The Internet Still Thinks I'm Pregnant

Modern Love

The New York Times

Love, New York Times, Nytimes, Essay, Loss, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Redemption, Nyt

4.3 • 9K Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2022

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amy Pittman was thrilled about her first pregnancy. She immediately downloaded a pregnancy app, and she was charmed when it showed her baby had grown from the size of a lavender bud to the size of a chocolate chip. When she miscarried, she deleted the app and the chocolate chip avatar, but the internet never caught on. Seven months later, Amy received a sample of baby formula. Although she had deleted the pregnancy app, the baby formula company didn’t know — and thought she was a new mom. She laughed — what else could she do — and loved the idea that her chocolate chip was out there, trolling the internet. After her miscarriage, Amy had a son, Simon. We check in with Amy about life with a preschooler, the lasting impact of grief and the strangeness of an internet that won’t let you let go.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin. This is Modern Love. A few months ago, I got
0:21.4	an email alert from my credit card company. It told me that I'd spent $400 at MGM Grand
0:28.2	Casino in Las Vegas, which was impossible because I was here at the office in New York City
0:35.6	working on an episode of this show. So I called my dad freaking out and he was like,
0:41.7	okay, someone stole your identity. Where is your credit card information online? And I
0:47.5	was like, I mean, it's everywhere. And it got me thinking about just how much of myself
0:53.4	my personal information is floating around on the internet. Amy Pittman wrote an essay
0:59.6	about how disconcerting it is to realize just how much of yourself you've shared online.
1:06.5	It's called The Internet Still Things I'm Pregnant. And it's read by Sam Dez.
1:18.4	I found out I was pregnant the normal way. I peed on a stick. My husband and I had been
1:24.4	trying to conceive for a long time and during a difficult year. So I held off looking at
1:30.5	the stick for as long as I could to give it plenty of time to think about its answer.
1:36.2	While I was showering, a beautiful magenta plus sign materialized.
1:45.4	With many twenty-somethings, I have an app for just about every important thing in my life.
1:51.1	I have a health tracker that I ignore, a budget tracker that I ignore, an app to pay my
1:57.2	bills that I try to ignore, and a period tracker that I'm obsessed with. Every week I religiously
2:05.1	tracked my mood on the period tracker, along with my core temperature, the viscosity of
2:10.9	various fluids. How often we were having sex.
2:16.3	The app had more intimate knowledge of my reproductive behavior than my husband or any doctor.
2:23.5	On the day of my positive pregnancy test, I logged into my period tracker to share the
2:28.3	good news. When I did, it suggested a pregnancy app. I downloaded it immediately.
2:35.1	I could see how big my baby's hands were. Look ahead to see what new and weird things my
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