There are dueling schools of thought on the matter of when to notify the world that you are pregnant. Some devil-may-care types tell everyone right away. Others find that this carries a risk of jinxing the whole thing, and wait until it’s “safe” after 12 weeks. Others harbor their secret until they simply can’t lie about it anymore, unless they want to pretend they have some terrible abdominal tumor. I’ve tried most of them. They all have flaws.
For one thing, as I learned when I delivered a preemie at 22 1/2 weeks (Jacob, 4/17/01, who lived for just 38 minutes) there’s nothing all that “safe” about twelve weeks. There’s nothing magical about crossing that line. Statistics say that 97% of babies who make it to the second trimester make it to the third. But… there is that nagging three percent.
So, last time around, although this may seem counterintuitive, I went the route of telling anyone and everyone when I was five weeks pregnant. My point was that there is no “safe” time to announce it. The whole concept of safety is an illusion. You can’t do your victory lap until you actually have delivered the babe, and that is really frankly too late to mention that you’re expecting. My other thought was, having had a few miscarriages by then, that there’s no shame in miscarriages. It’s a very outdated concept that a woman should bear her loss in stoic silence. (I tried it a few times just to be sure… wasn’t all that great.) So I figured, well, whatever. … If I tell everyone with caveats and then have to tell them about my miscarriage or premature birth and loss, so be it. As it happened, my pregnancy with Isaac (except for the ceaseless terror part, and the Chinese-water-torture slowness of it) went pretty well. He was born only a month early and has done great.
So this time around I’ve tried the waiting method, by and large. My thinking has been basically that it’s easier for me to just pretend that this is not happening and not all that real. It’s easier to keep it in a distant and hazy sort of place in my head, way WAY behind the scenes. Isaac helps in that I can’t really think a complete thought, anyway, as I chase him through the day. He’s very good a creating a diversion! If he notices me daydreaming he’s likely to dump a full cup of milk on the rug just to snap me out of it. At times the swooning nausea or overwhelming tiredness made this fantasy difficult to maintain. But through Isaac’s hospitalization, through weeks of my own hacking bronchitis, through lots of rodent-related travails, I did my best to take my vitamins and pretend that my jeans still fit just GREAT. (Note: I wanted to mention that poor Ben was saddled with all the gruesome mouse-related duties, not just due to sexism, not just due to wimphood on my part, although those are also true, but really because we both feared that exposing a small developing fetus to the Hanta virus would not be a good idea…)
Now that I’m breaking out the maternity wear, and the little one on the ultrasound is looking more and more adorable with each passing scan (kicking its little feet! Tiny fingers complete with knuckles!), I feel it’s time to come out of the closet and tell all.
Answers to your immediate questions:
1) The due date is October 13. Isaac was a month early. My uterus (bicornuate=”two horns”) is such that the baby can really only use half of it, so earliness is to be expected here. But… who knows. Some say that this kind of uterus gets better and better with repeated use. I’m thinking in my head “Sometime in September or October” but in my heart I’m hoping for a big fat 9-pound full-term baby who eats like a hog and sleeps like a sloth (i.e., the exact opposite of Isaac who as a tiny baby only slept in two-hour increments at best and ate with a painful inefficiency due to his tight frenulum and overall frail smallness.)
2) We are not planning to find out the sex. The reason is not at all that we harbor romantic visions of a delirious “it’s a ______!” delivery room moment, but that we are still gun-shy after our loss in 2001 and have no interest in making this whole project anymore concrete than it has to be. It always makes me nervous when a woman who is 5 months pregnant comes along pointing to her barely protruding stomach and says, “And this is little Anthony James…” Talk about counting your chickens! I’ll admit that it would be convenient to amass pink baby blankets, etc., if they will be needed, and to rid myself of the boxes of blue baby wear, but whatever. (If it’s a girl Isaac will have lots of pink items to hand down anyway– just bought him pink sandals at his urgent request!)
3) The pregnancy has gone pretty well so far… but not perfect. My weeks of hacking cough and Victorian-era respiratory condition, as well as the stress and strain of very ill Isaac, did put something of a dent it. I’ve had some very minor bleeding off and on and there are a few sort of unnerving-looking clots visible on the ultrasound. I said to the doctor, “But at least it’s not abrupting…” (chronic abruption– tearing loose of the placenta– being the cause of our loss before) and he said, “Well I would say this IS abrupting. It’s enough to worry you a little bit. But not too much.” He then went on to listen to my chest (the third doctor to do so) and to prescribe a very hard-core antibiotic (my second in recent weeks) which seems to have worked out just great. It seems the cough was actually creating an issue with my uterus, all the concussion all the time. Perhaps it caused the bleeding? We’ll see. You know things are getting weird when the obstetrician forsakes his interest in your uterus and focuses on your lungs. Then just a few days ago we had a small fire drill regarding unexplained (Braxton-Hicks?) contractions– not common at 16 weeks, and the way my pre-term labor started two pregnancies ago. So we spent the evening and over night Wednesday in a state of acute gripping worry, until an ultrasound the next morning showed that all was well! Phew. I am eager for this deal to settle down and become dull.
3a) the baby is nestled in the right half of my two-horned uterus. This is my lucky side, where Isaac spent all his time, and so this is a good sign.
3b) With my uterus such as it is, I’ve never carried a baby that wasn’t impossibly breech. So I’m looking at another c-section unless there’s a miracle somewhere along the way.
3c) We’re not doing an amnio or any other invasive genetic testing, because we just can’t justify the risk– even the test-enthusiast doctor says it makes no sense. But we did this new test where they measure the tiny amount of tissue behind the neck bones of the fetus at 11 weeks (by ultrasound) and then combine that information with a test of maternal blood. Doing this they now can find 88% of Down’s. They recalculated our risk of Down’s with this baby– based on my age alone (39) it was 1/58. But when they folded in the new information it dropped all the way to 1/150, less than one percent. We can certainly live with that, especially because the risk of premature birth here is way higher than that. (If you want to worry and/or pray about something, just focus on premature labor and do what you can to mentally fend that off. That’s what I do.) Then the other day the ultrasound technician pointed out this cute little nose bone on the baby’s profile. Apparently Down’s babies don’t have that, so it’s further reassurance. They also checked for some other serious genetic defects and they all came back at 1/2000 or better. Also just as a lay person looking at these ultrasounds, the baby looks great. All the parts are there, symmetrical, and in the right places.
4) We are not talking about the name negotiations while they are underway, and will likely keep mum until after the birth certificate is filed. It took months to agree upon Isaac Jonathan and I don’t expect that this time around it will be any easier. Ben is difficult in that the rules he sets narrow the options greatly: 1) it must be Biblical; 2) he must like the story. For me, I must like the NAME, and trying to choose between Job, Enoch, and Nebuchadnezzar just gives me a headache. (Here’s a tip for general living: whatever someone names their baby, up to and including Doodle and Moxie, you must say “What a wonderful name!” Remember this: no matter what!)
So that’s the situation. 16 weeks as of Friday. I feel the pall of the first trimester is lifting, and it’s helping that it’s spring. I’m going forth with normal life. Going to spend Wednesday out in a marsh looking at birds, that sort of thing.
Meanwhile, Isaac has unfortunately bonded to the movie “Toy Story 2.” If the guys at Gitmo ever get bored trying to think up ways to harass their inmates, I suggest making them watch Toy Story 2 in a continuous loop day and night. The tricky part is that if you just see once, or even twice, or even three times, it’s really not a bad film. It’s just the repetition that makes it so grating. Also the other day we were visiting some toy-intensive friends who were well stocked with Buzz Lightyears in various sizes. They kindly (?) allowed Isaac to borrow/keep one especially wonderful, large, beeping, blinking, talking model of Buzz Lightyear. I never thought that the simple words “To infinity and beyond!” would begin to drive me over the edge, but so it is. The only benefit of this fad (and I hope it’s a fad) is that Isaac will watch it for the full 92 minutes. Meaning– I can write a blog entry, for instance. I can fold laundry! I can have a phone conversation! So… I guess it’s a fair trade off… sort of.