent facebook changes I am so happy with the ability to filter and mute people; I don't want to "de-friend" these people, I just don't care to hear the play-by-play on their children's biological processes.
I've been stunned at how many of the best and brightest females from my elementary/high school years have become stay at home moms blathering endlessly about the mundane doings of their children. They were at the top of their class, went to college on scholarship, some studied abroad and got graduate or professional degrees, just to organize play dates, hang out at Chuck E Cheese, and keep us informed about sippy cups and boo-boos.
It's no wonder women get so little respect. They do so little to earn it. I just wish it didn't rub off on the rest of us.
I hear this completely... Though I rarely admit my disgust with the smartest ladies in school who now only post about their children and their goings on, I do often feel, well, disgusted.
My world is more sharply divided, for now. It has been less than a year since I graduated Harvard Law, and so far only one of my classmates has become a mother (during school; she had been married for three years before starting school, is in her 30s, and is working full time).
Meanwhile, I went through K-12 in a dull suburb, where people mostly stayed and followed the script of their parents' lives.
A lot of my female law classmates expressed ambiguity over whether they would become parents, and while I'm sure some will, I do hold hope. I'm sure at least some, like the only female summa ever to graduate HLS, will eventually drop out and make me wonder if one of the thousands of people hungering for a spot in our class would have spent a few decades more putting that degree to use.
But since this is the reasoning that kept women out of higher education, perhaps the best move is not to spend time lamenting it, but rather to take my own degree and my own mind and put them to the best use possible.
I added some cousins to my facebook account thinking I don't know them that well and I might get to know them better this way. I found out they are nothing but mindless breeders. One posted something stupid about how far her baby could pee and when 4 or 5 of her friends gave it a "thumbs up" like it was SO hysterically funny or something. I was just disgusted.
This is one of the reasons why I am the only person I know who doesn't have a Facebook or Myspace account. A high school friend with an account once let me look over her shoulder as she looked up some of our old classmates for fun, and it was amazing to me just how uninteresting and unaccomplished most of these people were.
Some had had shotgun weddings. Some were living in their parents' basements. Their pages made me feel pretty good about my life (good job, happy marriage, no kids) but also vaguely depressed that so few of my former classmates had seen fit to do anything interesting with their lives. I really don't need to spend time keeping in touch with people like that. I'm too busy living a life.
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