Christie Young writes and draws in Austin, Texas. She doesn’t plan on having kids.
56 Comments
Kay+53
I’m pretty sure my husband would’ve highly preferred any of these to what actually happened: Me shoving a recently peed-on test in his face while waking him up at 6:30 AM asking if he saw a very faint second line, too, or if I was hallucinating.
mendedspeech+22
Yeah, that was basically my method. Only I made him come into the bathroom to look at two (2!) tests and then cried and cried at him.
Meghan+5
That’s exactly what I did! And then dragged him to the store to buy one of those with the words because it’s easier to figure out.
jmstevenson76+5
My experience was *very* similar. It was 5 a.m., and my comment was “LOOK WHAT YOU DID” in a very accusatory tone.
elsamac+64
Spelled out in tampons you won’t be needing for next 9 months
ahahahaha, a friend of mine announced her pregnancy to me by handing over a fresh box of o.b., knowing we used the same brand and size. And I immediately knew what the gesture meant.
Alli525+8
Wait, same size? I know tampons come in regular and ultra, but are there different sizes besides that? Do brands differ?
[I was not allowed to use tampons growing up (several reasons/long story) so I just got so used to pads that I almost never use tampons. There are some areas of my life where I just do not know how to woman. Blerg.]
elsamac+30
Nope, you got it in one! “Size” is really my sloppy way of referring to absorbency:with o.b., there’s regular and ultra—at least, that’s all I ever see at local stores these days. I seem to recall that in my youth, there was finer granularity of absorbency ratings from super-light to ultra-plus, but (and again, I think this is correct) they were standardized cross-brand years ago.
There are some areas of my life where I just do not know how to woman.
When I was in the hospital last month, they couldn’t let me use tampons and instead supplied with pads, which reminded me how completely incompetent I am with pads. Just an example that there’s no one better Way To Woman: whichever way you do it is okey-dokey.
AmazingSandwich+6
O.B., at least, comes in regular, super, ultra, and like, ultra max. Wrapper colors are pink, green, yellow, and purple, respectively. The purple is hard to find. I can’t speak for other brands.
Goomaly+10
I knew some sisters who couldn’t use tampons because “it’s too much like the real thing”
WHAT
iarenivar+14
YUP I remember I was at a pool party once and another girl (a minister’s daughter) got her period, but the host only had tampons. We had to reassure her for at least ten or fifteen minutes that she was still a virgin.
Girl Named Jack+60
I am always in favor of the cake-related option, if there is one.
Rillquiet+93
Personal fave: My mother told my dad by flashing him when he got home and saying, “Does this look like a pregnant lady’s boob?”
xtieyoung+49
i think i do that to myself every month
LeastBittern+145
When I was young, I was v. baby crazy; friends used to joke that I’d steal a baby from a supermarket eventually.
When I do have the first kid, I’m never announcing that pregnancy on Facebook. Everyone who sees me in person will be sworn to secrecy. Then, one day, there will be approximately 7k photos of me with a baby on the Internet.
“LeastBittern, who’s baby is that?” “MINE. I GOT IT IN THE NORMAL WAY.”
ArsenioB_Ham+15
I really like this plan for a lot of reasons, not least because I really, really hate all the pictures on Facebook of pregnant bellies (especially when painted). I think it’s something about the intimacy and the fact that you’re not just looking at the pregnant lady, but also a kid-to-be who has no say in the matter.
ETA to clarify: I do not mean to diminish the autonomy of the pregnant person (I do not think fetuses have personhood or any such nonsense), but presumably if you’re posting all the photos on Facebook, you DO think of your unborn as a person and someday he or she might be confronted with the evidence of all the weird things you took pictures of before he or she was born.
LeastBittern+27
Hmmm. I think you could maybe see it as a “hey, look at the new thing my body is doing!”
It’s just that for ten goddamn years, every stomach bug, every car trip down a curvy road, every time I’m too hungry or don’t have a glass of wine, every time I decide not to eat some dubious raw seafood, people say “Could you be pregnant?”
1.) I will make it through an entire pregnancy without those fucks noticing. 2.) “Could you be pregnant?” is an amazing thing to say to paternal hypochondriacs. You know, since they apparently think it’s appropriate conversation at all times.
Ethylbenzene+14
This drives me INSANE with rage. Every fucking time any woman anywhere does anything at all it’s “oh are you pregnant.” I got into a huge argument with a friend of a friend on the facebooks about this very thing. It makes me so angry.
umbrellaribs+18
A friend of mine who is in med school said they explicitly teach them to assume every woman of a certain age is “pregnant until proven otherwise.” UGH, WHAT? This explains my experience with going to the doctor, in which they have almost always offered this to me as the first possible cause of a variety of ailments.
EPWordsnatcher+7
o.O
squishycatmew+5
To a certain extent you *need* to, because a lot of things you might use to treat someone can fuck up a pregnancy, and it’s easy to not know that you’re pregnant because bodies, wtf are they even doing?. But, uh, it should not be the first go-to *diagnosis*, jesus what?
emily_of_athens+44
I understand that you mean well and I say this politely and respectfully: please don’t be yet another person telling pregnant women what to do with their bodies. My body is still mine, despite having a baby inside it, and I will take pictures of it or not as I choose.
sagerenee+23
Friend of mine from college did almost exactly that. No mention on facebook until baby shower photos showed up without comment or caption, then BOOM baby! She was a total pregnancy ninja. I was in awe.
Site_for_Soris+6
YES this is my plan.
Miss_Dahila+3
This, for some reason in my sleep-deprived state reminds me of how in Ancient Greek mythology Hera became pregnant 2-3 times (depending on who you read) PURELY BY HERSELF because she’s just that awesome.
Emily+110
One other good way to tell someone you’re pregnant or also to give someone a heart attack is to send this comic to your fiance over gchat with no context.
shebreathesagain+46
I am a bad person and just did this. Reaction TBD, he is currently orange status.
rhymeswitheight+14
To share the comic or to actually announce your pregnancy? Either way, high fives.
ArsenioB_Ham+28
WAS ALREADY CONSIDERING THIS
LeastBittern+14
I’m just gonna bookmark this for when it’s relevant.
Anti_kate+11
These are all fabulous except they require more irritability and barf.
GreenGrasses+49
I love how vague the skywriting is! “There’s something inside me… Who knows what, though? You should guess!”
Abanthis+36
“A baby? Some cheese? An incubating xenomorph? Who knows! Hopefully it will be fun and non-fatal finding out!”
erindubitably+37
My cousin announced her pregnancy on Facebook by posting a picture of a chestburster with the caption “guess what we’re having?”
Best Cousin Ever.
Rebecca Lynde-Scott+27
I used to work at one of those engraving places in the mall, and one Christmas, somebody came in and bought a brass ornament and had us engrave it “Happy Father’s Day” as her way of telling her husband. We were very entertained.
mrtafadhali+19
These are all probably better than the ways I have found out about my brother’s girlfriends’ pregnancies and/or pregnancy scares, which have included “sudden very noticeable cup size change” and “they left their personal diary open on my coffee table to a page that said ‘SHIT I AM DEFINITELY PREGNANT’ in large text” and the phrase “don’t tell Mom but”.
(Luckily it has mostly just been scares and the time it wasn’t he told my mom instead of letting me languish in 19-year-old secret keeping misery. Also my brother and his girlfriends have not historically been good at birth control.)
dakimel+18
wait… all of that was ONE brother? Dude. Someone needs to take notes during sex ed.
mrtafadhali+6
His current and his high school girlfriend both went to my all girls’ school, which had pretty solid sex ed, and one of them lived with our health teacher and the other gave my little sister a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves for her 13th birthday, so they definitely HEARD about birth control at some point.
In my brother’s defense, the more recent scares are more because his girlfriend had to drop out of college to have a child and so now is always REALLY PARANOID that she’s pregnant again (see: diary entry), rather than because of actual bad family planning practice on his part.
dakimel+5
Sometimes I guess knowledge is too powerful – easy to convert every fluctuation into an augury of pregnancy. Especially when you’re talking about two people with young pregnancy history, I can see how rampant paranoia would set in!
halleloujah+44
Much better than screaming over the phone while sobbing MOTHERFUCKER WHAT DID YOU DO Next time! (there will not be a next time)
Hussified+7
I FaceTimed my husband this time around since we were both at work, I wasn’t expecting the result at all, and I needed to share it IMMEDIATELY. When all’s said and done, though, I would have largely preferred cake.
rkfire+36
I was thinking of just telling my husband “GUESS WHO ISN’T GETTING HER PERIOD FOR 40 WEEKS” but that’s only because I announce my periods to him with a “still not pregnant!!”
TheclaAndSeals+23
I do a variation of this where I euphemistically tell him I’m spotting by going “I’m pretty sure I’m not pregnant?” and announce my periods by saying “Yeah, DEFINITELY not pregnant, just FYI” from the bathroom door.
Trying to get pregnant is annoying, and my husband hears about my period about 100000% more than he would like to/ anybody needs to.
nonasuch+16
I have been escalating the weirdness/vagueness of my “having my period” euphemisms to see how abstract they have to be before my boyfriend no longer understands them. Started with “Aunt Flo,” have worked my way through, among others, “having the painters in,” “the Red Army is invading,” and a bunch more
blunderbusst+32
I send a “congratulations: we aren’t pregnant” email once a month.
It is typically followed by two days of texts that just read “craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamps.”
1BRUCE1+34
I recently forgot when my last period was, and was trying to figure out if I was late.
My husband searched his text messages for “craaaaamps” and came back with the answer almost immediately.
blunderbusst+1
Oh, I love this.
dupreema+13
I just saw a pregnancy announcement thing on Facebook where someone mailed eggs to people (like a realistic looking bird egg nestled in a…nest) and then I guess the recipient cracked it open and the little paper announcement was inside. I was kind of like “ewwwcuuuteIguess??”
So yea…I like the nesting dolls. I guess I am mildly weirded out by the egg thing but apparently not the opening of consecutively tinier wooden people thing.
xtieyoung+16
this egg thing really grosses me out / reminds me of that dino oatmeal that had “dinosaur eggs” in it
spiffygrits+64
I’ve never come up with a clever way to announce a pregnancy. I did make a sparkly gif when I was pregnant with my third kiddo that said something like “CARRYING AN ADORABLE PARASITE,” and when I had a c-section, I titled my birth announcement post “From her mother’s womb untimely ripped,” which apparently freaked people out a lot. I think the sky-writing really fits my M.O. on this and I’m only sad that I can’t send this comic back in time to tell past-me that it’s the way to go.
hysterietta+25
“From her mother’s womb untimely ripped” — YES. Now I kind of want to have another c-section so I can use that. (No I don’t. But kind of.)
annacardea+11
We announced on Facebook since we’ve got a lot of family and friends scattered all over and that was the easiest way. My husband posted a video of Garfunkel and Oates’s “Pregnant Women Are Smug,” and said something like, I thought Annacardea was looking a little smug lately. We only had to explain the connection (between me and the video) to a couple of people.
Frumiosa+5
Did the same for my first! Friends, it’s a movement.
betsymore+6
Ooh ooh, I am hoping to be pregnant in the near future (though fertility is a mystery, so WHO KNOWS), and when the time comes, I want to announce it on FB by posting the Philip Larkin poem “This Be The Verse.”
I think most people probably won’t get it.
isitisabel
YUP I remember I was at a pool party once and another girl (a minister's daughter) got her period, but the host only had tampons. We had to reassure her for at least ten or fifteen minutes that she was still a virgin.
deitybox
Did the same for my first! Friends, it's a movement.
Runbug Jones
My experience was *very* similar. It was 5 a.m., and my comment was "LOOK WHAT YOU DID" in a very accusatory tone.
I’m pretty sure my husband would’ve highly preferred any of these to what actually happened: Me shoving a recently peed-on test in his face while waking him up at 6:30 AM asking if he saw a very faint second line, too, or if I was hallucinating.
Yeah, that was basically my method. Only I made him come into the bathroom to look at two (2!) tests and then cried and cried at him.
That’s exactly what I did! And then dragged him to the store to buy one of those with the words because it’s easier to figure out.
My experience was *very* similar. It was 5 a.m., and my comment was “LOOK WHAT YOU DID” in a very accusatory tone.
Spelled out in tampons you won’t be needing for next 9 months
ahahahaha, a friend of mine announced her pregnancy to me by handing over a fresh box of o.b., knowing we used the same brand and size. And I immediately knew what the gesture meant.
Wait, same size? I know tampons come in regular and ultra, but are there different sizes besides that? Do brands differ?
[I was not allowed to use tampons growing up (several reasons/long story) so I just got so used to pads that I almost never use tampons. There are some areas of my life where I just do not know how to woman. Blerg.]
Nope, you got it in one! “Size” is really my sloppy way of referring to absorbency:with o.b., there’s regular and ultra—at least, that’s all I ever see at local stores these days. I seem to recall that in my youth, there was finer granularity of absorbency ratings from super-light to ultra-plus, but (and again, I think this is correct) they were standardized cross-brand years ago.
There are some areas of my life where I just do not know how to woman.
When I was in the hospital last month, they couldn’t let me use tampons and instead supplied with pads, which reminded me how completely incompetent I am with pads. Just an example that there’s no one better Way To Woman: whichever way you do it is okey-dokey.
O.B., at least, comes in regular, super, ultra, and like, ultra max. Wrapper colors are pink, green, yellow, and purple, respectively. The purple is hard to find. I can’t speak for other brands.
I knew some sisters who couldn’t use tampons because “it’s too much like the real thing”
WHAT
YUP I remember I was at a pool party once and another girl (a minister’s daughter) got her period, but the host only had tampons. We had to reassure her for at least ten or fifteen minutes that she was still a virgin.
I am always in favor of the cake-related option, if there is one.
Personal fave: My mother told my dad by flashing him when he got home and saying, “Does this look like a pregnant lady’s boob?”
i think i do that to myself every month
When I was young, I was v. baby crazy; friends used to joke that I’d steal a baby from a supermarket eventually.
When I do have the first kid, I’m never announcing that pregnancy on Facebook. Everyone who sees me in person will be sworn to secrecy. Then, one day, there will be approximately 7k photos of me with a baby on the Internet.
“LeastBittern, who’s baby is that?”
“MINE. I GOT IT IN THE NORMAL WAY.”
I really like this plan for a lot of reasons, not least because I really, really hate all the pictures on Facebook of pregnant bellies (especially when painted). I think it’s something about the intimacy and the fact that you’re not just looking at the pregnant lady, but also a kid-to-be who has no say in the matter.
ETA to clarify: I do not mean to diminish the autonomy of the pregnant person (I do not think fetuses have personhood or any such nonsense), but presumably if you’re posting all the photos on Facebook, you DO think of your unborn as a person and someday he or she might be confronted with the evidence of all the weird things you took pictures of before he or she was born.
Hmmm. I think you could maybe see it as a “hey, look at the new thing my body is doing!”
It’s just that for ten goddamn years, every stomach bug, every car trip down a curvy road, every time I’m too hungry or don’t have a glass of wine, every time I decide not to eat some dubious raw seafood, people say “Could you be pregnant?”
1.) I will make it through an entire pregnancy without those fucks noticing.
2.) “Could you be pregnant?” is an amazing thing to say to paternal hypochondriacs. You know, since they apparently think it’s appropriate conversation at all times.
This drives me INSANE with rage. Every fucking time any woman anywhere does anything at all it’s “oh are you pregnant.” I got into a huge argument with a friend of a friend on the facebooks about this very thing. It makes me so angry.
A friend of mine who is in med school said they explicitly teach them to assume every woman of a certain age is “pregnant until proven otherwise.” UGH, WHAT? This explains my experience with going to the doctor, in which they have almost always offered this to me as the first possible cause of a variety of ailments.
o.O
To a certain extent you *need* to, because a lot of things you might use to treat someone can fuck up a pregnancy, and it’s easy to not know that you’re pregnant because bodies, wtf are they even doing?. But, uh, it should not be the first go-to *diagnosis*, jesus what?
I understand that you mean well and I say this politely and respectfully: please don’t be yet another person telling pregnant women what to do with their bodies. My body is still mine, despite having a baby inside it, and I will take pictures of it or not as I choose.
Friend of mine from college did almost exactly that. No mention on facebook until baby shower photos showed up without comment or caption, then BOOM baby! She was a total pregnancy ninja. I was in awe.
YES this is my plan.
This, for some reason in my sleep-deprived state reminds me of how in Ancient Greek mythology Hera became pregnant 2-3 times (depending on who you read) PURELY BY HERSELF because she’s just that awesome.
One other good way to tell someone you’re pregnant or also to give someone a heart attack is to send this comic to your fiance over gchat with no context.
I am a bad person and just did this. Reaction TBD, he is currently orange status.
To share the comic or to actually announce your pregnancy? Either way, high fives.
WAS ALREADY CONSIDERING THIS
I’m just gonna bookmark this for when it’s relevant.
These are all fabulous except they require more irritability and barf.
I love how vague the skywriting is! “There’s something inside me… Who knows what, though? You should guess!”
“A baby? Some cheese? An incubating xenomorph? Who knows! Hopefully it will be fun and non-fatal finding out!”
My cousin announced her pregnancy on Facebook by posting a picture of a chestburster with the caption “guess what we’re having?”
Best Cousin Ever.
I used to work at one of those engraving places in the mall, and one Christmas, somebody came in and bought a brass ornament and had us engrave it “Happy Father’s Day” as her way of telling her husband. We were very entertained.
These are all probably better than the ways I have found out about my brother’s girlfriends’ pregnancies and/or pregnancy scares, which have included “sudden very noticeable cup size change” and “they left their personal diary open on my coffee table to a page that said ‘SHIT I AM DEFINITELY PREGNANT’ in large text” and the phrase “don’t tell Mom but”.
(Luckily it has mostly just been scares and the time it wasn’t he told my mom instead of letting me languish in 19-year-old secret keeping misery. Also my brother and his girlfriends have not historically been good at birth control.)
wait… all of that was ONE brother? Dude. Someone needs to take notes during sex ed.
His current and his high school girlfriend both went to my all girls’ school, which had pretty solid sex ed, and one of them lived with our health teacher and the other gave my little sister a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves for her 13th birthday, so they definitely HEARD about birth control at some point.
In my brother’s defense, the more recent scares are more because his girlfriend had to drop out of college to have a child and so now is always REALLY PARANOID that she’s pregnant again (see: diary entry), rather than because of actual bad family planning practice on his part.
Sometimes I guess knowledge is too powerful – easy to convert every fluctuation into an augury of pregnancy. Especially when you’re talking about two people with young pregnancy history, I can see how rampant paranoia would set in!
Much better than screaming over the phone while sobbing MOTHERFUCKER WHAT DID YOU DO
Next time! (there will not be a next time)
I FaceTimed my husband this time around since we were both at work, I wasn’t expecting the result at all, and I needed to share it IMMEDIATELY. When all’s said and done, though, I would have largely preferred cake.
I was thinking of just telling my husband “GUESS WHO ISN’T GETTING HER PERIOD FOR 40 WEEKS” but that’s only because I announce my periods to him with a “still not pregnant!!”
I do a variation of this where I euphemistically tell him I’m spotting by going “I’m pretty sure I’m not pregnant?” and announce my periods by saying “Yeah, DEFINITELY not pregnant, just FYI” from the bathroom door.
Trying to get pregnant is annoying, and my husband hears about my period about 100000% more than he would like to/ anybody needs to.
I have been escalating the weirdness/vagueness of my “having my period” euphemisms to see how abstract they have to be before my boyfriend no longer understands them. Started with “Aunt Flo,” have worked my way through, among others, “having the painters in,” “the Red Army is invading,” and a bunch more
I send a “congratulations: we aren’t pregnant” email once a month.
It is typically followed by two days of texts that just read “craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamps.”
I recently forgot when my last period was, and was trying to figure out if I was late.
My husband searched his text messages for “craaaaamps” and came back with the answer almost immediately.
Oh, I love this.
I just saw a pregnancy announcement thing on Facebook where someone mailed eggs to people (like a realistic looking bird egg nestled in a…nest) and then I guess the recipient cracked it open and the little paper announcement was inside. I was kind of like “ewwwcuuuteIguess??”
So yea…I like the nesting dolls. I guess I am mildly weirded out by the egg thing but apparently not the opening of consecutively tinier wooden people thing.
this egg thing really grosses me out / reminds me of that dino oatmeal that had “dinosaur eggs” in it
I’ve never come up with a clever way to announce a pregnancy. I did make a sparkly gif when I was pregnant with my third kiddo that said something like “CARRYING AN ADORABLE PARASITE,” and when I had a c-section, I titled my birth announcement post “From her mother’s womb untimely ripped,” which apparently freaked people out a lot. I think the sky-writing really fits my M.O. on this and I’m only sad that I can’t send this comic back in time to tell past-me that it’s the way to go.
“From her mother’s womb untimely ripped” — YES. Now I kind of want to have another c-section so I can use that. (No I don’t. But kind of.)
We announced on Facebook since we’ve got a lot of family and friends scattered all over and that was the easiest way. My husband posted a video of Garfunkel and Oates’s “Pregnant Women Are Smug,” and said something like, I thought Annacardea was looking a little smug lately. We only had to explain the connection (between me and the video) to a couple of people.
Did the same for my first! Friends, it’s a movement.
Ooh ooh, I am hoping to be pregnant in the near future (though fertility is a mystery, so WHO KNOWS), and when the time comes, I want to announce it on FB by posting the Philip Larkin poem “This Be The Verse.”
I think most people probably won’t get it.
YUP I remember I was at a pool party once and another girl (a minister's daughter) got her period, but the host only had tampons. We had to reassure her for at least ten or fifteen minutes that she was still a virgin.
Did the same for my first! Friends, it's a movement.
My experience was *very* similar. It was 5 a.m., and my comment was "LOOK WHAT YOU DID" in a very accusatory tone.