* Warning: This post contains vivid references to the first trimester and all of the unfortunate bodily functions it may entail. If these things make you queasy or uncomfortable, perhaps this is not the post for you! *
The reassurance offered by our first ultrasound did not last much longer than Nurse Beasley’s brisk goodbye. Shortly thereafter, we found ourselves lost in a sea of vomit, and even the anxiety of our first few weeks of pregnancy seemed like a luxury neither of us had the time or energy for anymore. The morning sickness started in the usual manner, with early morning nausea and things like brushing her teeth or smelling the garbage proving particularly difficult for Cari. We were optimistic at first, as we’d both read that morning sickness was correlated with a reduced risk of miscarriage. Besides, I was confident that I’d prepared for the challenge as well as anyone who wouldn’t actually be physically undergoing it possibly could. Starting in our fourth week of pregnancy, I’d begun to research cures for morning sickness and compiled our morning sickness emergency kit. By the time the first wave of nausea arrived, I’d already filled our cupboards with organic saltines, Preggie Pops, ginger chews, small-batch organic ginger ale, and a special blend of morning sickness prevention tea.
None of them were the least bit helpful. With the exception of the Preggie Pops and the saltines, which worked for about a week each, most of them went entirely untouched and even the smell or the mention of them triggered another bout of vomiting.
I think it’s fair to say that this is around the point where our paths diverged. Previously we’d been two women united in our quest to conceive, and then two women united in our terror that we had done so. Now, I began my fruitless but all-consuming quest to Be Prepared, while Cari embarked upon her own equally fruitless and all-consuming quest to Not Vomit.
And thus began the dark days of our pregnancy. Cari waking me at 5 am to rush to the kitchen and blend a smoothie in a desperate race to beat the vomit. Cari arriving at the front door after her two hour commute home from work with a bag of vomit in her hand. Cari calling to say that she wanted a particular dish for dinner, and then after I shopped for it and prepared it, discovering that even the smell of it triggered another bout of vomiting. She lost weight and we lost hope. The idea that Cari was pregnant with our future child became a shiny, foreign object we couldn’t quite place. They say the simplest explanation is the easiest to believe, and the simplest explanation for us was the Cari had been afflicted by the Flu of All Flues Forever and Ever Amen. That, or a life-sucking parasite.
Most disappointing of all, for me at least, was how angry I was. I like to imagine myself as a graceful, giving sort of person in most circumstances, and the circumstance of my dearly beloved being pregnant with our long-desired child seemed like the sort of circumstance to bring out the best in a person. Wrong. I slammed down her cups of perfectly proportioned cranberry juice and water and sighed dramatically while fixing endless plates of bland potatoes and pasta. I scowled while scrubbing the toilet, and grumbled irritably about the little mouse noises coming from our bed at night as Cari worked her way down an unbelievable loud package of saltines. We’d gone from a well-balanced partnership to the roles of caretaker, and someone who relies almost exclusively upon the caretaker for sustenance. This, of course, was exactly what terrified me about the unimaginable responsibility of being a parent, and I didn’t adapt well to it’s early arrival.
Cari’s disappointment was equally palpable. The only thing she’d ever wanted, from her earliest memory of lovingly carting around a baby doll, was to be pregnant. Now, here it was—the penultimate experience of her life, the culmination or her greatest hopes and dreams—and she was spending it looking at the inner rim of our toilet bowl, which I just never quite manage to get clean enough. There was no maternal glow, no loving caress of our baby-to-be tucked safely in her womb. Just misery, exhaustion, and an endless sea of vomit.
With what little optimism we had left, we counted down the weeks and finally the days until the magical Week 12. This, rumor had it, was the week where things began to fall into place. Your risk of miscarriage dropped, your nausea passed, and the troublesome first trimester said it’s goodbyes. But, as I flipped ahead eagerly in our array of week-by-week baby books, I began to have the sneaking suspicion that Week 12 might not have fully earned it’s fame. It seemed that the end of the first trimester was actually a debatable dateline—some books slipped it back to the end of the thirteenth or even fourteen week. Others cautioned that morning sickness improved only for some moms, while others might continue to receive daily visits from Vomit-land for some months to come. I cautiously asked my sister when she’d began to feel better, and she cheerfully replied: “You know, I felt better the very moment Hanna was born, it was amazing!”
Well then.
Despite this news, we forged valiantly ahead with our Week 12 celebration plans. Or rather, I did. Cari’s planning at this point consisted primarily of planning the closest route to the toilet. I organized a day in the nearby Walnut Creek, where everything is shiny and clean, and shopping is the past time of choice. I planned to begin with our first maternity clothes shopping at the two-story Pea in the Pod/Motherhood Maternity super-store, followed by lunch at Cari’s favorite California Pizza Kitchen, and Push Present window shopping at Tiffany’s. An hour later we found ourselves stuck in an endless traffic jam in a completely full parking garage, Cari carrying a full ziplock bag of vomit, and me desperately searching for either a parking spot or a garbage can. The line at California Pizza Kitchen was over an hour, far too long for even a non-pregnant stomach to wait by the time we finally managed to find a parking spot, the rings at Tiffany’s cost more than a year of child care, and the clothes at Pea in the Pod were designed for an anorexic model wearing a fake pregnancy belly. The sales-clerk offered half-heartedly to run upstairs and bring down some “relaxed fit” items from the Motherhood Maternity selection, but it was clear from her wrinkled nose that we’d gotten off on the wrong foot the moment we walked in and asked if they had any plastic vomit bags handy.
Defeated, we make our way to McDonalds, choosing a winding path that left Cari with the most available options for trashcans and bushes to duck behind if need be.
We ate our French fries in silence, me seething that our baby was growing exclusively on the nutrients available in potatoes, while Cari, I’m sure, was furious that I’d insensitively dragged her on this poorly timed outing in the first place.
We floundered along like this for several more weeks, as the true end of our first trimester passed us by largely unnoticed, and entirely uncelebrated.
The turning point came in the form of a crescendo; the first melodic hits of laughter, rising up to greet one final soaring aria of anger.
In our seventeenth week of pregnancy, Cari declared all weekend plans were cancelled in favor of dedicating our full attention to the matter of her sluggish bowels, whom she had not heard from in over two weeks. Armed with several bottles of magnesium citrate at our doctor’s recommendation, and the determination that has been the defining characteristic of our four years of marriage, we tackled the matter head on. Cari valiantly consumed the foul-tasting bottle of artificial lime liquid over an hour of concerted effort. Just as she reached the final few ounces, she got the look. That familiar vomity look you hope you never know your partner well enough to recognize. There’s a down-turning of the corners of her mouth, and a glassiness to her eyes.
“Go to the bathroom!” I cried.
“I can’t, if I vomit I’ll have to drink it all again!”
I eyed her cautiously, the look passed, and then there it was: a sea of vomit, filling my favorite blanket that was strewn across her lap, a quilt my mother made me years ago from my high school cross-country t-shirts. In it’s midst sat my I-Phone, drowning slowly.
Having now completely exhausted all other options, what choice did we have but to laugh?
So laugh we did, breaking a dry spell unrivaled during the course of our relationship. There have been a dozen times when we’ve found ourselves up against a wall, uncertain of where to turn to next, but there are rarely times when we find ourselves unable to laugh about the unexpected curveballs that life has thrown our way. After weeks of talking almost exclusively about some variation of the functions of Cari’s digestive system, the sound of our own laughter grounded us, and we tackled the clean-up readily.
Miraculously, my I-Phone emerged unscathed. But by that evening Cari’s designated task of the day remained unaccomplished, and the total number of ounces of food or fluid she’d managed to successfully consume was nill.
We packed up and headed for the Kaiser hospital in Walnut Creek, a dry run of sorts for the trip we ultimately planned to make there to give birth. I eyed the clock as we left our house and again as we arrived, trying to imagine how those elapsed minutes would feel the day our baby was arriving. It seemed like some sort of imaginative play or wishful thinking, as we still struggled mightily to connect Cari’s current affliction to the eventual arrival of a baby.
The doctor there was stern and disapproving, and made no secret of the fact that he thought pregnancy was a condition women ought to bear more quietly than Cari currently was. He seemed equally confident that he himself would be able to handle it much better, and smug that he would never have to discover whether or not this was true.
Although his inclination was to give Cari a bag of fluids and then release her and hope for the best, she finally managed to convince him to order an enema. We expected this to be a horrific affair, but it was actually a rather tidy little procedure, the results of which were nearly immediate. Elated, Cari declared that we would name the baby after the nurse who had administered it. This seemed to irk the doctor a bit, for no matter how reluctant he had been to offer treatment, he now seemed eager to take credit for the cure. As a parting gift, he advised Cari that if her pre-natal vitamins stopped her up, she might consider stopping taking them.
The following morning it became clear that while I had interpreted this to mean stop taking them for a day or two, Cari had interpreted it to mean for a good long while, perhaps indefinitely. I was blind to her desperation, to the havoc that had been wreaked upon her body over the past seventeen weeks. Instead, all I could see was my rage over the fact that I could research the very best pre-natal vitamins to provide our baby with the nutrients it was lacking from Cari’s limited diet of Cheerios, potatoes and chicken nuggets; I could order a nine month’s supply and put them out in a prominent location that blocked her view of the TV at night, but if she decided not to take them, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
Suddenly I was face to face with every fear I’d ever had that this baby might be ours in name and theory, but hers in actuality. Her genes, her flesh and blood, her body giving birth. Her features on it’s face, her milk nourishing and sustaining its growth. The choices that impacted our baby’s future were entirely in her hands now, and who’s to say that would shift into equal balance later?
“Do whatever you want,” I said coldly, “you’re going to anyway. It’s your body, after all, isn’t that what you want to say?”
“I’m doing my best,” she replied, “you have to see that. You have no idea what it’s like for me.”
She left for work without another word, our usual morning ritual of me handing her her lunch, walking her to the door, and sending her off with a kiss hung in the air like an unanswered question.
Terror, inadequacy, a fierce protectiveness, and a complete sense of helplessness; over the course of the day my isolating anger slowly gave way to the sneaking suspicion that these were things that Cari was feeling too, even though it was her body where our baby was making it’s home. Perhaps even, these were things that every parent felt, no matter how their child came to be in their lives.
Cari came home from work that night and took her pre-natal vitamins, a peace offering of sorts. We sat face to face on the couch, turned towards each other for the first time after months of standing side-by-side, fighting off the next challenge. I shared with her my fears about being the other mother, about loving a baby that might never fully be my own.
“This baby is yours,” Cari said, rising to meet the question with the full determination, confidence and assurance that I so loved about her. “This is our baby.”
Moment’s later she was back in the bathroom, vomiting, and I was back in the kitchen, rushing to make a dinner that would cater to all of her food aversions while still giving our baby some nutrition. But still, we’d had it, that brief reprieve. That reminder of why we’d fallen in love in the first place, and why we’d ever begun to dream that out of our love, we’d dare to grow a child.