Breaking the News

There comes a point in every pregnancy (one assumes – I’ve only been a part of this one… as far as the wife knows. Shhh!) when it comes time to make it “official”. No, I’m not talking about when you announce it on the Facebook – but when you finally start telling friends and family the big news. All the sudden, the baby goes from a little secret between the husband and wife (and area bartenders) into something that is public knowledge… and generally spreads like wildfire.

Girls like to choreograph these announcements like the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. There are props, elaborate schemes, and hours of tense buildup to the eventual moment. It only comes after hours of internal debate of which order to tell others, ensuring that the order that someone finds out you are with child is directly proportional to how important that person is in your life. It’s nice, but a little crazy.

Guys are the exact opposite. Aside from telling my parents (where I had to do it a typical Brian way – that is, being a jackass and burying the lead behind the excitement I had over my new iPhone), I’ve told people in exactly one way thus far – waiting until a conversation naturally veered in that direction and then saying “oh yeah, we’re pregnant” or something along those lines. It’s simple, direct to the point, and doesn’t steal the thunder from any other events or conversations that are going on.

Like most things in life, I think my attitude towards announcing a pregnancy is a direct result of the following scene on Scrubs, where JD and Turk stage an elaborate scheme only to have it fail in the end… and in the end, it doesn’t matter:

But aside from how you do it, when you finally make the announcement, I’ve found there are five possible reactions, almost solely determined by which group a person falls into:

Family Members – the most excited ever. Especially the parents, who finally are going to have their own grandkids to talk about after years of putting in time listening to their friends and family talk about their own grandkids. Fresh blood in the family means the family name (potentially) lives on for another generation and there is once again a reason to have toys at Christmas. Given that they are the first to know, when they start jumping in with a lot of in-depth questions, it leads to a lot of answers like “good question, we haven’t talked about that yet”… which can pretty quickly turn the “fun” of the announcement into the feeling of “holy crap this is for real and we have no idea what we are doing”.

Females with Babies – second only to family members when it comes to excitement. It often involves screaming, jumping, clapping, and a mob-like rush of the new mother with rapid-fire tips, suggestions, and stories about all-things baby. Finally, another female to join their club! The best advice I can give to a man who encounters one of these scrums? Back away very slowly and don’t make any direct eye contact.

Males with Babies – unlike females, the male reaction to the announcement usually amounts to some manner of hand-shaking, fist-bumping, or beer-cheering, followed by two to three minutes of polite small talk about the very basic basics about the baby, followed by an immediate return to the prior conversation - generally about sports, food, or recounting stories of stupid things you did in college.

Females without Babies – suddenly there is one fewer member in the “girls who will go out partying” club. Suddenly the female is faced with two options – either going along with the rest of the females and faking their way through the conversations about pumps and poops, or subtly sliding over to the male conversation and potentially alienating themselves from the rest of the females – who suddenly look at this outsider with distrust and fear.

Males without Babies – but as bad as the post-announcement moments are for the females, they’re even worse for the males. Not only do they have to potentially fake interest in conversations that they REALLY don’t care about, but this exponentially increases the odds that the next time they are alone with a female friend, the conversation is going to quickly slide into the danger zone of talking about babies (or in the case of single males, marriage). That’s not anything any guy wants after a nice evening of drinks with friends.

It really is quite funny how this makes it sound like there are such strict battle lines drawn between those with and without kids – but it’s kinda similar to marriage. As soon as you get married, you want other people to get married. Sure, part of it is to help ensure that you single friends aren’t out having too much fun without you – but also because you know that at the end of the day, it’s great and you want your friends to be just as happy as you are. I think the same logic applies to babies. Once you have one, you want your other friends to join in the joy that they bring… but also to be sure that you aren’t the only one stuck at home watching a baby while everyone else is out partying.

Oh yeah – one more thing. Remember earlier when I said I’ve only told people about the baby through normal, natural conversation? Well that’s about to change.

When I got engaged, I had this great idea to not tell anyone at work about it so that one day I could just say something like “hey guys, I’m going to be out of the office next week getting married”… again – basically the opposite of what I saw happen when girls got engaged at work, which resulted in a lot of screaming and attention. So once I found out that we were pregnant, I had the exact same idea. How hilarious would it be to just show up at the Christmas party with Kate 7 months pregnant? The reaction on peoples’ faces would be hilarious – and we could finally push the limits on the debate of “will you ever call out someone as actually being pregnant if they don’t tell you they are?” As a male, the answer is “no way in hell”, even if someone looked 7 months pregnant.

My downfall with the engagement was putting up a fake proposal on my Lost Blog – which I thought was equally funny… but it turns out that a number of co-workers read the Blog and the word spread quickly.

My downfall with the baby is going to be the same thing. It only seems right to link the Lost Blog to the Baby Blog since they’ve been anxiously waiting for me to start writing again for the past year… but in doing so, it will inevitably spill the beans to co-workers who still periodically check the Blog.

So here is my plea for a happy medium – co-workers who know me, please refrain from telling everyone at work as quickly as possible. You know you would rather see the experiment of the 7 month pregnant wife at the Christmas party play out, wouldn’t you?