I have been absent from my blog this last month. Life has just gotten busy and my blog and blog reading got moved to the back burner for a bit, but I’m catching up.
I do have a question for my blog friends. I want to know if this situation is common, or if it’s just something about me that makes people not remember important information about me.
I went to lunch today with a friend and our waitress turned out to be someone that I was friends with several years ago. She actually grew up in M’s neighborhood so he has known her since they were young. About 6 to 10 years ago I hung out with this girl quite often, until she got pregnant and had her son. Her son is now 5 or 6. I do see this former friend about once a year in random situations, but we are not friends like we used to be since our lives went in different directions when she got pregnant. We don’t contact each other or keep in touch, but the town I live in isn’t huge so we do run into each other occasionally.
I know last fall when I saw her, she had asked if M and I had kids yet, and instead of giving the common “no” or “not yet” answer I told her “we were not able to have a child”. I remember this because I started using this answer and people’s reactions are a lot different when you say this to them. I remember having a brief conversation that we had tried for years and used fertility treatments, but didn’t go into details.
So, why would she ask me again today if M and I had kids?
This is a big piece of information to tell people, and this isn’t the first time I have told someone that we weren’t able to have kids, only to have them forget and ask us at a different time if we have kids. Is it just me, and people don’t remember what I say, or invest the thought to remember that I had shared this important information with them, or does this happen to anyone else out there?
This is really frustrating. I don’t want to keep having the same conversation with people. Bringing it up once is bad enough. I don’t tell this to people that we just meet, but rather people that know, or have known us.
When she came back to our table with our food she asked my lunch friend if she had kids, and she doesn’t. My lunch friend is in her mid 20’s and just been married for 1 year. Then my former friend started to tell us how lucky we are that we don’t have step children and have to pay out $XXX.XX dollars a month, and that how she could buy a house, or this or that if they didn’t have to pay child support. I am pretty sure that my former friend has just turned insensitive and can’t see past her own life. It’s a pretty weird thing to say to someone you were friends with over 6 years ago and a stranger.
nice to hear again from you!
ReplyDeleteDon't worry ... it does not happen only to you. It happened few times to me as well. So frustrating!
Some people are just like that- they are so focused in themselves that when they ask something, they are not really listening. Well, they hear and perhaps remember for a day... but then the information is gone since it is not relevant for them.
So in the last few years I really cherish my friends that I can talk openly to them (they are really only few of them). I am not interested in meeting lots of people & having small talks
(or even worse - that I think that one conversation is deep and the other part take it only as un unsignificant small talk)
Anyway. I do not know if it of any help. I ALWAYS remember the things that you write!
PS: sorry for my English, sometimes find it hard to express myself.
I think in some cases people forget...because they weren't really listening (like what Klara wrote) in the first place or/and because of their busy lives. The more people they meet, the more mixed up the information becomes, so unless they really think that piece of information is important, they're likely to put that bit to the side (like when you can see something vaguely from the corner of your eyes without really focusing there).
ReplyDeleteI haven't really experienced this myself, but that's because I don't really meet a lot of people in real life (well, except the customers in the supermarket I work in, but then again we don't really talk about that topic - except for this one old lady who mixed me up a few times with another Asian lady who has a child so she asked me about my child a few times, but I don't take it too heart because she's already 70 years old). But I can easily imagine the same thing happening to other people, as well.
You say: "We were not able to have a child." In that statement is all the grief, the fear, the emotions and the time invested in your efforts to have a child. It's a huge statement for you. You remember the feelings of "uh oh, here comes THAT question" and you remember plucking up the courage to reply.
ReplyDeleteShe hears: "No kids" (even with the ensuing conversation) so it doesn't register with her because it doesn't establish a commonality between you both, so when she sees you again, she can't actually remember.
I think it is very easy for people to shrink into their own experiences, and be unable to break out of that on a day-to-day basis. Clearly her only conversation starter is "do you have kids?" Or perhaps she's just very lonely, and desperate to find another parent with a child the same age as hers she can socialise with?
Thanks for your input. I do agree that when I say “we weren’t able to have a child” there is a lot of emotions and years of failure behind it. I think I will just go back to saying “no”. It doesn’t really seem like there is a difference to other people if we wanted children or not, they just hear that there aren’t any.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the others. I also think some people hear "no kids" (for whatever reason) & in their minds, they are thinking "no kids YET." Even if you told them you werent' able to have a child -- that just doesn't register with some people. They hear the stories about miracle babies and think it happens all the time. There's a reason why they're called "miracles"... :p
ReplyDelete