"A wily trial lawyer I once worked for delighted in asking outrageous personal questions, and people almost always answered him. "Never forget," he told me, "a question asked is not necessarily a question you have to answer." That got me thinking. When I was feeling tender, defensive, or vulnerable, I wasn't ready to explain my situation. Then I decided I had every right to skirt the subject, because my reproductive status was no one's business but my own."
"People who knew me, of course, never asked if I had kids. Instead, they'd inquire either directly or furtively about details of my status, intentions, and conclusions about children. When that happened, I recognized I had a choice: I could either evade the topic or engage with the person asking. Neither felt natural to me in the beginning. By way of background, in my 30s, my ex and I tried for kids for about seven years."
I prepared for routine inquiries about children and built a set of conversational responses to reduce awkwardness. I learned a question asked is not a question I must answer and used that permission to protect my reproductive privacy. I sometimes evaded by leaving conversations or inventing errands, a tactic labeled "Cut and Run." I weighed choices between avoiding the topic or engaging directly, influenced by past fertility struggles with an ex that lasted about seven years. I developed tactics to manage vulnerability and to respond on my own terms in social settings.
Read at Psychology Today
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