I never thought I would become a mother. At age 19 a doctor talked to me gently about endometriosis and told me that I would likely never become pregnant. By the time I was twenty nine, I had been off of birth control for five years and had quite given up on the idea of ever having children of my own.
My family is full of children. I am the oldest of fourteen cousins on my mom’s side, there was always a baby on my hip from age nine on up. My brothers are eleven and sixteen years younger than me. I raised them as my own. When I started looking for work early in college, working with children was a natural choice for me and it was a path that I always seemed to fall into, whether I worked for a museum, a children’s clothing boutique, or childcare. I love children in all stages and my deepest and most buried hope was to have children of my own.
The pressure to have children is immense. People do not think when they ask you when you are going to start a family; it just seems to be a phrase that slips over the lips naturally. From the moment I graduated college it was a persistent question. The pressure got to be so much for me that I stopped attending family functions because I couldn’t bear to hear the question any longer or the clucking of the tongues and sympathetic shakes if I chose to tell someone we were having infertility issues. Worse were the people who reminded me that I was running out of time. My mother was relentless in her quest for grandchildren.
One day in late January or early February of 2008, my only sister called me, she seemed hesitant but she needed to speak with me. She told me she was pregnant. She had never wanted children and this wasn’t at all planned, they weren’t in a stable position to have a baby, but pregnant they were. I hung up the phone with her shaking. I looked around at my half empty home, rooms that were waiting to be filled with children, my husband who I had been with for ten years, and I just started crying. I raged and I cried; I was heartbroken. And yes, I was jealous. I couldn’t understand what I had done in my life to be so undeserving of motherhood. Why I had failed to do deliberately what so many women do everyday completely on accident. I sunk into a very deep well of self pity. To make matters worse, the next day my mother called to talk to me about my sister’s pregnancy, she decided that it was time that I start looking into infertility treatment and assured me that the family would have preferred me being pregnant over my sister. To say the conversation was less than helpful is probably an overstatement.
Meanwhile, my husband and our very close friend at the time had been picking up on little things that I had been complaining about. My breasts hurt, I smelled things very strongly, I was emotional, I was nauseous, and my period was late. They were both afraid to say anything to me because of the depression I was in over my sister’s pregnancy. Eventually they teamed up and talked me into taking a pregnancy test. I went to the bathroom raging at them, telling them what idiots they were, and how I was glad I wasn’t wasting my own money on this. Two lines showed up on the test. I stared at it in disbelief and just sat there shaking. I checked the packaging even though I knew without a doubt that two lines meant pregnant. When my husband came in to check on me, I couldn’t speak, I just held the test up for him to see. He said, “You’re pregnant.” And I cried. It had been a week since I found out about my sister’s pregnancy.
In my despair and resolve, I had pushed the idea that I would ever become pregnant out of my mind. I missed all of the beginning symptoms of pregnancy because in my mind, it simply wasn’t an option. I was never going to be a mother and it was something that I had been struggling to accept for years. I enjoyed the experience of calling our families to tell them our news. My youngest brother was the first person from my family that I was able to tell and he exclaimed, “I’m going to be like…SUPER UNCLE!” The prospect of two babies was even exciting for a fifteen year old. Everyone was excited and because the news was so unexpected we had a hard time keeping it quiet. Everyone knew before twenty four hours had passed.
Several weeks later, I was having a normal Saturday, I went into the bedroom to speak with my husband and my thigh felt went, I looked down to see a lot of blood. My eyes went wide and I couldn't breathe. I don’t even remember getting to the ER but I remember sitting in the waiting room for four hours crying while I bled.
It wasn't until another woman became angry and began berating the nursing staff for leaving a pregnant woman who was bleeding in the waiting room that they suddenly found a place for me. They did the ultrasounds and exams and the doctor came back to explain to me about blighted ovum and miscarriages, I was so numb and I don’t even remember looking at her face. I felt like such a failure. The next evening I went to step into the shower and found that the bleeding had become even more severe, I panicked and we went to another ER this time. The doctor there looked at the results from the first ER and backed up their conclusion that I was having a miscarriage, he did remark that it was curious that my cervix was still nice and closed. I asked him, “Have you ever seen a pregnancy bleed this much and still progress?” He said, “I’m sorry, no.” All I could do was apologize to everyone, for getting their hopes up, for not being able to be a mother, for failing. I remember that night as one of the darkest of my life.
I had an appointment the next morning for the best high risk clinic around, it had been scheduled before the miscarriage, so I called them in the morning, explained that I had had a miscarriage and that there was no reason for me to come in. The receptionist argued with me and said I still needed to come in and get checked out, I wasn’t in any headspace to argue so I complied. I sat in the waiting room looking at all these other pregnant women and I hated everyone one of them. I hated them and I envied them. I thought about how cruel it was that I was sitting here having lost my baby and having to look at their big, healthy, bellies. When my name was called, I somehow managed to walk to the door.
I was grim as I climbed onto the ultrasound chair; the tech was an older woman with a soft but bright voice. I don’t remember anything she said previous to her voice chiming into my thoughts with, “Do you want to hear the heartbeat?” I stared at her uncomprehendingly and looked at my husband to verify that I had just heard correctly. The two of us began to stammer the story of what we had been through over the weekend. She shook her head and said, “I don’t know what they saw but there is the baby right there.” She turned a button and there was the heartbeat. She showed us that there was a blood clot in my uterus and that it was very near the baby. Later the doctor told me I would need to be on bed rest and until the clot was resolved, there would be a danger of losing the pregnancy. I didn’t care; I would have done anything they told me to do.
I would love to give a thrilling story about how wonderful the rest of the pregnancy went but that’s not my story. For the next seven weeks, I continued to bleed and each week when I went to the OB, I had to deal with the fear that I had lost my baby in the previous week. But each week, my baby was still there, heartbeat strong and growing with the charts. Finding out I had gestational diabetes early on was a blow, but I adjusted and controlled what I ate and my blood sugar levels with ferocity. It was something I could control, so I did. The office was very thorough and every week I saw my baby on ultrasound and earlier than I should have, I noticed something about him. I couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen weeks along when I burst at the ultrasound tech, “Is it too early to tell the sex?” She’d seen what I had and she grinned and asked if I wanted to know. I said, “I think it’s a boy.” She thought so too. As if on cue, my sister called me from her own OB appointment, she was a little further along and it was her appointment to find out the sex. She was having a girl.
A few weeks after finding out the sex, the office called me and told me one of the doctors wished to speak with me. My heart jumped into my throat, I knew it could not be good news if the doctor himself wished to speak with me. He gently told me that my baby had tested positive for possible neural tube defects and that he wanted me to come in as soon as possible for more testing and to speak with the geneticist. He asked if I would allow them to do an amniocentesis and I consented. Looking over the ultrasound, especially the spine, the doctor couldn’t find anything abnormal other than inexplicably the umbilical cord had two vessels instead of the normal three. That wasn’t anything to do with neural tube defects, just another oddity on my list of oddities. I spoke with the geneticist, did the amnio and after a week of holding my breath, found out that I had had a false positive.
For the first time in my pregnancy, I was able to relax a bit. I marveled in the experience, the good and the weird. I laughed about how many things people say about pregnancy and how actually experiencing it was an entirely different ballgame. I called the nurse line in a panic, worried about a feeling that didn’t hurt but it was odd and tickly, the nurse gently told me that it was my baby moving. I worried over every little thing but was constantly elated to still be pregnant. I progressed to being kicked in the ribs and not being able to sleep since nighttime was playtime.
Towards the end of my pregnancy, my blood pressure started rising. I have an anxiety disorder and had told my OB team that many times. Their constant worries and worst case scenarios had been stressful enough but this was also my first baby and I was adjusting to things. Eight months of rollercoaster emotions had caught up with me. I told them I was stressed, they worried that I had pre-eclampsia. I had to stay overnight for observation, it was my first time in a hospital and because I had a roommate, no one could stay with me. They did tests and watched me and concluded everything was fine. The next week, I went in and my blood pressure was up again. I explained to the doctor that I had been having anxiety attacks before every appointment since I had begun coming to that office. They hospitalized me again. My stress increased, I don’t sleep well away from home and I was worried about my baby. My perfect blood sugar numbers were ruined in the hospital and all of my routines were disrupted. My blood pressure didn’t go down this time.
After a long night, my doctor came in to see me. He gave me the option, since I was 37 weeks and 1 day, of being induced or waiting a couple of days to do steroid treatments for my baby’s lungs. We talked about what could happen in the waiting period and I decided I was ready to see my son. I wanted him here so that we could know the situation and stop speculating on what ifs. My doctor agreed. As soon as the decision was made, my blood pressure went back to normal and stayed there.
I’d love to tell the story of my textbook labor, how quick, painless and efficient it was, but that’s just not my story. I was induced on the 30th of September. I was still iffy about drugs but my contractions were very hard and the labor and delivery nurse, Amy, who was amazing, talked me into getting an epidural. Her logic was that I had suffered with the pain of endometriosis all of my life, I had done my time. I agreed. During the epidural, my water broke and in my pregnant mind, I had done something wrong. I cried and apologized. When all was said and done, the epidural was only numbing half of my body. I got it into my head that someone, I am not even sure who, would be angry with me if they found out the epidural wasn’t working properly, so I resolved to fake it. The nurse would ask about my pain and I would gasp, “Two!” while my three birth coaches shook their heads and told her I was lying.
Eventually I gave in and allowed the epidural to be redone. I still remember the anesthesiologist’s name, Naser. Naser was my savior and I praised his name over and over in the coming hours. He popped the needle in with the comment, “I don’t know what their problem was earlier, she was easy.” When he came in to check on my pain level, I told him I hadn’t had a contraction since he had come and he laughed and said, “You are having one right now.” If only it had gone smooth sailing from there. I was progressing slowly and terrified of having a c-section. Every time they came in and my labor stalled, they would try to talk to me about a c-section and I would refuse. I would make a little progress and then stall out again. Seventy two hours after being initially induced, I could no longer pick my head up, I was exhausted and at the end of my rope. When the doctor said c-section, I said, “I just want to see my baby.”
I slept through most of the c-section, I woke up periodically to beg for the damp rag they were allowing me to suck, my mouth was so dry. I remember bits and pieces, snatches of conversation, and I woke up completely when my doctor said, “Here he is.” That first cry ran through my entire body, everything I had been through was worth it just to hear that strong cry. They showed him to me for a second then took him back to clean him up and weigh him. They handed him to my husband and we both cried. I kissed his head and whispered, “Asher.”
He was small, five pounds one ounce, eighteen inches long, but I never expected a big child, my family has small babies. They took him to the special care nursery for observation; he had a hard time regulating his body temperature but otherwise was just fine. After that perilous journey, I had given birth to a tiny miracle. I brought him home three days later and three days after that his status as the only grandchild was altered by the appearance of my niece.
My journey to motherhood started well before January of 2008, I loved and cared for many from the time when I was just a child myself. I did all the work without having the title. Asher is three now and not that long ago he was confused about him calling me Mama and other people calling me Jessica. He asked, “When did you get Mama?” and I said, “When you came you made me Mama, thank you, baby.”
