For All My Past Selves

The one about pregnancy (surprise!).

TW: pregnancy, fertility

Earlier this month, I read a poem that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. It was titled “To All of the Women I’ve Been Before” by Hannah Rosenberg, and you can read it here. It struck a nerve, particularly with the season of life that I’m currently in.

I haven’t talked about this publicly — hell, I’ve barely talked about it privately — but I’m pregnant. Halfway there, actually.

It’s happening and it’s real and I’m over the moon about it, and yet I’ve been unable to bring myself to talk about it much publicly. I haven’t posted any photos of myself with a pregnant belly on social media, I haven’t written about it, and I haven’t even told that many people in my life. I’m about to march into an entirely new season of life — become a new evolution of myself, I suppose (and perhaps the transition has already started) — and yet I’m still having trouble saying it out loud. I’m ready and yet I’m not.

I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with fertility and the idea of having children throughout my 30s. As I’ve written about in the past, I am someone who’s sat firmly on the fence when it came to choosing to expand my family (aka have a child that wasn’t furry), both unsure if I wanted to, and also sincerely unsure I biologically even could, due to my health situation. (If you’re new here, you can read more on that here and here.) I am sure the latter informed the former — it was a message that was repeated by my doctors from the time I was a kid, with the added nuance once I was in my late 20s/early 30s that sure, maybe I could make it happen (thanks to the rise of fertility specialists, medical advances, etc.), but it would be incredibly hard, if not impossible to get pregnant. And if somehow it did occur, it would be a difficult journey (more complicated than the average pregnancy). I thought about that a lot, and even now, more than 5 months pregnant, I still hear that talk track in the back of my head, right along with the footnote that people with my blood disorder used to not be able to live beyond age 30; maybe both no longer fully apply to me, but that doesn’t mean the impact of the messages left.

It did, in fact, take me a long time to get to this path, from a literal standpoint. Over the last few years, I’ve seen fertility specialists to double check (or, rather, confirm) what I assumed to be true based on previous conversations with my doctor, and toyed with the idea of IVF, mainly put off by the hefty cost and the idea of having to get more shots, more medical appointments than I already do. (Don’t get me started on how angry I am about the situation in Alabama right now.) When I saw the pink lines on a pregnancy test in the fall, I had literally just started to come to terms with the idea that motherhood was not in the cards for me. I’m 37, for heaven’s sake — I thought my window for pregnancy was moments from being painted shut. As the pregnancy test turned positive on the bathroom counter, I laughed like an unhinged person.

In the legendary words of writer/podcaster Kate Kennedy, you plan and God LOLs.

But as I said, I was very much unsure I wanted to have kids — again, likely an opinion formed by what I was told growing up. Chronic illnesses teach you cautious optimism, and to not get too excited about something. Never put all your eggs in one basket without a back-up plan. Never want something too much. So my expectations were leveled early, and the older I got, the more complicated my feelings became. I wasn’t totally sure what I wanted, and the part of me that genuinely considered being a mother wasn’t sure what my body could reasonably accomplish, from a fertility standpoint. I came to hate baby showers, and got to the point where I’d try to actively ignore the many, many pregnancy announcements littering my social media feeds. I can still recall one baby shower I attended of a friend, that happened at a point when I was still sitting on the fence of uncertainty; I left and cried in my car when it was finally over.

And I’d be remiss not to admit that I have also found myself really turned off at the way motherhood is presented in society — mainly by media, both traditional and social media, but also by some (not all) people I’ve known or observed in my life. I could probably write an entire essay on that alone. As I camped out on that fence right in the middle, I started to think maybe it wasn’t for me — maybe that wasn’t who I wanted to become, or even could become, based on what I was seeing. Pregnancy is sort of like that too, I guess, and maybe that’s part of why I haven’t talked about it much. I’m honestly so happy and feel so grateful for this opportunity to be someone’s mom, but at the same time, I don’t really neatly fit into what feels like the expectations set for being someone who’s about to be a mother. I don’t ooh and ahh over babies. I’ve never had that undying urge to be called “mama” or fantasized about having a household of kids, something I know a lot of people instinctively feel from the time they’re much younger than I am now. This feels like something I should not say out loud, but I don’t feel ready to be completely absorbed in motherhood or lose the rest of the parts of myself and the goals that I still have, still want to achieve. That one feels like the biggest to me, and I’m thankful that I have plenty of close friends who’ve set a beautiful example about the latter — that I can still strive and dream and go after the personal/career accomplishments I want while also being a strong mother — multifaceted. But that’s certainly not what you see a lot of in social media land. Or at least, that’s not what I’m getting served on my feeds. ((I already know there are people reading this shaking their heads with a knowing smile, ready to tell me how a baby will change everything, will become the most important thing — save it, please. I’m sure that’s absolutely true, but I have watched some people pull motherhood in as their entire identity after having kids, and I’ve watched others add it as an incredible layer — that’s the dichotomy I’m referring to.))

I heard someone once say they didn’t want to have a baby, but rather they wanted to be someone’s mother, and that really resonated with me. I was fortunate enough to have an incredible one, and if I could be for someone else what she was for me, well… that would be a gift.

Anyways. Sipping my coffee and typing this, knowing my ankles are going to be not-so-adorably swollen from sitting for so long once I hit “send,” it genuinely feels like I got really lucky, and I don’t take that for granted at all. Are things hard? Yeah, they are — of course they are; that’s life. But all in all, I have no complaints. I’ve had the kindest, most loving pregnancy so far that I could have ever imagined, if I knew what to imagine. (Knocking on wood here, over and over again.) It’s sort of funny actually, because when random people or colleagues find out I’m pregnant (not knowing anything about my medical history, of course) and ask me how I’m doing, I almost always say I have no complaints (because I don’t, truly!), and without fail, they seem disappointed. Like they want the drama, want to hear how devastatingly awful it’s been. (And hey, let me not gloss over this — pregnancy IS brutal, and some people get absolutely pummeled; I have friends who had terrible experiences, ravaged by constant sickness and other painful things that can accompany pregnancy but that literally no one ever talks about.) I have no complaints because the things that are hard for me from a normal pregnancy standpoint are honestly sort of minor from my perspective, and especially in comparison to the other stuff — the laundry list of things I’ve had to stress and worry about that are ~*unique*~ and scary when it comes to being pregnant (which I’ll spare you from but have, I’ll admit, taken a toll on my mental health in the last few months). All in all, it’s been a joyful and low key experience thus far. I mean, as low key as as a pregnancy goes when you have a chronic medical issue. :)

That’s probably why I’ve felt more precious about talking about this freely with anyone besides my husband and my best friends. Almost as if I can somehow jinx myself, or if I make the wrong move, say too much, it’ll all go away. Taken away from me as fast as it arrived. Nothing is guaranteed for me here (and really, nothing is guaranteed in any pregnancy — take a peek at the maternal health and mortality rates around the country), and I’m trying to savor and celebrate what I have right now. What an honor it has been to get to walk this journey, for as long as I get to do it. And if pregnancy has so far taught me anything, it’s that I’m no longer on the fence. No, I have completely unpacked on the parenthood side, anxiously waiting there on a lounge chair, debating planning a garden or painting my house but scared to dig too far in quite yet.

And so, we wait — me and the many versions of myself who have gotten us to this point.

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Thank you all for being here and if you made it to the end, wow. That means a lot to me. This is a challenging one to put out there into the universe, but as always, if it resonates with anyone, then it was worth it. And if it does, I sure hope you’ll let me know. Happy Friday!

Thanks for reading,

Joelle

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