Mamaphobic: The 28-Day Cycle of Not-So-Magical Thinking
How do you come to any sort of conclusion, let alone write and write well, about one of life's little impasses when you're in the middle of it? Writing, I learned early on, consists of an intro, a body, and a conclusion. You must have all three to have a complete piece. Of course, I have always counted on the act of writing to learn and to get to some conclusion, like many other writers and thinkers. In The Year of Magical Thinking
 , Joan Didion asks, "Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?" And I ask myself this same question all the time. Especially now with this ongoing column and its conclusion…conclusion…conclusion…looming over my head, I feel this intense pressure every six weeks to know what's going on with me, to make some intelligent point about my life or life in general, to put my messy shit out there in some constructive way for the world to learn from. Well, I have to tell you right off the bat that my husband and I are trying to conceive a few months after my second miscarriage in six months, and I don't know shit, and I absolutely don't have any conclusion, so that's why I have to write about it here in hopes that I will learn something. I don't know if any conclusions will be made by the end of this essay, but this intro and what follows is serving as one of the first steps in understanding a little bit more about what's it's like and what it means for me to be in it.
Before I even go on, I have some sense that I want to apologize or promise you that I'll never write another column on miscarriage. I want to swear that this is it and that I'm going to get a handle on this whole emotional rollercoaster ride very soon, no matter which way it goes. However, I know I can't make that promise in good faith. Maybe you didn't already read my column about my first miscarriage back when I was still strong and hopeful; back then, I was accepting of my fate, but only because I was sure miscarriage would be a one-hit wonder in my life. And maybe you're wondering why I would want to make such a promise in the first place. What for? What's the big deal? Go on and talk about it. It's healthy. Well, if you lived with me in my life or, God forbid, in my head, you would know why. It's taken over, and I fear that until I come to some sort of resolution, it will also take over my writing and my life. Even though I'm schooled well in all the "this too shall pass" dogma, my fear over the next miscarriage is almost all I ever think about, and it's permeating my whole world right now. I'm trying ever so hard to tame my inner neurotic. I'm typically a little neurotic about everything, but not this neurotic. Okay, so maybe I am pretty neurotic all the time. So this is how the brain is sprinting along right now and how the fear is beginning to seep into everything. Beyond the charting, the counting of days, the waiting, the dreaming of a sweet round baby girl that gets kidnapped by an old co-worker of mine and then of Clyde being kidnapped by Kevin Federline, and the frantic and constant checking for blood, my brain is on a rampage. You see, in my mind, if I've had two miscarriages, I'll most certainly have three so if and when I get pregnant again, I'll most certainly worry every day that I will miscarry and I will live and breathe for days, maybe weeks, maybe months in the acknowledgment that I have no control over the pregnancy, whether I miscarry early, late, or not at all, whether the baby is okay, whether the baby is born stricken or dead, or whether I ever get to have this baby at all. I will worry that I will kill the baby with worry. I will then also allot plenty of time for worry about Clyde, my husband, my family, my friends and all the ways in which I have no control over their health or their lives or anything at all. I will bury myself in the worry that I have no control rather than accept this fact that has always been a fact. In other words, I will become a big fat bubbling fear pot. But then I will try to justify that all the worrying really will prevent bad things from happening. My favorite saying has always been, "If I say it out loud, it won't happen." And I like to pretend this works. On good days, the realization that I have no control is actually liberating. In fact, that was the best thing the advice nurse said to me on the phone when I starting spotting before the first miscarriage. She said, "Try to take it easy, but if you are going to miscarry, there is nothing you can do to stop it. It will just happen." That was such a relief because in those exact moments, I was trying to figure out how I could seal myself into a soft germ-free, coma-inducing plastic cocoon, like Sigourney Weaver does at the end of Aliens In the two weeks prior to ovulation, which includes the week where we can actively try to get pregnant, I am calm and my anxieties are manageable. I feel like there's something I can actually do. I know the right days. We can try to conceive. I feel in control, even if it is falsely in control. But I can take real steps toward a certain goal. However, in the two weeks of waiting that follow, I am usually a lunatic. I got over obsessively doing home pregnancy tests pretty early on in this process. I'm much too cheap, and I just couldn't stand the false hope of, "Well maybe it's too early…Maybe it's still too early…" So I do wait until after my period is late by at least a millasecond now, but I continue to get eaten alive by the powerlessness of those weeks not because it may take several months but because I don't know how many of those months will stack up before we get to the end of this thing. I recently read on Slate.com a 2003 book review of Motherhood Lost Oh boy, and then there's that other thing I have no control over. The anger. The anger seems to be what the neurotic fear turns into. I'm not angry in the Why me? sense. I've always been more of a Why not me? kind of believer although even as I type that, I'm not quite sure I believe it based on my experience. When I had my first miscarriage in August, I was shocked it could happen to me. I mean, I knew something could happen to me. I imagined I could get hit by a bus, get cancer, slip and fall and die in my shower like my brother's friend's mom did when we were growing up. I even close the drapes when we eat dinner out of some irrational fear that I'll be nailed in a drive-by shooting (Can't you see the headline? "Mother dies in a seemingly random drive-by shooting with a tofu corndog in her hand."). However, I just never fathomed I would miscarry. Growing up, I never knew anyone who miscarried nor heard about any family members who had. Even more recently when several of my friends and some family members had miscarriages, I felt a little like, how shall I say…untouchable, immune, not the miscarrying type. And strangely enough, that feeling seems to be ongoing. I was just as shocked the second time I miscarried in December. And I know I will be equally shocked if, God forbid, it happens again. This is just weird to me because I've always been a big seeker of the ugly underbelly stuff in life. I guess I just don't like it when the ugly stuff comes seeking me. Or maybe I'm just the most hopeful goddamn cynic ever born. In my experience, when someone dies, it seems like people say a lot of the wrong things. That's just how this is. I mean if one more person tells me, "As soon as you stop trying, it will happen" and then lists 83 people who they know this has happened to, I'm going to scream. First of all, getting pregnant is not our problem (although after getting Clyde in literally one try, I have kind of high standards about how long this stuff should take). Staying pregnant is the problem. Secondly, are they saying once I stop hoping for a healthy baby, then I'll get one? Well, if I get to the point that I stop hoping, then I probably don't want it anymore, right? There also seems to be this underlying jab in this advice that I'm some sort of overstressed freak with an anxious womb. Or like in some cosmic way I brought this on or that I'm just not ready for a second child and I just don't know it. Fuck off. I mean, in all seriousness, I wasn't really ready for the first one (of course, I didn't know that until he was here), and I wasn't ready when a good friend of mine killed himself, and I wasn't ready when my husband's mom died, nor was I ready when my uncle died too young or even my Grandma died a lot older. I wasn't ready, but these things still happened. What the hell is ready? Who gets to be ready for these major life changes? Really ready? There is simply no real readiness in life or loss. And Jesus, if stress were any real indicator for miscarriage (yeah, yeah, I've read the studies), the human race would be extinct in my opinion. After all, I've known women who carried healthy pregnancies through messy divorces, through the loss of one's child, and so on. Don't feed me that. Oh wait, but maybe it's the way I carry my stress that makes me a candidate for multiple stress-induced miscarriages. Oh, I see. Ri-ii-iight. So how do I deal with the neurotic mind, the false hope, the real hope, and the anger? Well, of course, I seek out a little sympathy. And I'm not talking about the yucky kind of sympathy. I mean I love sympathy as much as the next woman, but at the same time I hate for people feel sorry for me. You know, I need the acknowledgment that something sad and painful has happened, but I don't need "Ohhhh, I just feel sooooo bad for you. If I were you, I would be devastated and feel like a failure." You know, as bad as all this has been, it's never that bad. I mean sure, I have felt these things on occasion, but I have not given over to them. I brush them off. They're not helpful to me. I also hate when people skip over the sympathy. I feel dismissed when people skip the acknowledgment of loss or my rightly neurotic state and jump right into, "It will all work out how it's supposed to." Yeah, I'm sure it friggin' will. It always does, right? But how exactly does that help me now? When I seek out other people or try to share my feelings, I just want to tell them right up front that I'm not looking for answers. I just need to say a little about what's on my mind in hopes of diffusing it. That's just what works for me. Isn't there some saying about this? "Secrets keep us sick" or something. I know there are no answers out there. No one has the answers. No one. And damn them all for it. So yes, yes, I'm doing the best that I know how from inside of this thing: talking to my friends and family (although less and less), writing this column in hopes of getting it out of my system, reading stuff (not medical stuff, which makes me hyperventilate; I'm still looking for an essay in which a woman has great luck on her third try; know of one?), and even taking masochistic comfort in essays such as Jennifer Friedlin's "Inability to Conceive Knocks Life Off Course" when she writes: "But what I found really encouraging was the peace of mind conveyed by each of the people I spoke with. Whether they adopted, used donor eggs or sperm, conceived through in vitro or decided to remain child-free, everyone said they were happy with the outcome." Someday I will indeed be beyond this misery and "happy" with the outcome. Won't I? Won't I? And, of course, I focus a lot on my healthy child and being grateful and on making little happy affirmations each day when I take my quadrillionth prenatal vitamin. I try to remember to be in, live in my current moments with myself and my family. I try and sometimes succeed in feeling a little bit of hope that something will happen to give me some conclusion. In other words, Enter stage left: A hefty helping of magical thinking. Well, damn if as I try to wrap up this piece, Clyde isn't watching The Lion King |
Sheri Reed
 Sheri Reed is the co-founder and co-editor of mamazine.com. She is a freelance writer and lives in Sacramento with her husband and two boys. You can also find her at today is pretty, this joy+ride, and Home & Garden Buzz.
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