As a single woman in my early 20s, I could frequently be found in a bar or line, asking a complete stranger: “So, do you have a favorite parent?” Which, I suppose, might go some way toward explaining the “single” part of that sentence.
The thing is, I grew up in the kind of family where any question was valid and all questions were answered, no matter how bizarre they were or how easily we might have been able to find out the answer ourselves. My mother would ask people in the supermarket how they lost their finger. My father would ask drag queens if they had any kids. My grandmother would ask if vegetarians ate ham. I had no idea that there was such a thing as an inappropriate question. Health, money, secrets, sex; I asked about them all. We all did.
So it was interesting to read a new piece of research, published by Peanut—an online community for women at every stage of the fertility journey, from pregnancy to motherhood to menopause—that listed a whole array of unwanted questions we should try to avoid. These include some absolute floor-filling classics. You know, the ones that are rolled out at every birthday, Diwali, Eid, Christmas: “Are you married?” “When are you going to have kids?” “Was it planned?” “Can I play with the baby?” Turn it up, DJ, it’s the soundtrack to my womb.
But there were a few others that felt less familiar to me. For instance: “When are you going to give him a baby?” Or: “Why do you look like that?” Perhaps my partner’s ambivalence about parenthood and the fact that I have always looked like a nectarine left at the bottom of a backpack protected me from this sort of invasion.
The report, titled “The State of Invisibility,” surveyed more than 3,600 women across the UK and the US in September 2023, and—as you might have guessed—a lot of what came out was people talking about feeling invisible. In fact, 30% of women said they felt invisible often, while 42% reported feeling invisible sometimes. What’s more, 93% said they felt unappreciated or unacknowledged, while 93% of women said that, since becoming a mother, their prebaby identity felt it had been reduced to simply “mom.” All of which shows us that feminism is needed on the frontiers of fertility and motherhood just as much as it is needed in the bedroom and workplace.
And yet, I do wonder if we should be too critical of people asking questions. Perhaps I’m showing my bias here, but I’ve always found that one of the strongest tools we have against invisibility is communication. And a significant part of communication is asking questions. (The other big part is listening, which I’m working on, but it is significantly less entertaining than, say, asking an adult man if he can grow a beard or asking your boss how much their bike cost.)
A well-intentioned question like “How’s the baby bump?” is surely more welcome than someone talking at you for 15 minutes about their new kitchen while resolutely keeping their eyes above your neck. I’m certain that being asked “Are you hormonal?” might play out very differently depending on the context, tone, person asking and the sense of empathy involved. And isn’t “How is your partner holding up?” sometimes a useful way to release the pressure valve of relationship stress?
There is certainly value in reframing some common and often insensitive questions. “How is your pregnancy going?” is less pointed than asking “Is it twins?” “What do you like to do?” is just as important as “What does your child like to do?” “Can I help you?” is way more useful than “Why is the baby crying?” (Although, when my son asked this recently, it did open up a genuinely interesting conversation about fear that we might not have had otherwise.)
As a lifelong casual interrogator, I was always going to take issue with the idea that certain questions were out of bounds. I love having friends and family who ask me the difficult things. I love the tricky questions that solicit revelations I couldn’t have gotten to on my own. I like people taking an interest. Of course, there’s a reason that therapists keep most of their questions open. It is true that some people are easier to open up to than others. And I have learned that some things are made inappropriate as a result of their context rather than their intention.
But really, I still want to know: Do you have a favorite parent?
This story was originally published in British Vogue.
