Kayla Lee Welch, a mom from Alabama with her second child on the way [1], perfectly explained why staging fake pregnancy announcements [2] can be especially hurtful — whether it's for April Fools' Day or not. In a devastating Facebook post [3] that went viral in 2017, Kayla made her case, and she's 100 percent right.
"This is why your April Fools' joke isn't funny," she said. "This is why it's not funny to lie and joke about being pregnant. This is what it looks like to have a miscarriage [4]. A week ago today, I started spotting. I convinced myself it was normal because I did it with Keegan. This time it wasn't."
She went on to describe just how painful losing a pregnancy can be so that pranksters can see that bringing a baby into the world is nothing to make light of:
"I avoid laying down to go to sleep because as soon as I hit the bed, I'm alone with all of my thoughts. My brain has finally stopped distracting itself from the one thing breaking my heart. And all I can do is cry. My eyes are so swollen and dark it looks like more than just my heart is broken. Crying so hard that you go numb and feel nothing anymore. Being so angry and upset at everything but not being able to explain why. Trying to be happy that your baby never knew anything other than love. And missing someone so dearly that you never even met. It's a pain no one can describe. Because how can you properly grieve someone you never got to meet?"
POPSUGAR caught up with Kayla a year later, and she explained how this "trend" struck her as problematic before she was even a mother herself: "I had for years seen people on my Facebook do this joke every year, and even before I had kids, I didn't find it funny. I felt it was cruel to women who have actually had to say 'We are pregnant!' followed by a 'We are no longer pregnant.' It was like slapping them in the face to me and I hated seeing it."
As soon as Kayla went through her miscarriage in March 2017, she decided to speak up.
"[That experience] absolutely destroyed me. I knew I wasn't the only one who didn't like the joke and I felt no one really explained why it's not [funny]. It was important to me to educate people who may really not understand why it's not funny to pull that as a 'joke,'" she said. "After all, a joke should be funny, and it's never funny to actually have to say you're no longer pregnant in real life."
