Baby Love (4 page)

Went to see the Tibetan doctor I have been trying to get an appointment with for months. She’s in town for only four or five days every two weeks. Her office was in a cramped suite at the top of a dark stair in a nondescript building on an exceedingly plain street. I chatted a little with a woman in a wheelchair in the waiting room, who told me she has been seeing the doctor for years and swears by her. Everyone else I talk to about her says the same thing. That she comes from a long line of doctors—her father is one of the Dalai Lama’s private physicians—and she’s incredible.

After forty-five minutes, she appeared and invited me into the inner office. I sat at the foot of the examination table in a wooden chair and told her I was pregnant and super-nauseated and super-tired and maybe just a tiny bit more anxious than usual. She nodded and took my pulse. Then I said, Well, maybe I am way more anxious than usual, and a bit depressed, and she nodded again and asked me to stick out my tongue. She asked me a few more questions about my diet and what times of the day I feel best and worst.

Then she said that there is still a chance I can lose the baby, and that I should keep my stomach and the rest of my body warm. She gave me a list of warming foods to eat, and herbal pellets to quiet the nausea, ease the anxiety, and clear my system of damp, cold, and clogging elements. She told me to make a drink of pomegranate juice, ginger tea, and honey, and to take 300 mg of liquid magnesium a day. She said I should consider going off the antidepressant.

Uh, really?

When I came out carrying my little silk bags of herbs and a sheaf of instructions, Glen was waiting for me. He was skeptical about the herbs. He wanted to make sure they wouldn’t hurt the baby. I got upset and told him that this doctor has been treating people for years and years and that I didn’t think she would give me something that would damage the baby. I told him what she said about the antidepressant, and he said I should choose one doctor and follow him or her. He said that all of this doctor-hopping was really just a manifestation of my fear of my life changing and how overwhelming and uncontrollable it all is. He said that if I am not careful, I could end up hurting myself or the baby, or both.

I burst into tears.

He may be right, but it’s weird to have to listen to someone else’s concerns about what I do with my body. Even though I get theoretically that it’s Glen’s baby, too, at the moment it’s still a bit abstract. Yesterday he reminded me, after I called the baby mine one too many times, that I
am
appearing on national TV and radio promoting my latest book on masculinity and saying that men need to be more involved with every aspect of domestic life and women need to let them.

Which made me wonder, am I being a hypocrite when I think, Just let me deal with the baby in my body, you go get food and protect me while I’m doing it? It feels sacrilegious to think it, blasphemous to write it down, but maybe there is something to this whole biology thing.

Needless to say, I had a splitting headache by the time I got home. I took three of my new pellets, one of each kind. I had to crack one of them open with my teeth and chew it up. It tasted like dirt mixed with, I don’t know, cyanide?

 

 

I HAVE BEEN sleeping for eight hours and now I am
starving.
I find the incessant desire to eat, no matter how shitty I am feeling, both fascinating and annoying. It’s as if the baby doesn’t care what I am going through, she’s going to make it here no matter what.

On what I can already tell is going to be the first of many outings in search of pregnancy clothes that don’t make me look like an infantilized suburban housewife, today I went to a shop called Japanese Weekend. It was recommended by one of my more stylish friends, and so it was in anticipation of the Prada of maternity wear that I made my way up Powell Street. What I found was a modest shop with six or seven racks of black, white, denim, and khaki pants and one Asian-styled top in several cheery prints.

At first I was disappointed. I just couldn’t get excited about the same plain pants in four colors, all with a thick elastic band around the waist. But then Blanca, the very gentle and attentive saleswoman, suggested I try the pants in a small changing room and nodded approvingly at my reflection when I did. As she admired, I berated myself for being such a snob. The pants were fantastic, and I decided in a matter of seconds that I was never taking them off.

In my determination to “network with other moms to ensure the success of my baby,” as advised by the editors of the
Fit Pregnancy
magazine I scoured in my ob/gyn’s waiting room, I started talking to the other trying-to-stay-cool mamas trying on pants. One woman was five months “along” and had a gigantic one-year-old knocked out in a stroller. Even though she couldn’t stop herself from telling me that her son was in the ninety-fifth percentile for weight and height for his age group, I was terribly impressed with this mom. She was dressed casually, in a simple black T-shirt and jeans, and had her dark, curly hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was confident and friendly and seemed very down to earth. She had great cheekbones and lovely lips that were lightly rouged.

Because she wasn’t the total mess I expect a woman with a baby in a stroller and one on the way to be, I asked for her secret. She said humor and a stay-at-home husband. Then she began extolling the virtues of the Japanese Weekend pant, namely the elastic band that sits below the belly and can be folded over in the later months. I fell more in love with her when she called the pants she was looking for a “piece,” and then pulled the pants she thought would be good for me from the sale rack.

The second mom-to-be to share the mirror was a little more high-strung. She looked like a corporate lawyer on her lunch break, and she tore through the options Blanca handed her with alacrity. We asked each other what I have surmised to be the stock mom-to-be questions: How many months, is this your first, do you know if it’s a girl or a boy, and have you picked a name? She was four months pregnant with her first, a girl, with no name. When I congratulated her and said, “Oh how exciting, you’re having a girl!” she grimaced and said, “Well, I don’t know, girls are easier in the beginning but much harder later on. You know, the whole mother-daughter thing.” I was so shocked by her candor that I just nodded and ducked back into the dressing cubicle. But I can’t stop thinking about what she said. I just want my baby to be healthy, but I know what she means.

Mother’s Day.

Went with my mother to see a documentary about a guy who eats McDonald’s food for thirty days. After the film, I told her that I’ve been feeling depressed, and she told me she was depressed throughout her pregnancy. She said that she always assumed it was because she was isolated in Mississippi, where I was born and where she was working with my father in the civil rights movement, but maybe it was hormonal and genetically so. She said she was practically suicidal, and there were days and days she couldn’t get out of bed. She said between the nausea (check) and the depression (double check), she almost lost her mind.

When I spoke with my father on the phone last night, he confirmed her memory. I asked how he dealt with it, and he said, Well, it was hard. Then he told me a story I’d never heard:

My mother wanted to go to Mexico after her first trimester because she was convinced that the sun and getting out of Mississippi would make her feel better. The only problem was that they didn’t have any money. So my father put their car, the VW Bug his mother bought him when he graduated from law school, up for sale.
Your car?
I screech. You sold
your car
to go on a trip to Mexico? He laughs, not quite able to believe it, either. We lived in a suburb. My father’s office was blocks and blocks away, as was the grocery store and just about everything else. He said it seemed so important to my mother, and he knew he could get a loaner from work. So they sold the Bug and went to Mexico, where they bought two paintings by the now famous Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo and got nauseated riding on public buses careening around mountain curves.

I asked my father if my mother’s depression lifted as a result of the trip. I think I remember a picture of her in Mexico, wearing a red-and-white serape and a huge smile. He is silent for a long moment. You know, Rebec, I can’t remember. I don’t think so.

Shit.

I broke the bank today at the market. I bought three different kinds of prenatal vitamins, two bottles of nausea-quelling ginger syrup, a box of healthy-pregnancy tea, two whole cooked chickens, two dozen eggs, bunches and bunches of kale, spinach, and broccoli, a huge piece of halibut, two containers of tuna, two Caesar salads, two containers each of blueberries and strawberries, tomatoes, carrots, and about six different kinds of organic chocolate, including a pound of fruit-sweetened chocolate-covered raisins. I have no doubt that if I had more arms, time, and money, I would have filled five more carts. I can’t tell if I was hungry, slightly manic, or revved up with pregnancy hormones.

I rushed home to meet Sonam, my potential midwife, whom I have known for years and always imagined delivering my baby. She arrived with her granddaughter asleep in a stroller just as I was unpacking the last grocery bag, took her shoes off, and asked if she could brush her teeth. Then we sat around my kitchen table with a calendar trying to figure out how pregnant I am. I told her Dr. Lowen’s estimate of eight weeks from the ultrasound, and that I think I am more like ten weeks. She took notes about how I have been feeling (tired, nauseated, depressed) while I made tea and devoured a container of tuna and a whole box of crackers.

When her granddaughter woke up, we shifted into the bedroom and talked some more while the baby went around the bedroom picking up my shoes and letting them fall to the floor with a boom that made her laugh. It was great to have a real live baby in the house, a prelude to what is to come. Since Sonam is a friend of both my mother and me, and because she asked, I told her that my mom wasn’t as enthusiastic as I had hoped. She told me to remember that whatever is going on with my mother has nothing to do with me, and that babies have a way of transforming families. She also said depression is common, especially in the first trimester, and that I should boost my vitamin B intake to help.

Then, get this, I lay down on
my very own
bed, and she felt my stomach, measuring the size of my uterus by counting thumb-widths from my belly button. The second she put her hands on my belly, I knew that I wanted her to deliver the baby. It was like she was talking to the baby with her hands, and the baby was listening. And I felt so safe, like I could fall apart and scream and cry and freak out with her, and she would know what to do.

Lying there, I thought more about how much I want to have this baby at home. The one video of a birth I have seen is of a woman giving birth to her baby in a hot tub with just her husband attending. She goes into labor and she’s totally calm, doing deep breathing and walking around their house looking like she’s in another dimension. As the contractions get more intense, she hangs on her husband’s shoulders and he massages her back. Then she gets into the hot tub and out comes the baby, looking unbothered and serene.

My mother said she wished that my birth could have been like that, instead of in the newly desegregated hospital with the doctor she didn’t like, who gave her an episiotomy she may not have needed. My mother’s experience haunts me. I am terrified of being cut. Episiotomy, C-section, I just don’t want to be lying there helpless and at the mercy of a bunch of doctors in a hurry to get to their golf game.

I flew to Seattle yesterday to keynote the annual benefit dinner for the Northwest Women’s Law Center. I talked about how since I’ve been pregnant, I’ve been more concerned than ever about the need for people in politics and the public eye to have healthy personal lives. So often the momentous cultural work happens at the expense of family and sustained intimacy with loved ones. I saw a lot of heads nodding as I spoke, and several couples came up afterward to talk about their experiences trying to keep their families together in the midst of giving so much of themselves to the work they care about.

I met some interesting people at the dinner, including a judge who told me about the evisceration of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the loveliest woman who was seven months pregnant. Of course we had a pregnancy moment because I can’t stop myself from telling every single person I meet my news, and pregnant women? Forget it. It’s all I can do not to grab them and sit them down in a corner somewhere to pump them for info about the road ahead. The vast, miraculous wilderness of gestation is my new frontier. I’m looking ahead, gathering provisions. I think I’m becoming a mother.

The woman’s name was Anna and this is her second pregnancy; she lost her first child last year to a rare disease. She had sadness in her eyes for the one she lost, but excitement in her laugh for the one to come. I got choked up talking to her. She was inspiring and vulnerable, and I wanted to hug her and take care of her and marvel at her. I was a mess. She lost her child, and then summoned the faith to do it all over again. How do human beings do it?

Stayed up all night finishing a book review of a new Audre Lorde biography I agreed to write months ago. What a fascinating life. At one point she had a husband, two kids, and a wife—my kind of woman! But she also had major issues: a raging temper, self-absorption that wasn’t easy on her kids or lovers. I am determined to live in a way that puts my baby first. I would rather not have a child than subject another human being to eking out an identity in the wake of unbridled narcissism.

But are narcissists aware of their narcissism? I could be going along la-di-da, thinking everything is fine, oblivious to how my choices are impacting my child. I have to rely on Glen to keep me on track. Last night he told me for the umpteenth time that being a parent is easy if you put the needs of the children first. If we can figure out what is best for them and do that, he says, we’ll be okay.