Better
2021
Toward the end of my second trimester I posted in a forum for second-time moms asking if anyone had encountered an app they like for subsequent pregnancies. While in general pregnancy apps leave a lot to be desired, I find them useful to help me keep track of what symptoms to expect week by week—and, let’s be honest, what week of pregnancy I’m even in. During this second pregnancy I have far fewer quiet hours in the day, and there is just no world in which it feels useful nor rejuvenating to spend that sacred time consuming missing-the-point filler copy written by an overexcited copywriter much like I was in my early ‘20s. (“At this point your bump is starting to look less like you ate a burrito and more like there’s a bun in the oven!”) It was cute the first time around. Sort of.
A few people commented saying they too were dissatisfied with the options out there. Then one mum said something like, “What kind of question is this? I’ve been through this before, I don’t need an app to tell me what I’m doing.”
I wasn’t sure whether to bow down to this woman who had it all figured out or to delete social media altogether. I thought her comment felt so unsupportive. I decided to tell her so, dryly and straightforwardly, and other commenters came to her defense saying they didn’t think she meant any harm.
Maybe I was expecting too much from a forum. I had seen so many mothers create posts that contained really personal information, detailing very challenging relationships and unethical care by medical providers and nonexistent support to help them birth or breastfeed or parent the way they truly wanted to. They were looking for strangers to boost them with words of encouragement. And they absolutely received it, including from me. Maybe by asking such a neutral question I had inadvertently created a safe space for those same commenters to blow off some steam. Maybe I was falsely signaling that my biggest “problem” was what app to spend time on. Maybe I didn’t belong among this group of mothers who had greater and more basic needs than what they supposed mine might be. There were thousands of people in that group. Shouldn’t there be a few more who could relate to me? Why didn’t they speak up for me?
I found myself stuck in this familiar space of frenzied questioning, alone, in my bedroom, on my phone. Where did I belong on the spectrum of struggling pregnant people? Do those challenged spiritually and those underserved more tangibly exist on the same plane? Do they intersect? Can they? Please? Can we hold hands?
I was in an alright place in that moment and was able to journal my 50 pleading questions and step away. This was notable since the lived experience of my first pregnancy felt like an emotional disembowelment; a spiritual crashing and burning; a backhoe through my relationships as I knew them; it felt like ongoing angst and anger, like it was my responsibility to prove a point on behalf of myself and every pregnant person to ever exist. But not in a confident, activist way. Showing my face to anyone at all on any given day was to appear with a coal-smudged face amid my wreckage.
It was an embarrassing way to live. Through that pregnancy and also after, I didn’t like who I was in this type of survival mode, and I didn’t feel liked by the people around me either. After slowly, slowly crawling out from under the heaviest parts of postpartum, I looked back and felt I had done an awful job of being pregnant. As though pregnancy is a job that one can succeed at, gain recognition for, add to their resume. As though it’s a job at all.
So, naturally, I envisioned myself as doing my 2nd pregnancy “better.” I put that in quotes because reason tells me there is no such thing as being good or bad at pregnancy, no succeeding or failing, no winning or losing. But my body is filled with an undeniable sensation of striving that feels so similar to life pursuits wherein this assessment is appropriate. To turn that self-judgement off in an instant is to be superhuman.
The reality of this 2nd pregnancy is that the hurdles feel far higher and my box of healthy tools far more scant.
❀❀❀
2023
Today I Google searched how old my youngest daughter is—the one from the pregnancy above—and the number is 880. It feels like such a large number for a small person. Right now I can hear her small, deliberate voice from a few rooms over, where she is leaning with her elbows against her sister’s bed, and my mom is flipping through a picture book of animals from the library. My child is identifying animals from all manner of habitats with such unique pronunciation as her lips and tongue learn how to speak like us. I can’t fathom how she knows what an otter is, or a chimpanzee.
It is Fall, and my hands are tired from priming a wall and typing emails this morning. My feet are cold under wool socks. My mind wanders to the woman from the forum, to her sense of knowing and her confidence in herself, in her body. I try to picture her child, now two, and likely the most capable person in her life of culling her anger in an instant. The same is true of mine.
The woman I was when I lamented my lack of direction in my 2nd pregnancy desperately wanted to be better. And now I am better. Existing inside the mundanity of a Tuesday at noon, with my oldest at school, and grandmother childcare here to occupy the “baby,” but no pressing task ahead of me other than the ongoing need to completely gut my house and start over. I’ll do what I always do: save it for a different day.
I click on the lamp next to me without premeditation. It feels like one of those motions that people to do get through the next moment. It’s a gloomy, boring, depressing sort of day. Yet in the yellow light I see—so clearly, so clearly—that here I am: fully, wholly, and undeniably better.
