by Laura June
My mother, who was only a few years older than I am now when she made that choice, never met her granddaughter or her son-in-law. She never knew me as a married woman or as a mother, and really, she barely knew me as an adult. And though much in my life has changed in the decade since she died, nothing has changed as much as my relationship with her. And in some ways, her dying led me here: the space she left behind opened a new place for me to make new things; happier things and, in many ways, better ones.
And by the time I did become a mother, at the age of thirty-six, on a Tuesday in February, more than three years ago, I thought that my relationship with my mother had been what it was going to be for the rest of time. After all, isn’t that what being dead means?
CHAPTER 2
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My mother, she would be the first to brag proudly, was great at having children. She excelled at easy pregnancies: no sickness, no drugs necessary. She didn’t gain much weight; we were just little basketballs on her tiny frame, and my brothers and I were all normal-size, perfectly healthy babies at birth. My aunt told me not long ago that she remembered the family talking about how my dad had to rush to the hospital right when she went into labor because otherwise he’d miss our births. She recovered easily; she never had a C-section or a pregnancy-related illness.
“Having babies is easy!” my mother said to me when I was fourteen or fifteen, when I expressed horror after viewing the PBS film The Miracle of Life in health class. She reveled in my disgust at the prospect. “Babies are easy, really,” she said. “Kids are harder. But babies? Psssssh.”
Maybe the fact that my mother was so excellent at the process of getting pregnant, staying pregnant, giving birth, and caring for newborns was what catapulted her into her life as a mother of four by the age of twenty-nine. Maybe it was just Catholics being bad at birth control. But as I moved shakily, hesitantly, and suspiciously into my own bout of motherhood, that fact, that my mother had thought it was barely a blip and certainly nothing worth complaining about, was often in the back of my mind.
Because my pregnancy, let me be clear, kind of sucked. And in another place and time before modern medicine, I’d probably have ended up dead. Almost definitely. Or Zelda wouldn’t have made it. But here we are now; I’m alive and well enough to complain about it. A lot.
My ambivalence about having a child was fading, but my body still seemed unsure. My own pregnancy, unlike my mother’s, never settled into an easy groove that let me grow comfortable. Instead, I progressed through it in a haze of complications, my body feeling as though it were constantly under attack.
The day I found out I was pregnant, I calculated it to be about six weeks. My doctor didn’t want to see me until nine weeks, which is when a heartbeat is usually detectable and can rule out early miscarriages, so I made an appointment and plotted out how to wait out that time, taking pains to avoid telling anyone, not even really daring to think about the time beyond the next few weeks. Josh was excited, but he followed my lead. Wait and see.
* * *
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A week and a half after I made the appointment, so far then in the future, I felt a familiar feeling—a sudden wetness—that, because I was now pregnant, seemed bad. I went into the bathroom and saw what I knew and feared I would see: blood.
“I think it’s just . . . gone,” I said to Josh when I came out of the bathroom. I was crying, but only a little bit, because I didn’t know if it was gone. Was I still pregnant? I’d been pregnant knowingly for only two weeks. . . . Was I supposed to be sad?
I thought of the possible baby in my future for a second.
“Call the doctor,” Josh said. Oh. Right. The doctor. Josh was so much smarter than me.
I went in that day, alone, because Josh had a meeting that he couldn’t cancel, and I assured him I was just fine to go on my own. My first visit with my obstetrician, a guy I didn’t know but who had been recommended via email by my GP, was because I was bleeding. Not the happy circumstance I’d been expecting and weeks earlier than I thought, but there I was, sitting in a room, waiting for him to come in, staring at a chart that listed the statistical likelihood of having a baby with Down syndrome based on maternal age. I noted that the likelihood really skyrocketed right around thirty-five before he came in.
“There we go,” Dr. Moritz said as he performed my ultrasound, declaring, “A heartbeat.” The fetus was, for now, alive. It didn’t sound like a heartbeat. It was muddled and watered down. It was so fast.
“That’s good, right?”
“That’s very good!” He smiled at me. I wondered if he thought maybe I was not very bright before I remembered he saw women like me in these circumstances every day. This was no big deal for him; he could be relaxed and matter-of-fact about the whole thing. My whole thing. My fetus. I realized while sitting there, for the first time, how desperately I wanted it to survive. Hours earlier I’d told myself it would be fine if I lost it, but suddenly, that wasn’t true at all. I didn’t yet think of it as a baby, but it was more than nothing. A desire, a biological need for it to survive and be protected by me, had appeared from . . . nowhere.
“Moving forward from today,” he said, “you have a fifty-fifty chance of losing the pregnancy.” This sounded bad, of course. Anytime a woman—maybe my age was a factor, but maybe not, I don’t know—bleeds early in her pregnancy for unknown reasons, the odds are about fifty-fifty that she’ll miscarry. The longer you go without bleeding, the odds of keeping it increase. Fifty-fifty. Not bad. But not good. He explained all of this in thirty seconds.
“It’s okay,” he said, patting my shoulder. But he didn’t seem overly concerned, either.
“Does this happen a lot?” I asked, comforted at the imagined prospect that I might be one of many.
“Yes, women get pregnant all the time,” he said, straight-faced, before breaking into a smile. “It’s okay”—he patted my shoulder again—“the best thing you can do is not worry.”
To this, I mentally said, “LOL.” Worrying is what I do. My anxious energy pushes me through every day, every piece of work, every holiday meal for twenty-four people. Aggressive worrying is how I operate.
“I’ll try,” I said with a smile, looking out the window at the buildings across the street. I wanted to be out on the street again, not there in that office, wondering when I would bleed again.
I got lucky in the doctor department. Dr. Moritz was the right choice. Over the course of the pregnancy we would see him, almost always Josh and me together, many more times than a woman with a normal pregnancy sees her obstetrician. He was, like Josh, a joker in the face of struggle and fear. But Josh couldn’t joke about this, so Dr. Moritz was there to do some of the work for us.
“Take your vitamins,” he said, clearly wrapping up our visit.
“Every time you bleed, you reset the clock,” he said, and though I never wanted things to be candy coated, even I could admit that these odds seemed . . . bad. “Don’t worry, take multivitamins, and don’t worry,” he said. “This part isn’t up to you, and you’re not in control.”
It was the absolute best advice I have ever received about pregnancy and, in some ways, motherhood, too.
* * *
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I bled three more times over the course of my first trimester, and yet, every time, I went in to see the doctor, squeezed in between other, scheduled appointments, and there was that sound, the heartbeat. I couldn’t hear the heartbeat at home when I woke up at 6:00 a.m. to the now-familiar feeling that I had gotten my period, even though I was pregnant. I wasn’t sure. I had to go see: Is it alive?
“Nothing is in my control” became my mantra.
My husband was supportive, but as a woman whose body tenuously held on to pregnancy against what seemed to be increasingly pushy and inhospitable conditions, I can tell you that I felt quite alone in that period. Dr. Moritz advised us to wait
longer than normal to tell people. Usually, they’ll tell you to wait until twelve weeks. He said wait until sixteen or so if we could. Already, it seemed, we might be at some disadvantage: the pregnancy, always high risk because of “advanced maternal age” (I was, after all, thirty-six years old!) now seemed to be truly under fire. This didn’t seem as though it would last. It really didn’t. And I don’t count on things that aren’t going to last. I couldn’t be optimistic, not then. Optimism was blindness.
It seemed more likely to me that I would end this phase without a baby than with. Simply put, much of my pregnancy really didn’t feel like pregnancy. It felt like an extended possibility of miscarriage, where some days I even just wished for it to get over with already, so sure did it seem that I wouldn’t hold on to it.
But I did. Or, more accurately, it held on to me. She held on.
In fact, though I felt kind of funereal in my heart, every early appointment progressed just fine. The fetus was growing, developing at a completely normal rate. The blood was inexplicable, the fetus—the baby, if you’re an antiabortionist—seemed totally fine, happy as a pea, a bean, a brussels sprout, just hanging on in there, no awareness that all day every day for me, her mother-to-be, was “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!” And yet, every few weeks, there was a little trickle of blood, for seemingly no reason, which I took as an attack against me and my recently acquired hopes and dreams of motherhood.
I made no plans; I brainstormed no names. I staked out my territory, waiting. The summer passed us quickly, and gradually, we allowed ourselves to tell close friends and family.
I told my father much too early. I even told him about the blood. “I’m not sure; it might not stay,” I said. I didn’t know what he knew of gynecology. We told Josh’s parents. We told his brother, who was getting married just then, in the midst of all this. I carried it like a secret, but one that I couldn’t even admit to myself.
We can tell “the kind of people we won’t mind telling if it goes away,” I wrote to myself in my journal, a new one I had started expressly to document the pregnancy. The individual pages were large—eleven by seventeen—but there weren’t very many of them. I didn’t choose it consciously, but looking back at it now, it’s clear to me that I didn’t think this was gonna last. I felt sure, really, that it wouldn’t.
I’d been ambivalent for so much of my life about having a child, and even once I’d decided that I wanted one, I’d cried tears of anguish or fear at the prospect of a baby. But now that I was pregnant, I wanted to hang on, to have the baby. I wanted the pregnancy to stay.
And it did. The months wore on. We did scans and drew blood and went through genetic screening to see if we carried anything that might be passed on. My mother-in-law was with me when I did the genetic counseling. When they asked if I’d miscarried or aborted, I said, “One miscarriage.” Not true: I had to run back in and tell them I had lied.
The many tests didn’t find anything abnormal, which, that early in the pregnancy, when they do find things, are often very serious. We aced the tests, all the while feeling under threat. I kept bleeding.
A few days after the genetic screening, the counselor called me from the hospital in the middle of the afternoon. I was standing in the huge open office I worked in, surrounded by twenty or thirty other people. We were in the middle of a week of all-hands meetings, and writers had traveled from all over the parts of the world where they normally worked to be there. Josh and I worked together, and he was in his office across the room. I could see him through the glass. I texted him from across the office: “They wanna know if we want to know if it’s a boy or a girl.” “Go for it,” he responded as I stood waiting there at my desk, ready to call them back.
“You’re having a girl,” the counselor said.
Josh told everyone in the office moments later that I was going to have a baby. A rare thing, in a roomful of bloggers, mostly men, mostly under the age of thirty.
Learning this, that we were going to have a girl, somehow made my pregnancy real in a way that it hadn’t felt before: Here was information I could snag on to and hold. Here was something I could imagine around. My baby was going to be a girl. I was a few weeks into my second trimester, and everything was going fine.
* * *
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Then followed a few fairly blissful weeks. I never really had morning sickness, I felt just fine, and I wasn’t yet so large that I felt encumbered simply by existing and taking up too much space. We moved into the fall—our daughter was expected at the end of February—happily. I finally allowed myself for the first time to really enjoy the concept of having a baby. I started researching cribs and strollers, making plans to clean out the spare bedroom, which would now be the nursery. I worked, and I planned. I allowed myself the luxury—one I had always avoided—of thinking, and even looking forward to, the future. I allowed myself to hope and to plan, things that have often been very hard for me even in the presence of great reason to hope. I wanted my hopefulness to last, and I wanted to share it.
* * *
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I have always approached life with a certain sense of wariness, not because I’m naturally cynical but because often, expecting the worst can mean that your expectations cannot be overwrought. I remember a long-ago childhood conversation with Emily in which she told me, “Things never live up to how I imagine them, in my mind, the way I see something; it’s always better than what actually happens.” I got that feeling completely, but I didn’t necessarily share it. I often approached things from the opposite side: I didn’t play things up or out in my mind. I expected nothing. And so occasionally I was pleasantly surprised when cool things happened, or when a party turned out to be fun instead of boring or awkward. I didn’t try to make friends, but sometimes I found a special person I connected with.
But with the progress of my pregnancy, I not only allowed myself to feel excitement at the prospect of the future, I embraced it. I wanted to meet this kid, badly, because for the first time, my imagination wasn’t filling in anything for me: I couldn’t even grasp at a basic outline, and each time she grew on the sonograms I got every two or three weeks, they didn’t really help me fill in the space. “I have no idea what she’ll be like,” I said to the air as I stood in the kitchen, stirring a pot of something for dinner. I couldn’t imagine her yet, and not knowing was so hard but so full of possibility. I imagined her then as a person, a wonderful, beautiful, vague, and poorly drawn person, but a person nonetheless.
I became a different, less taciturn being temporarily. “I’m pregnant” I started saying to random New Yorkers on the street or on the subway. “I can see that,” one of them once deadpanned back to me. I didn’t care; I was already floating up the stairs toward the street, and my feet didn’t even touch the pavement. I was feeling fine. Just fine.
I started buying her books. Maybe it made sense to buy her clothes or practical things first, but I started with what I loved and what I had ideas about. I bought her a Little House on the Prairie set, among other “great books” of my youth: Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Monster at the End of This Book, Madeline, The Snowy Day, The Phantom Tollbooth. Because I didn’t envision her as a specific person, she seemed ageless, and so I purchased whatever I wanted. I didn’t need baby books; she could read more advanced material. I was, without thinking about it, already trying to shape the person I imagined her to be or the one I’d like her to be. I imagined her as a book lover, like myself. These were impractical first purchases. Long before I thought of bottles or onesies or diapers, I thought of books.
I didn’t worry too much about what the experience of birth would be like, and I didn’t worry about what it would be like to have a baby. For the first time in my life, I felt as though I was really living almost entirely in the present. I knew that it couldn’t go on forever. But I tried to enjoy it while I could.
In hindsight, it’s hard to complain or eve
n to linger over any one complication, because my daughter was born and she was healthy and beautiful. But in truth, my pregnancy was pretty miserable. As I moved into the second trimester, I began to feel very tired, and I gained weight very quickly. I remember being offended the first time the doctor said something to me about watching what I ate. I’d read about these kinds of warnings. I wasn’t overeating; I was doing everything just like I was supposed to! I’m a vegetarian, and I generally eat well anyway, and now I was drinking lots of water and paying attention to everything I ingested. What did he mean I should “be careful”?
But he was right: I had gained weight alarmingly fast. Reading my chart now, it’s clear that there was a problem: I started at 135 and then edged over to 140 in the first three months. But less than two weeks later, I was nearly at 150. By the time I gave birth, I weighed 199 pounds. But it wasn’t from food.
Around the twentieth week of my pregnancy, at one of our routine checkups, I asked about birthing classes. I was worried that Josh, whose tolerance for unenjoyable activities he views as a waste of time can be very low, would not fare well in a class with other participants, and I was hoping we could have something private, maybe at home, even if it costed more.
“Hire a doula,” Dr. Moritz said, “and then you don’t even have to bother with the birth classes at all.” At various points throughout the pregnancy, this obstetrician truly seemed like a magician, and this was one of those times. I felt relief wash over me as the anxiety about what that fucking class would be like melted away. We could put it off! We could read a book or watch a YouTube video about birth. Our doctor was in a documentary about birth—The Business of Being Born—and we could just view that one night, for fun. But we never watched it. “I could figure it out,” I thought. “How hard could it be?”
