But can I still go skiing? - #110

Some news.

The options are scattered. A hundred miles south, but you’d see someone different every time. 71 miles north, but no specialized emergency services. 132 miles northeast if you really wanted to play it safe, but in a town we hated. 71 miles was closer, and we could still run errands there without it taking over the entire day. Also, someone said the food in the hospital was good, and things were going well. If they stopped going well, we could change course. 

All the doctor really said was never go 67 miles southeast. 

That’s how we found ourselves 71 miles away, Ben at Home Depot shopping for a freezer, me at Target shopping for new bras, and the blurry pictures of a wriggling lima bean left on the dash in the truck, our first ultrasound complete.

I am pregnant.

 I texted Claire first. I always text Claire first. 

I was isolating in the second bedroom while we thought I might have Covid, and my period was two days late. I figured, why not check? That’s what I figured. What I knew was that I was pregnant. I’m never late. I took a picture of the test and sent it to Claire. 

“Do I yell it to him across the room or wait til isolation is over?”
“The yelling is kind of a cute story?”

So I put the test on the kitchen counter, then texted Ben to come upstairs. 

“Hey, look at the counter.”

A moment of silence.

“Holy shit.”
“Yep,” I said, echoing the sentiment.
“I knew we could do it.”

This from the man who was asking if I would be depressed without having a child when we didn’t succeed on the first try. (For the record, the answer was and is no.) 

After we pretended to hug across the room, Ben went back to work in the basement and I went back to blowing my nose and watching home renovation shows. The first week of knowing I was pregnant was stunningly boring. So was the second week, the third week, the fourth week. Nothing is happening but strange sensations that are somehow always pregnancy symptoms and the deadening quiet of an enormous secret. Your entire life is going to change, but not yet.

 Now I am 11 weeks and change, but the bean is measuring in at 12 weeks. They’re a little ahead of schedule in size which is for the best: the science says altitude babies are often born under weight; the anecdotes say they’re often born early. 

“Don’t go above 10,000 feet,” my new OB said to me as she rattled off all the dos and donts in her office some 4000 feet lower.
“We live at 10,000 feet.”

She looked up at us.

“Oh. Well, don’t go above 11,000 feet? Just listen to your body, you’ll know.” 

Her office, 70 miles away, is the closest recommended obstetrician to our home. I have a GP in the town over, but she was pretty clear when she said, “please plan to be near a hospital and not anywhere near here.” Although her advice about skiing was considerably less cautious. “Depends how good of a skier you are,” she shrugged. 

The baby is due in May, and in retrospect, this really worked out to our advantage. It’s not uncommon here to put a little more effort into baby-making September through February to ensure your due date will land outside the bounds of Big Winter. For us, the weather will have relaxed, we’ll have drivable roads the whole month, and the chance of an avalanche trapping us in town is near nil. The baby will arrive before the leaves make their reappearance for the season, and those leaves will only begin to show themselves when I’m out of my own diapers and ready to emerge into the world as a newly branded milk cow. What a magical affair, huh?

The lima bean is now the size of a strawberry (though very much still looking like a bean). The concept of a “pregnancy glow” is something I am convinced is a fairytale told simply to keep you from losing your mind in the first trimester. At this stage, the fetus isn’t outwardly visible and only acts as an energy siphon, like some kind of tiny amulet from another planet draining you of your powers. But every mom I texted assured me this was a good thing: the shittier you feel, the stronger the pregnancy. Which is partially why we felt good about going with this OB — so far, so normal. These are the choices you make when you live rurally. 

You might remember that two months ago, I wrote a guest piece for

Jessy Easton

about the fear of a baby eclipsing my art, my writing, me. It’s inevitable, even if only for a time. What I did not expect was it to begin as soon as I got pregnant. 

I was familiar with the TV version of pregnancy: fatigue, vomiting, hormones, cravings. But what I was not prepared for was the worst symptom of all: being a fucking idiot. That piece for Jessy was published mere days after I got pregnant. At that point I had no idea. I was drinking mezcal margs in LA. I was surrounded by some of my very closest friends, many of them making magical Spiderman-like hand gestures at my abdomen like they might be personally responsible for getting the sperm into the egg. 

Two weeks later not only was I missing my period but also several thousand brain cells. All of a sudden I was just bricks for brains, incapable of writing anything I felt remotely proud of (let alone anything that performed well) because my body was like, “sorry, these supplies are being rerouted. The bridge to your brain is out for the foreseeable future.” I stared blankly in meetings, I read briefs over and over and over again, I couldn’t make it through the first chapter in a Sarah J. Maas book. (Granted, it was Crescent City, but still.) It was bad. 

Only a day or two ago, as I crept toward the second trimester did any part of me start to feel like they could listen to a Kara Swisher podcast and have any idea what was going on. The queasiness persisted, the rampant exhaustion clung like caked mud to my boots, but I was starting to be able to open the fridge and actually remember to close it — truly the bare minimum of functionality. I was in this constant state of underwater fatigue where anyone who tried to talk to me sounded like a Charlie Brown adult. 

This is also why I basically announced my pregnancy to anyone who came across my path. It didn’t feel like it mattered here. Why not tell every neighbor as I dragged myself from the car to the front door like I’d personally brought back the plague? Most people don’t share a pregnancy so openly and widely in the first trimester because there might be trouble, but that was precisely why I did: I needed backups in case Ben was unreachable if anything happened to go wrong. It is very easy to be unreachable in these parts. That said, I had a wholly different reason to find telling people troubling: they light up like a medieval torch soaked in kerosene while you feel like the torch itself.

 However much I wanted (and want) to have a kid and grow our family, I can’t feign boisterous excitement about it. When they say, “oh my god, congratulations! Are you so excited??” I typically say, “oh yeah, gonna be a big change,” with my eyebrows raised to my hairline and the fear of god pulsing through me. 

It is difficult to be excited to blow one’s self up like a balloon only to be ripped open and then have my sleep disrupted, my free time evaporated, and my marriage rattled. That kind of honesty though has definitely raised some eyebrows. I am, however, deeply curious about the female body’s ability to create and adapt. I love the science and I love the inherent risk assessment associated with pregnancy: to ski or not to ski, how high is too high, do I need crampons for this hike? I love facing it like a challenge, like you think that amount of nausea will keep me from stacking wood? Joke’s on you because outside is the perfect place to throw up. And I really love loving things. Sort of a long-winded way of saying “not excited but some other special thing.”

As soon as I entered my email into the first pregnancy related website, my Instagram feed changed overnight. My ads were all for various pregnancy leggings and belly bands, and the content shifted to bougie women in linens, cradling their bellies while their loose waves fell over their shoulders with some wispy music playing about being forever changed. But one video did stand out as relevant to me:

The ESPN journalist Mina Kimes was being interviewed by fellow sportswriter Pablo Torre and the subject of having a family came up. I saved the video immediately. I could not have resonated with her thinking more. Here’s Kimes on the decision to have a kid:

“I’m not great with kids, I don’t love them, I don’t look at my friends’ kids and think I’d like to spend more time with them, and I’ve never particularly enjoyed babies. I never fantasized about being a mom in my entire life. As I was kind of pondering existence, I had a moment where it wasn’t like ‘ah this is gonna disrupt my life’ or whatever — I just kind of woke up one day and thought, ‘you know, I’d like my life to be different.’ The older I get, the more I realize I do love my job but I get significantly more fulfillment from my relationships, and particularly my close ones that have kind of expanded my heart, and I see the way in which this new relationship seems to expand other people’s hearts and their minds, and so that seems like an experience that I’d like to have. And I have this recent history of really close friendships, my marriage, my relationship with my dog, all being the things that clearly make me so much fucking happier than everything else, so why not introduce another variable that will probably do the same thing?”

I loved her language of introducing another variable in the name of heart expansion. That is exactly why I wanted to have a kid, because I wanted to love more, and if my record with foster failing is any indication, it appears I do have quite a well of love to give. 

Plus Ben and I have spent so much time this past year cleaning up animal piss and shit, stepping on their toys scattered around every room, driving back and forth across the state for their care, having our sleep interrupted regularly because someone’s new meds make them pee in the middle of the night, and wiping up their vomit that we really thought what’s one more that we’re chemically induced to love?

We’ll find out in May 2024.

For related reading:

The pulsing drive of fear - #65