#choicemom

After my my midwife broke my waters and they came out clean, active labour came on pretty quickly. I tried and failed to get comfortable in the beautiful but poorly designed tub in my room. The next contraction that came as I was making my way back to bed was enough to put a look in my eyes that made it pretty clear to both me and my midwife that the next right step was an epidural. I really hadn’t wanted one, but there was simply no option left: my tank was empty, and I needed sleep if I was going to make it through active labour.

Sitting on the edge of a hospital bed, hunched over and clutching my friend’s elbows for dear life, riding out intense contractions while trying to sit perfectly still, was one of the hardest physical things I’ve done in my life, but 20 minutes later, when the anesthetist came back, his prediction had come true: he was my new best friend. Epidurals are FUCKING MAGIC. I was under the mistaken impression that I was going to be numb from the waist down, but instead it was the most curious sensation of being able to feel pressure but not pain. In “natural” circles, epidurals get a bad rap, and I had bought into this with my desperate dreams of a fully “natural” birth, but I am so, so grateful I had the option. (The idealization of a “natural” birth is so problematic that it’s hard to swallow now how deeply I was invested in it, but that's a whole other post…)

I slept through most of active labour, waking only when my fetal heart monitor needed to be adjusted. Sometime in the early morning hours, my midwife and student midwife had to leave after having been awake for 24 hours, and a new midwife arrived. The next few hours were a blur: I spiked a fever from the epidural, kicking off the Covid protocol and a round of antibiotics; they gave me oxytocin to get me from nine to ten centimetres; I slept some more; then, the time finally came. I was ready to push. My friend put on some Beyoncé and I got ready to meet my daughter.

Many birthing parents describe pushing as their favourite part of labour, and I was no exception. I am an athlete and a yogi, and I know how to isolate specific muscles to get a job done. Finally, I had something active to do that I had some control over, and after having slept a few hours with the blessed relief from pain, I had energy. At some point during a break between pushes, I turned to my friend and said, “this is awesome!” The midwife kept telling me to hold my breath while I pushed, but my conditioning to be compliant was so strong even in this most fierce moment that I couldn’t tell her I had zero intention of doing that. Instead, I did as I’d intended, which was to use my breath, but I exhaled quietly so she wouldn’t hear me, which my friend thought was hilarious. Regardless, I managed to push quickly enough that my daughter came before the backup midwife even had time to arrive.

I wish I could say that when they laid her on my chest, I was filled with a love greater than I ever thought possible. I wish I could say that I was fully present and drinking in this new life I had literally grown inside me and birthed into the world. I wish a lot of things, but mostly, I felt numb. I don’t remember much about this time, other than trying to still myself amidst the bustling of my midwife stitching me up, the respiratory therapist wiping my baby’s face to clear the meconium, birthing the placenta, the backup midwife arriving and taking her to be examined across the room. But I held her, I breathed her in, I felt her sucking on my cheek and knew it was time to feed her. I stared at her in relief and awe and numbness and thought, “holy shit. You’re here.”

Here’s how it actually went down: six days past my due date, I got my first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, ate a few too many cookies with eggs in them (which I normally avoid), saw my acupuncturist, and saw my midwife for a stretch and sweep (which, given I was only about half a centimetre dilated, was more like just irritating my cervix). When I laid down for bed that night, I started having what felt like intense gas pains, which I attributed to the cookies. They came and went and the little sleep I got was fitful. The next day when I got up, the pains were thankfully gone, and I enjoyed a long walk around the neighbourhood with my mom, chuckling at the stares my gigantic belly was getting. I also had another ultrasound; at this point I’d had so many (“advanced maternal age” + overdue = a million ultrasounds) that the techs were joking that they hoped they would never see me again. That night when I laid down, I had what felt like menstrual cramps, on and off all night, again enough to keep me from sleeping. The next night, those cramps progressed to pain beyond what I’ve felt before (and I’ve been on prescription muscle relaxants for cramps). At some point, I asked for another stretch and sweep to get things moving faster, but my backup midwife explained that all the babies were being born and no one would be available to be with me if I went into active labour at that point. I mostly had been able to avoid feeling sorry for myself for being single throughout this process, but I cannot describe the loneliness of being awake and alone for the third night in a row, in pain, anxious, and exhausted. Nothing my friend and I had talked about in terms of her being my birth partner had included what might happen if I was in prodromal (“false”) labour for days, and there was no sense in her being as exhausted as I was when things finally ramped up.

After the third night of little to no sleep, my friend came and set up and filled the birthing pool. Being in the pool felt heavenly; I was able to rest a little in between the contractions, which were picking up, albeit not very steadily. At one point we went for my envisioned forest walk, which had the opposite effect I had intended: my contractions stopped completely. At that point, given it looked like things were going to take a while yet, my friend went home for a bit to get some rest in her own bed and see her family. Every time I tried to rest, even with Tylenol and Gravol and propping myself up on pillows, the contractions would come on even more intensely. 

Around midnight that fourth night, the contractions had intensified enough in duration and frequency that I called my backup midwife (my primary midwife was off call). We spoke for a while, with her listening to me during my contractions. She didn’t think I was in active labour yet, so she recommended I try to get more rest, which after three nights and countless unsuccessful attempted naps, was incredibly frustrating. I called my friend, realizing at this point that I could no longer be by myself, but she didn’t pick up. Panicking, dialing her number over and over, feeling helpless and alone, I started to think I would maybe have to call my mom, but eventually, my friend did pick up and she came over. I alternated between being in the pool, which was soothing to the point of slowing my contractions, and getting out so they would pick up again. In between contractions when I was out of the pool, we played Quirkle and I read. No one felt like baking a groaning loaf. By the time my midwife’s student called and said I could come to the clinic if I wanted, it felt like there was no longer a point. They said my backup midwife would call to make a plan for the evening a little later.

In thinking about what I would want that plan to look like, I realized I’d hit a wall: I’d then gone four days and nights without any real sleep, and while I could handle the pain of the contractions easily enough, I had absolutely no juice left. I was truly and utterly exhausted. I knew, without a doubt, that even if I went into active labour that very minute, I wouldn’t have the energy to make it through and deliver my baby safely. I turned to my friend, sobbing, and just said, “I’m so tired. I think we have to go to the hospital.” (to be continued)

By this time, my belly was huge, and I had the stretch marks to show for it. I vacillated between hating these glaring marks stretching themselves across my abdomen like I’d been clawed by an angry tiger, and being immensely proud of them and what they signified: I—and my baby—had made it this far. I had a couple of friends help me with a pregnancy photo shoot, and while I did cry at the vulnerability of having someone see my tiger marks, and had a hard time looking at the photos of them after, I couldn’t stop myself from staring at the photos in which I was clothed, radiant, caressing my belly full of a baby I had wished for, longed for, cried for, and prayed for for years. I framed one of them and hung it in our bathroom to commemorate this slice of my life full of possibility and trepidation.

I didn’t have a car and wasn’t taking public transit at this point (see: pandemic), so I was walking everywhere, and the belly garnered me quite a bit of kindness from lovely strangers. There was the lady who, upon seeing me trudging down the street lugging my grocery-laden granny cart behind me, said “you got this, mama!”; the man who saw me resting on a post at a street corner (after a looong walk uphill) and asked if I was okay, leading me to burst into grateful tears; the countless times neighbours saw me struggling (because asking for help is something I was/am still definitely working on) and came to my rescue. There were, of course, also the times when there were no neighbours or kind strangers around to witness the moments of loneliness and exhaustion, when having lugged the groceries home once again, I would think to myself, “if I had a partner, they’d be doing this for me.” If the Land of Infertility was an isolating place, being single and pregnant in a pandemic was even more so.

As I got closer and closer to my due date, I began to feel this strange sense of existing in several places at once. I was in the liminal space of waiting: one toe into (at least the idea of) motherhood, one foot in the “before”. Life hadn’t really felt like “before” for over a year, and this pandemic pause made the sense of liminality all the more poignant.

One way or another, I was going to get to meet this baby in the next few weeks. Amidst all of my walking (endlessly around my neighbourhood, up and down stairs, or with one foot on the street, one on the curb—whatever people said could help get my body ready and bring on labour), I had this grand idea of spending a day in meditation, communing with Cupcake and declaring my sense of readiness. knew I would never feel truly ready—no one can ever be ready—but I was, and felt, as ready as I would ever be. I’d done all the things that felt necessary, and I was feeling good. I had read the childbirth books, had made a birth “preferences” list (which if you know me, you know was obviously quite extensive and detailed), had visualized my ideal birth. There were moments of terror at what could go wrong, but they were more and more dominated by visions of holding my newborn babe to my chest—weeping, in bliss, both, or something else entirely; of actual excitement at welcoming this being into the world; of awe at seeing God in the form of this baby I’d grown; of thanking my baby for choosing me as her mother.

This was my mom’s second cancer. When I was a teenager, she survived non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and I effectively shut down emotionally and threw myself into extra-curricular activities to avoid dealing with my  fear. This time, I was alone and pregnant in a pandemic, and terrified all over again: that I couldn’t be there for her through this in the way I wanted to, given the pandemic; that she wouldn’t be able to be there for me throughout my pregnancy; and most terrifying of all, that I would lose my mom before she’d even get a chance to meet her granddaughter. 

Reassured that they’d caught it early, I focused on what I didn’t have the capacity to do the first time around: being there for my mom, in whatever limited ways I could. This was hard to do from a distance, and it was hard to know what support I could provide that would actually feel helpful for my mom. Eventually, as a way of feeling connected, we landed on watching TV “together”: eschewing the fancy “watch party” apps, we would text “3, 2, 1, play” and start the same show at the same time and text each other throughout—something we still do to this day. It was a way of feeling connected without actually being physically together, and without putting any pressure on my mom to talk about anything she didn’t feel like she could.

Not entirely unrelated, I’m sure, the other less-than-fun (to say the least) thing that re-announced itself in my second trimester was insomnia. Almost as soon as the first trimester can’t-keep-my-eyes-open exhaustion wore off, I started waking up in the middle of the night and just staying awake, for hours. It felt like a cruel twist of fate that at this critical time when I was gearing up for the most exhausted I’d be in my life, when everyone was oh-so-helpfully telling me to “sleep while you can!”, my body was saying “nope!”. So I (mostly) learned to cope, got a lot of reading done, and napped as much as I could. Many, many people joked to me during this time that the insomnia was “practice” for when I would have a newborn, which made my weary brain want to punch them in the face (sorry, if that was you; I know you meant well).

Being pregnant again on the 14th attempt and after two miscarriages was very, very strange. It was clinging desperately to my nausea, hoping against hope that it was in fact the pregnancy hormones rising, and not just some ingredient in the prenatal vitamins causing it. It was practically demanding a relatively unnecessary second blood test just for the tiny bit of reassurance that the hormones were doubling as they should be, even though the hormones did that in the first two pregnancies and those still didn’t end well. It was being elated one second and terrified the next. It was compulsively checking my heart rate on my FitBit to ensure it was still slightly elevated. It was buying a home baby Doppler and setting self-imposed limitations on how often I was allowed to listen to the baby’s heartbeat to reassure myself (side-note 1: the first few times I did this, I mistook my own heartbeat, which the machine was picking up through the veins around the placenta, for the baby’s). It was telling more people than I normally would, because those were all people I would want to know if I had another miscarriage, and what was even the point of going through this alone? It was reading poetry to my little blastocyst (then embryo, then fetus) every night, and waking up at least once every night with anxiety that could keep me up for hours. It was checking the toilet paper every single time I peed, convinced that I would see blood. (Side-note 2: apparently it’s not just anxious pregnant people who’ve had miscarriages who do this; I know at least one friend who did this too.) 

It was sending screenshots from the Bump app of what foodstuff my embryo was the size of that week to SD1 and my mom, then wondering if it was actually even still growing inside of me. It was rejoicing when my nipples start to get sore, because hooray! Another symptom! Of course, for others, it may be none of these things or all of those things and more. For me, it was all of it and then some.

It was hard to distinguish, while on the progesterone, what was emotional side effects, what was simply heightened anxiety, and what was pregnancy hormones. Crying multiple times a day was normal during that time, as was going from zero to 100 over something relatively insignificant a colleague would say or do. Once I stopped the extra hormones at 10 weeks in (when the placenta had formed enough to produce its own progesterone), however, it became very clear: it was the drugs. Holy shit, y’all. The jump from hot mess to (relatively) stable was swift and merciful.

SD1 was a gracious godsend of a human being throughout the NTU ordeal (a reminder, since it’s been a while: NTU=Not The Unicorn). When NTU and I fell in love and I told SD1 that I wanted to pause our baby-making activities and focus on my relationship and trying with NTU, SD1 was nothing but supportive and happy for me. When NTU and I fell apart and I told SD1 what had happened, he was nothing but supportive (and appropriately aghast). And when I went back to SD1 to say that I was ready to try again, there he was, affable and open as always, and more than okay with resuming our non-traditional baby-making activities.

Starting again meant going back on several meds, including progesterone, which has the intention of preventing another miscarriage, and fun side effects that include but are not limited to randomly bursting into tears at the drop of a hat and being irritable AF. If you were ever under the illusion that you had any control over your emotions whatsoever, I recommend adding some extra hormones to the mix and seeing what happens.

Starting to try again felt like the first time all over again. I was hopeful beyond reason, convinced that after so much pain in the last year, maybe this would actually be easy. By easy, I don’t mean that being on that many medications is easy, or trying to conceive for the 13th time after two miscarriages is easy, but easy like maybe it would happen right away. Easy like given it’s a pandemic and my fertility clinic was operating under much more restrictive safety guidelines, I was subjected to way less invasive medicalization: instead of between 5 - 8 days of daily blood draws and transvaginal ultrasounds, and an injection to make me ovulate when I was going to anyhow, I did a few ultrasounds at a community clinic the month before to ensure the results lined up with my at-home ovulation tests, then I was left to my own devices (along with the medications) for the next cycle. So once we’d tried again, riding on this hope of “easy”, I scrutinized every symptom, convinced that they meant I was pregnant, instead of just feeling side effects of the progesterone.

When the millionth stick I’d peed on still stubbornly refused to produce a second pink line, I was devastated. It felt like such a punch to the gut that my story of an easy pregnancy after all I’d been through hadn’t come true, and the extra hormones didn’t help. I began to feel, for the first time on this whole journey, like maybe I was getting close to being done. I’d been through so much pain, and while I am resilient and I always get through it, l felt like a boxer who’d been through round after round, still hanging on despite having been repeatedly beaten to a pulp. In the Land of Infertility, my journey, interminable though it  has seemed at certain junctures, has been a relatively short and inexpensive one; inexpensive both in terms of the actual monetary costs, and in terms of what it has cost me emotionally and physically. That said, I’d been through almost two years of focusing an inordinate amount of time, money, and energy on getting pregnant, at the expense of a lot of the rest of my life. Maybe instead of framing it as giving up, I could give myself the gift of allowing myself to think of it as stepping out of the ring and moving on with my life. What would it be like to date without the insistent and deafening ticking of my biological clock in my ear? What could I devote my energy to if it wasn’t mostly taken up by managing the emotional side effects of fertility meds and the rollercoaster I’d been on for so long? 

While some people might find that thought depressing, or at least sad, I found it incredibly freeing. I was giving myself permission to say that at some point, I could choose to put myself first. I wasn’t saying I was ready to do it right away, or even after a definitive number of future attempts, but I was saying it was a possibility. I did, however, admit to myself that I had maybe one more attempt at “natural” conception in me before I seriously started thinking about IVF. As much as I didn’t want to go through IVF, I had already done the harder part (growing and having the eggs extracted) years ago, and at least it would give me a higher likelihood of both getting pregnant and being pregnant with a genetically normal embryo.

As the initial shock of the pandemic wore off and I began to stabilize, I was finally able to grieve the end of my relationship with NTU properly. In other words, I was finally able to feel beyond the anger over how it devolved and ended, beyond the gripping fear of the virus and of lockdown, to the sheer sadness of losing something that had once seemed infinite. We were so happy and so in love, before we weren’t. It was like there were two NTUs: one, the Dr. Jekyll with whom I fell in love, who was incredibly sweet and thoughtful and romantic; and the other, the Mr. Hyde he became. I should be clear: I don’t think NTU is or was evil; the duality just seemed so stark. In the aftermath of my anger at Mr. Hyde, I was left able to finally grieve the love we had and the man I fell in love with, and to realize that despite the seemingly stark duality, the man who ultimately ended our relationship was still a good one. He was just one who was in an immense amount of pain, one whom I couldn’t love the way he needed, and who couldn’t love me the way I was.

I still wonder sometimes if there is anything else for which to take responsibility. Not responsibility like taking the blame or fault for him treating me the way he did, but responsibility like “how could I have responded differently?”. Obviously, everything I did at the time was what I could do in the moment given the tools I had. Looking in retrospect, though, as is typical, I can see some things that I couldn’t see when I was in it. Ironically, I think that if, instead of walking on eggshells and trying to cater to his every mood, I had been able to tell him straight up that he couldn’t treat me like that, had spoken up more forcefully for my needs, things might have gone down differently. I know from the one time I exploded in anger-fuelled truth bombs (“of course I don’t want to marry you right now!!!”), he was hurt but actually appreciated the honesty. Perhaps, if I had done more of that, the difference would simply have been that our relationship would have ended sooner, which might have been a blessing for us both.

Now that the perverse urge to scroll endlessly through my Instagram discovery feed in hopes of seeing a photo of him has abated (having been able to resist just going directly to his open account), the memory of the experience has faded to a kind of surreal quality. Less than six months ago, I still had a diamond ring on my finger, a gift from a man I thought was my person; now, he seems like a stranger I had a passing (if rude) conversation with once upon a time.

And so, I moved through the paces of the pandemic post-breakup, taking walks and petting my newly adopted rescue cat to keep myself relatively sane. In April, two of my closest friends had their second baby. I was supposed to have been a support person at the birth, but given the risks, that obviously ended up not happening. When I saw the photo of my friend with her newborn pop up on my phone, in the middle of leading an online executive leadership development course, I held back tears as long as possible until I could explain that I needed to leave the call for a moment to talk to them. It was an explosion of joy and relief like I have seldom felt in my life. The birth had gone smoothly, and everyone was well.

The sadness and grief came afterward in intense waves mixed in with the joy: sadness that I couldn’t be there to support them, to have that experience, to hold him in my arms on the day of his birth like I had his older brother; sadness that I didn’t know when I would get to meet him in person, when I would get to hold him, or how to support his moms from afar. And so many memories, so much grief from my own fertility journey that I had thought were behind me, but as grief does, got re-surfaced and stirred up by the circumstances. It is a curious thing to feel that much intense emotion ranging from joy to grief at the same time, but all there was to do was to feel it.