Your Personal Guide to Pregnancy

That’s the name of  a brochure I was handed somewhat absentmindedly as I was headed out of the midwife’s office on Friday.

Here, without delay, is quite possibly the most useless piece of pregnancy advice that has ever been written:

“Sex:

It is normal to have:

More interest in sex….

Less interest in sex….

Mixed feelings and thoughts about sex….”

Like a lot of other advice in my personal guide, I think it might have been more helpful if it simply said: “Pregnancy, like life, leaves you with contradictory thoughts and feelings about almost everything almost all the time. The sooner you accept this and move on, the more sense it will all make.”

The Trip Advisor of Pregnancy Docs…& a Confession

There was one question in my mom’s e-mail yesterday: “Have you been to the doctor yet?”

And I didn’t answer, but the truth is… no.

*

The honest excuse, until this week, is that I’ve been out of the country.

When I saw the pregnancy test flash positive, I knew who I wanted as my health care provider- the ob/gyn-midwife I’ve been seeing since I moved to New York. She’s the best medical provider I’ve ever had: patient, caring, never hurried, intelligent, and engaging without being condescending.

When I called her office, I learned that she’d moved her practice from the Bronx to Midtown. I Googled her name, in search of her new office number, and happened across some disturbing reviews. “DO NOT go to this woman!!!” wrote one mom, exaggerating her remarks with too many capital letters and exclamation marks.  “Cold, impatient, high C-section rate,” another wrote.

I’d stumbled across the Trip Advisor equivalent of pregnancy docs.

Trip Advisor, if you don’t know, is a website where travelers leave detailed reviews and ratings of places they’ve stayed. These reviews can be glowing…and they can be brutal, but in either case, they exert a profound degree of influence over many people’s vacation decisions.

I’ve never quite understood the attraction of trusting in a total stranger to exert such influence over my travel plans. Maybe we’re different types of travelers. Maybe we have different interests, different needs, different tolerance threshholds. I’ve survived earthquakes in Costa Rica and Mexico, cockroaches surging out of the shower drain every morning in China, and plastic wrapped mattresses, so I’m a bit forgiving.  I also know–because I have some friends who own a travel lodge and are ranked #1 in their region on Trip Advisor–that there are all sorts of ways that competitors beat the system, posing as disgruntled customers. In short, I put no stock in TripAdvisor when it comes to making plans.

So why was I paralyzed every time I picked up the phone to reschedule the first appointment I’d missed?

Because pregnancy’s a lot more serious than a vacation. Because I don’t have a plan B provider in place. Because, God, what if these women are right? What if the midwife I knew and really respected and admired has somehow turned into this she-witch?

I doubt it, seriously. In fact, she’s called me back and even left her home number. She sounds as warm and as patient as ever.

And my appointment is on the 27th.

The Kitchen Is Closed Until Further Notice

It was 10:20 and we still hadn’t eaten dinner.

Not because it wasn’t ready–it had been in the oven on “warm” for at least two hours–but because I was surfing another one of the vague bouts of nausea that seem to have replaced full-on morning sickness.

I didn’t tell him, but the smell from the kitchen–which I’d find tantalizing under other circumstances–was suffocating. It wasn’t that I wasn’t hungry. We hadn’t eaten since a very early breakfast, which I’d picked at. I was ravenous. But the thought of vegetable and beef tip kabobs, brown rice, and garbanzos…. I buried my head in a pillow on the couch.

“Do you think you can eat now?” Francisco asked gently. I told him I’d try, but I pushed the food around my plate like a picky two year old.  “I think I’ll stop cooking,” he said, not accusatory or hurt, just pragmatic.  “So far, I haven’t found anything to satisfy you.”

I know I talk about food a lot, but when your husband is a chef and he cooks at least two meals a day, the loss of appetite associated with pregnancy is a big deal.

I hope he doesn’t close the kitchen until further notice. Even if I can’t stomach a full meal, there’s a profound joy and appreciation I experience every time I watch or hear him in the kitchen. And that itself is a gift.

After the Afterglow

It’s nice, in that early afterglow of finding out you’re pregnant, to think that you’ll have the ideal pregnancy.

It’s kind of like New Year’s: You feel full of possibility, full of the energy and resolve you need to realize all those ambitious goals and dreams.

You’ll eat well. You’ll push away from work at the computer to go for a leisurely walk in the afternoon sun. You’ll spend more quality time with your partner. And so on.

And like New Year’s, a few weeks later, you wake up one morning and wonder what the hell happened to that sweet vibe…when the moment was, exactly, that you lost it, whether it’s possible to get it back again, whether it can be captured and channeled with the same intensity and pleasure. And you feel a little sad because there’s a part of you, however tiny, that thinks maybe you can’t.

When I found out I was pregnant, I imagined all the ways I’d take care of myself (and be taken care of) for nine whole months, all the new little rituals we’d initiate: talking to the baby before going to sleep, listening to classical music or something, always being gentle with ourselves and each others. Eating nothing but organic, fresh food. And on and on.

But the reality is–surprise!–that pregnancy is a lot like the rest of life. You wake up in the morning grateful to be alive, to be healthy, to love and to be loved, to have work that brings you pleasure, but worried about bills, about the problems of people you love, thinking about the  list of things to do (and the ones you didn’t get done yesterday), bracing yourself for all of the challenges and unexpected bumps any day brings. You find yourself away from home, faced with the decision to eat a cheap slice of pizza or to take the time and spend the money to eat something a bit better. Though your inner circle of family and friends is stronger and more supportive than ever, you still have people in your life who you’d rather were playing their parts on another stage, preferably one on another continent, far away. You still get into bed at night wondering where the day went, why you don’t have the energy to make love, why you fall asleep during the first 10 minutes of a pretty interesting movie.

When these moments come–and they came last night as I lay in bed alone at our apartment in Mexico and stared at the ceiling until the sun rose and the traffic started buzzing outside this morning–there’s really only one thing to do. Just be with the feeling. Invite it in, sit with it. Have a conversation. Acknowledge your limitations. And agree that right now is the moment to begin again.

So Far, So Good, Now What?

Isn’t pregnancy supposed to be a time when a woman gets in touch with her body… but not necessarily in a good way? You know, the famed morning sickness and all that?

I’m not far along, and I don’t want to sound too smug , but I feel fantastic. No signs of nausea, no flattening fatigue that threatens to completely reorder my days.

But the fact that I feel so good is a little worrisome. It doesn’t seem…normal. At what point do all those usual symptoms begin to appear?

Gemelos*

*(That’s Spanish for twins).

So, the first thing the dad-to-be said to me this morning after “Buenos dias, Mamita,” was “You know there are lots of gemelos in my family, right?”

I rubbed my eyes and wondered if I was still dreaming.

“Uh huh,” I said.

But between you and me, I thought: “Look. Quite frankly, I’m already totally bowled over by the fact that that test blinked ‘pregnant’ yesterday. But two kids? Two? Are you serious?”

And then he began to tick off the number of women in his family who had had twins.

Including his mother, which I never knew. (They died, apparently).

But yes, now that he mentioned it, I recall that his mother has said “jemaguas” (another word for twins) on dozens or thousands of occasions. Whenever she talks with him, she asks about the “jemaguas,” Francisco’s twin cousins who left for the US years ago and who he hasn’t seen in a couple decades. “No se, Mama, no se,” he always tells her, but it doesn’t matter that he has no clue where or how they are.

She’s obsessed about the jemaguas.

Pregnancy= A Legitimate Excuse to Wear Sweatpants for 9 Mos. Straight

Okay, so I can’t have cocktails.

But let’s look on the bright side: being pregnant means I have a legitimate excuse to wear sweatpants for nine months straight.

I don’t own a lot of clothing and I tend to wear the same thing–jeans (one of two pairs) and a t-shirt (from a selection of about five)–over and over. But they’re already getting tight (that probably is a result of the filet mignon, lobster tail, and chocolate cake; I’m not gonna lie.).

I know that 21st century pregnancy offers fashion options that just weren’t available during our mothers’ or grandmothers’ eras. But I detest clothes shopping and I don’t really think that the best use of a limited bank account is splurging on outfits–however adorable they might be–from A Pea in the Pod (seriously, click on that link. I’m not an envious person, but that svelte, pregnant woman just makes me sick).

Let’s face it: I’m not going to turn into someone I’m not. I mean, look at this woman: I don’t wear heels like that under normal circumstances. You think I’m going to start sporting them now?

No way. Get used to it. From now til September, it’s sweatpants.

BabyMama.wordpress.com was already taken, ok?

The mystery of the sudden weight gain has been solved.

It wasn’t the filet mignon, lobster tail in alfredo sauce, and chocolate cake I ate in St. Kitts. (Ok, maybe that was part of it. But just part.)

It was… is… a baby.

Yikes. Feels pretty weird to say that.

There was no question that I wanted to document this whole experience, and I really (I mean, really, really) wanted to name my blog babymama. 

But alas, it’s been taken, so we’re all stuck with 9mos.

Gotta run. The baby wants to eat some chocolate cake.