We nearly reached the year mark of trying to get pregnant when I sought out a fertility specialist. I wasn’t distraught or anxious that it wasn’t happening, I just wanted to begin to collect information. This doctor and I sat together in a room and discussed my life and sexual practices, my family history, my yearly chart of monthly blood, and after about an hour of her time, she pronounced me normal and declared I should be pregnant any day. Her words, my seeking, I think both things finally jump-started my bodily processes, because I never saw her again to actually begin her work. I was pregnant within a couple weeks of this encounter. I only point this out because I think it’s kind of funny. It doesn’t happen this way for many women, but I like to believe that taking this step in faith (it was faith for me, because nothing else would have gotten me voluntarily, aka asymptomatic, into a doctor’s office) was rewarded. I think it was the beginning of a particular luck I’ve been carrying with me.

I have met this news and the changes in my body with a quiet calm.
This is kind of my whole thing. I don’t get worked up over much. When I have big feelings to process, I do it on my own, with pen to page. But the extent and flexibility of this steady quietude at the starting point of my transformation into motherhood has surprised even me. I could not truthfully assert that I’m never thrown off by the regular schedule of hormonal changes that comes with the female programming. And I expected a chaos of a distinctly new and unknown kind once the pregnancy hormones kicked on. You know, these are intense things. There’s a whole other person coming to life inside me. Yet, the only marked emotions I have to report on are minimal in their expression: I’m a bit in awe, and I’m extremely focused on the task of being pregnant.

This focus has been slowly and carefully drawing me inward. There are a list of intentions for my pregnancy that I know very well. I have loosened my hold of a few projects I was intending on at the start of this year. A change is happening.

The first trimester is an uncertain one. A woman goes without evidence of this small thing inside her for quite a while. I found it required all my trust in God’s goodness, all my faith to accept that I don’t know what God’s goodness might mean from moment to moment. Healthcare providers will inspect a woman’s midsection after she advances to a certain point in time, and they will begin to use words like viability to describe the condition of the mass of cells which may or may not become a human in there. If she’s in the headspace where she really wants it, a lot hangs on that word. It required all my trust and all my faith to balance the hope and expectation with the uncertainty, the waiting.

I received strange signals from my healthcare providers when they couldn’t locate a fetus for my first ultrasound. From woman to woman, from midwife to me, a weird energy passed. It was as if they quickly found reason to be worried, but just as soon determined not to let me sense it, though I did. I was told, don’t worry now, but in the event the outcome is…not the one we want, we can refund you as I passed a stack of bills over the counter. A few days passed, a few days in my steady quiet prayerfulness where I prepared myself to accept any outcome and believe it is for the best, then I went back to try an ultrasound again with a different woman. She placed warmed goop on my belly, rolled the reader around once, and said, “here’s your baby.” Yes, there was a baby in there after all, growing as expecting, a heartbeat surging through it’s whole entire single inch of a body. A miracle to me.

I am determined not to give in to fear. (Fear is the mind killer). Instead, my framing puts curiosity in place of fear. To be curious about all these new things I will feel, the ways I will grow, the all-consuming power that giving birth is - that’s what I want my mind to do first before fear and then panic morphs and changes what is beautifully and perfectly designed to run its course. I will try not to place my own mind in command over the events as they unfold, because I don’t know shit. I surrender.

Being pregnant at once connects me to women of every age and creed who have done it before me. When I share my news with them, they launch into telling me their story, pointing out important notes I should take with me. I love this and I take their words in seriously; that they would immediately want to help me, empathize and share knowledge with me, I think this is a feature of our shared nature. At the same time, after this first trimester, I still feel a little unrelateable to the general population of women. Much of the advice I’ve sampled includes using pregnancy as an excuse. I know there’s some logic to it, I know pregnancy = fragility in many cases. But I would feel just so silly if I were to indulge in complaining, at this point anyway, because truthfully it’s been a mild experience. Maybe I shouldn’t declare this now because I haven’t reached the hard part. Anything can happen. Yet I just don’t see myself participating in this the way I would otherwise be encouraged to, from a mainstream perspective. I’m looking into a lot of personal stories from mothers that are posted online these days, and what I see there is a lot of scorn that I just reject.

Couldn’t we try to wear the battle scars of birth with pride? (Maybe I’ll have more to say on this later. The joke is that I don’t like women, and that’s not true….there are a lot of women I love who don’t align with what I’m describing.)

I’m reading Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin which is basically the bible for anyone who trusts that a body knows how to birth. She is a prolific midwife who thoroughly revived midwifery practice in the US. She’s also thoroughly a hippie. Yes, she delivered a thousand babies on a commune called The Farm in the 70s. I watched this documentary which is really good if you’re interested, but my favorite line to pull out of context was this:

“We went through a phase where we thought it was more spiritually evolved not to wear our glasses.”

I’ve chosen midwives for my care at a birth center, outside the hospital. There was really no other choice. I was scared straight out of hospital birth when I took a course in college about it. Looking back, the course was not rigourous education, but rather propoganda, true for all the courses I took from this one professor. However, I’m thankful I had my eyes open to this perspective. The deeper I get into it, the more I find myself naturally aligned to it. And if I’m a bitcoiner, like, it makes sense. Why would I use the middleman in the hospital to numb me out and do the hard part for me (and also lie to me and work against my physiology, etc.) when instead I can participate in the most transformative physiological experience of my life. And perhaps even learn something useful from it, through it, rather than schedule a date to get it over with.

When I set out to write this, I didn’t think I had much to say.

Also I know that you guys are not really the audience for this.

But I did want to break the news in a non-attention-grabbing way, and give a round-about explanation for the few times I skipped zines last month.