Last week I was thinking of being H1N1 for Halloween. I wanted to be something scary and abstract, and for many right now there isn’t much scarier.

But maybe it’s too scary to be funny. I’m not sure if I have the heart to answer the door on Halloween night, pregnant and dressed as a virus, handing children candy that I’ve touched. Maybe it’s like in 2003 when two people came to a party dressed as the twin towers. Something about it was funny, one tower bobbing on each of their heads as they stood side by side, and something about it was very wrong and definitely too soon.

I’ve not been wanting to be afraid of the swine flu. I do feel that our culture is too afraid of germs, and I’ve felt that as long as I stay healthy enough, any infrequent viruses I receive will help the baby build up a tolerance. The more we throw antibiotics at a problem, the more the antibiotics won’t work. And throughout this pregnancy (knock on wood), while many have gotten sick around me, and Steve has been sick twice, I’ve had enough vitamins and fluids and sleep in my system to keep me safe.

I am going to sound crazy for a minute. Vaccinations scare me, though yes I will vaccinate my child. I simply don’t know who to believe. Some books say that vaccinations are helpful but that many of the diseases we vaccinate against were healed more by clean drinking water and general sanitation, and that even if we did get the mumps now, it wouldn’t have much of a chance of causing lasting harm. After all, we vaccinate against chicken pox now, when few people have ever died of chicken pox. It seems like a cavalier use of vaccines and children’s immune systems. And I’ve never understood why we vaccinate against the flu. Each time we encounter a virus, it helps us to build up resistance to a variant of that virus (which is what they say about the swine flu these days and why this specific virus is affecting mostly the young who haven’t encountered anything like it before). And, as crazy as this sounds, what would life be like if we never got sick, never knew our body’s limits, and never felt that sort of adversity.

But I will vaccinate because the nature of a virus is it spreads, and if I spread the measles to someone unwittingly, I’d obviously feel responsible and incredibly stupid. When we all vaccinate, we protect one another.

But at what cost? Many vaccinations have been around for not that long, and they are indeed full of toxins and pieces of diseases. The one year I got the flu shot was the year I got the biggest flu. My friend vaccinated her antsy baby, then couldn’t wake him, couldn’t wake him, and dragged him into the doctor’s office asleep and unresponsive. And as much as there is no proven scientific link between autism and vaccines, there are enough fighting mothers who feel otherwise: they’ve seen their child healthy, and then some light unlights. Even if autism is genetic and the toxins in the vaccines simply send the child over the edge, similar to a food allergy, that link is one that many mothers stand by, and I’m not currently able to turn my back on them (nor am I able to turn my back on the doctors who say otherwise). I am probably more afraid of autism than I am of H1N1.

To get the H1N1 vaccine right now, you have to be high risk, and there’s no one higher on the high-risk list than a pregnant woman. But the vaccine hasn’t been tested — no babies have been born yet since a woman received the shot. And as much as they say it’s perfectly similar to the regular flu vaccine, I’m a twin: two things that seem similar can have very different outcomes.

But in my research yesterday, a doctor likened it to something like Katrina: a bunch of hard-headed people sitting in their houses, believing that this storm will pass them by. I am afraid of autism, yes, and I’m sort of afraid of H1N1, but I’m really afraid of an I-told-you-so.

What do we know? Not much scientifically. And some people have died, but many, many haven’t. A friend took her daughter to the doctor’s office with the flu, they tested her for swine flu, it came back negative, and the doctor decided that they should call it swine flu anyway. Her friend went to the doctor with the flu, they didn’t test her for swine flu but decided that that’s what it was. The same with her two children. So all over their state there’s swine flu in the air, but is it?

In many parts of the country, schools are closed for days at a time — but not because people have swine flu. It’s because they’re afraid of swine flu. Parents keep their children home just in case. Rumors and fear spread fast as a virus.

My friend who teaches at the University of Michigan says that he’s seen not one case of swine flu. Not at this huge university in the middle of the country, this prime location for a big virus to hit, all these students stuck in dorms with the windows shut. Teachers are instructed by the university to let students miss as many days as they want and to not penalize them for it.

So is there an epidemic? (Obama has called it one because the word instigates action and money in hospitals, not because it is one.) Should I truly be afraid enough to get a piece of the virus grown from an egg and a little bit of formaldehyde shot into my arm? One midwife I saw said that she was definitely getting the vaccine and that she was giving it to her kids. Another midwife said that I should get the vaccine if I’m the kind of person who would seek medication if I felt the flu coming on — because many medications are cost/risk worse for a pregnant woman than the vaccine itself. I shouldn’t get the vaccine if I’m the kind of person who would rest and drink lots of fluids instead. I like that logic for the regular flu, but the swine flu (I’ve heard! Bold print in the newspapers! Be scared!) can randomly hit the healthiest person in the room.

I’ve been able to control my environment a good deal. If Rosie feels feverish, I ask her mother to take care of her. I wash my hands a lot, and I use my own pen when I’m signing receipts. But on Sunday I leave for Vermont, and I’ll be out of my safety zone for three weeks, surrounded by people I don’t know, eating off of plates someone else ate off of in a cafeteria. And suddenly it seems smarter for me to get the vaccine. People are dying, we don’t know how the virus will mutate, and the flu season hasn’t even really begun. If I get sick when I’m away, there will be no doctor I know to take care of me, and Steve, staying home with the zoo in Ann Arbor, will be unable to help me.

I called the hospital about getting a vaccine, but they don’t have one for me. They don’t have enough even for the most high-risk people. Maybe they’ll get more, she said, check back later. I felt for a minute like I was stuck in the middle of the ocean without a raft. But I’m leaving town, I need one right now, I begged, but there just isn’t enough vaccine to go around. So maybe the decision will be made for me — maybe there won’t be enough and I’ll leave town without being vaccinated, and I don’t know how I feel about that.

I won’t be H1N1 for Halloween. This baby stuff is scary. The costume might tempt the gods. There’s not enough wood to knock on for that.

October 27th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (4)

It seems like I’ve been waiting forever to be able to say that I’m thirty-some weeks.

And sometimes it feels like I really can’t get much bigger, yikes.

October 23rd, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (3)

In my family there has been some controversy because, here, the nurse trained to deliver babies in a hospital is called a midwife. That word is terrible for too many people. I can hear the bad connotation, too, I’m not immune to it.

While I would have liked to have a midwife who delivers my baby at home, I’m not capable of that: I’m not trusting enough that something won’t go wrong, and I’m not solid enough in myself that I wouldn’t blame myself for the rest of my life if something did go wrong.

Birth is, I believe, not a medical procedure but instead it’s a life process. I think I stole that phrase from a million books, but it rings true. But it’s also a trauma, in that it pushes the body like a marathon does. And also, it might have to be a medical procedure if something goes wrong. That’s why I’ll be in a hospital in the labor and delivery wing with all the rest of the laboring women. We toured it this week — it’s ugly and uninspiring.

I chose a midwife because I believe that there is a lot outside of normal that still produces a healthy baby, and that she’ll trust my body (to a point) to keep a baby alive. I can trust that the midwife won’t give me pitocin if my labor has gone on longer than 12 hours (though she would if it has gone on longer than 24). I can trust that she will try her best to turn a breech baby up until labor (though if I were in active labor and the baby was breech, she would call for a c-section). I can trust that she wouldn’t misread a heart monitor (which has upped the amount of c-sections when the baby’s heart rate drops, but which has not upped the amount of saved babies — sometimes babies heart rates drop during contractions, and it isn’t necessarily a sign of danger). And because it’s in a hospital, and she’s a nurse specifically trained to deliver babies (and many of these ‘nurses’ have medical degrees), and because all the doctors and midwives are in the same wing, they could cut me open in four minutes and take the baby out, just as quickly as anyone in the next room over, cared for by doctor or midwife or what.

I think I am mistrusting of doctors, which isn’t a good thing, but I also have seen studies that show that, discounting high-risk births in order to balance the study, women who deliver with midwives have a lower infant and maternity mortality rate than those who deliver with doctors.

We are delivering in the dark. I have been trying to write about this for days, but I don’t know how to describe it except by using the word intuition. Doctors aren’t trained to intuit. They have machines that shine light in dark places. Midwives are trained to see beyond the machines, only using the machines secondarily. It’s so dark in the womb. There’s so much going on that no doctor or midwife can understand. So many answers are vague — sometimes it hurts when I press here, but no ultrasound could explain why; sometimes I feel tired, but no medicine can be given to fix that. The doctor I saw last week only shrugged at my pain and told me to go to bed. I could have fought with my health insurance for another ultrasound, but I was happy to pay only for my pee sample instead, because I’m fine now; whatever it was resolved itself with rest.

We are all birthing babies in the dark, and sometimes the machines tell us what we don’t need to know and what can’t help us. At one ultrasound, they saw twins, and they couldn’t tell me if the twins would be there the following week, and there was nothing they could do to stop me from bleeding when only one kept growing. Some say that there are lots and lots and lots of early twins, and I’m only grieving for one because I saw its heart beating inside the shape of a shrimp on a screen. At a later ultrasound, they saw a black tear in the gray of the amniotic sac, and so I went back for another ultrasound. I could only give friends and family vague reports because no one could say what it meant that there was a tear there or what would happen to it. My mother, who has birthed four children, assured me that it was fine — intuition — and that too many people get alarmed these days because we see problems that resolve themselves on their own, when before we didn’t have to know that there was ever an issue at all. My health insurance paid only partially for the next ultrasound, which showed the tear healed, and who knows what it was, certainly not the highest-trained doctors who read the images at one of the best hospitals in the country, but you could tell with a simple stethoscope and a tape measure across my belly that the baby was fine.

From Time Magazine:
About 99% of all births in the U.S. take place in hospitals, yet we rank 29th in the world in infant mortality — below Hungary and tied with Slovakia and Poland — with 6.71 deaths per 1,000 live births. That compares to a rate of about 3.5 deaths per 1,000 live births in Far Eastern and Scandinavian countries such as Singapore, Japan, Norway and Sweden.

My friend tried to get pregnant for six months, then, on her way to Denmark where she was planning to stay for a year, she found out that she was pregnant. I guess this baby’s meant to be born in Denmark, is what she determined. After four days of labor, her daughter was born. If I were in a hospital for four days in the U.S., there is no question, midwife or not, that I would be cut open, but her daughter is great.

I think about that with my mother, too. My older sister had to wear braces on her hips after a difficult entrance and a long labor, and these days I figure that my mother would have had a c-section whether she wanted one or not. We were next, twins, and twins these days are automatically sent into the high-risk labor ward and well over half come out by c-section. But my mother at the time didn’t even know that she was having twins until the day of delivery — and we’re fine. My younger sister was breech, I think, which is now an automatic c-section, and also she was born with meconium in her mouth. None of those births was easy, but if she had had a c-section with her first, it could have presented all sorts of problems for the rest of the births that followed.

Recently the midwife from The Business of Being Born was sued because she let a woman labor for three days who then gave birth to a stillborn baby with the cord wrapped too tightly around its neck. This is terrible and a tragedy, and I’m not willing to put myself or anyone inside of me or around me through that. And I also realize that many labor tragedies occur in the hospital each year, as well. The article that describes the lawsuit is short, but the comments that follow it are colorful and show the extremely different points of view we have in America about birth.

It seems we’re coming to a point in society where there is a shift in how we understand labor — we can birth, we can deal with the pain, millions of women have done it for millenia; believe in us, trust this process. In 2006, 31% of births were c-sections (up 50% from 1996 though our bodies hadn’t changed in that decade), but doctors admit that that drastic increase has done nothing to improve infant- or maternal-mortality statistics. In the countries where births are the least invasive (and where the countries are part of the developing world) are where the most babies and mothers survive. There is some muscle of intuition that they can flex, when our culture of lawsuits and rules and fears and germlessness may blind us.

But I will get a c-section if I have to. I’ll knock a lady off an operating table if it means I have a better chance of keeping me and the person inside of me alive. More than many people, we have been through hell to get to this point, and I’m not stupid enough to risk that. I just feel that I’m making the smarter choice by keeping my low-risk pregnancy in low-risk hands, cushioned by a Level 1 trauma center.

I don’t think that the way that my baby is born will define me any more than the way that the baby was created. I am positive that I could bond and recover from a c-section as fast as the next person. I think that babies sometimes come into the world with relatively little effort, and I hope that’s true for me, but as much as I want to claim my birth as my own and not as a doctor’s, I can’t claim it from my own body — my best intentions may come up against what my body needs in order to keep the baby alive — c-section or early labor or what — and then there will be a new birth plan. Like seemingly everything, it’s a balance based on intuition and flexibility and strength.

October 23rd, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (1)

My brain has gone down the drain. I am not capable of holding a list in my head. Lists all over the house now.

I had to buy spinach at the store. My list said spinach not one not two not three but four times.

This morning I am trying to organize my day: I have a thought, I go to write it down, and by the time I get to the paper the thought is gone. Gone. I open a new window on my computer screen in order to write here, but I see my homepage and can’t remember what I was going to do.

This morning I boiled an empty pot for five minutes, waiting patiently for tea.

It has been a mellow couple of weeks after a storm of activity. I was in pain that the doctors determined was simply round ligament pain exacerbated by overworking and overlifting, but it kept me in bed for four days straight, on my left side, my computer tilted sideways, the charger popping out, popping out, popping out of its socket. It is not as revitalizing as it sounds to lie down for four days. It is stultifying. The fogginess in my body and brain feeds on itself and then nothing gets done.

And there is sickness everywhere. One minute it’s my throat, then it’s Steve’s head, then Rosie’s home with what her mother thinks is a fever. Then her mother has the flu. Jack coughs continuously. I was helping him put on his halloween costume makeup and he coughed absentmindedly directly in my face. So I lay low, and drink my nourishing tea and take my vitamins, all of my energy going into making a baby in the most abstract sense — I’ve never seen it, I might just have gas, all I know is I’m tired and bloated and I’m not supposed to get sick.

Yesterday we threw open all the windows and went on the first walk we’d been on since before the bedrest. The world is glowing right now. It is positively gorgeous. It’s a time where I feel that a photograph would cheapen it, would turn it into an image made for a thrift store puzzle. I just like to look, feel my eyes try to adjust and make sense of how yellow the trees are in our backyard. I feel them working, thinking. My brain in the background is the ocean, swooping in and taking thoughts away.

October 22nd, 2009 | Category: inward, the baby thing | Leave a comment

My belly is becoming a thing.

A thing I have to breathe around.

I lean back when I sit because otherwise my lungs seem to squish one atop the other. And my stomach is stuck in between, compressed.

If I eat, I have to lean way back.

If I’m sitting normally, the right set of ribs start to feel like they’re falling asleep — too much conflated into one spot — like an over-edited poem.

It’s a belly I touch because it’s where my hand can rest. And because part of me feels as if I can hold it up. It doesn’t feel heavy, it just feels vulnerable out there.

I’ve gained twenty pounds. I make the floor creak.

I can’t slide by people anymore. I try, then I remember.

And part of me still feels that it’s my secret. When strangers ask when I’m due, half of me is surprised that they can tell. From up here above the bubble, it doesn’t look that big. All I know is I can’t see much of my legs, and my arms feel like T-Rex arms.

Looks like you’re really packing it in, someone said recently. She ran over and tickled my stomach. She is usually more sensitive. I am usually less so. I think I glared.

A friend of mine told me what her partner said after he’d seen me: Is she going to get any bigger? She looks like she needs a cart. Sometimes I wish my stomach obstructed my hearing instead of my lungs.

October 20th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

I’ve been looking for discounts on baby items on craigslist, and I found a co-sleeper for sale for half off. And better yet, it was just down the street, so I didn’t have to drive very far or have it shipped.

We’ve decided that the system that perhaps might work for us is to start with the baby in the co-sleeper — a small crib attached and directly in line with our bed — and for naps the baby could be in a crib in its room or else in a pack-n-play that floats around the house. I may even be okay with the baby sleeping right in our bed, but because we have dogs who are slowly being trained to not jump on the bed at night, I want the baby to have a place that is safe from them and from our semi-conscious selves.

I don’t feel any particular desire to push the baby into its own room too quickly — it’s harder for me, and a swift transition from nine months inside to a room on its own seems unnecessary. I don’t think there’s any prize for putting the baby in his own room the fastest — in fact, I actually think I may feel that the opposite is true (though I’ll have to see, I don’t know from experience).

Last night I drove down the street to check out the used co-sleeper, and what I found was this beautiful young family, our age and in a house that was simple and uncluttered and with a huge piano that took up most of the main room. The husband showed me the co-sleeper, taking it out of its bag and showing me how it worked and pointing out where it was worn from use. Then the wife came in and helped him disassemble it. They talked of their three-year-old, who has slept with them for most of his life and decided recently that he’s ready for his own room. No tears, no difficult transition. He was ready when he was ready.

So $75? I asked.

Yeah, does that sound right to you? the husband asked me.

Actually, the wife started to say.

Maybe less, because of the worn spots? the husband finished for her.

No, actually, I was thinking that she could just take it, she finished quietly.

The husband was quiet but seemed relatively indifferent. The wife helped me bring it to the car. She said she was just grateful that someone could use it and that it wouldn’t have to be in their house anymore.

Sometimes giving looks so easy. She just wanted to give. We were neighbors, and I was entering a life phase that she had just finished. She was sending me off into mine with a gift, from one family to another. I tried to offer to pay perhaps too many times, and I assured them that they had my contact information if they changed their mind.

It made it easier last night to give. To jump up and get Steve his tea, to take the dogs out, leaning over my obstruction of a belly to deal with their muddy paws. It made it clear that I also have to give like she gave. I’m already planning all the things I can give to a new mother once the baby or babies are grown.

October 20th, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Comments (1)

After a week in Seattle and four days with family, two days ago (after I came home from teaching a quick workshop) Steve asked if I’d like to go for a walk. I didn’t, but I went. And I shouldn’t have, (there is a lesson in there about intuition) because on the walk I felt a pull start in my right pelvis and back. I almost asked for a break, but we were almost home. I spent the rest of the day in bed.

But the next morning, which happened to be the morning we went to the midwife, I felt great, and the heartbeat was louder than ever, my goodness it filled up the room with its strength and volume.

The midwife said that if I feel any pain like that I should hit the floor, lay low. It means I am overworking, or have lifted something too heavy or moved too much. Allow the body to repair.

And I realized that yes it was too much, I had spent a week and a half doing too much and here my body was telling me so, my baby was telling me so. I am trying to be still.

Yesterday I stayed in bed as much as possible, which is hard to do, and I was up taking the cats to the vet and up making dinner and up doing whatever little thing the house asks so loudly to have done to it after a busy and beautiful weekend family storm. But I hit a wall, I felt it, at 8, and Rosie and Steve felt it too because I got cranky. I was up until midnight anyway, but sitting down, and my pelvis and back hurt loudly.

So today I am laying low. Hard to type this way. On my side (do-not-lie-in-your-back-do-not-lie-on-your-back). My menagerie like a star touching any part of me they can. Right now Joon is at my right knee, Moby at my left toe, and Lucky at my left thigh (there is some grumbling between those two). (Roxy, the black cat, has not ever been a shadow to me, good girl). Steve pops in and says it looks claustrophobic, but for me I feel contained, unable to fall.

Being down like this is hard. I’m not the most productive person I know, but certainly I have never sat in bed all day. The menagerie is thrilled, but I feel like I have had thirty sodas and my teeth are rotting and I have no way to burn any of it off. I need a fairy to come in and clean the house and comb my hair and take the sweater and sheet patterns off my skin.

October 15th, 2009 | Category: house, the baby thing | Leave a comment

I heard a lot last weekend from people who hadn’t seen me in some time that I have a pregnant glow. I don’t know what it is. I don’t think it’s true. I’ve not seen it in anyone else who’s pregnant.

I think I look healthier because I don’t get to drink or eat too badly. But I also think I look waterlogged, like my sinuses sting. I definitely look more tired. I look like I’ve gained weight in my face at my cheeks. And if I haven’t eat for a couple of hours, I start to look green. Sometimes I wonder why people haven’t stopped me on the street to ask if I’m okay, my eyes look so gray underneath.

I read somewhere that it’s the oxytocin that makes the cheeks flush. But oxytocin is emitted during nursing, too, and no one says that women have a nursing glow.

I pressed someone who said it to me to tell me what she meant, how I could possibly look like I have a pregnant glow. This woman is smart, but she shrugged and said she just sees it in people when they start to show, and I am wary.

We saw a friend in Northern Michigan earlier this summer who didn’t recognize us at first — it was too coincidental that she was there at the very same beach at the very moment that we were there — and when she saw me, she said to herself, that woman’s pregnant. She said she could tell by the way I was smiling, and at that point it was too soon to tell by my stomach.

October 12th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

My mom and older sister organized a baby shower for me at our house this weekend. It was at points overwhelming to see all these people I love in my house. I wanted to lock the door so no more people I loved would come in because if they did then I might explode. I couldn’t believe that people even remembered to come, and brought gifts for the coming baby, and stayed for hours to talk to strangers and listen to my dad tell them to save ten percent. It was elegant and beautiful and comfortable and really fun, and we kept partying long after we thought we would. After some feelings of loneliness the week before, it was just so amazing to see that we really aren’t alone and that there are so many people who already care for this baby and for us. Looking around at everyone, I felt completely sure that the baby would turn out okay, with a community as beautiful as the one I have around me.

My dad said the day before the party that we needed a balloon to help people find their way. I pictured a tiny blue balloon sagging from a string on our mailbox, but he went out with Steve and came back with the most massive balloon. BABY SHOWER, it says on the shape of a rattle, waving above the mailbox, letting all the neighbors know without a doubt that actually I’m pregnant like they may have suspected. Steve tried to convince my dad to get a small, discrete balloon, but my dad insisted. He said he wanted me to know that he supported me. He was so proud of it, he went outside after the party and took this picture himself.

October 12th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment