Honoring your “astronaut.”

Kid,

For each of the past 35 weeks, save the first couple during which you were too small to tell, doctors using high-tech imaging devices assured us you’d be born female. And for each of the past 35 weeks, save the first couple during which you were too small to tell, that’s more than occasionally scared the piss out of me.

Here’s why.

I went to school. I go to work. I watch television. I listen to music. I troll feminist blogs. Lately, I read Cinderella Ate My Daughter in one sitting. Occasionally, I go shopping. I know females. I’m friends with and/or related to more than a couple of handfuls of them. Plus, I am the proud/weary owner of a vagina, so I know from first-hand experience that growing up chick isn’t for the faint of heart.

And I’m not talking about the assorted horrorscapes of adolescent girlhood either. I’m talking about kindergarten. Pre-kindergarten even. Toddlerhood. Infancy. Hell, female fetushood! There are a lot of people out there who want you to be a lot of things girls supposedly are: pretty-in-pink, pint-sized princess, daddy’s little girl, a real lady, drive-the-boys-crazy, somebody’s mother. And the thing is you might not be any of these. And if you’re not, or even if you’re just some of them, some numbnuts will have something totally misplaced to say about how you prefer pants to skirts.

This one time I was four and Mrs. C-, my kindergarten teacher, asked the class to finger-paint a picture of something that made us happy. And in a sea of flowers and bunnies and rainbows and princesses and stick-figures-to-resemble-mothers, this girl painted a rocket ship: a white, phallic-shaped spacecraft soaring among a vast expanse of black universe, three stars (yellow X’s) and two distant red circles (Mars twinned) in the background. A couple of kids asked inquisitively whether this made me happy, and I said yes because it was true. I was going to be an astronaut. And then it happened: Some poor, misguided little life-ruiner raised his hand, pointed at me, laughed out loud and announced to the teacher, “She painted a boy picture! Girls don’t like space ships!” And before Mrs. C- could explain that some girls do, other kids laughed and this one was simultaneously embarrassed/confused/thrown. (Wait, wait…they don’t?) “She wants to be an astronaut!” The message was clear, if accurate: Astronauts are usually boys. And she isn’t. So she’s weird, weird, weird.

And I felt it: cognizant, truly cognizant, for the first time ever that I just broke the metaphorical mold and there’d be a price to pay: less than five minutes worth of teasing before one of my peers managed to detract from this unsolicited attention by taking a giant dump in his uniform-trousers. I was grateful, if still shaken. And from that day forth, and until I came to my senses and realized I was on to something and it really is bullshit that a scant 20 percent of each new class of astronauts is female, I started to pay a lot of attention to getting “girl” just right.  Which felt sort of wrong. Because what’s “girl” anyway except for just exactly what you say it is?

The point is this: Someday, probably someday soon, somebody is going to hurt your feelings, erode your confidence and call to question your values. And someday, probably someday soon, it’s going to have something to do with the fact that you have a vagina. Think: Sit up straight, or that doesn’t look pretty or that’s not nice where “nice” is code for “nice for girls.” And the somebody who hurts your feelings/erodes your confidence/calls to question your values might be a stranger or your best friend or your grandmother or, G-d forbid, one of your parents.

And much as the prospect of my kid in my pain scares me, and much as it will probably destroy me to see it (not least of which if I’m to thank for it), I’ll try to see the forest through the trees. Or the universe through the stars. The opportunity. Which I super hope you hastily seize.

Mostly I hope you tell these people to suck it. I hope you tell them as sweet and lovely or tough and bad-ass as you know how that you’ve decided to honor your “astronaut.” Not because you think you can do anything you set your mind to (you can’t, that’s hoohaw, actually) but because if you fail it isn’t because you have girl parts or neglected to behave like you do. Rather, it will be because you grasp that if someone is actually worth your precious, precious time and energy and companionship – if they’re worthy of you, in other words – they’re going to (learn to be) ok with you as you are when you’re your most authentic. Authentic: Four. Before anyone ever scoffs at your little kid ambitions (which, oh, by the way, are maybe a little fantastic – or not – but which are probably more important than you know).

For the record, I promise that if you hate pink or you’d prefer to be president because you’re not really sure what princesses do anyway (me neither) or you happen to value your parents equally or think traditional femininity is overrated or you take a girl to prom or decide you never want to be anybody’s mom, yours has only ever really wanted one thing for you: that you realize happiness, on your terms, in finger-paint and real life.

Love,

Mama

The pregnant pause: National Infertility Awareness Week 2012.

In nine weeks or less, we’re going to have a kid, and she’s going to have parents, and they’re going to be us. And she’s going to live in our house and eat our food and we’re going to take her places and introduce her to people as “our daughter” and marvel at the stuff she does which is going to be a lot like stuff other kids do except it’s going to be totally remarkable because she’s not going to be other kids. She’s going to be our kid.

I can’t even think of anything so simultaneously terrifying/wonderful/remarkable.

Terrifying because, if we’re being honest, we don’t know nuthin’ about birthin’ no babies let alone raising them to adulthood unscathed. Sure, we took all the crash courses our docs advised, but we’ve never been anybody’s parents before and we might suck at it. We’re not going to be derelict in our duties, of course. Probably, Social Services will let us keep her as long as we want. But there’s no guarantee that, owing to some parental oversight, she won’t grow up to be boy-crazy or a shitty student or smoke pot or vote Republican. No offense.

Wonderful because of that whole she’s-going-to-be-ours thing. And doesn’t a brand new human represent tremendous opportunity, too? She might turn out to be a righteous human being. A damn legend.

Remarkable because nature said we weren’t even supposed to have this kid – or any kid for that matter. And if we lived in virtually any other time in human history or, say, one of the 35 states that doesn’t mandate insurance coverage for fertility treatments, we probably wouldn’t. As it is, though, we’re about to give birth to a kid who was conceived outside my body and cryopreserved. Probably (definitely) there are people who’d suggest that, in our selfish desire to grow this family, my spouse and I undermined the sanctity of human life or ran afoul of “G-d’s will.” But I’ll never believe that. Because what happened here is nothing short of absolutely awesome. We’re poised for the same experience, and plagued by the same fears/excitement/enthusiasm/awe, as the fabulously fertile prospective parents we’re…well, not.

Because even as some of the sting of progesterone injections and so many failed cycles gives way to New Baby Bliss, we’re forever and ever affected by an experience that forced us to muster courage and honesty and creativity and determination we didn’t know we had. These seven-and-a-half-months of knockeduppedness have taught me that the experience of infertility doesn’t (and frankly shouldn’t) be replaced or repressed, but acknowledged.

It’s a part of me. It isn’t all there is. But it’s something. And it’s important. Like growing up working class. Or going to Catholic school. Or getting married. Or staying married. Or passing the bar exam.

Believing resolution is possible. Resolving infertility in the manner that made sense for us. Confident that everything we learned about ourselves in the process will, we hope, help us to approach this whole parenting thing with the same courage and honesty and creativity and determination we learned when we learned we might never get to be parents in the first place.

In nine weeks or less, we’re going to have a kid, and she’s going to have parents, and they’re going to be us. And she’s going to live in our house and eat our food and we’re going to take her places and introduce her to people as “our daughter” and marvel at the stuff she does which is going to be a lot like stuff other kids do except it’s going to be totally remarkable because she’s not going to be other kids. She’s going to be our kid.

And for that I’m grateful.

The author is one half of one in eight couples of child-bearing age affected by infertility. She is 31 weeks pregnant with a baby girl conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) with frozen blastocyst transfer. She lives with her husband and cat in Massachusetts: one of only 15 states where the legislature mandates insurance coverage for fertility treatments.  

April 22-28, 2012 marks National Infertility Awareness Week. To learn more, visit RESOLVE at www.resolve.org/. 

Chez L&D.

What for how it took a long time to get to this place where I’m pregnant at all, let alone still pregnant, let alone can feel my fetus kicking like so many awesome ninjas ala Kill Bill, not actually getting to see this kid through the rite of passage known as my vagina would be a real shame. I’m looking forward to it – and, if we’re being honest, to a dimly-lit, private room with the 20-setting gurney, the birthing ball, the iPod dock and the spa tub.

They’re amenities that might not actually matter come B-Day, but which, from where I pregnant perch (and since I have no idea really), seem like welcome niceties…the stuff of lovely, uncomplicated birth stories. And one of the reasons we settled on this place to begin with.

They didn’t show us the operating room on our hospital tour. Probably they couldn’t. Or they figured we didn’t bring our sunglasses. Or it’s scary. I don’t know.

I do know placenta previa can suck it.

So it is that I’ve turned my meditative prowess toward willing it to reposition just enough to settle in to Chez L&D like I hoped I might. Like I still hope I might in spite of the fact that while our tour guide was showing us where we might access an extra supply of spa towels, we overheard the laboring lady next door not really giving a shit about 500 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets.

Which is when it occurred to me (really occurred to me): Regardless of how she gets here, we’re having a baby!

Yeah…

Rainbows aren’t funny. Except for, sometimes, they’re hilarious!

Dear Kid,

Last weekend, your father and I participated in the first of five sessions worth of Hypnobirthing classes designed to encourage us to do what we already know how: to “attend” a birth and “breathe” you into the world through a marvelously-constructed orifice, respectively.  Birth, Wise-Hypno-Practitioner reminded us, is a fundamentally normal, deeply personal, experience which calls upon us to banish old fears and to embrace our strength as people and as parents well before our child ever feeds from her mother’s teats or craps her first diaper.

Your experience of family has already begun.

Curled up on the floor, in quiet and near-darkness, beside seven other couples we never met, we practiced breathing and meditating on rainbows. Or how life is like a rainbow? Or birth is? Or you are? Truth be told, I couldn’t tell you, and you made sure of that. With one swift kick to the bladder, I peed my maternity pants: not enough to make a mess, mind you, but enough to send me into waves of hysterical laughter. The kind that requires you to tell another human being, between gasps for breath, why you can’t contain yourself. (So, to Dad, lest he think me a huge nut, I whispered: I just peed my pants.) The kind that causes the other human being to completely and totally lose his shit, too. (Think: hands cupped to mouth and nose, shoulders shaking, bodies convulsing, not meditating on rainbows. And the best part, I later learned, is that he had absolutely no idea what I said! He just felt like laughing. So he did.) The kind that, even if it’s ill-timed or disruptive for people who are meditating on rainbows is one of the truest expressions of joy. (Screw ‘em. Laugh on.)

So I don’t really remember the rainbow meditation. But I got the “homework.” You are awake and alert, said Wise-Hypno-Practitioner. And I was. The whole time. For our next class, read to page 117 in the Mongan book, listen to the relaxation CDs  and continue to bond with your babies.  

The book to page 117 said I should write you a letter. In fact, it said I should write you lots of letters, tell you stories, include you. Starting now. Because, as an inevitable fact of your existence, you’re going to want to know from whence you came and, someday, as a maybe-inevitable fact of parenthood and aging and probably not unlike your grandmother, I’m going to forget the juicy minutiae, recollect in generalizations and say cliché stuff like, “I loved being pregnant,” or “The day you were born was one of the happiest of my whole life.” You’re going to wonder why. And I’m going to leave out the part where I carry low and pee my pants.

So, in the interest of parent-child bonding, I present the whole truth: It took a hot second for your mother to wrap her good-humored head around the fact that you were real – or ours. Blame infertility. Chalk it up to emotional self-preservation. When I heard the whoosh-whoosh of your 174-beats-per-minute for the first time, I cried happy tears and hoped you’d keep growing, but I was only cautiously optimistic. When, at 12 weeks, the doctor told us you had girl parts, I wasn’t among the brand-newly-pregnant moms scouring The Land of Nod for pink princess crib sheets. (Princesses aside – really, don’t get me started! – I’d have a daughter if a daughter would have me for a mother. And time would tell.) I forced myself to do things like register for our shower and paint-swatch the walls of a room that was still more office than nursery. Hell, I was nearly able to overlook those first subtle movements. We revered one another quietly for a time, interacting little except through a placenta previa.

And then you happened, hard to ignore for the way you fit like I secretly hoped you might and probably always knew you would: conjuring up laughter in strange places because you already understood that in your family, in our family, we laugh without needing a reason and, sometimes, to spite the fact that we shouldn’t.

You’re my rainbow,

Mama

The Belly Button Boogieman.

I’m hardly troubled by the idea of passing a kid roughly the size of a watermelon through a hole the size of a lemon. Hell, I’ve seen movies about it. I’ve read stuff. People tell me how absolutely terrible (and terribly forgettable) it can be. They say things like, “Well, I survived,” or “I forgot all about the pain just as soon as I saw his precious little face!” The fact that some of these people are on to their second and third children is comforting. It makes me think they’re maybe telling the truth. Or they’re not. Or they’re crazy. It doesn’t even matter, because I buy it.

But I’m deeply troubled – legit terrified! – by my own elastic belly button which, in recent weeks, has begun slowly transforming from a tiny “innie” to a kind of widening orifice destined to pop like so many kernels of Orville Redenbacher.

The fact that the majority of movie producers, reference book writers and expectant mothers aren’t a quarter as omphalophobic further guarantees nobody’s talking about this either. Nobody’s reassuring me it’s going to be ok, because it hasn’t occurred to most people that ballooning belly buttons are scary as hell!

Two weeks ago, I schlepped off to the emergency room for the first time in my entire life, crippled with pain in the lower left back. Kidney stones or uterine compression syndrome, who cares! My ureter was stopped up by something, be it calcium deposits or the weight of a 1lb. fetus. Docs agreed the pain would be indistinguishable, too…hard to think through except to think you want it to go away. Speedily. So you attempt to distract yourself with something you fear might, maybe, be much more terrible. Like, say, your own umbilicus exploding.

Valium? I don’t need no stinkin’ valium? This ain’t so bad. It could be worse. It could be much worse.  

Once, I read this article in The New York Times about these scientists down in North Carolina who counted upwards of 1,400 strains of bacteria living in the human navel as part of the “Belly Button Biodiversity Project.” A few hundred of these bacteria were previously undiscovered species, too! Sure the scientists purported that they weren’t harmful – just really, really cool? – but I couldn’t help but conjure the stuff of Outbreak. After all, doesn’t “previously undiscovered” mean these squints had no flippin’ idea what they were looking at and what they were capable of?

So it was that, last night, when the rabbi asked the congregation to reflect upon those among us in need of health and healing I prayed, first, for our kid. May she grow and thrive and be only fractionally as crazy as her mother. And then I prayed for myself. Also, please G-d, keep whatever’s growing in my center-body orifice from sending thousands of flesh-eating bacteria scurrying across my body when, as it will inevitably do, my belly button juts forth from my abdomen like a mood-ring sized mountain of scar tissue. Because it has absolutely. Nowhere. Else. To. Go.

So it was that while I slept, it grew some more and I didn’t feel it or die. I also didn’t stop being scared. In fairness, I never asked the Great and Powerful G-d to cure my pregnancy-induced omphalophobia, I just asked Her to keep my belly button nasties from killing me.

Oh, holey placenta!

We’re (still) having a girl. Still because, in the last five weeks, her genital tubercle remained flat. And she didn’t grow testicles. And, last week, when we had our surprise fetal survey (see below), she bore the Mark of the Hamburger.  (Aside: The term “hamburger marker” was lost on me, too. And then it wasn’t. It’s a graphic reference for the vajay… tipped on its side.) Our progeny is unquestionably female.

Also, she has a less than a one in 50,000 chance of being born with Down’s Syndrome. Read: Probably, she doesn’t have an extra twenty-first chromosome.

Or Trisomy 18.

Far less certain: What caused my serum screen for AFP to come back slightly outside the normal range at 2.25.

And so I got the call that no expectant parent wants to receive. Ever. “We need to run more tests.” Because, oh, by the way, your kid might have spina bifida. Or anencephaly. Maybe she’ll grow up to be healthy, functioning and as, ahem, “normal,” as the rest of us. Or maybe she won’t live to her first birthday.

But the surprise fetal survey our doc ordered revealed that probably she will. She doesn’t have spinal lesions and her brain and skull appear perfectly in tact.

My placenta on the other hand…

The doc didn’t say so exactly, but I read between the lines, and this is what he meant: It looks like shit. Maybe it isn’t actually, and time will tell, but it looks like it. 

That is to say, where normal placentas are homogenous in texture, mine isn’t. Bespeckled. Holey. Heterogeneous. And heterogeneous placentas – especially low-lying ones like this – warrant ongoing, careful scrutiny on account of the heightened risk for placental abruption and pre-term birth. PS) No sex for you. And maybe bed rest. And a c-section. Maybe.

So we do that thing we’ve gotten so damn good at doing thanks to our daughter’s circuitous route to my uterus: We wait. We wait to see that she keeps thriving. We revel in the fact that we’re knocked up at all. We enjoy being pregnant. We admit that we are powerless. And then we turn it over to super-smart docs. And deities. Mine, yours. Whichever is listening.

Watch over this holey placenta!

I am preggo, hear me roar.

In these nearly 16 weeks, I’ve decided my experience of knocked-uppedness is maybe one of the most empowering of my life: right up there with living abroad, delivering a commencement address and passing the bar exam.

Here’s why: Pregnancy makes me think more thoughtfully about well…everything. It forces me to consider the world, and the people in it, in terms of my almost-kid. And it causes me to say out loud the stuff most normal people would just sort of keep in their  heads. Noteworthy: I’m traditionally a little reserved, circumspect.

Whether thanks to progesterone or pending parenthood, however, I can’t seem to help myself. I feel I already have an obligation to this kid. I mean, sure, I know our fetus isn’t actually going to hear me for another couple of weeks – and when (s)he does I’ll probably sound like that teacher in Peanuts – but I’m already busy setting precedent. Mama will ward off many things retrograde nuts and unacceptable in your honor!

The other day, for example, I called the cops on a dipshit.

Police dispatcher (serious): 911-emergency. What’s your emergency?

Me (chipper): Oh hi! I’d like to report a dipshit.

Police dispatcher (serious): A what, ma’am?

Me (chipper): A dipshit. I’m driving south on 95 between mile marker [such-and-such and such-and-such] and I just witnessed a middle-aged Caucasian male, a speeder in a greenish-colored Escort, circa 2002, nearly sideswipe two vehicles before forcing a third, mine, off the road. So do you think you can get someone to verify for me whether he’s drunk, reckless or just stupid?

Police dispatcher (serious): Yes, ma’am.  Radio 435, come in, we have a report of a…

Me (chipper): A dipshit.

Police dispatcher (serious): A…reckless driver.

I missed my exit on purpose to watch him get pulled over for speeding a half mile out. Justified, fulfilled, I thought how absolutely marvelous, and extremely convenient,  it would be if I could call the cops on everyone who acts a fool or talks nonsense.

But the thing with fools and nonsense is it’s not always this “out there,” this global.  Sometimes it lives in your own back yard. It calls you on the telephone. Or it knocks on your door. Or you run into it at the mall despite your best efforts to avert your gaze and make like you don’t see it coming and screaming your name.

I guess, in such instances, because you can only ward off many (not all) things retrograde nuts and unacceptable, you pick your battles and they pick their poison. Hear this if you value your life: I’m actually pregnant (not fat in the uterus), and I tried very hard to get like this. So there.