Welcome to The Ick, Season 5: TABOO. We’ll be covering death, sex, money—and so much more.
Season 5 will culminate in a print magazine and launch party in San Francisco. All online articles are free, but please consider these paid subscription tiers. All proceeds go toward printing costs.
Next up is Charlie T, a married man navigating the polite society of Richmond, Virginia. He reports on the euphemisms and taboos when talking about heteronormative sex. Is he being uptight? Or does questioning someone’s family planning require extra tact?
Five years ago, I was sitting at lunch with a coworker. We were slightly better than work-friends, but not quite real-life-friends. He’d recently gotten married and bought a house. I was 23 and deeply curious about moving into those phases of life. While talking about the house, he mentioned it was “big enough for a kid or two.”
“Oh?” I replied, “is that something y’all are thinking about?”
In retrospect, stupid question. Of course he’s thinking about it, he just brought it up. I was a little inexperienced with Grownup Conversation, and asking “do you want kids?” felt too personal.
To my stilted question, he replied, “Well, we’re not really trying right now, but, y’know. Safety’s off.”
I had never met this coworker’s wife, but I was now aware of the status of her birth control. Is this a HIPAA violation? It felt like a crime of some sort, especially when three months later, this coworker announced to the team that his wife was pregnant. Seems like their “not really trying” was a huge success!
Four years later, I was at lunch with the same coworker. During the conversation, he mentioned that his wife was now pregnant with their third child.
“Wow!” I said, asking zero questions, “That’s amazing! Congrats!”
“Yea,” he volunteered, “we weren’t really planning on a third, but there was just one night we got the kids to bed on time and… now we’re having a third!”
I think I said, “Oh!” but what I wanted to say was Jesus Christ! Congrats to you and your wife on being the most fertile people on the planet. Please stop telling me about your highly reproductive sex!
Babymaking and Baby Making
It’s no great secret that once you get married, people start asking when you’re going to have kids. Source: I’ve been married a little over a year now. My brother- and sister-in-law made a comment in their toast at my wedding about how excited they were to become an aunt and uncle. My sibling gives me a look every time my wife refuses a drink, and then goes “dang it!” out loud when I shake my head.
I can understand their anticipation; babies are extremely rad! It’s exciting when my friends have babies. It’ll be exciting when it’s my wife’s turn to have a baby! What I have a hard time wrapping my head around is how comfortable people become talking about baby-making as soon as it seems like that might be what’s literally occurring in their friends’ bedroom.
Comedian Nina Oyama had a tweet in 2019 that has remained stuck in my head ever since:
“You say: we’re trying for a child
I hear: my husbands been doing big huge cums in my pussy.”
Thanks to this, I am consistently thrown for a loop when casual acquaintances or somewhat distant family members ask me “are you two trying for kids?” Like excuse you Aunt Georgia, I would not inquire about your sex life! Please mind your business!
That kneejerk reaction of mine is a bit unfair. Someone Aunt Georgia’s age only really gets to talk about sex when that sex is between married people. Another of my aunts remarked to my wife before we were married, “I think bridal showers are the best thing ever. I went to one of my sister’s bridal showers when I was 14, and I remember hearing my mom laugh at dirty jokes for the first time in my life, thinking, this is so great.”
As Owen Cyclops put it in his brilliant post The Signification of: Sex Makes Babies: “The baby, as a symbol, bridges these two worlds: the world of sex and the world of the wholesome - which are normally… in extreme opposition.”
That bridge is what my grandmother and my coworker cross when they discuss these things. It is acceptable to talk about sex insofar as the focus is on the baby production and not on the sex-having. If my coworker had said “I’ve been doing big huge cums in my wife” that would be more obviously inappropriate. To euphemistically relate that fucking his wife is now (re)productive is more socially acceptable. I still found it weird, but clearly not weird enough to say anything! I let him get away with it, because I could sense that by crossing to the realm of wholesomeness, he’d transformed his sex life into polite conversation.
All of this is complicated by the fact that creating a baby is way scarier, grosser, and more personal than non-reproductive sex.
The Scariest Lottery in the World
The thing that is truly nerve-wracking about being asked “are you two trying for a baby?” is not Aunt Georgia learning that I have sex with my wife. That’s a pretty safe assumption. The thing that feels charged is: what if I say “yes, we are trying” and then my wife isn’t pregnant the next time we see this person? Are they going to ask again? What about the next time?
There’s been a lot of wonderful progress on de-stigmatizing topics around fertility. At least two couples we know have shared in large group chats or on social media that they used IVF to have their baby. Another friend of mine was very candid about a miscarriage she had, sharing the excitement-turned-to-grief on Instagram. I think it’s wonderful that these things are becoming more acceptable to talk about.
Normalizing things, however, does not make them less painful or scary. Things like miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, pre-eclampsia, birth complications… shit is terrifying, and it wouldn’t even be happening to me!
When I had that first conversation with my coworker, I didn’t know most of these things existed. Like a lot of young single men, I was pretty ignorant when it came to women’s health. I was familiar with the concept of a miscarriage, but unaware of how many other ways a pregnancy can go wrong, or how traumatic and difficult a birth can be. I had a middle-school sex-ed understanding of pregnancy: conception, gestation, birth. Ta-da, baby!
Then, you reach a life stage where people you know are actually having babies. And the horror stories abound. This baby came early and had to go to the NICU. This baby came on-time, but was in a tough position and it took a long time and then, yep, NICU. This baby made mom so sick she was bed-ridden for the last month of pregnancy. This baby had heart disease, right off the bat.
Some babies do great and have no problems, though. The same friend that shared news of her miscarriage on social media now has a one-year-old baby. He is the happiest, chunkiest creature on the entire planet. He’s perfect. How could you resist asking if they’re going to have another? The people demand another!
These are two sides of the same coin, but the stakes on this coin flip feel astronomical. Adorable new person or medical nightmare, what’s it gonna be? So when somebody asks me if we’re flipping the coin, what do I say? Is there any way to share the excitement of a possible baby without also increasing the potential for sadness and suffering?
Pulling the Goalie
Much to my neurodivergent chagrin, there probably isn’t a rules-based approach I can take to this. What Aunt Georgia and my oversharing coworker have in common is that they are excited. Whether excited for me or excited to share with me, the impulse is ultimately good. I would rather endure some awkwardness than close myself off to being able to share in that joy with them.
Instead, what I need is a canned line; a go-to phrase I know I feel comfortable sharing. When my wife worked in the ICU, and people would ask how her day at the hospital was, she had a number of lines. Which line you got depended on how much she was ready to divulge - from “it was tough, but we had some wins” to “it was great! Nobody died who wasn’t supposed to!” I was always impressed with her ability to gauge and calibrate those responses, but she didn’t do it perfectly the first go-round. She practiced and dialed them in over time.
Now, in a phase of life where I get these questions, she and I have the opportunity to calibrate our own set of lines. How much are we comfortable with telling Aunt Georgia? How about coworkers? Can I, like one of my wife’s colleagues, drop a casual “we’ve pulled the goalie” and leave it at that? Because honestly, that one’s pretty good. Way better than “safety’s off” if you ask me.
All of this can be pretty funny, too. Some folks would probably tell me this is the purpose of comedy: to help navigate situations that are too raw, too real, too teetering on the knife’s edge of a happy ending or a tragedy. The other day, I met a neighbor, a very nice old Southern lady, who asked “do y’all have kids?” I tried a new line, simple and direct. “Not yet,” and a head shake with a smile. She gave me an eyebrow raise and a little head tilt in response, like we now shared a secret. It was nice. It was a way to share that my wife and I wanted children, implied that we were “trying,” and that was it.
Like all communication, plenty of information lies in the things we don’t say. A thoughtful listener will pick up on that, and let me share what I’m ready to. If I am mindful of it, this experience will make me a more thoughtful listener as well.
I’m a fool if I don’t treat this as another opportunity for gratitude. Gratitude that my wife and I are in a stable enough circumstance that we can think about this. Gratitude for friends and family who are excited for us. Gratitude that, when my coworker inevitably gives me too much information about their fourth time successfully conceiving, I can cut him some slack.
And if this article has left you curious, dear reader: my wife and I are fucking.
