When you are splayed out on a table giving birth with what seems like sold-out stadium seating all around you, you may have a fleeting thought between pains and pushes about the embarrassing lack of privacy. Well, hang on girl, it only gets worse! They tell you about losing your abdominal muscles, hours of sleep, and sanity, but the loss of privacy is rarely discussed…I guess because once you lose it, you forget that you ever had it.

My first clue came during my daughter’s infancy when I was the only parent in the house who knew how to soothe a crying baby. Sometimes the soothing had to go on for hours and eventually nature would call. I had always maintained a modicum of reserve when it came to toilet functions. That was an area of intimacy I didn’t want to share with my husband. But pretty soon I was actually holding an infant while sitting on the throne. By the time she was a toddler, I began to expect her coming into the bathroom with some emergency (like, the immediate need for a juice box) whenever I retired to the privy.

It’s not just physical privacy that is lost it’s the supposed secrets that you don’t necessarily want to share with the world. When we first moved to Raleigh, my son was four. Soon after we got here, my husband and I decided that we had as many children as we could handle (two, that is…we didn’t say we could handle much) so I got my tubes tied. A brief, truthful, but non-specific explanation as to my hospital visit was given to the children. A couple weeks later, we met a new neighbor walking his dog. We chatted with the usual, “Where are you from?” and “How long have you lived here?” When he asked, “How many kids do you have?” my son piped up, “Just us two. Mommy had surgery on her belly so she won’t have any more.” It gave new meeting to TMI (too much information)!

The secrets they divulge while you stand there praying for the ground to open up and swallow you whole are mortifying, but what is REALLY scary is the secrets they share when you aren’t present to strategically interrupt or place a gentle-but-firm hand over those loose lips. When my daughter was in kindergarten, we had her best friend Jenna in the car with us when we were going to pick up Chinese food. I stayed in the car with the girls while my husband went in to fetch the food. Jenna announced, “We come here too. But my Mommy can’t leave me and the baby in the car while she gets the food anymore. The policeman told her she can’t do that.”

The more I think about it, the more I’m certain that I would rather have my privacy back than my abdominal muscles! I have a feeling Jenna’s Mom would agree with me!

Di appears every Saturday on TriangleMom2Mom. Read more about Di at her blog Live and Let Di.