A throng of people in line at Starbucks, a swarm of drivers vying for a spot in the Trader Joe’s parking lot, a crush of humanity at a downtown sample sale, I dispense with all of this proof that human beings are having no trouble reproducing themselves and decide instead that it’s a wonder any of us made it out alive at all and I should follow the common practice and keep the pregnancy mum for twelve weeks.
This is the hardest secret I’ve ever kept, so I constantly fantasize about telling people, about telling everyone.
This is followed by mentally rehearsing how I will disclose losing the baby. Will I even use the phrase “lost the baby” or just keep it clinical, tell them I “miscarried” with a brief medical explanation and a sunny sign-off about how we’ll try again next month? Will I send out a group e-mail, subject line: “sad news”? Or maybe I’ll have my husband roll the miscarriage calls, while I sit next to him listening and quietly weeping, turning a lamp on and off like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction . Of course, in this mental rehearsal, we are always perched in a cozy nursery, which makes the vision even more poignant, because I’m sitting against a freshly painted, pale yellow wall on a nursing rocker I won’t be needing with a couple of sad little plush toys on my lap. My pregnancy hormones are like an endocrinological remote control, constantly switching the channel in my brain to Lifetime.
“Are your boobs sore?” asks my friend Lucy, who has three kids and used to be the anchor of the morning news show where I worked as a field reporter.
“Yes. Very sore,” I answer.
“You’re pregnant,” she says decisively. “Trust me. You’re still pregnant.”
I have long chats with her on the phone while she puts on her makeup to anchor the evening news in Houston and I stroll endlessly around the block asking a million questions about pregnancy and knowing that I won’t have to un-tell her if I miscarry, she will simply know, because she is one of these women who seem to have magical mommy powers. And this is the beginning of something I will feel throughout, a kinship with anyone who has a baby. I’m in the club; just barely and maybe not for keeps, but I’m in the club.
Lucy is the only person I tell, before I even get the official results from the blood test my doctor takes. Well, the only friend. I yap about being pregnant to any and all strangers, valets, waitresses, and sales-clerks because I will never see them again and won’t need to un-tell them. And I love saying it, finding ways to jam it into any conversation.
Waitress: “Welcome, can I get you a drink?”
Me: “I wish I could order a cocktail, but you know ... I’m pregnant. So what would be a good drink for someone in my condition? Which is pregnant?
Dry Cleaner: “Your shirts will be ready Thursday.”
Me: “Oh, great. That’s perfect, because I want to wear these shirts while they still fit, because I’m getting bigger. Because I’m pregnant. So, see you Thursday. I’ll be the pregnant one, in case I lose my ticket.”
Lady in line at bagel shop: “I think you were ahead of me.”
Me: “Oh, gosh, thanks so much. I’m so hungry these days, because I’m pregnant.”
Valet: “Garage closes at midnight.”
Me: “I’m pregnant.”
Non sequiturs will do when you really can’t work it in organically. It becomes this secret between me, my husband, my fetus, my doctor and any service industry professional or stranger who gives me twelve seconds of their time. It reminds me of using a fake name when I was a teenager hanging out at the arcade at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, where I grew up. That person, “Andi,” was my much cooler alter ego; she was a B-cup, thanks to a stuffed bra, and had a fictional bio, complete with married parents who lived in Pacific Heights and who were both college professors. Likewise, this anonymous first trimester version of myself, this character I play for strangers, is nothing like me; she is so sure about the health of her baby she never knocks wood, wouldn’t even know what that meant. She is carefree and psyched. She’s planning on delivering at home with a midwife, maybe squatting on one of those plastic yoga balls in a candlelit room filled with sage and confidence in Mother Nature.
On the other hand, despite being “a little bit pregnant,” too little to openly discuss, it’s all I can think about. It dictates every morsel I put in my mouth, every Google search in my computer, every thought and daydream in my head.
The “tri” in first trimester should really be spelled “try,” as in, try not to tell people even though you can’t believe they don’t know just by looking at you. While self-absorption isn’t one of the standard pregnancy symptoms, it is certainly pervasive in my case. Since it is all about me, and the totally unique miracle that I am creating a new life, I can’t fathom how my coworkers at the radio station don’t notice that I’ve swapped my coffee for tea, that I’m practically wearing a bikini to do the news every day because my inner thermostat is all screwed up and I’m standing there shuffling papers in a flop sweat. The studio, like every room, feels like a sauna I’m standing in fully clothed.
How can they not notice that I’m constantly adjusting the air conditioner to try and cool off the studio every single commercial break? I become very conscious of the packets of Wheat Thins and baggies full of pretzels on my console, the crumbs from countless Fig Newtons, a dead giveaway of my new morning eating schedule, which is constant. There are now blotting papers next to my laptop for the slicks of oil that form on my cheeks by nine thirty a.m.
The “try” could also stand for “try” not to feel nauseous and ravenous, the twin symptoms that have overtaken my body. These twins go everywhere together and even dress alike. The nausea makes me hungry, the food I eat to settle my stomach makes me queasy, and the twins make me gain an obscene amount of weight in the first three months.
Whining about gaining weight makes me feel about as cutting edge and literary as a Cathy cartoon, but this is a pregnancy book, so aaack! My inner critic can suck it.
Morning sickness doesn’t hit in the morning, but any time of day and especially in the late afternoon, and it doesn’t make me throw up, which might be nice because I wouldn’t be gaining about six times the recommended amount for the first trimester if I did toss some of the calories back up. The nausea I feel can only be described as a motion sickness so intense it feels like I rode in the back of an old station wagon, while reading, to an amusement park, where I rode the spinning teacups for an hour before returning home by helicopter through choppy weather to my houseboat lit only by a flickering, fluorescent disco ball. When it hits, all I want is a giant sack of cheese crackers to make it go away.
Anything tangy calls to me: oranges, peaches, lemonade, vinegar, cherry yogurt. Protein bars become appetizers for meals consisting of other protein bars. I fall asleep with a spoon in my hand, a half-empty bowl of oatmeal congealing on the nightstand. I wake up, spoon still in hand, and finish it. It’s difficult to separate a true craving, which you are supposed to satisfy because it means your body must require some nutrient therein, from the sense that I must eat just a little bit of everything in case my baby needs it, will starve without it, will somehow be deficient because of my unwillingness to eat a handful of peanuts or a can of tuna. The strongest craving I have is for Guinness beer—not just any beer, but something dark and viscous—which I want to drink with a mustard-covered soft pretzel. This is bizarre because I’ve never even tasted Guinness, though I served it to many a table as a waitress. It must have been the mumbo jumbo I read online about Irish beer containing iron.
I don’t give in to the beer, but each time I walk by the Drawing Room, a dive bar down the block from my house, I pause and wonder why I didn’t take full advantage of drinking when I could, why I didn’t while away afternoons in that cool dark guzzling stout on a bar stool patched with duct tape. Anyway, who cares what the hell food and drink I want to ingest while pregnant? Just know I want a lot of it.
I’m going to complain a bit more for a second, before I apologize for complaining, so please hum
or me.
There is also a burning sensation in my heart, and I can’t figure out what it is, before I put together that a burning in my heart area could be a thing I’ve heard about called “heartburn.”
There is my first hemorrhoid, concurrent with and certainly related to niggling bouts of constipation. There are leg cramps, concurrent with and certainly related to nightly insomnia, both of which I treat by spending hours in the middle of the night sitting in the bathtub listening to podcasts of This American Life and staring at my belly poking up above the water. There is something my dermatologist calls “an estrogen surge,” which results in cystic acne on my chin and jaw-line and most frustratingly across my chest, because what good is having cleavage for the first time when you can’t showcase it because even when covered by concealer, it is lumpy and odd-looking?
“Overactive sebaceous glands on your neck,” whispers my hairdresser, as he shampoos my hair, and the accidental shaming takes me back to my teen years, during which I had terrible skin and sometimes took a “me” day off from school if there was an especially bad breakout I couldn’t hide.
While I wasn’t pregnant during those years, I certainly looked like it thanks to the chub I acquired when I quit ballet and started soft serve. In fact, the headmaster of my high school called me into his office my sophomore year to let me know he had heard I was pregnant, and to tell me with studied, “I’m-an-educator” compassion that he “was there for me” if I needed help. I assured him I was not pregnant, could not be, as I was a virgin, to which he replied with obvious disbelief, “Okay, but if you need to talk, I’m here.” I stared at his gray crew cut and squinted my eyes before repeating that I was not, in fact, with child. “Right, but if you need to talk, it would be totally between us.” At a highfalutin prep school, I guess a puffy, carb-eating Jew on scholarship was basically Claireece Precious Goddamn Jones. No baby would be born to me that year, but an eating disorder was already crawling by then. Thanks, Mr. Butler. Maybe you meant well, or maybe you were just a do-gooding jerk who couldn’t tell the difference between fat and pregnant.
So, anyway, it doesn’t feel good to have pimples on my neck so glaring as to trigger Butler flashbacks, but at least it gives me an excuse to say, “Oh, yeah. It’s an estrogen surge. I’m not supposed to say anything yet, but I’m pregnant,” using a stage whisper and kind of hoping the whole salon overhears so they can make a fuss over me.
There are Sea-Bands on my wrists, stupid acupressure things you buy at the drugstore for motion sickness, and I’m always chewing on ginger candies from the health food store to tamp down the nausea. Though neither works at all, they make me feel closer to the pregnant side of limbo. After all, each day, each hour, I wonder if I’m still pregnant and I have only my burgeoning acne and gripping vertigo to tell me, yes, I am.
At Oscar time, I am hired to make jokes on the red carpet with my cohost on the deep cable talk show I’ve been doing for a couple years. The makeup artists have to shade my face, even my nose, which is widening. Although the wardrobe lady begs me to get at least two Mystic Tans before the event, I can’t, because they might be toxic, so I show up so pale Nicole Kidman and Amy Adams make Casper jokes to my face (I didn’t actually interview either of them, but you get the idea—I was white). My feet get swollen and blistered on the red carpet, my skin is a mess with no faux tan to cover it, I’m sure everyone has noticed my puffy belly and beefy upper arms, and the mental energy I should be using to plan my “off the cuff” remarks I mostly spend finding ways to get back to the craft services table so I can pick the fried noodles off a giant pan of Chinese chicken salad.
Here’s the thing about pregnancy complaining: I feel terrible about it. It makes me uncomfortable to bitch about such high-quality, first-world problems, especially when conceiving at all is such a blessing.
Later, when I end up talking about the pregnancy publicly, and all the symptoms that go along with it, I get an angry e-mail: “I used to be a fan of yours, but my husband and I can’t conceive and I am sick of hearing you complain about being pregnant.”
She has a point and now my worst fears about how I’m coming across are confirmed. That’s when I ask myself, who can complain? My girlfriend who is desperate to get married and pushing forty-five up a hill would probably be pissed off at this bitch for bemoaning the fact that she can’t conceive when at least she is lucky enough to have found a mate. Someone else would hate the forty-five-year-old for griping because at least she has a job, even if she hasn’t found a man. Take this thesis to its natural end and there is one guy living under a bridge with no arms, no job, no parents and maybe one kidney who has the right to complain. And only that guy. So the argument is spurious and I’ll continue to lament all I goddamn want.
Back to complaining, although I promise to try and keep it in perspective and tritely struggle to find the bright side, because that makes me feel better about complaining the way knocking wood makes me feel better about having hope.
My biggest complaint in these early days, and it’s one that will grow and fester, is anxiety, which is alleviated only by my doctor visits every couple of weeks. My doctor is one of these guys who gives you an ultrasound every time you go to the office, probably because he bought the expensive imaging machine and insurance covers the test so patients don’t sweat it and it doesn’t hurt and everyone loves to see their fetus on-screen and ascribe all kinds of bullshit characteristics to it, so why not blast sound waves at your fetus unnecessarily? Anyway, at my eight-week checkup, I sit on the butcher paper during my exam as he probes me with the transducer, my denim skirt in a pile with my panties in the corner, my husband in the other corner, and there it is: the heartbeat. He turns up the volume and we can hear it, fast and loud, calling us to the other side.
Now I think I can talk about the baby, but I’m not sure.
I take the small black-and-white photo from the ultrasound like I’m going to be all scrapbookish, but it ends up stuffed in my glove compartment.
In a way, this is sad. In another way, it’s reassuring. My therapist was right—maybe I’ll still just be me, but with a kid. I will not suddenly turn into, say, this woman whose pregnancy blog I found online complete with a photo of herself in jeans and an unbuttoned white shirt. In the picture, her husband stands behind her, also in jeans and a white shirt, and both of them make heart shapes with their hands surrounding her belly button. Even if you don’t have morning sickness, this will probably make you throw up in your mouth. At least I know I can find less syrupy ways of disgusting people with my solipsism. Or at least I fundamentally understand that despite the thrill of being “a little bit pregnant,” a sonogram image of my fetus at eight weeks is not compelling to anyone else. Like the dried-out ballpoint pen, melted ChapStick and expired insurance cards also rattling around in my glove box, its usefulness has passed.
The likelihood of miscarrying seems smaller now that I’ve seen the fetus, and I’m increasingly anxious to tell. Mostly, I want to tell the listeners of the radio show, who have been with me through Billy, the guy who met the love of his life when I declared us “on a three-month break”; Anton, the guy I met on MySpace and almost married in Vegas on our first date before I sobered up; and countless other dating misadventures, not to mention the blaring sound of a clock ticking that our sound effects guy, Bald Bryan, had been playing for years whenever I discussed my personal life. The morning show is going off the air, because the station is flipping from talk to Top 40. After almost three years, I just want this one moment with the anonymous masses who have traveled with me. I want it though it isn’t prudent; I want to tell though I know there is no way to un-tell a couple of million people, what with the show going off the air and all. I would wait the entire twelve weeks, but I can’t because the end is nigh and 97.1 FM will not be a place for anecdotes, but instead for a steady dose of Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.
Our last day is a Friday, a month before I’m officially out of pregatory. I still have no idea whether I�
��m going to say anything on the air. As always, Adam Carolla throws it to me to do the news. I hear my news music through my headphones (or “cans,” as I like to say to act like I know what I’m doing) and I have no idea what I’m going to do. There is a pause while I grip a stack of the day’s news in my sweaty hands.
“The lead story today ... I’m pregnant.”
Adam is so touched, he has his assistant Jay run into the studio and hug me.
I get my dramatic moment, lots of callers congratulating me, and coworkers running in to squeeze me and mistake my estrogen surge for a “glow.”
Though I’ve now spilled the beans to a couple million listeners, I don’t call my mom. I sometimes think she will call me, when she hears it through the grapevine or reads it online, but I know that comes from the fantasy place of the little girl who thinks her mom will do lots of things she won’t—pick her up from school when it’s raining, smile at her when she enters a room, tape her lousy drawings to the refrigerator, be able to name her elementary school teacher.
Now, if my uterus plays its cards right, I’m going to be someone’s mom, and the only good thing about this rising level of concern for my baby is that it proves I’m already attached. My constant worry is like a friend whispering in my ear, or perhaps posting a note on my esophagus written in stomach acid and bile, saying, “You will not be your mother.” You will fuck it up in your own way, but not in hers.
five
I’ll Miss You, Toxins
Exploiting My Baby Page 5