Being pregnant has been different than I anticipated. I can't seem to motivate myself to write about what's happening to me because it's almost as if the whole thing has simply been too much. Not too much physically. In fact, physically being pregnant has been a breeze.
I underestimated the mental part.
I should have seen this coming. In all aspects of my life, I crave the timing to be "right." I never want to get in over my head. I don't want to undertake any enormous changes without everything else being in a perfect row of easily managed categories.
When I got pregnant my personal reserve to allow for any added stress was essentially non-existent. Sure, the infertility treatments were trying, but those weren't the issue. When I found out I was pregnant, the way I once envisioned raising a child was turned upside down because the permanent variables of my life were suddenly less permanent.
There are waves of dealing with a sick family member. Sometimes it's relatively manageable; every moment of everyday is not tainted with cancer. Sometimes you find yourself at the crest of a wave struggling to get your bearings and to keep your head above water. When you are in the midst of a wave, there is no room for anything other than survival. At the end of September when I took that pregnancy test, I was in a wave.
Since finding out I am pregnant, my mom has undergone a hip replacement. For around two months leading up to that surgery, she could not walk on her own. She couldn't go anywhere without a walker and really she needed a wheelchair to move efficiently at all (although she refused to use one). We spent Thanksgiving and Christmas under the assumption that the pain in my mom's left leg was simply the result of bone cancer. We thought that this was the way the rest of my mom's life would be. Walkers and wheelchairs. Crippling pain that left her in bed with heating pads and pain medicine that barely phased the pain. We scrambled to schedule radiation which didn't help at all. We researched pain management options that doctors performed in far away cities and presented them to my mom who blankly stared back at her able-bodied family members. She tried to fake hope. She thanked me for not buying into the idea that the rest of her life would be spent using a walker. I bought my mom a heating pad and a TENS unit for Christmas. It was a rough holiday season.
We eventually found out my mom's hip was broken. She had not fallen or had any sort of accident to cause this. Her bones are compromised from the cancer. Sometimes they just break.
Today, my mom can walk without a walker or even a cane. She has a limp and some pain still, but she is vastly improved from a few months ago.
When my mom was at her worst, I tried to recreate the mental picture of my life with a child. I tried to imagine how my mom would hold my baby or take pictures with him. Could she ever keep him by herself? Could she ever pick him up from a carrier or crib when he was crying? Could she go on walks around the block with us? Or take him to the park? Could she stand by my side as I delivered him? Could she love him the way she loves me?
These were all questions I found myself trying to answer in the midst of coming to terms with the human inside of me. As I was becoming a mother, I was trying to let go of the way I needed my own mother. The whole thing was just too much.
The good news is that eventually a wave breaks. After the surgery and a few weeks of her recovery, I found myself on the shore. I could finally start to do all of the things I would have done at the beginning of this experience (names, pictures, registering, decorating a room) had my mom not been in such a bad way.
I realize now that the unexpected turmoil that accompanied finding out I was pregnant helped to put and keep this experience in perspective. I've been reminded that being pregnant is not about picking a name or registering for gifts. It's not about gender reveal parties or meticulously recording every craving or pregnancy development. Being pregnant does not have to be a production of fake milestones and celebrations (although when life allows those things are perfectly acceptable). Being pregnant is about having a baby, God-willing a healthy baby, who will enter a world that isn't always easy but is always worth it.
I will soon have a baby boy. I will be his mother and my mom will be his grandmother. She will hold him and love him for as long as she can. She will help me be a better mother than I could without her. There is no guarantee on these experiences, but there is a guarantee on the love that this tiny human will receive when he shows up one day. The details of how we got there will not be important when we finally get to meet this person. So maybe I don't know what I was craving in week nine or when I started using a rubber band to hold my pants together, but I do know that having a baby is about loving people; loving this baby and loving my husband and my dad and my mom and all the people who will shape who my son will become.
