Shoot Me (Please)

Could anything more boring and coma-inducing than listening to a bunch of women talk about pregnancy, child birth and day care centers for an hour straight?

Today we had a farewell lunch at work for a coworker who is pregnant and leaving. There were about 12 women at this lunch - mostly mothers, but 2 or 3 of us are not mothers. Well, first the ladies asked the departing pregnant women, Jennifer, how she is feeling. A ten minute discussion ensued about tiredness, too-frequent bathroom trips in the middle of the night, trouble sleeping and so on. Then the discussion turned to potential names for the baby - another 10 minute discussion. Then the women embarked on a lengthy discussion about day care centers - which ones are good, which ones are not so good, and a lengthy discussion about the merits of a particular school with a "child-centered" philosophy. Then the topic of child birth emerged and the mothers began to regale all of us with all the gory details of vaginal birth versus c-section, natural childbirth versus epidural and on and on. All this, mind you, while we were in the middle of eating greasy, cheese pizza.

For the entire hour these 10 or so women - most of whom are intelligent, educated women who are normally quite capable of interesting conversation, talked about NOTHING - not one single other topic - other than this stuff. It took every ounce of self-discipline I could muster to maintain the appearance of interest and attention. I just kept thinking to myself, "how soon can I leave without being rude?"

You would NEVER, EVER catch a group of men sitting around and talking about expectant fatherhood for a full hour straight. Men realize that it's just not that interesting and there is more to life than babies, diapers and epidurals. But put a group of otherwise interesting and intelligent women together with a pregnant woman and be prepared to be bored out of your skull for 60 minutes.

Now you can understand why most of my friends are male.