Let’s keep in mind…
Pregnancy is something I was fortunate enough to choose for myself, when I felt ready, with an extremely present and supportive partner with whom I love. Even given all the help I will have raising this child, I know how challenging parenthood can be and how significant an impact it can have on one’s life and so while I vehemently respect everyone’s array of beliefs about women’s reproductive rights, I want to be clear on mine. I can’t even begin to understand the complexities of people who face unplanned pregnancies, yet as a therapist I have bore witness to the bewilderment and trauma mostly women face as a result. My own experience so far with pregnancy has had its toll on me, someone who has always felt certain about becoming a mother one day, and therefore I feel I have absolutely no power to judge any of the decisions made by others regarding their own bodies and forever commitments to a child.
Additionally, I have so much empathy, respect and love for all the people trying to have a baby. Sex is already presented to us in such a confusing, sometimes even harmful way, but having a baby has always been presented to me as easy for women. That idea unfortunately isn’t true as there are so many lovely couples who for whatever reason are challenged in their access to what seems like a biological right we should have over our bodies. And so for the people who are facing setbacks to this experience or having to spend significant financial and emotional resources on having a child, my heart goes out to you. You are not alone, you are seen and heard by so many of us out there rooting for you.
And last but not least, I want to extend a hand (and high five) to those who choose not to have children, people I am already slightly envious of knowing they too will go on to live fulfilling, beautiful lives full of love and connection, without a paternal or maternal bond. Our society doesn’t do a very good job of acknowledging this, and can even be shameful of women in particular, who don’t feel the desire to become mothers. I feel so strongly about our right to choose as much as possible in our life, because the reality is we are fairly limited in what we have full control over on this Earth. Like the fact that I won’t ever be able to just hop on plane for a last minute getaway, not like I ever did that before but you get the gist!
Our miscarriage
My journey with pregnancy started last summer, when my husband and I were lucky enough to get a positive pregnancy test shortly after our first attempts at trying. Early on I was overcome with joy, excitement and just the wow factor that this was happening. Of course my first reaction as a therapist was to be cautiously optimistic, knowing that so many women experience miscarriages especially within the first trimester, but that lasted all of two seconds before my husband and I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. We told a few close friends and family, over the moon about the baby, but also a sense of relief honestly that biology would work in our favor.
However, at about eight weeks pregnant, I started to realize what was happening. For whatever reason, I miscarried the baby, a process that took the weekend and involved increasing amounts of blood and a whole lot of sadness about what we were loosing.
We confirmed the miscarriage with our doctor that following Monday, still remaining hopeful it was just a scare, but pretty certain deep down, that for whatever reason, this just wasn’t our baby to be.
The next couple weeks were sad and honestly a bit nerve wreaking. I had so many thoughts come up about whether or not it would ever be possible to carry a baby to term, doing my best therapeutic work on myself before recognizing it was okay to feel it all. The worry, the internalized shame and now doubt about the future. I knew I needed to let myself take the time to heal and fortunately I did. My birthday came and as COVID-19 continued I remained grateful for the ability to hide out at home in my safe little bubble, fully focusing on finding hope again.
for the people who are facing setbacks to this experience or having to spend significant financial and emotional resources on having a child, my heart goes out to you. You are not alone, you are seen and heard by so many of us out there rooting for you.
As my birthday always has it, change felt on the horizon. I also left my first real job of six years to fully go out on my own in private practice, a new challenge to refocus my attention towards.
Shortly afterwards, we got the best news again, I was pregnant just about a month after our miscarriage. We couldn’t help but find joy and regain some hope that this one would stick, growing into a future representation of us. But before we got too far in our doctor warned us the test could potentially be picking up hormone remnants from the miscarriage, so I had to go in twice to have my blood drawn and see whether the hormone was trending upwards or downwards.
Fortunately both the pregnancy hormones and my newfound hopefulness were trending upwards.
We entered into this second pregnancy with a bit of caution but equal joy and excitement about the prospect of the adventure that is becoming a parent. As fortunate and prepared as I feel about this rebirth of self I will soon encounter, I have worked with enough parents and children to know that this new way of life will be filled with both beautiful moments and challenges. Like with everything, I am entering into motherhood with an open mind and open heart, expecting the late nights and likely bouts of disappointment all parents experience, along with the all the incredible and sacred moments too. Bravely searching for harmony with what is.
The First Trimester
In addition to bouts of excitement, I was also experiencing bouts of nausea, headaches, worry the pregnancy wouldn’t last and a very mild but very present depression. I can’t stress how isolating the first trimester can feel, given I wasn’t comfortable yet sharing with too many people that I was pregnant again and it wasn’t very obvious in how I looked or acted, especially since we were in the midst of COVID-19. Of course I felt extremely fortunate to be able to be home, with no where to go, nobody outside my family and a few close friends to see and with the most supportive partner who was instrumental in helping me through this time. Perhaps that is why it took me, a mental health therapist, quite a few weeks to self diagnose myself with depressive symptoms. If we weren’t living through a pandemic I think I would have been much more acutely aware of what was happening, but since I didn’t have much else to do but work, I was able to immediately crawl into bed after my last session with a client, nap on my breaks, completely ignore the fact that I was absolutely disinterested in everything that typically brings me joy. It wasn’t until I realized how unappealing the thought of writing a blog post or creating content was before it hit me; the one thing that always motivates me is gone.
My bout with prenatal depression was mild, considering the complexity of depression I work with on a daily basis. I was still able to show up 100% for my clients and for the occasional family outing or check ins with friends, but I was paralyzed in every other domain. Doing basic things like walking our dogs, cooking, cleaning or running errands all the sudden felt like such a burden I had to really psych myself into doing. I felt like a less than partner, friend and creative. My husband, however, was so wonderful in helping me take the rest I needed, by truly stepping up and filling in the gaps for me, something I never have allowed anyone to do in my entire life. I can’t stress enough how grateful I am for him and all his unconditional support that most certainly assisted me through the process.
I am entering into motherhood with an open mind and open heart, expecting the late nights and likely bouts of disappointment all parents experience, along with the all the incredible and sacred moments too. Bravely searching for harmony with what is.
Eventually the depression got much better and instead headaches took over, which if I were to have to choose between the two I honestly can’t say I have a good answer. Just like I tell my clients, sometimes we just need to go through it to get out of it. This was certainly the case for me and unfortunately the headaches too. No amount of caffeine or Advil helped my headaches. I even tripled my water consumption with this wonderful jug I recommend everyone get to maintain hydration not just in pregnancy alone but in general. Eventually towards the beginning of my second trimester the headaches went away along with the nausea, and for the first time in a while I started to feel much more like myself, only with a burgeoning midsection!
The Second Trimester
Like everyone said, the second trimester was a breeze symptom wise. I finally felt much more energetic, motivated and the biggest wave of relief honestly regarding the physicality of being with child. However, no trimester is without it’s setbacks apparently because we got some unfortunate news from our early test results that devastated us and all our hopes about our future baby. The non-invasive prenatal test (NIPT) results came back atypical. That’s a word I have never quite feared before until now, bewildered that science could disappoint me so significantly. What was even scarier was that my OBGYN had never seen the result herself before, upping the ante on us soon to be parents’ absolute worst fears.
Our doctor told us not to panic, as the result could just be a false alarm and immediately sent us and our perplexed faces to a chromosomal specialist. The specialist took a good look at baby via ultrasound, with no immediate concerns based on that. He then went through our options in terms of testing to determine what was going on and giving us such a weird result. He explained that the particular lab our test was submitted to is unusual in offering an atypical test result at all for this test, and he ended up offering us another NIPT through a different lab entirely, just to see if the result would be more clear one way or the other. He also stressed to us that the only true way to know if a chromosomal disorder was at play would be through invasive testing, the two options being a chronic villus sampling (CVS) or amniocentesis. Of course we took the second NIPT blood test with the hope it would put all our fears to rest and decided to sit back and wait prior to committing to an invasive test option, given the small but still present risks of miscarriage associated with both.
CVS vs. AMNIOCENTESIS
I want take a second to explain in my very non-medical professional knowledge a bit about these two invasive tests and my process in sifting through both options in the hopes it might be helpful to anyone else in a similar position. Let me preface this by reminding everyone here I am not a doctor or scientist, just someone who’s sharing their own experience and understanding of these tests, so please do consult with a medical professional for further information about these tests before making a decision. Both the CVS and amniocentesis are in office procedures that do not require anesthesia and essentially draw a small sample from your belly in order to help determine what is up with baby. The CVS test can be done sooner at 10-12 weeks and draws its sample from the placenta and this fluid sample can be taken through the abdomen or vagina depending on where baby is positioned at the time of procedure. Your doctor uses ultrasound the entire time during both procedures to avoid directly poking baby and to very carefully obtain the sample. Similarly the amniocentesis also obtains fluid, however not from the placenta, but the amniotic sac baby is in. Therefore this procedure can only occur through the abdomen in order to ensure it reaches baby’s cells directly and can only be done around 16 weeks or later. Both procedures last only a few minutes long and are relatively pain free given they can numb the area of the abdomen in which the sample is being extracted from. The down time following the procedure is also fairly short, at least one day in bed and about a week of limited activity if I remember correctly.
A few weeks from the second NIPT test we had our results, which came back as having traces of trisomy 13. I still to this day haven’t googled it per recommendation from my doctor aside from determining how to spell it for the sake of writing this post. Getting this result was unbelievably harrowing and just continued to spread my fear of potentially having to make the heavy decision of whether or not we could let this pregnancy continue on its own. As a social worker and therapist I often tell people how my career has taught me how get more comfortable being uncomfortable, to essentially live my life with all its uncertainty, finding peace and meaning in the grey. This experience has been the biggest test of those words, siting with the complexity that is not knowing.
The silver lining here was that the traces of trisomy 13 could just exclusively exist in the placenta, meaning our baby could be absolutely fine if the blood test was only picking up this result in my placenta. My OBGYN herself actually had that happen too, going on to deliver and raise a perfectly healthy baby with no signs of of trisomy 13. However, the only way for us to know this would be through an amniocentesis, as the CVS test would only be able to test the placenta, not the amniotic sac with our baby. So we made the seemingly only available decision to have the invasive testing done, right when I turned 16 weeks.
This experience has been the biggest test of those words, siting with the complexity that is not knowing.
I want to take a minute to put aside the medical stuff and just reflect on how all of this impacted my experience as a pregnant woman. By this point I felt like I was still stuck back in those first trimester blues, not so much in my depressive symptoms, but more so in the shadow of uncertainty, dancing on what appeared as an invisible line because I felt paralyzed to share it with others. I did everything I encourage my own clients not to, allowing unhelpful, negative thoughts flurry up inside me such as, “I am a monster for even considering possibly terminating this pregnancy if the baby has a disorder?”, “should I even be looking at baby stuff online or thinking about names,” “if I let myself fully embrace pregnancy right now, am I living a lie?”
All of these thoughts sound so frustrating to say out loud, because I know none of them are truly representative of how I felt at this time, they were all stemming from doubt and fear around this legitimately scary process. The fact that this was all happening during COVID-19 also didn’t help too much, in that my usual outlets for managing stress through socializing, trying new restaurants, exploring the city and going to the movie theater by myself were fairly unavailable to me. The whole process felt so isolating as I saw my pregnant peers announcing as early as 12 weeks and although I didn’t feel any resentment or anger towards them, it served as another reminder that this significant part of my life, like everyone’s honestly in COVID-19, was still stuck in limbo.
The day of the amniocentesis finally came and I wasn’t that concerned about the procedure itself necessarily, I just wanted to get it over with. I psyched myself up with the promise of yummy snacks, my big warm bed and several new episodes of Bravo reality shows waiting for me when I got home. Fortunately my amazing husband was able to join me inside the doctor’s office for the procedure and he held my hands tightly the whole time, supporting me as I kept chanting to myself in my head, “you’re lucky they have this technology, remember Catherine of Aragon on the Spanish Princess, she didn’t have the chance to know what was happening and was married to an unsupportive loser.” I know it may sound silly, but to each their own!
The procedure went quick after I quickly chugged four cups of water to get my bladder full enough for the lining in my stomach to match up well enough for a smooth incision. The only small pain came from the prickle of the novocaine, after which I could feel the needle going in but it lasted such a short time and was completely pain free. Fortunately the whole five minutes was over well before it started and I took a deep breath praying for a risk free recovery and healthy test result.
I was still stuck in the shadow of uncertainty, dancing on what appeared as an invisible line because I felt paralyzed to share it with others.
A few weeks later we got the wonderful confirmation that everything looked fine, even after our specialist was concerned about how some of my own cells got mixed into the sample, the geneticist seemed fairly confident that all baby’s cells identified we healthy and strong with no trace of trisomy 13. Of course, no result can give you absolute clarity as we are unable to sample all the amniotic fluid from baby, but that crevice between all knowing and knowing what I do know is where my faith must flourish.
My husband Arthur and I are just so grateful for this journey so far that we are well aware hasn’t been easy in terms of settling our nerves and getting to fully enjoy this special time before our little one arrives. However, I have become so much more attuned than ever before about what privilege we have been dealt. The ability to choose our pregnancy and it happen relatively quickly, our great health insurance that allowed us comfort and support throughout this devastatingly frustrating process of testing and unknowns, the familial support we’ve had from our parents who are nearby and have been so wonderful to us throughout and the great love and support we have given each other as partners during life changing times. I cannot stress how lonely and scary this process can be and already has been for me to some degree despite all these strengths in place. I am now more than ever so empathetic towards the billions of women going through this experience and sincerely hope everyone around them will show up in whatever ways they can, some ideas for that below.
Ways we can support women before and during pregancy
Initiating regular check-in’s, bring up the conversation yourself (for example- how have you been feeling about getting pregnant? any fears you want to share with me? what’s the experience been like lately being pregnant?)
Respecting what women want to share or don’t want to share
Escorting women to their doctor appointments (even if you have to FaceTime from the car)
Trying to understand what they feel, do not try to suggest other ways of feeling. (ex. well at least you know you can get pregnant.)
Don’t be afraid to share your own pregnancy experiences, but ask how they feel about you sharing and remember everyone’s experience is different.
Avoid judging their behaviors like exercise, drinking coffee/wine, eating sushi, soft cheeses, etc (if your so concerned read this book and still avoid the judgment please)
Always ask open ended questions that allow women to respond how they feel without being lead (ex. oh but you’re going to try to avoid a c-section right? vs. oh what are your thoughts on birth so far?)
Don’t touch someone’s stomach, don’t even ask to honestly.
Only give your feedback or opinion when explicitly asked for it.
When someone tells you they are pregnant, just say congratulations, nothing else is necessary.
that crevice between all knowing and knowing what I do know is where my faith must flourish.
Some final thoughts
This post has been long and detailed, and even if you weren’t interested in reading the entire thing I am really grateful to have processed all of what’s happened so far. I promise to continue to be as authentic as I can about my experiences entering into motherhood, but I always encourage any consumer of lifestyle blogs to take everything said with a hefty dose of reality. Writing about my life and creating beautiful content around it makes me happy, but it’s not by any means a fully accurate picture of what my full life entails and most certainly does not reflect the day to day hustle of life before and I am most certain after entering into this new stage. I have been so grateful for the real words behind the most inspiring imagery so many women in this space have shared as I am attempting to do as well. I don’t know if this will be my forever way of expressing myself and documenting certain parts of my life, but it brings me great joy now. Consume with caution, however, because no life is picture perfect, nor any of our journeys.
