#267: There’s nothing like the first time (and thank god)

A motherhood update

Some time last summer, Avi and I decided to stop using birth control. Although people like to say this is equivalent to “trying for a baby,” it felt dramatically less pointed. We’d decided we wanted another baby, yes, but the decision seemed to exist in some fantastical future: a sibling for Sunny, a more populated family dynamic, etc. In the harsh light of the present, “another baby” felt increasingly insane. Another one? All that all over again? And why would we do that? Our commitment was shaky in the vein of a promise to get coffee some time. We refused to go all in. Letting fate decide, meanwhile, beheld a certain romance.

Due to my personality, I spent the next four months calculating when I was ovulating, comparing this to when we’d had sex, and doing ridiculous mathematical predictions involving the likelihood that I could get pregnant despite these dates not matching up very well. My vigilance for early signs of pregnancy during each “two-week wait” passed through me like an unfriendly ghost. I was surprised to find that, this time, my ambivalence regarding the outcome had no impact on my willingness to fixate on the outcome. This finding brought me a certain satisfaction: The impatience, rather than being endemic to me and my desires, was in fact endemic to the process. Thank god it wasn’t my fault (save this for my tombstone). Also, I did not get pregnant.

In the fall, we restarted birth control as we had an important faraway wedding to attend in August the following year that we didn’t want to miss. Unfortunately, this left me with plenty of time to revisit the pros and cons of having another. The long-term benefits were clear; it was the short-term challenges I dreaded, and perhaps wondered if I didn’t deserve. Sunny was two years old, and I felt I was finally on the precipice—in fact I was always on the precipice—of “refinding myself.” And wasn’t it a little wrong to enter another pregnancy reluctantly? It didn’t help that we were on a hard streak: nearly a year of inconsistent sleep and shoddy health capped off by a holiday-cancelling case of RSV for all three of us. “Like…we can’t do this again,” one of us said to the other through a tissue, eyes at half mast after finally getting the toddler down. At the very least, we ought to wait a while. The other nodded.

Then we had a serene and charming January. Sleeping a lot, dancing around the living room, everything a laugh. The new year arrived like a damp cloth swept across our dusty indecision: What had we been so worried about? We were great at this! Perhaps destined to do it more. Our cheery delusion aside, this struck me as reassuring. Surely people who didn’t want another would come to the inverse conclusion, reasoning in good times that it was better not to mess with what was working. Instead, our optimism begot more optimism. Suddenly, all our former doubt felt like a kind of theater—a little play we’d felt it prudent to perform, but never truly believed. Around my next ovulation, I caught another cold, but it was mild, and our attitudes prevailed. There was always next round. But fate intervened: I was pregnant by the end of the month.

The second time

I spent the first two weeks of my pregnancy laser-focused on an imminent debilitation that would mirror my first pregnancy: nausea, bone-deep exhaustion, flu-like symptoms that lasted for months—all undoubtedly around the corner. When I explained to my sister that those first days felt like a countdown to hell, she rebuked me. “Stop willing it! Why are you willing it?” I flushed with shame, then defended myself: I wasn’t willing it, I was trying to prepare emotionally, psychologically, and logistically. I’d pre-written newsletters and planned other backup content in case I couldn’t work; I’d purchased nausea medication and researched hidden-protein meal ideas; I’d warned Avi about how much slack he’d have to pick up. I was thrilled and grateful to be pregnant—had cried with Avi under our duvet as the sun came up the morning I got the positive test—but I was also very scared.

When the first waves of queasiness arrived in February, I felt a little smug. See? I told you, I said to the enemy in my mind. Then, incredibly, it never got worse. In fact, my medication eventually knocked out what little nausea I felt, and aside from a handful of hard days, I spent the next six weeks stunned by my lack of symptoms. No bone-deep exhaustion or flu-like agony, no hand bruises from anemia or dark bags under my eyes. No nightmares involving chicken; I could eat salad without gagging. I didn’t feel wonderful, but I didn’t want to die.

This was perhaps the first iteration of the lesson I was (and remain) fated to learn: This time would be different. In the case of my wildly improved first trimester, this lesson was fairly literal. But I think it would have tracked in the abstract, too. Even if I’d suffered as much as last time, or more, I’m no longer the person I was. My sister’s accusation that I was willing my own misery may have proved incorrect—in truth, I’d failed to will it—but what I think she understood that I couldn’t yet see was that I wasn’t starting over. I was doing something new, with experience this time.

Doing something for the second time may seem very similar to doing something for the first time. After all, it’s merely n+1. But in the case of having kids or anything as monumental, these are worlds apart. I don’t mean everything is better the second time. I mean everything feels different without first-time fear. Looking back on my most brutal entry-points to motherhood—the first trimester, the birth, the first month postpartum, the first ER trip, the first sleep regression, the constant merciless change to my everyday life, the newfound distance between me and friends without kids—it’s now hard to parse how much of my suffering sprang from the precise details of those experiences versus the terror of courting the unknown. The shock, the panic, the flailing in the dark. What will it all feel like without that? I’m four months in and the difference is already surreal. It’s true what they say, that there’s nothing like the first time—and that’s a good thing.

More of it

Last week, in a dark, quiet room downtown, an ultrasound technician measured our second baby’s organs and bones. Avi and I watched her little heart flutter, made note of one hand curled into a tiny fist up by her face, like Sunny’s was when she was born. Little sister is due in October.

I’ve gone through various phases over the last 18 weeks, from blithely confident to forgivably nervous, but one sentiment has remained steadfast: Having another baby feels cosmically correct. Maybe my suggestion that our former uncertainty was all a performance is just a retcon that suits the narrative. Or it might just be true that commitment generates confidence. Sitting in indecision has a way of keeping you in conversation with the threats of every path; once you choose, you get to focus on all the beauty. Another one? All that all over again? We must be the luckiest people alive.

Me & everything Sunny said the afternoon we told her I was pregnant

There’s an element of romance to this perspective. When I think about the potentially difficult years ahead, I feel none of the dread I once felt (and expected to feel) in anticipation of a second, although maybe I should. Instead, I feel accepting, in a galaxy-brained sort of way, of all that’s to come. Yes, the first two years of Sunny’s life were long and difficult, but they were also full of non-stop laughter and heart-bursting wonder and falling in love. And now she’s telling us funny stories and zipping ahead of us on her scooter, and my friends without kids are in awe: Didn’t I just give birth to her?

It’s fitting, in hindsight, that my final wave of doubt about having another kid crashed over me mere weeks before I got pregnant. Call it an extinction burst. I’d missed New Year’s Eve with my friends, stuck at home doing RSV triage. A huge part of my resistance to having another lay in this very tension: Maybe if I didn’t have a second baby, I could finally get back to the life where showing up to a party didn’t require so many contingencies. But that life, for me, had become a kind of myth. I was no longer sure I knew what it looked like, or if I even wanted it. Moving forward, no surprise, had nothing to do with going back. It was about committing to my present reality, finally, and realizing I wanted more of it.

Last week’s 15 things included two of my favorite articles I’ve read this year.

The rec of the week was: The best men’s crew socks.

Thank you for joining my podcast foray into Healing Back Pain by John E Sarno!!

Happy Mother’s Day,
Haley