Pregnancy

Pregnancy and birth stories are amazing. It is a true wonder what a pregnant body goes through from conception to birth: a whole human being is made from scratch. Although I have always been in awe of pregnancy, I have never actually been pregnant. My main goal so far has been 'nurturing a career,' so a baby was this abstract idea in an unknown future. Until one day my husband brought up the "baby" topic. We looked at dates. We spent car rides going through baby names. And then suddenly it hit me: I was not prepared for it. The first thing I hear from everyone is, of course: "there's never a good time." Maybe. But listening to people tell...

Most people that know me know I am a “Boy Mom” who absolutely adores her sons and her Boy Mom adventures. I truly do. However, there is an almost unspoken reality that I live with daily. I had a daughter. I gave birth to Charlotte, my “official” second child, too early and she died. She was born, yet never took a breath of air. She has a name, but she didn’t live. I held her but she didn’t move. Being pregnant with her is the only memory she and I will ever have together. Most well-meaning friends and family don’t acknowledge her existence, I am sure, out of fear of hurting me. I don’t publicly acknowledge my love for her on a...

"Is this your first?" To any woman pregnant after loss, you know the punch in the gut feeling that follows. The inner turmoil of dialogue goes something like, "Should I tell them I lost my first baby? No. It's too sad, they'll feel so uncomfortable. But, does that make me ashamed of him? If I don't explain, does that make me a bad mom? Would he think I'm not proud of him?" It's a battle I faced every time an acquaintance innocently asked that question. And let me tell you, working in a hospital, it happened a lot. Before returning from maternity leave after losing Weston, I honestly practiced a script of what to say when faced with tough questions like...

“Congratulations” is basically the norm when someone announces they are pregnant. Growing up, that’s what I learned to say, followed by visible excitement. With time, I learned that, although the prospect of a baby is can be seemingly happy, there are a lot more subtleties to it. When I was 18, one of my close friends got pregnant. Her mom had passed when she was 9, there was no partner in the scene, and she was struggling at a retail job. Nonetheless, she broke the news to me with a big smile on her face. I said “Congratulations!” as a reflex, but then I realized how complicated this could be for her, and I immediately followed it with “How are...

I'm expecting our third child at the end of August. This has been a decidedly different experience than being pregnant the first or second time. My first two were winter babies and a summertime pregnancy is just ridiculous. That's all I have to say about that. And I'm tired and achy in ways that I don't remember with the last two. But mostly, this pregnancy has been different in regards to people's comments to me regarding having a third child. It's hard to tell if people are well-meaning or just plain nosy! You'd think I was planning to have an extra head attached to my shoulders the way some have looked at me. So what IS it about three? Here's...