Don’t Break the Rules by Having a Baby without Mention that you’re Expecting

I’m talking about breaking the rules on Facebook. There are some unwritten rules. In my opinion, one of those rules was broken.

The rule is:
If you decide to keep major life events a secret, do not suddenly do a 180 degree turn around and then rapid-fire posts about the event that is no longer a secret.

A former classmate of mine suddenly displayed photos of her baby boy on Facebook. Until she did so, none of her Facebook friends even know that she was pregnant.

All prior posts up to that point in time were benign posts about her progression in her martial arts classes. The usual stuff like graduating to a new belt level. Some tae kwon do competition photos and awards.

It was all just stuff with restaurant food images. Desserts. A couple motivational posts. Birthday greetings, Chinese New Year posts.

Actually, the most recent post prior to the hospital baby picture was captioned:

“Finally got our house ready after being busy for months. There is still a lot of work on the backyard but at least can sit down and enjoy a cup of coffee in such a sunny day. Never feel so close to nature.”

Then suddenly, a photo taking in a hospital room of a man holding a baby with the caption, “Yeah! Ready to go home!”

The first comments on that photo were:

• “Your baby?”
• “Whose baby?”

At least she was kind enough to post replies right away stating that it was indeed her baby. Nevertheless, many others like me were also clueless.

Does this change anything for me?

Nope. Nothing really. It just seems that the etiquette for the rules of using Facebook were broken.

In a world where people use Facebook to brag about how much nicer their life is than everybody else’s, it was weird to see somebody post a major life’s event at a moment where it would shock other friends/followers.

I get that some people want privacy for their children, but this seems different. There have been many baby picture posts post-birth. There was nothing prior to the baby picture post that indicated a major (and expected!) life event was about to occur.

This makes me wonder what the motivation is by some people to use Facebook.