determined
I was back to spinning in thoughts of fetus love and what that means. My friend knows someone who rarely smiled. She became a doctor and then got pregnant unexpectedly and said more than once, What am I going to do with a baby. She gave birth to a boy and she began to smile. My friend put photographs of her on the precious real estate of her fridge, holding her boy, opened by love, and now she’s pregnant again.
Some say people feel a connection to their baby the minute they conceive, some say when it is born, some say in between — when they feel it kick, when they see it on the ultrasound screen. I have felt it kick and it feels like gas, though slowly now I’m differentiating, and to get to picture what’s happening inside is, if not love, then at least cool. Rosie says her mom loved her when she was still in her belly. She has talked to her mom about me and my silly monologues on love.
How can you truly love someone you’ve never met? I ask her. Maybe people say that about God. I ask her, Don’t you think it’s strange that there’s someone in our family we haven’t met yet? We have no idea who he is, but he’s inside of me? He’s this close, incredibly close to us, he’s right here in this car right now with us, and we don’t know anything about him, we have no idea who he is. She asks me if I’m having second thoughts about pregnancy, which isn’t true at all. I’m articulating the mystery.
I know the mystery will end with love. Why I know this: I can love her, and Jack, and the dogs, and the cats. I even loved her hamsters, while others have given up their dogs. I love fiercely and with all my brain and heart. But that doesn’t mean I stop articulating. I want to ask her, though I don’t, but do you love your new brother?
And I think it’s different because I’ve never known this, the unchosen kind of love. In all love before this coming baby, I’ve picked them. I picked Steve; I interviewed Rosie and Jack and chose to stay. I picked the cats and dogs. I saw them all first and I said yes, I do, I choose to love you my whole life. But maybe, Steve says, you had no choice in loving me. It was predetermined. I believe him. I didn’t feel choice — it felt like I was drawn to him for a purpose, outside of my control.
It is different with IVF. There was so much medical intervention involved in making this baby, it’s hard to say it was predetermined. Doctors drugged me up, swelled up my ovaries, extracted them, inserted random sperm directly into them, then chose the embryos that they then inserted back into me, freezing the rest for a yet-to-be-determined date. This baby, the son I will have for the rest of my life, was picked for me by a doctor. This baby is a miracle in every sense of the word, but it was chosen for me and also for God, if God was working through a doctor to bring it here. It wasn’t created like Rosie was: she was a miracle that forced herself into existence through determination, in spite of the efforts of her parents. This coming baby is the exact opposite. And I feel funny about that.
Rosie and I went baby registry shopping, and this was the moment — not the kicking, not the ultrasound — where I realized we were having a baby. A real human being. It’s not the stuff I love — but it was visual evidence. I was picking items that my baby would sit in, put his mouth on, love. I could picture it then. Before then, I couldn’t picture it almost at all. I’ve been afraid to — afraid to buy things that mean this is real. Every little twinge of pain still puts anxiety on the upswing: maybe this will disappear. That’s normal because of how I got here. I know logically why I’ve been afraid to put evidence of a baby in my home, why I’ve over-analyzed fetus-love. All that fear because of how I got to this place. Though I know, despite my fears, how the mystery ends. The way it always ends.
