Your Birth Story Is Super Boring

boring birth storiesI don’t have a lot of rules in my house for visitors. I was raised to allow people to treat my home as their own, and as a result the fridge, the remote, the couch, and the special poo spray in the bathroom are all yours for the using when you are here. I usually only ask that you take your shoes off, because I’ve got this whole thing about my carpets, but that’s pretty much all of it. Oh, that and don’t tell your birth story. It’s super boring.

First thing’s first–this rule is waived for new parents. Everyone gets a year long grace period, since I understand that you just brought a child into the world in an explosion of blood and goo and that’s still kind of mind blowing. But once your kid’s first birthday has come and gone, every engraved invitation that I send to your home will have an asterisk under the RSVP line that cordially invites you to shut the fuck up about your mucus plug because we are all done with that now.

It’s not that I think birth is gross, despite the fact that birth is undeniably super gross. I’ve inexplicably been asked to participate at the business end of a few friends’ births, which brings the total number of vaginas that I’ve seen that aren’t mine up into the danger zone of too many. If I’m a mature enough adult to tell my best friend with a straight face that no, of course she hasn’t poo’d herself and yes, her mons pubis looks lovely, I’m mature enough to have a conversation about birth. It’s just that I don’t want to because it’s a major snoozefest.

I drafted Theresa’s Law© a few years ago when I was getting to know more and more moms, and I began to notice that no matter the age of their kids, conversation would eventually come around to birth horror stories, and what was weird about this was that no one even seemed to be listening to one another. They just sat there with glazed over eyes waiting for the speaker to shut her talking bits so that they could tell their story, too. So really, there were no conversations, just a lot of loud syllables layered on top of one another.

Plus, every story pretty much ended the same: “and then my baby was born.” I mean, I’m happy for you, that’s great, but everyone’s birth story pretty much ends that way. End a birth story with “and then my twin unicorns were born” and we’ll talk.

The other problem with the birth story drum circle was the fact that I often have mixed groups of people over at my house, which includes the childfree and the people who want kids but haven’t hit the lucky sperm jackpot just yet, for which the two hour play by play that starts with your bloody show and ends with third-degree tearing is either excruciatingly nauseating or else just kind of rude.

So get it all out of your system, because once you come to my house and slip off your shoes, you can bring up all of the forbidden topics that you want;  like politics and religion and Mariah Carey‘s Glitter. You just can’t talk about cervical dilation.

(Image: Everett Collection/Shutterstock)

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