Speaking Up, Guilt, and Risky Defense

It’s been a rough couple of days. My grandmother has been hospitalized/rehabbed/nursing homed for pneumonia that just won’t quit. It's not so pleasant to visit Gran there, but I do. Sadly, she is losing mental competency faster than the ticking of the national debt clock, but that's a blog for another time. Then, I wasted an entire day on Saturday looking for that perfect dress for our Elvis wedding to no avail. Meanwhile, a phone call to a good friend later that night disclosed that all I really needed to do was make a trip to fancy dress store. Sure as taxes, I drove there and within an hour, I walked out with my little number. Yay for all that wasted time on a perfectly good weekend. The inconvenience is just slightly offset by the knowledge that I am going to look real cute in the new threads next Sunday. But, I digress…

Next, I found out that one of my favorite actors (if not my very favorite) has died. I ask you, was there ever a man in Hollywood sexier than Paul Newman? Ok, ok, so that didn’t cause me too much angst, but still… Monday revealed that I completely spaced a meeting for which I should have prepared. Instead, I dialed into the meeting from my office and BS’d my way through the meeting, speaking about the issues as if I could offer some real insights. Meanwhile, I was looking up the data and information on the web while on the call. I wonder how many of my colleagues could hear right through that little performance.

And then, yesterday, the topper. For some quick background, there’s a woman at work that I am sort of friends with. She’s rather self-absorbed (as if I aren’t, what with this blog and all), particularly now that she’s pregnant with her second child. I thought the first pregnancy was bad, with all the constant chatter. But no, that was only first-child jitters. Pregnancy number 2 has proven to be the real litmus by which this woman has tested the limits of my tolerance and perhaps, my friendship. She routinely barges into my office to announce her morning sickness, complain about her gestational diabetes, lament her swollen ankles, bitch about her husband, all the time rubbing her 3rd trimester belly. Meanwhile, she is perfectly aware of all my fertility issues. For reasons I cannot recall presently, I shared all of it with this person. She was the only one at work in whom I confided. I can’t say that I regret that now, but I am perfectly shocked at how completely insensitive this woman has become. I mean, why complain to me? Go complain to someone else who can relate to being pregnant. I was pregnant for all of 6 weeks. Moreover, she knows that I would give anything to have a child and her complaints are received by me as stinging reminders of what I don’t have.

So, back to yesterday. She barges in and starts right up with how sick if being pregnant she is, she hates all the appointments, hates the new diet, and promptly plops herself in a chair across from my desk. She starts with something I hear from fertiles with kids all the time (oh yeah, it’s a classic - one that makes my witchy blood boil), “Are you sure you really want kids!?”. And before she can complete the sentence, I mustered the courage to finally tell her what I’ve been rehearsing in my head for months now. I summarily told her that I found her choice of words to me insulting, hurtful, insensitive, and completely selfish. I tried to soften it by following up with words and fragments like, “I’m sorry” and “rough weekend” and “I’m tired” and “I’m a little depressed today”.

Almost immediately, I wished I could have taken all of it back. This “friend” began to cry. Full on sobbing right there in my office. Luckily, I had a box of tissues at the ready. A whole litany of things came out of her: worries, fears, financial difficulties, issues with her step-children, etc. And then she apologized to me, but I felt like I should have apologized. I totally made her cry by pointing out some additional shortcoming in her personality that she had not previously known. And that was like the last thing she needed. So there we were, sitting across a desk from each other, she crying and me feeling like the biggest bitch for making her cry. Thinking about it now, I think she was a cry waiting to happen but I pushed her over the edge. How ridiculous that my first crack out of the gate at self-preservation from fertile insensitivities and it backfires on me miserably!

I stayed in my office for the rest of the day, trying hard to avoid her. She came by again later on but saw that I was on a call, so waved and left. Here’s the thing: I felt guilty about the episode yesterday. For weeks and weeks, she had been the object of my contempt, with all of her pregnancy complaining. Sure, there’s a touch of jealousy on my part, but she really does seem pretty ungrateful and it irks me. Today, I am not feeling so guilty about it. Well, a little. It's tempered by the fact that I do feel better about speaking up for once. And if she can’t hang, then she shouldn’t come (uninvited) into my office. Furthermore, women like her need to learn that they are not the center of the universe whilst pregnant. Increasingly, I feel like I am drawing lines in the sand between myself and fertiles. It’s playing defense, for sure, but I wonder if it’s going to come back and bite me.