On not telling, Part II

I just learned on Facebook that a friend recently had a miscarriage. She wrote a poignant reflection on the culture of not telling until the first trimester is over, concluding that it's pretty dumb not to gather support at the time you need it most.

I agree, and I don't.

Part of me thought it would be silly to keep something so important from the people who are important to me. My friends and I share info about being tired because a child didn't sleep well, about husbands not being what we need on any given day, about our own grumpiness that gets in the way of appreciating our partners, about interactions with family, about sore nipples, the whole nine yards. So why, I thought for a while, would I withhold the truth of what is going on with me?

Because I'm scared. What's not so clear is exactly what I'm scared of. Part of me is, of course, concerned that something will go wrong, and then I'll have to tell everybody. If you never shared the news in the first place, you don't have to share the un-news. You can wait until the pain has passed and then offer some perspective.

But that doesn't fly if what you really want is support. I understand that. So why don't I want support?

Because I don't know what I want support for. I'm ambivalent. That's not very inspiring. No one signs up to be a cheerleader for a team that's not sure whether or not it wants to win.

Yes, of course I want to have a baby in my arms in, gulp, eight months. I wouldn't have had sex three times and waited until the middle of the night to pee if I didn't want it.

But I'm tepid. Timid. Unsure. It happened faster than I expected, and I am not ready to share any kind of excitement until I feel it's relatively safe to have some.

It seems to me that by this time in my first pregnancy, my son had already told me he was here to stay. (And that he was a boy, which freaked the hell out of me). I know it was in the 5th week (which starts today or tomorrow), because I was at a writing conference, and I can picture that Sarah Lawrence College dorm room where I felt like I heard the message (but still took my temperature every morning just in case. And by the way, I was peeing a thousand times a night already. I had to go across a linoleum tiled floor to a flourescent-lit bathroom).

Since I was a writing conference -- about writing the medical experience -- I wrote about my new experience as it was happening. We were tasked to produce a poem the morning after we got there, so I wrote something I'd been composing in my head on the train ride about shoots taking root or being washed away, like the tomatoes in my soggy yard. My pregnancy (and the fact that I wrote long poems) was the first thing people in my workshop learned about me. Other people -- the prose writers -- had no clue, of course. But I was thinking it, living it, feeling it.

I'd also told my mom by this time, because she was to have surgery while I was gone, and I wanted her to know, just in case. I might have told my sister right before I left, but I think I told her shortly after I got back. I couldn't ask my mom to keep it a secret for too long.

After all my health issues, we were all excited that I'd even gotten pregnant. "Oh, (name)," my sister said. "I hope this ends up with a baby in your arms" (hence the language used above), "but even if it doesn't, this is really exciting."

She miscarried at least once, my other sister more times than she cares to count, the last one ectopic and leading her to call for a tubal ligation. My mom, though, doesn't think she had any pregnancy losses, and she had five kids.

Which brings me to the next fear, one I don't even feel like addressing yet: the ability to have natural birth, at home, after having had a c-section.

I've been living with such doubt for so long: can I safely have a baby vaginally? Or nevermind that, can I even get my period back and ever get pregnant again? How about, Can my marriage take another child? Can I take it?

I've done some work on these questions with a therapist trained in Emotional Freedom Technique, and it got me away from gripping tears and toward a kind of distance.

I'm embracing that distance now. Like a parent unsure of a child's new boyfriend, I'm not going to get my panties in a bunch until I know he's sticking around. Why bother getting attached to something that might be gone tomorrow?

But I'm also not drinking even decaf coffee or eating any non-nutritious food, (except some coconut milk ice cream, which has good fat). I might be staying up late, but I'm generally trying to be a good maybe-mama.

I'm just doing it quietly for now.