My heart goes out to all those suffering with fertility issues, who have a hard time getting pregnant, getting a pregnancy to stick. I know there are a lot of you out there. But that particular set of hardships, of heartaches and heartbreaks, has not been my problem, and I can’t claim it in any regard.
I don’t mean to be glib or boasting, and I don’t want everyone out there to hate me, but if you are kind enough to be interested in following my story, I have to be honest: I get pregnant at the drop of a hat. I got pregnant with our first child the first time I ever tried to get pregnant in my entire life, and she was born forty weeks later, darling and healthy, at home in the water, one of those clichéd beautiful births with candles and reiki and me singing her out of my body at dawn. Pregnancy and birth are never, I’m sure, totally easy, but as far as these things go, that first one was pretty damn easy for me. Easy-peezy-lemon-squeezie, as that now-three year old girl likes to quote from Charlie & Lola.
We had actually decided, a little while after she was born, that our daughter was going to be our only child. Three people and one dogwere plenty for our apartment, and one kid was plenty for me to mother with my full-time job as a professor and poet. My husband had been an only child and was happy to stop there. I was happy to stop obsessing all the time about whether or not we were going to have another. I gave away most of our baby stuff: our cloth diaper covers, our crib. We told everyone we were done.
And then we got pregnant again. While trying not to. While practicing the Fertility Awareness Method, studiously charting and avoiding sex during my fertile phases, phases which only lengthened after giving birth. In fact, despite the fact that I was now in my mid-thirties, I felt like my body was conspiring against me to get pregnant: I had the sex drive of a teenaged boy and “cervical fluid” to spare. Within days of my daughter’s last go at the breast (at age two) and of reaching my pre-pregnancy weight (yes, that would be twenty-four months after her birth, thank you very much), I got pregnant again. An “accident,” as such things are called.
It felt like an accident at first: a car crash, actually. We had all these new plans in place that revolved around our One Child policy,and now what were we going to do? But very quickly we realized that a new baby might be temporarily inconvenient, but it was not unwanted. We could afford another child, love another child, raise another child. We decided to go forward, and we quickly got excited. We made room for this next member of our household. We made baby name lists. We called our friends and tried to get our crib and cloth diaper covers back. We put our apartment on the market and started looking for a bigger place. Our baby grew and kicked. We had an ultrasound and saw that he was a boy who moved and grooved on the screen, even grabbing at his tiny penis for us. “I’m sorry,” the embarrassed technician said, as we tried tofigure out what we were seeing. “He seems to be, um, holding himself.” “That’s my boy!” I joked, and we waltzed out of the hospital full of excitement for this son we would eventually get to know.
And then, at thirty-one weeks, the baby stopped moving. This, my friends, is where the story of this column begins: with that brief stretch of days, one year ago, when it started occurring to me that I wasn’t feeling the familiar kicks of my active boy anymore. This column begins with a subtle question at the back of my mind that grew, from a Wednesday night to a Saturday morning, into a concern, and then into a fear, and then into two nightmares, and then into confirmation and devastation.
I’ll tell you more about our son Day’s death and birth (as parents of stillborn children know too well, this is the only situation in which the death comes before birth in a sentence) in columns to come, but for now I just want to tell you where I am today: pregnant again, once more pregnant by accident.
This time, we knew we wanted another baby. The space we opened in our lives for Day is still empty, and besides (she said glibly), now we have our crib and our diaper covers back. We just weren’t planning to have another baby yet. We planned to wait until after Day’s one year birthday, until spring. We were charting my fertile phases again, even more carefully than before. But, at the risk of coming off as downright obnoxious, I really do seem to be one of those people who gets pregnant when my husband looks at me sideways. And my husband seems to be one of those guys with good aim. All those fertile clichés I know must have a real sting to those of you who never get to use them.
And now I’m another cliché: a woman with a pregnancy after loss. This column will chronicle that journey, which, so far, as I am leaving my first trimester and the all-day nausea thereof, has been one of nonchalance mixed with rapturous anticipation mixed with dread.
[Author’s note: Due to this magazine’s production schedule and my own writing deadlines, these columns appear quite a bit after the moment in which I wrote them. For clarification, I got pregnant in late August, and am due in mid-May. This was written in early November 2008, when I was about twelve weeks pregnant.]