Janine

"No kids! Do you want mine?"

"Nah. No worries thanks."

An actual exchange I have had a number of times now.

These days, the sting is less. Once you hear a phrase enough times, it ceases to have much impact. It has become a platitude, a throwaway remark, meaningless in intent.

But of course the truth is that how I take it, how it hits me, depends on many things.

Am I in a low place?

Does this person know me well at all?

Did they intend to try and be funny, or was it just a stock answer?

That last one is tricky to contend with. Because we all have stock answers we hold in storage for situations for which we don't immediately have a good response. "Happy Birthday!", on a birthday card for a colleague we hardly know. "Sorry for your loss," for, well, ditto. "Have a great day!", when we can't get the customer out of the store fast enough. One old customer of mine always greeted my cheery, "Hello!", with "Well any day above ground is a good one." It was his reflex response.

Can I get irritable or angry with whomever lobbed a, "Want mine?", stock response at me? Sure I can, but I've come to understand that most people aren't intending to be cavalier with our feelings, it doesn't come from a place of malice or thoughtlessness, they just haven't experienced enough discussion around the pain of childlessness to understand how it might come across. After all, most of us will revert to similar ourselves. It's why so many of us send flowers, fruit, or chocolate when someone we know has endured a horrific accident, or is battling cancer. We just don't know what we should actually say, and instead buy things as an act of sympathy. Our friend is going through something rough, and there's absolutely nothing we can do to make it better. So, chocolate?

But if we are in the same room and it take us by surprise, what then? Do we leave the room and rush out to the local Lidl to buy a bunch of wilting blooms? More likely we stay and say something inane because we can't come up with an empathetic response fast enough. Some will stutter, our mouths on pause as our brains try and dredge up a truly sympathetic sentence that won't be offensive, and some will find the first empathetic sentence that springs hurriedly to mind. "So sorry for your loss!" "Thoughts and prayers." "Plenty more fish in the sea!" Or that evergreen antipodean favourite, "No worries!"

"Do you want mine?"

In the depth of our pain, it can be hard to fathom that our friends don't always hear us screaming, and to me the worst incidences of "Want mine?" are from those who we feel should know us better; those who have been our friends for years and have witnessed the progression from the same potential of parenthood they themselves went down, to the road less taken of childlessness. When they have achieved the children they wanted and are somehow astonished at all the work and exhaustion it entails, that's when it's like a sucker punch to the gut, and I have to take a step back and reevaluate if the friendship is really worth keeping.

I can ignore the thoughtless comment from a random stranger in the queue at the supermarket. If it comes from a politician, I can just roll my eyes in the same way I would about a 'childless cat lady' commentary. But friends? Friends should know better. Friends should do better. Friends should be better.

Does "Want mine?" hurt? Mostly when the speaker just doesn't care where we're at.

It's always going to be there, "Want mine?" It won't go away any more than "Thoughts and prayers." It's out there, and it can never be unsaid. But it's a handy litmus test. If they thoughtlessly lob that grenade at me and don't seem to particularly note my anguish, I'm out of there. They're not the sort of people that are worth having in my life. I'm on the lookout for, "Well I'm glad you're in my life. Whatever your family situation."

To all my childless friends, I truly am grateful that you're in my life, even if I don't mention if as often as I should. And that we can be each other's families. No worries.

Photo by Ashley Batz on Unsplash