Facebook has been an incredibly useful tool in my post-loss life. It has been a way for me to reach my network of friends and family easily, a chance to keep up on where everyone else’s lives are going, and it has also provided me with opportunities to connect with other women in the infant loss community. It’s given me a way to share our story with others, which is priceless. All of those things are positive reasons to keep a social media outlet like Facebook in my daily life. It has actually helped me tremendously. However, the downsides of such an avenue of communication for someone who has lost their newborn baby are also numerous. I know that when I check my Facebook, there is always the risk that I might see something that saddens me, and I accept that. Sadness is honestly one of my predominating feelings for obvious reasons, so I’m not afraid of it. What makes it tough though are the multitudinous baby product advertisements that pop up in my newsfeed. It’s a lot like the random assortment of infant-related mail that shows up in my mailbox at home- unexpected and hurtful. Just another reminder that any of those things are useless to me because fate decreed that my baby would not survive.
On Facebook, there’s the option to “Hide this ad” when you click on the little down arrow at the top right corner of the ad. Upon first using that option, I was pleasantly relieved that, like the ‘unfollow’ button, you could choose to unfollow an advertisement. After that click, however, you have to take another step and answer the question “Why don’t you want to see this ad?”. Instantly, the painful answer, “because my baby died”, forms in my mind. I can almost see the words as if they are listed in the options that you can choose from. But, alas, that isn’t exactly an answer they’ve formulated, nor is it one they’d truly want to hear. No one wants to hear that. One potential answer option is “It’s offensive to me”, and that doesn’t quite fit, and though it’s hurtful, it obviously isn’t intended to be. There isn’t an option to write an answer, so the closest answer I can select is “It’s not relevant to me”. The trouble is, it IS relevant to me because I DID have a baby, and I WANT those things to be a part of my life. But instead, I must give a generic answer, because it’s the easiest way. The team behind the scenes (whom I believe must analyze page interests and likes and then figure out which ads to target my page with) then promises not to show as many ads like that in the future. It rarely works though, because more baby ads inevitably show up again. There’s just so much of it out there in the world. This isn’t meant to bash on Facebook at all. I use it every day, and of course there is always the option for me not to look at it. The point here is that our society as a whole, along with social media networks, often don’t think about infant loss. Though it happens more often than you’d think, it’s just not something the majority of the population experiences. There’s no option to be exempt from advertisements, pages, mailing lists, emails, etc. because your child died, but maybe there should be!
Being a bereaved parent hurts enough on its own, and there will always be certain things that are difficult to see, but the extra, constant baby reminders add another unnecessary layer to it. But, if I’ve learned nothing else as a grieving mother, I’ve certainly learned that the world is an unfair place. Life is unfair. Life after loss is even more unfair.