A Bedtime Rant

I'm not sure why, but tonight as I was getting ready for bed I kept thinking about the different ways people have responded to our news. And maybe it's simply because I'm pregnant, but no response seems to make me happy. When people say, "Oh how exciting," I want to throw a dose of reality in their faces and tell them how much this will cost us financially, physically, mentally, and emotionally. On the other hand, when people say, "You poor thing" or "Wow. That will be such a challenge," I want to tell them that we'll handle it. More than that, we'll make it look easy. Maybe it's because both types of people mirror my own feelings at one moment or another, but there has to be a better way. Why can't people ask how we feel instead of telling us how we should feel? Why not say, "Wow. That is amazing news. How are you feeling about it?" And I don't mean, "How is your husband handling it," which I already get quite frequently, as if the man will just faint like the husband in that stupid credit card commercial everyone and their mother asks us if we've seen the moment they hear we're having triplets. Trust me. We know this is big news. We're neither naive nor stupid, yet people keep asking, "What are they going to do?" and telling us how scared or excited we should be. Don't you think we already are those things? Don't you think that we already know this will be a challenge? We are two rational, college-educated people in their 30's for goodness sake. We are not a teenage couple whose birth control failed and is now blindly stumbling into parenthood. We planned this. We paid lots of money to get medical help doing it. We mentally prepared for twins. I'm sure we'll manage with triplets. So be supportive, be honest, be inquisitive, but stop trying to tell me how I should feel about becoming a mother of three.