Baby [Not] on the Brain
Footprints on the heart.
Reposting in recognition of Infertility Awareness Week 2023. Don’t miss Dear M&J, the letter I wrote my in-laws when we were trying to get pregnant.
For years, I never wanted to have kids. I was, admittedly, very selfish, and found them weird, kind of boring, needy, and diapers made me gag (still true). Truth be told, I also perceived pregnancy as a way to become uncomfortably fat really quickly. Growing up, I was always a bit overweight. Looking back, I suspect part of it was that I come from a long line of exceptionally talented cooks, and the other part is that when I was diagnosed with epilepsy at age 11, I was put on medication that made me gain almost 40 lbs. In middle school, aka hell on earth when bitches come crawling with their claws out.
But by the time I headed into high school, I had switched meds and the weight melted off. I was the thinnest I’d ever been, and healthy. My neurologist put me on folic acid, which he explained would be a necessary complement to my drug regimen if I ever wanted to have kids. At 14, I balked at this, but at 33, when we first started trying to get pregnant, I thanked that doctor in my head many times.
When we were dating, my now-husband and I discussed having children. He was absolutely certain he wanted them. One day, before we were married, we were sitting on the couch in his Virginia apartment watching TV and I can’t recall what was on but it prompted him to ask me, “What if you can’t have kids?”
I burst into tears.
He hadn’t meant to be insensitive, and I was surprised at my own reaction. Up until that moment, I had never thought about not having kids because I couldn’t, only not having them because I wouldn’t. But after all those years being disinterested in reproducing, his question triggered feelings I didn’t know I had. Maybe kids would be cool! Maybe kids with him would be cool.
We got married in 2016, moved, and both started new jobs a few months after our wedding. At 30, we were in no rush to begin a family; I still didn’t even know if I wanted kids for sure. Our jobs were demanding and we were adjusting to a new city. Plus, my epilepsy and other health conditions needed to be addressed before we could try.
Eventually, I began consulting with doctors. I knew I was already considered a high-risk pregnancy but I didn’t know exactly what that meant. For two years I worked with a family planning team consisting of an OB/GYN who specialized in high-risk pregnancies, a neurologist, an interventional radiologist, a maternal fetal medicine physician, a genetics counselor, an ENT, and a pulmonologist. Each doctor put my mind at ease and agreed that my own health issues were certainly not a reason to not have children and that plenty of women before me had healthy pregnancies and healthy babies.
As I was adapting to the idea of pregnancy, it seemed that suddenly everyone around me was expecting. Friends who got married after us were having babies, telling me that when we have one, they’ll be the best of friends! I’d be lying if I didn’t say that some of this played a role in my growing desire for children. Watching our friends with their kids opened my eyes to a whole new side of them. They were indisputably happy, even when things got tough and their kid melted down like an abandoned ice cream cone.
I also knew how much my husband wanted a baby and I knew he would be a wonderful father. I had never said ‘never’ to having kids, and he never said it was a dealbreaker if I didn’t.
In 2019 we bought our first house. I had randomly found the listing online at 7am on a Sunday morning (why I was awake at that ungodly hour on a weekend remains a mystery) – it had been on the market less than 24 hours. I sent it to our realtor who set up an appointment to see it immediately. We fell in love and wrote an offer, beating out four others. We felt very much like adults and as if we were taking the next big step in our lives. The step after that, of course, would be children. We couldn’t ignore the fact that as proud new homeowners, we had two extra bedrooms.
Baby Brain set in and I was consumed with getting pregnant. As a bona fide control freak, my biggest mistake was trying to control this. I listened to too many people, read too much online, downloaded too many apps and spent too much money on ovulation sticks. We were hemorrhaging cash on new and unforeseen things for the house (“welcome to home ownership,” everyone said) and my husband was extremely stressed.
After nine months of trying with no success, I was losing my mind. I added so much pressure to our lives and unfairly left many responsibilities to my husband. Convinced it would never happen, I sought help from a reproductive endocrinologist. He reminded me that nine months really is not very long for a healthy woman my age but understood my fears about managing my risk factors were I to get pregnant. After a slew of tests, the doctor reported that we had “unexplained infertility.”
I talked my husband into trying IUI. I knew someone younger who had done it and wound up with triplets on the first round! IUI is far less invasive than IVF, not to mention a fraction of the cost. But it still required a significant time investment. I was going to the office three times a week for check-ins and giving myself shots each evening. I tried extremely hard to stay positive and reassure myself it would work.
It didn’t.
This all sounds very dramatic, and it was. It was saddening, maddening, and made me feel like the biggest failure ever. I know firsthand people and friends whose journey to conceiving took years and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here I was at “only” ten months, and I began to feel very guilty for unloading on my friends. Fortunately, I have the greatest friends in the world and they were compassionate, helpful, and kept me hopeful through it all.
We decided to stop timing the trying. I tossed the ovulation sticks, deleted the apps, and retreated to a clear headspace. We lived our lives, attended more weddings, did it when we wanted and didn’t force anything. We were coming up on the one-year anniversary of our home purchase and my husband seemed less stressed. I was no longer trying to control things. We were just living.
Then, on my drive home from work one day, I realized I was nine days late. I am never late. Ever. I walked into the house and didn’t quite know what to do with myself. So I took four pregnancy tests.
They were all positive.
I began to think back and couldn’t believe I didn’t recognize the signs. There was the morning I randomly craved OJ and after one sip was running to throw it up. My chest felt like boulders. There was the exhaustion. I had been abnormally tired to the point where I thought I had narcolepsy. I was leaving work early, my eyes closing on the long commute home, and taking naps before dinner because I physically could not keep my eyes open.
I couldn’t reconcile my emotions. I was elated and shocked and scared. I was so scared it was a false positive. I was scared to tell my husband for fear that it wasn’t real. When he got home, I waited hours to say anything. I found him laying on our bed and I went to retrieve the tests I had hidden earlier to give him. He smiled so wide and pulled me in to the biggest, tightest hug ever.
In January 2020, I went in for a blood test to confirm everything and breathed a huge sigh of relief when that too came back positive. We went to the first ultrasound - the only one we’d ever attend together - and the doctor pointed out the tiny cell that would grow to be our Peanut within 9 months.
As the outside world changed rapidly, I stayed inside where I felt secure and safe. My job had sent everyone to work from home. Not having to venture into the new COVID-laden society was an absolute privilege; I could wear loungewear all day and get Starbucks iced green tea delivered when I was too nauseous to drive (a godsend for morning sickness as well as their butter croissants and marshmallow dream bars). If I needed to take a nap, I did. I wanted nothing more than to have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby – boy or girl, I didn’t care. I tried to do everything right.
For all my fears and worries, I did indeed have a very normal pregnancy. The nearly four months of morning/all-day sickness were brutal, but I got through it with Whole Foods mac and cheese. I gained a perfectly healthy 35 pounds, and while uncomfortable, a daily pool routine helped immensely. My husband and I bonded over my growing belly. Every Tuesday, we would look at the What to Expect - Week by Week Pregnancy chart to check what size Peanut was that week. It was a silly, fun little activity we looked forward to doing together. For the rest of the week, he would refer to the baby as that fruit - How’s my little strawberry today?
As it turned out, having a baby with my husband was pretty cool. She looked exactly like him when she was born and in my painkiller-induced fog, I wondered if the doctors had gotten the sex wrong. They hadn’t – and two years later with her long blond curls and fair skin, she’s finally looking much more like me. The other day I showed her a baby picture of myself and asked her who it was and she said her own name. It was soooo validating!!! Now, that baby is always on my mind.
