My sister, who loves me, just emailed me to tell me that it may now be safe for me to join facebook. Because of this.
Come on, you should read the whole thing. Here's a taste of why: the article's writer is a childless woman (but not an infertile woman, which means she doesn't fully understand the oppression-by-baby-pictures phenomenon - no doubt it's one she intends to participate in herself, at some future date). She doesn't plan to use the technology described, as she finds it adequate to scroll past the baby pictures of others. But I think she accurately captures a concerning social phenomenon (separate and apart from the issues that accompany infertility), which she terms "Facebook's gradual evolution into yet another way that smug parents can force the world to look at their unremarkable children."
In other words, even if I weren't having problems having children, even if I had a great huge brood of my own, the self-obsession that causes so many parents to plaster not their own refrigerators but the entire world with photographs of their young is not an admirable thing. And it is a new thing. My mother did not do this. My mother also told her kids that we had to listen to our teachers, and the other adults in town, and she would have laughed until she cried if someone had suggested that we were perfect, extraordinary, and incapable of error. Because she knew us. Sometimes I wonder whether the average parent these days has met his children...
I just like to think that infertility gives me a special insight into this. And a special appreciation of the beneficent google that has provided cats to remedy this situation.
But I'm still not joining.
