I'll be 50 with Teenagers

A weird thing happened to me when I was taking a walk with the kids. A guy passed me going the other way on his bike, and his bike was pulling one of those carts that carry kids in them. He took a look at the stroller and started laughing and said "ha ha ha ha ha, twins! Twins!" I said "Ha, yep, twins" and he stopped and said "I have twins too," and gestured into the bike cart. Indeed there were two girls in there.

So this guy gets off his bike and turns around so that he's going the same direction as me, and starts walking with me, talking about twins. Turns out he is a stay at home dad, so maybe he was feeling isolated or something, but he stuck with me for the entire rest of my walk.

I learned a lot of things about this guy in the next 20 minutes: his twins are 3 and a half, they are not identical, they are not potty trained, they don't talk much, he dropped out of art school when they were born because it was too hard to deal with them and be in school, his wife is a nurse, they live on the far east side, they only planned to have one child, they use disposable diapers, and oh, yeah -- his twins are "natural". None of that weird reproductive technology for him and his wife!

"Have you checked out that multiples club in town?", he said. "They are all a bunch of weirdos. They all had to use reproductive technology to get pregnant. Yeah, most of them definitely took advantage of pharmaceuticals. If you ask me, if you need to use reproductive technology to get pregnant, then you have no business having kids." I asked him "how do you know that they needed help to get pregnant?" He said "Well, most people won't admit it, of course. But you can tell. Most of them are really old. I sure wouldn't want to be 50 and still dealing with teenagers!"

Huh. This guy had a real thing for the phrase "reproductive technology". I guess enough people have asked him whether his kids were "natural" (as if my kids aren't?) that he now feels like he has to let new people know right away. They were natural all right. None of that fishy reproductive technology for him! He just had extra special manly sperm!

I told him that I'll be 50 and dealing with teenagers, and he seemed surprised. At one point I said that whenever I feel overwhelmed, I think about people who have triplets or quadruplets. He said "yeah, well when there are higher order multiples involved, you know they used reproductive technology. It's practically a given. If you ask me, they dug their own grave."

My weird walk with this tool reminded me of a couple of things. One, never assume. When you meet new people, you don't know much about their personal history. So it's probably smarter not to, I don't know, go off on some weird religion X or some pyramid scheme Y because the person you're talking to might end up being part of that group. But the more important thing is to try to have compassion for points of view that differ from your own. This guy's rant about people who use reproductive technology is probably something that I would have vaguely agreed with a few years ago. Until, you know, I became one of those people. One thing that taught me is that you can't know what it's like to live through certain things until you actually do it. And you might not know how you'll react until you're actually faced with making the hard decisions. It is so, so easy to judge other people and say "I would never do xyz." I distinctly remember saying that about IVF. Easy to say it, but we don't really know. We don't know what other people live through, we don't know what plagues them, we don't know their suffering, we don't know what drives their decisions. That's worth remembering the next time I might feel tempted to judge a decision that strikes me as stupid, petty, selfish, or unfathomable.

(Above -- when I was at work, Jake and the twin whisperer took this photo of the results of reproductive technology. Totally totally worth it, thank you very much).