Mother's Day

I am a woman with two pregnancies. Seven years apart. If I’d had the babies to show for them, one would be learning to spell four-letter words at school and the other would be roughly the size of a pea and still growing inside of me. If I’d had the babies to show for my pregnancies, I’d have a whole different vocabulary and routine, and I wouldn’t take impulsive nights out for bougie dinners or karaoke or trips with my girlfriends for granted. I’d have already visited the Field Museum and Adler Planetarium and ridden the ferris wheel at Navy Pier. I’d be a mother.

I have zero babies. Zero onesies to wash. Zero worries about why my baby is coughing or crying or sleeping too little or sleeping too much. Zero tiger stripes running up and down my torso from my skin stretching to make room for our baby. Zero nights putting myself to sleep while reading to them or mornings making them biscuits and gravy like my mom used to make for me. No one calls me mom or ma or mama. There is no baby.

And yet my baby feels real to me. My pregnancies—though each devastatingly brief—birthed ideas about what Christian and my child would look like. I pictured their hair curling into galaxies like Christian’s peppered locks or rolling hills of wheat like mine, both somehow more perfect on their head than ours. In my mind, Christian has already taught them French and I am catching up on DuoLingo because I don’t want to be left out of their conversations that I presume to be about something important —in my daydreams about my baby, I have FOMO. I’ve paced the house with them on my chest and fed them and hastily put their diapers on too loosely and had to suffer the consequences. I’ve painted their room and gathered nicknacks and books to fit the personality that I’ve created for them in my head. Their room doesn’t really exist because they don’t really exist, but somehow I’ve already cradled them on the cushions I collected on the floor of the closet in a sort of makeshift tent complete with twinkly lights creating constellations on the walls. There is no baby. Yet their presence is vivid and often consuming. 

I’m prone to attaching myself to plans that have as much a chance of coming to fruition as not, and sometimes, I feel the urge to apologize for them. But I really love these plans, these images that play like memories in my mind. When I took my first pregnancy test seven years ago, I didn’t read pregnant, I read mother, and for the first time in a long time I felt like I understood part of me that had gotten wrapped up in meal logs and calorie counting. Yes, that I wanted a baby, but more importantly that I wanted anything. 

I spent so many precious years of my life trying to want nothing but to be thin. I was in the pursuit of smallness and the relief I believed it brought others. I was tall and imposing. I often spoke loudly and had even louder emotions. And though a part of me shared the human desire to be noticed, I learned quickly that I might be noticed for the wrong reasons; that me and my body might inconvenience others. I wanted to ask for nothing, need nothing, be unflappable. So I dedicated every muscle I overworked at the gym to contain every twist of my gut or pound of my heart signaling an unruly eruption of desire. When friends bounced through casual relationships and flirted with strangers, desire spilling out of their words and soft touches, I sat stone-faced, waiting for someone to crack my cool disposition. Despite my alarm set to wake me at 3 o’clock in the morning for work, I stayed out late into the evening dancing, drinking, singing karaoke, denying myself sleep. I never said anything about the industrial metal music and skateboarding videos that my friends wanted to watch to myself, even though inside, the sound of the boards grinding on railings and concrete mixed with the screaming ailments of emotionally-repressed grown men made my ears ring until they burned. And while others ate, I baked. I whisked and folded and served while others complimented the flavor profiles that I never tasted. Everything I thought I wanted was wrapped up in my ultimate and desperate desire to be small, smaller, smallest. 

Eventually, my eating disorder diagnosis would label me as “a failure of care.” I abandoned myself, my body, my wellbeing, they said, and I was sick for that, unwell, unfit. I couldn’t be trusted to care for myself, and I believed that too, for many years. I attempted recovery with the belief that I was incapable of knowing what I wanted or what was good and right for me. Doctors told me I needed to quit baking, I needed a new career. I believed them. I followed friends through meals, bite for bite, eating precisely how much they ate because their bodies and minds worked. They knew how much they wanted and needed to eat, when to eat, where they wanted to live, how they wanted to live. My path to recovery seemed clear: I would have to keep trying on the desires of others until I finally found what was true for me. 

But when my first pregnancy test signaled two lines, the unmistakable current of my own desire took over my whole body. I wanted this. For years, I told myself I would be incapable of caring for a child because I couldn’t even care for myself, but I couldn’t deny this new sensation. I wanted to be a mother. I saw the scenes play out: my belly swelling with life, in the hospital with Christian, welcoming our baby into the world, my life becoming full of so many wants and needs that I couldn’t ignore. My muscles unclenched. My shoulders fell. My jaw took its first rest in twenty years. I wanted to be a mother. I wanted to relax into my life and want this. The longing swam through my body and woke up parts of me that had been asleep for decades. I read mother, and in an instant, motherhood began to give me my body back. 

The idea of thinness dissipated from my consciousness as I became overwhelmed with baby ideas. Me and my body weren't just going to exist, we were going to be home for our baby now. We were going to expand and take up the space I had so desperately tried to save for everyone else. Once our baby was here, we would have no choice but to care for ourselves because we were theirs now. They needed us to show them how to be and need and want. As my mind sorted through images of baking and going on walks and painting with a tiny human, I realized that I imagined Christian and my tiny human had round edges and fuschia cheeks and big hair. I wanted them to take up so much space. I couldn’t wait to expand into the world with them.

Those treatment rooms had been wrong about me.  I didn't lack the ability to care. All I did was care. All I did was notice and consider everything and everyone else around me. I had misplaced my care and stuffed my own true desires beneath so many expectations of others that I found it impossible to reach below the junk and grasp my needs and wants. I had misunderstood care. I thought that if I cared enough about others and their feelings about me, my life, my body—if I did not impose but instead made myself small—their relief would fulfill me. I had abandoned myself, but it wasn’t because I didn’t care. I just deeply misunderstood how to. 

But now, I wanted motherhood, and the desire consumed me. The rush of ideas of my body being a home, that my body was sacred and safe enough to be a home overwhelmed me. And when the baby left my body, I wanted to make a home for them. I wanted to help them grow and laugh and cry with the grace that I never gave myself. The test read mother to me, and as swiftly as I floated through the clouds of possibilities about my baby and got comfortable in the warmth of my desire to be a mother, it was taken from me. Ectopic pregnancy. Surgery. No baby. Not a mother. 

Grief tore through any ease and clarity I might have felt with rigid claws. I had lost my baby and, with them, the permission I’d briefly felt to want without inhibitions. Without the baby to show for it, my desire for motherhood felt naive. Where my body had softened and warmed, it now burned like a raw open wound. What a baby myself to think it would be so easy as just getting accidentally pregnant and then having a baby. If it wasn’t ectopic, it could have been traumatic in about a million other ways. Who was I to want something so unpredictable and scary and expensive and invasive and completely life-altering? The vulnerability of wanting had swiftly proven itself to be devastating.

Several years later, while choking on snot and telling my new therapist that when I’d lost my baby, I’d lost my one shot to live my truest life, she asked me, How can you access motherhood without pregnancy? Can you mother without the baby? I cried harder. My thoughts moved through my mind like they were traveling through a rube goldberg project, through tubes and slides and swinging doors and up pulley systems looking for any valid way to respond to a question so unanswerable. Might we look at this as an opportunity to care for yourself? 

The words made me wince. Self-care conjured images of bubble baths and hot yoga and lots of Lululemon and it made me want to crawl out of my skin. These images, though, were interrupted by a snapshot of me as a child. I’m in a dance costume, a teal green tutu with sequins reflecting the camera’s flash on both the bodice and the boxy hat that rests on top of my teased bangs. My posture is slack, and my smile is half-hearted, like I don’t want the photo to be taken but I also can’t wait to see the photo once my mom gets the film developed at Walgreens. Why didn’t I care about her? Bullies and strangers and well-intentioned but misguided adults in white coats had convinced me that something about the way I naturally existed wasn’t right, and so I started to care for them. I tried to please them and I threw my needs down a black hole and hoped would never creep up. The discomfort I felt at the idea of self-care wasn’t because of the ideas I’d been fed by influencers; it’s because it was deeply embarrassing to admit that I had so abandoned my needs that I couldn’t recognize the opportunity to care for myself. Even when I started to imagine caring for myself, I wasn’t sure where to begin without a baby. 

Maybe I’d like hot yoga. Lululemon is probably popular for a reason, right, it must be comfortable. Maybe all I needed was a hug and cheese pizza. I didn’t need a baby for my needs and wants and body to be sacred. She had been my home for nearly thirty years, and despite my best attempts at making her disappear, she was still here. She was still capable of so much love and care. It’s so vulnerable to need love, attention, food, rest, time, but I needed all of that. So many of our needs go unmet. If you have none in the first place, there’s no disappointment when you don’t get them. Despite my best efforts at suppression, here I was, no less disappointed and incredibly unsure of what I wanted.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I began starving myself literally and figuratively when I moved away to college, away from my parents. My parents are the ones I’d felt the most comfortable expressing needs to. I don’t think it’s crazy that I told myself during all those years of treatment that I could never be a mother because I couldn't even care for myself. Treatment centers for mental illnesses aren’t exactly uplifting and empowering places. But I have the capacity to care so deeply. I just needed to redirect it to the people and things I actually wanted to care for. I needed to start with caring for myself. My ability to relax into my life and into my body didn’t require a baby. I still wanted a baby, but I didn’t need to wait for them. I needed to care that most metal music makes me wish for eternal silence and that I actually love the predictable chord progressions and moody lyrics of Taylor Swift. I needed to care that I was starving for attention and love and food, goddamnit I was so hungry for food. I’d suppressed my needs and the volume of my voice and my body. I needed to let it all be. 

Last week, I miscarried another baby. I’m grieving, but it feels different this time. I know how to better care for myself—and, crucially, I care enough to access and listen to my needs a bit better. I also can’t help but wonder if my 0/2 record is a bad omen as I inch my way toward geriatric pregnancy. I’m devastated and also grateful to be on this path with a partner who is attentive and loving and thoughtful. As the physical gore of passing an unviable pregnancy moved through my body, I ached for the women who don’t have support, who are forced into birth or holding onto pregnancies through unimaginable traumas. To experience this kind of yearning pain is a gift that I wouldn’t have previously given myself access to, one some women won’t have access too. I’m lucky. 

I desperately want the ideas of my babies to be real. I want to feel the sweat build up in the crease of my elbow as I rock their warm body to sleep. I want to obsess with Christian over every coo and new facial expression and poop. I want to demolish our routines and create new ones and then demolish those as our child demands of us to let go of any preconceived notions that we’re in control of any of this life or theirs. I want to share what I’ve learned and let my babies teach me more in all of their unapologetic needs and desires. I’m still a little afraid of wanting these baby ideas with such all-encompassing fervor. Wanting is so vulnerable. I know I might not get what I want. I also know that I lost a pregnancy last week, but I didn’t lose my ability to be a mother. I still want a baby. I care enough about myself now to care that I still want them. Staring down a path of more potential grief, I’m still going to try.