29

We scheduled labor to be induced on a Monday in July, and the date couldn’t arrive fast enough. I now spent most of my time in bed; when I needed to go to the bathroom, someone had to help me. We didn’t have a television in our bedroom, so I divided my time between reading and staring at the wall, enumerating everything that could possibly go wrong during labor.

The Friday before the big day, Joe stayed downtown late to finish up a few things at the office. When he came home, he presented me with a bouquet of white and yellow flowers.

“What are these for?” I asked, giving them an obligatory smell.

He set the flowers on my nightstand and sat on the bed next to me. “I have some news that might cheer you up.”

I raised my eyebrows. “This has all been a bad dream, and I don’t have a DVT and a blood-clotting disorder?”

“You might like this better: I took a look at that Tarrytown house today. They had a contract fall through, and it’s back on the market.”

“Really? Did the realtor say they’ve had any interest?”

“I didn’t meet with the realtor. I just walked around and checked it out. One of the windows was unlocked, and I tried to get in through there until the woman next door threatened to call the cops. It’s a great house!”

I remembered the reality of our situation, and my heart deflated. “I guess it doesn’t matter, though. With these medical bills, we’re toast.”

“Actually, I have good news there too: One of the reasons I stopped by the house is because it looks like we’re going to land a big new client.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Right now I’m just doing basic documents for this local business, but they’re about to start a complicated lawsuit against a bigger company and will probably ask me to handle that, too.”

“Wow!” I said, pulling myself to a sitting position. “But I thought you wanted to get out of litigation because it’s so high stress.”

“It is, but how else are we going to get that house?” He patted me on the leg, making sure to hit the right one.

“Are you kidding? Wow. Wow!” For the first time in a while, I allowed myself to think about our life in that house. “We’ll be right by the lake! And I can finally have all my clothes back. And—oh my gosh, I almost forgot about our bookshelves, those ones we had custom made! I still can’t believe I accidentally put Donald’s baby book in storage. . .”

I would have expected Joe to jump in with me, throwing out his own thoughts on what would be so great about it, but he was silent. He smiled, but his expression was tinged with something else. Maybe he was just too excited to speak.

As I was talking, something clicked. The expression on Joe’s face wasn’t genuine excitement. It was happiness, but not his own. It was happiness for me.

* * *

The following Monday, baby Elaine was born. She had a full head of bright red hair, which made her quite the celebrity among the hospital staff. The labor induction went fine, and I was even able to get an epidural after the anesthesiologist spent about three hundred million hours going over my entire medical history with Dr. Wolfe.

Two weeks later, it was time to get to work. Now that we had decided to step up the law firm to bring in more money, that meant more work for everyone. Thanks to Coumadin, my leg had healed just enough that I was semi-mobile again, and so I could limp into my office to work, with newborn Elaine propped on a pillow in front of me.

Each morning my clock radio would crackle to life at seven o’clock, and each morning it felt like gravity had doubled overnight. Between the early rising and the baby’s night feedings, I rarely got more than five hours of sleep in total. My mom kept asking me if I was okay, saying that I looked awfully pale. I explained that I was just busy, and promised to slow it down one of these days.

As the weeks living this punishing schedule wore on, it caused a problem that I had never seen coming: It made it difficult to learn about Natural Family Planning. Joe and I were kind-of-sort-of-mostly sold on the Catholic anti-contraception stuff. We still had questions, but we thought it was likely enough that the Church was right that we were willing to begin sort of following (or at least learning) its teachings.

Every day I tried to find time to read a book I’d ordered that taught women how to track their fertile symptoms, but my schedule was too packed with the demands that came with having a job and two young children. I had picked up enough to know that I should be tracking my temperature on a chart, but the points on my chart always looked like they had been chosen by a random number generator.

After a few months of this, I emailed a blog reader who had kindly answered a few of my Natural Family Planning questions in the past. I asked her if it was normal that my NFP chart would look like it depicted a Himalayan mountain range at this point postpartum.

She happened to be on email and responded right away. “The baby is only four months old; that’s likely normal. Though since you mentioned that you had to supplement nursing with formula, you’ll want to watch carefully for ovulation.”

I snorted as I read. No kidding. The DVT hadn’t completely dissolved yet, not to mention the fact that my doctors strongly recommended that I not have any more kids at all, let alone anytime soon.

Her name popped up in my inbox again. I expected a quick word of goodbye, but instead she asked, “Also, are you under any kind of stress that could contribute to weird readings? I know that my charts are always my first warning sign when I’m pushing myself too hard.”

Hmm. I couldn’t think of anything. Well, unless you counted the fact that I was waking up early each morning, working furiously for ten hours a day with a baby on my lap, driving my babysitter home, running around with my toddler for a bit, getting him ready for bed, getting the baby ready for bed (often by myself if Joe was still at work), going back to my desk and working until midnight, getting up with the baby three or four times a night—all while dealing with severe leg pain and being consumed with fear about whether or not we’d get this big client before the Tarrytown house sold—and starting it all again the next day. Other than that, I couldn’t think of anything stressful that was going on.

She continued: “You can still do NFP if you are under stress, but you may need to check more symptoms to get a complete picture of what’s going on.”

“Oh come on,” I muttered to the computer. That’s what I needed. Since contraception was off the table and we hadn’t figured out NFP yet, we’d decided to take no risks while I was on Coumadin. Now my last dose would occur in four weeks, meaning that we didn’t have much time to figure out what to do about birth control before it would be an issue again. The good news is that it was amazing how quickly the months of being on this drug had gone by, but the bad news was that I had not had time to learn NFP. I thought I’d be able to scan the book a few times and pretty much have it down. Now this woman was telling me that I’d have to waste even more time tracking symptoms.

I closed my email and started work in a huff. I seethed with resentment. Some of it was directed at the hassle of NFP, but most of my anger was directed inwardly, at my own body.

I didn’t want my body to have a voice; I didn’t think it should get a vote. I wanted it to fall in line with whatever I felt like doing. I preferred to push and push and push myself and pretend like everything was going fine, and I resented this system that made me check in on how my choices were impacting my physical well-being.

I’d occasionally come across flowery hippie-talk about how Natural Family Planning was all about listening to your inner body-goddess as she speaks to you. I laughed every time I heard such nonsense. But, now that I considered it, I realized that my own message to my body was something along the lines of, “FALL IN LINE AND SHUT UP. YOU WILL DO WHAT I SAY OR I WILL FORCE YOU TO!”. . . which wasn’t all that inspiring either.