Why I will have a "Facebook-Free" pregnancy.

Hi friends. Chances are, if you've come across my little corner of the interwebs, you're already a friend of mine. If not, stick around awhile, and you'll become one. It's no shock to pretty much all of you that as much as we'd love to, chances are, hubby and I will never get to have children the conventional way. But because I'm a dreamer, we've been discussing the "what ifs" since we got married.

I have everything planned. Names, the nursery decor, the potential lullaby, and how we'll tell our parents. We've even decided not to say anything to anyone for the first trimester (expect our parents) because we know anything can happen during that time. I learned this week though that I might need to go even deeper than that.

Let me share a story with you. I have this amazingly beautiful friend from Jr. High. We've been friends since the late nineties, and while I moved away, I'm still extremely close to those friends and consider them more like sisters who live in a different state. This friend has two absolutely perfect children: a girl and a boy. These two kids could rot your teeth with how sweet they are. Imagine our absolute joy when in spring 2010, she announced she was pregnant with twins. All of us were over the moon. She's an amazing mom, and we were so excited to meet them. She posted on Facebook, we all sent well wishes and followed along her journey. Cut to September 2010. Something went wrong. No more heart beats. She delivered two sleeping babies only 2 days later. All of the photos, the plans, the posts...all of it was there staring her in the face to come back to. And, on top of that, with all of Facebook's new features, the "On this day in 20xx" posts let us all re-live that horrible event along with her...shattering our hearts all over again.

My friend is a strong woman. She's a freaking trooper. She's handled the entire thing like a champ. There's no book on how to deal with something so devastating. I just know one thing...I'm not that strong.

So, after a night of crying on my couch reading my friend's posts on Facebook, hubby and I decided. If we're ever blessed enough to have a baby, there will be NO word of this on Facebook. At all. No "OMG! We're gonna be parents!!!!" posts. No random "Congratulations" from people you haven't talked to in 15 years. No fawning over names and sharing sonogram pictures. And, in an effort to be explicitly clear, we plan on asking our friends and family to refrain from any mention on Facebook, too. Until I'm holding my baby, and until I know I wont have to relive a nightmare, I don't want to mention it. Afterward, we'll happily share our news, but in the interim, our friends and family will learn of the news as well as follow our journey through phone calls, emails, and probably a little bit of my blog. That's it.

In a time when we are all so reliant on Facebook, it's almost unheard of to not put such important life information out there for the world to see. I see posts about everything from what someone ate, to the weather, to some of the more graphic posts about people's trips to the restroom (no, I'm not kidding.) But there was life before this phenomena of sharing even the most minute detail of our every day lives with our 300 plus friends. We used to call people. We used to email them. Before that, we even wrote to them. We stayed connected by reaching out and taking the time to share with them. It was more intimate. And you know what? I need to unplug and do that more often.

(On a side note, I do love Facebook. I especially love it so that I can stay in contact with my friend E, who I miss terribly. We have this hilarious online dialogue, and I love it. So, I don't want anyone to think that I'm preaching about how terrible Facebook is.)

So that's our plan. In a time when hubby and I would essentially be walking on egg shells for 9 months, I just don't think I could have something reminding me of bad news. Does that make me weak? Perhaps. But it's important to me, so that's the way it'll be.

ETA (Edited to add): I can assure you that if the time ever comes, we're going to document everything about our road to parenthood. We'll still share all of the information (after the first trimester) with our friends and families. We'll just do it in a way that not every single person can see. I sometimes feel like Facebook is like a window, and that we peek into those windows when the curtains are left open too much. I just don't want to leave the curtains open too far. I don't need the people who haven't so much as spoken to me in 5 years know the intimate details of my someday pregnancy. If we have your phone number or your email address or if you follow my blog- I can assure you, you'll know.  :) This way I can control what I come home to. I can choose not to open an email. If it's on Facebook, I don't have much of a choice but to respond to the posts at some point.