Baby Love Read online

  The pictures were incredible. Carl was young and cute, with long, braided hippie hair and an embroidered denim shirt. In the pictures, he’s rubbing his wife’s back and holding her hand and kissing her. She’s lying down, fully naked and fully pregnant, surrendering to the process first on her back, then on her side, then on all fours when the baby is ready to come out. The room is dim so the baby won’t be shocked, and Carl’s first child, Tomas, who was four or five, holds a flashlight so they can take pictures.

  Martine and Carl sent me home with something called The Birth Book, a collection of birth stories published by a midwifery collective Carl worked with in the seventies. After reading the stories of ten or fifteen women and their partners and midwives, I feel more than ever that I want to have a home birth. I can’t imagine having the baby in a hospital. I just don’t see how lying flat on your back can possibly be the best way to have a baby. I mean, for starters, it works against gravity.

  May 4

  I had my first official prenatal appointment today. It was like being on a conveyor belt at the baby-making factory. I was weighed, my urine tested, and seven vials of blood were extracted from my arm. I was asked about my mother’s health, my father’s, sister’s, and brother’s. Then back to the beginning for Glen’s family info. The doctor briefly skipped a rock across the ocean of my diet, instructing me to avoid shellfish, raw eggs, and one other thing that I now cannot remember. Then she prescribed a prenatal vitamin and handed me several sample packets of the enormous bright purple pill. She did a quick vaginal exam, apparently the only one I am going to have until I go into labor, and then the whole thing was over.

  The appointment took about twenty-five minutes and she never looked at or touched my stomach. There wasn’t time or opportunity to discuss the creeping depression I’ve been feeling, or how concerned I am about my life changing, or my fear that I won’t be able to handle it all. I mean, technically there was. She did ask how I was feeling, but we were going along at such a clip, I couldn’t imagine what would happen if I bogged things down with my actual thoughts. She did say she had several patients who stayed on antidepressants through their pregnancies with no side effects whatsoever. That was helpful, considering I’ve been gnashing my teeth to stubs every night worrying about the implications of taking them: Am I going to burn in hell or give my kid epilepsy?

  She also said, somewhere in between the questions about my family’s health history and the exam, that she’s looking forward to delivering my baby. And that she hopes I won’t do something silly, like have a home birth.

  Uh-huh.

  After the prenatal, I indulged in my bimonthly luxury of getting my eyebrows and toes done. Just as I was lying down, Yelena, who has been in charge of my eyebrows for the last three years, asked how old I am and if I am planning to have children. I hesitated just a second too long, trying to figure out how to answer, and she said, You’re pregnant! And I said, Yes, and she said, I knew it! And then we both laughed and I told her how nauseated and tired and freaked out I am, and she told me about her clients who come in to the salon the day before their due date to get a Brazilian bikini wax. Apparently, they want to look good for the doctors. By the time I left, my toes were a lovely lilac and I was laughing my head off.

  May 6

  The mood swings are so intense. I woke up at four in the morning and scribbled this on the back of a paper bag:

  I am eight weeks pregnant and terrified. Each morning I wake up filled with a peculiar blend of dread and longing. Who am I, and what the hell is happening to me? Already I eat uncontrollably, craving foods I classified as off-limits years ago: huge balls of mozzarella, thick steaks dripping with blood, slice after slice of eggplant. After only eight weeks, my breasts are painful to the touch, my small nipples now engorged to twice their normal size and dark as blackberries. I cannot drive to the store without having to slow the car to twenty in a fifty-mile-per-hour zone, without pulling over at a gas station to let the ocean of nausea subside. To make matters worse, I can no longer get into my favorite pair of jeans, and my hard-won good posture, the result of hundreds of Alexander Technique lessons, seems frightfully on the sway. And oh yeah, forget about planes, which I have to board every other week to give lectures, readings, and writing workshops. Just the words “jet” and “fuel” send me running for the toilet.

  And that’s just my body. Far worse is what my mind is doing to me. In my worst moments, when I am seeing my patient and adoring partner as a modern-day Satan, and feeling as if I am going to be an unfit joke of a mother, I am certain that I am being invaded by alien intelligence, a force so powerful it can make me do things I otherwise would not, a force so totally in control of me, I may never know who I am again. And while daddy-to-be can make eggs and burn the turkey bacon just like I like it, he can’t really help with the psychological plunges I keep having to claw my way out of because after all, I am going to be this child’s mother, and heaven help me and her if I can’t figure out how to contain my anxiety about it. Right?

  Of course, being the writer and reader and info-junkie that we all are these days, I’ve bought a half-dozen books to try to get myself through this. I’ve scoured all 669,801 pages on the Internet on pregnancy and the first trimester, pregnancy and depression, pregnancy and emotions, pregnancy and anxiety, pregnancy and fear. They all, every one of them, allow for the kinds of mood swings I am having, they all say that everything I am feeling and thinking is normal, healthy, and won’t hurt the baby. But while the experts say what I want to hear, they still don’t seem to say it as adamantly as I need them to. They don’t say, Yes, you may feel as if you are going to lose your mind and there will be moments when you reconsider everything and think, after all this wanting and trying and hoping and thinking about names and strollers and birthing methods, that the only reasonable thing to do at this point is terminate the pregnancy.

  They don’t tell you that. Or if they do, they tell you in tones so soft and modest and reserved and professional that you want to scream at the page, the computer, the doctor, Yes, but do you understand that this whole thing is freaking me out? My life is about to change and I have no idea how to prepare? And do you know why they are calm and you are not? Because they don’t have to have this baby, you do. They are not going to be responsible for this being for the rest of their lives, you are. They are not going to lie in bed worrying about the week of doxycycline you took before you knew you were pregnant and whether or not the baby is going to have stained teeth that need forty thousand dollars’ worth of veneers. They are going to go home at the end of the day without carrying your baby with them. You will never be able to go home at the end of the day without carrying your baby again.

  Cheery, huh?

  May 7

  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, an
d 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.

  May 8

  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.

  May 9

  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.

  May 12

  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 to
ok 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.