Assumptions

While I was away on vacation I was trying desperately to keep up with all the blogs I read.  I may not have been commenting, but I was trying to read as much as I could in the few quiet moments that I had.  I have to admit, one of the posts that came up on my blog roll took me aback and I immediately jumped to conclusions that I had no right to jump to.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a teacher.  I don't have a classroom right now, but I still identify myself as a teacher, and I still am very interested in education and teaching as a whole.  I taught for several years in the inner city and it completely changed who I am.  Another piece of who I am, has to do with food.  As a kid I was overweight.  I look back on the food that I ate and I realize now that it wasn't so great.  Once I got to high school I realized I had some control over all that and lost a bunch of weight.  Now I'm really thoughtful about the food I eat, and especially the food I feed Bean.  These two parts of me collide together in certain ways.  Especially when I saw the free lunches that my kids ate when I was teaching.  It was pretty abysmal.  Which lead me to one of the few non-infertily blogs on my blog roll, Fed Up With Lunch.

I highly recommend that you check it out if you have an interest in either teaching, food, or both.  Mrs. Q took on the challenge of eating her schools lunch every day for a year and documenting it.  The results are fascinating and frighting at the same time and I've been following her for a long time.  It's one of the few blogs that isn't related to infertility or family that I follow and I've always enjoyed the kind of break in the norm.  So last week when I saw the title of her post pop up that said "Surprise, I'm pregnant," I had that heart sinking moment that infertiles are so familiar with.  Which doesn't make a ton of sense, because I'm pregnant too.

It's not actually the fact that she's pregnant that I reacted to, it's just the out of the blue announcement.  It seemed, so, foreign to me.  It seemed like the kind of thing that you see on Fac.ebook.  The, wow, I got pregnant out of the blue and now I'm telling the whole world a few weeks in kind of thing.  And I almost didn't click over and read the post.  I almost took her off my blog roll because I didn't want that same feeling coming over someone else visiting my blog.  But I realized that I needed to read the post.  And I'm glad I did, because I had it all wrong.  I read these words, and my heart dropped:

"Call me suspicious or paranoid (wait, you already did that back in 2010!), but I’m just one of those people who doesn’t always think things will go according to plan. It took awhile to achieve this pregnancy and so I’m not taking it for granted."

I made completely unfair assumptions about who she was and where she was coming from based on three words.  It reminded me once again that we're everywhere.  Those of us who don't get pregnant easily and who know that things can go wrong.  And I was kind of ashamed that I need to keep being reminded of that lesson.  So even though she never knew any of this and she really has no idea who I am, I feel the need to apologize to Mrs. Q.  I'm sorry and congratulations on your wonderful news, I'm really very happy for you.  And thank you for reminding me once again not to jump to conclusions, about anyone.