There is a lot of good and funny advice out there about what not to do on Facebook (like CNN’s The 12 Most Annoying Types of Facebookers). I would like to add another: if you really want someone to have a happy birthday, do not allude to their likely conception date in your birthday greeting. No one likes to go there. What you’re really saying is – have a kind of freaky moment on your birthday when I force you to consider your parents having sex.
The Bloggess recently detailed how freaky the thought is in her Mominatrix interview. There she rightly steers the conversation with a mom-sex author away from the idea of moms having sex. Reeling with visions of her own mother and grandmother conceiving in this manner, I tried to make her feel better by suggesting I got pregnant by merely making eye contact with my husband. Maybe she is a rare exception where her parents didn’t actually “do” it.
Meanwhile, my son just celebrated his first birthday, so even if I’m right about the eye contact, someone already planted the thought for him, writing on Facebook: “so many people have a birthday now because it is exactly 9 months after Christmas.” Lo and behold, 6 weeks later we celebrate my husband’s birthday and someone has the audacity to write, “Amazing how many birthdays are exactly 9 months from Valentine’s Day…” Really? Not cool.
We can all subtract 9 months from the current date. Please don’t ruin our birthdays doing that for us anymore.