Becoming A Mother

My husband woke me gently, “It snowed.” It was already after 9 a.m., unusually late for me. The light coming in the window was brighter than usual, amplified by the half foot of snow on the ground and I felt a rush of excitement. We were living in North Texas, where snow like that comes once a decade.

But as reality settled in, my excitement gave way to heaviness: the day before I’d had my second D&C in a year’s time, to remove a baby that had died in utero. “Missed abortion,” it’s called when the fetus dies but the woman’s body doesn’t expel it on its own. What a terrible term for it, when my babies were wanted so very much.

My heart ached, despite the balm of white outside.

“I know in today’s world of scientific interventions and technological advances, it can be hard to believe, but the truth still is, you do the wild thing, you get pregnant,” my OB had said with a chuckle almost four years earlier when I’d asked bewilderedly, “How?” after she’d confirmed my first pregnancy. In that moment, I realized I’d never spent even one minute of my life imagining what motherhood might be like for me, despite the fact that getting pregnant had been a conscious decision for my husband and me. He was a natural with kids, and after five years of marriage — three of them living and traveling overseas — we both thought, “Well, now what?” It took a few months to get pregnant, but the pregnancy had gone smoothly and ended in the birth of my first son, Gideon, now a beautiful blond-haired, blue-eyed three-year-old who loved cars, trains, and playing naked in our backyard.

I loved being pregnant. It felt truly miraculous that another life was growing inside of me. I had no morning sickness, or extreme swelling or discomfort. I had to take iron, got nosebleeds (a less-common, but normal side effect), and eventually had to deal with heartburn. We didn’t find out the baby’s sex — I loved the feeling of it just being, ephemeral and unlabeled. We narrowed our name list down to three or four of each gender.

It was also terrifying at times, though, the weight of keeping this life inside of me safe. And try as I might, I could not see what life with the baby on the outside would look like. The night after Gideon was born, I lay awake watching him in his hospital crib most of the night, not out of love, but out of fear. I was terrified of him. Just what exactly was I supposed to do with him?

“I think he may be cold,” I told my husband as I re-wrapped the swaddle on Gideon, placed him in the co-sleeping “nest” between our pillows and pulled our blanket up just to his waist. Thirty minutes later, I had him un-swaddled with the thermometer under his armpit: maybe he was getting too hot? I don’t remember how many times we took his temperature that first night home from the hospital. I had no confidence in myself to know how to care for this tiny baby.

That was the beginning of my sleeplessness. My nights were spent lying awake waiting for the baby to cry. My days were spent holding him constantly. Eventually, when I followed an older neighbor’s advice to “start putting that baby down for his naps,” I would alternate between waiting for him to fall asleep and waiting for him to wake up—always, always anxiously awaiting the crying that I felt useless at calming.

Nothing could have prepared me for the utter desolation wrought by the extended sleeplessness of the newborn days and I’d experienced frequent bouts of insomnia for most of my adulthood. I was someone who tended to undertake things I already knew I would be good at and at 32, I thought I should be able to apply other life lessons to this endeavor and breeze through it. But it became apparent quickly that nothing I had done before could help me care for this tiny, vulnerable human being, while also at the mercy of the hormonal ebbs and flows of post-pregnancy. His cries, my inability to soothe them, and the anger I felt at this tiny baby when my efforts to assuage him went unappreciated made me question everything I thought I knew about myself. I worried all the time that I was failing miserably as a parent, that I was ruining this baby, that everyone around me could see that I was ruining this child. The truth is that I worried more about my sleep loss and what others thought of me than I did about my baby.

“People, all over the world, join hands, join the love train,” Keb’ Mo’ sang loudly from our stereo, as he did every afternoon at 5, the “witching hour.” I held Gideon to my chest and we twirled around the living room, putting my two-stepping skills to work to a kids’ sing-along album. The weight of the day settled in on him and the crying became inconsolable - his and mine. We were tired and fed up with each other. During the day, I had nursed him, held him, swaddled him, laid him down, picked him up, carried him around, swung on the porch swing, taken a stroll, laid him on his play mat, and nursed him some more. He had cried, dozed, slept, squirmed, screamed, nursed, cried, kicked his legs, watched the cat and the ceiling fan, and nursed some more. I could see the driveway from our dance floor in the living room, and I watched it intently for my husband’s car. I sang the word “love” urgently, desperately, willing it to pour forth from me and worrying that it never would. In that first hard year of motherhood, I swore there would be no other children coming — ever.

I was curling my hair in my in-laws bathroom. Gideon was seven months old, and we had travelled the eight hours to my in-laws home to celebrate my father-in-law’s graduation from college, at the age of 54. I felt particularly vulnerable and exposed, parenting in front of my mother-in-law — a mother of four, who had so far offered this nugget of parenting wisdom: “My kids just always ate when they were hungry, and slept when they were tired.”

I was using the toilet one last time before departing when I found blood in my underwear, my period’s first appearance since giving birth. I was beside myself and I demanded my husband’s private counsel. I launched into a self-pitying soliloquy about how tired I was, how terrible it was that now of all times my period should return. I didn’t want to go to the ceremony. My husband quietly, but sternly responded, “I took care of Gideon during your sister’s baby shower last month without complaint. You can be here and do this for me so that I can attend this and celebrate with my dad.” In the ten years we’d been together, he’d never spoken that way to me; it turned out to be what I needed to snap me out of the downward spiral I’d been in.

Around this time, I also read Surrendering to Motherhood by Iris Krasnow. She related the moment she finally knew that as long as her mindset was “I shouldn’t have to be doing this,” she was going to be miserable when she was on her hands and knees picking scrambled egg out of carpet. She realized in that moment that if she stopped railing against her current circumstances and accepted them, life would actually be better. For the first time in my life, I began to understand and embrace the idea that this phase of my life was not about me: it was the first time I’d truly endeavored putting someone else first.

Finally giving myself completely over to the role of mother, combined with exiting the intensity of the early months of motherhood improved my outlook and began softening my heart. The latter half of that first year was full of Gideon’s smiles and movement and talking, and I discovered a companion in him. I spent hours outside watching him crawl-push his trucks around the driveway. Inside, he’d meticulously line up every Hot Wheels car he had. Somewhere around 18 months in, I started to warm to the idea of another child. I realized additional companions might not be so terrible.

It took several months, but in the spring after my firstborn’s second birthday, we discovered we were pregnant. When I went in for my first sonogram, I was told the heartbeat was a little slower than expected, but it could just be part of moving into the next phase of development. I was sent home to wait to be checked again in two weeks. Of course, I Googled “slow heartbeat at eight weeks” and found very little to encourage me. I agonized, imagining often throughout the days that followed that the baby’s heartbeat had just stopped for good, never knowing entirely. At that next appointment, there was no heartbeat and I hated that I was not attuned enough to my body, my baby, to know the moment it had stopped for sure.

My son was old enough to understand when we’d told him another baby was coming. It was hard to have to tell him it was no longer going to happen: “It wasn’t strong enough to live outside of mama’s body,” we told him. “That just happens sometimes with babies.” We knew the statistics ourselves - a third of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. This was hard, but it wasn’t uncommon. We could try again.

By the time I got pregnant again just a few months later, Gideon had started asking for a little brother or sister. We announced the pregnancy to our family by putting him in a “best big brother” t-shirt, after an encouraging first doctor’s visit around eight weeks along. At that appointment, my doctor told me that normally she’d wait until twelve weeks to have me come back, but she knew I was anxious, so she scheduled me for a visit at ten weeks.

My son went with my husband and me for that second appointment, eager to see pictures of our new baby on the little “television” screen we’d told him about. He was chattering excitedly as the doctor put the wand of the small bedside sonogram machine to my belly in the exam room. He kept chattering as the doctor continued pushing the wand across my belly, searching. The silence of the adults in the room didn’t faze him. He seemed oblivious to how intently we all stared at the monitor. My doctor quietly said we were going to need to go to the sonogram room for a full sonogram because she was having trouble finding the heartbeat.

Gideon continued chattering, “Where’s the baby? Is that it right there?”

“Gideon, be quiet!” I snapped. I hadn’t been prepared for this. I had borne my loss already.

There was no heartbeat. What was supposed to be an appointment to calm my nerves and reassure me ended in a counseling session with my doctor, in which we arranged for another D&C, and she offered, “Your son will be the one to get you through this. Focus on him. I know it’s hard but be patient with him.”

Telling him that yet another baby had not survived broke me: I realized I’d never before in my life wanted something for someone else so much. I wanted to give him that sibling he was asking for. The illusion of control in my life was shattered: I could not make this happen for my son.

The morning I awoke to snow was the day before my thirty-sixth birthday and my husband and I had planned to have dinner out to celebrate it early. We’d sent Gideon to stay with my parents for a few days and decided to try a French restaurant in town we’d heard about. Somehow that evening, despite slick, icy road conditions, the restaurant chose to be open. My husband and I spent the evening eating delicious food and reminiscing about all the amazing places we’d been and food we’d eaten before becoming parents. The nights of karaoke rooms in Korea, the night at open-air bar and dance club in the jungles of the Krabi peninsula in Thailand, the meal on the train in China where the dining car chef helped us order by animal sound, sharing vodka on the Trans-Siberian train with the Russian pilot who said he’d learned how to shoot down Americans in the Cold War, the meal at the small rural French Inn where I learned how to use an empty mussel shell to eat the other mussels.

The first years of parenthood are so all-consuming, a parent loses themselves for a time as they give themselves over to the care of a helpless person, entirely dependent upon them for their survival. That night, my husband and I remembered what we’d been before, how those experiences had shaped us, stayed with us, made us who we were at that time, and we realized we hadn’t lost all of those things in the past three years.

Life is a collection of phases, a book of chapters. Some chapters are full of world travel, while some contain a world as small as our 1400 square foot home. Some chapters are about change. That evening, we realized it was time for a change, time to undertake a new adventure: we would accept the east coast move we’d been half-heartedly contemplating for my husband’s work. We needed a new start.

I slept well that night and woke up excited the next morning, my thirty-sixth birthday. I was ready to have my son back with us; I wanted him to see the snow before it melted since it had not snowed at my parents’ house. I realized everything I saw was now filtered through wondering what he would think about it. I wanted to show him everything. Mothering had not come naturally, but it seemed it had come nonetheless.

We called my parents and moved up our pickup time to have him back at home by early afternoon. The roads were clear and passable, but the trees were still heavy with snow that came up to my son’s calves when he stepped into it the first time. He crawled in it, rolled in it, and helped build his first snowman. His favorite, though, was the snow ice cream we made to go along with my birthday cupcake.

Just six weeks later, we would uproot ourselves and move halfway across the country to the east coast, starting fresh and leaving behind as much as we could of our loss. My son would get to play in snow several times a winter there, and maybe, just maybe even get that sibling he wanted so much, that I now wanted so much for him.

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