Baby Love (3 page)
Authors: REBECCA WALKER
Marie didn’t bat an eye or get judgmental, and that’s why I love her, my kindhearted M.D. homeopath. She just said, Well, good thing you didn’t have to go through all of that! and started making a list of all the foods I should start eating: farm-raised lamb, eggs, Norwegian fish oil.
Then we talked about whether I should stop taking the low-dose antidepressant I’ve been taking to counteract God-knows-how-many generations of depression in my family tree. The thought of quitting cold turkey is terrifying. I have gone from being skeptical of my little purple pill, to angry that I need it, to hugely grateful to all of the good people in big pharma involved in creating it. I’m not exaggerating when I say it has allowed me to have some semblance of a normal life.
As I looked on expectantly, Marie checked her big pharmaceutical handbook to see if trials have been done on pregnant women. Limited trials, she said, but the drug is rated B for pregnancy, which means it’s not stellar, but it is doable. I looked at her across the desk covered with mugs, supplements, and files. Unless we know for sure that it will hurt the baby, I said, I just don’t think it’s a good idea for me to stop. The first thing depression takes from me is hope, and I am pretty sure I can’t have a baby without that. She agreed.
I left her office feeling good about the decision, but still full of concern. In addition to all of the other ways I can lose or harm this baby, I can now add the possibility of damaging his nervous system with what to some is an optional drug.
I also wonder about straddling the medical ob/gyn and homeopathic worlds. In theory they are compatible, but in reality I am not so sure. Dr. Lowen is all business and efficiency, Formica and fluorescents, and Marie is soft lighting and colorful art, hugs and flower remedies. Of course, Marie says they are compatible—after all, she is an M.D.—and Dr. Lowen tries to sound sympathetic when I mention the natural methods. But in real life, there seems to be an eerie disconnect between the two that leaves me slightly uncertain about both.
Which brings me back to where I started, at the perfume that triggered today’s initial bout of uncertainty about what may be the biggest decision I’ve ever made. Is this the beginning of the end? Is this the first of many things I love that I will have to give up for the baby? First perfume and then sanity, sleep, and travel to interesting places? Is this what everybody means when they say your life will never be the same? Say goodbye to emotional stability? Say goodbye to amber, lavender, rose, and sandalwood? Say goodbye to Brooklyn, Paris, and Dakar?
Is there any peace in this process? I struggled for years to decide whether to become a parent. Now that it’s happening, I’m plagued by apocalyptic visions of how it’s going to turn out. Has it always been this way? Is this elixir of ambivalence and anxiety the universal experience of motherhood, or is it just America, circa right now?
Two
MANY WOMEN SAY that for as long as they can remember, they’ve wanted to have a baby. They say that playing with dolls was their first introduction to the idea of motherhood, that they’ve known since childhood they would give birth.
I didn’t play with dolls. I never knew, the way I knew that I would go to college and eventually earn a living, that I would have a baby. Unlike the women who can’t pinpoint exactly how or why they came to the feeling, I remember exactly when and where I felt the first pang of maternal desire.
I was in Africa, in a country so foreign that none of my old thoughts about myself could hold. I found I could live without running water and electricity. I could survive armed soldiers and random searches of my bags on public buses. I could be friends, sisters even, with women who covered themselves from head to toe in swaths of black cloth.
And, because of a man I met, I could fantasize about having a child.
Ade was and still is a devout Muslim. We met in the middle of Ramadan and spent hours on the rooftop of my guesthouse talking about his culture. In conversations I dominated, I questioned him pointedly about how women were treated. What were his thoughts about the veil? Forget niceties. I wanted to know if the women in his family were circumcised. I asked these questions, but I can’t say I was open to Ade’s answers. Though only twenty years old, I was positive I knew much more than Ade about the gender politics of his country from the books I had read and women I had befriended.
But Ade wasn’t affected by my arrogance. He listened to each of my criticisms intently, and responded with a rather (compared to mine) complex view. He told me first what he believed (women are as powerful as men and should be respected as equals), and then explained what the Quran taught (one of the Prophet’s wives was a businesswoman who financed his rise), and then finally conceded the interpretation of those with power (women should be subordinate and obedient). He was adamant that there was no circumcision, but promised to ask Fatima, a rare female friend with whom he could talk about these things, and tell me what she said.
What can I say? I fell for Ade during those conversations. Ade could talk. He wasn’t afraid of me. He seemed to know his own mind, to have considered the issues I raised and come to some decisions, decisions I respected even if I didn’t agree. He was unfamiliar with the intellectual combat I was honing at college, and his lack of competitiveness allowed me a relaxed curiosity I had not known. When he left, I felt awake and alive, as if the door of everything I had learned had been blown open.
Because of this and other factors too numerous to mention here, I stayed several months with Ade, and one day, after I had convinced my traveling companion to go to Tanzania without me and I no longer knew when I would leave Ade’s tiny island or why, I went out in a dhow with Ade and some friends. We were far from the shore, out on the open sea. I was wearing a gray T-shirt and Ade’s blue-and-white-striped
kikoi
around my waist. Ade was balancing himself on the hull of the boat, releasing the rope that let the ship’s battered sail unfurl in the wind.
kikoi
around my waist. Ade was balancing himself on the hull of the boat, releasing the rope that let the ship’s battered sail unfurl in the wind.
As the boat picked up speed, I leaned back on my elbows and imagined a future with Ade. Even though his culture and beliefs ran up against everything I knew and held sacred, I found myself fantasizing that I would spend the rest of my life with him, that I would wash clothes by hand in a basin with two cups of water, and give up reading at night because we wouldn’t have electricity. I dreamed that I would dress modestly and respect his mother, that I would learn to cook delicious food in huge aluminum pots over an open fire.
And then the fantasy I’d never had: the dream that was less about Ade than it was about what I suddenly saw as possible for my life. I would have a baby with Ade, two babies, three babies, as many babies as I could.
A baby. I want to have a baby.
And then, just as quickly, I turned my eyes from the sky to the floor of the old boat and thought,
That’s ridiculous. I can’t have a baby. I have to finish school and start my career.
April 25That’s ridiculous. I can’t have a baby. I have to finish school and start my career.
I’m back in Mendocino. The drive up from Berkeley last night was
awful.
I was so nauseated going around the curves, we had to stop the car. As I leaned out the window gulping air and smelling the blood of fresh roadkill thirty feet away, I thought seriously about walking, or going to sleep in the backseat and trying again in the morning. I was so happy to get to the gate to the house. I threw myself on the ground and lay there smelling the dirt and waiting for the world to stop spinning.
awful.
I was so nauseated going around the curves, we had to stop the car. As I leaned out the window gulping air and smelling the blood of fresh roadkill thirty feet away, I thought seriously about walking, or going to sleep in the backseat and trying again in the morning. I was so happy to get to the gate to the house. I threw myself on the ground and lay there smelling the dirt and waiting for the world to stop spinning.
I’m nauseated and exhausted, but none of that has any effect whatsoever on my urge to nest. I’m always trying to make a home because I moved so many times as a kid, but now my nesting thing is on, like, hyperturbo overdrive. My mind just goes tick, tick, tick across every room, scanning for possible upgrades and nooks that could be softer, more comfortable, more homey.
After we unpacked the bags and bags of food, and after I set up my desk by hooking up my laptop and getting the lamp positioned just so, I checked the shower tile and the light fixtures. Then I went around and made a list of the other changes I needed to talk to Carl, my friend the builder/contractor, about.
I don’t know how he does it, but Glen just reads and eats and relaxes as I run around trying to make everything perfect. By just leaving me alone, he gives me permission to be myself and I
love
that. I feel the animal aspect of it, too. I am making the nest and he’s standing over it, protecting all three of us while I do it.
April 28love
that. I feel the animal aspect of it, too. I am making the nest and he’s standing over it, protecting all three of us while I do it.
Today I feel sad, tired, and unsure about everything. Like I have no real support outside of Glen for having this baby. Like I have no healthy models for how to have a family. My parents barely spoke to each other for twenty-five years. After raising two children together, my father and stepmother live somewhat separate lives. My relationships thus far have been, um, educational, but not terribly successful.
I am trying not to ruminate on all of this and to believe that I can reverse the divorce dynamic by staying with Glen until one of us dies, but it’s like my mind is in a vise. When I am not throwing up or wanting to throw up, I am having anxiety attacks about being homeless, unable to keep my family together, and making the same mistakes my parents made. Other variations on the doomsday theme running through my mind: miscarriage, miscarriage, and miscarriage.
I would rather die than hurt my baby, but I think I would actually die if I lost my baby.
Is that a depressed thought or a normal pregnancy feeling?
April 30Today I was outrageously nauseated, but went looking at gates with Carl anyway. I think I can safely describe Carl as an aging hippie. He built many houses in Anderson Valley and along the Mendocino coast, and is incredibly knowledgeable about all things having to do with construction, environmental preservation, and a host of other things we haven’t yet talked about. He’s in his sixties, and has a little shake that makes hitting nails a challenge sometimes, but I consider it a blessing that he has agreed to help reclaim this little house of my mother’s from dry rot, wasps, and a general state of dilapidation.
After finding a fairly nice gate that I will be able to open and shut without too much effort even at nine months, we went to see the house he has been building for his family for fifteen years. His wife, Martine, made me chamomile tea with honey for the nausea I told her was flattening me, and Carl brought over a book of photographs of the home birth of his second child.
The pictures were incredible. Carl was young and cute, with long, braided hippie hair and an embroidered denim shirt. In the pictures, he’s rubbing his wife’s back and holding her hand and kissing her. She’s lying down, fully naked and fully pregnant, surrendering to the process first on her back, then on her side, then on all fours when the baby is ready to come out. The room is dim so the baby won’t be shocked, and Carl’s first child, Tomas, who was four or five, holds a flashlight so they can take pictures.
Martine and Carl sent me home with something called
The Birth Book,
a collection of birth stories published by a midwifery collective Carl worked with in the seventies. After reading the stories of ten or fifteen women and their partners and midwives, I feel more than ever that I want to have a home birth. I can’t imagine having the baby in a hospital. I just don’t see how lying flat on your back can possibly be the best way to have a baby. I mean, for starters, it works
against
gravity.
May 4The Birth Book,
a collection of birth stories published by a midwifery collective Carl worked with in the seventies. After reading the stories of ten or fifteen women and their partners and midwives, I feel more than ever that I want to have a home birth. I can’t imagine having the baby in a hospital. I just don’t see how lying flat on your back can possibly be the best way to have a baby. I mean, for starters, it works
against
gravity.
I had my first official prenatal appointment today. It was like being on a conveyor belt at the baby-making factory. I was weighed, my urine tested, and seven vials of blood were extracted from my arm. I was asked about my mother’s health, my father’s, sister’s, and brother’s. Then back to the beginning for Glen’s family info. The doctor briefly skipped a rock across the ocean of my diet, instructing me to avoid shellfish, raw eggs, and one other thing that I now cannot remember. Then she prescribed a prenatal vitamin and handed me several sample packets of the enormous bright purple pill. She did a quick vaginal exam, apparently the only one I am going to have until I go into labor, and then the whole thing was over.
The appointment took about twenty-five minutes and she never looked at or touched my stomach. There wasn’t time or opportunity to discuss the creeping depression I’ve been feeling, or how concerned I am about my life changing, or my fear that I won’t be able to handle it all. I mean, technically there was. She did ask how I was feeling, but we were going along at such a clip, I couldn’t imagine what would happen if I bogged things down with my actual thoughts. She did say she had several patients who stayed on antidepressants through their pregnancies with no side effects whatsoever. That was helpful, considering I’ve been gnashing my teeth to stubs every night worrying about the implications of taking them: Am I going to burn in hell or give my kid epilepsy?
She also said, somewhere in between the questions about my family’s health history and the exam, that she’s looking forward to delivering my baby. And that she hopes I won’t do something silly, like have a home birth.
Uh-huh.
After the prenatal, I indulged in my bimonthly luxury of getting my eyebrows and toes done. Just as I was lying down, Yelena, who has been in charge of my eyebrows for the last three years, asked how old I am and if I am planning to have children. I hesitated just a second too long, trying to figure out how to answer, and she said, You’re pregnant! And I said, Yes, and she said, I knew it! And then we both laughed and I told her how nauseated and tired and freaked out I am, and she told me about her clients who come in to the salon the day before their due date to get a Brazilian bikini wax. Apparently, they want to look good for the doctors. By the time I left, my toes were a lovely lilac and I was laughing my head off.
May 6The mood swings are so intense. I woke up at four in the morning and scribbled this on the back of a paper bag:
I am eight weeks pregnant and terrified. Each morning I wake up filled with a peculiar blend of dread and longing. Who am I, and what the hell is happening to me? Already I eat uncontrollably, craving foods I classified as off-limits years ago: huge balls of mozzarella, thick steaks dripping with blood, slice after slice of eggplant. After only eight weeks, my breasts are painful to the touch, my small nipples now engorged to twice their normal size and dark as blackberries. I cannot drive to the store without having to slow the car to twenty in a fifty-mile-per-hour zone, without pulling over at a gas station to let the ocean of nausea subside. To make matters worse, I can no longer get into my favorite pair of jeans, and my hard-won good posture, the result of hundreds of Alexander Technique lessons, seems frightfully on the sway. And oh yeah, forget about planes, which I have to board every other week to give lectures, readings, and writing workshops. Just the words “jet” and “fuel” send me running for the toilet.
And that’s just my body. Far worse is what my mind is doing to me. In my worst moments, when I am seeing my patient and adoring partner as a modern-day Satan, and feeling as if I am going to be an unfit joke of a mother, I am certain that I am being invaded by alien intelligence, a force so powerful it can make me do things I otherwise would not, a force so totally in control of me, I may never know who I am again. And while daddy-to-be can make eggs and burn the turkey bacon just like I like it, he can’t really help with the psychological plunges I keep having to claw my way out of because after all, I am going to be this child’s mother, and heaven help me and her if I can’t figure out how to contain my anxiety about it. Right?
Of course, being the writer and reader and info-junkie that we all are these days, I’ve bought a half-dozen books to try to get myself through this. I’ve scoured all 669,801 pages on the Internet on pregnancy and the first trimester, pregnancy and depression, pregnancy and emotions, pregnancy and anxiety, pregnancy and fear. They all, every one of them, allow for the kinds of mood swings I am having, they all say that everything I am feeling and thinking is normal, healthy, and won’t hurt the baby. But while the experts say what I want to hear, they still don’t seem to say it as adamantly as I need them to. They don’t say, Yes, you may feel as if you are going to lose your mind and there will be moments when you reconsider everything and think, after all this wanting and trying and hoping and thinking about names and strollers and birthing methods, that the only reasonable thing to do at this point is terminate the pregnancy.
They don’t tell you that. Or if they do, they tell you in tones so soft and modest and reserved and professional that you want to scream at the page, the computer, the doctor, Yes, but do you understand that this whole thing is
freaking me out
? My life is about to change and
I have no idea how to prepare
? And do you know why they are calm and you are not? Because they don’t have to have this baby, you do. They are not going to be responsible for this being for the rest of their lives, you are. They are not going to lie in bed worrying about the week of doxycycline you took before you knew you were pregnant and whether or not the baby is going to have stained teeth that need forty thousand dollars’ worth of veneers. They are going to go home at the end of the day without carrying your baby with them. You will never be able to go home at the end of the day without carrying your baby again.
freaking me out
? My life is about to change and
I have no idea how to prepare
? And do you know why they are calm and you are not? Because they don’t have to have this baby, you do. They are not going to be responsible for this being for the rest of their lives, you are. They are not going to lie in bed worrying about the week of doxycycline you took before you knew you were pregnant and whether or not the baby is going to have stained teeth that need forty thousand dollars’ worth of veneers. They are going to go home at the end of the day without carrying your baby with them. You will never be able to go home at the end of the day without carrying your baby again.
Cheery, huh?
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