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Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Last week, my mom and I went on our annual buying trip to Houston. I’d forgotten until I stepped off the airplane and into Terminal B that this airport was the very place where 2009 began to spin out of control. It was here, on the tram, that I got a phone call from our facilitator, telling us the mother of those three little kids wanted to talk to us. It was here, in Terminal B, that Mom and I sat across from that coffee shop and brainstormed questions to ask when I talked to the birthmom that afternoon.
I remember the giddy excitement, the fluttering in my stomach, the way I could think of absolutely nothing else that entire day.
But more than that, I remember the bad stuff that came after, the two weeks of arguing and crying and bitterness. I remember how long it took before I could be in my mother-in-law’s presence again and how much longer before I could be around her without vibrating with hatred.
I remember the eight more months of waiting, the escalating disappointments, the desperation, the flare-ups of crying and begging D to ignore his mother’s opinion and open our adoption preferences to any race. I remember the sadness in his eyes, the helplessness, torn between saving me from all this pain and saving a black child from being in an extended family that would never treat him or her quite the same.
Then came September and the little boy that was almost ours and then, suddenly, wasn’t. Little did I know, while I was immobilized by pain and melting into tears over my Chik-fil-A nuggets, I was already pregnant, just barely, with this child.
It’s a lot of pressure on a child to save someone, but already she has. 2010 is already so different from 2009. There is still uncertainty - no, terror - that something could go wrong and we’d be back where we were, only worse. But there is also hope, and progress, and a baby stretching and turning flips and growing in my belly. I can finally feel her moving - little tickles and nudges that are at once miraculous and strange.
We’ve chosen a name for her, and every time I say it, she seems more real. I’ve bought her snowflake tights and polka dot hats, and a bubble suit with a flower on the butt, and when I close my eyes, I can almost picture her in them - our little blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby, because that’s what we both were.
Already, we are in love with her, the way we’ve been planning to be for so long. We are in love with each other, too. Though the pregnancy hormones seem to make me more annoyed with everyone else, the opposite is true with D. Lately I feel even more that he is my home, my comfort, my safety. I love to look at him, this man of mine, and marvel at how he gets more handsome all the time, even when he hasn’t shaved in a few days and is wearing a lumberjack shirt. I love to share the sofa with him and two cats and a dog and talk about where our baby will fit in when she comes.
These days, there is no more hopeless weeping to come between us, no more sadness or blame or confusion or desperation. We are happier now than we have ever been. I am happier now than I have ever been, even if it is all still tinged with worry.
Because that is to be expected - loving people goes hand in hand with worry. And it’s worth every forehead crease or moment of panic. I’d much rather be worrying about this baby than worrying I’ll never have one. Thanks to her, this is going to be a much better year than 2009. It’s only been a month, and there’s already been a year’s worth of happy.
posted by K | filed under Adoption, Mr. and Mrs., 9 Months of Awesome | 8 Comments
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Yesterday was the big 20 weeks diagnostic ultrasound, when they check that all the baby’s all-important organs and bones are where they’re supposed to be - oh yeah, and determine gender … not that it’s been on my mind at all. I also had to do a blood sugar test, in which I had to fast for two hours, then guzzle a cup of sugary drink (fruit-punch flavored cough syrup, anyone?), then have my finger pricked an hour later.
As I sat in the lab area waiting to get my blood pressure taken and my cup-o-syrup measured out, I kept smiling to myself and even almost giggling. I looked around at the other pregnant ladies and thought, “I can’t believe I’m really here!” Through the past several years, whenever I sat in that chair, I kept my eyes focused on my cuticles or a House Beautiful magazine, always keeping my distance from the smiling faces on the covers of the abundant copies of Parenting magazine. I tried to avoid looking at all the ladies with charmingly distended bellies surrounding me.
This time, I was one of them - my belly finally starting to stick out appropriately under one of the two shirts from my pre-pregnancy days that hasn’t turned into a 1990s-era crop top on me. I could listen to the ladies’ talk of weight gain and back pain and nausea without turning shriveled and bitter inside.
D and I had to wait two hours for the fun part - the ultrasound - but I didn’t even mind much. In the mean time I passed my blood sugar test (to my own amazement! My score was 131; anything over 135 and I would’ve had to continue on to the 3-hour test), and my blood pressure was deemed “perfect.”
When we finally got called back for the ultrasound, my stomach was all aquiver. This was it! The moment!
Since our last ultrasound three weeks ago, I’ve slipped into referring to the baby as “she,” despite my misgivings. Still, in front of the ultrasound tech, when I called the baby “she,” I immediately corrected with “or he.” We didn’t mention our previous ultrasounds or their results because I didn’t want the outcome of this one to be influenced in any way.
After a few minutes of perusing the vital organs - kidneys? check! four-chamber heart? check! stomach? check! bladder? check! spine and ribs and femurs and radials and ulnas and all manner of other fascinating things? check, check, check, check! - the ultrasound tech focused on the nether regions. I’d already glimpsed what I suspected were girl parts, and she confirmed it easily. No cord between the legs this time to confuse things. No ambiguity. There they were - the fabled three lines! And they popped up clearly a few times during the ultrasound, while no boy parts whatsoever popped up and presented themselves as they are so wont to do.
Now I was beginning to feel it - the excitement of near-certainty that I’d been hoping for with the last two ultrasounds. D said, “We’ve got a Rosemary,” because that’s the name we’ve been bandying about this week, and suddenly she did not feel like a Rosemary to me. But a girl, yes, we have a girl. The ultrasound tech even gave us a little white onesie with the doctor’s office’s name printed on it in vivid, girly-girl candy pink.
After the ultrasound, we were sent to sub-waiting to wait to see my doctor, and I took a detour to the bathroom. Pregnant ladies have to pee a lot - have you heard that? In the bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror and suddenly couldn’t stop grinning. I jumped up and down and danced a jig and squealed in glee. We’re having a girl! It’s really happening - all of it! This baby is healthy and amazing and a real live person who will one day come home from this place with us and be ours forever!
Even now it keeps popping into my head and making me smile. Pregnancy is no picnic - I can’t lie down flat or sit at the wrong angle without my lower back hurting because the weight of baby and uterus makes an old pelvis injury flare up, and I’m still throwing up about once a day (the doc has diagnosed reflux), and finding a comfortable sleeping position is nearly impossible … and I haven’t even made it to the third trimester yet - but it is 100 percent worth it.
I wake up in the morning and lay my hand on my belly, and almost every morning she’s in that same spot - a little knot that’s getting bigger all the time (12 ounces and 10 inches long at yesterday’s count, measuring two days ahead) and moving a little higher all the time. It’s still miraculous to me that I can reach down and touch her, that if I can feel her, maybe she can feel my hand on her, too. That soon I will feel her move inside (may have already a couple of times, but I’m not sure).
All of these little things make me feel less anxious for the end. I’m halfway through now, but I’m beginning to think of it less as 4.5 months to survive and more as 4.5 months to savor. I will never be this close to her again; I’ll never be able to protect her this well again.
Last night, my mom, sister and I went to visit my grandmother and aunt. Before dinner, my aunt said the blessing, and in her prayer she prayed that this baby be safe and grow strong and healthy. My aunt’s baby girl - her only child, after years of infertility - was born premature at 19 weeks, six years ago this month; she was too tiny to survive.
She and my aunt have been on my mind every day since I got pregnant; every day I have thought about what happened to them and how unfair and terrible it was; every day, I have told myself, “if I can make it past 19 weeks, my baby will be okay.”
Then, on the day I reached 20 weeks, my aunt gave us her blessing. What better sign can there be? Me and this baby - I think we can make it. She is strong and healthy, and I will do the best I can.
posted by K | filed under Reflection, 9 Months of Awesome | 6 Comments
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
This baby does not like having her nether regions photographed, which is a good thing in most contexts but less-than-ideal in gender determination. My belly is still a little sore three days later from how much and how hard the ultrasound tech had to poke and prod to get even halfway decent “toilet shots” of the bambino. The tech, who was very very nice and thorough, asked, “Am I hurting you?” but I - wanting to know, once and for all - said, “No, just do what you have to do.” And so she did.
Still, after nearly an hour of struggling, she never could get a shot clearly showing the classic girl “cheeseburger,” though we never caught a glimpse of anything resembling the usually-obvious boy “turtle.” The tech did seem quite confident anyway and gave us 95 percent odds of having a girl. She said she would be very surprised if this baby turns out to be a boy, and if it does, give her a call and let her know about it.
Afterward, we felt confident enough to have our photo taken with our first “girl” picture, and we started calling up the relatives to make the “It’s a Girl!” announcement. We went to the conveniently located Hobby Lobby across the street and bought girly stickers for the baby book. We went to Babies R Us and bought baby’s first dress - an adorable tie-dyed number with matching blue pants.
D was excited and certain right from the start. Me, though … maybe I’m a glass-half-empty kinda girl, but when I hear a number like 95 percent, my mind goes straight to that mysterious 5 percent and all the what-ifs that it contains. What if, after all this it’s-a-girl announcing, it turns out to be a boy? What if we have to return this tie-dyed dress with the adorable hood? What if I get myself trained to say “she” and then it’s a boy and I have to retrain myself to say “he” again?
Somehow, I’m just having a hard time believing this is really a girl. Before we found out, people were always asking me if I had a feeling one way or the other, and I always said no. I had no clue if it was a boy or girl. But somehow, now that it’s 95 percent probably a girl, I feel a little weird - like maybe all along I did think it was a boy.
Or maybe it’s just because for the past year every adoption situation has been for a boy. This time last year, I really wanted to have a little girl to play dolls with and style her hair in pigtails. But over time I saw how excited D got every time he thought about having a little boy, and I started wanting that for him. Besides which, we got so close to having a son that I’d already gotten used to imagining myself as the mom of a boy, and I liked that image.
I think somewhere along the way I stopped thinking about what it would be like to have a girl. I didn’t linger too long on the cute girly quilts at Pottery Barn Kids or the pink polka dotty outfits at the baby store. Instead, I focused on the stuff with puppy dogs and dinosaurs, to prepare myself to be psyched for the inevitable boy.
Now that it’s a girl (well, probably), I feel a little lost. Am I really allowed to buy girly stuff now? Is it okay to be excited? What happened to the imaginary boy child we’ve been calling Elliott - will we have him one day, or is he gone?
Of course, D doesn’t seem worried about any of this. He touches my belly and addresses it as his “little girl.” He’s taken up the pronoun “she” without a hitch.
I think I just need a little more time before it feels real. Oh, probably about 16 days time … that’s how long before my next ultrasound, the big diagnostic ultrasound at my regular OB. If we get another girl reading that time, maybe I can finally believe it.
posted by K | filed under 9 Months of Awesome | 7 Comments
Monday, December 28th, 2009
Lately I’ve been in the habit of touching my belly a lot, partly because it’s so cool there’s a baby in there and partly because it’s so weird there’s a baby in there! I’m always poking around, trying to figure out this bizarre new shape of mine, especially when I’m lying in bed trying (and often, failing) to fall asleep or stay asleep.
So this morning, I reached down, and there was something different. On the left side of my lower belly region, there was this hard knot. On the right side, not so hard. And suddenly I realized this knot on the left was the baby! It’s supposed to be about 5 inches long crown to rump this week - or, as one website puts it, about the size of a baked potato. That’s about what it felt like, too - a baked potato.
I woke up D and made him feel, and then we got out the fetal heart monitor we’re renting from BabyBeats.com to see if we would find the heartbeat where I suspected the baby was. It took about 5 seconds to find it - right where the baked potato lump was, 2 or 3 inches higher than where we found the heartbeat last time, a little over a week ago.
I find this to be one of the coolest things yet about this pregnancy. I’ve heard very-pregnant women say stuff like, “oh, this is his head over here, and that’s his butt over there,” but I didn’t really get how they could tell or what it felt like. Now, I’ve caught a glimpse of what the future of this pregnancy’s going to be like. I felt my baby! How cool is that?
posted by K | filed under 9 Months of Awesome | 4 Comments
Sunday, December 27th, 2009
Yesterday I wore jeans for the first time in two weeks (I’ve been living in two pairs of magical and wondrous black pants with a high spandex quotient), and oh dear - they don’t fit anymore. Two weeks ago, I could still button my various pairs of jeans, though it was more comfortable to wear them unbuttoned with a belly band to hold them up. Now not only can I not button them, zipping them is uncomfortable, too. I tried the belly band trick yesterday, but it really only works properly if the pants are zipped, so I kept having droopy butt all day.
When I got home, I decided to bust out the collection of fat(ter) pants from before I lost weight this spring. I’ve been considering these my ace in the hole all along - the pants that would help me segue into the second trimester without having to spend a million dollars on maternity clothes. Lo and behold, I did find several pairs that still button (for now) - some jeans and even some dress pants to take on my dreaded business trips next month. So yay, right?
Well … though I’m thrilled the baby and I are growing (my waist is expanding at a rate of roughly half an inch per week) and I’m starting to show (at least to myself and D if not the world at large), it was still a bit disheartening to pack away my hard-won skinnier jeans in favor of the old ones in a bigger size. I was hoping never to have to see them again!
But being a fairly practical person and no stranger to the roller coaster of weight loss and gain, I never actually give away the fat clothes (or the skinny ones, for that matter). That’s why I have a full wardrobe in four different sizes. Good thing I have a lot of attic space, huh?
The main thing was just how freakin’ fat I looked in these clothes. My waist hasn’t expanded quite enough to fill in the indentation between my upper and lower belly flab, so my “baby bump” looks less “aww cute, there’s a baby in there” and more “geez, she must eat a lot of Big Macs.”
However, I content myself with the knowledge that it will fill out and look properly bump-like soon enough, especially at this rate. Half an inch a week, people! And I’m only three weeks away from the halfway point, where supposedly even the most bizarrely-shaped among us (that’s me) start looking pregnant enough that random strangers can cheerfully rub our bellies and ask personal questions. Awesome!
Also, in just a few days I’m going to see my baby in action again on the ultrasound screen, which is always a delight. 17 weeks, here we come!
posted by K | filed under 9 Months of Awesome | 3 Comments
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
Every time people asked me when we were finding out the baby’s gender, I always said, “On the 21st … I hope, if the baby cooperates.” But I never actually considered the possibility that it wouldn’t. Of course, we’d be able to find out. After roughly one million years of waiting for a child, this one thing would work like it was supposed to, and we’d spy some super-obvious genitalia, and we could get on with the naming and the shopping and the calling of the baby by a gender-specific pronoun.
Oh, how quickly optimism turns to bitter disappointment. We did our best, and it wasn’t enough.
I ate and drank beforehand, which stimulates the baby to move; the nurses tried for more than half an hour to spot something definitive. The baby squirmed and kicked (with real feet!), opened and closed its mouth, stretched and waves its hands (with real fingers!), but every flip and wiggle, however entertaining to witness, was in the wrong direction.
After a few fleeting glimpses of the relevant parts, the nurses finally said they thought it might be a girl, but they were far from certain. There could be no happy announcements (my plans to tell my parents in a cutesy way were shot); there would be no excited, tearful hugs between me and D, no touching of the belly and feeling like we are starting to know the person in there. Everything was still a mystery, just as it has been for the past year and half - or, if we really count from the beginning, the past six and half years.
I pasted on a happy face at the doctor’s office, but in the car I had to struggle not to cry. I know it shouldn’t matter this much. I should just be happy the baby is so healthy and active and has long legs and a beating heart. All the grandmotherly women I know tell me it doesn’t matter a bit and act like I’m silly for even wanting to know.
But silly or not, I do want to know, desperately. Whichever gender, I just want to have this one thing settled. I want to know whether I can buy that baseball cap with an E on it, or whether I should rev up the campaign for the name Ruby. I want to know whether I’ll have a son or daughter - this information will be the beginning of setting my life on one course or another. Whichever it is, I’m ready to get started on that course.
So once I got home from the doctor’s office, I studied the video and the photos from the ultrasound over and over. I analyzed them in comparison with others I found online. And the infuriating truth is, the images are just too unclear.
Another truth? I can’t accept that. I can’t wait four more weeks. As my friend Mandy put it, I had just enough patience to make it to the 21st, and I used all that up. I have no patience left for this. I need to know!
So I got on the internet and researched elective 3D/4D ultrasound providers. I found several in a few-hour radius from here and decided on Chattanooga. Next week, D and I are going to Chattanooga for a mini-vacation, which will include an hour in an ultrasound clinic, where for $150 this mystery will be - I hope - finally solved.
If not, you can find me in the nearest loony bin. With my baby. Whatever it may be.
