Morning Sickness and Death

Now, let me draw the distinction right now between:

1. Feeling like you’re dying
2. Wanting to die
3. Literally dying

I’m not kidding here. 1 is something I think most of us experience, if not in first trimester than in unending third trimester, or in labor, or in the newborn phase. 2 is something common enough when you feel really, really poorly (depression is actually a symptom of HG), but you should see a midwife or doctor for help. And 3 means you should see a doctor, too. I’ve done the IV, and it is amazing.

I’m reminded of a chapter from one of my favorites, What Mothers Do: Especially When It Looks Like Nothing. The author, Naomi Stadlen, spoke with many mothers over many years in new moms’ groups, and one of the most common refrains was, as the chapter title goes, “So tired I could die.”

These were mothers of newborns, but I feel this way often in pregnancy, especially in those unending early months. And I think what Stadlen argues of new motherhood in her book is true of pregnancy, too: you kind of are dying. Dying to your old life, your own expectations, your own definitions of success. It’s exhausting work, emotionally and physically.

In the same way that Haley Stewart argued that getting your life back may not be the point of Christian parenting, I would suggest that this death through pregnancy is maybe a difficult gift that prepares us for motherhood when the baby is here. It certainly makes me softer and less obsessed with doing for myself, less dedicated to my own ideas of how things should play out.

This pregnancy, I’ve gotten into the pretty metal Mary prayers they tuck at the end of the book. In the past, I’ve always found them almost comically intense (“this vale of tears” indeed!). Suddenly, though, I’m so grateful to have a prayer that acknowledges how “Sinking we strive and call to you for aid.” I’ve been sinking, that’s for sure. And if I’m buoyed now, it has everything to do with prayer and friendship and relenting hormones, and very little to do with epsom salts and Sea Bands and Zofran.

If you’re finding yourself on the same sinking ship of severe morning sickness, here are some of my favorite resources for processing those feelings. There seems to be a shortage of resources on managing the despair and anger that comes with feeling really, really bad while something really, really good happens to your body and your family — probably because desperately barfy women don’t tend to have great word output, and once you feel better, you rightly want to dwell on the baby and not how you felt like a trash fire in the early months. (I once threw the perfectly innocent but relentlessly cheerful Prayerfully Expecting: A Nine-Month Novena for Mothers to Be across the room when the author mentioned you might not feel up to mopping as often — at the time, all I could manage was scrubbing the toilet a bit as I lay beside it.) These writers understand the blessed awfulness of a trash fire pregnancy, and have helped me:

• Leila Marie Lawler: Plain Cooking: Surviving Morning Sickness and More (this is the most remedy-focused of the selections, but the tone is so great; the comments section is also super reassuring here)
• Haley Stewart again, my sister in arms: You Were Made for Greatness, Not Comfort
• Laura Kelly Fanucci: various 
• April Hoss: For This Child, I Have Puked
• Sarah Jobe: Creating with God: The Holy Confusing Blessedness of Pregnancy

Getting my IV when I was so morning sick I didn’t realize I also had a stomach bug until in retrospect

 

 

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Friends Rush In

“Let me know how I can help!” We all say it, and it’s meant well, but not usually very helpful. So let’s real talk — things people have done for us in this and other pregnancies:

• Brought fresh soap in case the smell bothered me
• Brought snacks
• Brought dinner
• Watched my kids for appointments
• Sent their big kids to be mother’s helper so I could lie down
• Sent their husbands who work only part-time to be mother’s helper so I could lie down (my husband insists this isn’t be a mother’s helper but a “dad-in-training”)
• Taken my kid to preschool or picked him up
• Sent flowers
• Left cookies
• Mailed encouraging notes and prayer cards
• Walked my dog when it was snowy and John was out of town and we didn’t have a fence
• Helped me do laundry and straighten up

(My friends and acquaintances, let’s be clear, are awesome, and if I name this child after them, it’ll be about twenty names long.)

A friend was recently saying she felt like she was failing at modeling generosity for her kids because she wasn’t making a lot of time for soup kitchens and other volunteerism. And while those things are definitely important (and an area in which I regularly fail), this same friend has been helping me in big and small ways, from showing up to dinner to helping me lug the toddler around preschool events. No doubt her kids see these acts of friendship and generosity, too. 

A lot of this, of course, applies to more than crippling morning sickness or even newborn babies: to grief and all kinds of hardship. For more really concrete advice, check out Sheryl Sandberg talking about what helped her in the wake of her husband’s sudden death. What have people done for you in tough times that’s helped most?

Dear Control Freak Pregnant Lady

You find yourself queasy, or actively vomiting, or sleeping at every opportunity. If you’re like me my first pregnancy, this was not part of the plan. Pregnancy, sure! Sleeping every moment outside of work that you’re not huddled over the toilet? NOT ON PLAN.

Baby doesn’t care. Welcome to motherhood.

It is so, so hard to surrender to this season of comparative powerlessness while you wait for hormones to shift and wellness to return. By now, I imagine your puppeteer hand is twitching pretty severely. Surely, from the sickbed you’ve taken to like a Victorian damsel, you can still exert some influence.

For you, through three first trimesters’ bitter experience, a list of things you cannot control right now:

• You cannot make your loving supportive husband do all your chores exactly as you would and on your timeline. Believe me, I’ve tried, and wound up crying on the couch that not only I couldn’t mop the floor before guests came over, but that I couldn’t be the kind of person who didn’t care I hadn’t mopped the floor, either.
• You cannot control how much TV your sister (or friend or mother in law) lets your kids watch while you are resting. In fact, you may even end up letting them watch more on your shift than you feel great about. They may also eat a lot more Goldfish so that they stop bothering you about your constant nausea snacks. It’s fine. It’s a season.
• You cannot control how your crappy coworker completes your responsibilities, or who you hand your job over to if you’re leaving. This is hard. You care about your work, but things change when you’re pregnant and suddenly all your obligations center around this little person you don’t know and kind of resent. It’s ok to be sad and frustrated.
• You probably can’t keep all your social commitments. It’s fine. Pregnancy is a get out of jail free card and because I’m so wretchedly sick from six weeks on, I’m pretty open about telling people so they don’t think I just suck. Sometimes I still feel like I suck anyway as I’m backing out of book club and road trips and everything else, but trust me: you don’t. This isn’t you. It’s a season.
• You probably can’t even engineer a ritual of a certain food at a certain time that will get you through the day consistently feeling great. You will try lots of stuff, and most of it won’t work, and then more of it will, and then you’ll realize that was probably just the morning sickness dissipating. Whatever. Take it.

The good news: THINGS YOU CAN CONTROL IN FIRST TRIMESTER:

• What exciting plot-driven fluff you  read waiting for the hours to pass.
• How much you wallow on Facebook looking at people who don’t throw up every day
• You can practice relaxing your body! Even now, with labor a million years off and this baby hardly feeling real to you. While you lie in bed, you can practice finding tension in your muscles and releasing it. This will definitely help if unmedicated childbirth is a possibility on down the road, but I think it would help even if you were just dealing with aches and sleeplessness in later trimesters, too. (The Bradley Method has some awesome exercises if you need more information.)
• Tinkering with treatments. Only do this with a doctor’s or midwife’s guidance, obviously, but once you’ve shooed away those awful “Have you tried Saltines?” people (seriously, you don’t need them in your life), veterans will have all kinds of advice worth trying. Vitamins at night! High protein snacks! Hydration when you can manage it! In three pregnancies I haven’t found anything that fixed my morning sickness, but I’ve found lots of little things that helped. You can lose yourself in a lot of online research on first trimester treatments, and honestly losing yourself for awhile in these long early weeks is kind of the goal.
• How you use your misery. Try, when you can, to offer up your aggravations for the people you know who would so love to have a baby. You don’t have to feel guilty that you’re getting what they want and you’re miserable, but you can try to use this as an opportunity for prayer.

How you handle surrendering control during first trimester is up to you, and takes practice. It’s ok to find it hard and to tell people you are finding it hard. I threw up my lunch in the trash at work once and the janitor came up and started gushing about how pregnancy was the best thing that ever happened to him and his wife and…I was not so psyched myself. But I thought I would be eventually, and when I felt better, I was.

Three pregnancies in, I’m a bit better now at not resenting my husband for his ability to get by on fewer than 12 hours of sleep, but the honest truth is I have to be pretty sick before accepting my reliance on other people comes easily. When I’m at the hobbling point, I can peacefully accept all the help that comes my way, but give me a few hours nausea free and I’ll be back to my old tricks of trying to do all the laundry and crying.

Hang in there, and let me know if I can pray for you, or listen to you vent.

Commonplace Book, 29

What is a commonplace book? For me, this is a space where I post interesting links, reflections on what I’m reading, and the newest recipes I’ve been trying out — a collection of miscellaneous micro-posts.

What I’ve been fixing:

• Nada. My most masterful culinary accomplishment in weeks is buying potatoes for John to microwave and serve with chili I had made with my mom back at 5.5 weeks. Also, sometimes I make toast and sit on the grimy kitchen floor as it toasts.

What I’ve been reading:

Well, that’s a horse of a different color, or something. Here goes:

• The Screwtape Letters: reread for Well Read Mom. I love that with each new pass, new things convict me — this time discussions of who time really belongs to and a striking critique of delicacy, which definitely comes into play when you’re trying to evaluate how much of your morning sick life is legitimate survival and how much is fretful selfishness.
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: I know the title is supposed to be cutesy, but it drives me nuts. Otherwise, loved this one about life in the Occupied and postwar Channel Islands. Told in sly epistles for bonus points!
• The Light Between Oceans: In the early 20th century, an Australian lighthouse keeper and his wife discover a baby and a dead man washed ashore their isolated island. They keep the baby. Hypnotically depressing but with an unexpectedly hopeful ending. (See below.)
• Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand: Not as good as I was hoping — kind of weirdly veering in places — but still fun. Major Pettigrew has lived his life in genteel English society in a way to uphold the family honor, but when his adult son’s behavior becomes increasingly crass and the Major himself strikes up a friendship with the village shopkeeper, he must decide how important the status quo really is.
• Blythewood: See, here is where I got really wretchedly sick at nine weeks and dropped all literary pretensions. Young adult; girls at a mysterious boarding school in the early 20th century learn to fight the mysterious denizens of Faerie. But are all the creatures as evil as the girls have been taught? Fine. I don’t know. Probably not worth reading.
• Red Rising: Life on Mars mining below its surface is hard to the point of slavery, but one miner discovers the truth: other castes rule this and other planets, living in unimaginable luxury. A little like Hunger Games, a little like Ender’s Game, way too violent for me. Also YA.
• Edgewater: the YA parade continues as I demand plot and escapism. This was more nuanced than I was expecting. A girl raised by her eccentric aunt in their crumbling beachside manor is suddenly reduced to poverty just as she meets the tabloid boy of her dreams. See? It sounds ridiculous.
• The Shade of the Moon: this is the fourth in a series I read so long ago I had forgotten some key plot points. In short: four years ago a meteor hit the moon out of orbit and towards the earth, causing mondo natural disasters and destroying society as we know it etc. Now our man Jon is a lucky resident of an enclave, a sort of fortress that exploits workers who live in comparative poverty. He’s a spoiled teenager till a new girl in the enclave opens his eyes to social justice. Then he does a bunch of bad things but eventually mends his was. This series is mysterious in its pull for me because parts are really, really grim for YA (rape, brutality) and yet some plot and dialog ring almost middle grade in their triteness. Luckily the series is finally over now so I can’t be lured back in.
• Everything I Never Told You: in 1970s small town Ohio, the golden child of the biracial Lee family is found drowned in the neighborhood pond. As above, hypnotically depressing, but with an unexpectedly redemptive ending. And look! Twelve weeks and back to adult books, for the moment at least. 

Dispatches from an Enchanted Castle

Onions and garlic root in the pantry. Dog fur collects in drifts in the corners. On a sunlit couch somewhere in the house, a mama naps.

Or doesn’t nap. Just lies there with eyes closed tight, still as Snow White, still as Sleeping Beauty. And around her, her children play.

So, I was wrong in one of my last posts, and I am indeed pregnant. And for our family, that means everything goes into suspended animation. I’m almost thirteen weeks now, and can sometimes get by with just one nap and twelve hours at night. I can get by with a half dose of Zofran in the morning and a dose of Unisom and B6 at night.

But mostly, there’s a lot of lying around. In the spectrum of things, I seem to fall about in the middle first trimester: not glowingly symptom-free, not hospital fodder (though a stomach bug did earn me an IV this time).

Without my friends, it would be an unbroken schedule of hunch-walking from obligation to obligation with hibernation in between and lots and lots of tv and fast food for the kiddos.

It can feel like stagnation, or suffocation. It definitely feels interminable, every time I invariably fall ill at six weeks and stare down the rest of the first trimester. (I still have a pretty sensitive puke trigger after that, but not the soul-crushing constant nausea.)

Instead, this time, I’m trying to see it as a season. Like Quiet Month, but with more mint chocolate chip ice cream. I’m receiving more help from my village than in past pregnancies and trying to just have the grace and gratitude to accept it.

For three weeks there, Christmas lights turned on by the kids shone from our porch like some weird Lenten anomaly, a quarantine beacon: in this house, no one stirs. But that’s not the death sentence it felt like in my first pregnancy, nor the cataclysm of spoiled plans of my second pregnancy. It’s a season of enchantment in the old fairy tale sense: something strange and mysterious and hard, but yielding something wonderful.