My Pregnancy Story

Intention

When I was pregnant I wanted to hear from other women about their experiences and get a sense for what I might be in for next. I hungered for real personal stories, but few were easily discoverable on an internet saturated with marketing. I read Ina May's "Guide to Childbirth," but still longed for more current shares from educated, aware and particularly intentional* women trying to make our modern approaches to pregnancy work for them.

I disclose my own story here with the desire to normalize sharing about pregnancy in culture. I write to reflect on my own experiences as a body growing another body. Pregnancy is commonplace, yet too rarely examined in public with candor.

Pregnancy After Loss

I've learned this is a particular experience with a distinct flavor of unreality to it. With legitimate concerns about fertility later in life, my husband and I were surprised to get a positive result on our first try in the fall of 2024. It felt too fortunate to be true, so when that turned out to be the case and we got pregnant again on our second first try the following winter, there was a distinct bitter-sweetness to the repeat in our good fortune.

I still didn’t know if my cellular bundle would manifest into the child we hoped for or subtly fade away at any moment. The potential was like tasting cotton candy flavored bubbles: tantalizing, but so ephemeral in nature that it might potentially not exist at all. And so we strove to be happy without attachment; a state of consciousness our brains are quite unaccustomed to in our consumer-conditioned culture.

First Trimester

This time we did not excitedly call family and friends to share the good news. Eight weeks in, my quiet hopefulness was dashed one morning when I awoke to sudden bleeding at 4am; a telltale sign of spontaneous gestational termination that was much more dramatic than the subtle onset of my previous miscarriage. I sobbed in my bathroom while getting dressed for a day at the emergency room. It was the weekend and so my doctor was out of office and my husband was away visiting family on the East Coast. Fortunately my mother was available to take me in. We went to the ER that has a reputation for being less bananas than the other major hospital in town, not realizing we'd picked the one out of my limited insurance network.

While I was seen quickly, my stay added up to be over six hours waiting around to see an actual doctor. Given a bothersome IV I didn't need, want or ultimately use, I was told I might have a cornual ectopic pregnancy - a potentially life threatening condition that could require immediate surgery if confirmed. After days of teetering on the edge of despair, my doctor at the high-risk maternal fetal medicine clinic scoffed at the report from the ER. "Your radiologist didn't know what the hell he was looking at," he said. "You can forget that 'diagnosis.' The position of your embryo looks fine to me." The matter-of-fact emotional whiplash was dizzying. Repeat tragedy averted!

I will never forget the moment the hospital sonographer showed me my daughter's heartbeat for the first time. This was a key milestone that my first never grew into, and I was overjoyed to see that there was evidence of a will to live in there after all.

Second Trimester

After this "subchorionic hemorrhage" side quest, the rest of my pregnancy was medically uneventful. I experienced my fair share of pregnancy related fatigue and other typical symptoms associated with the process of growing a viable human body in one's reproductive tract. Nausea, fatigue, hot flashes, night sweats, swelling, constipation, heartburn, insomnia, freckles appearing out of nowhere - you name it, I went through it. Everything except barfing profusely and a whole host of other not uncommon pregnancy health conditions such as gestational diabetes and preeclampsia.

Other times I felt quite pleasantly high on hormones. The thought "this is how some people must feel when they smoke pot or drink a lot of kava" occurred to me more than once. While no single symptom was unbearable, the strain made me question the quiet assumptions we carry about productivity during pregnancy. I feel like the way our society expects women to continue working through this time is often unreasonable, and can sometimes even be inhumane.

While I knew pregnancy would be a “journey,” here are some tidbits I didn't know that people considering pregnancy ought to be aware of:

• Nobody told me I would be able to hear my heartbeat shaking my whole body like a factory house pump station while trying to fall asleep at night.
• Nobody told me I would feel like a tender ripe avocado waddling around on puffy feet, sliced in half with a gigantic hard round pit protruding from the center of my gut.
• Nobody told me about common pregnancy rhinitis, in which I blew bloody boogers out of my nose every morning for weeks.
• Nobody mentioned how winded I would feel walking even a slight incline.
• Nobody told me about all the daily activities I would need to give up when my body suddenly needed ten hours of sleep instead of seven.

While I actually enjoyed my pregnancy in spite of the carousel of symptoms (in part because I could afford to choose to not work full time) I wish we could be more educated and honest about the nature of the long labor of pregnancy as a society. Why aren't women's pregnancy symptoms more visible and normalized? Why are we left to Google our experiences in fear instead of understanding the broad range of inconveniences that pregnancy often entails? Is it kind to expect women to sublimate these experiences so we are not tiptoed around in the workplace? I think not. I hope by the time my daughter chooses to reproduce or not, she will be well aware of the normal symptoms involved and won't wonder if her health is running off the rails every time a new weird thing occurs in her body.

I cried by myself for an hour when I learned through genetic testing that my fetus was female. I was happy to have a baby of any gender (yes there are more than two; over 1% of the population is intersex), but the lifetime of both subtle and overt sexism I have experienced as a female flashed before my eyes. I reflected on how little progress we've made on many of the dynamics I've been impacted by, and I wondered how many generations it will take humanity to grow out of our current curtailments for all women and girls, especially those less privileged than us white American ladies. It was a multi-tiered grief cake, topped with a thick layer of hormones for extra panache.

A big part of the Second Trimester was the process of gathering "All The Things." Nobody mentioned the truckloads of baby gear that often gets acquired in the ramp-up to taking care of a newborn. As an environmentalist I do what I can to live a relatively minimalistic lifestyle. I mean, how much stuff could a new mom really need? How did moms in prehistory survive, and how do women in modern developing countries manage? Even the most conservative shopping lists I found had well over a hundred items. I did my best to acquire things through the gift economy and second hand as much as possible, despite commercial warnings not to do so. Thanks to the generosity of friends and the lack of others in my age group having babies, I was able to amass the vast majority of our baby goods without making new purchases.

Doing product research to create a baby registry for gifts was quite overwhelming. You have to make significant lifestyle decisions around multiple tasks that you've never performed before. Breast pumps and bottling system sets? Diapering styles? How do you even begin to know what you need when the utility of many products depends on the unique preferences and needs of your unborn child? I found a spreadsheet, worked my way through it, and involved Jim in the great acquisition adventure. (Retrospectively I'm glad I said "yes" to all the extras I never thought I'd need and wasn't sure I wanted. We've used almost everything we collected, with several comfort items really improving the quality of our new parenting experience.)

To make room for all this gear we converted a room into a nursery and spent months remodeling half of a garage on our cohousing site into a new out-of-home office just a walk through our common house and garden. I was a fussy colicky baby, so we wanted at least one serene retreat where work could continue to take place if things came to that.

Third Trimester

Our girl was not the first baby to be born in Spokane cohousing as our neighbors became pregnant two months ahead of us. This proved to be a huge advantage as we benefited from many hand-me-over maternity clothes, duplicitous baby registry gifts and the like. We agreed to have a joint baby shower and neighbors generously organized a feast with activities such as a bottle chugging competition, crawling races, crafting a felt storyboard for each baby, a baby picture ID game and other fun challenges for entertainment. People pooled resources to pay for a cloth diaper washing service and brought books to round out baby's library. Our "baby fever" months in the community were sweet ones to be remembered. People say "it takes a village to raise a child," and I'm so glad I invested all the years I did to help build a real one.

Meanwhile on the family front we organized a joint baby shower/summer 4th of July weekend reunion gathering in Liberty Lake. It was a fully co-ed party and had as many relatives joining us online as in person. This format was a first for many of the family involved, and was also subtly bittersweet since the vast majority of my cousins are not in a family way. Looking at the prospect of a new life also invites reflection on the beginning of one's own.

Among friends Jeannine Tidwell of the Twin Eagles Wilderness School offered to lead a "blessingway" gathering for me in the final months of my pregnancy. This is a lesser known tradition where the focus is on wishing the mother-to-be strength, health, fortitude and courage in the sometimes life-threatening process of child bearing. I was intimidated by how large and uncomfortable I would feel in my third trimester as the looming birth ordeal drew near. This invitation forced me to think about women in my life who I could trust to be present to me in a time of need. Going through my friends lists with such a lens was a sobering process, and spoke to the need to protect authentic relationships of capacity and care in the context of becoming a parent to a child.

Ultimately just under a dozen women joined me for a potluck, sharing circle and short ritual that worked wonders in erasing the uncertainty I had about my final months of pregnancy. Because of this gathering the 3rd trimester actually ended up being my favorite. Our nursery was mostly pulled together, "all the things" were corralled there, and Jim and I had undergone months of interpersonal preparation to establish strong routines.

In addition to my women's gathering, Jim and the other dad-to-be in cohousing were regaled with a "Man Baby Shower" by the men in our cohousing community. This involved going out to dinner, doing an escape room and talking for hours in the common house about experiences with fathers and fatherhood.

Preparing for Parenthood

Throughout this pregnancy my partner and I did a lot of work on our collaborative rapport and to establish healthy routines in our household that would best support the rigors of child rearing. Together we read four books that we'd recommend to others:

1. Expecting Better by Emily Oster
2. How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids by Jancee Dunn
3. Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman
4. And Baby Makes Three by John and Julie Gottman

We established habits for daily and twice monthly check-ins, created a better system for procuring needed groceries, and practiced communication skills we never saw modeled growing up in single parent households, to name a few focus areas. It wasn't easy at first, but the more we normalized tuning in to what we really wanted and needed, the better we were able to make our habit building approaches work for us. We attended a couples birthing class at Quilted Health that was a fantastic overview to many topics, and tried to learn from family and friends through their experiences.

Pregnancy as Teacher

Pregnancy gave me more than a child to anticipate — it gave me a mirror into deep lessons for how to lead a more compassionate life. There aren't a lot of explicit UU or Buddhist parenting resources, but the idea of "your child as a spiritual teacher" was a familiar one to me. What better way to eliminate your self-centeredness than to serve the constant physical and developmental needs of a child day after day for years on end? This got me thinking about my pregnancy as a teacher. I noticed the experience promoting:

• Forgiveness and patience towards myself
  • when I couldn't do what I hoped I could
  • when I needed to move slower or take longer
• Appreciation and compassion towards others
  • for when they are unable to do things, as I sometimes was
  • for when they can do things, and the fleeting preciousness of that capacity
• Readiness for parenthood
  • the importance of frequent, appropriate and regular meals
  • the importance of a planned quality and quantity of sleep
  • the ability to roll with big emotions
  • learning to be at peace with a daily domestic flow
  • reminders to not overlook or overdo things
  • starting to create space to constantly serve and care for another
• A dress rehearsal for death
  • an experience that takes place over a finite period of time with an inevitable conclusion that is dramatically different than the state of being that came before it

In the end, my pregnancy felt like an initiation into a different way of inhabiting time, vulnerability, and power. It stripped me of illusions of control over my experience, widened my capacity for patience, and made visible the invisible labor women carry in their bodies long before a child ever arrives. It asked me to hold joy and terror in the same breath, to live in uncertainty without collapsing into it, and to soften where I have a tendency to brace. More than anything, pregnancy revealed how profoundly interdependent we are - on partners, community, and the unseen intelligence of our own biology. If birth is a dramatic threshold, then pregnancy is the dedicated apprenticeship that precedes it: a season of becoming in which a new life forms in concert with a new sense of self.

*What I mean by 'educated, aware and particularly intentional' women in the introduction is educated in the sense of being scientifically informed, aware of the profound ways in which money and culture shape different peoples' realities, and intentional in understanding pregnancy and birth as nothing less than a spiritual rite of passage.