There is one human error I think we need to become much more conscious of:
We speak loosely about deeply personal things simply because we have never personally experienced the sensitivity around them.
Recently, I was sitting next to someone when they were congratulated on their new baby.
A beautiful moment.
Then, almost randomly, another woman asked:
“Did you push or did you have a C-section?”
She answered that she had delivered through a C-section.
And somehow the conversation moved from curiosity to questioning her womanhood.
The comment was along the lines of:
“How are you a woman who couldn’t push?”
I interrupted.
Because no.
There are conversations where I can mind my business, but I could not comfortably sit next to another woman and watch something so deeply personal be reduced to a measure of whether she was “woman enough.”
And what struck me even harder was that this was woman to woman.
Sometimes I wonder whether we realise how casually we can touch somebody else’s scar.
You don’t know why she had a C-section.
You don’t know what happened in that delivery room.
You don’t know what doctors saw.
You don’t know whether there was an emergency.
You don’t know how frightened she was.
You don’t know what decisions had to be made to protect her life or her baby’s life.
You don’t know whether the birth she experienced was completely different from the birth she had imagined for herself.
Yet somehow, after she has carried a pregnancy and brought a child into this world, we can reduce the entire experience to:
“But did you push?”
And then attach womanhood to the answer.
I think this exposes something much bigger about us.
We have a habit of using our own experiences as the measuring stick for everybody else’s humanity.
“I gave birth naturally, so why couldn’t you?”
“I had difficult pregnancies and still went to work.”
“I breastfed all my children, so why aren’t you breastfeeding?”
“I lost weight after giving birth, so what happened to you?”
“My marriage survived that, so why did you leave?”
“I went through worse and I was fine.”
But your body is not another woman’s body.
Your pain threshold is not hers.
Your pregnancy is not hers.
Your medical history is not hers.
Your marriage is not hers.
Your circumstances are not hers.
Your experience can give you perspective. It does not give you authority over everybody else’s experience.
And perhaps we need to become particularly careful about the things society has attached shame to.
Fertility.
Pregnancy loss.
C-sections.
Breastfeeding.
Weight.
Divorce.
Marriage.
Childlessness.
Illness.
Sometimes the person standing in front of you has already fought an enormous private battle around the very thing you have decided to casually joke about.
We also need to stop using biology as a weapon against women.
A C-section does not make somebody less of a woman.
Infertility does not make somebody less of a woman.
Not breastfeeding does not make somebody less of a mother.
And another woman’s body does not need to perform the way yours did for her womanhood to be valid.
What saddened me most about that interaction was that the woman who had just had a baby should have simply been allowed to receive:
“Congratulations.”
Full stop.
Not congratulations followed by an investigation into how the baby exited her body.
Not congratulations followed by a grading of her womanhood.
Just:
Congratulations. You brought a baby into the world. I hope you and the baby are well.
Sometimes kindness isn’t about knowing the perfect thing to say.
Sometimes kindness is having enough emotional intelligence to know where your curiosity should end.