Alternatively, this could be peculiar to the Hollywood area, where I live and write in various coffee shops and drop off dry cleaning and wander. I’m told the Midwest, the South, heck, even the Valley—those are great places for pregnant bonding.
Or, both of these theories could be bogus. In the classic horror movie
When a Stranger Calls
, the most chilling scene is when cops tell the terrorized babysitter, “The call is coming from inside the house.” There is a decent chance that this call is coming from inside my own haunted mind. Either I am unknowingly giving off a frosty vibe that turns off the strange women I’m hoping to befriend or I’m reading into this parade of pregnant girls some animosity that doesn’t exist.
Like I said, my social skills have never been great.
What if, with our giant bellies and off-kilter walks and vulnerable demeanors, we are simply used to being the center of attention, and we unconsciously despise sharing the spotlight?
In any case, this could all be solved with an ice-breaking secret handshake. Or if that’s too intimate, maybe we just throw up a sign, one finger per trimester, sideways, OG-style, and know for a sly, passing moment that we’re in the same crew.
One afternoon, I’m meeting one of my girlfriends for a movie, standing outside the theater. There is one other woman waiting there, who is also visibly pregnant. I’m pretty sure we’re even wearing the same black Gap maternity leggings. I try to make eye contact, but she looks away.
As people walk in and out of the movie theater, they notice us, a matched set, standing a few feet apart, and I can swear they are thinking, “Maybe you two should chat.” But we don’t. It’s a bizarre standoff, and when my pregnant friend Christy arrives, there are three of us and I’m sure this lady is going to make contact, maybe joke about how between the three of us, there are six trimesters. Or maybe she’ll say something about how we’ll all be spending the entire movie running to the bathroom, or eating buckets of popcorn. At the very least, can this woman eke out a “When are you guys due?”
No.
This is why I’m thankful I’ve latched onto my new crew. I have now made three new friends, simply because we are all pregnant at the same time. Hanging out with them feels both right and comfortable.
Christy is a friend of my friend Ben. Both are movie critics. She is a month behind me, heard about me from Ben, asked for my number and invited me out on a blind date for coffee, where we proceeded to talk for hours about vaginal tearing and finding day care. When you’re pregnant, you think almost exclusively about your condition, and desperately want to talk to other people who are right there with you, find out what’s on their registries or how much alcohol their doctor allows. You’ll want to commiserate about the time-consuming gestational diabetes test that involves drinking a cup of syrupy cola-type stuff and waiting an hour before having your blood drawn. You’ll want to compare pounds gained and appointments forgotten due to “baby brain.” You’ll get over any social phobias you may have had just to have someone to text about every doctor visit and symptom.
When my radio show went off the air, a magazine writer who had been a guest a few times wrote me to say he was sorry we got canceled, and that his wife was also pregnant.
“Really? Can I have her e-mail?” I wrote back. And that’s how I befriend Cassandra, who is months ahead of me, close to delivering.
Like me, she was never baby crazy, but she seems way more on top of things than I am. She sends me a list of birth doulas. She plans on using cloth diapers and having her placenta cooked and turned into tablets to stave off postpartum depression. I respect her hippie ways, and the fact that she has dedicated herself to learning about the foreign world of baby birthing while I sit around paralyzed like a pregnant fly in hardening amber. Also, she hates being pregnant and has gained fifty pounds, which I am on pace to do, and she makes me feel better about the fact that not every day is joyful or certain. There are moments I ask myself, “What have I gotten myself into?” and that’s a sentiment you can only share with other pregnant girls.
Jen, who has also done a few tours of duty hosting on basic cable, is a woman I met through Christy. She gets bonus points for also having a troubled relationship with her mom and being a few months older than I am.
Before being pregnant, I didn’t even know these women, and now I’m pretty sure I can’t go a day without contacting at least one of them.
At camp, in college, at my first newspaper job, at my first television writing job, I always fell in with a small, tight group and thought, “I love these people, and we’ll all be friends for life.” Now I’m lucky if I recognize their photos when they contact me on Facebook. The point is, going from city to city and job to job, I tend to get very close to people quickly and just as quickly move on, but in this case, we’ll all be moms together. We’ll still need each other. And that’s a bond that has to last.
Christy, Jen and I go to lunch together in Burbank one afternoon. The host gives us a special booth in the back with lots of room for our giant stomachs. We discuss baby names and stretch mark creams. It’s dark in that back room and cozy and I never want to leave there, just want to eat melted cheese off French onion soup and discuss baby stuff into the night in our dim womb of a booth. Plus, it’s pretty hard for me to get my unwieldy body back out, so the desire to stay there is both emotional and practical.
It’s a tale of two types of pregnant girls, the ones who are on your team and the others, on the visiting team, who stink eye you.
What’s amazing is that the rest of the world, they kiss your ass. The cashier at the grocery store smiles at you extra wide, the saleslady at the maternity store asks if you need some water, the receptionist at the chiropractor asks why you didn’t wear a sweater on a cold day.
This is, by far, the best thing about being pregnant.
Since I was little, I wanted the gold star, wanted to win the spelling bee, win at kick ball, win awards and otherwise prove myself in ways that were public and indisputable.
This is very simple, as far as psychological analyses go. My stepmother spent fifteen straight years convincing everyone that I was a chubby, devious, sloppy, rude, outcast loser who would never amount to anything. I just wanted to prove her wrong, and even though she’s been in the ground for five years now—ground I would tap dance on in a red dress if that wasn’t just a figure of speech and she wasn’t, in fact, cremated—I can’t stop trying to rub her cold, dead nose in her wrongness about me. It’s not a great raison d’être, having to excel in the world because my evil step-monster said I couldn’t. It’s exhausting and often results in failures feeling bigger than they are, and achievements causing a brief high that fades, leaving nothing but a gaping hunger for shinier gold stars.
For the first time, I can let go of all my trying.
The world is opening doors for me and holding my bags and rubbing my shoulders not because of anything I accomplished in my career but simply because I’m smack in the middle of this run-of-the-mill human rite of passage that makes people want to take care of you. The relief is like a Tums to my frontal lobe. I can relax and the world won’t forget me.
Biology has taken over. The attention I once chased was contingent on my being excellent, and that gave me everything from writer’s block to crippling stage fright. On my way to speak to two hundred people at a university one Friday night, I got out of a moving car because I was so petrified of performing. I spent twenty minutes on the side of the road reciting affirmations from a book called
Stop Obsessing
before I could get back in the car. When I used to do live hits for a national news show, I would shake so badly it was hard to hold the mic still while covering a parade or interviewing Brad Pitt. Now, my body is doing something cool without my mind’s help, and everywhere I go the belly is buying me 27 percent more human kindness. Despite the worsening discomfort, this makes me want to be pregnant forever.
The effect is so pronounced that being in my car, where other drivers can’t see that I’m pregnant, is confusing.
When a car doesn’t let me merge, I find myself momentarily shocked at not being given the right of way. I start to feel like I should be allowed my own siren, to snap on top of my car so I can speed home when I have to pee, which is all the time. Some malls have a few parking spots designated for “expecting moms,” which makes me feel like I should have my own space everywhere I go, because my feet are swollen and, c’mon, it’s
me
, with child. I should be allowed to speed, go through stop signs, park when there’s street cleaning, drive in the carpool lane and forget to signal. Everyone should clear out when I’m trying to exit the clogged parking lot at Trader Joe’s. I’m making a baby, and everyone should make a big deal out of it, and take care of me, and know just by looking at my car that there’s precious cargo inside and thus the rules, like my pants, should have plenty of give. It’s a peculiar mix of entitlement and fragility.
I wonder if other women feel like this when they’re in their cars, if they feel weak and protective and huge and hulking all at the same time.
That’s why we need each other, to make sure we aren’t insane. Sure, women have been doing this forever, but that doesn’t matter at all when you’re a rookie. When you’re standing at the plate facing a ninety-mile-an-hour pitch in front of a packed stadium, it doesn’t matter at all that every big leaguer before you has been there. That fastball is still coming at you, and the stakes are painfully high. Even if your dugout is just a booth at a restaurant in Burbank littered with breadstick crumbs, you’ve been drafted, and you better make some friends on the team. At the moment of truth you’re out there alone, but before you step up to the plate, you can get some scouting reports, a pinch of chewing tobacco and an encouraging pat on the butt. They may not help you get on base, but they know exactly how the butterflies feel.
seventeen
A Cut Above (the Anus)
L
et me throw these two words at you: fecal incontinence.
Now that I’m six months pregnant, I have finally gotten around to taking a break from worrying about what kind of mother I’m going to be in order to get to the urgent business of stone-cold panicking about how this Buster kid is getting out of me, and what damage he might do as he leaves. At my last doctor visit, we had the episiotomy talk, and now I can’t stop thinking about the potential slicing of my privates, or the uncontrolled tearing, or the aforementioned fecal freaking incontinence, which happens to some women after childbirth.
According to Rod Stewart, “the first cut is the deepest,” but I think it’s safe to say any cut that might lead to bowel leakage is the deepest, at least emotionally and spiritually.
First- and second-trimester concerns now seem almost quaint in their solvability. Nauseous? Enjoy some ginger chews and pop some B
12
. Leg cramps? Stretch your calves before bed and eat a banana. Your baby’s head is too big to exit your vagina? Slice open the area between your anus and vulva, stitch it back up, and hope you don’t end up with the inability to control the seepage of gas and stools from your bowels due to a torn sphincter.
Perhaps I was intentionally fuzzy on the episiotomy thing. I wasn’t ready to know about my perineum (or “taint,” as it is often called, because it ’taint your vagina and ’taint your anus). Call it squeamishness, or immaturity, or just plain intentional ignorance.
That is, until my doctor tells me that he is a big fan of cutting, that most women will tear, and if you do a preemptive cut, you can control the severity and direction, keeping the tear away from the bad place. Fecal incontinence and severe, lingering sexual pain averted.
Sounds reasonable to my husband and me, until we go home and consult a few pregnancy books and Web sites, most of which suggest that cutting is old school, and that perineum massage during labor can help the vaginal opening stretch, leading to just a small tear or no tear at all. Friends who have had babies are all over the place, some insisting, like my doctor, that cutting saves you from a jagged tear, others saying a rip is more natural and heals more easily.
I’m in labial limbo—okay, not precisely, but alliteration is so seductive. I have no idea which is best, and I assume it depends on you, your baby, and your labor, but I guess you probably want a doctor who hopes for a neat little tear but makes a cut if need be.
At times, I feel guilty for making such a big deal out of this cut/ tear thing when I’m bringing a person into the world. Why should I care so much about my little old vagina and anus? That’s when I come to my senses. This is a big deal.
Fecal incontinence hangs in the balance
.
When I found out I was pregnant, it took me by surprise, because of my plan for a lengthy, draining bout of infertility. So I hadn’t put much thought into choosing a doctor, and in fact, I just picked a guy my makeup artist recommended because he had an open appointment and she said he gives a heck of a Pap smear. I didn’t interview him about his philosophies on childbirth, nor did I ask any of the questions that now seem pertinent—his thoughts on C-sections or epidurals, for example. I didn’t know any mothers who recommended him. For some reason, I didn’t want to be the woman who goes around with a clipboard auditioning doctors. When I started to meet other pregnant ladies, however, I realized this was a blunder, and that I really didn’t know much at all about the guy who was going to deliver my child. And now that we’ve been together awhile, shared some good news and fun sonograms together, it seems hard to break up and start all over with a new ob-gyn.
My plan is to take the path of least resistance, and hope my vagina does likewise.
When it comes time to choose a doula, an assistant who provides nonmedical support during labor, I’m more careful. Okay, I interview one lady and hire her, but I love her instantly and she isn’t as hard-core on the no pain meds front as others might be. And I like her name: Margie. Who doesn’t want a Margie around when they’re dilating? Because Margie has been around the birthing business for years, I ask what she thinks of my doctor, who seems nice enough other than telling me, “You only get two questions per visit,” and of course his dubious love affair with the preemptive episiotomy.