Babies: How We Got To Where We Are

(Post carried over from Up To The Surface blog)

I had originally never planned to have children.

Though I never had set in stone a layout for my future

With world travel or a dream career at the center,

I did write the map to accommodate a child-free life.

Just after I turned 20, I realized that I desired marriage.

I felt incomplete without a husband.

I did intend to land and keep a “real” job

And with the income from it,

Buy a nice home, comforts and regular vacations.

I wanted to see some parts of the world,

But I didn’t feel like I would die if I didn’t ever get to

Stand atop the Eiffel tower, backpack through Europe

Or explore the streets of Tokyo.

I just wanted to have a photo album with a lot of pictures

Of myself and the husband lounging on tropical beaches

outside of luxury resorts.

I made it all the way through my 20’s without becoming pregnant.

I knew my future husband at 21 and was married to him at 26,

But took pride in having a flat stomach and enviable body

When most of my peers had stretch marks and paunch

from carrying babies and not having time to exercise

because of the presence of needy toddlers.

And then it happened.

Just a few months after I turned 30, I was caught off-guard.

I was trapped in a messy whirlwind of drama spanning from

The year before I turned 30 to at least six months after.

My marriage almost imploded.

I lost my full-time job at a bank.

I had to spend Christmas working in retail.

Finances were a shambles.

I had friends in my life who meant more harm than good.

And just as I had rolled into a new year thinking that

A fresh start meant the dust would settle

And I could focus on finding another 9-to-5,

I didn’t get my period.

This was the first time it ever didn’t arrive.

Even when all else in my life was chaos,

I could always count on that one function to be on-time.

Because of all the stress of working odd hours and

Nearly losing my marriage,

I was down to a pitiful 103 pounds.

I honestly thought I had finally done it-

I had inadvertently starved myself into breaking my own body.

Now I would have to face months of a special diet

A change in pace

Possibly expensive medications

To get my monthly period to start back up.

And then a friend said I should take a test to “rule that out”

Remember I said that my marriage had almost imploded?

We were working on mending it from just before my 30^th

But it was a long and bumpy road.

We had intimate time but we weren’t exactly

having more of it than the norm.

I was not on birth control, however.

We had always been “careful”

And since I knew my cycle,

Being careful had been enough.

But somewhere during the hectic holiday

Of working weird late and unpredictable hours,

I must have gotten disoriented about what day it was

Or how close I was to my next period.

So when it was a full week late,

I bought two tests so I could

“rule that out”.

The problem is,

Within seconds of the first test

Dipping into the little plastic cup,

Two lines started to appear.

I didn’t even have to wait five minutes,

But I instinctively flinched and turned it over

Face-down on the counter

To give it the five minutes anyway.

Maybe the extra line would vanish again?

I took a deep breath, and went to get my husband.

I brought him into the bathroom and told him

We were going to look at a test.

He knew I was taking one, so this was no shock.

But when I turned it over,

The second line was even darker.

Our marriage could have ended about ten months earlier

And it was still on the rocks

And we were still arguing fiercely and often,

But he saw the two lines and a smile crossed his face.

He wanted children.

I had always said flatly “no.”

“no, I’m not qualified.”

“No, I have anxiety”

“no, I enjoy my sleep”

“no, we can’t afford that”

And I will be honest... I was angry.

My literal response to seeing the test was

“Dammit Max, there’s a line”

as I was pointing to the one you didn’t want to see

if you didn’t want to be pregnant.

But here we were.

And I am pro-life, so there was no going back,

Only forward.

At the time I took the first test,

I called the doctor and they informed me that

Counting back to my last period,

I was five weeks pregnant.

They could not see me until I was closer to eight weeks.

I made the appointment, but half of me was still in denial.

I thought that maybe this was a fluke.

Maybe I did, indeed, technically conceive a child

But it had been what is called a “chemical pregnancy”

And it had terminated itself soon after

And the next test I would take at home,

A week later, would be negative.

And I would still get my period.

I still did not get my period.

And the second test, at what would now be six weeks,

Would still be positive.

When I got to the doctor’s appointment,

Which was at almost eight weeks,

My perspective changed.

I saw the tiny blueberry-sized creature on

an ultrasound monitor.

It was a blob, with a small body and a large head

But it did not look human yet.

Despite that, it had a tiny heartbeat.

I could see it flickering back and forth.

I felt ashamed for hoping it was a fluke,

And my tune changed from “God let this be a mistake”

To “I want you to be alive!”

I wanted it to survive against the treacherous odds

Of my underweight, stressed out body

And the tumultuous situation it would be born into

If I didn’t make some changes quickly.

At fourteen weeks, the ultrasound scan showed

That the baby was most likely a boy.

In just those six short weeks, he also had

A much more human form.

Seeing a heartbeat the first time made him real,

But to see a familiar baby shape

And have a gender to put with it in my mind

Made him mine.

I could assign him a name.

I could plan his room.

I could start daydreaming about mother-and-son adventures.

By the time he was born,

I was still very afraid about some aspects of parenting

And had no clue about others

But I was ready to embrace it and do my best.

Most of our marital dispute had been resolved.

I had a good bank job that would pay for a seven-week maternity leave.

I was conscientiously staying away from negative people

For the most part

And I had set up our condo for bringing home baby

to the best of my ability.

I will be honest.

I have had ups and downs.

I dealt with post-partum depression.

I couldn’t breastfeed for long.

I still fought with my husband.

I made mistakes with our son,

But I learned from them too.

I discovered after about eight months of broken sleep

That I would probably lose my job if something didn’t change

So my husband, temporarily the stay-at-home parent,

Had to step up and care for my son when he woke

During the night.

I felt guilty about so much responsibility falling on my husband.

I wanted to do better,

And present day I am still striving to be a better parent.

Now for the “part two”

In my early 20’s, I had resolved that I did not want to be a parent.

Part of it was fear that my anxiety and depression

Would do more harm for a child than good.

Part of it was selfishness...

wanting my free time, my sleep and my money

to be mine and not interrupted by someone else.

But I also made a vow with myself.

If somewhere along the line, there was a baby...

Whether a spouse talked me into it somehow

Or I accidentally got pregnant

There would be a sibling.

Why would someone who wasn’t sure she wanted to be a mother

Make a vow that she would have a second child?

It goes back to my own childhood.

My father came from a large family.

He had six other siblings, but it would have been more

Had a few not passed away at birth.

His was a poor family, but they understood

the value of togetherness.

If it was up to him, he would have had several children.

But my father isn’t a pushy man.

He is more of a pacifist, especially with my mother.

My mother came from a nearly opposite situation,

Save for the “poor” part.

Her mother didn’t want a child.

My mother was the product of an affair with a married man

And the resulting pregnancy cost my grandmother

her military career in Hawaii.

She had to return home to Florida to raise her daughter

As a single mother.

She carried my mother to term and gave birth to her,

But she passive-aggressively made it clear throughout

her whole childhood that she was a burden.

Later my grandmother would find another man and have a son.

That relationship also expired after so long.

Once she was a little older, my mother was left at home

to raise her baby brother

While my grandmother went out on the town and did as she pleased.

My grandmother also went to great lengths

to make it obvious she only liked boys.

My mother sported a boyish haircut.

She had oversized, shapeless clothes.

Her room was decorated in a color scheme more fit for her brother.

Her brother was fawned over and coddled, but she was not.

And when my mother was legally an adult,

She moved away for college-

Only to return home to find out that my grandmother had moved

Sold my mother’s possessions

and not told her where she was going.

Years of feeling rejected and not valued resulted in hurts

That would carry over into her motherhood with me.

My mother had a difficult pregnancy.

She described herself as being “constantly sick”

for so many weeks that I might have been at risk.

What she describes is most likely the condition

Hyperemesis gravidarum, which came into public focus

After Princess Kate Middleton suffered from it.

But in the late 1980’s, I don’t think it had a diagnosis yet.

My mother was also afraid of hospitals.

Around the time that I was born,

There had been some cases brought out in the open

of malpractice that caused great pain for some families.

So my mother opted for a private birth center.

I was born in a real bedroom with a lovely view of a lake.

But my mother labored for 17 hours with no epidural

to bring me into the world.

After all that she went through,

She claims that she was not suffering from post partum depression

But deep down, she had old hurts from a tough childhood.

Those would become more obvious later on.

Between the difficult pregnancy and birth

And whatever was unresolved from her past,

She only felt she could manage one child.

My father acquiesced and no other children were had

by my parents.

I was probably about four years old when I became aware

That I was the only child and other kids on the block

All had a sibling or two.

All the kids on TV had a sibling to share life with.

I wanted a little playmate.

I dreamed of a little sister,

Drew doodles of this little girl that didn’t exist

And went so far as to have an imaginary friend.

My teddy bears would also become siblings.

I would dress them up and sit them at the table at dinner.

It was enough to fulfill me for awhile

But by the time I became a pre-teen,

There was still a void there that my own imagination failed to fill.

When I went to a private school in middle school,

And didn’t fit in,

It became more painfully obvious that I needed a little sibling

To call my best friend and pal around with at the mall.

But for that to work, that child would have had to be born

When I was two or three.

Sometimes, I wished I had an older sibling.

When I became a teen that was old enough to go more places

But not yet old enough to drive,

And my parents said they were not going anywhere that day,

I wished I had a sixteen or seventeen-year-old sister

To drive me to Books A Million

so we could paw through fashion magazines

and then she could take me to American Eagle and

show me how to dress cooler.

As I became an adult,

I filled my time with enough pressing matters

Such as finding a job or a husband

that I obviously stopped thinking so much about siblings.

But every so often, a friend would mention

Getting to fly to a destination to be in her sister’s wedding

Or getting to celebrate her sister’s new baby

And I would feel a pang of jealousy.

I wanted that person around my age that

I could cry to about relationships

And she would embrace me in my pain and see and hear me.

I wanted that blood next of kin to do life with.

Getting into a relationship and getting married to my husband

Gave me a seat at the table of his large family.

That has had its moments,

But they had an entire existence as a family

For more than thirty years before

I came along

And their constant reminiscing reminded me

Of how far separated I was from them.

My husband would remind me that he fought with his brother.

They fought with his little sister.

They still get in fights now.

I still felt like I missed out.

My son wasn’t planned but it doesn’t mean

That he is going to grow up playing by himself.

Pregnancy was not easy for me either

At six weeks, I developed an unnerving nausea that

Didn’t just appear in the morning, it lasted all day.

But I was not sick as my mother described.

I could eat, but I would have food aversions

and feel sick regardless.

I had headaches, constipation,

tiredness at times.

By around sixteen weeks, it got better

But I had my share of aches and pains

As the baby grew.

Still, I ate well and stayed active.

I took long walks and worked out.

I went to my job.

I didn’t let the baby slow me down too much.

And when the time came,

I was induced.

I only had to suffer through a few hours of labor

Before I was given an epidural,

And the whole process was said and done in a total

Of eleven hours.

Childbirth was not pretty, but it was not traumatizing.

My stitches healed quickly.

There were no complications

I, Boymom

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Babies: How We Got To Where We Are

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