Things you think about when you are only weeks from your due date- #1. Kid, listen. Please, please, please don't die. I just want to meet you and have our communication be more than kicks, squirms and wiggles. I don't even care how much you hurt me. I don't care if my tender bits look like Rocky Balboa's face when you get done in there. Or if you make them cut through my belly to get you out. As long as you come out alive and stay that way. #2. How on earth did I get here? With all the things that could have gone wrong and didn't...you are still in there! How lucky am I? #3- when I stop and think how completely my life is about to change, I panic a bit. But waiting another five weeks really doesn't do me any good. I won't be any more prepared then than I am now. Any chance you can step it up and grow a little faster? #4- Please, please, please, please, please. Don't die. #5- If you do, in fact, die, there is a chance that everything I put in this nursery will have to come back out. I may not survive that. Can't we just wait until you are safely here to furnish your nursery? Refer to #1 and #4.
Okay, maybe most of these are just things that fatalistic basket cases like myself think about. But ya know, the whole learning that just because you conceive a brand new life doesn't necessarily mean you are going to be a parent, that'll do it. Even if your miscarriages are early, as mine were, it blows my mind that this is the third life to take up residence in my body. I have worked hard at this current, third project for most of a year. The emotional investment has been huge, ever since this kid landed inside me over Memorial Day weekend last spring. And it is now closing on Valentines Day. I have had 60 inch-and-a-half needles pushed into my hip and held there for two minutes each while they were slowly injected. That's a total of two hours of bending over the bathroom counter feeling a needle deep inside my muscle moving around as my husband tries to hold it steady, telling me to stop swaying, pushing the thick, oily substance that made this pregnancy possible into my increasingly bruised and scarred hip. I have poked countless chalky, icky suppositories into my nether bits when the shots by themselves proved to not be strong enough to keep my progesterone high enough to not risk preterm labor. I have choked down hundreds of vitamins that were truly nasty and made me nauseated and had so many attacks of vicious heartburn my poor esophagus hates life by now. And run the gamut of assorted pregnancy weirdnesses and discomfort. And passed up a LOT of wine and margaritas in the last eight months. And at least four fabulous vacation hot tub sessions. And watched cellulite grow on my thighs at an alarming rate. And if my life experience has taught me anything, it is that even with a lot of superstitious bargaining and hard work, there are no promises. All that stuff I have been doing, all those panic attacks and all the insomnia and impatience that each week that brought this baby closer to viability was passing at the pace of cold molasses...none of it was a promise. It all meant nothing, as far as guaranteeing that I would have an alive baby and not just a bloody lump that could have been a baby. And before all of that classy stuff started, I got pregnant twice, and loved the thoughts and dreams that those lives were, and was devastated when they left, and cried. Hard. Long. Tried to hang on for the ride as my messed up hormones ran their course and made me certifiably crazy. Learned that grief and screwy hormones are an emotional dirty bomb. Beyond toxic. Wanted to punch every pregnant person I knew in the face. Asked myself why they deserved to keep their babies while mine planted, grew, and quickly died. Tried to prepare myself for the possibility that I may never have a kid. Peed on sticks that mocked me with only one line every month. Waited and waited while month after month, nothing happened. Heard friends announce their pregnancies and instead of being able to congratulate them with heartfelt happiness, felt their happiness and contrasted it with my grief and couldn't manage to choke out a sincere sounding congratulation around the lump in my throat and the roar inside my ears from the inevitable hysterical bawling that was bound to happen the second I was alone.
If you have a friend get pregnant after you lose a pregnancy, it is incredibly hard to not let things get weird. Likewise if you are the pregnant one, helplessly watching your friend go on a hormone-fueled grief and rage trip. But you can still be a good friend. After my second loss, I tried my hardest to explain to my (to me) suddenly cruelly pregnant friend that I knew I was being crazy, and begged for time. I loved her, but really could not hear about her pregnancy. She understood as well as she could be expected to, never having been in my shoes, never having lost the dream that was a pregnancy. She couldn't entirely understand why I couldn't be happy for her, after all, she had been trying to get pregnant when I got pregnant the second time, and had still been happy for me during those weeks, and sad for me when I lost it. But she still told me that I had the hall pass I was begging for. I didn't have the words to adequately explain that I was truly happy for her, in the part of my brain that managed my diminished logical thought, but simply the fact of her existence, at that moment, reminded the illogical, subjective, emotional 9/10ths of my brain of what I had lost and may never have. The fact that she already had one healthy child and so easily conceived the second one made me beg the question why she and apparently everyone else (it seemed) deserved to get what they wanted and I kept having it ripped away. It took me weeks to be able to talk to her again, weeks that I spent bawling every time I thought of the life she was growing inside her and how happy she must be. During which time various other friends also announced their pregnancies and a regular baby boom swept my community. And people with babies came and went and for the first time, I could not find one bit of sympathy for exhausted parents of newborns. I just wanted to punch them because they were happy. (Yes, apparently my hormones think violence is the answer. To everything.)
Something like one out of seven pregnancies end in miscarriage. That's a LOT. Now that I am all objective and logical, I realize that means probably at least a dozen of my facebook friends have lost a pregnancy at some point. And most people, unlike me, do not make their grief public so that people can forgive them for being crazy- they just mask the crazy and act normal and...impossibly NICE. How, I don't know. Not admitting how I feel and why I feel it seems comparable to depriving myself of air, water, and food. So I am convinced that if their experience is fresh, they may secretly want to punch me in my ("OH, SO GLOWING!") face. Or possibly stab me with a fork in my ("ADORABLY ROUND") belly. Having felt the urge to punch innocent pregnant women at one time in my life has sort of ruined me for a normal, happily self-absorbed pregnancy experience. It has made me keep those ballooning belly pictures off of public forums. It has made me keep the postings about my pregnancy on Facebook to the milestones- ultrasounds and hurdle dates and a few posts about the things I am most grateful for. (Because the only thing that took away the urge to punch a preggo was hearing them say they knew how little they deserved such good fortune...and the one thing that was guaranteed to feed the rage monster was hearing them complain.) The last thing I want is to be to them is a grief trigger, and it is hard when I am carrying a grief trigger the size of a Fourth of July picnic watermelon under my shirt. Now I feel guilty being the fortunate one. Especially since I raged so much about having to watch other fortunate ones. Yes, I was going through a process. Yes, eventually I would have been okay. In fact, I eventually was (kinda) okay. Even before I got pregnant. It took me six months after that last miscarriage to be okay, and on the seventh month, I felt human. Ya know, kind and happy and non-violent. I didn't even resent anyone. Not even happy people. I even considered joining them, childless though I was. My lack of reproductive productivity stopped feeling like the end of the world. And later that month, up popped two pink lines on a little white stick and I dissolved into a scared, shaky, panicky, tearful mess that I have yet to entirely mop up, even at T minus 30 odd days. The timing supports my theory that the grief, by itself, was not the monster, but my hormones were. Because the month the stars lined up and my hormones were right enough to allow conception was the month they also allowed me to be reasonable and objective for the first time in half a year. But then I had to live with the guilt of having been so absolutely, certifiably crazy and wondering how much of it leaked out and landed on those around me, and how many people I had alienated by not being able to be happy for them at the precise moment they needed me to be.
So if you are the pregnant one in danger of being unfairly punched by a heartbroken friend who resents your knocked up existence right now, the absolute best thing you can do is be okay with being pregnant without having her unbridled support and enthusiasm. Give her a hall pass. It will happen eventually, and then, oh goody, you will even find yourself having to counsel her through her guilt over the way she treated you. It is okay to take a break and continue with your friendship after the crazies have passed. And try to remember that she still loves you, even though she can't stand the sight of you right now. And even if your own screwy hormones can't take her rejection and your own bloated, nauseated self is sobbing in the shower, it really, truly isn't personal. She'll come around and adjust to the new development. And the best thing you can do in the meantime is be visibly grateful. Bask in the glow of your good fortune. Don't pretend to be cavalier or dismissive about the insanely awesome thing happening inside you. Acknowledge that you are the luckiest person on earth and you did nothing to deserve this incredible fortune. And if you are the one who has lost a pregnancy, the best thing you can do is just be crazy without hating yourself for it, and be honest so people know why you are being crazy. And wait. And try not to say or do anything you can't take back.
And that's all I've got to say about that.
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