One Year Ago

On the Monday before last Thanksgiving, we were a family of three. I steamed some broccoli for dinner, and I’d been looking forward to eating it, but as I chewed the first bite I realized I was hardly going to be able to swallow it. This yummy veggie was inexplicably making me gag.

Inexplicable only because I was a little dense. The previous week I’d had what seemed like my period, but it had never amounted to more than a trickle. (Damn PCOS, I thought.) I’d been thinking I needed new bras, because boy did my boobs hurt (Ingrid must be nursing more, I thought.) And the previous weekend I’d commandeered a trip to a burger place where I wolfed down a record quantity of the best fries I'd ever tasted. (I guess I’m just hungry.)

Trying to sleep that night after the broccoli, I started to see it: Gag reflex. Sore boobs. Intense food needs. Weird bleeding. Ahaaa!

I rolled out of bed at 2:30 a.m. to rummage through the bathroom cabinet for a leftover HPT. I found it, but I waited until morning to pee on it.

I kind of knew what I’d see. And I did, clear as day: that line.

The morning was rushed. It was a work day for me, and the babysitter got here and I didn’t say anything to A yet. It’s the biggest secret I’ve ever had. I was so rocked by it I couldn’t bear to give it to anyone else yet, not even him.

The car was in the shop and the bus was late, so I walked home from work that evening. It’s a long walk: 45 minutes if you’re fast. I remember the cold of the day, how my thighs and hands were burning when I arrived home, how strange everything looked. I remember standing on our front steps before I pulled the door open. Looking in at the glowing little world of our home, watching A feeding Ingrid dinner, knowing I was about to crack it all wide open into something new by bringing my body and my big, big news inside.

A and I had always hoped to be able to have a second child. To have that child flicker into our lives without any effort at all on our part—even if it happened a year or so sooner than we would have ideally planned—was a gift as magnificent as it was unexpected.

Happy birthday-of-sorts, little lovely one. I’m so glad you’re here.

I'm sure you want to know...

Today's peek at ye olde cervix revealed pretty much nothing of interest. Quote of the day: "This baby could hang out for another week." However, this was the same doctor who, at my 36 week appointment, predicted "a couple more weeks" and got me in a tizzy about not being ready in time. She has pretty much used up her ability to get me excited one way or another.

I guess this is the stage where a lot of people start to fear they will be pregnant forever. And it has crossed my mind that this is not a baby but some sort of rare abdominal tumor (With a heartbeat. And feet.), but mostly I am confident that eventually I will go into labor and a baby will come out. And beyond some heartburn, I'm not really so uncomfortable. My chief problems are the heat (how I would love to walk and walk and walk, but it is so hot out there's just no way) and boredom. Which is silly because I'm pretty much doing all the things I normally do in a week (besides work). I guess my usual activities just seem more boring when I'm thinking something else should be going on instead.

Fortunately, Dr. Poor Prognosticator was not at all jumpy about induction (though she seemed surprised when I said I'd prefer to wait if all looks fine with the baby). I have an appointment a week from today for a non-stress test, and if the baby still looks healthy and I still want to wait for things to happen on their own, she's fine with going a few more days from there. I hope we don't make it that far.

40 Weeks, 3 Days

I don’t know about where you are, but here it's the hottest week of the summer, more or less. On the radio last week, someone called it “deep summer,” and I’d never heard that term before but it seems exactly right.

The garden drinks everything we give it and wants more. Every day, a handful of cherry tomatoes turns red enough to pick. One of our two pear trees drops its hard, stunted fruit for lack of water. In front of our house, kids scuff by in flip-flops on their way to the pool at the park, towels over their shoulders.

A was diagnosed with Lyme disease this weekend—which isn’t as bad as it sounds, as they caught it before the painful and unpleasant symptoms emerged, but still feels like another sign that everything’s langorous and perched between ripeness and rot.

My belly is big and low and hangs out indecently from under all but the most giant, uncomfortable shirts. I walk very, very slowly, and my hands are so swollen my wedding ring is cutting a neat circle into my ring finger. The baby moves all the time, but more and more gently, running out of room. I eat raw almonds and drink ice water, willing down the heartburn.

Ingrid sits in what’s left of my lap, her head on my shoulder and her arm on top of my belly. I can feel the baby moving. I think that’s the foot. And that’s Mama’s belly button. It’s so big and squishy!

We're all just waiting. I’m done with work. I was so convinced the baby would come early, I didn’t make many plans for these days. We walk to the river, visit a waterfall, soak in the wading pool in the backyard. We make predictions, all wrong so far: It’ll happen on the full moon. The day after my due date. After a spicy meal. The night the doctor who delivered Ingrid is on call. We reconsider our name decision, add a whole new girl name right at the top of the list. I knit. I parse potential early labor signs: Irritability? Increased ear wax production? Carbohydrate cravings? The phone rings again and again. Not yet. We’ll let you know.

No Further Effacement...

...physical or figurative. I went to my appointment all set to apologize to the receptionist for my part in our tense conversation yesterday, and she wasn't there. Hmm. And apparently there is also no significant change on the cervical front. Which...whatever. My mom arrived this evening, and it's a relief to have that last piece of our labor & delivery scenario in place, but I'm still in no rush.

The Shuffle

I showed up at my OB appointment today to find out that the doctor I was supposed to see is "in surgery", as are a number of other doctors in the practice, and the next time someone can see me is 2:45 tomorrow. This same thing happened last week, only that time they called me in the morning to reschedule and I was able to get in that afternoon after all. But today I'd been away from the phone all day (I am the only person on earth without a cell phone, it seems), so hadn't gotten their message.

It is pretty irrational to be all disappointed about this, as all I would have done is pee in a cup, have my blood pressure checked, and get a quick poke to the cervix and the latest reading of the tea leaves about when the baby will arrive. But it makes me uneasy to be shuffled around and especially to hear "in surgery" thrown around like it's not disturbing. I'd be much more cheerful about it if they'd just let me believe the missing OBs are busy catching healthy, uncomplicated babies as they emerge in the healthy, uncomplicated, traditional fashion.

What made it worse was the yucky and botched conversation I had with the receptionist about it. I think she took my basic lack of perkiness as meanness, and my weird attempt at humor as some kind of criticism of her, and reacted defensively, which to me looked like bad behavior and felt rotten, so I reacted by being abrupt, and, ack. I hope it didn't wreck her day as much as it did mine.

There are a thousand very good arguments to use to talk myself out of this, but for now I feel vulnerable and mad and uncared for and worried about bad omens and labor in the hospital and bureaucratic messes and being one small patient of one pretty big (though really good, I still believe) obstetric practice, one who may get crunched up by forces beyond her control.

There is a mama bear in me, still, who says, I am not at their mercy, I am going to get this baby out into the world the way I need to and the bureaucracy and the hospital smell will just be there, standing by on the outside. But oooooh, she is a tired and bloated mama bear, one who'd be much less growly and grumpy if things, even little things, would just go according to her plans.

Absent

Wednesday I went to the grocery store to get food for the week and for a dinner I was making for a friend who stayed with us last night. Rather than follow my usual, well-worn path through the store, I overlooked and had to loop back to find no fewer than five items. I visited the baking aisle three times (and I’m not even baking anything). And I still came home without bread (I eat a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast pretty much every morning), milk (my calcium obsession is in full swing), or couscous. (The dinner for that friend in town? A couscous dish.)

I haven’t felt so spacy any time that I can remember. If it hadn’t already been going on for three days I’d swear I was in very early labor. But this week’s peek at the cervix turned up no significant change from last week, and I remain, a good deal of the time, unable to connect one sentence (mine or anyone else’s) with the last, so I guess this part of the preparation is strictly mental and, if you want to get all lofty about it, spiritual.

I’m enjoying these strange, liminal days. I make plans, but know I might not be keeping them, so nothing is too weighty. Each thing I accomplish feels like a bonus. There’s plenty to fear and worry about, but not much to be done about any of it, and besides I’m so sleepy it all just drifts over me, along with, like, everything else I’m sort of marginally trying to pay attention to. It’s like my brain is floating on its back in a pool of estrogen, reading chick lit and sipping a progesterone martini. Mmmmm.

Ready

Or, as Ingrid would say, Ready-dode! (She has a fabulous habit of adding suffixes to words. Greens are greensongers. Dinner is dinnerdond, A is Daddy-dode or sometimes Datty-dotey, I am Mama-sama or Mampa-ninta. I love this. My smart, smart girl! She already gets that language is here for us to embellish and enjoy.)

Anyway, despite some recent wrenches thrown into our plans, we are all about as ready-dode as we can be for this baby.

Over the weekend, A took Ingrid to Grandma’s house and I had an amazing, dream-like 36 hours of doing whatever I wanted. I cleaned things up and they stayed clean. I moved from room to room with total lack of drama. I had whole thoughts, lots of them, from beginning to end, without being interrupted. I sorted clothes, cleaned baby items, culled toys, washed and folded tiny onesies, made lists, read, wrote, ate, shopped for nursing bras. I also purchased, in almost insane disregard for our always tight and now even tighter household budget, these swaddling blankets. And, in the last four hours or so before A and Ingrid arrived home, I sat on the couch, watched terrible TV, and worked on knitting a sweet little light blue cotton kimono sweater.

Many, many things are crossed off the list, and I’d love it if the baby held off until my mom arrives in town and our doula gets back from vacation and we’ve sorted out the name question and I’ve had more time to hand off various duties at work, but if it happened today, I’d no longer feel so unprepared.

The wrenches all got thrown into the works yesterday: I tested positive for group B strep, which means I’ll need to be at the hospital for probably most of my labor, to get IV antibiotics. The aforementioned vacationing doula (who gets back Sunday) called to say that her backup doula is swamped because three of her clients are overdue, so there’s a chance we will need to go to backup doula number two, who is only available nights and weekends. And the dear family member who had agreed to be the main, number one Ingrid care person during the baby’s arrival was kind enough to cc us, yesterday afternoon, on a breezy e-mail giving the details of her upcoming road trip—of which we had previously been unaware—this Thursday through Sunday

Oh, and also the baby is at -1 to 0 station, and I am maybe 60% effaced and a fingertip dilated.

It sort of sounds like the perfect storm, doesn’t it? It all made me pretty teary yesterday. But, having had some time to make backup plans, I feel more optimistic. We now have some good backup child care arrangements in place, and I seriously doubt we will fall through the cracks of this whole metropolitan area’s doula network; someone will be able to be with us.

The strep thing, though, is really a bummer. I know there must be people who decide not to, but I'm risk averse enough to want to follow my OB’s advice on this one. And I had really hoped not to spend much time at the hospital. All mature discussions of the relative importance of birth vs. the whole rest of a child’s life aside, it is pretty important to me that the birth part go well, and I am both unhappy that I won’t get to labor in the comfort of home again and worried that more time in the hospital will lead to unnecessary interventions.

But it looks like this is the way it’s got to be, so I'm going to work hard at building my own little comfortable (mental) labor world to take with me into that hospital room and hope that when the time comes there’s a doula around to help guard the edges of it.

Oh, and I found out my mom was four centimeters dilated for two weeks before my brother (her second baby) was born. So maybe we’ll make it past the doula / child care black hole and most of this will be irrelevant.

Ingrid is ready-dode, too, but this has gotten long, so that part will have to wait.

Same river?

As I waddle my way through that to-do list, I try to get a handle on what happened when Ingrid was an infant, why it was so hard and what I can do to make it better this time.

I’ve been keeping a journal, off and on, for a long time. (It made me shriek a little, just now, when I did the math to figure out how many years: 19.) The main result of this is a lot of heavy boxes full of notebooks with not much of interest in them. But once in a while I read back and find something I’m glad I wrote down. Like this, from the month after Ingrid was born:

She already seems so BIG. A and E from work came to visit Friday and went on about how tiny and delicate she seems. And people I meet on errands and walks say the same. But to me she already seems so much bigger and stronger than when she was born. Her face is stronger, is already losing that absolutely peaceful newborn softness and taking on more personality, becoming more a person’s face than a little spirit’s.

The pace of change is almost violent—both what I’ve seen already and what I anticipate. I remember feeling this especially strongly the day my mom left—thinking, two weeks ago I was a giant pregnant lady with no children. Then I was in labor. Then I was in the hospital gazing at a sweet newborn. Then there was this time when everyone was around taking care of me, and now they’ve all left and I am really a mother and she! She is a pound bigger than when she was born and look how much she’s already changed.

It’s like being a parent requires you to be able to roll with lightning-paced change, to love someone who again and again rips you open with her newness. It’s like every day you have to say goodbye to someone you love and welcome in someone entirely different. It’s a new kind of love. The other loves in our lives—romantic partners, parents, even friends—part of the deal is that they are relatively constant. They do change, and part of the challenge of love is to let them change, to let yourself change within it. But in almost every case the pace of change is slow—from one year to the next the difference is small. But Ingrid—this baby—a year from now she will be walking, probably, and beginning to say things, and will have a whole set of needs and preferences and qualities that I can’t even imagine today, and my sweet three-and-a-half week old, with that particular full-of-milk look, that certain way of smiling, those tiny hands and that little munchkin face—she will be long-gone, replaced by a succession of little Ingrids, each of whom I love heartbreakingly much. It is a different kind of love, a painful kind of love, to love someone who grows and grows and grows like this. I can’t imagine anything else that could stretch my heart this way.

Everyone knows parents get sentimental about how fast they grow up. Printed on one of the tiny onesies I unboxed this afternoon: If they could just stay little.

But it still surprises me how intensely I experienced growth, her growth, as loss. I remember the sadness of it, still, vividly.

I still feel these things: Grief when I notice she’s left something behind; intense love for who she is each week, each day, and excitement about what comes next. In a way I’m glad to have the chance to feel those extraordinary, opposite emotions at once. How vital, how thrilling, to be in this. But in those first months, it felt, as did so many other things, like too much. The volume of those emotions was turned up so high it was all I could do to hear anything else at all. What will happen when I go, again, into the storm of life with a newborn—a newborn who will be, barring a major rearrangement of priorities or major birth control failure—our last baby? I hope I’ll be able to take it all in, this time, without being too overwhelmed to see the arc of joy over it all.

But then...

...I actually am kind of excited. We met with our doula, and the concreteness of talking about plans for the birth reminded me that we’re really going to be meeting a new little human being. And that little person will have really soft skin and tiny fingers and those silly newborn facial expressions and, in all likelihood, gods willing, will spent its first few days zonked out in milk-drunk bliss in our arms. That I can get excited about.

Also, we are closing in on good names. We’ve had a short list for each sex for months now, but I’m starting to be able to imagine us actually agreeing on one of each kind.

There are issues with the names: Many of the ones we like have Scandinavian origins, yet we have the feeling if we go too Swedish with this one we’ll end up looking like we’re running a little Scandinavian farm. (And that’s not even my background!) The girl name we both are most drawn to is possibly too uncommon to be bearable with our somewhat difficult last name. And our favorite boy name is unfortunately also the name of our neighbors’ often loudly reprimanded weiner dog. But still, we’re figuring it out. I think we have three good ones of each kind now, and maybe we’ll have to wait and meet this baby before choosing one.

Still, there are a zillion things to be done before the babe arrives.

Many of them, I am realizing as I think about the possibility of a somewhat early arrival, are actually not so necessary. The scuzziness of the inside of the fridge, the organizational status of Ingrid’s outgrown clothes, the drifts of stale rice cake crumbs and (yes) petrified rounds of string cheese on the floor of our car...these things will not have direct bearing on the health and happiness of a newborn.

Other items on the to do list are actually kind of important. It is pretty important that I finish these projects at work. It’s also pretty important that I sit and think about what’s about to happen and write rambling paragraphs about it. Those are my two top priorities, really. Not necessarily in that order. (The file I need to be working on is open. That counts, right?)

This weekend, A is taking Ingrid to Grandma’s house, leaving me here for my first night alone since she was born and close to two whole uninterrupted days to tackle some of this stuff. I think I am now comfortable amending my wish for four more weeks of pregnancy to a hope that the baby stays in through the weekend. After that, I’m all set.

Gestational Update

Social:

At 36 weeks, this pregnancy has reached the status of Spectacle. No sneaking into a room for me. I am giiiinormous, and feeling sort of beautiful about it.

The drawback to such conspicuous largeness: the need to discuss my due date with every passing stranger and appropriately answer the question, “Are you excited? You must be getting so excited!” many times a day. (See Emotional).

Medical:

The OB du jour, this morning, said the baby’s head is down and is “pretty low,” and that my cervix is “soft, but not open yet.”

Then she said, “I think you have a couple more weeks.”

Emotional:

A couple more weeks?! Didn’t she look at my chart? I am 36 weeks now. I get four more weeks. FOUR! I need those weeks! I need them to unearth newborn paraphernalia and send poems out to be published and mail birthday gifts and savor being pregnant and get a little bit farther over my last post-partum period. I need those weeks, if nothing else, to finish the big, big projects at work that I am at this very moment procrastinating about. Gaah!

I know babies will come when they come, and OBs will say what they will, but Ack! And also Aaaghh! Baby? Coming? In two weeks? Not ready. Not. Ready.

The doctor seemed surprised that I was hoping to go longer. Could I really be the only patient she’s ever seen who, given the option, would gladly gestate Junior until, like, his or her first birthday?

Riddle

The to do list isn’t as long as it was before Ingrid was born. We have all the gear already. But it’s still a long list, and the weeks are going fast. And the biggest task—figuring out how to finally feel ready for this baby—is not one I’m sure how to accomplish at all. I plug away at it, quietly, inside, all the time.

And, in the meantime, I creep through the to do list, and take care of Ingrid, and work.

On Tuesday I interviewed a man who, the next day, would move into a new home, a group home for people with mental illness. We met in the living room of his old house, an extraordinarily dim and, dare I say it, depressing place, with sagging furniture and grayish walls and still air. While we talked he didn’t move his body at all. His face showed less emotion than any face I can remember seeing. I took several photos of him, and they all came out blurred, as if there were no sharp edges to his body.

When I asked him how he felt about the upcoming move, he hesitated. Mixed, he said. I like the room I have here. I can hear the traffic going by at night, and it calms my thoughts. I said, like the ocean. After a second he said, Yeah, like the ocean.

It was ninety degrees outside, humid and clear. I drove home along a highway I rarely drive on, and the suburban landscape—one I usually think of as sort of a wasteland—felt peaceful, full of green and air.

As I drove, I heard on the radio a story about a hundred-year-old collection of flowers made of glass. They interviewed the novelist Jamaica Kincaid, who said of seeing the glass replicas for the first time, I began immediately to think that real flowers were the imitation...that the flowers I saw before me in my garden were an imitation of things that were in glass. And they recorded Mark Doty reading part of the poem he wrote about the collection:

He’s built a perfection out of hunger
fused layer upon layer, swirled until
what can’t be swallowed, won’t yield
almost satisfies, an art
mouthed to the shape of how soft things are,
how good, before they disappear.

I ended the day feeling this all must add up to something, but I still don't know what.

Shadow

When people ask me how I’m feeling about the baby coming, I start out being honest. I’m worried, I say, about how we’ll do it. In response, people are universally upbeat: You’ll be fine. The second one’s always easier. Maybe this one will be a good sleeper.

Here is what I would say next if I could reliably say any of it without crying:

After Ingrid was born, I didn’t feel good. For a long time.

It’s hard to admit. I didn’t want to be anything less than blissed out by her very existence. I had imagined and anticipated her babyhood as a sweet, gentle time, and in a way it was.

But also I was anxious. A lot. About what might happen to her. About nothing and everything. I was set on edge by sounds—her crying, especially, but also other things: the TV, certain people’s voices—that seemed louder and rawer and more grating than usual. The farther from Ingrid I was, the more of my skin seemed to be missing. I dreaded leaving her to return to work, and at the same time I desperately needed breaks from her, from all the physical contact and all the vigilance. I guiltily fantasized about moving away alone, and I felt so ashamed about craving solitude (a bad mother! contemplating abandonment!) that I didn’t talk about how very much I needed a break, even to A, until months and months later.

The speed of Ingrid’s growth—the constant change—unnerved me. The pace of it felt violent. Boxing up each set of outgrown onesies, I felt so sad and weirdly lost, like I wanted to grab onto something but didn't know what.

Possibly more than anything, I needed sleep. Sleep I wouldn’t get for months and months and months. Many mornings, I was so tired I cried as A put his shoes on and left for work. How am I going to make it to the end of this day?

I was isolated. It’s embarrassing to admit how isolated I was. I’d assumed that being alone with a baby would be like being alone, which, for me, means invigorating, renewing. I didn’t count on being so drained by it and so lost without any point of reference. What are three-month-olds like? Do they all do this? I had dear friends with children who lived far away, and I had dear friends without children who lived nearby and worked all week, and I read a lot of books, but that wasn’t enough. Ingrid was born in May, and it wasn’t until September that I joined a parent/baby class and started to understand what a difference it made to see other babies and talk with other parents.

But it was still a long time before I started to feel better. It was a long time before I even realized (or admitted) how bad things had been.

There was joy all along: Ingrid was beautiful. She was precocious. She was snuggly. She had the world’s most kissable cheeks and the ineffable quality of being the world's most magnificent child and, my god, she was finally here. But the joy was always at the edges. I was never just happy being a mom, I was uncertain but happy or, more frequently, exhausted but happy.

One evening this winter as I sat with Ingrid while she fell asleep I realized that I felt really content. Nothing notable had happened that day; I'd just had a really good time hanging out with Ingrid, doing the things we do together. It was the first time I remember feeling simple contentment without at the same time having to hold something else down with both hands. I'd been feeling better, gradually, for many months, but this was the first time I remember feeling at home and right and simply happy. Ingrid was about 20 months old.

This is all hard to admit, not only because I’m so sad that it went that way, but also because it seems so silly in the face of a whole world where people, all the time, raise kids in poverty or sickness, or lose children, or aren’t able to have them in the first place, or confront a million things worse than anything visible in my life. But neither that nor the fact I longed for a baby for years before we were lucky enough to have Ingrid changes the fact that her first year on earth utterly knocked me on my ass.

I don’t want to turn this blog into some kind of therapeutic spot. There’s already a nice lady getting paid for that. But this is a big part of our story, and I want to try to tell more of it as I start to make more sense out of what happened and what to do next.

Update

Five months. What can have happened, right?

M speaks in complete, long sentences. She jumps (sort of). She goes down the big twisty slide by herself. She sometimes nurses only once a day, and she asks for "cows' milk in a cup" of her own accord. She spontaneously thanks guests when they leave: "Bye! Hanks for swinging wif me!" She carries her own plate of food to the table and climbs into the booster seat by herself. She still loves to sit on the potty with her shirt off, and she still has yet to pee in it. She hugs and kisses my belly and says, "Hi, baby."

She sleeps! For two or three hours at naptime and for nine or more hours at night! By herself! In her crib! She goes to sleep by herself in her crib! And does not need me until morning!

And I'm sick of the pseudonym M, which only stands for Monkey, a nickname she kind of outgrew when the Moro reflex went away. Her name is Ingrid. I can go public with that without you coming to TP my dandelion field, can't I?

I am still pregnant. Ever more unwieldily pregnant, and the baby seems very pointy and hard and active. We had a scary few hours after the 20-week ultrasound in March involving some choroid plexus cysts and a full-scale freakout by both my husband and me. We have moved on from that to occasional plunges into dread of the baby's first year. On which, more later. We have been talking a lot about names, and I've taken to taping down my belly button most days. Who knew it could be such a train wreck at only 32ish weeks?

I splurged on three ridiculously expensive giant allium bulbs last fall and they are now two feet tall and blooming. What Ingrid calls "a bad bunny" ate our first zinnia, but lots more blossoms are about to pop, and the tomato plants are shooting up and the pumpkin plant is already threatening to take over, and, speaking of taking over, the dandelions and milkweed and sumac and ivy are having a banner year so far. Let's not think of those things as weeds, shall we? Let's just see them as evidence that lots of things come here to thrive.

And it feels like I am thriving for the first time in a long time. Despite the baby worries. I feel so well-rested and, if not actually focused, more attentive to the things that matter than I have been in ages. Since Ingrid was born, really. For the first time in two years, I not only feel like writing but also seem to have the mental coherence to give it a shot. So look out.

Stew

Lucky. We know we want another child someday. We knew we would probably have to go through some rough times to get one (17 months to get pregnant with M!), and that it might not even be possible for me to get pregnant again. We practically willed M into existence, and now it seems someone else is headed our way pretty much unbidden, just like that. Sweet.

Sad for M. She has been at the center of our lives for her whole life. Everything is going to shift for her, and she has no control over it, and she isn’t really old enough to understand.

Terrified. M’s infancy was skull-splittingly, brain-meltingly, lie on the floor and drool HARD for me. She nursed constantly and I never figured out how to do anything but sit on the couch while I fed her. She spit up after practically every feeding and I spent months and months wearing the evidence and lacking the energy to clean up the many, many spit up spots on the floor, the furniture, the bed. She had a hard time sleeping and I did not cope well with sleep deprivation. People say you spend the first three months in a fog? I was in that fog for at least six months. Maybe nine. Maybe twelve. I am afraid of doing it again and really can’t imagine how I will get through it and also remain a decent mom to M, who will be two months past her second birthday when the baby comes.

Also, terrified. I am afraid about the period of sleep deprivation we may be entering (when M’s sleep has FINALLY become somewhat tolerable). About what this (pregnancy plus nursing, which M is still doing pretty often, at least for now) will do to my body. Our marriage. Our lives, all three of us.

Foolish. I knew I was having somewhat regular periods. Well, every 30 to 40 days, which is damn regular for someone who in the past has gone the better part of a year without bleeding. I even kind of suspected I was ovulating. But after all the months of trying to conceive before, it just seemed wrong to use birth control. So we … didn’t. We talked about it and agreed we would be happy to get pregnant “by accident,” but it just seemed so unlikely I don’t think we thought very hard about what it would really mean to get ready for a second child so soon.

Guilty. See Foolish. And Terrified.

Excited. It will be hard, but in my more clear-minded moments I kind of know it will be ok. We have a lot of time to get ourselves ready, and the hard parts will be ok, and about three years from now and maybe sooner it will be GREAT. Last night, my husband said, “I’m so excited that we get to have another baby.” I am too.

Skeptical. It still seems so unlikely, all this. The thought has crossed my mind that maybe that pregnancy test (um, I mean those three pregnancy tests) was the sort that show a “+” when you are NOT pregnant. I feel like we can’t tell anyone about it until we have some proof. Like an ultrasound. Or me no longer being able to fit into the booth at our favorite Mexican restaurant.

Worried. This is a given for me, really. Despite all my complicated feelings about this, there is the ever-present hum of “What if something goes wrong? Or already has?”

A Second

Well, I guess it takes big news to get me to post anything these days. And I think this qualifies:

I'm not sure how to say this or what to say next but it seems as though somehow. Erm. Seems as though I am pregnant.

There it is. It is a surprise and we are terrified but how could we not also feel lucky and thrilled? To have this as a surprise. The surprise of our lives.

Choked Up

Part of the reason I've been gone from here for so long is that I took a two-week vacation on the Oregon coast with my family, during which I had no access to the internet.

When I came back and started catching up with the fertility blogs I read, I was amazed at how quickly things change. While I was gone, people had found themselves pregnant, lost pregnancies, gotten news good and bad. So often each moment seems like we are frozen, and yet so much changes so drastically in such a short time.

Here's what's changed for me:

My cycle in August was the first cycle with monitoring and an hCG shot, my first cycle taking clomid and metformin at once. I didn't think it would work. During that two-week wait, I obsessed very little. I was busy. We closed on our house. We did a million things getting ready for vacation, and for moving.

But it turned out it worked. IT WORKED! An HPT was positive, and I had good, rising hCG levels in my blood.

Mr. Jae and I spent that week in a really weird state of disbelief.

I didn't write here because I didn't believe it yet.

I didn't believe it yet, and I was thrilled, and I was trying to start the long shift from the pessimistic attitude that served me so well for the past year an a half to the optimism that seems more useful and enjoyable in pregnancy.

Then we left for the aforementioned vacation. We met my parents at the coast, and we told my immediate family the news. We told them while my mom was chopping up cilantro, and she dropped the knife and the cutting board on the floor and cried and cried, and kept wiping her face with her hands, which were covered with cilantro bits, and she got cilantro bits all over her face, which I kept wiping off for her.

In the wee hours of the next morning, I woke up to pee, and when I wiped I could see blood. Reddish brown. Ugly.

I panicked. I didn't wake anyone up. I lay in bed letting tears soak my pillow and thinking, "God: If you are out there, I hate you," until, hours later, I fell asleep.

I called my RE's office in the morning, and the nurse told me not to worry as long as the blood was brown. And I tried to be all brave and cheery and optimistic but the bleeding seemed to increase and there was even some I'd say was brownish red rather than reddish brown, and I had cramps exactly like I'd get before having a really nasty period, and I spent the whole afternoon on the bed in the downstairs bedroom, crying and wiping my nose all over my snotty pajama shirt.

My mom brought me a sandwich and Mr. Jae sat with me and was amazingly calm and said amazingly right things (How did he know just what to say to a woman who was sure she was miscarrying?) My mom told me all about the bleeding she had while pregnant with me, and the bleeding my aunt had while pregnant with each of my cousins. I think I was tempoarily insane. I didn't really believe how common bleeding is (even though the nurse had told me on the phone), and I couldn't see how everything could be ok.

Finally I told them I wanted to take a nap, and Mr. Jae and my mom left, and I lay there clutching my snotty PJ top. The only thought I could think that was even slightly hopeful was, "Stay with me, little soul." And I kept saying this to myself as I fell asleep.

And I did NOT wake up to harder cramps or a gush of blood. I slept for a few hours, and woke up, and found the same unenthusiastic, ugly, brown spotting.

And it went on like that. I spent the whole vacation in a slowed-down state. I slept a lot, and went to the bathroom every half hour, probably, to check the color and quantity of the moment. Amazingly, amazingly, the spotting tapered off. And then came back. And then tapered off again. I made a few more teary calls to the RE's office and had a few more teary conversations with my family.

By the time we left for home, I'd had two days of no bleeding.

After we got home, it started again. On and off, sometimes seeming worse than the initial incident that had scared the living bajeezus out of me. The RE said they wouldn't do an ultrasound for another week, because it was too early for anything to be conclusive. Which I think is a load of crap. But the last thing I needed was anything else to be unconclusive, so I stuck it out. For a week I went back to that two-week-wait state - expecting the worst, hoping in my tiny little buried optimistic soul for the best: Stay with me, little soul. I couldn't write about it then. I couldn't put anything down without knowing how it would turn out.

The ultrasound was on a Wednesday, a week and a half ago. We held our breaths. We saw a heartbeat. The doctor said, "There's only one." I was too choked up to say, "One is perfect. One is all we need. One is just right."

I've had no bleeding for almost two weeks now, and I have been discharged to the care of a regular OB, who sees no problem with my quitting the metformin, having rambunctious sex, and taking up trampoline polo, and who says I will not be having ultrasounds every two weeks to preserve my sanity. I am still proceeding with caution.

I know so much about What Could Happen. And I am still making that shift, from protecting myself by expecting disappointment, to letting myself be THRILLED and hopeful, even while knowing there are no guarantees.

The world seems so dangerous, full of things I could breathe, swallow, or touch, that would severely fuck up what's going on inside me.

But here I am, almost nine weeks, and seemingly still pregnant. Nauseated on occasion. Gagging on dried apricots for no reason. Reading about pregnancy, which I never, never allowed myself to do before this. And feeling my mind turn, like a sunflower, to look at things differently.