I have never been baby-crazy. Having babies always seemed like a thing to do; not the thing, but a thing that one could do in their life. It’s not that I dislike children; I just don’t know what to do around them or say to them. Once, a fellow Metro driver brought their kid in for the day, and forced that poor child to shake my hand and say hi; I think I felt more awkward than the kid. I took out my Altoid tin and shook it at him. “Spicy candy. Want one? Hide the alcohol on your breath? [wink at scowling dad].”
When Michael and I first started dating, he met my family on date two when we made an appearance at Hattie’s birthday party before catching a movie. It only seemed fair that I meet his local family: his good friend Matt, and Matt’s daughter. At one point, when the daughter was talking about school, I suggested that she light up a cigarette in class, kind of in that way that it would signal the end of the conversation and let the teacher know who was really in charge. It’s a great tactic to dismiss people. “Take my seat? [Light up nonchalantly, exhale slowly and with purpose] Yeah, we’ll see.” End of discussion! Hilarious!
Michael (after the outing): “I don’t think Matt thought that was funny.”
Me: “We just took the kid to a HORSE TRACK; I can’t see that it matters.”
Michael: “Yeah, well, he’s sensitive.”
Me: “Pfft. I used to joke about smoking with my niece, and look how she turned out.”
Michael: “Doesn’t she smoke?”
Of course, if I were a smoker, I could’ve shut that down quickly, classily, definitively:
Michael (after the outing): “I don’t think Matt thought that was funny.”
Me: “Yeah [light up, contemplatively stare at the glowing tip of the cigarette]… Well…[slow exhale, look away, end of conversation].”
Don’t make me talk to your children. It’s too stressful, and it ruins relationships. Then why did Chad and I try to get pregnant? Looking back, it’s because I didn’t want to get a job. See, the first time I tried to get pregnant, Chad and I had just bought a house and I was a few months from finishing my undergrad degree. Also, I was about 28, and had learned that fertility drops significantly after age 30, so the clock was ticking. And I don’t mean in the way that I felt a biological drive, but more of a, Shit, if we are going to have kids, we better get crackin’. I made an appointment with my doctor, thinking that at the geriatric age of 28, I should have a team of fertility specialists working on this. My biggest concern was being on antidepressants, and how this could affect a fetus, but basically I learned that it’s cool to pop pills like Elvis when pregnant. Also, I learned that my uterus was cavernous, which was reminiscent of our recent house-hunting experiences where agents would note in the property description that there was ‘room to add-on.’
Three months went by, and nothing happened, so we got a dog (please see my expose on Pug Ownership, WRESTLING BIG PUGS WHO LEAVE MIGHTY BRUISES, in which I describe in graphic detail the legless man and his puppy mill from which we rescued my sweet baby angel Atticus Pug). You might think that Atticus’ amazing 3-weeks-until-house-trained journey would have tricked me into thinking raising children would be easy, but those three weeks of midnight trips outside were enough to totally fuck up my sleep and psychologically derail me. Clearly, I wasn’t meant to get pregnant because I wouldn’t be able to handle the sleep disruptions of an infant without ending up in a psych ward.
Really, that’s what stopped me; my biggest fear was pregnancy + depression. Followed by my fear of parenting + depression. Just those few weeks potty-training Atticus led to mood changes, and the link between sleep disruption and depression is well documented; it seemed that pregnancy and child-rearing was something I would have to *get through* (endure, suffer; not enjoy or cherish). As many as 80% of women report at least mild depression within one year of giving birth, so to me, it seems like there’s just no way I’d escape pregnancy without experiencing a major depressive episode. Also, women are 25 times more likely to become psychotic following childbirth than at any other time in their lives which basically means that childbirth is a huge fucking bitch (I’m curious how likely a psychotic break would be sans pregnancy?). Assuming I didn’t kill the baby in a fit of psychosis, surely I’d at least have trouble bonding with it because of my mood, which means that the kid would grow up to be a serial killer.
So, instead of spending money on children, Chad and I made annual pilgrimages to Waikiki. I was good with this plan, but for whatever reason, the rest of the world wasn’t. When I first started my job at the county, the receptionist (complete with tattooed eyeliner and the hopes of meeting a husband through her position) couldn’t understand why I didn’t want kids.
Crazy Lady: “Is it because you were a teacher and were always around kids?”
Me: “No….I was never a teacher [but thanks for thinking of that weird excuse].”
Crazy Lady: ‘Then, why not? Why no kids?”
Me: “Because I don’t want them.”
Crazy Lady: “…because you can’t have them?”
Me: ‘If that answer will make this conversation end, then sure, why not?”
Because not wanting children wasn’t enough; there must be a reason, and everyone needed to know the reason. Why is it hard to accept that I just don’t want kids? Is it that misery loves company? Parents love to hear about others having kids. Also? Women seem to want others to get pregnant at the same time that they are pregnant (same with getting married…. once you’re married, it’s hard to not encourage your single friends to get married), but after witnessing two friends corresponding attempts at pregnancy, it was actually heartbreaking to see what happens when one gets pregnant and the other doesn’t. By age 35, folks my age had broken into two camps: those with kids, and those without. And for those of us without, we would meet for happy hour because we can and inevitably confirm with each other: you aren’t having kids, right?
Then Chad and I divorced. Not that the ‘baby thing’ was a cause of this, but it did come up a few times in my therapy sessions that preceded the divorce. I started to think about the baby that never was. I had done my best to minimize the importance of our brief stint of trying. I was quick to stop and quick to move on. That book is closed. End of discussion [stubs out cigarette and walks away]. I never mourned this loss of “what could have been” because who knew it needed to be mourned? I was too busy packing for Hawaii. Of course, I also never anticipated getting divorced at age 37 or 38. Even though I pretty much accepted that Chad and I would be childless, being single after prime baby-making-years seemed harder to accept because in my mind, if I did want a kid, if I did change my mind, well, that option was totally off the table because there’s no way I’d meet someone, get married, and get pregnant before my eggs disintegrated into dust. Also, unlike so many other people I knew, I had experienced neither a pregnancy nor an abortion. Shouldn’t there have at least been an ‘accident’? Maybe I couldn’t get pregnant. And when Michael and I got together (please see my post about online dating You Chose a Monster), we talked about kids, but both agreed that this window had closed given our ages, and with that we moved forward with our life together.
And then Trump won the nomination. Our house fell into darkness. We were both sad and moody. I missed work the day after his nomination, just sickened by this outcome, and it turns out quite a few people at the office had the same reaction, except one co-worker, who prides herself in having not called out sick “since the third grade” (this should NOT be a point of pride, by the way). Although, perhaps she should have called out, because even though physically present, she had taken to trolling the PAWS website all day as a method of self-soothing. She kept sending us, the teammates, links to available pets: “Here’s Butters! Everything’s better with Butters!” “Jacques would be perfect for you, although he would benefit from basic training and continued socialization so he grows into the best dog he can be.”
Turns out, she’s actually pretty good at her side-business of pet-matchmaker, because she found a dog for me, and I forwarded that link on to Michael, who was suddenly open to the idea of getting another pet (even though we had decided no more pets (“fish don’t count”) until we saw a reduction in our current pet-population). Michael and I discussed that PAWS-pup, and then started down the rabbit hole of the hunt for a new dog, scouring websites, “maybe not THAT dog, but why not THIS dog?” Hours later we were awfully close to driving across state to pick up the perfect dog we saw on Craigslist that we absolutely needed immediately. But, with age comes wisdom, and we smartly decided to pause and discuss the new dog over drinks at our local dive bar where we proceeded to get drunk and before the end of the night, Michael asked me, “what if we had a baby?” And I said, “Sure.” Six seconds later, I was pregnant.
Can we just be perfectly clear that I wholeheartedly and un-jokingly blame Trump for this baby-misadventure? Understand me: I NEVER WOULD HAVE AGREED TO HAVING A BABY IF TRUMP WERE NOT ELECTED, and I truly believe that. As my friend Max said, “It’s like you two wanted to light a candle in the darkness.” Exactly. And see, if we were serious, we needed to do this immediately, before I got much older (because I was just shy of my 41st birthday), and since I was at the end of my cycle, there really wasn’t time to think, it was either take a pill and wait a WHOLE MONTH or jump in (heaven forbid I ever wait patiently and think things through), and while we both agreed on the plan (“get pregnant”), we were also both busily Googling “pregnant at 40” and “older parents.”
Instead of sleeping, I’d lay in bed, poring over Amazon, placing late night orders for books on fertility and diet, researching and purchasing prenatal vitamins, ovulation kits, and even Pre-Seed, a lubricant (or snake oil) which supposedly helps the sperm reach the egg. I was even tempted by a sperm mobility test you can get on Amazon, but Michael suggested we wait until we actually tried before jumping right into the diagnosis of infertility. I started drinking whole milk, because there was evidence that women who consumed at least one full-fat item everyday were more fertile than those who didn’t. I stopped drinking my morning creamer-with-coffee because no more caffeine for me, and of course stopped drinking alcohol (which resulted in me attending a hockey game SOBER).
The week I ovulated, I got a massage, and I felt weirdly dizzy afterward. As someone who regularly gets massages, this was unusual. Was I pregnant? I began making an effort to walk during my lunch break at work, to burn off those extra calories I was consuming in the name of having the most perfectly well-balanced diet (not that I was eating anything too crazy, but I started swapping out low fat/ low calorie/ low flavor Sara Lee Delightful/ Weight-Watcher-friendly bread for Dave’s Killer bread— which is an additional 3 points. Hardly seems like a big deal, right? But of course, multiply that by 3 meals, and of course the whole milk steamers I started drinking, and well, hell. There you go. I gained a few extra pounds). On one walk, I smelled ketchup. Ketchup! Not fries or hamburgers or anything like that, but ketchup. Was I pregnant? Then the cat food smelled metallic. And one day I could smell wine in the lunchroom at work; does anyone else smell that? Maybe I’m pregnant. One week after ovulating, my legs felt thick and heavy on my walk. That night I came home from work and slept for 4 hours. I was so tired I couldn’t function. Clearly pregnant.
Every. Little . Thing.
I Googled it all, then reported Michael. How do you tell your husband all of this and not sound crazy? Because, first, I’ve had my body for 40 years and I’m pretty familiar with its little idiosyncrasies, so believe me when I say it’s different. But second? Not only can all of these little things mean you’re pregnant; they can also mean you are NOT pregnant (you could have cancer). It’s like a fucking horoscope. “Slight cramping, not much. No spotting.” “Now I’m spotting. Shit. Well, that could go either way.” “I feel moody, emotional, but not my usual anger-emotional. Just… different.” “I have nervous, butterfly-stomach, but I’m not nervous.”
My period was due on a Sunday. I took the pregnancy test on Thursday, the very earliest I could test (then I took it again Friday, then Sunday, then Monday, and I would’ve kept taking tests, not because I didn’t believe it, but just so certain I’d miscarry and by repeatedly testing, well, then I’d know –even though I’d probably know I was not pregnant without taking a test). The line was faint, but it was there.
I think? Was it? Should I test again? Should I wait a day? Should I wake up Michael and say I might be pregnant? And then what? What do you say after that? “Go back to sleep. I have a bus to catch.” How does life keep moving forward when it turns out you’re pregnant?
I waited until I got to work, giving Michael some time to wake up and have a cup of coffee, then instant messaged him (I found that, much like how someone with an eating disorder knows everything there is to know about nutrition and weight loss, someone trying to get pregnant knows everything there is to know about getting pregnant. Also, the first thing I Googled when I got to work was rates of miscarriage):
Me: I’m pregnant.
Michael: But you don’t know yet because it isn’t Friday and you took your test early
Me: you can’t get a false positive, just a false negative. Unless you have cancer.
Michael: so you are convinced you are pregnant
Me: convinced in that, as of this morning at 6am, I was pregnant because positive means there is the pregnancy hormone in your body. If the line is light, it just means it’s early and so not a lot of the hormone is present, but it’s still there, so I don’t know if it’s really a question of being convinced. I think it’s a question of, if it’s this early, there’s still a chance it could abort. They call that a “chemical” pregnancy, miscarrying this early.
Michael: so you are pregnant but you may not stay pregnant
Me: Yes. Apparently a 34% increased chance of miscarrying because of my age and up to a 75% chance that will happen in the next few weeks. There are key dates. if you make it to week 7, miscarriage drops dramatically. Then week 12 is like when it drops big time, then again at 20 weeks. But yeah, if I were to miscarry, it’d pretty much be now, which is why people don’t say they’re pregnant until the 2nd trimester
Michael: mmmmk, so I shouldn’t tell my family.
Me: yeah, probably not.
So, we kept it to ourselves. Well, not totally. I had to tell my sisters; they are my support system. I would need them if anything bad happened, and if I told my sisters then I had to tell my niece, because she’d find out anyway, and if all of these people knew, then Mom would be rightfully sad that she was left out, so I told her, too. But, I didn’t tell anyone at work. Oh wait, actually that’s not true. I told my friend Max that same day, seeing as how he was already in on our plan to get pregnant. And Haley, I guess I told Haley. I don’t know. I suppose you could say I’m not great at keeping secrets, but secrets are weird. Bad stuff happens; why pretend otherwise? Why make bad things shameful things? Good things happen. Why lie about it? If you aren’t comfortable with your decision, then why did you make it? Secrets are for Christmas presents, not for life (I don’t 100% believe this, by the way; there’s plenty of legit reasons to keep a secret).
My body changed immediately, which I found fascinating. I needed new bras only a couple weeks in. I felt thick, and my pants got a little snug around the waist, like I was always bloated. Things started shifting: the uterus, normally the size of a pear, starts to grow around week five (3 weeks after fertilization), and although you can’t see it from the outside, it’s already pressing on the bladder (which apparently goes away as the uterus begins to “stand up,” and it stands up not because there’s a 9-pound baby in there, but in preparation for the 9-pound baby). (BTW, the pregnancy-counting system drove Michael nuts. Because you know, you count from the first day after your last period, which seems stupid in a first-world full of ovulation kits and people who want babies and obsessively track dates. But I also say, don’t dismiss the important work my body was doing before the sperm showed up. Every month, things happen, all in the name of babies).
Let’s talk about the most debilitating change: exhaustion. I recently learned that when people drown, there isn’t splashing or yelling, like they show on TV or in movies. That splashy-bit is a sign of distress, more like “drowning is imminent”. Actually, people drown silently, having no time to yell for help because they are gulping at air, then they sink back under; and unable to flail because their body is trying to stay afloat; but how boring is this? Instead, TV focuses on all the splashing, which leads to death and dismay in real life because no one can identify when their kid or their friend is drowning. My point is this (beyond creating an opportunity to educate on swimming safety): I think morning sickness is like the exciting TV version of drowning. You can see vomiting, imagine it, sympathize with it. It’s a showy and well-known part of pregnancy. But the average person doesn’t know about the exhaustion that accompanies early pregnancy.
And why would you be exhausted? How can that be legitimate? It’s probably all in your head, I mean, after all, the little creature is microscopic. But hormones, oh hormones are devious devils from the beginning. Per my extensive Google-research (all very scientific), I’ve learned that progesterone was the real bastard in my (brief) pregnancy. In addition to relaxing smooth muscles–specifically the uterus, to prevent it from contracting (aka, your period or a miscarriage)– it relaxes ALL smooth muscles: esophagus (heartburn), bowel (constipation), and nostrils (congestion) to name a few. And progesterone makes you sleepy (or, as one woman posted online, “it’s like having a couple of glasses of wine”). In a normal non-baby menstrual cycle, progesterone ranges from 1-20 nano grams in a milliliter. But if there’s a baby, then it climbs up to 90 ng/ml, like around weeks 8 to 14, then the placenta starts to make progesterone and the levels slowly drop back down. In other words, progesterone is increasing at a frantic (a scientific word) rate during early pregnancy.
We have a quiet room at work, a little closet basically, with a recliner and a phone; it was created for the overnight staff who answer midnight mental health crisis calls, but of course we all use it for one reason or another. Around mid-morning, I’d reach my limit of being alert, and do a walk-by of the quiet room, in hopes that it’d be free. Unfortunately, my wave of exhaustion coincided with the pump-and-dump of breast milk by a couple new moms in my office. Too many days (twice?) I was kicked out. That last time, with nowhere to go, I sat on the floor of my cubicle, covered with my jacket and a blanket I keep at work for emergencies, crying quietly and trying to sleep. This nap was immediately followed with me logging onto Amazon and ordering a reclining camp chair, which continues to reside in my cubicle for those occasional times I need to shut my eyes.
I couldn’t make it through a few hours without taking a nap, let alone a whole day. This combined with my compulsive need to check everything off my list of things to do resulted in quiet-crying-while-folding-laundry or quiet-crying-while-changing-the-sheets, and so on. I couldn’t walk away from the Siren’s song of laundry when tired! How would I be able to let things go with a newborn? And when I did feel awake after work, I’d want to work out, but was too scared because what if I shook the baby loose, and goddamnit, of course I know this isn’t how it works, but it doesn’t matter how educated you may be, or how much Googling you’ve done, it’s scary. Even Michael warned me to “be careful” when exercising. Of course it was a joke, but it wasn’t a joke, and it didn’t make me mad; it just meant this thing in me was just as important to him. It also doesn’t help that everywhere you read says that a woman’s body is built to protect babies, but then you go get a massage and are turned away because you are all of five weeks pregnant. “Oh no! We can’t do that. Something might happen.” (If you massage my shoulders? Really?)
OH, and also there was pregnancy-brain. I could tell that I was having trouble at work. I chalked it up to being tired. But I couldn’t keep track of conversations, I felt like all I could do was the bare minimum, and please don’t ask me to do anything that might have required me to think of something creative because I just couldn’t. We had a team retreat about then; I had spearheaded finding a location, and was kind of excited about the whole thing. But by the time it came around, I couldn’t do it. I mean, I went, but I was floating in a fog. And I felt nauseous. So many different kinds of foods were brought for our potluck lunch, all of which smelled overpoweringly disgusting.
I could feel the foggy-brain-veil lifting after the pregnancy. I didn’t really realize that it had taken over until week by week, my interaction with friends and work increased. Pregnancy-brain: Pregnant women have increased activity in the area of the brain associated with emotional skills when pregnant (and a decrease in other areas), which scientists theorize is to prep the woman to be a mom. Like, creating the neurological pathways that your brain needs in place so you can bond with the baby. 80% of pregnant women report having pregnancy brain (I wonder if it’s the same 80% who report postpartum depression?). So, as much as it sucks, it’s all very real and for a very good cause and it’s not all in your head (well…I guess it technically is).
Every twinge in my body was scary. Is it good? Well, cramping could be the uterine muscles stretching out, which is good. Of course, it could also be bad. What happens when you miscarry? What would it look like? Do I need a miscarry-kit for at work, in case I suddenly bleed out in my cubicle? In December, I was calling in sick once or twice a week. I would have telecommuted from home, but things don’t always work out and I ate up all my sick time. Why does this hurt? What is happening? I was too tired to get up, shower, take the bus, and then what? Show up at a place in which, for whatever reason, I felt isolated, alienated, and unsupported? I was scared of what was happening, what could happen, and even what would happen if everything was successful (the lifetime implications of “successful” pregnancy).
And then one day I wasn’t pregnant. Having no sick time left, I asked the doctor if I could go to work the next day. Of course you can! What he meant was, physically you’re able to sit at a desk for 8 hours. What I wish he told me was that my hormones would drop some ridiculous amount within the first day. I drove into the office. Within five minutes of arriving, my boss walked by me and shrugged. Just something he does; a shrug at life, meaningless. And I turned around and went to my cubicle and sobbed. The women around me in neighboring cubicles came over and made a wall (is this what it’s like to live in a village? When women gather in the hut when they have their period, or when they’re pregnant? Supporting and protecting each other?). A couple of them knew; I didn’t need to tell them what happened.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“She was pregnant.”
“I didn’t even know you were pregnant!…Oh…”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Why are you here? Go home.”
I emailed my boss, “see you in 2017,” then packed up my stuff and was given a little Dixie cup of muscle relaxers and anti-anxiety pills, a collection gathered to help numb the psychological pain, then sneaked out the building and headed home (see my earlier post Lies Then and Now in which I compare my office to Valley of the Dolls–which, btw, young people don’t get this reference, so basically all my pop-culture knowledge is now obsolete).
In the next few days, I cancelled my first doctor appointment. “May I ask why? Did you find a new doctor?” Why would it possibly matter? FINE, I’ll tell you. “I’m not pregnant anymore” I said; voice steady when I initiated the call, but shaky now as I tried not to cry. The poor receptionist; he panicked a bit, unsure what to say, surprised by my response (which surprises me, actually). A couple weeks earlier when we wrote our Christmas cards, we started adding notes to family “and there’s a 75% chance that when you get this card, Lee will still be pregnant!” It was funny, until it wasn’t. Luckily I texted Michael the next day and said “please don’t send those cards.” Good call, although the one to my dad slipped by and made its way to Finland. When he finally got it, he emailed a congratulations to us.
I went for a massage a month later, having not been since they turned me away at week five. I walked into the room and there was a long pillow on the massage table. A pregnancy pillow. So, it was in my chart. And how pregnant did they think I’d be? And why would it have been okay now but not before? “I don’t need that,” I pointed to the pillow. Awkward pause. “Oh, I’m sorry; I’ll just remove this.” I started quiet-crying while she reconfigured the table.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“If you were fine, you wouldn’t be crying” (Then why did you ask?) Hiccup to sob, then 15 minutes of holding hands and talking.
Another woman, a co-worker, asked me if my feelings on abortion had changed (no), because she’s a Christian and doesn’t believe in abortion. FUCK. OFF.
Work was killing me. I started looking for a new job, a new career, a totally different education. I bought GRE flashcards because it had been so long since I took the test that my scores were too old to use, and I needed to get into that Juris Doctorate/ Political Science/ Social Justice program on the east coast, so also, btw, we’ll need to sell the house and move, okay Michael? I had coffee with my friend Mary who suggested I just — be— and wait for whatever needs to happen to happen. FUCK. Patience is not one of my virtues. I DO NOT LIKE TO WAIT. I don’t like sitting with feelings, and experiencing feelings, at least not when the feelings are about me.
Anyway, it’s all for the best so don’t be too sad for us. We’d be in our 60s when the kid graduated from high school. Michael and I are both the youngest in our families, with our older siblings being considerably older— as in, if anything happened to us, the family we’d ask to raise our child would be many years out of child-raising-age. There probably wouldn’t be siblings, but who knows what we would have done. The closest cousin (on this coast) would have been my practically-30-year-old-niece.
When my parents reached 50, all their kids were out of the house. They had moved on. Of course, they had the time, money, and health to continue to support us. My dad crawled under my first car to tie the dragging-muffler so that I could make it to a service station without sparking a wildfire. Would he have been able to do this in his late 60s? Would he have WANTED to do it in his late 60s? No, probably not.
I didn’t want to have to worry about college and retirement at the same time. I don’t want to burden my kid with: congratulations on being a high school graduate–now, help me move into assisted living (Michael: but NOW who will we get to bring in the firewood?).
“It’s not like we can’t try again if we wanted to.” Yeah, it’s tempting at moments, but all these realities still held true. And besides: what if I miscarried at 12 weeks, when all seems safe? What if we did genetic testing at twenty weeks and the kid had Down’s Syndrome? What happens when there was more time to bond and wish and hope and plan before having to give it up, or think about giving it up?
About February or March, I was feeling like I couldn’t shake the sadness. I told Michael that I thought about the pregnancy daily. It was emotionally exhausting, and made me feel crazy, because I wasn’t even pregnant for that long. But, Michael responded, “Me too. I think about it a lot.” This conversation (I’m not alone in my mourning for this specific embryo) stands out so clearly as the moment when I could finally let The Baby-Thing Go. I noticed it was no longer on my mind every day. Instead of leaving my therapist with a scheduled follow-up appointment on the books, she’d say, “just shoot me an email when you want to meet next.” As in, you seem to be holding it together again.
When I saw my ARNP a few weeks ago, the appointment began with me entering the office where she was dancing (for the receptionist?) to the piped in music, and I joined her. “You seem… light again!”
Me, smiling, light: “You just gotta dance to the Jackson Five.”