When did i get like this.., p.3
When Did I Get Like This?, page 3
If wanting and praying for a child was supposed to be enough, we had that. Surely we had that. David and I had not been overly sanguine. I had lived in a state of suspended animation for almost a month. I had not-done everything I could. And we had finally reached the day when we could know for sure: we were meeting with Dr. Simon himself.
Dr. Simon, my “RE” (that’s “reproductive endocrinologist” to you), was one of the partners at our enormous fertility center practice. He had hundreds of patients, so I had seen Dr. Simon only once before, on our first visit to the clinic a few months earlier. He listened kindly as I sobbed through my patient history while David avoided eye contact, staring instead at the faces of the three gorgeous children framed on the doctor’s desk. Dr. Simon flipped through my X-rays as I talked, lingering over my ob-gyn’s notes, which were impenetrable as Sanskrit to me. Then he set the protocol of my care in motion through an anonymous army of blood takers and technicians and answering-machine-message leavers. I hadn’t seen Dr. Simon again because it wasn’t yet time. You didn’t see your RE again until it was time to go to the next step—either by ramping up your course of treatment because it hadn’t worked, or by confirming a pregnancy, because it had.
The clinic scheduled my appointment with Dr. Simon for the day I was six and a half weeks pregnant. By forty-four days’ gestation or so, it is usually possible to see a fetus’s heartbeat on an ultrasound. If it can be seen, the pregnancy can be presumed to be progressing smoothly, and the chance of miscarriage going forward drops dramatically. If it is not there, the fetus is nonviable. It is declared a “chemical pregnancy,” a chimera. Never really there at all.
“How have you been?” Dr. Simon asked as he prepared the probe with gel.
“Oh, fine,” I answered, eager as always to seem a good patient. I mean, where to begin?
“Lie back, please,” Dr. Simon said. He put one hand on my stomach.
David held my hand. I held my breath.
We all squinted at the lava-lamp gray screen for a few moments.
“I might not be able to see anything today,” Dr. Simon said, trying to sound reassuring. “If that happens, we will try again next week.”
He moved the wand gently from side to side, searching. I sucked in my ribs, raising them high up into a wishbone, so that whatever Dr. Simon wanted to see could be found.
Then I saw something. A tiny blinking light, so faint I could hardly see it. At first I wasn’t sure I was seeing it. But as I stared, it was there, flashing.
“What is that?” I whispered, so as not to disturb it.
Dr. Simon regarded it for a moment. “That’s the baby’s heartbeat,” he said. “There it is. And it’s strong.”
He said “baby.” Then he said, “Congratulations!” Then he said he was sending me back to my regular obstetrician, and we wouldn’t have to come back to his office anymore. David just looked at me, too shocked to say anything, but from the tears in his eyes I understood: he too had seen, and believed. David jumped up, shaking Dr. Simon’s hand vigorously, thanking him. I lay there, still transfixed by the monitor, while they exchanged collegial back-pats.
Infertility robs you of many things along the way, but the last thing it steals from you is the ability to celebrate being pregnant, if and when it actually happens. You are told not to believe too fully, to want too much. You cannot jubilate. You only, slowly, exhale.
And so I didn’t want to get up from that table. I wanted to lie there all day watching my baby, my lighthouse. I still felt very far from shore. But there he was, he had been there all along, and now I could see him at last, blinking to me in Morse code: I am here.
CHAPTER THREE
Step Away from the Jumpy Castle
As soon as I found out I was definitely, totally pregnant, I planned a pilgrimage to Liz Lange on Madison Avenue, the Tiffany of over-the-belly capris. I had walked by its windows many times in the past, hiding behind my sunglasses like Holly Golightly, looking longingly through the glass at the elegant maternity mannequins in their stretch tunics. Now I had become a prime customer, and although I did not shop at pricey boutiques like this when I was not pregnant, in my delicate condition, I deserved the very best.
This wasn’t your “Liz Lange for Target” Liz Lange. On Madison Avenue, her maternity sweaters and trousers, in cashmere and spun silk, hung two inches apart on well-spaced racks. They were sized 1, 2, and 3, rather than X and XXL. And if shopping became too taxing, comfy chairs, bottled water, and watermelon-flavored Jolly Ranchers awaited. It was the nicest store I had ever been in. Although I was eight weeks along, I felt like an impostor being there; you could not tell I was pregnant just by looking at me. But my glow, my excitement, or merely the fact that I was in there at all, was enough to give me away to the preppy young saleswoman. “What are you looking for today?” she asked.
“Um, some—clothes,” I stammered, distracted by the $275 price tag on the boot-cut pants I had been admiring.
“Don’t forget, Liz designs a wardrobe of basics,” the salesgirl said, reading my sticker shock and laying the pants across her arm. “You’ll be wearing these three or four times a week.”
The salesgirl showed me to the dressing room and offered me a stuffed prosthetic belly, which she said would approximate the size I would be at five months along. I strapped it around my waist, put on the boot-cut pants, and admired my side view for several minutes. This was even better than when I stuffed washcloths in my training bra in sixth grade. I looked great pregnant! Why, I looked just like the willowy expectant models in the pictures taped alongside the mirror. I imagined wearing these pants seven months hence, out on the town, an acquaintance saying, “I can’t believe you’re due next month! You look amazing!”
“Thank you,” I would answer, smiling humbly. “I feel great.”
I bought the boot-cut pants and yearned for the day I would have the belly to wear them. David was taking a series of pictures of me in the same pajamas every Sunday night, a record of the miracle taking place inside me. I hiked up my shirt to show that there was almost something to see, my stomach suddenly gassy and hard each evening at bedtime. Surely it wouldn’t be too much longer before the whole world could tell. We went home to visit our families the following weekend, and since I was feeling great, we shared the big news at a family cookout. “Best wishes!” Great-Uncle Toby said, Michelob in hand. “You know, I thought you were putting on a little weight in the rear, there, but I didn’t want to say anything.”
I had gained exactly five pounds.
Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to look pregnant after all.
Still. My pregnancy had been so hard-won, so longed for, I was certain I would be good at it. I wasn’t going to eat everything in sight, waking David up for 2:00 A.M. Pizza Hut runs. I maintained my regular workout schedule and added “Aqua Mom” prenatal water aerobics once a week. My only indulgence was an afternoon nap, from which I would wake up flushed with estrogen. I was feeling—and looking—better than ever. Then I walked across the park to see my obstetrician, Dr. Merman, and stood on the scale for my sixteen-week checkup.
Dr. Merman checked the scale twice. Then he looked at my chart, frowning. “You’ve gained fifteen pounds so far,” he said.
“Have I?” I said, excited, thinking that meant my body was off to a great baby-making start.
“By now you should only have gained eight to twelve pounds,” Dr. Merman clarified. “You’re gaining weight too quickly. Time to cut out those desserts, hmm?”
Until that moment, I had never in my life been told that I was overeating. I didn’t, really, but I can’t say I ever thought much about what I put in my mouth, either. My metabolism had outpaced my caloric intake nicely for thirty years. But even if pregnancy was going to be different, there was no reason to panic. I was sure that a mere modicum of will-power was all it would take to get my body back on track, so I skipped the packet of sugar in my morning decaf and returned to Dr. Merman for my twenty-week checkup. He balanced the scale and this time, barely concealed a double take. “You’ve gained four pounds in four weeks!” he said, then gave me what was apparently his stock prescription: “Time to cut out those desserts, hmm?”
Now I was baffled. “I have cut out the desserts,” I told Dr. Merman’s receptionist, Mary, on the way out. (She was the one I could really talk to.) “I’m not eating any more than I usually do.”
“Are you eating fruit?” she replied, eyebrow cocked. Well, sure I was. Fruit was good for you, right? The more, the better?
“Oh, Lord. Stop with the fruit,” Mary said. “Fruit has tons of carbohydrates.” But that didn’t sound right at all. If I stopped eating fruit, wouldn’t the baby get scurvy or something?
For a definitive answer, I was grateful to have on my bookshelf the authority on all such matters: What to Expect When You’re Expecting. My friend Debbie had given me a well-thumbed hand-me-down copy as soon as she heard my good news. On the cover of the edition I inherited, a pregnant woman in a dowdy dress rests in her rocking chair, looking a little sleepy, perhaps from an afternoon’s exertion creating a cozy nursery. This mother-to-be has put her own reading aside and looks out at the reader and right beyond, reflecting upon her impending joy. She looks far too relaxed to have actually read what is inside the book she beautifies:
You’ve got only nine months of meals and snacks with which to give your baby the best possible start in life. Make every one of them count. Before you close your mouth on a forkful of food, consider, “Is this the best bite I can give my baby?” If it will benefit your baby, chew away. If it will only benefit your sweet tooth or appease your appetite, put your fork down.
How could I have been so selfish? Here I was, eating to appease my appetite! Eating because I was hungry! If I wanted my baby to have the “best possible start” in life I sure had a funny way of showing it, what with those handfuls of Honey Nut Cheerios I was sneaking after midnight. From now on, I would follow the book’s “Best Odds Diet.” What this diet was offering my future child best odds of, specifically, it did not say. But what kind of glue sniffer would opt for the “So-So Odds Diet”? Now that I knew I could do better for my baby, there was no choice but to follow the diet’s precepts:
Bread your fish with oat bran. Add triticale to your rice pilaf. Those who like to drink their vegetables may be happy to know that they can occasionally count a glass of vegetable juice cocktail toward their three-daily green leafy and yellow vegetable allowance.
This was going to be harder than I thought. I had never heard of triticale, I was nauseated at the very notion of bran-breaded fish, and I had never, in my whole life, slapped myself on the forehead with the too-late realization that I could have had a V8. I skipped ahead to the “Guilt-Free Cheating” section, perhaps more applicable to my lifestyle:
We all need to give in to temptation now and then. So once a week, help yourself to something that may not be nutritionally stellar but has some redeeming value, like frozen yogurt or a bran muffin…But don’t cheat at all if you find that you can’t stop once you get started.
This was “guilt-free”? A bran muffin once a week? Even in my hormonally altered state, I could see this was taking food obsession to a new level. (To their credit, so have the book’s editors; the Best Odds Diet has disappeared from the latest edition.) But back then, these dire warnings on the evils of flour haunted me. Even if I snacked on whole wheat crackers, I felt like a pregnant woman in some obnoxious ad on TV, dipping gorditas in gallons of ice cream, eating like her distended abdomen held mere lack of self-restraint rather than a rapidly growing child. If I could not be the purist who, as this book recommended, refused even a taste of birthday cake unless it were her own birthday, then I was a selfish mother who deserved to be fat.
Each time I had a weigh-in at Dr. Merman’s I prayed Mary would be the one doing the weighing. At least she was kind enough not to announce the damage aloud. If Dr. Merman was weighing me, I would take my earrings and socks off first, so as not to add to the grotesque number he would proclaim with a click of his pen. “Time to cut out the desserts, hmm?” he would say each time, as if he never had before, as if he thought I needed only to be reminded once to stop going to the supermarket and eating my way up and down the cookie aisle in order to get my weight back on track.
Every week I gained another pound, no matter what I did. My metabolism was glacial. I pooped once every five days. My body was hanging on to everything I gave it and clamoring for more. Feed me! Feed me! my body would say, and I tried not to listen, even though it was making another human being, because my pregnancy journal said that by week twenty-seven, I should have gained eighteen to twenty-three pounds, and I had gained…twenty-seven. I could have chucked this pregnancy journal, or at least found one that wasn’t such a buzzkill, but I felt I deserved these reminders. Four pounds over the recommended range was four pounds of weakness. If my body wouldn’t listen to me, Dr. Merman, or the pregnancy journal, it might listen to the Liz Lange boot-cut pants I had longed to fill, which were now, in month seven, laughably small.
Everywhere I went my body was thoroughly scrutinized. I had thought I would revel in this attention. Instead, I felt like the prize heifer at the state fair. Friends, relatives, even strangers would have me stand in the center of a room so they could examine me from each angle and decide, based on how I was “carrying,” whether it was a boy or a girl. When Aunt Marie (known for never guessing wrong) announced at my baby shower that I was having a girl, I could not share the gathered crowd’s enthusiasm. I knew, according to Aunt Marie’s system of divination, that her saying “girl” could only mean my ass had gotten huge back there. I have heard tell of women who delight in their Rubenesque selves. I was not one of them. “I could tell it was you coming by your waddle!” my friend said when I bumped into her on the corner, thirty-eight weeks along, and at least she enjoyed it. My baby was also enjoying itself thoroughly, bouncing around all day in the jumpy castle I had become. I was the one who couldn’t wait for it to be over.
Connor arrived right on his due date, a good healthy weight, not the eleven-pound monster the pregnancy best-seller/harbinger of doom had raised as a distinct possibility for a mother as gargantuan as I. As I walked the maternity ward hallways with my baby the next day, I spotted a scale by the nurses’ station. Next to Connor himself, I figured this would be the greatest payoff of childbirth: counting him, the placenta, and all the accessories, I would have lost at least fifteen pounds in the previous day’s activities! But when I stepped on the scale, not only had I not lost weight—despite having unloaded eight pounds into the Isolette next to me, I weighed a pound more than before he came out. I’m still not sure how that is physically possible, although the four bags of IV fluid I had during my twenty-one-hour labor might have had something to do with it. Really, the very idea of scales on maternity wards seems sadistic, or at least premature.
Over the next six months, though, all the weight came off, thanks to StrollerFit, breastfeeding, and most significantly, the return of a living person’s metabolism. As Connor grew, I shrank; it was as if he was sucking the fat out through my boobs and depositing it directly onto his considerable thighs. I looked great! I was back into my skinny jeans! Just in time to get pregnant again!
This time, I was digging out the Liz Lange boot-cuts as soon as the EPT was positive. There is a certain evil muscle memory that occurs in the body of a woman who has been pregnant before. “Oh, this again,” your abs say, and surrender immediately, rather than fighting the good fight for twenty-five weeks like they did the first time around. It is considered bad luck to tell family and friends you are pregnant before your second trimester, but when strangers on the street are asking you your due date at nine weeks along, it is hard to remain coy.
I swore I would maintain a more positive mind-set about my weight this time. If I gained more than the prescribed limit, who cared? At least now I knew it could come back off again. Instead, I was filled with self-loathing as soon as my bras got too tight, because I now knew exactly how house-boaty I was about to become. Any sense of the magical when I looked at my changing body was gone.
Still, if I could have just gained my forty pounds and been left alone, I might have been all right. I will never know, because I was not. Do strangers walk up to a person who is over-weight but not pregnant and say, “Wow, are you ever morbidly obese”? Because when you are pregnant, everyone feels at liberty to tell you how huge you’re getting, like it’s something you want to hear.
Four months into my second pregnancy, I was sitting on the recumbent bicycle, feeling rather proud of myself for having gotten my nauseous ass to the gym for once. The woman on the bike next to me leaned over with a twinkle in her eye.
“You’re having a girl. Want to know how I can tell?”
“How?” I puffed, nearing the anaerobic threshold.
“Because I had a girl,” she answered, nose crinkled with delight. “And I was all hips and thighs, just like you!”
A stronger woman might have been able to laugh this off, or better yet, agree with this assessment and still have the dignity to leave the house in the morning. For me, it was the beginning of an extended sabbatical in Low Self-Esteem Land. With a baby underfoot and another one within, I thought about how big I was all day but was too overwhelmed to do anything about it. I ate whatever I could find in the cabinets during Connor’s nap time, and for a calisthenic regimen, I lifted him eighty thousand times a day. On this half-assed plan, I gained the exact same amount of weight as I had the first time around, when I broke a sweat daily and denied myself more than half a sandwich at lunchtime. Once my second pregnancy was behind me, I was very pissed off about this. Glad, but pissed off. When I lost all thirty-nine pounds again, I told myself that if I ever had a third baby, I was going to have a mirror on the ceiling for the birth so I could see the whole thing. But I would not look at the scale. Not even once. “Please don’t share those numbers with me, Dr. Merman,” I would say, smiling with a wave of my hand. “My body will do what it needs to do.”
