WHAT NOT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING
Let go and make yourself independent and free, not being bound by things and not seeking to escape from things.
—Yuanwu
The first signs that none of this would go according to plan appeared early on. Early, early on, if I’d been alert enough to weave the circumstances of my life into a coherent plotline. Would I ever have children? Would I ever even want them? My first marriage was childless by choice and extended into my midthirties. My second marriage was at midlife. By the time I was prepared to answer the second question, Yes, I want a child, the first question seemed to be answering itself, No, you can’t have one. Without any apparent barrier, I simply could not get pregnant. I was too old, I told myself. I’d waited too long, and the choice was no longer mine. Case closed. I was furious at having lost the chance to have what I’d never even wanted.
And then, in a magic moment of old-fashioned fertility, I conceived. I was forty-two. Looking back, I saw that doing nothing to prevent pregnancy was not quite the same as doing something to get there. What I did was simply take my basal body temperature and have sex on cue, but even that required that I discard the ambivalence that I’d long carried about the issue. If it happens, it happens, I had been telling myself with a comfortable dose of confidence that it wouldn’t.
So I was pregnant. I was going to have a baby girl. It wasn’t difficult. I wasn’t sick. Things rolled merrily along. I focused on how unchanged my life would be as a result of a child. The guest room would remain the guest room/study with its double bed, books, filing drawers, fax machine, and computer; we’d just put the crib in this little corner right here. Perfect fit. No problem. Of course I would still be working from home! Of course I would have time for this and that and everything. I would still be me, wouldn’t I? I was intent on avoiding all the questions and clutter that I felt crowding in on my tidy little world. All those baby things! All that stuff! A crib and a bassinet? A car seat and a carrier? Surely I could do without. Babies, after all, could sleep in shoe boxes.
That they call this state “expecting” is one of many cruel paradoxes life has in store for a mother. Expecting what? A first-time mother has no idea what to expect from the experience, nor should she, but none of us let ourselves off that easily. We think we are supposed to know something and proceed to do it all the right way, thereby achieving the best outcome. What’s so bad about that? you might ask. Nothing, by itself. The well-being of a pregnant mother and her child is a worthy goal, but examine just how much more than well-being you expect from your expectations: freedom from risk, trouble, surprises, and pain; adherence to your plan; ease and confidence; ecological correctness; intact execution of the approved color scheme; command control of the delivery; eradication of all doubts and fears; and a product that is judged by all objective standards to be a beautiful and brilliant child. Expectations accomplished, early admission, here we come!
By the end, you really will know something. You’ll know that well-being is all that matters, and that you can handle even less than that.
Until then, you’ll climb a craggy bluff of fear in your pregnancy and scale it in your own way. Where I sought to escape my fear, others arm themselves against it with information and ideology. They research methods and theories and gather advice and referrals. They collect the multitude of opinions that are lofted like arrows at their bull’s-eye bellies. I was astonished when a friend announced, by way of a question, “You’ll be using cloth diapers, won’t you?” She had made up not only her mind but mine as well. It must be nice to have that sense of self-determination and control. Too bad it’s only a sense.
In truth, I hadn’t given thought to any of it. To believe that I could reason it out, to think that I could know for sure what was right or best, to presume that I was in charge, was already far beyond me. From its first bloated moment, pregnancy had seemed to me a lesson in losing it, a lesson in letting go. So it is. Can you imagine any other scenario in which you would pack on fifty extra pounds and never once pause to flick a speck of powdered sugar off your doughnut? Where you would fall so effortlessly, so helplessly to sleep before sunset? Where you would lose yourself in misty deliberations of lavenders, blues, and yellows; polka dots, pinks, and Poohs? Can you imagine a scenario in which an exquisitely miniature yet still massive head and all the rest actually emerges from your body? By hook or crook, it all comes down to letting go.
It’s not a matter of expecting less or expecting more, expecting the best or expecting the worst. Expecting anything just gets in the way of the experience itself. And the experience itself is a stunner.
I can remember over the course of my pregnancy stark moments of full amazement at what I had not done. I had done nothing, and yet here it was: conception, gestation, and transformation of magnificent and unknowable proportions, all occurring outside the medium of thought and beyond my force of will. This must be what they call creation. It must be what I am.
And so I arrived at the place, late in the wait, when your ob-gyn or hospital invites you to complete a “birth plan.” This is typically a simple one-page questionnaire about your preferences in labor, chiefly about dealing with pain. To be fair, this is a useful thing, especially for those of us who have not yet considered the distress and tedium of labor. I chuckled. This exercise reminded me of the common anxiety dream in which you’re about to take a final exam for a course in which you never attended a class. Having never given birth, on what basis would I make a birth plan? How could I know now how my delivery would go? And what use is a plan at the bone-splitting moment of truth, especially what amounts to last month’s plan?
I was skeptical, but I completed it dutifully. Then things started to go wrong.
At my seven-month prenatal visit, my blood pressure was slightly elevated. I also complained about swelling in my feet. True, that is common for midsummer pregnancies. Yet every day my discomfort grew. I could no longer sit in a chair without having my feet elevated. The first steps when getting out of bed were excruciating. Socks dug deep trenches in my ankles. I spent hours scanning the Internet for remedies and reassurances. Normal, normal, normal, I saw everywhere—indeed, it was what I wanted to see—but none of the fixes I tried made it one bit better.
My mother called with worries of her own. She had been dropping weight all year long with a diligent diet, but nothing seemed to reduce the size of her belly. It was getting bigger. Thrilled with my late-life pregnancy and a bonus round of grandmotherhood, she herself had begun to feel and look pregnant, she said. A series of unhurried examinations through the HMO referral system had finally landed her in the hands of an expert. He warned her of the worst it could be: ovarian cancer, with its subtle warning signs of abdominal swelling and vague pain. Surgery was scheduled within a week. At the very best, she would miss the trip to the West Coast for her grandchild’s homecoming. The very worst was unthinkable.
I stopped thinking, or trying to wear shoes. I closed my eyes and shut my ears and, concerned only about the circumference of my thighs, stepped on the scales. Twelve pounds in less than two weeks. My sister called with the surgeon’s report. Mom had stage IV ovarian cancer, the most advanced, and it had spread throughout her abdominal cavity. All kinds of body parts came out during surgery, and those left would be taken later, although we didn’t believe it then, blitzing past the plainspoken prognosis to grab onto the tiny odds of her recovery, 5 percent, which suddenly sounded so feasible. Mom had always finished in the top 5 percent of everything.
At my own doctor’s office the next day, my weight, urine, and blood pressure spelled out something obvious. “I don’t feel well,” I said woefully. “You have preeclampsia,” the doctor said. This was the word that I had been browsing past all summer on the Web. Preeclampsia is never neatly defined because it is still so poorly understood. For unknown reasons, preeclampsia favors first-time mothers—first-time older mothers even more so. They develop hypertension and protein in the urine and experience swelling, headaches, and blurred vision. The symptoms point the way to grave and even fatal consequences to the untreated sufferer: liver or kidney damage, convulsions, and coma. Deliver the child and preeclampsia goes away.
I liked my doctor for plenty of reasons. She was smart and fast, a pedigreed practitioner in a shorts-and-sandals suburb. In her quiet efficiency I found everything I needed to confer guru status. She was cheery, matter-of-fact, and completely noninvasive during the first six months of pregnancy. I interpreted her inaction as reverence for the mystery of birth. That made me unafraid. But this time was different. I had preeclampsia. I was instantly and totally petrified.
The doctor stood staring down my disbelief and spoke with unartful clarity. Go check into the hospital. Do not go home. You may last until the weekend. If she could lower my blood pressure with bed rest, she hoped to gain a few vital days of gestation. Each day between now and then would help the baby’s lungs develop. I was thirty-three weeks into the forty weeks of a full term. Lungs are developed by thirty-four weeks.
There was good luck in this, although not the kind of luck you’d wish for. Preeclampsia can develop earlier in the second trimester, and mothers are hobbled at home or in the hospital until the odds for the baby’s survival tip in favor of early birth—even a critically premature one. Because preeclampsia had occurred late in my pregnancy, the baby was certainly better off outside my womb than inside, where, stressed and failing, the placenta was nourishing her less and less.
But I didn’t buy it. I couldn’t buy it. This was going to go my way, I willed, this was going to go the distance. Stocked with relaxation tapes and a meditator’s self-assurance, I coasted through the next week in the hospital. My blood pressure stabilized, my urine normalized, and the swelling went down. My performance convinced some of the nurses. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” one uttered under her breath in that nurses-know-best tone as she took my blood pressure for the umpteenth time. My doctor reluctantly let me go home. “I’ve never seen this work before,” she warned. “Now you know what is possible,” I preached, thinking I had prevailed.
Two days later I was back at the doctor’s, my blood pressure soaring. An ultrasound found that even as I had reveled in victory over my imagined foe, my daughter had lost half a pound during my week of bed rest, and she had no pounds to spare. I thought I had won, but she had, in fact, lost, as she would every time I mistook my own fears and desires for what was best. It was impossible to believe, but this part of my job was over. Pregnancy had prepared me as I hoped my mother’s life had prepared her. It was time to let go. It would always be time to let go.