Category: pregnancy

infertility · pregnancy · trauma

“So, How Was It?” The Feels Edition

Molly Daniels Hayes2 Comments

I’m part of an online group for people who are pregnant through IVF, and it’s been bringing me back to last December full force. The minute clocking of how many days and weeks along, the agonizing over whether taking your medication early or late or not at all that day will cause an irreparable issue, the wondering, wondering, wondering.

I’ve already written a bit about the early days and weeks of my pregnancy with HB, how worrisome it was for me. There was literally nothing else on my mind. When I had abdominal pain acutely on one side of my belly, I was absolutely convinced I was having an ectopic pregnancy, which mandates “cancellation” of the pregnancy. This fear has to continue until the embryo is large enough to detect on an ultrasound, which means you’re even more pregnant than you were with a potentially non-viable pregnancy, which also means you’re even more invested in it going well, you’re even closer to seeing it come to fruition.

At my earliest possible time, I came in for an ultrasound because I was convinced my abdominal pain was the portend of bad news. She’d told me it was early, that just because they may not detect anything didn’t mean it wasn’t there. My blood levels were continuing to rise apace. Then, the frozen agony as she angles around with the wand like a spotlight in my body, searching, searching for life.

And there it was, a flutter on the black-and-white screen. A flutter in my uterus where it should be. She turns on the sound, and there it is… a heartbeat, an honest-to-goodness heartbeat. Not my own, something new, something hers. Her. New. Yes.

And this is how it was for every minute of every day for me. A terrified conviction that any moment could be the last, as it had been several times before. It was this way until my 20-week ultrasound, an in-depth three-dimensional view of the growing body inside me. I would not, could not with a fox, allow myself to breathe until that 5-month test. I know personally three women who’d had “bad scans” at that critical appointment, all three who’d had to make haunting, heart-breaking choices, and I could not allow myself to plan for the arrival of a baby until then.

To be honest, it was only a few weeks to the end of my pregnancy when I was posting in a group about my terror that it would all come crumbling down. This feeling didn’t abate until she was safely, healthfully in my arms in the hospital bed. It’s a horrible feeling. It’s a horrible cloud to live under during a time that many people feel can be the most blissful and abundant.

And this was usually the kind of content I gave when friends asked how I was feeling. The emotional piece. I expressed how difficult it was for me to trust, how I was awaiting the 20-week scan to really believe this would happen, how I was having a hard time wading through my own trauma. Funnily enough, after several minutes of my talking in this vein, friends would often say, “I meant, ‘How are you feeling physically?'” but I knew what they meant. That aspect just wasn’t that important for me to talk about (see previous blog!).

But there she was at 20-weeks, a face, eyes, nose, heart. Four chambers of a heart. All moving blood, red and blue pulses of light on the screen. Pulses of life.

Til the end, this is how it was, checking my underwear for spotting each time I sat down to the toilet. She was still right-side-up as my time came closer, and this worried me. (She did flip on her own eventually.) Two weeks to go, I hadn’t felt her move in over a day. I drank juice, did jumping jacks, drank cold water, and sat quietly in the dark awaiting her movements to confirm she was still there. Really there.

I came downstairs streaming tears. J drove me to the hospital. And she was there, really there, just moving less but healthy, beating, “breathing.”

Everyone does what they can to assure you, assuming things have been going well, that they will be well. Everyone with the best of intentions and with all the love they can muster try to hold your hand, physically or virtually, as you wade, slog, crawl through the darkness that creeps into the side of your vision. The unbidden thought. The momentary arresting of your breath.

So, How Was It?

Pregnancy is a nine-month mental labyrinth, regularly gnarling your joy into a Gordian knot.

Until it’s over. And the knot unravels, cascading open to reveal the most tender pulse of awe and magic this side of the veil.

beginnings · infertility · pregnancy

“So, How Was It?” Pregnancy Edition

Molly Daniels Hayes2 Comments
At Mom’s The Word in SF. 7 mos pregnant.

As you may have read in my previous post, getting to pregnancy — and a pregnancy that “stuck” — was a long and winding road for J and I. That said, pregnancy itself? I’m reluctant to tell you!

One of the lessons I learned during pregnancy was that when people ask you a question about how it is going, often (though certainly not always!) the reason behind their questioning is loaded. Perhaps they will use your answer as a benchmark against which to compare, at length and with unasked-for advice, their own pregnancy or their partner’s. This looks like: “Well, when I was pregnant it was hell in XYZ ways; let me enumerate in great detail how I suffered.” “You’re tired now, just wait until the kid gets here.” “Better do ABC now because you’ll NEVER BE ALONE AGAIN.”

I really had a hard time with these conversations. And so, I stopped having them, mostly. The best advice I received during my pregnancy, and this lovely advisor told me to throw it out the window if I wanted!, was to Lie Positively. How are you feeling? Great! How are you sleeping? Great! [When the baby comes along:] How are they sleeping, eating, pooping, blinking…? GREAT!

The aim here is to stem the flow of unasked-for advice and the tide of misfortune that childbearers want, for reasons that completely elude me, to dump on you.

And why stem that flow? Why try to distance myself from that muck?

Because my pregnancy really was great. I loved it! (See, I told you you’d hate me for it!) At about 6 weeks pregnant, I awoke from a deep sleep because I was laughing. I personally believe/think/imagine that this was little Hannah telling me a joke or being delightful in the way she is and does. I think it was her telling me she’d come, and that she’d be a dose of sunshine.

I was mildly green around the gills for a few weeks, but I drank ginger lemon tea by the gallon, all day every day, and my nausea would abate. I didn’t retch once. And by week 10, the nausea passed.

I was ravenous. My coworker who’d been experimenting with baking bread (as many did during the pandemic!) brought me a large, circular loaf of crusty, whole-grain. I ate half of it before lunch time. Repeatedly, I took photos of the enormous hoagie sandwiches I bought at the corner store, after I’d already eaten my own lunch. I would text J that I was only going to eat half — this was my “accountability” text. Not because I was or would get fat, but because of the many times I’d already eaten it all and felt so sick afterward! And, inevitably, I would have to send the close-to-upchuck text that I ate the whole thing anyway! But, this time passed, too.

At about 17 weeks, even though I’d been waiting for the 20-week ultrasound to truly commit to “being pregnant/expecting a child,” I had to get new pants. After several fruitless internet searches, and deciding that, No, thank you, Gap, H&M, etc., I will not be wearing stripes throughout the rest of my pregnancy!, I bit the bullet and went to the “nice” maternity wear store and bought some wonderful jeans and a top that fit well and would serve me beyond pregnancy. I came home elated to show J: “I look like ME!” Not a circus tent, not a pastel-shrouded matron. Dark blue jeans, a black top, and bronze loafers: I looked like me. Just with a bump.

I’d always thought that I would be able to make due without the ridiculous accoutrements of pregnancy, like the pregnancy body pillow. However, on that tack, I was wrong. By the latter months, sleeping on my side wore on my hips, and luckily I was on summer break by now and could scour the second-hand online marketplaces, and found this C-shaped one that took me through the end comfortably.

My back didn’t hurt. My feet didn’t hurt. I didn’t get headaches or sweats or pox! I was just carrying.

The only wrinkle for me was my left knee. I’ve always had trouble with that one, whether when running or working out or skiing, and as my pregnancy progressed, so did swelling and pain. This meant I couldn’t even walk a block without limping and began to see a chiro and acupuncturist. I saw an orthopedist, and did eventually make the decision for a cortisone shot, which helped immensely, though temporarily. However, it also meant that I needed to find an alternative mode of exercise, and I started swimming at a local pool. It was glorious! I loved it. Outdoors, watching the trees pass by overhead, engaging in conversation with the retirees who frequented the pool and hearing about the gossip of which upstart was causing trouble in the fast lane (HA!). I’d never swum for exercise before, and it was quite lovely. Not the same as running, sure, but really nice and easy on my knee.

As the time drew nigh, and J and I moved into new place with more stairs than Coit Tower (ouch!), I hurriedly drove hither and yon to acquire second-hand clothes and other items. As it drew even closer, I finally turned to the internet to just send me this crap.

And, by month 8 and 9, we were ready — or as ready as we’d ever be. (And sure, I’m glossing over the fear and terror that occasionally gripped me solid. But that’s another blog.) 😉

(Forgive typos/grammar; published after one draft; baby calls.)

hope · miscarriage · pregnancy

Maybe Baby.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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It was about a month ago.  J and I had returned from Berlin, our honeymoon destination, a week earlier and I finally mustered the courage to ask him,

What if I told you that my boobs have been hurty for the last day or so?

A larger part of me than my pride cares to admit didn’t want to tell him.  There feels to me a dangerous assumption in our world that women cry wolf.  But considering we’d been trying for a pregnancy for several months, taking tests, checking out my belly in profile, wondering if maybe, maybe now… Questioning to myself, Am I just fatter than usual?  Is it just that I have burrito belly?  And I would say to him, Maybe I am.  And he would say, gently, it’s not likely to show up in evidence there that quickly.  And a week later, my body would concur by making it clear I was not.  Nope, my body would tell me, just cake belly.

This would go on for several months, several months of buying pregnancy tests in bulk, of the check-out counter girl telling me she hoped the results were what I wanted.  And I would go home, hold my breath, pee on a stick, and hope.  Then, results in, I would despondently cap the test, re-wrap it in its plastic sleeve and deposit it in the trash quickly, ashamedly, as if it had exposed some deep vulnerability.  Which, of course, it had.

The last two times I’ve peed this dance, I’ve felt the compounding nature of months of disappointment.  Earlier, it was easy(er) to say, “Well, we haven’t been very ritualized about our timing,” “We haven’t really been trying diligently,” and I would watch the calculations on my mental calendar extend.

Because I’d had it all worked out, you see.

Counting months from the summer attempts, it would be a Spring baby (if all went well) and that would be so great for a teacher’s timing — deliver at the end of the school year, have several months at home over the long summer, and desultorily return back to school in the Fall, delivering my child this time to the care of another.

It was the optimal timing.  And besides, it worked for my friend Jess who’s a teacher.  She got pregnant on her honeymoon in August and followed the gestational plan like a Swiss watch.  Surely, if she could do it, so could I/we.

Yet, as the months ticked away this summer with another negative line, another round of menses, I would have to recount and replan and force this new plan to be acceptable in my mind.  A summer baby is okay; we’ll have a 1/2 birthday for them so they can celebrate with their peers at school; school birthday parties are so important when they’re young.  … Okay, well, Fall birthday, okay, well the school age-start, we’ll have to decide if they’re to be a year ahead or a year behind their classmates; no worries, I have friends who’ve made either decision, just like my brother and I took either route.

New and revised plans laden, too, with disappointment, curiosity, worry, and damnable hope.

If it doesn’t work out to have natural children, I told my close friend before it all began — as J and I are older, I have chemo’d ovaries, we both have mental illness in our families, plus the myriad of reasons why a zygote decides not to become a person — then we’re open to the adoption conversation, or the foster one, or the refugee family hosting conversation.  J and I are very fortunate and we have a lot to give.  I’m open. 

And… I am.  But I would not be without a feeling of loss.  I am honest enough to know this about myself.  I am honest enough to admit that the idea of seeing what our DNA creates thrills me (as much as it worries me).  To admit that carrying on a lineage, a descendancy, feels important to me.  To admit that I know the hill of adoption and fostering is rewarding, as I’ve seen it be beyond measure for friends and family, but I know, too, that it comes with baked-in abandonment issues that can create ripples.

And so, when a month ago I turned to J in bed and asked him how he might feel if I told him I was having a sign of pregnancy — one that wasn’t on my mental list of knowns, one that I couldn’t have made up because I hadn’t known of it, one that could not be cried wolf — it was elating.  Thrilling.  And harrowing for how it could turn out at any which point.

For that week-long period, we examined the different changes, weighing my breasts in our hands, noticing they felt not only sore, but full, like a laden water balloon, wresting from our memory the way they’d felt before that week.  And indeed, they were different.  And every day I felt and cupped and squoze, and imagined.

I told my mom, with the preface to be cautious in her reaction, that my boobs were hurty, and she said that was her first sign, too.

A few days after my initial inquiry, I built up the courage to show him the darkening line on my lower abdomen, the one I’d colloquially heard as the “climbing line,” that pregnant women get — some say as a guide for a birthed person to climb up to the milky breasts upon birth if the mother is unable to guide them.  I checked it, this amber-colored stain we were both sure was new, in the mornings when it was certain it couldn’t be an imprint of my jeans’ zipper or a seam.

I began to notice that my jeans were fitting differently around my thighs, the cloth feeling tighter, and I looked it up online.  It is an early sign, the thickening of the thighs as they begin to store fat to become milk upon arrival of the baby.  I added it to my growing list of evidence — and I took the pregnancy tests.

But.  They told me: No.  They told me what I was experiencing in my body was not a pregnancy.  And I told them they were wrong, that it was too early, maybe, just hardly two weeks.  I told the blood test at the doctor’s the same thing.  No, you’re wrong.  Touch my breasts, look at this line.

But my body had the final word, too: the flow came, and I sat on the toilet in our tiled-white bathroom and I wept.

 

I know that our bodies are limitlessly wise, and I do not fault the Universe for sorting this one out because I know its reasons are always(?) legitimate.  DNA melding and dividing is a probability crap shoot, and sometimes the house rakes all our chips back in and tells us better luck next time.

So.  Here we are: “Next time.”  With hurty boobs.  A week to go before the jury releases its decision.

And I am yet to know how much heartache I will endure.