Pregnancy: Part One

The Way Before

I spent a lot of time in my 20s reading mommy blogs. It terrified the guys I dated during that period. I told them all I was reading them because I was curious about what my body was capable of (e.g. child bearing). Let’s get real, though. You don’t watch hours of “Momversation” unless you want children. I was curious about the physical aspects of pregnancy, but I also wanted to be a mother. I wanted all of the other stuff they had, too: long-term romantic partners, houses, etc... They informed my ideas about adulthood more than I could know. They also taught me about the scarier bits of giving birth, adding words like “episiotomy” to my vocabulary.

To give you an idea of how long ago all this was, the babies from those blogs are young teens now. That’s wild to think about. Blogging then was more about sharing your life and less about satisfying sponsors (“Thanks, International Delight Non-Dairy Coffee Creamer!” etc…). It was a much different landscape. But that is another rant for another time.

The Just Before

I got married to a lovely man in 2015. So it was that last year I found myself not only with a long-term partner, but also financially stable (amazing!). It was feasible to start planning for a kid.

Because this is America, the financial side is important. Here, healthcare costs come at you weeks later at mystery rates. We’d both heard stories about L&Ds that wound up costing upwards of $10k, immediately throwing new parents into debilitating debt. That’s not how we wanted to welcome our little one into the world, if we could help it. We agreed to spend a year creating a decent emergency fund before we started trying to conceive.

The year felt long. I hated the waiting. But I’m so glad we did—not because we wound up needing that extra money (thankfully!), but because I got pregnant more quickly than I thought. For, you see, a 35-year-old woman is considered “geriatric” in the fertility world. At 34, I was on the cusp of being elderly. I figured it’d take ages to get pregnant. Fortunately, I did not have that struggle.

After a couple of months of trying, my boobs felt funny. That’s the only way I can describe it. I had a feeling I knew what it meant. My boss was having a going away party at an axe-throwing bar* that week. I figured that if this was really going to be “it” that I’d go out one last time before I knew for sure. I went, threw some axes with careful vigor, and had one beer. It would be my last drink for quite a while.

I left on the early side, excited and anxious. At home, I quietly took a pregnancy test in our master bathroom. Two lines. I’d secretly bought and hidden away a little green onesie for just this occasion. I brought the test and the onesie out of the bedroom to display to my husband, who was on his laptop in the living room. After a long time wanting, and a year plus waiting, this was it.

* Yes, this is, apparently, a thing.

The First Trimester

There is no nice way to say this: the first trimester was hellish. I’m a lifelong pessimist with an overactive imagination, yet it managed to be even worse than I’d pictured.

There was little throwing up and it sure wasn’t “morning sickness.” I had intense nausea that appeared one day and lasted for months. It was there 24/7 and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I had zero appetite. Saltines, apple sauce, and Annie’s mac and cheese were about all that I could eat. Of all the home remedies, fresh lemon in my water was one of the only things that helped. I bought loads and loads of lemons. I progressed from slicing them daintily into my drink to shoving big pieces into my mouth, keeping them there while I grimaced. After a frustratingly long runaround with my insurance, I got the OK for a prescription for my nausea. By that point I’d already lost a bunch of weight.

I work in an office and managed to go in some days, though I can’t remember much of what I did there, honestly. I remembering stuffing plastic grocery bags into my coat pockets before I left the house to make sure I had a place to barf on the train on the way in. I remember covering my face with my sleeve because coffee smells disgusted me—an inescapable scent in an open plan office. I remember having a conversation with my boss during which I told him I just couldn’t operate at 100% for a little bit.

I’d never felt so devoid of energy in my life. At the end of the day, I’d come home and immediately collapse on the couch, not moving a muscle for hours.

That was the first trimester.

My Broken Midwest Memories

My grandparents raised two kids in a cement block structure with dirt floors and no indoor plumbing. They all used an outhouse, even through bitter Southern Indiana winters. When their third baby came along, my mother, they decided it was time to move.

My grandma was sitting on her “davenport” in her home when she told me this four years ago. I was there on a visit with a former boyfriend to see my family for the first time in a long while. We were gathered around grandma as she told her stories. I’d never heard that one before.

Later on, I called my mom on the phone to confirm it. She said it was true, without much interest. To me it felt like a revelation. It filled in gaps in my understanding of my mother and shined light on cracks in my own identity.

I was born a Hoosier, but it’s been more than 20 years since I lived in Indiana. We moved a lot when I was a kid. The first time we left it was for Virginia, when I was five. We came back, to Indianapolis, but left again when my dad got a job in Jakarta, Indonesia. I was eight or nine years old.

After our plans to move overseas were made public, I made up weird stories about it to my classmates. It mortified my mother when she caught wind because a parent had fallen for it. She was having her own tough time, grieving in advance for the friends, family, church, and city she would lose. This all happened in the 1990s, but she still talks about this period like it was yesterday.

We lived abroad for less than a year before we came back to the States — but not to Indiana. Under palm trees, not corn stalks, my identity formed under a blazing hot sun in the forge that is Florida.

After undergrad, I moved a lot on my own, too, to Brooklyn, San Francisco, and even to Gothenburg, Sweden. I kept my home state in the back of my mind all the while as the potential future site of my settling-down. You can buy a four-bedroom house in Indiana for $150,000—a very nice back-up plan, indeed, I thought.

It was with that naive vision of the state that I’d set out on my road trip in 2013. I booked a room in a funky inn in a historic town nearby for $60 a night. The owner wanted to speak over the phone first. He had lots of questions. Well meaning, I thought.

The last time I’d visited that particular town I was a pre-teen with my aunt and mom. I dug through bins in an antique shop while they browsed. I remember I bought a Superman comic in which he marries Lois Lane, because I thought it might increase in value.

When we arrived, the cute inn I’d booked was a little rundown. The bed dipped in the middle and the room smelled moldy. The town was nothing like I’d remembered. I’d pictured shops filled with local crafts. People outside and walking on the sidewalks. It was a ghost town. My aunt told us they’d closed an important bridge across the Wabash in 2012. It was the town’s connection point to Illinois. It’s just too hard to get to now.

After dinner and a couple of beers outside at my cousin’s place, my ex-boyfriend needed a cigarette. He’d been keeping it a secret from my family all day. I told him that around those parts it was not a good idea to stop off on a road in the middle of someone’s cornfield. It would look sketchy.

Maybe two minutes after he lit up, a pickup came down the road, a plume of dirt kicking up into the air behind it.

All through our trip so far, the people we ran into — shopkeepers, waiters, and so on — wanted to know where we were from. Over time, the phone conversation I’d had with the inn’s owner made sense. “Where are you from?” is the Midwest version of a longer sentence: “You are not one of us, we all know it, and we want you to know that we are watching.”

A man got out of the truck and asked us a few questions. He was friendly enough, but I knew what his “friendliness” meant. I gestured in the direction of my cousin’s house and told him we were visiting family. Then we got out.

There was a Whirlpool factory on the side of U.S. Highway 41, on the way to my grandma’s house. Its gleaming blue facade and the swooping motion in the big logo on its side looked so modern to me as a child. It was my landmark that told me we were getting close on car rides. A beacon of industry and things to come after miles of relative nothingness. It shut down in 2010, despite protests. Hundreds lost their jobs.

My mom had never been on board with my idealization of Indiana, and now I know why. The town she grew up in had a population of 500 at the time. Though it had a brief blossoming, after 1970 that number began to shrink. There was never anything for hardly anybody there. There’s even less today.

My secret deep longing for Indiana had more to do with people, time, and childhood than the state. Some things I missed I could probably find elsewhere. The sound of the cicadas, for example, along with their spooky shells that cling to trees in the summer. Hummingbirds at a feeder in the backyard. Cold drinks on a hot porch. I can’t recreate the wonderful feeling of eating Miracle Whip and bologna sandwiches with American cheese on white bread. Those were forbidden in my house, but OK to eat at grandma’s. There’s Canasta played at a kitchen table with my family, too. Even if we all played now, I’d no longer be the youngest trying to hold my own with the grown-ups. (Plus, we’d all have our digital distractions.) I realize I wanted to visit thosethings. But like the factory jobs and traffic flowing across the river from a neighboring state, they’re gone.