More often than not I find myself completely in love with the Internet. I love the way people have learned to use it to connect with others in very real and meaningful ways. I love the ease with which I can find information, and obtain something that I need (or want). It’s not too often that I think about some of the downsides of the Internet, but being pregnant has certainly brought some of these to the front of my mind.
When we first announced that we were expecting our child, people asked us which books we were reading, and very many warned us away from What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Honestly, I had already bought the book, and generally felt it was completely useless. It didn’t contain any information I wasn’t already getting for free from BabyCenter.com, thebump.com and numerous other websites. I got a handy weekly email telling me how much my fetus probably weighed, and what piece of produce he or she most closely resembled at that moment.
I had blogs, some of which like Dooce, Girl’s Gone Child and Marriage Confessions, I had been reading from well before we even began planning our family. It didn’t matter that I was essentially the only one of my friends having a baby, I didn’t feel alone.
My big issue is one of numbers. In the books, and on the websites, in the birth classes and in the doctor’s office they go over some of the “extreme” and rare things that could possibly occur. Those one in a million cases of really serious complications. But when you consider how many people are on the Internet telling their stories, one in a million is actually a significant number of people. So in reading a non-mommy blog, in fact a DIY home improvement blog, I found myself caught off guard by the terrifying story of a mom who experienced cord prolapse and placental abruption at the same time. And luckily she and the baby are both fine and healthy. But suddenly the “rarity” of one in a million seems a lot less rare, because I have been reading words by this woman, looking at pictures of their small child, and feel in some ways as though I know the family. Things seem a lot less rare when you “know” someone who’s experienced them.
And what’s any nervous, Internet-savvy, first-time mom-to-be to do when she has a question about something? I for one turn to my iPhone and look up “risk of eating feta cheese in 26th week of pregnancy”, except I don’t have to type the whole thing into google, because google fills in the rest of it as soon as I finish the numeral. Enough other people have searched for the answer to the exact same question that google can autocomplete it for me. That in and of itself makes me feel better about it. And then I get the answer, and I have to hide from the Internet for awhile.
Or I start googling the names we’ve been considering, and I discover a news story about a boy who is autistic, or a girl who was hit by a car, or some other tragedy, and I wonder how I can name my child without channeling bad mojo.
Thankfully I have plenty of reasonable, rational people in my real world. They remind me to turn off the computer, put my phone away, and stop worrying about the things that are outside of my control. They remind me to look at the people I actually know, and how many of them have had normal pregnancies, how many of them have turned out just fine. Because if all of these things were really as common as my brain has made them seem… well, we’d all be walking around having either had, or been close to someone who had horrible experiences.
