great litany

(note before the essay: if you are also pregnant and prone to anxiety, you might want to not read this essay in case it could accidentally inspire new anxiety for you. you know yourself best!)

I was doing really well mentally in this pregnancy until I wasn’t. Fear came rushing in, like a storm door being blown open by wind. It only surprised me because I thought somehow I would avoid my anxiety this time around, like somehow I had grown past it. The inoculation of doula work, maybe, or just… maturity? No. The ways we are vulnerable, our softest spots, stay soft, maybe forever. Pregnancy is not something to master.

Sitting vigil with one not yet born can begin to feel strangely like sitting with one about to die. You sweep the thought out of your mind, but it comes back unbidden. There is nothing I can do but watch and wait, and fear what could lurk around each bend. I want my baby out and healthy, their whole life ahead of them. I have every reason to believe that is where we are going, yet my disbelief holds. We are not there yet, and so I can’t know for sure. I crave certainty, 100-percents. There’s always that tiny fraction, the trapdoor that could open underneath us.

But everything is looking good. I have no real reason to worry, yet I still do. My baby feels impossible, too precious to me already. My sons didn’t really materialize for me until they were born (when I suddenly knew and loved them desperately), but I bonded with this baby early this time, and that’s part of the terror. We named our first two kids when we saw them on the outside, but this baby already has a name, when I say it out loud it feels like a hymn. I’m in the middle of an unfolding story and I can’t tell the ending, not for so long, forever maybe. Every ending is just a snapshot of the way things are just now. A birth is not a happy ending, it’s a bend in the labyrinth. We keep walking.

The problem is always knowing too much. I do know too much, and I have seen so much too. As of now, I am still planning to have this baby out-of-hospital at a freestanding birth center, but I do have to admit that that choice feels more tender this time, and that I am holding space in myself for my mind to change. I don’t know yet. I have seen blue floppy newborn babies now. I have sat with mothers whose babies were taken to the NICU instead of placed on their chests. All of those babies were ok pretty quickly, but still. Those kinds of scenarios are not even what my worries are most fixated on, but it’s all in the mix. My eyes have seen, and will not unsee.

I will be the first to admit that I went into my first two pregnancies and births with at least some naivety, but I also think that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I have also lived the safety of birth twice now, two uncomplicated birth center births with pink screaming babies born into my waiting hands, and I trust that experience just as much as my fear pulls me in the opposite direction. My two healthy boys are doing great. I just know more now. I know so much about so much. There are so many ways now to test and screen and monitor so many things — and I both want it all and don’t want any of it. It’s all great and fascinating until it’s you who are pregnant. What would I tell a doula client expressing anxiety like mine? I’d tell her there are no easy answers, that it’s so hard. I’d tell her to talk about all of this with her care providers, to seek therapy, don’t keep it bottled up. I’d tell her to ask all of her questions, again and again if needed. To be the squeaky wheel, the leaky faucet, when she needs to be. I’d quote Pam England, say “worry is the work of pregnancy,” which is affirming (this is normal, you’re not alone) but doesn’t make it easier. I’d tell her to text or call me anytime, I am always here to listen. So I guess I’ll try to take my own advice in the ways that I can. Who can I call? Who will listen to my great litany of strange fears?

I am so good at finding new things to worry about, and then catastrophizing my way to the terrible end of them. I won’t tell you the particular things I’m hung up about right now because the funny thing about them is that they almost definitely won’t happen. It’s the rarest things that short circuit my brain — I wish I could tell you why. I fixate on things that are hard to definitively avoid or rule out, but that are stunningly rare. Contamination OCD is my official diagnosis, mixed with generalized anxiety — not just in pregnancy, but pregnancy definitely makes my symptoms flare wildly. Because of course it does! I’d been doing so well for so long. It was worst in my first pregnancy, during early covid. I was a basket case then, and how could I not be? That was the perfect storm for someone like me. Maybe that’s another reason why I thought it would be easier this time, but it isn’t. I read this poem I wrote during that pregnancy, and shudder. I still feel exactly the same, still fear the same litany of troubles. Does anyone else think about “water that splashes back up from the sink”? I do.

As much as I wish I wasn’t, I am still here, in this poem I wrote the first time I was 23 weeks pregnant. I’m 21 weeks pregnant now with our third child. This has not gotten easier. Will I ever move through pregnancy not feeling like the way forward is littered with land mines? Parenthood feels the same, but at least I can hug my kids close and feel their safety more fully in the calm of them right there beside me. The womb is a liminal space, both real and not real. My kids have proven their hardiness to me, their resilience, bouncing back from fevers, falling and getting up. My baby hasn’t yet. Of course I’m still terrified, nearly all the time. We pulled a tick from behind my two year old’s ear before bed, then I laid awake for four hours that night worrying, imagining years of lyme disease, knowing that the tick wasn’t attached long enough for the PEP antibiotics but wanting them anyway — any certainty that things would be ok. So, no, it never goes away. Parenting children means years of exposure therapy to exhausting and near-constant fear. You can’t be afraid all the time, so you aren’t — but it comes back to remind you with a force that is startling sometimes. I’ve been here all along.

What I want is the faith I used to have, prayers that felt sturdy. I miss my old certainty, having a place to cast my cares! I’ve hardly written about faith or religion at all in the past few years. I haven’t known what to say. It was in my first pregnancy that my faith in God unraveled, something I never asked for or desired. My deconstruction felt like a tower of blocks crashing down very suddenly. Terrible timing, really, but also perfect timing as somehow it was about parenthood. It’s all intertwined, in ways I still can’t articulate or describe clearly. I’m still so confused and wish it could be easier to believe in an eschatology that used to feel so simple and clear. I need it, and I don’t have it. I have wisps of belief, broken yarn tied back together shoddily in some places but not others. I’m an imposter in church now, but I sit there anyway. I don’t think it will ever be simple for me again.

I read this Jane Kenyon poem this morning and it stopped me in my tracks. Kenyon is a poet I have always self-identified with, from the first time I read her — we must share similar minds. I feel her poems as if I have written them myself, which is not something I feel for many poets. It was reading her poetry that spurred me toward writing my own — spurred me toward many right-sized things, really. I remember reading some of Kenyon’s God poems in my mid-twenties and feeling sort of shaken up by them, uncomfortable with her comfort admitting doubt, disbelief mixed with belief, citing and then questioning the scriptures, and naming that same imposter feeling in her old local parish, but sitting there and being a part of it all anyway. I was fascinated by the way God showed up in her poems, and it also frightened me. Now I see it was because it was a window into my own future. Kindred spirits tend to show us the way, even before we are ready to walk it.

The God of curved space, the dry God. Jane making paths in my mind for all I still cannot say. The poets are here for our empty places, our own curved space. Jane was a step-mother, but she never had her own children. I wonder what she would have written about pregnancy. It wasn’t her path, so we will never know.

but the son, whose blood. So who am I speaking to now when I pray? I haven’t known lately, but I do it anyway. Like so many other post-deconstruction women of my generation (for whom a deeply patriarchal and domination-centered evangelicalism that was so big in the nineties and early-2000’s stole so much potential spiritual beauty and spaciousness from our most formative years), the “great mother” image of god is the only one that truly resonates now. So I suppose I imagine a god who knows exactly how I feel because she has felt it too and it tore her apart the same way. The torn apart god, the bleeding god. God of birth and stained garments. She held together though, holds all things together. I whisper my fears to her, and ask what I should do, knowing there is no real answer. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.

And I hold together the best I can. My boys climb on my lap and I hold them while our baby kicks at their warm bodies from the inside. A surreal feeling, all three of my children in my embrace. We feel each other. Everyone safe and here together right now.

I will move through this. It is a notable pregnancy milestone, really. The second trimester is always hard for my mind. I remember now, it comes rushing back. The long, lonely middle, so close and so far. In the first trimester, my mind is usurped by my body, then again in the third. But now it’s free to roam, and that’s not a good thing, at least not in my case. Anxiety blooms like toxic blue algae on a pond. No, I am extremely not alone in all of these things I feel. I take solace in the due date forums, where I read but never post. I feel isolated but I am not alone. We are all exactly the same amount insane, just refracting that insanity differently, kaleidoscopic. Pregnancy demands reaction, and we definitely react. Reading other moms unload their fears on the message boards like little prayers sent up and away to the open arms of the internet’s great cloud of witnesses, we all bow our heads together and hope against hope that everything will be ok. I sit vigil with the moms who type out their test results, the hard news, the complication, the questions. No two of us are the same, but we are in this together, somehow, all unbearably moved by how badly we need our babies to be fine and well, and how hard it is to wait. I don’t know what to say, so I just listen, a hand on my belly. I know, I think. I know. I wish this could be easier. I know exactly how you feel. That’s all we can say to each other. Maybe that’s all we really need.

Thank you so much for reading. As always, I love to hear from you — please comment with any thoughts you have! And I always appreciate likes and restacks, sharing goes such a long way!

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