News!

Well world, this is probably one of the biggest things I’ll find myself sharing here:

I’m pregnant! Five months from now, on February 23, 2027, a little gal is due to join this family of ours.

I know usually this announcement is accompanied by either an Instagram post of a sonogram or a teeny set of baby clothes, but as someone who seriously considered titling this post “Pregante!”, I knew that wasn’t the way for me.  

Aaron and I are both incredibly excited for this amazing new phase of life, but I’ve held off on sharing because I’ve been thinking about sharing via the internet a whole lot.

My tendency towards memes over cliches notwithstanding, since finding out I’m pregnant, I’ve found myself unintentionally withdrawing from posting on Instagram. We found out at the end of June, and somewhere around the end of July I realized that not only was I less present online, but that I didn’t mind so much.

A few years back, between the pervasive ads and sponsored posts and general slog that is modern screen time, I really contemplated stepping away from Instagram and even waxed poetic about it here. Unsurprisingly, I ended up back online with my usual goober posts and vintage shopping carousels within a few months. So why is this happening now all on its own? Among the very many emotions I’ve experienced in the last several months, I’ve distilled it down to this: I’m truly considering what I want to share online these days. Private profile or public, privacy settings or no, what do I really want to put out there, into the vast dear void that Kathleen Kelly expounded on in 1998?

Clearly, I want to share this! It is huge, wonderful news, and I want the many people far and wide that I know and love to hear it. And Instagram has long been that place for me – it’s been what’s brought me back to it time and time again. Yet while Instagram allows for a version of staying in touch that is so valuable, it is also reductive, and lacking intentionality. Instead of sitting down to either call or email an individual friend, or even writing an annual newsletter and mailing it out to a Christmas card list, I can just be myself online and anyone who cares to follow gets to keep knowing me, because my life is mine to share however I want and it all never really was that deep.

When life started to include Aaron, I knew he was not a social media person, but he has never minded and always consented to the moments when I include him in a photo or a post online. But everything that comes after sharing this news sits somewhere else. This is bringing a whole new party to the table – a tiny, totally human party that is years away from making their own decisions. You take that and add in two other elephants in the room – bone-deep exhaustion with all things digital and virtual and a longing for analog that far surpasses millennial nostalgia for the past – and I just wonder if I’m done with the way I share with Instagram.

Is that patronizing? Am I suddenly being the worst? I once wrote that one of the most off-putting aspects of having children was my fear of becoming one of those parents: the ones whose opinions, as parents, immediately appear to supersede those of anyone without children. If I am becoming one of those people already, seventeen weeks in, please tell me. But I think this is coming from a combination of places: of being tired of communal online spaces being commodified, of being tired of everything being digital, of nothing online striking the feeling of that black-and-grey Tupperware box my family kept all of our photos and Polaroids in.

There is part of me that feels like I could (and probably will) end up just lurking on Instagram, or maybe just leaning into aesthetic posting. My profile would suddenly slow down and I’d just be sharing memes to my stories and following the happenings of others. But I don’t really want to do that, because that means still getting tied up in all of the really shitty parts of social media: the ads and the sponsored posts and the inadvertent supporting and participating in anything relating to some of the world’s worst humans, all bizarrely intermixed and peppered with the good bits from my friends. My life is about to get a lot busier, and this might just be a good time to step back and return to my 2003 self. Fourteen-year-old me was convinced that when it came to being online, blogging was the best the internet got. She may have had a point.

It’s entirely possible that this will be a temporary feeling, and that even if I end up keeping this little gal to myself, I’ll still return to Instagram to share and celebrate me. After all, one of the other deep fears I had about parenthood was losing that ability.

But for now, whatever this all means, I am genuinely excited to share the news that ya girl is pregante! She just might not be talking about it a whole lot. ❤️