There is a belief in the world of psychoanalysis that a pregnant woman cannot be psychoanalyzed.

The fact of being physically merged with a baby, some have said, empties the maternal mind of its ability to examine and effect change in its contents.

I used to get feministically ragey on that prejudice.

But today I am wondering about how much access do I have to writing, to creating characters, remembering details, and painting a visual picture.

How much can a mother do that while her kid is napping?

Wait, is that her? Do I not get to finish even this?

How much of our mama brain is ours and internally free to wander while we try to sing our song and voice our particular story?

How much of me is taken up in crouching, waiting for the interruption or the remembered phone call I HAVE to make while she's out?

We need so much to have a place where we are subjective, messy, passionate creatures, beholden to no one, freely longing and growing.

Today's answer: Well, at least I can try to write a blog. . .

Oy, she's up!

By Avvy Mar

Labels: Avvy Mar, feminist, log, mama brain, napping babies, pregnancy, psychoanalysis, psychoanalyzed, rage

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In the many years I’ve been struggling to get pregnant (and I succeeded once), I’ve never taken a pregnancy test in hopes that it would be negative.

But that’s what I did last week.

A couple of months earlier I took another pregnancy test. I took that one because I was about to begin a medication for a sports injury and the pharmacist warned that you can’t take it if you’re pregnant. 

I laughed and said, “OK.”

I had been trying for a second child for two and a half years, and after expensive acupuncture treatments and one failed IVF, I gave up. I had exhausted my emotional stamina. It’s not going to happen, I told myself. I’m too old. I’ll have to find some other path to a second child.

So I took the medication.  But then I paused.  Just because I had given up didn’t mean my husband and I had stopped having sex.  And wasn’t my period due around now? 

Just to be responsible, I took the test, treating it like a routine, as  if I were about to brush my teeth.

I was SHOCKED to see the double pink lines. My hands shook when I called my husband to tell him that after all this time we were actually, really pregnant.

That was early October. On Halloween I went in for an ultrasound and it was discovered that the embryo had apparently deceased. 

“No heartbeat.  We’re sorry.”

I felt my trepid hope deflate out of me.

I went to a restaurant and had a long, slow glass of wine. I thought of all the things I did that might have caused this, but most likely nothing I did caused this.  For two days, I embraced the loss, crying and feeling numb, and then I let it go.

At ten weeks I started to miscarry. Although the bleeding has stopped, the double lines on the pregnancy test last week tell me I’m still pregnant, and so it will be a while longer before my body is clear again for another fresh start.

And I believe in a fresh start, despite my just turning 44. My doctor expressed confidence that it could happen again, and there is something to be said, too, about giving up, letting go, and releasing yourself from the pressure.

But I’m wary of hope.

So here’s what I’m thinking: I am not giving up and I am not hoping. I am just going to try to live my life as fully as I can with what I have in the moment.

By Cindy Bailey

Labels: # 2, baby, Cindy Bailey, miscarriage, pregnancy, pregnancy tests

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Another mother in my mom’s group just announced her pregnancy. She’s the third one out of the 10 of us so far. Ours is a group of first-time moms whose babies, now toddlers, are all the same age (16 months), and now three of us are on the road to our second.

I know what will happen next: one by one each of the moms’ bellies will balloon and then pop, and then there will be me, standing there in my non-maternity jeans while the others talk about food cravings and fatigue and sleep deprivation. I will be coming to our weekly playgroups armed with my one beautiful child to find the topics have shifted from napping and pre-schools to the exponentially increased workload of caring for two. Well-meaning, the moms will reassure me that having only one is a blessing, and then they’ll go back to cooing at their newborns.

It won’t matter what they say, though. As deeply in love as I am with my child, and as much as I appreciate his blessed existence, in my head “family” includes more than one child, and anything less is just not complete.

I assumed that because I was able to bear my first child, that there would be no problem bearing a second, even though I was told I had only a 2% chance of getting pregnant the first time around. I subscribed to my own natural healing efforts, and four months later I was pregnant -- naturally, the old-fashioned way.

Now, once again, I’m panicking over the negative statistics about aging and fertility, I’m feeling jabs of envy each time I hear of another friend getting pregnant, and I’m getting impatient, stressed. All over again, I have to remind myself that I am not a statistic, that I can make a difference in my own fertility, that I need to be patient and mostly, that I have to surrender to whatever life brings me. Just like when I conceived my son, I have to be in that place where I can see that my family -- my life -- is complete, just like it is.

And once I can see that again, anything is possible.

By Cindy Bailey

Labels: babies, Infertility, mothers groups, pregnancy, toddlers

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