Thanks for Waiting

by Doree Shafrir

  She was a certain kind of person who I like to call the “just you wait”ers. They’re the people who don’t allow you to live in the moment—whether you’re trying to celebrate or complain about something. “You think things are good/bad now? Just you wait—you have [insert some horrible-sounding thing here] coming up.” If I’m being generous, I would say that this impulse seems to stem from people’s desires to be genuinely helpful, but I actually think it’s rooted in the tendency some people have to remind you that they have suffered, and you will suffer too. It’s a way of centering the conversation back to them.

  To be visible and vocal is to be criticized, I reminded myself. Women have been attacked online much more severely for much less. I was lucky that the worst I was getting was some random person’s bitterness. In the past, I would have spiraled, but now, I simply blocked her. This was about her, not me. I was glad I could finally see that.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I stopped feeling nauseated gradually. First I went for a couple of days without vomiting, then a week, then ten days, and then, around the sixteen-week mark, I realized that I wanted to eat something other than a carb. And then I started to feel amazing. My pregnancy became the kind of pregnancy that I’d heard people talk about, that I thought only happened to people in their twenties who made pregnancy look effortless: My skin glowed, my hair thickened. I went to prenatal yoga twice a week and Pilates and worked out with weights at the gym; I felt good in my body in a way that I never had before. I’d heard people talk about how, when they were pregnant, their bodies didn’t feel like their own, that they basically had a parasite living inside of them. I did not feel this way. People stopped me on the street to tell me I looked beautiful. Friends commented on my Instagram photos to say how great I looked.

  I felt guilty for relishing the attention paid to my body. You would think that suddenly having an enormous protruding stomach would have made me feel even more insecure, but it did the opposite; the only other time I’d felt so confident in my body was after the breakup with Jon, when Revenge Jacket Doree entered my life—not exactly a healthy time. But now I had been given permission to have an enormous stomach. “You have a perfect basketball stomach,” a friend said, a note of envy in her voice.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “You know, skinny legs and a nice round tummy poking out.” I felt gross that on some level, this delighted me. Still, it was hard not to internalize the message: Have the basketball stomach, but don’t get too fat, because then how are you supposed to “lose the baby weight” and “get your body back”? I found these phrases to be the most insidious. What did that mean, exactly, to “get your body back”? Where had your body gone? Wasn’t your body always right here, doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing? In the country that I’m planning on leading, in addition to getting a week off for your period, unlimited paid sick leave, and a year of parental leave, I’ll issue an executive order that the bodies of people who have just created another human inside their own bodies should be celebrated, worshipped, coddled for at least a year, no matter what they look like. Preferably forever, but we can start with a year.

  For me, the expectations of how to perform pregnancy were partly wrapped up in my age. I was forty-one when I got pregnant, which was old to have a first child even for my cohort of women who had had kids “late.” There’s a certain kind of pregnant influencer who tends to be twenty-five, gorgeous, and already has two kids, who has someone (her Instagram husband?) take ethereal photos of her in a low-cut prairie dress, standing in a field, her long hair flowing down her back. These moms, who are almost entirely white, love to post pictures of their nurseries-in-progress, carefully curated rooms in neutral browns and pinks.

  I related to these women…not at all. Where were the women like me who were over forty, having their first kid, and amused at (and somewhat befuddled by) these influencers who were young enough to be our children?

  * * *

  —

  EARLY IN MY second trimester, right around the time that I started feeling less nauseated, I decided that I wanted to hire a doula to assist in my labor and birth. A birth doula is someone who helps prep you for your birth, comes to your house when you go into labor, and is with you through the delivery. They’re supposed to be your advocates with whomever and wherever you’re giving birth, whether it’s with doctors and nurses at a hospital, with a midwife in a birthing center, or at home. It sounded great—someone who’d been to dozens if not hundreds of births who’d be able to support me at an incredibly vulnerable time, and hopefully also make sure my husband kept his wits about him. Friends who had given birth before me were adamant that having a doula helped them, and I figured I could use all the help I could get.

  The first one I called seemed pleasant enough, and after a few minutes of my asking her about her experience, she started asking me questions. Like: “What are you picturing for your birth?”

  I was stumped. I knew there was no right or wrong way to give birth, but she was waiting expectantly for an answer. I got the feeling that to her, the right answer was any kind of vision for my birth at all. But after so much struggle to even get to the point where I was wearing distressed Madewell maternity jeans with the waistband that stretched over my stomach, the idea of actually giving birth and having a real, live child still seemed abstract. I had spent so much time, money, and mental energy trying to get pregnant—that seemed like the endgame. It’s like focusing so much on the wedding and not the marriage: I had been so hyperfocused on just getting pregnant, that even the pregnancy—let alone the birth and the idea of having a child—felt beyond my comprehension.

  In a Facebook group for women who were due around the same time as me, people talked about delayed cord clamping, walking epidurals, laboring in tubs, the positions they wanted to be in during the birth. We were months away from giving birth but they were already discussing what to take to the hospital—what kind of essential oils would they have in their diffuser? What was on their labor playlist? Were they going to have a videographer at the birth? These questions overwhelmed me. I scrolled through the comments on these posts, growing increasingly anxious but not able to look away.

  And now, I was being asked this question in real life. I took a breath. “I’m really just focused on having a healthy baby,” I said.

  “But you know, you are allowed to think about what kind of birth you want to have,” she said.

  “I guess,” I said. I didn’t like that this woman was acting like she had the right to give me permission to come up with an ideal birth. And maybe it was the IVF talking, but I really didn’t have a vision for my birth. I felt like she wanted me to say that I would labor at home in a tub, then be rolled into the hospital in a wheelchair wearing a flower crown and smelling of lavender, smiling beatifically at the nurses as I felt my contractions. At the very least, she was probably hoping I would say I wanted to pay her to make pills out of my placenta. (No judgment if that’s your thing but no thanks, not for me.)

  To be fair, it was slightly misleading to say I had no vision for my birth. I’d had several friends who’d been induced—which is when labor doesn’t start on its own, and for medical reasons (usually) the doctor wants to get things moving, so they give you drugs to jump-start labor—and the induction had gone on for so long that they’d ended up with an unplanned cesarean section, having to be rushed into the OR, shell-shocked from everything that had happened, unable to revel in the first few moments with their newborn. That was the birth that I was sure I didn’t want. It just sounded so miserable, hanging out in the hospital for hours or even days while your body tried to respond to various drugs that they were pumping into you, maybe even being in active labor for hours on end, only to end up in the operating room getting cut open to get your baby out.

  I said this to the doula hopefully, like this “vision” of my birth would be sufficient.

&nb
sp; “You know, just because you did IVF, you don’t only need to want a healthy baby,” she said, pressing me again.

  “Okay,” I said. “Listen, it’s been really great talking to you, but I actually have to jump off. I’ll let you know if I have any other questions.” I hung up. It felt like the specter of IVF was going to permeate the entirety of my pregnancy, coming up at times that I wasn’t anticipating it, and sending me back to the place that I was trying to forget.

  I told Cynthia, my therapist, about my conversation with the doula. “Am I ever going to stop feeling like an IVF mom?” I asked.

  “It’s hard to move past it, I know,” she said. “What does that bring up for you, though?”

  I thought about her question for a moment. “I guess I feel like my pregnancy has an asterisk next to it, and I’m always trying to feel like a ‘real’ pregnant person,” I said.

  “Well, you are a ‘real’ pregnant person,” she said, “but I don’t think you necessarily need to ‘move past it.’ It’s always going to be a part of your story.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “And I’m not embarrassed about it. If anything, I feel like I should have a gold medal next to my pregnancy, not an asterisk.”

  Or maybe my resistance to developing a birth plan had more to do with being an “old” mom than having done IVF. If I were giving birth at, say, age twenty-six, I might still think that I had some control over any of this. But being older, coupled with having done IVF, made me all too aware that when it comes to our bodies, the best-laid plans inevitably go awry. What was the point, I wondered, of making a whole elaborate birth plan, only to see it discarded once you needed a blood transfusion, or the baby got stuck, or the pain you so confidently thought you’d be able to get through without meds suddenly got so overwhelming that you felt like you couldn’t get the epidural put in quickly enough? It seemed like a recipe for disappointment, and I had already had enough experience with getting my hopes up. The birth would just be a continuation of everything else I’d already had to accept as being out of my control—which, I suspected, would continue long after I gave birth, anyway. Why not get used to it now?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Matt likes to say that he doesn’t like to plan, but he does like to be prepared. He says it comes from being a Boy Scout—and his response to my fear of having an unplanned C-section was that I should just plan the C-section. His reasoning was that if we scheduled it, then we’d know ahead of time, and there would be zero risk of ending up unexpectedly in the OR.

  This seemed like flawed logic to me. If I scheduled a C-section, then yes, I would have zero risk of an unplanned C-section, but I would also have a zero percent chance of having a vaginal birth. We discussed my birth plan or lack thereof with Dr. Brown, my OB, a matter-of-fact woman with curly brown hair that always seemed damp, like she had just rushed to our appointment from a postdelivery shower.

  “I can’t guarantee anything,” she said, “but I will try.”

  I liked Dr. Brown. She never once uttered the words geriatric pregnancy or said anything about being an older mom; the only times it came up were when I pressed her on it. Would I need an induction at thirty-nine weeks to avoid stillbirth, like some doctors were recommending for patients over a certain age? She shrugged and said that she didn’t think the evidence for doing it was particularly compelling, and besides, even though I was forty-one, I was otherwise healthy.

  “So when would you say this baby has to come out?” I asked.

  “Probably at forty-two weeks, I’d say it was time,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  AND SO I woke up the morning of my due date, April 22, 2019, feeling great. I was healthy, if slightly uncomfortable, but I hadn’t developed any of the physical ailments of pregnancy that I’d been warned about, like varicose veins or sciatica or hemorrhoids. I was having trouble sleeping—I was waking up in the early morning hours, around three or four a.m., and was often unable to go back to sleep for an hour or two, if at all—but otherwise, I felt pretty good. And at the end of my thirty-ninth week, when I had gone in for my ultrasound, the ultrasound tech told me that the baby was still firmly, cozily pretty far up in my uterus. He hadn’t “dropped,” which is when the baby makes his way closer to the cervix in preparation to leave the womb. He seemed to be in no hurry, she said. Meanwhile, Matt was hopeful that we’d be able to go to opening night of the new Marvel movie, Avengers: Infinity War; I had tickets to see one of my favorite riot grrrl bands, Bikini Kill, perform three days past my due date. (As one of my friends put it: “It would be so punk rock to go into labor at a Bikini Kill show,” but it also seemed like it could be, I don’t know, messy?)

  I had an appointment with Dr. Brown that morning, and before we left the house, I snapped a picture in the mirror. I was wearing a stretchy black dress and sneakers, and cradling my bump. I captioned it, “Bump pic but make it art…btw today is my due date. He’s still in there.” I felt relaxed. I liked my pregnancy glow, and I wanted to enjoy it.

  At the doctor’s office, I maneuvered myself onto the exam table for my ultrasound, and breathed a little sigh of relief as the ultrasound tech checked the baby. Matt, who was sitting on a chair at the foot of the table, and I stared up at the monitor. Our baby was right there, looking pretty content, just chilling in that cozy amniotic fluid. Was he sucking his thumb? He was.

  Everything looked perfect, she said. Except…she frowned. “Hmm,” she said. “Uh-oh.” The radiologist was a honey-blond Russian woman, not given to chitchat. I preferred the other radiologist, who was French, even though she had once matter-of-factly pointed out my baby’s “pee pee” on the ultrasound and made a joke about it being large because my dad is Israeli (gross). As I lay on the exam table, the warm gel on my now-mountainous stomach (“This is Beverly Hills,” the French radiologist had told me, “we warm the gel”), I didn’t like the sound of “uh-oh.”

  “Your amniotic fluid is low,” she said, with not a word minced. “Dr. Brown is going to send you to the hospital. You will be induced tonight.” If your fluid is low, your placenta can start to fail, and your baby will die.

  Even as she said it, I didn’t believe it. Surely my doctor would look at the rest of the scans and determine that this one factor of my fluid being low didn’t necessitate an urgent trip to the hospital?

  “When you say ‘low,’ ” I said, “what do you mean exactly?”

  “Normal is eight or above,” she said. “You are at a 5.9.”

  And a few minutes later, as I was hooked up to a stress test machine, Dr. Brown looked through the results of the ultrasound and agreed with the Russian radiologist.

  “Okay, so you’re going to have to go into the hospital tonight, and we’ll start the induction,” she said.

  “That’s our only option?” I asked.

  “Look, if this had happened at thirty-seven weeks, I might have told you to go get fluids at the hospital and then we could reevaluate, but since you’re at forty weeks, and also you’re forty-one, I’m going to say that yes, this is your only option,” she said. She had once told us she went to SoulCycle every morning at six before coming into work and I liked to imagine that sometimes, after an especially long night at the hospital, she just went straight to SoulCycle to sweat it out.

  “I just really didn’t want to be induced,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  There was a brief silence.

  Matt said, “I told you we should have scheduled a C-section—”

  “Not now,” I said to him. “I don’t want to discuss this right now.” I was going to be induced and that was that. “Okay, so, tonight,” I said to the doctor. “Does it matter what time?”

  “Not really, but I would go around eight, after the shift change. I’ll call them now and let them know to expect you.” Matt and I drove home, dazed but also sli
ghtly frantic. I’d started packing my hospital bag a couple of weeks before, but now I threw more stuff into tote bags: my own hospital gown, slippers, headphones, leggings, a caftan, a toothbrush, a Bluetooth speaker for the seven-hour labor and delivery playlist that, despite my eye-rolling, I had ended up making. (I had drawn the line at a diffuser, however.) I had a pillow for Matt, and coconut water and apple juice. We were as ready as we were going to be.

  * * *

  —

  IT FELT WEIRD to be pulling up to the hospital when I wasn’t in labor. I’d been picturing something very different—starting labor at home, and having to make the call about when to head over to the hospital. Maybe we’d mistime it and I’d already be in active labor when we got there! Maybe Matt would drive up to the emergency room, tires squealing, and I’d be taken up to labor and delivery in a wheelchair. Instead, we parked, took all our bags out of the trunk, and took the elevator up to labor and delivery.

  Our room was small, but it was private, and I changed into my gown and tried to get comfortable. A nurse attached a strap around my enormous stomach and told me that they’d be continuously monitoring the baby’s heart rate, and I couldn’t roll over to the side or the monitor would slip off. A nurse explained that they would be inserting a medication called Cervidil into my vagina; after around twelve hours, my cervix would hopefully be dilated to three or four centimeters, at which point I would either go into active labor on my own or they could start an IV of Pitocin, which would get my contractions going, and then my baby would come flying out of me.

  The first challenge came when they tried to examine my cervix to see how much I was already dilated. The nurse inserted her fingers into my vagina and tears came to my eyes. It felt like someone was ramming something between the size of a wooden spoon and an eighteen-wheeler deep inside me, then trying to go deeper. “That…that really hurts,” I said.