My Pregnancy Journey Part 1

My story begins at a wedding. It wasn’t my wedding, though. I was co-officiating for two dear friends in my hometown of Memphis, TN in October of 2019. In the bathroom at their reception venue, I noticed the beautiful display of menstrual care products, and then wondered…when was the last time I bought tampons? I took a pregnancy test a couple of days later in the upstairs bathroom of my brother’s house, where I was staying during my visit. When that second line turned a faint pink, I knew my life was going to change. And it absolutely did, but not in the ways I expected.

I returned to Boston, where I was living at the time, to my husband. We had talked about children, but in a “some day when we’re settled” kind of way. We were living in a duplex and had no idea where we would put a baby, but I wouldn’t turn away what I saw as a gift from the universe.

When figuring out what to “do” about my pregnancy, I felt totally out of control and disconnected, like I had to look everywhere outside of me for knowledge and information and reassurance. It almost became a mantra for me to say "I don't know anything! I don't know anything". I did what they do on TV and I went to my doctor. She had me pee on a stick and told me I was pregnant, which I already knew, having peed on my own stick. She told me to go upstairs and make an appointment with the OB-GYN up there. I remember thinking it was so strange that they didn’t want to see me until I was 12 weeks along. I got the impression that it was because they wanted to make sure the pregnancy was going to “take,” which didn’t help my confidence any. I thought they would want to bring me in right away to tell me what to eat or not to eat, what to do or not do. Weren’t those first few weeks really critical to fetal development? Didn’t they have the information that could help me prevent miscarriage? I didn't tune into myself or what I was feeling, I just wanted to know what everyone else had to say about my pregnancy and what I should or shouldn't do. I called my insurance company, and they set me up with a nurse I should call. I called her and she asked me a bunch of questions about my mental health, which made me really worried about my mental health. I was taking prescription medications at the time. I was on two antidepressants, an anti-anxiety, adderall, and a PPI. I made an appointment with a perinatal psychologist to discuss if and how to come off of those, which is a discussion for another post. 

In all of these interactions with medical professionals, I felt something was missing. Or more accurately, a lot was missing. I would come home from them feeling depressed and unworthy, judged and scrutinized. What I wanted to feel was celebrated and exalted. Wasn’t I doing something amazing? Wasn’t I a sacred portal of life? I didn’t feel like that, I just felt like a cog in a machine, another drop in the bucket of pregnant women. I figured that was just how it was and went on with my outsourcing of power.

Then after a few weeks, I saw a spot of blood on the toilet paper. Just a spot. That was how it all started. It was the first time I had paid any attention to my own body in all of this. I had been so cerebral and external with the whole thing. This was my body’s invitation to listen, to tune in. But instead of listening, I called the nurse from the insurance company. She said to make an appointment with an OB-GYN right away, which I did. She sounded so panicked. Now they wanted to see me. They had me come in immediately for blood draws. The next few days were more of the same. More blood draws, an ultrasound, all of these tests on my body that had to be interpreted by other people. I felt completely disconnected. I was just this vessel, this container, to be poked and prodded. My baby was something to be studied. Finally, a very sweet and well-intentioned nurse told me that my HCG levels were dropping. I knew from all my books that those numbers were supposed to be doubling every day. The fact that they were not only not rising, but actually lowering meant that the pregnancy was over.  Before it had even really started. 

When the doctor told me my options, I finally listened to my intuition for the first time in the pregnancy. I feel lucky now in retrospect because she actually gave me the option of doing nothing and letting my body do its thing. I knew from my experience at the abortion clinic that there were a lot of drugs and procedures I could do, but I knew I didn't want that. I wanted to own at least one part of this whole experience. So she sent me home to do what she called "expectant management", which is doctor speak for letting the body do what it knows so very well how to do. 

I went home depressed and miserable. I had been needing to go to the grocery store for days but all this medical stuff had been getting in the way. I started the bathtub, thinking fuck the grocery store, fuck everything, I'll just starve, what's the point anyway. When the bath was full, I stepped in and just stood there for a moment. Something about that hot water hitting my feet and legs lit a fire in me and I think I actually said out loud, "you know what, no". This is not going to ruin me. I am not going to stop taking care of myself and go down this path of misery. I am stronger than this, I am better than this. So I got out of the tub and put on clothes and went to the goddamn grocery store and got food to nourish my beautiful, wise body for the work it had ahead.

The next few days were sad and uncomfortable. I sat in the not knowing. I went for lots of walks through the fall trees and thought a lot about cycles and how they continue in perfect rhythm even if we don't tune in to them. I watched a lot of colors come out of me. Browns and reds and blacks and purples. Some of them shiny and slick, some clumpy, some wispy. I stopped googling, stopped analyzing, started surrendering. I bled more than I had ever thought was possible. I cramped and I cried but I held onto this fierce trust that my body knew what it was doing.

 The actual event happened around another bath. The intensity of the cramping ramped up over the course of a couple of days and was really peaking in the late afternoon of Oct 30th. I asked my husband to draw me a bath, thinking the hot water would help. Before I got in, I spent some time on the toilet because, like so many other birthing women, I thought I had to poop. It wasn't a poop, though.  It was a perfectly preserved sac of what would have been a baby. When I released it, I felt a rush of energy and power, which I now know were the hormones adrenaline and oxytocin surging through my body. I fished it out of the toilet with a colander, put it in a glass bowl, and couldn't stop looking at it. It was beautiful. The yolk sac was completely intact, and while nothing about any part of it looked remotely like a human, I thought it looked perfect. I felt so proud of this thing I had created and that my body had expertly expelled. I loved it, and I loved my body for releasing it. I had a strong intuition that the baby would have been a girl, so we named her Sadie, after a Joanna Newsome song I couldn’t stop singing throughout the whole pregnancy. We buried her in a park in the rain, near an oak tree. We thanked her for the wisdom that she had brought into our lives: the awareness that we wanted to be parents. I thanked her for showing me how to trust my body. We cried for her and I kept crying for her for weeks after. 

I used vaginal steaming with some of my favorite plant friends in the weeks following to help restore my womb and my heart. I did go back in for the recommended follow-up ultrasound to make sure that the miscarriage was complete and that there was nothing left. I knew there wasn't, and the ultrasound just confirmed it. I journaled and painted and meditated about my experience and eventually it hurt less and less.

During that time, a dear friend of mine (the co-officiant from our friends’ wedding) introduced me to the Free Birth Society podcast. I started absorbing stories of women birthing in power and sovereignty, not fear and pain. I read about the physiology of childbirth and the measurable negative effects of being in a hospital or anywhere other than your home on the perfectly orchestrated hormonal dance of the birth process. The more I learned, the angrier I became. Why, if birth is this perfect process that only becomes dangerous if it’s interrupted, are we constantly interrupting it? I was an abortion doula for so long because that was where I believed I was needed. The whole rest of the world is built to support birthing women, I mistakenly believed, so I wanted to support the women who were not being served by society. My experience with pregnancy completely changed that belief, so I started shadowing a birth doula and attending her childbirth education classes so that I could serve the rest of the women I had been neglecting in my previous work. 

After learning about the powerful and beautiful concept of conscious conception,  I knew that was what I wanted for my next pregnancy, and planned and dreamed about the ceremony we would hold and the candles we would light to call in our spirit baby.  I meditated with and prayed to the moon until I synced my cycle up to her so that I ovulated at the full moon and bled at the new. The plan was to try to buy a house and get our life in order so that we could be in a stable place to welcome in a baby. I was practicing what I thought was the Fertility Awareness Method, but was actually the (very unreliable!) rhythm method.  By the time I was planning out every detail of our perfect conscious conception ceremony, I was already pregnant.

I was so grateful for my miscarriage experience because I knew that I wanted to do everything differently this time. I vowed not to spend a moment of this pregnancy in a doctor's office or doubting my body in any way. I knew I wanted to do this pregnancy my way, according to my beliefs, doing what felt good and right to me. My mantra throughout my son’s pregnancy was "I believe in myself, I trust my body".

Almost exactly a year later, on October 28th, 2020, I birthed my son into my own hands in a kiddie pool in my living room. No medical presence, no strangers, everything done my way, in my power and on my terms.