Fade Away

I hate everything about this post.

Yesterday around lunchtime, I went to the bathroom and noticed some reddish streaking on the toilet paper, and a tiny blood clot about the size of a mustard seed. Rob and Westley were out running errands, and the house suddenly seemed uncomfortably quiet.

I paged my midwife, and stood in the silence. Then I set the timer on the microwave for 20 minutes. (If you don't get a call in 20 minutes, you're supposed to page again.)

Four minutes later my phone rang. My midwife prescribed "pelvic rest" - no sex, no orgasm, no jogging. Not that I've jogged recently. Or had sex, for that matter.

I sat all day, drinking water, occasionally getting up to pee, checking the toilet paper. Always some pink or brown streaking there on the white. Sometimes a tiny bit. Sometimes a tiny bit more. By 9:00 PM, I was still spotting, and starting to feel uncomfortable. Rob dialed the pager number for me.

* * *

By 1:15 PM, the ER observation room across from mine had been cleared twice. I'd been sitting cross-legged on my narrow bed, watching through the window for three hours. It would be at least another hour before I got the ultrasound I'd come for.

We met our midwife, Bev, at the clinic this morning to check things out and listen for heart tones. I brought her a little Ziploc bag full of my red-streaked toilet paper. Her brow furrowed when I handed it to her, and even before I climbed up on the table, I was pretty sure she wouldn't be able to hear anything on the Doppler.

Nothing came up but the whoosh of my own insides. It was time to seek out an ultrasound (and on Sunday morning, that that meant going to the Emergency Room). Bev said, "Prepare yourself." That babies at 12 weeks move around a lot, that Dopplers aren't perfect, but . . . "prepare yourself." I don't know how one prepares oneself for an ultrasound showing no life - except to expect it. I didn't want to expect anything negative; I wanted to be calm happy and hopeful.

The longer I sat on that ER bed, the less hopeful I felt.

Rob and Westley had gone out for lunch. The room was cold, dim, and so, so quiet. Tomb-like. The TV had no remote. I was glad to have my journal:

There's a mirror across from the bed, so I can see myself out of the corner of my eye. Or else I can look up and see how miserable I look.

* * *

A young man with an armful of tribal tattoos wheeled me into Radiology, a ghost town of a department on Sunday afternoon, and parked me in a room with an ultrasound machine.

Phillips, I noticed immediately. Not Siemens. (I used to work in technical publishing. I've seen the manual for several Siemens ultrasound machines in more than a dozen languages.)

"Hello?" my chauffeur-nurse called out, and his voice echoed.

"Hi," a female voice came back from around a doorjamb.

I was glad the tech was a woman, even though when she came into the room she looked half my age and was chewing bubblegum. Over my shoulder, the nurse disappeared quietly. The ultrasound tech, Becky, said almost nothing once I was on the table. She'd angled the monitor away from me, but I could still see most of it. And I knew what I was looking at, and what it meant.

The outer-space landscape of my uterus with a curved black hole on one side, a few inches long on the monitor. Not a flicker of movement.

There was nothing, Becky explained later, when the ultrasound goo was wiped away. No crown-to-rump to measure, no heart to be beating. (Though she didn't say it like that.) Essentially, I had a tiny empty sac with no sign of a fetus.

* * *

Becky wheeled me out into the silent hall. She took two blankets out of the warmer, and draped one over my legs. The other she wrapped tightly around my shoulders, mummifying me.

"Someone will be by in a minute to take you back to Emergency." And she left.

I sat in my wheelchair, wrapped in my warm blanket cocoon, unable to lift a hand to my face. I started to cry. The occasional doctor or nurse walked by, completely oblivious to the wheelchair. I felt invisible, like a piece of paper someone had thrown away.

I sat alone - staring at the framed pink patchwork quilt, about the size of a baby blanket, that hung on the opposite wall - for five or ten minutes.

My chauffeur-nurse appeared from around a corner I didn't know was there.

"I'll take you back to Emergency."

I nodded, and burst into tears. I was getting good at crying in front of strangers.

"What happened?" he asked.

I thought about what to say. All I could manage was, "Bad news."

"I'm sorry," he said, sounding not particularly committed to his sympathy. Then, a second later: "Something about a pregnancy?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry."

Rob and Westley were waiting for me in my ER room. They didn't let us go home for another hour and a half.

* * *

Rob drove home. The three of us were almost silent. I felt numb, and my head was very quiet inside, except when it drifted into singing the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter." (Why that song? I wondered. I can't remember the last time I listened to it.) The view as we crossed Lake Washington was a heartbreaking kind of beautiful.

* * *

The closer it gets to completely dark outside, the more I seem to bleed.

It's the first day of Spring. The symbolism is all wrong.

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Twelve Weeks

Sometimes I forget I'm pregnant, but it usually only lasts a second. Occasionally, Rob has to remind me, when I wonder aloud, "Why am I so tired?"

"You're growing a person - and a placenta - from scratch."

When I think about it, it makes my head spin. There is a new, unique human being growing inside me. A human being who supposedly looks undeniably human at this point, with limbs, fingers, toes, and a tiny face with eyes and ears where they should be.

I'm so curious about this baby. Is she a girl? Is he a boy? (There is just one of them in there, right?) Is everything all right, safe, healthy? Will this child have an energy similar to Westley's, or will my children have radically different personalities? I've never been so anxious and excited to meet someone, and my September 30 due date seems awfully far away.

Food and I officially made up this week. (Hello, legumes! Hello, leafy greens! So nice to see you again.) I am eating what seems like a ridiculous amount, but I feel like I'm always hungry. And I can't seem to get enough fruit. I never had much of a sweet tooth before, but sugary things suddenly sound delicious. My three-pear-a-day habit seems to curb some of the sweet cravings, but I still have a hard time passing up a gluten-free vegan cookie when one is available.

My go-to jeans became unquestionably too tight, as of yesterday. I feel much heavier than I think I look. Maybe I'm just anticipating the inevitable hugeness.

This is the last week of my first trimester. It feels like a beginning. I'm glad to be leaving behind the sickness and the disbelief - Is this really happening? Am I really going to have another baby? - for a place of certainty, and pure joy.

I'm really fucking happy to be pregnant again.

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The Pronoun Game

Westley seems fully convinced that the baby is a girl:

"When the baby comes, I will tell her all about robots."

"Mommy, I will show the baby this puzzle and she will say, 'Wow!'"

"Is the tea going into the baby's body? I hope she likes peppermint!"

I have no idea where this came from. I've been avoiding gender-specific pronouns since we first told Westley that "there's a baby growing inside Mommy." Once in a while, I'll offer up an "it" or "its," but I usually default to simply "the baby." And unlike the first time around, I have absolutely no clue as to the sex of the person currently sharing my body.

With Westley, I was certain I was pregnant with a boy from about 10 weeks on. It sounds kind of mystic-crystal-revelations, but I felt that the baby had an undeniable "little male" energy. It was almost as if he was saying, "Hi, Mommy! I'm a boy!" This time? Not so much as a peep. As I contemplated the double pink lines on my pregnancy test, I flashed on the idea of having another baby boy. But it was mostly a wondering (and a little worrying). With Westley, I knew.

This time, my kid is the one who seems to know. I'd really like to ask Westley why he keeps using female pronouns when talking about the baby. I'd do it if I thought he'd understand what I was asking him. But I also know that Westley randomly assigns a sex - usually female - to things in his world. He maintains that Gromit of Wallace and Gromit, Oscar the Grouch's pet worm Slimey, and, most recently, the monkey Steve in the movie Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs are all girls.

So maybe this has nothing to do with the baby whatsoever, and Westley just likes girls. I'm understand that's fairly common among boys.

* * *

Edited: Last night when I used "she" to refer to the baby - to avoid sentence clunkiness - Westley looked at me like my hair had just turned purple.

"Is the baby a girl?" he asked, the excitement bubbling up.

"I don't know," I told him. "Maybe."

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Let's (Not) Go Shopping

I got bitten by the shopping bug this week. Here's what happened: I woke up feeling somewhat human again (i.e. nausea seems to be gone) and I suddenly got really fucking excited about being pregnant. Then I decided that since I'm already about a quarter of the way through this pregnancy and this baby is going to need stuff, I should get on that! So as to, you know, be ahead of the pack in the preparedness department.

So I started to think about all the things we're going to need:

1. A car seat, for sure.
2. Um . . . er . . . let's see . . . oh, I know! Breasts!

But I've already got those like crazy. (You should see them. They're insane. If I'm this big at 11 weeks, I'm going to be obscene by 40 weeks.) And everything else I can think of? We already own. Or else it's stuff like newborn-size diapers and itty-bitty white onesies, neither of which is going to disappear off the face of the planet before the baby gets here.

Rob and Westley, August 2008, rockin' our beloved Ergo carrier.

So I won't be celebrating the happy return of my normal-person status with a baby-gear shopping spree. But so much for the better really, as most of that "must have" crap is actually completely useless.

(Oh, and also since we're paying out-of-pocket for all of my maternity care. Ouch.)

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Post-Kid Kitchen: Making Up With Food

After several weeks of on-again, off-again nausea, I'm starting to feel like a person again. A very hungry person. And while I still feel a little edgy around protein-rich foods, carbohydrates have been sounding wonderful.

At first, I practically lived off fruit: three pears and a giant grapefruit for breakfast, a pound of grapes for lunch, that sort of thing. Then, out of nowhere, my pregnant nose caught a whiff of French fries cooking somewhere, and I had a flash of, ohmygod that sounds SO good right now!

Unfortunately, fried food and I no longer see eye to eye. I love it, but it wants to date other people. People whose stomachs are not quite so sensitive to fat (and the likely gluten-by-proxy that happens to potatoes when a restaurant cooks all of its fried offerings together).

Because the real appeal of French fries (for me) is that warm, salty, potato-y flavor, I decided to whip up some potato soup. It scratched my food-itch and then some, coming together quickly and turning out much more satisfying than I'd expected. The secret ingredient is the potatoes themselves, half of which get blended with vegetable broth to give the soup a creamy base with no cream, dairy or otherwise.

Creamy Potato Soup

Serves 4 generously

3 lbs potatoes

4 cups vegetable broth

2 tbsp olive oil

1 large onion

1 large red bell pepper

2 medium carrots

2 cups water

2 tbsp nutritional yeast

You're going to need two pots for this.

Peel your potatoes and dice them fine. Place vegetable broth and half the diced potatoes in pot #1 over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil and cook 10 minutes or so, until potatoes are very tender.

Meanwhile, dice the onion. Heat olive oil in pot #2 over medium-high heat and add onion. Dice bell pepper and carrots, adding each vegetable to the onion as you finish dicing and stirring occasionally. When the onion looks nice and translucent, add water and remaining potatoes. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to medium and cook, covered, 7-10 minutes, until potatoes are tender.

When your potato-broth mixture is thoroughly cooked, blend with an immersion blender until smooth. (You can also transfer the mixture to a blender or food processor to blend.) Add the blended potato mixture to pot #2, and stir to combine. Right before serving, stir in nutritional yeast.

* * *

P.S. Rob suggested that this soup could be garnished with roasted chickpeas for some nice crunch (not to mention protein). While that sounds delicious to me in theory, legumes and I are not currently on speaking terms.

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Taste Tested

I kind of enjoy the Bionic Nose of Pregnancy. While it's not exactly pleasurable being able to smell bad breath or too-much-cologne or just-used-catbox 100 feet away, I like feeling like a superhero with a Super Sense of Smell.

A Super Sense of Smell I should have trusted last night when I heated up the wok and swore I picked up the scent of detergent. One mouthful of stir-fry was more than enough to know that something was horribly, soapily wrong.

Since banishing last night's dinner to the yard waste bin, everything has seemed off. Toasted millet bread with soy-free Earth Balance tastes oddly metallic. Grapefruit, whose sourness I usually relish, seems too sour. The peppermint I popped to help ease my nausea tasted like aftershave. I just finished a small bowl of plain white rice that, while stomach-settling, seemed oddly "planty." Lemon drops taste awesome, but only for a few sucks; once that crystallized outside part is gone, no thank you!

I hope this is just psychological fallout from having bitten into dish-soap-infused broccoli last night, and not a new pregnancy symptom. I certainly didn't have anything like this when I was pregnant with Westley. The closest I came to experiencing tastebud craziness was when I'd go on food jags and eat one thing for a week, before suddenly being repulsed by that very thing. I still remember the tomato sandwich that put me off tomato sandwiches. What had been The Best Food Ever was now all wrong, God, no, get it away!

(Ugh. I just grossed myself out thinking about tomato sandwiches.)

If this taste insanity doesn't end soon, I'm going to be in trouble. I'm running out of things to eat. What do you do when almost nothing sounds good, and the things that do sound good taste wrong?

The one glorious thing that has yet make my tongue be all WTF? is actually the perfect marriage of three things:

Lemon juice, sugar, and bubbles.

Not a lot of nutrition going on there, sadly. So now I feel queasy and guilty, because I'm depriving my fetus!

I'm given to understand that one solid cure for all of the unpleasant food-related pregnancy stuff is good nutrition, with protein at each meal and snack. That sounds very sane and reasonable and worth a try...until you realize that the raw almonds you just started munching on taste suspiciously (and disturbingly) like Canadian bacon.

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Post-Kid(s) Kitchen: Eating for Nausea

Food and I broke up this week. Between my kidney-bean-sized passenger and a cold that Westley was nice enough to share with me, I've been balancing nausea, loss of appetite, and post-nasal drip that makes everything taste "off." The thought of eating makes me feel like a contestant on Fear Factor. And cooking? Pretty much out of the question.

My wonderful doctor (who is also a licensed midwife, and was the student midwife who saved my life present at Westley's birth) said, "The first three months are just about surviving." But I feel like I should at least make an effort to consume more than pickles and lemonade, the only two foods that sound good - if anything could be said to "sound good" right now.

So far, I haven't come up with very much. Pasta puttanesca has been going down pretty easily, but I don't feel like I can eat it for breakfast. Enter blended fruit.

Take Your Iron Supplement with This Smoothie

Makes a lot, probably 2 or 3 servings, but I just drink the whole thing myself

1 cup pineapple juice

3 Clementines, peeled and broken into sections

1/2 cup unsweetened frozen raspberries

4 strawberries (fresh or frozen)

Combine everything in a blender and blend until smooth. Serve immediately. That's it! Lots of fiber and 296% of your RDA for vitamin C.

Unless you count boiling gluten-free pasta, practically the only thing I've been able to cook this week has been a super-simple soup, based very loosely on Chinese Corn Soup. I say "very loosely" because it's not much more than corn and vegetable broth - but it's been the perfect thing for my cold symptoms.

Almost Instant Corn Soup

Serves 2 - or 1 sick person who doesn't feel like eating much else

1 1/2 cups super-flavorful vegetable broth (I use a powdered broth concentrate, and just make the broth a little stronger than usual)

1 1/2 cups corn kernals

1 Tbsp cornstarch

2 Tbsp water

Combine vegetable broth and corn in a pot over medium-high heat and bring to a boil. In a small bowl, whisk together cornstarch and water until well-combined. Add the cornstarch-water mixture to the boiling soup and stir. Continue to stir for about 2 minutes, until the soup has thickened slightly. Serve immediately, garnished with baby corn (pickled or not) and chopped scallions.

I'm hoping that as my cold disappears, I'll start to feel less like cooking and eating are things I have to force myself to do before I lose the nerve to do them. I was feeling really tired (unbelievably tired) but otherwise awesome before the cold reared its ugly, mucousy head. In the meantime, I'll be racking my brain for things to eat when I don't feel like eating.

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Embryo in Broad

Of course this would happen the one month I wasn't a "preganoid" lunatic.

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Preganoia Will Destroy Ya

Since ditching IUD numero dos a few months ago, I have become a hyper-crazy symptom-watcher. Every twinge or tummy rumble can only mean One Thing:

"I must be pregnant!"

The non-plan plan had been to treat the (maybe) having another child thing in a very relaxed, no-big-deal fashion. No talk of "trying" or timing or ovulation. We'd just go about our normal, everyday activities (though not, ahem, every day) and not think about it.

Except that I can't stop thinking about it! I am a preganoid lunatic.

So I do things like come out of the bathroom topless and stick my chest in my husband's face. "Do they look bigger?"

"Not really."

"But feel!"

"Um...they feel about the same. Maybe a little smaller than yesterday, actually."

Because, yes, I made him do this yesterday too.

Over the past two weeks, when I haven't been making my husband manually estimate my bra size, I've been taking naps and crying over every little thing (including but not limited to Disney's Robin Hood and not one but two Katy Perry videos!). I remind myself that I haven't been sleeping well, and that sleep deprivation (in me) means teariness and even sometimes nausea. So I'm probably just really tired. But what if I'm pregnant? Oh, God, I'm totally pregnant!

Besides, lack of sleep doesn't explain why I've been craving curried everything. (Black bean curry, potato curry, delicata squash curry, mmm...)

Last night, I had heartburn for the first time in, um...ever? No, wait. There was that one other time. When I was PREGNANT!

The problem is I go through this every month. And then every month, I get my period and feel like an idiot. For about a week and a half, and then I decide once again that I'm pregnant. And I think about taking a pregnancy test, even though I'm probably not pregnant and even if I were, it's way too early to test. Some months, I take a test anyway. The little 'minus' sign convinces me about half the time.

Someone should make giant, economy packs of pregnancy tests for crazy girls like me who want to take one every day. Or maybe I should skip a step and just start peeing on $10 bills.

(As I'm writing this, Rob is out shopping for more curry ingredients and a box of Mother to Be tea. I think he might be an enabler.)

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Vegan Pregnancy Blog

If you arrived at this site after searching for a "vegan pregnancy blog," please leave a comment to let me know what you're looking for. I think and write about pregnancy often, and I do eat a vegan diet. And since I'm planning to get pregnant again, I could certainly do some vegan pregnancy blogging. But before I venture down that road, I'm interested in what questions my Googlers might want answered.

Thank you!

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The Pre-Planning Stage

Rob and I decided recently to seriously consider stopping at one child. We put that idea out on the table and left it there.

It actually seemed to sit pretty well, much to my surprise. I'd always imagined I'd have at least two children (except on the days I thought I'd have none). When Rob said early on that he wanted two, I pictured us with one of each: a rich man's family. Before we had one child, two seemed like a reasonable number. Now that we have Westley, two children seems like twenty. "I'm not sure I could go through this again," I said to Rob on the evening of a particularly grueling day. And that's when the One Child Plan emerged.

The more we thought about it, the more stopping at one made sense. Pregnancy, birth, and the first year of Westley's life basically kicked our asses: physically, emotionally, financially. My health checked out. I got closer than I ever have to saying "I want a divorce" and really meaning it. Now, when we're still working to stitch our relationship back together and haven't even begun to pay back our savings account, hitting "reset" on the child-rearing timeline seems ridiculous. Stopping at one would mean we could just keep moving forward.

All Westley, all the time.

The minute I make up my mind on a major life decision-type-thing, I start to feel the tiniest questioning itch. It's not even as noteworthy as an inner voice of doubt--more like a grain of sand--but it's there. And the more that grain of sand rolls around in my mind, the more it starts looking like a pearl. I think, You're wrong! There's a better option! Look how shiny it is!

I have to admit right now that my mother is frequently the source of those sand grains. About having children, my mother says (and I'm not paraphrasing), "A sibling is the greatest gift you can give your child." What a fabulous grandparental pressure-filled greeting card that would make! Admittedly, however, there's something to consider in that statement. Having a sibling means having a peer to practice all that important peer-stuff with. A brother or sister is the perfect ally against Mom and Dad which, let's face it, is often essential for a person's mental health. But having a brother didn't keep me from missing out on the peer-relations front. And besides, having a baby because my mother thinks it's a good idea? Has all the makings of some Lifetime-Television-for-Women crazy shit. Of course my mother thinks it's a good idea for me to have another baby! She's the grandmother!

Still, I'm carrying around that tiny, almost-pearl idea. It doesn't help that suddenly all of Seattle is pregnant--or else the new trend in birthing classes is to take field trips to the grocery store. There are pregnant women everywhere, which makes it hard not to think a.) I Know What You Did Last Winter, and b.) why not me? And lately, Westley himself is the ribbon-icing on the diaper cake: he has become obsessed with all things "baby."

Westley has four dolls, all of whom he calls "bay-bee." He carries whichever of them is his current favorite over his shoulder, like he's going to burp it. He can spot an actual baby a mile away (even though sometimes the "baby" is a child older than he is). Annie Rose is My Little Sister is one of his favorite books. My beautiful (and goofy) friend Amanda is pregnant, and it took Westley about three minutes and my mentioning it once to figure out that there was going to be a baby. And then he couldn't stand how awesome it was. He had to point to Amanda's belly and give it kisses over and over. Now we can't mention Amanda's name without Westley asking "bay-bee?"

Given Westley's current obsession, it's difficult not to lose myself in fantasies about what he would be like as a big brother. So often at the park an older boy will engage Westley, and show him how to do something like take a "shortcut" up the back side of the climbing structure or slide down the tube slide head first; I try to imagine a four-year-old Westley teaching his little brother the secrets of the playground. I try to hear Westley telling his little sister about all the things he loves: dancing, Sesame Street, dandelions, guitars and oboes, the pool. The picture in my head is blurry, hard to bring into focus. Two children? My two children? It seems like an impossibility. It seems crazy! And yet, something about it just seems...right.

"I want another one," I said to Rob.

"I know you do, baby."

So, there you have it. We're not quite ready for a second child. Okay, we're not even "not quite" ready. But we're ready to be thinking about being ready. I definitely want Westley to have turned three already when his brother or sister is born. In terms of "planning," that means out with the IUD and off with the pants and on with the gettin' it on a little less than a year from now. That seemed like a reasonable amount of time last week, when the "let's stop at one" idea was officially replaced by "let's have another." But now, a year seems like no time at all. It might as well be next week, in fact. I don't know how we're going to be ready to "try" a year from now. (Practice? Heh.)

I realize that our "plan" is not set in stone. It doesn't have to be next summer; any pressure I'm feeling about having another baby soon-ish is entirely self-imposed. But I want Westley to have a sibling close to his own age. And getting knocked up next year means I could be done having children before I turn 30, which sounds kind of awesome. On the other hand, two children before I turn 30 sounds kind of crazy. For starters, how the hell am I going to deal with being pregnant and taking care of a toddler?

Advice from any of you bloggy people who have embarked (or are currently embarking) on the two-child journey would be very, very welcome. How did you decide it was time to go back for seconds? Was age-difference a factor in your decision? What am I really getting myself into? Feel free to comment or post a full, tell-all report on your own blog.

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Midwives Help People Out (Insurance Companies? Not So Much)

I am feeling a combination of dread and rage as I look over Rob's and my health insurance options for the next year. The rules, the restrictions, the buts and excepts and only ifs that pepper the language of these official forms always arouse a dull fear in me--I'm sure that someone is trying to rip me off--but it's worse this year. This year, there's a birth to consider.

For the record, I'm not pregnant yet. (Just like I haven't seen Evil Dead II...yet.) However, Rob and I are seriously considering putting me at serious risk for pregnancy. That is, we're thinking about not using any birth control and seeing what happens. (The last time we did this, I ended up with a big belly and then a baby, so we're pretty sure that's how it works. [Although, really, I'm not entirely convinced. I mean, what about all those times I had sex and there wasn't a baby? What about all those times you had sex and there wasn't a baby?]) The thing making me insane right now is how few choices I have with respect to prenatal care and birth if I want insurance to cover any of it. I'm not intending to start a pro-life vs. pro-choice debate here, but my prospective insurance company would rather I have an abortion than a home birth.

I'll happily say that I am pro-home birth--for myself, and for anyone who wants to try it. The hospital is not a place I want to be, especially when I'm feeling vulnerable and possibly (probably, definitely) in pain. I don't judge anyone for delivering in the hospital. I don't judge anyone for wanting to deliver in the hospital. Treat others as they would be treated, I think. It's none of my business what anyone else does. And I say this because there are people who envision militant leagues of pro-home birth mothers trying to force their hippie ways on others. And who knows? Perhaps there are such militant home-birthers somewhere. I'm just not one of them. In fact, a big part of me still can't believe that I had Westley at home without any medication on purpose.

When I think about having another baby, I can't imagine giving birth anywhere but home, barring an emergency, of course. And while I know there are many wonderful and capable midwives in the Seattle area, I cannot imagine anyone I would rather call when I go into labor than the women who helped Westley into the world.

I just keep looking at the insurance information forms and thinking, I want a home birth. I want a home birth. I want a home birth.

And then I stop myself. Becuase isn't the point to have a baby?

Well, yes. In the end, it's about the baby and not the birth. But the birth still matters. A good experience surrounding the birth of a child can make a huge difference in terms of getting a family off to a good start, and a bad birth experience is horrid. And the process of having a baby is a huge deal if for no other reason than unless you're lucky crazy Michelle Duggar, you probably only do it a couple of times. In your life. What else do you do just twice?

It seems ridiculous that by choosing to have a baby at home, by wanting to work with the midwives whose guidance and experience I so trust, I put myself in a position where my health insurance won't help me. Yes, I get it, I get it: insurance companies aren't in it to help people. They're interested in making money. But if making money is the goal, why cover hospital births and not birth center or home births? Why cover doctors but not midwives?

If I pay for my home birth out-of-pocket, which is almost certainly what will happen, that money has to come from somewhere. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, it would come out of our downpayment fund, which isn't growing nearly as quickly as we'd imagined it would. I'm feeling split in two and incredibly guilty. On the one hand, I have an obligation to my family as it currently stands to make sound financial decisions. On the other hand, a second baby is probably also a last baby, and nothing is going to stop me from wanting the birth I want. And yet, borrowing from the housing budget feels like robbing Peter to pay Paul's vagina. Or something.

The thing that sucks the hardest? At the end of the day (well, at the end of September, actually), I still have to choose an insurance plan and sign on the dotted line. A plan that includes in its name words like "Open" and "Choice" and "Access." Right. As long as you see one of these twenty-seven doctors not more than three times a year, and you weren't even thinking about having a baby in the living room.

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Disfigured

I found one of the pictures of pregnant me the other day in the whole "move everything over to the new computer" process that is still going on despite the fact that "the new computer" just goes by "the computer" these days. There are only a few pictures of me pregnant, so the image isn't something I run into electronically on a regular basis. And it seriously freaked my shit out.

I remember this perfectly. The yellowy lighting in the bathroom that made it impossible to apply natural-looking make-up. The maternity dress that I wore at least twice a week towards the end of my pregnancy, when I had gained well over the recommended 25-35 pounds and nothing else fit. The feeling tired and heavy and looking the worst I'd looked in a good long time, and yet deciding that some day, someone was going to want there to be photographic evidence of the gestation process. Thinking some day, someone would smile about this.

That someone probably won't be me, it turns out. My first thought--even though I clearly remember taking the picture--was, "I never looked like that!"  And yet, evidently, I did, and for some reason, that disturbed me. 

Maybe it's because on most days, I have a pretty good sense of what I look like. Or, at least, I've become accustomed to my mental image of myself, which is not, shockingly enough, pregnant. Even when I was actually pregnant, I didn't look pregnant for a long time (except from certain angles). Rob made a joke as part of his toast at our friends' wedding that included mentioning my knocked-upness, and afterwards, more than a few people came up to me and said, "I didn't know you were pregnant." So, pregnant or not, I think of myself as not looking pregnant. But in that picture, I'm pretty undeniably pregnant.   

For the past few weeks, Rob and I have been in baby-making negotiations. I alternate between thinking trying to have another child in the next year or two is a fantastic idea, and thinking it's a horrific idea. We've discussed waiting until Westley is potty-trained to start trying to conceive having sex without birth control and seeing what happens. We've discussed having another baby as soon as possible, and putting baby-having behind us. We've discussed not having any more children. And it's all still up in the air, and for now, that's where it will stay. But there is one question that keeps gnawing at my brain, a little zombie of uncertainty: 

What will I look like next time?

Of course, every pregnancy is different. So I guess there's only one way to find out.

 

.....................................

The First Nine Months

The last year and a half has been a crazy, scary, joyful journey. Westley has been part of my life for eighteen months and it’s hard to believe he wasn't always here. My little man-person will be nine months old tomorrow, and it feels like such a milestone. He looks more and more like a little boy every day, moving out of babyhood as he works to eat, talk, and move on his own. He has been outside my body as long as he was inside it. I'm looking back and looking forward at the same time.

Six Weeks Pregnant

I leave my seat at the front desk to call the midwives' office from the small, windowless Interview Room. My hands are shaking as I talk to the woman at the office's answering service.

"How far along are you?" she asks.

"Uh, about...five and a half weeks," I say, suddenly self-conscious about having to think in Pregnancy Math, which is not like Regular Math.

Silence on the other end of the phone. I stared down at the scrap of paper I'd brought in with me. I'd written my own phone number at the top, because I always forget it when asked by someone I can't see.

Her voice came back suddenly. "Birth date?"

"I'm due November twenty-eighth, oh-seven." A number from an online generator, memorized since the afternoon the two purple lines appeared on the pee-stick.

"No, your birthday."

"Oh, uh...um..." I should have written that down on the scrap paper, too.

Three Months Pregnant

We have dinner with Rob's parents at the vegan pizzeria and tell them, and his mother promptly tells everyone. I'm so angry at her, and angry at Rob for not also being angry with her. She shared news that was not hers to share, and deprived him the opportunity to introduce his unborn child to the family personally! I'd imagined Rob calling his grandfather in Alaska and receiving congratulations and old-fashioned-sounding advice, whatever the baby-having equivalent of "don’t go to bed angry" is.

After saying good-bye to my in-laws that evening, I throw up. I’d been feeling sick almost constantly for weeks and in a crazy way, it's rewarding to finally have my nausea validated.

Now everything makes me feel like vomiting. Thoughts of feeding my fetus salads and whole grains and fresh things disintegrate. I get on food-jags and eat basically one thing for a week or so, until it starts to repulse me completely, and then I find something new: tomato-and-Vegenaise sandwiches, hard pretzels and lemonade, plain bagels with Tofutti cream cheese, bean burritos (from Taco Bell), soy yogurt and soy pudding, veggie burgers and fries, pounds and pounds of melon...

Four Months Pregnant

I thought I would feel pregnanter by now.

Five Months Pregnant

What is my body doing, anyway? Incubating a tiny human being. How did I get here? Being twenty-four, reasonably healthy and having lots of sex, for starters. Oh. Right.

Rob measures years in Christmases. If someone is in prison for ten years, he thinks, that's ten Christmases. When I think about Christmas, it sinks in that there will be a tiny, newborn human being in my house, and I begin to feel my future shifting. It's like the way I felt after getting married. The wedding is supposed to be The Day, and it's built up as a Happily-Ever-After with no mention of the enormous journey that follows. A couple's future as parents is similarly misshapen. So often the idea is about having children, not having a child. But that little heartbeat, that thwump-thwump-thwump underwater rave coming through the doppler, belongs to a little individual. A single new person who will make Rob a father, and me a mother.

Rob puts his hand on my belly just in time to feel three strong kicks from something round and firm, like there's a hard-boiled egg pushing on me. This is not a future-tense family. We have a child.

Vacation

I'm hoisting my carry-on suitcase into the overhead bin when the woman behind me says, "Here, let me help you. I remember what that was like." I'm almost six months pregnant and it’s the first time a stranger has noticed and said anything to me. I feel sort of elated, and the baby kicks for most of the long flight.

My college girlfriends, whom I'm visiting for five days, are pissed as hell that I didn't tell them right away. We make up almost immediately, and they determine that since there are five of us and three beds, the expectant mother should get the bed by herself. They make sure I have rice milk for my cereal, and Sarah tries to listen to the baby with her stethoscope. Choosing names quickly turns from the classic and plausible to the ridiculous.

They don't care that I got pregnant kind of on purpose but mostly by accident. They like to think that I was trying, because "trying" sounds so official and grown-up. I guess I'm the grown-up in the group now.

Seven Months Pregnant

Unless I'm naked or wearing something with an empire waist, I still don't really look pregnant, and it makes me want to cry. I have belly fat rolls instead of a baby belly. I wasted too many years being fat, and worked very hard to lose weight before I got pregnant, and now, instead of looking cure and pregnant, I just look fat again.

It's fucking unfair.

Eight and a Half Months Pregnant

People at work keep asking if I'm ready. The question makes it sound like there's a disaster coming and I should be stocking up on canned goods and bottled water. Ready. The word alone suddenly has me feeling certain there's something I haven't thought of. Something pivotal. Of course, it doesn't help that we really have nothing for the baby. Not even a house.

Rob and I are moving out of our house soon. I've been hesitant to buy anything until we have a place to put it. The tiny, windowless nursery in our apartment used to be the laundry room, but things have been rewired, water has been redirected, and doors have been installed. One of the walls is painted swimming pool blue. Very serene.

There is nothing calm about my life right now. After three months of no work and waiting for a phone call, crossing fingers, and agonizing over interviews, Rob has a job. A good job. A job that is going to take care of us, make everything okay. It's both a huge sigh of relief and a question mark. A new home, a new job, a new baby.

If I'm not ready, I'd better get there fast.

Nine Months Pregnant

The sun is setting outside, but all I see is black. My eyes are closed, and I press my teeth together, feeling pain in the darkness. Pulling like a rubber band stretched taught. Contracting. Is this it? I exhale. I slowly open my eyes. I look at my husband and wait one minute. Ten minutes. Nothing.

I try to keep my mind clear and calm, try not to get excited at the prospect of labor or disappointed by another painful Braxton-Hicks contraction. I feel a heel digging into my ribcage on the right side, and picture the baby upside down, its head pressing me open from the inside. I wonder if concentration and mental toughness can make my cervix start to dilate. I wish there were more I could do. All there is to do is wait...


.....................................

Vegan with a Vaccine

Westley feels warm, and not just baby-warm -- fever-warm. He had shots on Tuesday (happy 4-month birthday, bub!), and just like I did two months ago after his first round of vaccines, I've been watching him like a hawk. A guilt-ridden, slightly freaked-out mama hawk.

My gut tells me that it's wrong to inject anything into a perfectly healthy baby, never mind scary-sounding and potentially harmful substances. Vaccines certainly aren't vegan, and they don't exactly go along with my general suspicion of anything medical. I did everything I could to increase my chances of having a natural child birth. I worried about taking ibuprofen for postpartum cramps. So why on earth am I having my child injected with viruses grown in chick embryos?

Our vegan-friendly, pro-extended breastfeeding, homeopathic pediatrician highly recommends vaccinating. We chose Westley's health care providers because we liked and trusted them, and specifically because they didn't take the position of "I'm the doctor, you're not, and you'll do as I say. End of discussion." I did as much research on my own as I could manage to do. Every time I read something in the anti- camp, I was adamant: We will so not be vaccinating. And then I'd read something from the pro- side, and change my position completely. Back and forth. The more I researched, the more confused I became.

So I decided to have faith in the experienced professionals whom I had trusted to help me make decisions about my son's health. The experienced professionals who have seen kids' health seriously and tragically compromised by preventable diseases. For me, the risk of disease outweighed the risk of vaccination.

And yet.

I can't imagine a worse feeling than holding your screaming baby in your lap, trying to nurse him while a stranger pokes him with needles, praying that the breast milk (along with the Tylenol) will magically make everything OK. And nothing will fill you with self-doubt like scrutinizing your grouchy and feverish child afterwards, looking for any change in demeanor or behavior. And then there's the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which is enough to make anyone at least a little suspicious.

In the end, the parent has to wade through all of the uncertainty and make a judgment call. One way or the other, there is risk. Right now, Westley is fine. I have to trust that he's going to continue to be fine. I'll remain skeptical on matters of medical intervention, but I have to believe that I'm doing the best I can at weighing the risks on my son's behalf. Because some day, he will be taking risks for himself -- and then I'll really have something to worry about.

.....................................

Birth Days

Day One

Twelve weeks ago today, I was getting out of the car in the Whole Foods parking lot when I felt a small-but-noteworthy rush of fluid. Noteworthy except that it was my due date and I was determined not to think about the "due-ness" of anything. I had sent Rob off to work with the usual hug/kiss/"I'll-let-you-know-if-anything-exciting-happens" routine, and I had resisted the temptation to watch whatever birth programming Discovery Health was broadcasting early in the morning. I was damned if I was going to let something like my water possibly breaking get in the way of purchasing organically grown apples and bread baked by local hippies.

I decided that the fluid was probably nothing. Just a side-effect of being gargantu-pregnant. Later that afternoon I felt it again but maintained my "probably nothing" stance. But by about 5:00 pm I was starting to feel like a leaky faucet. "Nothing" was turning out to be an undeniable something.

When Rob walked through the door an hour later and asked how my day had been, I said, "Uh, I think I'm leaking amniotic fluid." He made an oh-shit face, and the potential seriousness of the situation hit me hard. I called my midwife. She said I probably was leaking fluid, and that she would come by the house when evening traffic out of Seattle had died down.

Rob and I stared at each other for a minute. How could this possibly be? It seemed so ridiculous and surreal. Neither of us really believed that there was going to be a tiny person at all, never mind soon. Mother and father. We paced around the apartment, and stared at each other some more.

Rob cleared his throat. "I guess I'm not going to work tomorrow."

Day Two

It's cruel to have to set an alarm when no one has to get up and go to work in the morning, but we had done it anyway. We wanted to be awake and somewhat presentable when the midwife arrived at 6:00 am.

During my pregnancy, I tested positive for Group B Strep. When my water broke, I would need a shot of antibiotics every eight hours until I delivered to keep the baby safe from all kinds of GBS-related medical problems. I got my first shot on the evening of my due date, after the midwife confirmed that I was indeed leaking amniotic fluid while Rob and I did our best not to freak out. After some discussion of how my labor should progress, she had determined that she would return in eight hours for my next shot, unless we called her sooner.

"I'm glad your baby let you sleep," she said when we reported that the night had been uneventful. I wondered how the hell she could sound so chipper when I was feeling groggy, impossibly huge, and very worried. She had explained the night before that if I wasn't in labor by 5:45 pm the next day--today--I would have to go to the hospital.

I was having no contractions. None. Nothing to indicate that the baby was on its way except for a little wetness every time I stood up. I felt incredibly vulnerable and was suddenly afraid of interventions and unfamiliar surroundings and unfamiliar people. I repeated over and over to myself that everything would be fine, hospital or no. But some deep-down, childish part of me truly believed I would die if I ended up in the hospital.

Antibiotic shot over with, I was directed to eat something substantial, and walk. But I was pissed. I had seen two midwives throughout my pregnancy, and I felt less comfortable with the one who was on call that day. I hated having a deadline for getting labor established, nothing was turning out the way I'd imagined, and I was starting to feel very put upon about this whole baby-having thing.

Left to my own devices, I probably would have pissed and moaned and moped around the apartment all day, complaining that nothing was going my way. Rob wouldn't let me be whiny. He took me out to have lunch for breakfast. I suspected my midwife wouldn't approve of veggie burgers and French fries as pre-labor nutrition, but I didn't care.

Afterwards, we commenced with the walking. And walking and more walking. Walking led to strong Braxton-Hicks contractions, which encouraged me to walk some more. It wasn't labor, but least it was something. We walked around Target, and then Walgreens. We discovered that while gingerbread house kits are made from sugar, salt, and chemicals, they claim to be edible--serving size: one-twentieth of a house. I bought a bottle of castor oil and some chocolate soy milk.

Sometime after we got home, I started having contractions. Real ones, with pain and everything. I sat on the couch and watched the clock, waiting for them to become regular. No pattern emerged, mostly because I didn't know when to decide that a contraction was beginning or ending. I made myself a castor oil milkshake and drank down it in three cold, oily chocolate glugs. And then...more walking. Up and down the lane, circling our cul-de-sac, stopping every little while to lean into Rob's shoulder and try to breathe.

Somewhere between 2:00 pm (my next antibiotic shot) and 5:45 pm (my active labor deadline) things started to happen. Time began to shrink and expand. Hours flew by in minutes, and minutes felt like hours. And near-constant walking. Up and down the lane--mind the potholes-- up and down the hallway--squeaky floorboards. The birth pool was inflated in the kitchen and filled with water, and then drained, and then filled again. I wore my bathing suit, then my bathrobe, then my college sweatpants and gardening clogs and my mother's crocheted duster jacket. There was crying and hugging and pacing.

At one point, my labor stalled. No contractions, no discomfort apart from the weight of a giant belly with a baby inside. A boulder refusing to budge. So we bundled up and headed outdoors for another walk around the neighborhood. I found myself pausing to play fetch with a neighbor's dog through a chain-link fence. The dog would bring me one of his muddy tennis balls, I'd squat down to scoop it under the fence and then I'd throw it into his yard and he'd tear off, delighted to find the ball and bring it back to me. Sweet, wonderful dog. For a few minutes, I forgot that I was working on having a baby.

One hilly mile and no contractions later, I felt defeated. I went to lie down for a while, and things were happening again almost instantly. The pain hit me like a building collapsing, and I tried to remember how to breathe through it, or with it, or whatever I was supposed to be doing. I was tired and suddenly very afraid. Although I was determined to be tough about this natural childbirth thing, my heart dove into my stomach. I can't do this.

The pain was excruciating. I had expected pain with contractions and thought I was prepared to cope with it, resting between contractions and working through them. But I had terrible back pain that didn't subside when a contraction ended. My midwife, along with a student midwife whom I had never met before (but loved immediately), had arrived somewhere amidst the in-and-out-of-the-pool tedium. They came into the bedroom as I was cuddling up to Rob and crying that I was afraid, that I couldn't do it. I prayed that the pain meant progress. The midwife suggested an exam. I agreed, convinced that I had to be almost there.

"Well, you're at about four centimeters." Four. I lost it. Four was a million miles away from ten. It was almost midnight, and after having worried for hours that my labor would never start, I was now sure it would never end. The next few contractions were agony, and I didn't even try to cope. My mother asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. I told her to go away. "I can't," I sobbed, my tension making the pain worse. I felt hopeless. "I can't, I can't, I can't…"

Day Three

When the student midwife gently mentioned that many women choose a mantra like "I can do it" to help them through contractions, I tried not to listen. I was miserable, and didn't want to accept help from anyone, especially someone I'd just met.

But then, everything changed. Suddenly, somehow, I was up and standing in the bathroom, repeating over and over again that I wasn't afraid, that I could do it. Then back into the pool. I told Rob I wanted him with me, and then yelled at him to put his suit on when he tried to get in wearing clothes. I fell asleep between contractions. The back pain never let up. The midwife determined that I was between eight and nine centimeters, but I was too tired to care.

Pushing came before I was ready. "Don't push. Pant." But pushing was the only thing that made the pressure somewhat more tolerable. I wasn't feeling contractions anymore. I got on my hands and knees and pushed, putting my face in the pool, thinking about God, the water, the baby's ears and how they must be smushed up against its head, mother lions… The midwife urged me to get out of the pool, but I couldn't have moved if I'd wanted to. I had the briefest realization that these were my last moments of being pregnant.

The Doppler was on and the baby's heartbeat had suddenly dropped to a slow thump. "Your baby needs to come out now!" I was sure that I would tear right up to my navel, but her tone of voice scared me. Fine, I thought. I'll split in half. It was better than trying to get out of the water, so I pushed. And pushed.

And then a flurry of excitement. I sat back. A limp baby was untangled from its cord and placed on my chest. A slippery blue swimmer with long limbs. A floppy, strange fish. No crying at first. Then, a little squawk. The room sighed.

"Hi, baby." I moved the long legs aside. I have a boy. "Hi, Westley!" I looked at Rob. "Westley…Oliver, right?"

"Right."

Westley Oliver. December 1, 2007. 4:58 am. Seven pounds, fourteen ounces. Twenty inches. Born at home, in the kitchen.

Then, a different kind of chaos. Rob left my side for the first time in three days. The baby went with him, and I was helped out of the pool and into the shower. I rubbed my deflated belly, not really believing any of this could be real--that somewhere in our little apartment, my husband was holding our son.

I fainted getting out of the shower, and spent the next little while lying on the bathroom floor. Blood everywhere. I lay on the tile and ate a piece of toast with jam very slowly, and told the student midwife the story of how Rob and I met. I was examined (everything sore, but incredibly, not really torn) and Westley was examined (long and slender, perfectly healthy). Then trying to breastfeed, trying to pee, "Here's an ice pack for your bottom and call us immediately if..."

Finally, finally, a new family got tucked in to bed. The sun was coming up, and snow was falling outside, and Westley was wrapped up like a burrito and fast asleep. Rob and I stared at each other, and I cried.

Mother and father and son. It was not at all what I had imagined, but it was exactly as it should be. Three strange, difficult days--over.

.....................................

VeganMoFo: One-Handed Food

I've been having trouble citing my sources lately. I'll hear or read something that sounds like it might be helpful in this whole baby-growing, child-rearing motherhood thing, and I'll file it away in my mind under "Important--Don't Forget!" and I don't forget it. But I can't, for the life of me, remember where or from whom (my midwife? the PPK? Mom?) I heard it. It makes me feel like I'm imagining things. At least I'm imagining helpful things.

Anyway. The latest helpful thing is the suggestion that new (and especially newly breastfeeding) mamas stock up on foods that can easily be eaten with one hand. And it makes perfect sense. Who wants to hold a wiggly baby and try to negotiate a giant bowl of chili?

Unfortunately, when it comes to choosing foods, I'm usually in the giant-bowl-of-chili camp. I really, really like "dinner in a bowl." You've got your grain, veggie, and protein all in one convenient chili, or soup, or stir-fry; all of the flavors get to play together; and clean-up is usually a breeze. And when I think of foods to cook and freeze for reheating after the baby arrives, I think of hearty bean-and-seitan stews and big glass casserole dishes of spinach lasagna and tofu-ricotta-stuffed shells.

But these are not one-handed foods. Not really. Yes, in theory, one could set a bowl of soup down on a TV tray next to one's rocking chair and attempt to eat it while nursing the baby, but the whole process sounds a little like that exercise where you try to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. After a minute, you just end up patting both your head and your tummy, and you drop hot soup on the baby. So one-handed food it is.

Unfortunately, when I first picture one-handed food, it's never anything that I might actually want to eat on a regular basis. I think of Luna bars (which are fine, but not great), and then my mind goes immediately to the preservative-laden world of pre-packaged and often non-vegan food: toaster pastries, pizza rolls, drinkable soup in a microwavable sippy cup (because spoons are for suckers!), and tubes of neon-colored yogurt and pudding designed to be squeezed directly into the mouth (down with tool-use!).

(Yes, the part of my brain that comes up with ideas for one-handed food is also the part that wants to stay up all night playing video games with the other 7th-grade boys. Why do you ask?)

I'm wildly disturbed by the idea that, despite the fact that I will never purchase any of the above food items, their advertisers have been successful in that I remember the existence of the these products and strongly associate them with the whole grab-'n'-go food concept. So I'm racking my brain for ideas, trying to beat out the advertisers and my penchant for bowl-based dinners with a list of tasty, reasonably nutritious, single-hand-friendly vegan (or easily veganizable) options:

• Fruit and vegetable slices
• Whole grain toast
• Bagels with peanut butter
• Pitas with hummus
• Wrap sandwiches (I have trouble eating "traditional" sandwiches one-handed. I feel like my sandwich contents are precariously balanced between the two slices of bread, and I have to rearrange things before every bite. Same goes for veggie burgers.)
• Vegetable maki
• Muffins
• Fruit and non-dairy milk smoothies
• Pretzels
• Nuts and seeds
• Samosas
• "Bar-based cuisine," as my husband likes to say (Luna bars, Clif bars, Lara bars, etc.)

It's a measly little list so far, and I'm sure there are awesome things that I'm forgetting. It occurs to me, however, that the above list contains a lot of the foods that I ate when I was first pregnant and felt like ass and absolutely nothing sounded good to eat. Coincidence? I wonder...

BiB

.....................................

Home Sweet Home Visit

This evening, my midwives will be conducting a home visit. All of my previous prenatal appointments have taken place at a clinic that used to be a house, so the vibe shouldn't be too different from how it's been all along: relaxed, casual, low-key.

Except that, um...we just moved in. On Saturday.

I would take a picture of the madness, but I have no idea where my camera is. I felt very lucky that I was able find something to wear this morning, but I'm not so sure I'll be able to do as well tomorrow. What is supposed to be the baby's room has become a storage "staging" area. (The last time we moved, we also had a second bedroom that Rob dubbed a "staging" area, with the promise that it would someday become an office, or a library, or a nursery. It was still a "staging" area on Saturday morning when its contents were loaded into the back of my dad's pick-up. I call shenanigans.) Cabinet parts are still wrapped up in moving blankets in the middle of the living room. I'm not even sure we have a phone number yet.

Ahh, the joys of moving.

Now, my midwives are some of the kindest, most wonderfully understanding people on the planet. And I'm sure they've seen a lot worse during a home visit. At least, I hope they've seen worse. But I still feel like I've totally dropped the ball by not having everything in at least some semblance of order before this evening. It's not just a case of wanting to "keep up appearances." The chaos of moving seems to have jump-started my lazy nesting instinct, and I want my home--and everything in it--to be ready for the baby. Like, now.

Of course, appearances are important, too. I don't want us to be remembered as "that couple with industrial-sized garbage bags everywhere and no where to sit."

Oh, well. At least we're not remodeling. Yet.


BiB
.....................................

My (Super-Secret) Vegan Pregnancy

One of my New Year's Resolutions this year was to write more. Among other things, I was going to participate in NaNoWriMo. I read No Plot? No Problem! when I was working in a store that sold it (and other worthwhile reads), and the whole thing seemed pretty doable. In a hectic sort of way.

And then, about mid-March, I discovered that I would be thinking about other things during the month of November. The 50,000-word novel would have to wait until I was done gestating.

But there's no way I'm going to miss out on VeganMoFo.

Now, ideally--and in the spirit of the month-long writing frenzy upon which it is based--my participation in Vegan Month of Food would involve me posting one vegan-food-related entry each day. Photos! Recipes! Witty insight on veganism!

But really, I don't have much to offer as a food blogger.* Certain people have the whole "gorgeous food photography" thing waaaay under control. And since the Internet is one of my favorite cookbooks, almost all of the recipes I make on a regular basis can be found elsewhere. Which means I have to try to be witty and insightful. Maybe this was a bad idea.

It does occur to me that the last time I wrote anything about my diet, I wasn't pregnant yet. And I continued not to write about my diet because, well, it didn't seem relevant to the whole holy-shit-I'm-becoming-a-mother thing. Yeah. I know. Diet is only one of the major things that healthcare providers focus on with pregnant women. Because when you're eating for two, and one of you has to make bones and organs and a brain out of nothing, what you eat really matters! I get that. But when your midwives, husband, and parents are all unconcerned and very supportive, eating a vegan diet during pregnancy really seems like no big deal.

Of course, one of the reasons that it hasn't been a big deal is that I don't discuss it. After a pre-pregnancy lecture by a well-meaning acquaintance, and phone conversation with friend that ended abruptly when I said I planned to remain vegan during my pregnancy, I got a little gun-shy about revealing my dietary and lifestyle choices. I don't like to argue. When someone offers me something non-vegan, it's just as easy for me to say "No, thank you" as it is to say "I don't eat meat/eggs/dairy/animal products," so it rarely comes up.

What does come up, of course, is food cravings. For some reason, people find the topic of food cravings during pregnancy fascinating. And this is where I lie. When they ask about cravings, I tell them about the first trimester food jags: a week of tomato sandwiches, a week of bagels, a week of bean burritos. But the actual cravings? No. I never mention drooling over memories of eggs Benedict breakfasts smothered in Hollandaise, grilled crab and Swiss sandwiches on white bread, homemade oven-baked macaroni and cheese, and (oh God) flank steak.

I don't mention craving this fatty, high-protein animal oppression partly because I find it embarrassing, and partly because everyone has opinions about what food cravings mean. "Our bodies know what they need," a friend of mine likes to say. I seriously doubt that my body needs Pringles and diet Coke, but if cravings really did indicate a nutritional requirement, I'd have an easier time convincing Rob to enable my giving in. Mmm, grilled crab and Swiss... I can almost taste the richness of warm cheese and mayonnaise-based crab salad. "I'm sure the veal farmers appreciate your support," my husband says, kindly but pointedly.

The truth is that my non-vegan cravings have nothing to do with the foods themselves. They're all about memories of Sunday breakfasts at the diner and family dinners that my mother cooked entirely from scratch. I'm not craving food, I'm craving comfort, and it's difficult to un-learn the good feelings that my mind associates with certain dishes. Of course, it's equally difficult to un-learn the information about health and farming practices that lead me to a vegan diet in the first place. And it's all difficult to talk about without unintentionally starting an argument, or feeling like I'm expected to speak on behalf of all vegans everywhere.

So I don't bring it up. I keep my pregnancy cravings, and my diet overall, to myself as much as possible. I guess this puts me pretty firmly in the vegan closet. For now, I'm comfortable here. However, I expect things to change drastically when my vegan child is old enough to realize that not everyone puts soy milk on their cereal.


*I did have a vegan food blog for about twenty minutes. And then I got the stomach flu and ate Culturally Insensitive Flavor Oriental Flavor Top Ramen for a week and the project kind of lost momentum.


BiB
.....................................

Tick Tock, Baby

I'd like to say that I haven't posted in nearly a month because I've been busy. But the truth is, I've just been offline. It's really pathetic when you're so worn out that facing the Internet feels like too much work--never mind actually writing something.

But while I was feeling run-down, not writing, not keeping up with my blog-reading and generally trudging through the daily routine for a while...time passed. And suddenly my due date is 36 days away. And we're going to move out of our house and into an apartment at some not-yet-determined date. And our baby gear amounts to two knit hats, a couple of mismatched outfits, and the plush sheep rattle that we bought a year ago when Rob decided it was too awesome to pass up.

Oh yeah. We're so ready.


BiB
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