After a climactic day of Discovering I Was Pregnant, I had a rather anticlimactic period of Discovering I Was Going to be Waiting, A Lot. This realization didn't set in for a while. At first, I tiptoed around gingerly everywhere I went, as though I was a ballerina practicing good posture by balancing a stack of books on her head, except my stack of books was topped with a sign proclaiming, "Guess who's Pregnant?!" (with an arrow pointing downward for clarity). Meaning: I figured that somehow everyone could tell that my life had suddenly taken a dramatic turn toward the unknown, due to the fact that I was, oh, growing another live human being inside of me. (AHHHHHH!)
But in fact, I slowly realized that things pretty much looked the same from the outside. No one could tell that my sudden voracious appetite was due to, oh, the growing of another live human inside of me (AHHHH!), or that my constant dizziness and intense fatigue was from, oh, the growing of...okay, okay, you get the picture. While my world had suddenly turned upside down, things were annoyingly, stubbornly, outwardly THE SAME. This was a problem.
A little background, as always. You know how some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth? Well, I was born with a mouth. One that I immediately decided to start using for talk therapy. Meaning, any time anything of any significance happens to me, I feel the urge to share it. With anyone. This is how I routinely emerge with new recipe ideas after sharing my excitement for preserved lemons with the grocery-store clerk, or how I recovered from intense grief while bonding with a Drybar stylist over the tragic breakup of Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck. But now, all of a sudden, something of actual, honest Significance had happened to me, and I couldn't share it with anyone.
Not being able to share this news had a weird side effect on my normal, gregarious, tell-all self: I became a wallflower, unable to talk. I couldn't call friends, knowing that I would instantly blurt out the news that was overtaking my mind and life. I didn't want to go to parties and bailed out on dinners and Fun Events, knowing I would be relegated to nibbling on bread, sipping seltzer water and smiling wanly and nodding at things I barely heard. I looked longingly at our neighborhood postal carrier as she dropped off a package, wondering if she would be weirded out by a random pregnant woman confessional. I stood mute in checkout lines (checkout lines!! My talk mecca!) staring unenthusiastically at the milk and pickles that I was buying (yet again), studiously avoiding eye contact with the teller lest I blurt out uncontrollably, "Dear God I'm buying pickles because YES I KNOW YOU'RE THINKING IT - I'm pregnant! I'm just a pregnant cliché!"
Even though I came home every day feeling as though I'd run two marathons, I looked stubbornly normal on the outside. Close, daily scrutiny of my stomach in the mirror showed only my normal, ab-crunch-resistant food baby, but no telltale sign of a real baby. (This is another thing my doctor-trained self had not internalized about pregnancy. Didn't every pregnant woman start to have a cute little "I'm pregnant!" bump starting at, like, week 4?!) Inside, of course, I felt like my emotions were a bunch of white iPod earbuds that had all been careslessly crammed into an Altoid tin that then went through 3 moves and had thus become hopelessly, inextricably tangled together. Crying became my automatic response to most things: plucking my eyebrows, seeing a music video during spin class, eating a stale cookie, thinking, talking to my parents, feeling exhausted. If I wasn't crying, I was
Actually, I've decided that the emotional drama of pregnancy is a thoughtful, intelligent evolutionary design. See, basically, pregnant women begin to become like babies and toddlers: we start crying, we throw temper tantrums, we get colicky and gassy, we can't deal with pain, we need a ton (a ton!) of attention, we go to bed early, and we can only digest one variety of peas and plain boiled chopped pasta and they CANNOT be mixed together, for the love of God. By thusly going through this pregnant-toddler hybrid phase, we will never forget to empathize with our little incubating child a few years later, when s/he is throwing temper tantrums about the fact that there is green food on his plate and green food is not acceptable, MOMMY.
What surprised me also was how independent, carefree me suddenly became overwhelmed with a need to be around Kurt all the time. I felt personally affronted when he did things like, you know, leave in the morning to go to work. (The nerve!) Maybe this was a subconsciously fueled by the baby's demand for Dad: "Hey Pops! Just said hi to Mom by giving her some nasty heartburn, and now wanted to check in with the person who's determining whether I'm a boy or a girl! Thanks for the chromosome!" Unfortunately, given my aforementioned tendencies for 1) crying, 2) sleeping, 3)"being feisty" (heh heh), one can reasonably understand why a sane, Zen-master man would not be particularly motivated to spend 100% of his time glued to my hip. But, as the good sport he is, he did endure a good 60-70% of glue-time. This, in turn, inspired his composition of catchy, two-line ditty (kind of tuned to Disney's "Under the Sea" steel-drum intro tune, but not really):
"Mood swings, go away/
"Don't come back, ever again".
My parents, meanwhile, would have none of my freaking out. They were genuinely confused: "You're pregnant. It's a huge blessing. What's the problem?" Even my mom. The woman who bore me. Who should understand my woes. But because my mom is actually a Superhero-slash-Angel, she was probably not the least bit feisty or cranky during pregnancy. The worst she did was make my dad buy like, a crate of oranges, like, maybe twice. I have already done approximately 1596 things to Kurt that have topped that. I am not a Superhero-slash-Angel. I'm more a pickle-fueled Beyoncé, with a little dash of J-Lo-level divadom, sprinkled with a dash of Alec Baldwin-esque temper.
My freaking out initially vacillated between two states. One was a paralyzing fear that I was not ready to have a baby. In my mind, "Readiness for Motherhood" was a nebulous state that one could reach only after a period of intense penance of doing things like Making and Sticking to a Proper Budget, Going More Than A Week Without Serving Frozen Amy's Burritos for Dinner, Practicing Selflessness Daily, Not Whining, Avoiding Grocery Store Impulse Shopping and Becoming a Morning Person. Needless to say, I had ticked a grand total of zero checkboxes off this list.
The second was an emotion that would become a constant companion over the weeks to come: anxiety. Pregancy anxiety is like Spanx: a torture tool lurking beneath a smooth exterior, supposedly there to help by encasing a bulgy belly in a protective, slimming embrace, but instead having the decidedly unfriendly effect of threatened suffocation. Sure, I may not have been "ready" to be a mom, but now that this little sucker had decided that it wanted to set up shop in my uterus, it could not change its mind. Every day, I spent several minutes anxiously pleading with Little Embryo not to break its lease.
It didn't help, of course, that the Internet is an enabling haven for the Anxious Pregnant Woman, filled with useful reminders of the various awful things that can happen in the first trimester, posting danger signs on everything from herbal tea to a foot massage to breathing air, thereby allowing any sane woman to conclude that a pregnant woman is a walking eggshell that should not be touched or jarred in any way lest she crack open and baby spills out.
The anxiety only escalated when I discovered that I actually wasn't going to be seeing my OB/GYN, for, like, many weeks. My father and I shared a moment of righteous indignation as we discussed this. I was a newly pregnant woman! I mean, I was basically as important as the President! How was it that they weren't going to see me for another month?!? Wasn't there some kind of law about the right of a pregnant woman to see a doctor on demand?
Another frantic Google search revealed, however, that the first prenatal visit was, in fact, typically several weeks into the first trimester, so that the baby was big enough to be seen on ultrasound. Despite this bit of Internet foreshadowing, I muscled my way through our clinic's call center and convinced a kindly nurse that I needed to be seen ASAP by my OB/GYN for "stomach issues" (e.g., a pregnancy). I saw Dr. C that week, and had an ultrasound that showed....well, actually, it showed a tiny little dot the size of a sesame seed, e.g., a "gestational sac" that should contain a little microscopic embryo, but no visible evidence of a growing embryo yet. "It's likely just too small, and it's probably too early to see anything," said Dr. C nicely, ignoring the fact that my too-early appointment was a result of me diva-demanding my way into this appointment. She booked me for another visit next week, to check on the status of the sesame seed.
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| Circle marks the gestational sac, aka sesame seed! But too early to see anyone inside yet. |
After the appointment, I started to cry and freak out imagining the worst, as Zen Master Kurt (who, in typical fashion, was completely unfazed by Unsatisfying Seemingly Empty Sesame Seed Ultrasound) attempted to calm me down. He convinced me not to research anything about Possibilities (ugh, I hate Possibilities), and so to distract myself, I went to an acupuncture appointment instead. And there, lying on the table with needles poking out of my forehead, ears, belly and knees, I breathed deeply. For the first time, I started to focus only on the Little Being inside me. Not me, the carrier, but this little miracle that had started out, just like all of us, as a tiny ball of cells smaller than the head of a pin. I thought of how it was furiously growing even as I lay there, with all its cells somehow already programmed knowing what they needed to do and what they were destined to become, forming a microscopic, autonomous construction site that would build a beautiful, perfect human being.
And suddenly, I felt something rise within me that I had never, ever felt before. It was this powerful, expansive, endless sensation of love, something much greater than myself. It unfurled from head to toe, directed toward the beautiful little miracle I was holding inside. With it came a sense of total calm, peace, and innate knowledge that this baby was meant to be. It was fine. I was calm, because I knew with complete certainty that this love - the love of a mother for her child - would act as the guardian ensuring its health.
I hadn't thought I was ready to be a mom. Mom-hood was the furthest thing from my conscious radar. And yet, the day I was born, my parents named me "Janani": the Sanskrit word for "Mother". 33 years later, I had finally experienced that title's power. That day, the day I first felt a true mother's love for my child, I knew that motherhood was going to be amazing. I was ready - at least, ready to learn, to start the training and participate in the race.
A week later, Dr. C repeated the ultrasound and we saw that Little Sesame Seed had become a tiny little Blueberry tadpole. with a cute little head. (I love how they included a little arrow, like a tourist map marking the point of interest. Clearly, they are highlighting its Einstein-worthy brain.)
And then we had another ultrasound a little later that showed a beautiful, pulsing little beating heart:
Motherhood, we're a Go.
Lovely! Go, Mother! Enjoy!!
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