I’ve thought long and hard about this, but there’s really no smooth or clever way to say you’re pregnant.
Posting an ultrasound or belly picture, crafting a sly hinting status update about not being able to drink or all the kicks to the ribs, sending out photo postcard announcements involving fruits or balloons, even just coming out and stating the obvious—nothing seems right. All seem too smug and assured, especially when you’ve been on the embittered receiving end of such news. After I miscarried, I took each baby announced or born so seriously, almost as a personal affront. This wasn’t a reflection on any of the parents to be or how or when they had chosen to share their news. This was me holding the measure of my life up to theirs and irrationally crying UNFAIR!!—as we are all wont to do sometime or another. If you’ve suffered a pregnancy loss, if you want to have a baby but have been unable to get pregnant, if you’re wading through the red tape of foster or adoption proceedings, if you want nothing to do with any of it at all, you might recognize this feeling of rage at being socially coerced to sugarcoat and coo. You might have embodied such temporary inability to separate your relative un/happiness from someone else's.
So to say anything felt wrong. To say nothing felt duplicitous.
And all of it felt too certain when the one thing I know I know is that nothing is certain. Egg plus sperm does not always a baby make. Neither does a baby bump or any time-based milestone. Drawing attention to my expanding self and sense of family in any way seemed foolhardy, and selfish, and incautious.
You see how unsmooth and not clever this was.
How dark and unfluffy and unbunnied. Nary a pink or blue. Sorry. I cannot not be myself. Despite how wide open I was about miscarriage, from the moment I knew I was pregnant—even before that $%&#%@*#(@ internet troll shit all over my blog and morning sickness banished me to offlineland—I’ve wanted to keep everything about him to myself.
But twenty weeks have gone by. I’ve called and e-mailed all the relatives and family friends. He is the little boy I always wanted to have, he has a strong thumping heart and beautifully operational organs and limbs. I am halfway through this pregnancy, and I am trying to breathe into it. Because there comes a time, too, when not embracing the fullness of this experience seems foolhardy, when staying mum seems selfish, when not letting the joy come to you is in its own way incautious.
It is Thanksgiving tomorrow. I am spending it with family, partially in a gorgeous snowy cabin in Tahoe. I want to breathe and increase and trust and invite joy. I want to celebrate the journey of it and to honor and not forget that, for some of us, it is not a straight, well-paved path. I want to stay honest, and share my stories, and through openness invite the stories of others to boomerang back to me.*
I want to be thankful for all of it, even the bitterness and overcaution, because of how sweet life can be in contrast to all that we fear.
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* More about this to come. I am planning an anthology and will be casting about for submissions soon.
6 comments:
May you forever remain unbunnied! Thanks for sharing this in your very you and very wonderful way.
I think this is the best and most Mayumi-way to share this beautiful news. I feel as though I can't say it enough so here it goes again. Congratulations!
Oh, May! May I reiterate the blessings of unbunnying! I haven't personally gone through a miscarriage, but my mom lost twins to stillbirth when I was three... And I have other friends who have dealt with the unbunniness of pregnancy (miscarriages and post partum depression.) and after a year of grieving over the impending loss of my father to cancer, I just want people to have the permission to recognize that life has so many unexpected pieces- and we should never expect to have the script of how we are supposed to act, respond, or feel prewritten for us. I'm hoping for a continued positive pregnancy for you AND all the joys and not-to-distressing navigation of the hair pulling
moments of parenthood!
Heaps of joy and blessings for the growing you! Filled with faith in this never-straight unfolding world. And, while I'm here, I may as well publicly announceme that I'm expanding, too: 14 weeks. Which means you're having a Taurus and I'm having a Gemini...and that we'll be sleepless together...and that we can commiserate in all the best of ways. Smiling from ear to ear here in the snow-clogged woods.
Oh, congratulations, May. Many blessings and much love. :)
Congratulations, May! Thank you for inviting the joy. I am feeling it from here as I look at my little boy who turns 14 tomorrow and remembering his first Thanksgiving at only two days old. Embrace. Enjoy. Breathe.
And Congrats, too, Woodbird! So much to be thankful for.
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