To better appreciate where I am, I need to dredge up where I've been. I have neglected it long enough. It's go time.
There's a good deal of truth to the saying that you can't accurately judge a person's daily life by their highlight reel. If that were the case, my life would easily be in most people's top 25, based on cuteness alone. I mean, look at that baby boy. I rest my case.
Yet, before Jacob, there was a struggle--a big mess of nine+ months, some of which I am still trying to cope with.
This was early August 2014. These crazy kids have been married almost a year and have zero clue they are currently pregnant while traipsing around Cape Cod, MA on holiday.
We had entered into the "trying phase" of the "maybe we should see if we can make a baby" process--which follows the discussion phase and the "but we live in 600 square feet of a townhouse and can only scratch our behinds if we open a window, a baby can't possibly live here WITH us, nice try" phase. Contrary to popular belief, no talent is actually required to make a baby. This is not intended to sound jerkish to people with fertility struggles. That is a separate issue altogether, and come on, you should know me better.
Seriously, though. There are no guaranteed dress rehearsals. Don't joke around and think, "Oh, we'll just practice," because nature will laugh and laugh and laugh and make you vomit seven times in transit from your Massachusetts vacation back to your 600 square foot hovel, including once while cruising altitude of 30ish thousand feet with a sympathetic flight attendant gently knocking on the door asking if you're okay as you attempt to scrub pink puke out of your jeans because damn, these restrooms are tiny, and you missed the upchuck bag.
Blame it on the squa-squa-squa-squa-squa-squagel, y'all
We'd had a wild Brazilian steakhouse evening the night before our flight, so the notion that a little person-to-be was multiplying on a cellular level at rapid pace wasn't on our radar (it's less terrifying when you look at the cute face) look at it. LOOK AT IT.
My relationship with squishy has evolved over time. It had to. After all, while baking, he destroyed all the things I loved the most seemingly all at once, and in no particular order: physical intimacy,
sleep, food, eating food without it leaving me, driving to work without having to stop every fifteen minutes to slap myself awake. In addition, I was labeled "high risk," by my OBGYN, which--if you have never tried having a high risk pregnancy, just go ahead and pass. Contrary to what some of my former students will tell you, my age did not put me in this category (really, Anna? 40? #neverforget). I have high blood pressure; I was diagnosed at 19 with chronic hypertension, which means I had it as a kid, and no one bothered to advise me on it. Thanks, Western medicine. Thanks.
Before all the sickness and the scary parts that go along with being high risk, though, we were genuinely happy about our budding little blastocyte and how to nurture him optimally from womb phase to womb phase each month. And before the countdown officially even began, we had a date planned to tell my parents: August 24, 2014, the day before inservice started for the new school year. We were full of excitement, hope, and life.
***
On August 24, I received a phone call from my father, vague, informing me that there was a bad situation with my stepsister Veronica, who was due with her little girl in October.
Without launching too deeply into the details that still make me shake with rage, Veronica, who had a high risk pregnancy due to where the placenta attached, had begun hemorraging in her bathtub the previous evening. Her caretakers did not act in time, leading to her death at age 32 and a premature baby. I did not attend her funeral because I was a coward who could not look death in the face. I was a coward who, newly pregnant, was sick, scared, and selfish at a time when I should have shown up. Instead, I hid and cried.
When there's a baby on the way, how many people dwell on their own fragile mortality? No one wants to think of it. What a sight we must have been to the Labor and Delivery nurses the day Veronica died: tear stained, sobbing strangers searching for the body that bled out amid pink and blue congratulations! Balloons on what is only imagined as such a joyous occasion. People die. Mommies die before they can hold their babies. Babies often die before their mommies can hold them to their hearts and whisper hello.
I wanted to burn the world down.
Who keeps a dead body in a maternity ward?
***
I thought of her often. I think of her, still, but during my second and third trimesters, I was pulling my car over twice a week, crying in fear and anger, thinking about Veronica. Scared for my life, scared for my baby. What guarantees are there in this life?
On Monday, April 6, 2015, Nick and I drove to the hospital for a scheduled induction. We had been to the L&D ward twice before with scares of preeclampsia, once in February and again at the end of March. The second time, I was placed on bedrest. I waited it out until The big induction day.
Doctors don't typically induce babies at 37 weeks. Most doctors are content to let first time mothers cook those babies until they're ready to graduate high school, but even then, I had blocked out how serious my condition was to have gotten such expedited "service." If I had been truthful, the minute the nurse mentioned the head size, I would have given up trying to manage that melon through my ladybits, lifted a finger politely and said, check-please. It had been 24 hours.
Even after all the emotional jarring I had experienced, I was not ready to relinquish the one experience that many women equate with The Ulimate Woman badge: squeezing a baby through my hoo-ha.
I cried, selfishly, as they rolled me into surgery, and then put on my brave game face as the plan changed. And then, hot mess that I was, (well, shivering swollen pale mess), my body delivered a human being into this world. And he was so strange looking, and tiny but huge. And my husband cried and kissed me. And I sang Dethklok's "Sewn Back Together Wrong" in my head to pass the time while my OB tied my layers back together. (Correctly, FYI).
We were in the hospital until Saturday. My blood pressure refused to come down.
Wednesday night around 2am, I slipped out of bed and limped bravely to the bathroom without assistance, but when my feet touched the cool tile, I began to uncontrollably shake and could not regulate my body temperature. Frightened, I screamed for Nick and he rescued me, calling for nurses and socks, and heating pads. In what felt like my most helpless moment, what felt like my body saying, "No more, Holmes. We're done here," another person was strong for me.
That night, I cried in shame but also gratitude.
***
When I was discharged, baby in arms, I had two goals: heal and keep this tiny human alive. I put an inordinate amount of strain on myself to do this. I tried so hard to share the load with others, but I felt I had to do most of it. After all, I knew that eventually the others would be gone, and our little family would just be the three of us.
It got better, but tiny human cried. A lot. Tiny human was colicky because the nursery gave him formula and his digestive flora was not having it. This issue resolved itself immediately once I went to EBF (exclusive breastfeeding).
Each day, the three of us figure it out. He's beautiful, wants to do everything on his own like his mama, is hilarious and kind hearted like his daddy, and attacks the world with a gleeful yawp.
The truth about my pregnancy is that I was reborn. The old is still with me, but the new keeps me going.
And to Veronica, I wish you were here to razz me lovingly about how weird I am.
