Irish Triplets

or, 'the time i got pregnant after six weeks of dating a guy'

From about February until June of every year, something odd happens to me: strangers become unusually excited about my sex life.

I should preface this by saying that, while I am not terribly generous of spirit otherwise, I do think that most of the time when we think others are being willfully offensive, they’re just desperate to make small talk. As a gold-star idiot who has put my foot so far into my own mouth that I’ve tasted knee, I wish we’d all be a little more forgiving* of the fact that in even the most lightly trying situations, the poor, overwrought human nervous system simply defaults to a kind of limited language model line of questioning. Emphasis “limited.”

(As a side note: I don’t get mad when people in Los Angeles default, as they famously do, to banalities about the weather or an exhaustive list of what roads they took to our coffee meeting… mostly because I want the right to do the same. What do you all want us to talk about, anyway? The Magna Carta? Middlemarch?! It’s a miracle that we’re hauling our crispy microplastic brains out of our protein-popcorn-crumb-filled bedsheets just to dissociate at each other all day. Let’s all cut one another a break if we can’t come up with anything better for the CVS cashier than “Rainy out there!” )

Okay, back to me and my personal grievances. When you’re a woman over 30, you often get asked if you have kids, but for me, it’s the follow-up question, “How old are they?” that shoots me and people I’ve never met before right to a place of deeply unerotic, mouth-puckering, nose-wrinkling discomfort.

This is because, during these few particular months, my children’s ages are consecutive. Right now, they are six, seven, and eight years old.

I realize this is fairly unusual, but it makes people’s eyes spin around in their heads like ping pong balls in a bingo hopper, and steam comes shooting out of their ears. I’ve heard every iteration of remark that means “How often were you and your husband doing intercourse? Did you go to work? Who was watching the other children while you two were humping yourselves into oblivion?” Then there’s the inevitable mention of “Irish twins,” a quaint, hilariously ethnically rude phrase that has somehow survived a century of whipsawing cultural sensitivity.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this happens at least once a week during the spring months — in part because my children are very loud and occasionally disruptive in public in a way that prompts others to demand their biographical information.

That my children are present sometimes seems to be no impediment to anyone — from Jersey Mike’s sandwichistas to pediatric dermatologists — to declare, “Wow, you and ‘Dad’ were busy!”

Because I am from the Midwest and have issues with overapologizing — not to mention creating and enforcing boundaries — rather than letting these comments pass, I sometimes feel that I must explain myself.

I’ve thankfully gotten to the point that I no longer say things like, “No, no, we weren’t having that much sex,” or “Yes, I know, the third one was such a shock I dropped the test into a shag rug and had to cut it out with nail clippers and still got pee everywhere and had to throw the rug out, but the sanitaiton department wouldn’t take it for weeks so I called them up and yelled at them in my second-trimester and they only got it because I was crying,” etc.

For a while, when the kids were still VERY little, I tried to come up with some sort of sly retort, the kind syndicated newspaper advice columnists were always advocating for in the 1990s, that indicates that I’m delighted with my life and you’re the creepy horndog for looking at my toddlers and immediately imagining me getting my back blown out, non-stop.

But, as it happens, I’ve been overexplaining it since the beginning — I got pregnant after dating someone for only a few weeks.