Survival Mode

It's been really hard to write lately. Every free minute for the past several months has been spent sleeping or lamenting the filthy state of my house, which I don't have any motivation to clean. I know that every pregnancy is different, but here's something that's been uniform across nine trimesters for me: I have zero energy and wind up morphing into a cat, if cats all had really bad heartburn and got winded walking up the stairs. I just tend to curl up in a ball somewhere comfy and fall asleep, sometimes several times a day. Pregnancy is pretty brutal, even aside from the fire-breathing heartburn and the gestational narcolepsy (not a real diagnosis) and the weight gain and all the truly disgusting physical side effects that are too gross to mention here that you have to contend with. Your size makes it difficult to sleep and sleeping on your back is forbidden for some reason and you can't even unwind with a glass of wine at the end of the night. You pee every fifteen minutes which is inconvenient at best and downright humiliating when you are almost always accompanied by a three year old who is still scared of public restrooms and hand dryers and has also taken to turning bathroom breaks into physical wrestling matches because she's really hit her threenager stride lately and is very disinterested in following your stupid instructions, even if it means she's gonna pee her pants, or worse, you will. You wake up drenched in your own sweat even when you aren't hot because hormones are weird. You can't clip your own toenails and you get BO and even worse, your sense of smell is so heightened that you can smell everyone else's BO. Or their perfume, which is equally unpleasant.  

But the real thing that I've always hated about pregnancy is the weird way society treats you when you are pregnant. Like, sure it's nice that people are generally more willing to hold open your door or let you cut in the bathroom line, but otherwise your belly is somehow viewed as public domain even though no one would ever reasonably discuss (or touch!) your midsection in an elevator if you weren't pregnant. This has long been a crusade of mine so if you've known me for more than the past like, six months, you know how riled up I get about people commenting on my breasts (seriously, what the fuck) and my size and then acting weird about my acting offended by them so casually discussing my body as though my brain is not somehow still attached to it. When you're pregnant people tell you that you're too big, that you're too small, that your husband must be loving your giant new pregnancy boobs. They'll ask how much weight you've gained as if that's any of their business. They'll ask if you're having a c-section or a vaginal delivery. (They also ask with a tone of judgement, like, "You're having a vaginal delivery the way God intended, RIGHT? And not some weak shortcut major abdominal surgery?") They'll ask if you're enjoying every minute in the same breath as they, a perfect stranger, ask you about your goddamn genitals and if your child will be exiting your body through them. Yes, perfect stranger, there's nothing I love more than standing here on my cankles waiting in line to buy this Preparation H while you ask me invasive questions. It's a truly magical time.

But this pregnancy is different. Because I'm still getting affronted looks when I tell people that no, they may not touch my belly (seriously, why is that a thing, keep your hands to yourself), but the social ramifications of a pregnancy after stillbirth are so much more fraught than that and navigating it is a new minefield of anxiety every day. Even the non-disgusting idle chitchat that comes my way is uncomfortable because I feel forced between telling a cruel truth and perpetuating a terrible lie.

Someone asks something like, "Oh, is this your second baby?" And my internal debating mechanism is triggered. No, this isn't my second baby, it's my third. Unless you count those two very early losses (I usually don't) and then its my fifth. But if I keep it "simple" and say it's my third, then they'll look at Ellie and see no other child around and be like, "Oh, and where's the other one?" And then what do I say? "Oh he's buried at the Naval Academy, sorry to bring the mood down in here," or do I just nod? 

And then I nod, because the cleaning lady probably doesn't need to hear my life story, and frankly, I don't owe it to her. 

It gets a little harder when people ask Ellie if she's ready to be a big sister. She never answers because strangers freak her out, God bless her, and my antisocial tendencies tend to prevail and I just answer, "Yes she is," and then at the soonest opportunity, I bail on the situation. But before I respond and retreat, I think, She's already a big sister, and an amazing one at that. She helps me pick out flowers to bring to her baby brother's grave, and sings 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' into my belly button at the top of her lungs. There's never a really great time to toss that kind of bomb in someone's lap, and definitely the elevator down to my midwife's office seems like an especially poor choice to share those details.

Even a question as simple as, "How are you feeling?" isn't terribly welcome. Like, I feel like crap (and amazingly, no one actually wants to hear how you really feel during pregnancy, they want you to just be glowy and delighted)-- I can run through all my discomforts again if you like, but also I'm not like, about to spill my guts to everyone who asks. What am I supposed to say? I have this heartburn that sometimes means I can't even lie down but also while I sit up awake at night chewing on Tums as if they are breath mints, I wonder how we'll manage if this baby dies inside my body, too. Will another unquenchable desire to have a new baby overtake me immediately? Would we bury this baby with Sam? What decisions would we make differently, having had a year to reflect on how we decided things before? How I'm feeling, when people tend to mean in it that loaded way, is like every day I am aware that this baby could die in any instant, and I am entirely powerless to prevent it, because if I could, obviously I would have done so with Sam. There's no possible solution to these anxieties, except to have a live baby this time so that all these questions I ask myself become irrelevant. And there's nothing we can do for that except wait. 

Not having a solution to these negative and gnawing feelings is something I've become accustomed to over the past year. Nothing can help you feel better when your baby dies-- no amount of lasagna delivered to the door, no amount of sympathy cards, no ritual, religious or otherwise, is going to actually offer comfort when you are saying goodbye to your baby. The support is obviously appreciated and important, but it doesn't help you feel better. Nothing can really do that except time. And that's the position I find myself in with this pregnancy as well. I know nothing will make me feel confident that this baby is coming out of me alive except for this baby coming out of me alive. The many hours I spend in the dark with an ultrasound technician in this home stretch don't guarantee a live baby any more than they did with Sam. There's no reassurance that whatever kinds of things can cause a pregnancy to fail in the last few weeks won't happen when the baby and I are "off camera." And that's the hardest social question of all to navigate, because it comes from those in our lives who have the total context for this pregnancy. "Everything looks good at your appointments, right?" I can never tell if the intent is to reassure me, or to reassure themselves. But I struggle mightily with it, because there is no reassurance available for me and I have none to offer anyone else. I had thirty-eight and a half weeks of perfectly normal appointments with Sam. I had extra ultrasounds with him--not as many as I get now, but I was still receiving more attention than your average low-risk pregnant woman. And still nature failed us in a single instant, without warning, provocation, or indication. Reassurance is a luxury no longer available after stillbirth, and that sucks. 

So as much as I've adopted survival mode as my method of physically enduring the pregnancy--wear pants only when strictly necessary, bend over as little as possible, rely on Sofia the First to entertain Ellie while I pass out on the couch (thanks, Netflix!)-- slipping into a mental survival mode has been crucial. Brush off the questions; they aren't helpful. Get through one day at a time. Focus on what I can control. Try to appreciate the kicks and squirms, because what if this is all we get with this baby? Of course that wouldn't be enough. Pregnancy was never the goal; having a baby was the goal and pregnancy is just the means. The only thing left to do is allow time to bring us to the other side. So we wait.