I sat on the floor early this morning and did something I haven’t done — felt something I haven’t felt — for a long time. I sat and cried. The crying part isn’t the usual part. It’s that those tears streaming down my face were happy tears.
I triple checked out of disbelief — was I also thinking of the best way to remove myself rom this universe? Did I have negative, self-defeating thoughts causing the tears that I somehow wasn’t detecting? No, I was crying because – baby. Because tomorrow, depending on who you ask, I’m either entering the last week of my first trimester or the first week of my second trimester (I’ll be 13 weeks pregnant.) And, my prenatal defect ultrasound was yesterday and everything went great — baby is healthy, so far as they can tell in the things they tested for, and spending its time upside down sleeping until you wake it up and then, in true related-to-me fashion, bouncing all over the place the second you wake it up.
Maybe it’s just the pregnancy hormones, but I’m not crying again these alien happy tears which are nothing short of incredible. I have all the fears in the world about being a new mother at 34, still living in a one bedroom apartment, not knowing how everything is going to work out, but that isn’t distracting me from this pure bliss of impending motherhood. I think, in a way, I’ve had so much love to give in my life, and for so long was suffocated by having no where to put that love. My husband surely helped–he’s a hopeless romantic–but there is a deep love that comes with ones family that I don’t think was there when I was a child. Love, in my family, was more like neurotic worry about another person–which, I guess, is a form of love–but this goes beyond that. I love my baby whoever he or she is and becomes. And, I don’t know how or why, but I feel ready to be a mother–more than I feel ready to be a director-level employee at a corporation. More than I feel ready to do much of anything else. I feel like my life is suddenly making sense after 34 years on this year.
Now, ask me again after baby is born and a few weeks of sleepless nights–perhaps I’ll feel different. But for the first time in my life, even when I go to a dark place of hopelessness and defeat, I have hope. I have hope and purpose. Maybe my baby shouldn’t be my “reason for living” necessarily — that’s not healthy for baby — but I know I have a responsibility to this person growing inside me. I have a responsibility to love it and teach it right from wrong as best I can and to teach it, one of the most important things, that being different is beautiful, and those in the world who are the movers and shakers, those are the ones who embrace not trying to be like everyone else (if they don’t want to be) but their uniqueness. And, while some people are born evil and others good, most humans are born neutral into different circumstances which turn them one way or another, and for every action there is a reaction, and every moment of our history there is another moment which ripples from that, through a sea of inequality which we must always understand our place in and fight to send ripples back until the waves have lulled and the tide has calmed.
I have no idea if I’ll be a good mother–I’m sure I’ll mess up a million times. But I want nothing more than to be a mom–I didn’t want to let myself want this before because I thought I couldn’t get pregnant. I knew, with infertility treatment, it was possible. But that possibility also included the real possibility that it would never work. So, I think that also was weighing on me, given how much I wanted to be a mother despite not letting myself know or feel this. I’m certainly not out of the woods yet with this pregnancy, moving on to week 13, but every day it seems more and more real that I’ll get to meet my own baby in just 6 months. My world will certainly change on that day, and I have full faith it will change for the better.
Congratulations! That is huge to pass that ultrasound. Happy for you and your family!
My wife got pregnant about a week before you and we lost it to a misc. at ~9-10 weeks around Christmas time; it was only a 10% chance to get a misc. after having a heartbeat – which we had a heartbeat at 8 weeks. Then if you pass the ultrasound that you just passed at I think 10 or 12 weeks, you’re basically in the clear and obviously you’ve done your genetic testing.
You were smart to not tell your family until the second trimester. My wife had told everyone right away since she went to a bar to meet friends and told people she wasn’t drinking and then some people figured out from that, so then she told everyone, and regretted it and said she’d never do that again…