I think we're doing this
Aug. 21st, 2012 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunabee34babySo, here's the skinny.
My daughter Emma was born in 2002. I was 23.
I had a not-so pleasant experience as a pregnant person and new mom for a variety of reasons.
1. We had just moved to a new place and had few friends living in the area. We had almost no married friends and no friends with children. The few friends we did have pretty much dropped us as soon as I got pregnant. We had no family nearby, so we had no support system.
2. We were broke grad students. Josh worked three jobs while I was pregnant and into Emma's first couple years of life. When she was an infant, I was essentially alone with her all day, every day with no money to go anywhere or do anything.
3. I was very ill when I was pregnant. I threw up every day, multiple times a day, from the beginning of my pregnancy to the very end. I even threw up on the delivery table. I steadily lost weight in the beginning of my pregnancy (which wasn't a huge deal because I was overweight when I got pregnant) and didn't regain my pre-pregnancy weight until I was 6 months pregnant. I only gained 19 lbs the whole time I was pregnant. When I wasn't throwing up I was experiencing continuous nausea. I lived on lemons, radishes, and cokes. I couldn't keep anything fried or fatty down. I had meat, seafood and poultry aversions. Finding foods I could eat and keep down was a huge challenge. The heightened sense of smell I got from pregnancy also contributed to the nausea. If I smelled cigarette smoke, I threw up. Entering buildings was a huge ordeal because smokers tended to congregate around building entrances at this time (this was before most college campuses moved smoking to designated areas). Catching a whiff of smoke even on someone's clothes would make me puke. I threw up in every building on the Ole Miss Campus and behind every bush in Oxford. Totally not kidding.
4. I developed preeclampsia and was on bedrest the latter part of my pregnancy. I had to go in for weekly stress tests and evaluations until at 35 weeks, labor was induced to prevent eclampsia.
5. Emma was a premie. She weighed 5 lbs 5 oz when she was born, and fortunately she was absolutely perfect other than some jaundice. We were facing her being transported to a hospital in another state with a NICU while I had to stay behind if she had respiratory or other problems, so that was a relief. We were in the hospital for a week, and when we went home she weighed 4 lbs 9 oz.
6. I was ultimately unable to breastfeed. I managed to pump for five weeks, and then my milk dried up entirely. This was due to a few factors. First, I found breastfeeding really freaking weird and gross personally. I have no issues with anyone who does breastfeed; I think it is admirable and awesome. But for me, it was strange to take this part of my body that I had always seen as sexual and let a baby suck on it. Then, Emma was so tiny that one of my boobs was literally bigger than her whole body. So it was like lowering the Hindenburg onto a kitten. Additionally, I had such a complicated relationship with food at that point that I was unintentionally starving myself. I was so used to being nauseated and had so many food aversions, that I just wasn't eating. I wasn't doing this on purpose at all, but if you don't eat, you don't make milk. I even got on some kind of medication that increases lactation, but ultimately I wasn't eating enough for milk to be produced. I finally got a clue when I realized I'd lost 50 lbs in four weeks, and I almost fainted in my living room. At that point it was too late to do anything about the milk production though.
7. I had extreme post-partum depression that was very difficult to deal with for several years. To a certain extent I don't feel like I have ever regained the self I was before I became pregnant. I had nobody to talk to, and nobody seemed to understand how badly I felt or to take me seriously except Josh. This wasn't the baby blues. This wasn't a spot of feeling down. This was I can barely take care of myself for a while. And at least ten years ago, nobody talked about PPD. Nobody casually mentioned that they'd had a rough go of it. Everyone who talked to me about their pregnancies or their children talked about how wonderful and amazing and life-affirming the whole experience was for them. I felt like something was wrong with me--scared and ashamed and guilty and like I had to hide.
8. I've dealt with physical changes since pregnancy that are pretty annoying. Every time I get my period, it's like a little mini pregnancy. I get sick to my stomach (although I don't vomit, thank the baby Jesus in his golden diapers), and my boobs swell up horrifically and ache, and I experience hot flashes and night sweats on a regular basis.
9. I also found the transition to motherhood really difficult. I am inherently a deeply selfish person, and the loss of my autonomy was deeply grating. I didn't feel that Disney Mommy moment that pervades our media and our culture, and I felt weird and ashamed as a result.
So, why, given that experience, do I want to have another baby?
1. Josh has always wanted additional children, and it's made him deeply sad that I disagreed.
2. I have wanted more children theoretically, but I have been deeply afraid because of how difficult my pregnancy was with Emma.
3. Josh almost died twice this summer. It was a real wake-up call for me in terms of our mortality and what we want out of life. I started thinking about how finite our existence really is and how Emma will be left with no immediate family when Josh and I die.
4. I think my biological clock turned on, the one that says, "Hey, you're 33 now. If you're going to do this thing ever again, it better be soon."
5. I had dreams every night for a whole week that I was pregnant with Captain America's baby--these really detailed, visceral dreams that were focused on the pregnancy--and at the end of the week, I started thinking about what it might mean to have another baby.
6. I realized that a lot of the issues that plagued my first pregnancy would be very different on this go-round. First off, we have insurance and good-paying jobs. Josh wouldn't be working three jobs and leaving me alone all day. We have a good support system. We have tons of friends in the area who are married and who have children that would be within five years of age from a new baby, and our friends who don't have kids are child friendly and part of a network of people we could lean on. Now that my grandmother has passed away, my parents are more mobile and could come help periodically with a new baby as well. Josh and I aren't kids anymore; I'm a grown-up now, and I know how to advocate for myself in a way that I didn't before. For example, the degree of nausea I experienced was unacceptable and preventable, but I didn't speak up and just slogged through it. I will not be doing that this time around. I know that nausea prevention has progressed in the last decade, and while I don't expect to be nausea free, I damn sure am not going to be throwing up all day every day. Because my mother had preeclampsia and I had preeclampsia (and with my first pregnancy), probably I will have it again. But I know this, and I can plan better for that scenario. Same thing with the post-partum. I know that I am likely to experience it again, and I can start treating it the second a new baby emerges rather than waiting for weeks until I hit rock bottom like I did with Emma.
7. Most of our friends waited until now to have children, so there are tons of people in our lives with children under the age of two. Constant exposure to babies is disarming. :)
8. This go-round, I'm not even going to try to breastfeed. I'll pump the colostrum at the beginning or whatever, and then I'm done. Emma is pretty much a genius, and that all came out of a bottle. I'm not making myself crazy again with that.
I still have some reservations about having another child.
1. I do worry that now that I'm ten years older, I won't be able to get pregnant as easily as before. We tried for sixteen days before I got a positive test result with Emma. I need to have a summer due date so as not to fuck with my job overmuch, so I need to get preggo in the next couple months or else stop trying and wait a year.
2. I worry about having a career and being pregnant. I don't know if I can physically manage a job if I'm as sick this time as I was last time.
3. I worry about the age gap between siblings, but I also think that Emma will be an awesome help. She loves babies. She plays with all our friends' children (who gravitate to her), and she loves to help out.
4. We'd have to do daycare from the beginning. Emma didn't start daycare until she was nearly two. It's going to be hard to put a teensy baby in daycare.
Overall, though, I'm deeply excited hope to have good news in the next few weeks as Josh and I officially start trying at the beginning of next week.
ETA: I realized that I should also explain that Trashboat is our nickname for the baby and comes from an episode of Regular Show. I tried to name this journal Trashboat, but alas it was already taken.
My daughter Emma was born in 2002. I was 23.
I had a not-so pleasant experience as a pregnant person and new mom for a variety of reasons.
1. We had just moved to a new place and had few friends living in the area. We had almost no married friends and no friends with children. The few friends we did have pretty much dropped us as soon as I got pregnant. We had no family nearby, so we had no support system.
2. We were broke grad students. Josh worked three jobs while I was pregnant and into Emma's first couple years of life. When she was an infant, I was essentially alone with her all day, every day with no money to go anywhere or do anything.
3. I was very ill when I was pregnant. I threw up every day, multiple times a day, from the beginning of my pregnancy to the very end. I even threw up on the delivery table. I steadily lost weight in the beginning of my pregnancy (which wasn't a huge deal because I was overweight when I got pregnant) and didn't regain my pre-pregnancy weight until I was 6 months pregnant. I only gained 19 lbs the whole time I was pregnant. When I wasn't throwing up I was experiencing continuous nausea. I lived on lemons, radishes, and cokes. I couldn't keep anything fried or fatty down. I had meat, seafood and poultry aversions. Finding foods I could eat and keep down was a huge challenge. The heightened sense of smell I got from pregnancy also contributed to the nausea. If I smelled cigarette smoke, I threw up. Entering buildings was a huge ordeal because smokers tended to congregate around building entrances at this time (this was before most college campuses moved smoking to designated areas). Catching a whiff of smoke even on someone's clothes would make me puke. I threw up in every building on the Ole Miss Campus and behind every bush in Oxford. Totally not kidding.
4. I developed preeclampsia and was on bedrest the latter part of my pregnancy. I had to go in for weekly stress tests and evaluations until at 35 weeks, labor was induced to prevent eclampsia.
5. Emma was a premie. She weighed 5 lbs 5 oz when she was born, and fortunately she was absolutely perfect other than some jaundice. We were facing her being transported to a hospital in another state with a NICU while I had to stay behind if she had respiratory or other problems, so that was a relief. We were in the hospital for a week, and when we went home she weighed 4 lbs 9 oz.
6. I was ultimately unable to breastfeed. I managed to pump for five weeks, and then my milk dried up entirely. This was due to a few factors. First, I found breastfeeding really freaking weird and gross personally. I have no issues with anyone who does breastfeed; I think it is admirable and awesome. But for me, it was strange to take this part of my body that I had always seen as sexual and let a baby suck on it. Then, Emma was so tiny that one of my boobs was literally bigger than her whole body. So it was like lowering the Hindenburg onto a kitten. Additionally, I had such a complicated relationship with food at that point that I was unintentionally starving myself. I was so used to being nauseated and had so many food aversions, that I just wasn't eating. I wasn't doing this on purpose at all, but if you don't eat, you don't make milk. I even got on some kind of medication that increases lactation, but ultimately I wasn't eating enough for milk to be produced. I finally got a clue when I realized I'd lost 50 lbs in four weeks, and I almost fainted in my living room. At that point it was too late to do anything about the milk production though.
7. I had extreme post-partum depression that was very difficult to deal with for several years. To a certain extent I don't feel like I have ever regained the self I was before I became pregnant. I had nobody to talk to, and nobody seemed to understand how badly I felt or to take me seriously except Josh. This wasn't the baby blues. This wasn't a spot of feeling down. This was I can barely take care of myself for a while. And at least ten years ago, nobody talked about PPD. Nobody casually mentioned that they'd had a rough go of it. Everyone who talked to me about their pregnancies or their children talked about how wonderful and amazing and life-affirming the whole experience was for them. I felt like something was wrong with me--scared and ashamed and guilty and like I had to hide.
8. I've dealt with physical changes since pregnancy that are pretty annoying. Every time I get my period, it's like a little mini pregnancy. I get sick to my stomach (although I don't vomit, thank the baby Jesus in his golden diapers), and my boobs swell up horrifically and ache, and I experience hot flashes and night sweats on a regular basis.
9. I also found the transition to motherhood really difficult. I am inherently a deeply selfish person, and the loss of my autonomy was deeply grating. I didn't feel that Disney Mommy moment that pervades our media and our culture, and I felt weird and ashamed as a result.
So, why, given that experience, do I want to have another baby?
1. Josh has always wanted additional children, and it's made him deeply sad that I disagreed.
2. I have wanted more children theoretically, but I have been deeply afraid because of how difficult my pregnancy was with Emma.
3. Josh almost died twice this summer. It was a real wake-up call for me in terms of our mortality and what we want out of life. I started thinking about how finite our existence really is and how Emma will be left with no immediate family when Josh and I die.
4. I think my biological clock turned on, the one that says, "Hey, you're 33 now. If you're going to do this thing ever again, it better be soon."
5. I had dreams every night for a whole week that I was pregnant with Captain America's baby--these really detailed, visceral dreams that were focused on the pregnancy--and at the end of the week, I started thinking about what it might mean to have another baby.
6. I realized that a lot of the issues that plagued my first pregnancy would be very different on this go-round. First off, we have insurance and good-paying jobs. Josh wouldn't be working three jobs and leaving me alone all day. We have a good support system. We have tons of friends in the area who are married and who have children that would be within five years of age from a new baby, and our friends who don't have kids are child friendly and part of a network of people we could lean on. Now that my grandmother has passed away, my parents are more mobile and could come help periodically with a new baby as well. Josh and I aren't kids anymore; I'm a grown-up now, and I know how to advocate for myself in a way that I didn't before. For example, the degree of nausea I experienced was unacceptable and preventable, but I didn't speak up and just slogged through it. I will not be doing that this time around. I know that nausea prevention has progressed in the last decade, and while I don't expect to be nausea free, I damn sure am not going to be throwing up all day every day. Because my mother had preeclampsia and I had preeclampsia (and with my first pregnancy), probably I will have it again. But I know this, and I can plan better for that scenario. Same thing with the post-partum. I know that I am likely to experience it again, and I can start treating it the second a new baby emerges rather than waiting for weeks until I hit rock bottom like I did with Emma.
7. Most of our friends waited until now to have children, so there are tons of people in our lives with children under the age of two. Constant exposure to babies is disarming. :)
8. This go-round, I'm not even going to try to breastfeed. I'll pump the colostrum at the beginning or whatever, and then I'm done. Emma is pretty much a genius, and that all came out of a bottle. I'm not making myself crazy again with that.
I still have some reservations about having another child.
1. I do worry that now that I'm ten years older, I won't be able to get pregnant as easily as before. We tried for sixteen days before I got a positive test result with Emma. I need to have a summer due date so as not to fuck with my job overmuch, so I need to get preggo in the next couple months or else stop trying and wait a year.
2. I worry about having a career and being pregnant. I don't know if I can physically manage a job if I'm as sick this time as I was last time.
3. I worry about the age gap between siblings, but I also think that Emma will be an awesome help. She loves babies. She plays with all our friends' children (who gravitate to her), and she loves to help out.
4. We'd have to do daycare from the beginning. Emma didn't start daycare until she was nearly two. It's going to be hard to put a teensy baby in daycare.
Overall, though, I'm deeply excited hope to have good news in the next few weeks as Josh and I officially start trying at the beginning of next week.
ETA: I realized that I should also explain that Trashboat is our nickname for the baby and comes from an episode of Regular Show. I tried to name this journal Trashboat, but alas it was already taken.
