Dear Girls

by Ali Wong

  I really romanticized being pregnant from a young age. I loved stuffing dolls up my shirt to pretend there was a baby in my belly (since we lived in less woke times it was always a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby ). When I was in eighth grade, we dissected frogs in biology class. Their poor bodies were so cold and slimy, and the chemicals used to preserve them made me dizzy. My classmates and I were much more interested in looking at pictures of Luke Perry (RIP) than snipping through the belly of a dead amphibian. Our science teacher, Mrs. Landers, was seven months pregnant at the time. She excused herself from the classroom when the frogs arrived, because she said breathing in the formaldehyde was potentially harmful to her baby. She tagged in the vegan art teacher who was just as repulsed as we were. I thought, Wow, being pregnant can get you out of a lot of stuff.

  I was also very motivated to have you as soon as possible because I didn’t want to be an old parent. When I was born, my mom was forty-two and my dad was forty-seven. They both went gray almost immediately and used to dye each other’s hair black. It was really cute watching them squeeze the tube of cheap hair dye goo purchased from 99 Ranch Market onto the special comb and apply it to each other’s hair, each with a big beach towel wrapped around their shoulders. They always seemed so giddy to age each other down. But when you have old parents, you’re always scared they’re going to die and you never feel protected. When I was in second grade, my dad hurt his back and started walking with a cane that had a gold duck’s head for the handle. I think gripping onto a lower life-form’s cranium for support made him feel a lot more empowered about getting old, like, I’m still doing better than this poor fucking thing. Now, support my weight, duck! I have no memories of my parents going down a slide or riding a roller coaster with me. By the time I was born they were too scared of hurting themselves and outsourced those activities to my older siblings.

  When my dad was sick with cancer, he, like a lot of sick people, took his frustration and anger out on his caretaker: my mom. He was not himself and, in his delirious state, told me: “I was so mad when I found out Mom was pregnant with you, because it was yet another sign of her neglect—that she had forgotten to take her birth control pill.” I didn’t say anything back to my dad, because I knew he was just expressing how angry he was that he was physically weak, that he was dying. He couldn’t drive anymore, he couldn’t go to the bathroom by himself anymore. It was all very disempowering. At his funeral, a family friend felt the need to tell me how upset my mom was when she found out she was pregnant with me: “I remember your mom coming out of the sauna, with a towel wrapped around her head and body, and saying to me with a frown, so grumpily, ‘I’m pregnant.’ ” I told the family friend, “You’ve told me that story already. I don’t know why you keep telling it to me.” (Translation: “Write some new material, bitch!”) Sometimes I feel like a lot of my motivation comes from a need to prove to my parents that they should be gladder they had me.

  Unlike me, neither of you were accidents. You were very much wanted and planned. You were so planned, in fact, that the intense scheduling of ovulation sex pretty much ruined sex instantly, so, you’re welcome.

  I wanted to have kids close in age because the gap between me and my siblings was painful. They were all ten to fifteen years older than I was and had lived a whole different life as a family of five before I was born. There are framed pictures of them, all on skis. By the time I was born, my parents weren’t hitting the slopes; they were hitting the Metamucil. (To be fair, I gave up on skiing because I crashed into a tree while trying to conquer a half-pipe when I was eleven years old so please don’t expect Mommy to ski with you ever.) It was traumatizing when my siblings all went to college. I played in the closet with all my stuffed animals because I didn’t want to feel the void of my missing sister Mimi, who up until that point I had always shared a room with.

  When I was in third grade, Mimi used to pick me up from school in her gray Volvo station wagon, and I climbed in the back, illegally sitting on the laps of her volleyball teammates. All of my classmates, uniformed in green plaid jumpers over white blouses and brown shoes, watched in envy as I drove away in a car full of supercool teenage girls. At Mels Drive-In, I felt so empowered to choose my own dish (fish sticks don’t really qualify as a “dish” but the point here is empowerment), because we always ate family style at Chinese restaurants and my parents always ordered. And before sliding into the squeaky red booth, Mimi gave me a quarter for the jukebox. I selected “Everyday” by Buddy Holly—Stand by Me was my favorite movie because River Phoenix was the hottest boy of all time to a third-grader born in 1982. All of her friends exclaimed, “Great choice, Alexandra!” as I sat back down and smiled while coloring with the provided crayons, listening to them talk about Madonna and boys, riveted by all of it. So when she went away to college, suddenly there was nobody to take me to the disgusting non-Chinese restaurants I wanted to eat at, like Mels Drive-In. I missed her friends. I missed her letting me choose. I hated seeing her empty bed, I missed her piles of clothes everywhere on the floor.

  I missed Mimi.

  * * *

  I was thirty-one years old when Daddy and I decided to try for a family. We used these one hundred for ten dollars ovulation strips on Amazon. They came from China, packaged in a cheap ziplock bag with no instructions. After one month of aforementioned scheduled sex, I was pregnant. I was so happy and told all of my friends, my family, my co-workers, and lots and lots of strangers. Then eleven weeks into the pregnancy, I started spotting.

  That night I had a miscarriage. Now I know why you’re supposed to wait until after the first trimester to tell people that you’re pregnant. It’s very rude to ask a woman if she’s pregnant or if she’s trying because you have no idea how long or how hard she’s tried or if it’s a conversation she’s even had with her partner. If she is pregnant, that might not be information she’s ready to share. If you end up having a miscarriage (which is very common), you don’t want to then be forced to tell everyone the bad news. I couldn’t believe some of the insensitive responses I got when I told people about my loss. Here are the top five:

  WHY?

  Well, did you take folic acid?

  It was probably from all the performing.

  Was it because you were stressed out?

  Was the doctor able to determine the cause?

  Or in other words, “Hey, Ali, how’d you manage to fuck up your pregnancy??” The underlying message of those reactions suggested there was blame to be placed on me, as if I had control of the very unfortunate outcome. When you go through something as tragic as a miscarriage, the last thing you want is to feel like it was your fault. I didn’t want to share with anyone what had happened because I was scared they would think my body was fundamentally defective. And I also didn’t want to bum people out. It’s very hard to tell someone you had a miscarriage and then casually go back to eating hand-pulled noodles and talking shit about the latest comedians getting into a Twitter battle. Here’s my tip for the best thing to say when someone tells you she miscarried: “I’m so sorry to hear that.” That’s all you have to say. Other responses I would’ve appreciated are: “How are you feeling?” or “I know so many women who have had a miscarriage, and it sucks, but you’re not alone” or “Here’s a frozen bag of dumplings my Shanghainese mom who used to have a dumpling shop in Shanghai made.”

  It helps so much to know you’re not the only one who has had one, because then you realize it’s not your fault. Miscarriages don’t discriminate, and there is nothing I could’ve done. I found great comfort in knowing that Beyoncé also miscarried. If the goddess queen had a miscarriage, it’s okay that I had one too. In fact, we were part of a special club now. Actually, now it’s like I’m friends with Beyoncé. And by extension I am now besties with HOV, Michelle (spoiler alert: She had a miscarriage too and writes about it in her awesome book) and Barack, and nobody understands what it’s like to be us, r
ight? That’s what I’ll say in the deposition when I get arrested for hugging them to death. It is one thing to hear the statistic that one in four pregnancies will result in a miscarriage. But it’s another thing to put faces to actual women who have experienced the same loss, like the beautiful face of my BFF Beyoncé. Because I was forced to be so open about having a miscarriage, women privately shared their own personal stories of loss and I remember every single one.

  After that I did my best to convert my grief into a celebration of my unexpected but suddenly extended independence. I decided to view it as a bonus round of opportunities, to do whatever I wanted. That is to say, I discovered the joy of edibles. Every weekend, I’d eat a weed gummy, watch a Hayao Miyazaki movie, blissfully sink into the couch, and eat sashimi. It was like an awesome bachelorette party where I didn’t have to leave my house and the maid of honor was an animated Japanese cat-bus.

  * * *

  Three months after the miscarriage, I got pregnant again with Mari. This time, I made sure not to tell anyone until I was four months in. The miscarriage colored all of my decisions and attitude during the pregnancy. Every day of every trimester was filled with happiness that I was still carrying and paranoia that I could all of a sudden lose the baby. So I never got too upset about all the discomfort. Even when I was throwing up on planes, even when I would get a charley horse at night that felt like a ghost was strangling my calf, I was just grateful Mari was alive. I didn’t mind the weight gain either. Looking pregnant was a privilege and so was getting to wear maternity clothes. It was liberating to not have to worry about sucking in my belly or selecting outfits that would make my stomach look flatter. Most of the time I rocked tight dresses that would make me look even more pregnant to capitalize on strangers opening doors for me and offering to carry anything heavy.

  After a while, I couldn’t see my vagina when I looked down, because all I could see was my belly. But when I stared at myself in the mirror, my vagina just looked like an ancient, wise Chinese man from a fairy tale that got stuck in a cave and survived off yams. The hair was so damn long and neglected. My nipples became progressively bigger and darker. One day I noticed the tips were starting to look a little scaly and naturally rubbed them. Some bits started to flake off like tiny brown boogers. And I just sat on the bathroom floor completely naked, with a garbage can between my thighs, picking at my nipples. Daddy walked in on me while I was completely focused on this important activity and asked, “Are you harvesting your nipples?” I didn’t even look at him and just responded, “Well, obviously.”

  Before I got pregnant, I was determined to have a kumbaya hippie birth in water, surrounded by a Santa Monica sorceress named Owlfeathers and lots of chanting. One TV director gave me her meditation CDs that were meant to guide you through an epidural-free labor. (Fun fact: You can’t meditate your cervix to open wider so don’t waste your time!) Another mom told me that when she felt the baby coming, she squatted at home and then pulled the baby’s head out from her vagina, all by herself. Which is cool and independent and everything, but like, be humble. One friend posted an Instagram picture of her naked, looking orgasmic, in a tub sitting on her husband’s lap, with her newborn baby covered in fresh afterbirth lying on her chest. They all made it seem so easy, natural, and fun! I made plans to eat my placenta to prevent postpartum depression and not waste any of that valuable, free nutrition (if you haven’t picked up on it by now, I’m extremely cheap).

  But I had to let go of the magical unknown moment of “going into labor” when the doctor let me know, at thirty weeks, that Mari wasn’t growing enough. I had a condition called intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR), which affects 10 percent of pregnant women. Apparently there was some blood flow resistance in the umbilical cord from the placenta to Mari. It was unsafe for her to stay in my womb past thirty-seven weeks at the very latest, and my obstetrician explained that she would get better nutrition outside rather than staying inside. This did not help my paranoia. One day, I didn’t feel the baby kick for three hours. A co-worker told me that drinking a little bit of orange juice could stimulate baby movement. So I decided to chug a can of grape soda just to be safe, and lay down on the floor in my windowless office, underneath my desk where it was quiet and dim, so I could put my hands on my belly and focus on feeling my baby’s tiny feet and fists, which would give me relief that she was still alive. Staring at the legs of my cold metal desk, the quiet and stillness of my body was terrorizing me. Also all that sugar from the grape soda, which I hadn’t drunk since I was a kid, was making me feel like someone was prying my eyes open. I lay there on my side for a good five minutes and almost started to cry when all of a sudden Mari turned into a Muay Thai kickboxer defending her title as the strongest, sweetest baby. And instead of crying, I just laughed. I laughed and laughed, all by myself, underneath that desk, lying on that dirty-ass gray carpet.

  I didn’t want to tell anyone about my condition but then people kept on asking about my due date. So I had to explain that we were most likely going to have to get induced at thirty-seven weeks or get a C-section. When I told people, their faces would wince and they would ask me a bunch of questions that rang a bell:

  WHY?

  Is it because you ate old leftovers?

  It was probably from all the performing.

  Was it because you were stressed out?

  Was the doctor able to determine the cause?

  As if I didn’t feel enough shame, these questions only made me feel worse. Again. I felt like people were judging my body to be fundamentally flawed. But unlike the miscarriage, this was not as common and at the time I didn’t know anybody else who had this condition. There was no Beyoncé lighthouse to show me the way. Mari had been inside of me, growing and kicking, for seven and a half months. I already loved her so much, could not stand the thought of losing her, and would never have had the emotional strength to try getting pregnant again if something tragic happened. Plus, I had just taped my very first stand-up special pregnant. How would people be able to laugh at my jokes if the baby they were watching inside didn’t survive? It would have turned that special into an avant-garde tragedy.

  I had to go to the hospital twice a week for “perinatal testing,” to make sure Mari was okay and wouldn’t have to come out sooner than thirty-seven weeks. A nurse would hook me up to a monitor to check the baby’s heartbeat and my amniotic fluid, while I tried to decide which celebrity “wore it best” in the latest issue of Us Weekly. According to the perinatal nurses, most patients found it to be a nuisance but I loved getting to listen to Mari’s heartbeat. Because of the miscarriage I was filled with anxiety about Mari’s survival, so I was ecstatic and relieved to confirm she was still okay.

  I made it to thirty-seven weeks and they tried to induce me. I had contractions for twenty-four hours but my cervix was still only dilated half a centimeter. It hurt like hell because I was trying to push a cantaloupe out of a hole the size of an apple stem. The doctor offered to put some medical balloon up my pussy to open up the cervix more, which to me sounded like some sort of interrogation torture tactic. Clowns have always scared me and while I’ve slept with two homeless people, I really didn’t want to get fucked by a balloon. Despite the nurse’s discouragement, I decided to go straight to the C-section. It was the first lesson in having kids: You cannot control anything. Whatever dreams you had of how things were going to go down, they ain’t gonna come true. Kiss goodbye your fantasy of delivering your baby in a rain forest, or in a Buddhist temple surrounded by frangipani flowers, and get ready to shit your pants emotionally and physically.

  In the morning the nurse came in to shave my pussy. I wasn’t able to trim or even see my own vagina for the last four months of my pregnancy, so it was a nice reunion with myself. But the pile of hair she had cut off looked like a New York rat. And it didn’t get shaved again until the second time I had a C-section. And then I was rolled into the operating room w
ithout Daddy. The room was so bright and sterile, no kind of place at all for a proper balloon fucking. I had made the right choice.

  The anesthesiologist discovered I had scoliosis and then proceeded to attempt to search for a spot on my twisted spine. He missed with the needle about a million times—every time he guessed wrong he said out loud, very casually, “Well, that’s not it.” All of the bloody tissues were piling up around me and I started sobbing. The anesthesiologist asked me in disbelief, “Are you crying?” and I screamed, “Yes, I’m crying!” Here’s a free tip for anesthesiologists: If your patient is crying, you’re bad at anesthesiology. He finally got the needle in and I felt a rush of warmth through the bottom half of my body. Daddy was escorted into the operating room, to find me shaking from the drugs, with my teeth wildly chattering. He took my hand, and I pulled his ear right up to my mouth and said, “We are never doing this again.” Like a good man, he said, “Okay.”

  But ten minutes later, Mari came out, and I saw her cute little face above the curtain and immediately said to Daddy, “Let’s do it again.” Like a good man, he said, “Okay.”

  And then I threw up from all the anesthesia and my teeth were still chattering and they were telling me not to vomit so hard, otherwise my stitches would bust open. I said, “I don’t know how to vomit softly.” That’s like telling someone to shit perfume.