Crunch!

This morning at breakfast I found this shining example of well-meaning punctuation that just — should I say it? — misses the mark. Granted, “Crunch!” (exclamation point and all) is part of the cereal name, but here it just looks like onomatopoeia. So for those of us who like to share our cereal with a special someone, we also get to enjoy dramatic sound effects. CRUNCH! Take that, non-lovers!

Un-mother

Let me put it plainly: I am not a mother. I get to spend Mother’s Day enjoying time with my mother and my mother-in-law, both of whom I love dearly, with none of the attention on me and I’m quite happy about it, thank you.

But I’m in my mid-to-late twenties and have been married for five years, so naturally people have been getting more and more curious about our childless state — more specifically, when we plan on remedying our childless state. As in, with a child. Some are more curious than others. (And more than our mothers, which if you ask me is a little weird.)

I’ve been asked the question numerous times over the last several years, by many different people. I don’t mind when some people ask. Yet others are quite off-putting. I hadn’t thought much about why that is.

It randomly occurred to me today that it must be the subtext — the invisible implications — that exists in the question when certain people ask, when worded a certain way. You can tell when I’m put off by your nosiness and you’re put off by my snark that now, now we’re really miscommunicating. It’s a beautiful, vicious downward spiral, all born of a relative stranger’s unnatural interest in my reproductive plans.

There’s the innocuous, “Are you planning to have kids?”

And then there’s, “When are you having kids?” or, “Are you going to start having kids soon?” and my all-time favorite, “Wow, all that working and going to grad school sure isn’t going to leave you with a lot of time to have kids!”

The first I can answer with a definitive, “yes,” which is all you need to know as far as I’m concerned. Yes, we plan to, but maybe we don’t know when, or if we can or will. But once you start digging for more, for juicy details, and asserting the assumption that two young, seemingly healthy, working adults would have nothing more important to do (or could want nothing more than) to have children — when you’ve gone there, you’ve breached that comfort zone and are heading straight for sarcastic retort land. We’re waiting for a wealthy benefactor, you see.

Of course I’m missing a lot of other important nonverbal clues — tone, inflection, physical expression — that help to imply one meaning or the other. Some people are harmless, and simply have trouble with the wording. It’s forgivable. The problem is that while the former suggests that I set my own baby-producing schedule, the latter seems to imply that I have but one purpose in life, and would I please just get on it already?

Anticipation

The road of communications studies is fraught with peril.

Especially if you’re a perfectionist.

Especially if you’re a perfectionist who writes a blog about miscommunication.

As I prepare for the final presentation of my master’s thesis project, I realized that I’ve become hypersensitive to what and how I communicate what I’ve done, why, and what it all means. If someone doesn’t get it, does that mean I’ve failed somehow? Aren’t I supposed to be the expert — a master — after all? So, what if I make a mistake? What if I’m not a perfect communicator?

As with any presentation, especially one with many “parts,” there are lots of ways to go wrong: the poster, the paper, the verbal explanations. The directions to get my family there. The clothes I wear. The crab dip.

Egad! It’s ironic when the fashion expert wears an unflattering color, when the neatnik leaves her socks on the floor, or when the chef burns the toast. Likewise, when the communication “expert” miscommunicates, does it do her discredit? There’s a certain paranoia that accompanies such displays of knowledge: will I be perfect enough?

After all, there is a guilty pleasure in observing and ridiculing the glaring mistakes of others (it’s sinfully delicious!); then we quietly and consciously evaluate our own behavior in order to avoid becoming the object of ridicule ourselves. I would know. Many of the miscommunications I’ve written about are things I’ve been guilty of. My goal has always been to avoid proselytizing, because I’m not a perfect communicator — far from it, in fact. But still, I’m pursuing a graduate degree in COMMUNICATION. Wouldn’t you expect to leave my presentation feeling like you fully understood my work? And if you just couldn’t grasp it, and I couldn’t figure out how to help you grasp it, wouldn’t you be pondering — and possibly ridiculing — the irony of that fact? Because I would. And then I’d come here and blog about it.

Anyway, my point is that in this case, it’s possible that miscommunication itself miscommunicates something about my ability to communicate. Unless miscommunication simply communicates my ability to miscommunicate, and if that’s true, then I no longer have any idea what I’m talking about. But at some point it was really profound.