If you’re in the family way, it means you’re expecting. A baby. Good on you.
Like, it’s kind of a stupid phrase because there are lots of families who don’t have children, so why are we using the term ‘family’ to only mean ‘with children’? It doesn’t really make sense.
But who cares about that, it’s only language, right? It’s only rhetoric. Except there’s no such thing as ‘only rhetoric’. People chose language specifically to communicate certain beliefs.
So we all get what this phrase means – it’s not overly complicated. I want to talk a bit about this whole bullshit family values junk that spews from the mouths of all republican politicians and citizens. It’s a shame that this phrase has come to result in a direct attack on anyone who isn’t considered to be the norm (white, hetero, Christian, upper-middle class, fairly racist…). The words ‘family’ and ‘values’ should mean something beautiful. The two words put together should imply a sense of ethical responsibility to your own family, including your actions and beliefs and how you choose to treat your intimate family members, but also the greater community in which you live.
Instead, the term has been hijacked and means something quite different. Family values is the upheld belief that the nuclear family is the essential ethical and moral unit of society. This belief is used to systemically discriminate against everyone who doesn’t adhere to those conventional fundamentalist values. Which is most of us.
Most of us are totally fine with gay marriage, single parenthood, gay adoption, childless couples, etc etc. Most of us don’t really want the pope or some ridiculous politically conservative batshit crazy person dictating how we can live our lives. And yet somehow we have to keep hearing all this rhetoric about family values and how those of us who don’t adhere to this bullshit is somehow threatening ‘the family unit’.
So yeah. I want babies. But I’ll never consider myself to be ‘in the family way’, because that’s a bigoted phrase that indicates one very rigid concept and definition of what family is. I already have a family. In fact, I have several families. One includes my partner and our three-legged angry cat. Another includes my extended family, my parents, my sister and brother, their families. Another is my chosen family – friends and loved ones who aren’t related to me by blood (and whom I certainly didn’t push out of my vag), but are every bit as important to me as my family by birth. If we could just let go of the rigid concepts that try to define us (and maybe kick the conservative religious nutcases, who try to shove these definitions down our throats, in the balls) then we could begin to unravel the mess that categorizes us into ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’.
1. I’m not in the family way, I’m shitting out babies. There’s a difference.
2. Julie would have loved to be in the family way, but she was devastated to discover that you’re only allowed to use that phrase if you’re a right-wing conservative douche boat.
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