August 20, 2015: 9wks1day - Baby has a heartbeat and the urge to dance apparently.
Giving My First Pregnancy a Second Try:
I've never been gushy about babies. I'm seldom gushy and emotional about anything, publicly. At home I run the full spectrum of emotions, no doubt, but I'm a resting bitchface kinda gal and its something I've come to terms with. I love to smile, hug and love on people but I want to feel that those actions are more than surface-level before I unleash them upon a relationship because I love deeply and am fiercely loyal. So, yeah, along those lines babies are people, too.
But in the past two years, I've found myself oddly sympathetic of and drawn to pregnant women - especially yoginis. All of a sudden I was broadsided by awe and wonder at the strength of women to carry the spark of a life inside for nine months while going about "business as usual." This feeling is very different to the aversion I used to feel toward pregnancy and babies. I am very thankful that I was so put off by pregnancy in my young and reckless days. I was not mature enough or physically ready to carry a child in my late-teens and early-to-mid twenties. However, for the past few years, I have been as ready as I'll ever be. My body has known and has been speaking to me along those lines as has my heart and soul. Matt and I planned to wait. We wanted to move away from Lynchburg, Va and to somewhere we felt a sense of tribe/community. If that plan had stuck we were looking at 2016 at the earliest to begin to try to have a baby.
Around the end of April my body was beginning to morph. My typically modest A-Cup was starting to look rather a bit more ample. I was nervous but suspected it was just my body really wanting to have a baby and not actually the real deal. May 15th I was two weeks past due for my period. So, I went to CVS and picked up a pregnancy test - the second one in fact. The prior I was starting to suspect and was getting really nervous so I bought a test but foolishly did it in the middle of the afternoon and got a negative. The second time I waited until the morning. Early Saturday May 16th, I took my usual trip to the bathroom, peed on the stick and got a positive. I have never experienced such a strong shock. My heart felt like it was going to rip out of my chest. Matt and I were poor, like hoping and praying for a break-through poor, still in Lynchburg and planning to move to Atlanta with no prospects at the time...and I was pregnant. I took the test back to bed and laid down next to Matt trying to keep myself from hyperventilating. He was concerned and had no clue why I was in that state until I slipped him the test...
May 19th: 4-5 weeks pregnant.
If you're doing the math, you know that something is amiss. And what you probably didn't know is that my first first pregnancy ended shortly after it started. We waited about a week to tell our families. I think it was Saturday of Labor Day weekend. By late Sunday evening I was experiencing cramping and pain and by mid-Monday it was clear that things were going very wrong. It took less than a week for my body to go through a complete miscarriage. Just like that, no more baby.
Matt and I share a love for each other that I thought might not actually exist outside of books and movies and the occasional high school sweet hearts. We are two people that have burned through firestorms of our own creation and risen time and again to be shiny and new and try again to be better. We fight to help each other to be better which sometimes means fighting the world and sometimes means fighting each other...but most often that means, that as individuals, we have learned the greatest fight is against our own egos. We wanted that baby. We were unprepared materially but mentally and emotionally we had come together and were ready to do what we needed to raise our child.
I've had some really low moments in my life but the day that I passed what I assumed was the embryo of my unborn baby the depth of misery I felt was so physically crushing I thought I might not get up to fight again. I'm a yogi, I'm resilient and healthy and I had no clue why my body betrayed the life inside of me. I was catatonic except for the yoga classes I had to teach. I let myself live in that for about a day while Matt grieved in his own way. Then something really magical happened. We came together, sitting across from one another we looked each other squarely in the eyes and recognized each other's pain. In that moment, we came to the conclusion that if either of us gave in to the despair that the other person would not be able to heal. I didn't want to hurt him any more than he was already hurting. I wanted to be strong so that we could bring this fire down to a smolder, brush off the ashes and rise again, together.
So yeah, that whole experience for those of you who paid attention is what this was about...
Briefly, I would like to send an internet hug to any woman/couple who has had to deal with the self-doubt and physical ramifications of miscarriage. Without Matt, two strong mothers helping me to cope and yoga, I know I would have had a lot harder time. If you ever need someone to chat to - find the contact page and hit me up. Compared to the stories people were sharing on the internet, I had a remarkably easy time with the physical recovery. My gut tells me it was because of yoga and diet.
Round two:
I was under the impression that it takes a couple of months to get pregnant after a miscarriage. I think that gestalt was based on the assumption that the woman is going to have some level of PTSD and still be emotionally distraught and is actually not based on biology...cuz here I am 9wks and 3 days into my first pregnancy round 2.
Within the first few days of living in Atlanta my boobs started ballooning. Again, I was skeptical, thinking that my body was doing the false pregnancy thing. Then I was laid up in bed for two days with extreme nausea but I wrote it off as dehydration from pulling out a stump from the garden in 95 degree Georgia heat. Then one morning that oh-so distinct smell of pregnancy hormone wafted up from the toilet after my first pee of the day and I knew I was pregnant again. Miraculously, unplanned and with only marginally better material-world prospects Matt and I got a second chance.
Thank you for the extreme outpouring of support in the last couple of days. We are so happy to share this with our friends and family and so full of gratitude for this chance to pick up anew and love this baby. Several of you have asked for pictures of my "bump." Y'all, this is my first pregnancy and I have strong yogi-abs. So below are the pics...very underwhelming. If it wasn't for the ultrasound I would still be skeptical...
This is my skeptical face
I mean, kinda. Only because that's normally super flat...9wks+3days