Pregnancy and April Fool’s

Last year [and many years prior] on April Fool’s Day I read several posts about women/teenagers claiming to be pregnant and making the “happy/blessed announcement” public on Facebook. Most of the pregnancy announcements were believed by friends and family with little feelings being hurt or minimal damage being done. I don’t know what this says about the person that posted it; you were actually deeply in love that it was a matter of time for a baby or that you publicly display your sexual experiences that it was only a matter of time before you became “knocked up”.

However, this year before you post your fake pregnancy announcement think of the women going through infertility treatments, the couples actually trying to conceive a baby, and those that have lost a child or miscarried.

It’s not funny to them and you won’t think it’s funny if there is a time [heaven forbid] that you’re trying to conceive or experience a miscarriage.

Life lesson classes?

Note: This piece was written back in February of this year. It’s direct and open, but I get my point across… at least I think I do.  

In high school everything they teach you is to prepare you for college, in college everything to prepare you for your career – where the hell is the “Let’s prepare for life” classes. I get it, you expect us all to go to college, to have our degrees, careers well underway before we get married, have kids and settle down into society’s depiction of the “American family”.

Get over it, shit doesn’t always work out the way our teachers, professors, family, and friends think it should, but no one prepared us for anything more than scenario one.

There was no avoiding the drama that came with high school, college, and a military installation and no one taught me how to deal with it. I’m not saying there isn’t going to be drama… it happens I get it, but maybe a class on avoiding confrontation, or a way to deal with anger in a productive non explosive way? Maybe it’s just me wishing I had classes like that.

No one taught me about sex other than “it’s going to hurt ALOT, save it for marriage, and make sure you use protection” You know it’s going to happen and you know we’re going to be teenagers when it does, this isn’t the 1940s, at least teach us how to make it pleasurable for us. Even minor things like… positions? Don’t tell me it results in a baby, I get it that’s how I am here writing this today, I was a product of a couple having sex, yay moving on. No classes on that? Great I took advice from Cosmopolitan magazine that I started reading at the whooping age of 12… I was a curious child. Of course, it wasn’t until I was like 16 until I started feeling comfortable and feminine enough to get close to a guy and another 3 years to even consider “losing it” with him when I thought I was “ready”. Thanks for the sex lessons, it was awkward, I didn’t know what to do, and yes… it hurt. I don’t blame Cosmo for my rough first time, I’m blaming society’s lack of informative classes for that one and the fact that all they tell us is don’t do it. Haven’t they learned that if you tell us NOT to do something… we’re going to do it anyway.

Shit we have classes for Pregnant woman and teens for having the child, which is great we should, because if you thought the sex you had for the first time hurt… child birth is going to be excruciating.

So aside from the lacking information on how to actually have intercourse in a fun and not awkward scenario no one bothered to offer information on when you should…

– start looking into life insurance

– how to buy your first car

– searching for your first apartment

– medical insurance

– politics

– taxes

– putting together a resume

– finding a job/career

– parenting

…. the list goes on, apparently this shit is supposed to be common knowledge, news flash: it’s not.

If it wasn’t for the military I wouldn’t have looked into life insurance [even though my grandfather brought it up at dinner when I was 17 that I was already behind on having it – shit someone should have I don’t know… told me that].

My first car? please, I am just lucky I didn’t have to deal with a dealership until I got married and we were buying our first car together.

I live on a military installation, that took care of the apartment hunting, leases, dealing with a landlord and all that jazz… thank god!

Taxes? I know people that know how to do taxes, their parents taught them or my father did it for me… I tried one year, it didn’t work out, I had someone else do it for me.

My resume? I did that shit, I used a template on Microsoft Word and tips off Google.

Thank you high school for being completely useless to me. You taught me Mathematics I relearned in college, English I could have read on my own, Science that I could have taught myself out of the book, History which is completely useless, because let’s face it… the shit happened already. I learned that I can’t stand being friends with females because of their drama, I should have never dated a ginger, I had a love/hate relationship with swimming, I was going to always battle with poor self image because of the bullies and that I had absolutely ZERO common sense, social intelligence and knowledge of the common working world… so what good were you exactly??

My point is: we should probably learn about life’s little things that turn into major things, before we get smacked in the face with them and failure and forced to figure out how to do it on our own…