The World Is Pregnant
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No, I’m not pregnant. I don’t think so at least. Maybe I should go check? Please hold.
Okay, I’m back. Not pregnant.
But I am obsessed with pregnancy. Literally obsessed. I write about pregnancy a lot on this blog even though I have never been pregnant while writing this blog. I wrote about my Belly Envy. I wrote about My Birth Story. Hey, I even compared our beleaguered economy to an illegitimate (octuplet) pregnancy. Sometime soon, I hope to be writing about my own pregnancy. I’m not saying when because I don’t when. (This is a big question in this household and in my head and fodder for its own award-winning essay.)
I loved being pregnant. Even the mild morning sickness was okay with me. I just used it as an excuse to be lazy and scarf salt bagels and orange Gatorade with abandon. Even the weight gain was cool. (As long as the pounds arrived with precise gradualness and didn’t exceed twenty-five total. Yes, a control freak here.) Even the no-drinking thing was absolutely fine. Who needs Pinot Grigio when cells are multiplying with evolutionary elegance in your belly? Really. The point which I will not belabor (too late and pun very much intended): I loved being pregnant.
And now it seems that everyone around me is pregnant or trying to get pregnant. Everyone. The world.
Here is an incomplete list of my pregnant people (in no particular order): Sister in Chicago; Cousin in Kansas; Cousin in L.A.; Two high school friends (and I suspect more); One college friend; Five, yes five mommy friends.
For those of you who do not have “mommy friends” in your lexicon, let me explain. Mommy Friends are the amazing, wonderful, fabulous mothers you meet early on, when you are still bleary and bloated and all boobs. Mommy Friends help wipe spit-up off your cashmere and rock your wailing infant while you run to the bathroom. Mommy Friends trade stories and tips. Together, Mommy Friends bemoan the loss of freedom and frolic, reminisce about their fierce former selves. Simply stated, Mommy Friends make parenthood palatable. If you are a mommy and you don’t have Mommy Friends, I would suggest that you go pick up a few. You can thank me later.
But I digress. Yesterday, I took Toddler to her class at the incomparable Children’s Museum of Manhattan. We enrolled in this class (yes, on top of Preschool) to keep up with friends from Toddler’s first months. My Mommy Friends! Together, we Mommy Friends plopped our kids at the art table and escaped. We went for coffee. There are usually eight of us. But we were missing two yesterday, two women who have the same name I will not share. So, there were six of us.
We purchased some afternoon fare: coffee and soup and papaya with lime. And then we gathered around a small table and talked. What about? Pregnancy, of course. We talked about our friend who is still recovering from pneumonia and swine flue and is due to give birth next week (she is home! finally!) We tried to get my one friend, thirty-seven weeks along, to spill her baby name. My friend who is over four months pregnant with her second child confessed her deep desire for a girl. My friend who just announced her pregnancy last week said she will find out the sex soon.
We talked and talked and talked. About sibling rivalry and trimesters and prenatal tests. We talked about baby names and baby nurses. We talked about food cravings and belly shapes.
And then. Another friend said she had an announcement. Yes, you guessed it. She is pregnant! Surprise! This was not just a surprise for us. It was one for her as well. Why? It took this particular friend three years, one major surgery, and IVF to conceive her twins. After batteries of tests and interventions, she learned that she had a degenerative condition that caused her fallopian tubes to collapse. And she is pregnant!
This friend was all smiles. The smiles were contagious. Maybe smiles were not the only things that were contagious? I looked across the table at my friend whose second daughter is seven months, the only person other than moi sans fetus at that table, and said, “Hey, you and I better go home and take pregnancy tests. It seems this pregnancy thing’s contagious.” She smiled. We all smiled. Mommy smiles.
I could not stop smiling all night. I could not stop thinking about the life around me. I could not stop thinking about the miracle baby in my friend’s belly. The baby who would not let collapsed tubes stand in her way, who would not take no for an answer. I could not stop smiling.
And late last night, I was on the computer catching up on some work, re-reading all of your amazing comments on yesterday’s post, and I started chatting online with another friend. It started as your standard back and forth. And then she told me that she has been trying to get pregnant and the doctors say she is not ovulating and that her progesterone is low. She expressed her frustration and her sadness was palpable in her sentence snippets. This friend (who has a very successful professional career and is one of the smartest people I know) told me that when she was in grade school, she was told to write an essay about her future. She said that plenty of her friends wrote about careers and travels, but that she wrote all about family, about the five kids she’d one day have. My friend wants kids. She has always wanted them.
“You will have kids,” I typed. And I meant those words. She will. And then I told her about all the friends I know who struggled a bit, or a lot, in getting pregnant. I reminded her that having kids wasn’t a cakewalk for me. I shared the stories I knew of people who’d gone through a lot to have kids. Stories. Of fertility treatments. Of advanced age. Of cancer. Of miscarriage. And then I told her my newest story: a story about collapsed tubes and a miraculous surprise. She thanked me for my words, for my support, for my stories. I wonder if she could sense my smile through the screen?
Whether it is an accident or a surprise or the result of hard physical and emotional work, pregnancy is always a miracle, the majestic work of the most inscrutable mommy of all: Mother Nature. I am thrilled to be at a point in my life when I am surrounded by babies and bellies. I am thrilled to have a growing stockpile of stories – happy and less so – to be able to share, to remind myself and people I love of how precarious and powerful and pregnant life can be.
Tell me your stories. Stories of pregnancy and paths to pregnancy. Happy. Sad. Frustrated. I want them all. Stories sustain us.
I have been thinking of this topic a lot lately. I too am surrounded by pregnant women – a disproportionate number of whom became pregnant after struggles with infertility. After years of crying with these women over their failed battles with Clomid and IVF, I have had the pleasure of crying joyful tears at their announcements that things had finally worked out.
What shocked me when Husband and I started trying to conceive our first child was how difficult it was – biologically speaking – to do. I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent person, but much of my understanding of fertility was mired in my days of Catholic elementary school “family life” classes that seemed to suggest that pregnancy was possible from sitting on a toilet seat. And the idea that the odds of becoming pregnant in any given month were actually quite low astonished me.
I commented yesterday about the fire I felt internally when our initial efforts were fruitless, so to speak. Our desire for a child wasn’t born out of a competitive instinct, but months of failure knocked me off my axis – I wasn’t used to being bad at something. I saw doctors, specialists, convinced that there had to be some explanation for why I wasn’t getting pregnant. The idea of waiting, playing the odds was excruciating. I’m not sure I learned my lesson, even when I finally did get pregnant. My reaction was relief – okay, I did it – more than joy.
I loved being pregnant too. Loved it. And loved labor & delivery also – two of the most defining moments of my life. I think there are few things more amazing than the extraordinary ability to grow & bring to life another human being. To witness the raw beginning of a life. I look forward to living vicariously through your next pregnancy!!
I loved being pregnant too. Absolutely loved it. I had no problems getting pregnant, but I did have difficult pregnancies. I treated everyday as if it were a miracle. Thanks for this post. It is bringing back memories of those lovely days of rubbing my belly and feeling life inside me grow.
Pregnancy. I love the idea. I loved the first one. And then it got hard. And I couldn’t enjoy it as much. Especially with number three. Having a six month old on your hip while you run to the bathroom due to all-day (not so much MORNING) sickness is hard. And moving around is hard. And going up stairs, and gaining weight, and even just sitting still. And my boys were big. All of them. The smallest at 8/10 and the largest at 10/3. Yes. Big. Hefty. Weighted. In my belly. In my soul.
But I would do it again I would think. I don’t feel finished. I just don’t. Maybe it is my age. Maybe it is simply that ever-present longing for a daughter. But I just don’t feel finished. Four. Five, even. I would go there. Time and money and space is all I need. Shoot, drop time, even. Drop them all. We can make do on love.
So this post? About pregnancy? And all those women? It is more than just a piece of beautiful words and truths. It hits the heart of things when you are in a place where you know you want more children.
Thank you. And we are all awaiting your own announcement!
Being pregnant. Hmmm, I loved being pregnant but can tell you that I never want to be pregnant again. I have been pregnant five times – one of those pregnancies being twins. I was told that getting pregnant would be difficult as I have a tipped uterus. I never seemed to have any problems with that as I have 16 months between the twins and #4.
I never had an difficulties in my pregnancies until pregnancy #5, child #6. I developed pregnancy-induced (sort of like exercise-induced asthma) hypertension. My blood pressure sky rocketed. First we tried a baby aspirin a day. Didn’t help. OB/GYN prescribed BP meds. Didn’t get it under control. Finally, OB/GYN said go directly to hospital, c-section is this afternoon. He was afraid I was going to have a stroke if my BP didn’t come down. #6 was, other than one of the twins, my smallest baby at 6 pounds, 13 ounces.
I did have a slight recent scare but have decided that is just my body adapting to my age.
One year ago today I was in labor. Conception was quick (though we were prepared for it not to be). My pregnancy was easy, textbook, fully routine. Delivery was a bit of a nightmare, but ended well enough. And today we celebrate our first son’s first birthday. Last night we wrote on his card and signed our names “Mommy” and “Dad” for the first time.
With the close of this first year comes the realization that I can’t wait to do it all over again. The positive pregnancy test. The first ultrasound. The first kicks. The first smiles, and steps, and words. I am not pregnant, and won’t be again for a while. But that doesn’t make me any less excited for it.
I was very lucky to be able to get pregnant easily, and “older.” But pregnancy itself – while I found it wondrous – was miserable for me. I’m tiny; those babies were big and hard for me to carry. But I would have and wanted to do it all again, because the end result is the most extraordinary gift there is, and it continues long past the happy event.
Aidan, I just really loved reading this post(and so well written, as always) I had to chime in. I, too loved being pregnant (for 8 months, tiny preemie baby, easiest delivery ever) and have been thinking seriously about doing it again.
What I remember most is not so much how I physically felt but how much friendlier the world seemed to be in those last couple of months. Folks instinctively giving up their seat on the bus, offering to carry things for me, freely sharing their stories of pregnancy and parenthood, etc. And it makes me think that maybe, we really all are basically good. Maybe.
Looking forward to your book release!
Oh how I did NOT like being pregnant! Not. One. Bit. And I feel awful saying that because of the horrendous time I had trying to GET pregnant. When I stopped taking the pill a year before I wanted to conceive my daughter I never got my period. Just never came back. Luckily a few cycles of Clomid did the trick and I got pregnant with my daughter. I was unbelievably sick for most of the pregnancy and just scared. I look back and I’m not sure what I was so scared of but I remember being so nervous not only about the pregnancy but also about what my life would become. I then had an emergency C-section to deliver Hannah (bleeding profusely at work – fun).
I’m not sure HOW I ever forgot about the misery of my pregnancy in order to try for #2! And this little guy… he was my miracle. This time clomid didn’t do the trick. I had 3 miscarriages and 1 ectopic pregnancy. My marriage was suffering. I was depressed. I was falling apart. My fertility doc told me IVF was my only option but most likely wouldn’t wor either. The first one didn’t. The second try did. And I had triplets inside of me. Three babies. Identical twins and a fraternal third. And all I cried. For as much as I was DESPERATE to have another… three more seemed totally and completely incomprehensible. All I could imagine was poor Hannah who would get so little attention with three infants needing so much from us. And then at 8 weeks I was told the identicals weren’t going to make it. And I cried again. Did I will them to die? Not that I had gotten used to the idea of having FOUR (WTF?) kids, but I was working through it and they were my babies. So i was down to one. One who made me throw up every single day for 6 months (still trying to figure out how to get him back for that).
When Luke was born I held him and told him he was my miracle. And he got the love of three babies that I had made room for in my heart. And I told him and anyone else who would listen that I. Was. Done.
So now, I look at pregnant ladies and I smile for them because YES it is such a miracle. I know that firsthand. I know I’m certainly not going to go through it again – I’m much happier feeling the joy for everyone else! So bring on the good news!