pregnancy as opportunity

I’m 14 weeks pregnant now, and the first trimester symptoms are slowly waning, little by little. I’m still plagued by nausea, but not all day long. I’m still going to bed at 8:30 pm every night, but feeling a little more energy during the day. There’s a dear little bump emerging, a crescent moon-like arc at the center of my body. I anxiously await the first little swishes of quickening — every once in a while I wonder if I’m feeling something, but nothing has been very convincing yet. I worry daily that something could be wrong, then remind myself that worry does not protect us and try to breathe the worry away. I plod forward toward everything changing, day by day by day. Everything is already changing, isn’t it?

Earlier this week, I supported a really difficult birth. It involved unwanted outcomes, heartbreak, fear, and big complications. Everyone seems to be ok now, but there were moments where we weren’t sure. It was really hard. I have a lot of support as I’m processing through that experience, and I’m continuing to support the family for whom it was much more life-altering as much as I can — but still. That was a big thing to pass through, especially while I am pregnant myself. In the middle of the experience, I felt eerily calm and steady. The unsteadiness has come in the days after. I made the list that became the outline of this essay before that birth, and coming back to it now to flesh out my thoughts feels newly urgent. Having babies is truly no small thing, and always invites uncertainty and risk. I hold new reverence and humility toward birth. Every birth I attend or experience myself builds that humility, but this one offered a huge dose. I can make no promises. Life is never simple, and birth is no different.

But I myself am not at birth’s threshold yet. I am knee-deep in pregnancy which brings different lessons than birth does. In walking through pregnancy with so many others, having so many conversations with people about how it feels and how those feelings shift over time, and now walking through it again myself, I am beginning to see something beautiful and true. Pregnancy is an experience unlike nearly any other human experience, different even from motherhood itself. Pregnancy is a distinct opportunity that many of us only encounter a limited few times in our lives, if at all. It holds inherent boundaries, it is time bound and transitory. It is limited by biology and circumstance. It is slippery or obvious, hard-won or a stunning (and sometimes difficult) surprise. It is as multiple as we are unique, and as universal as we are similar. It is, invariably, really hard — and yet life just keeps going, keeps demanding things of us even while we are pregnant. When I say I am pregnant, you immediately know something big about what I am going through. You picture me somehow — round-bellied, waddling, whatever else.

What special lessons does the experience of pregnancy bring? How do we all process these lessons differently, let them change and teach us, permeating our soft places, or not? I wrote this list in my notes app in a flurry, and now coming back to it I can feel the way each of these lessons are challenging me even now, deeply present in my life as a pregnant mom of two. It is hard to take in so many things at once. I find with my clients that one lesson tends to emerge as primary, very loud and strong — usually precisely the one they need the most to wrestle with or learn. It is different for everyone, and can shift over time. I can’t tell which lessons are loudest for me yet, which makes sense this early in the process. They are all here, symphonic in their influence. Not all of these lessons are unique to pregnancy, of course, but no where else in life are they “bundled” in quite this same array. Maybe I’m trying to see pregnancy with rose-colored glasses after moving through a lot of hard in the first trimester? I’m sure I’m extra eager about all of this because I’m a doula. But I’ll say for myself — it feels special this third time to come to expect some of this, and to feel like I want to learn these things, to feel them and let them change me in small and big ways. It is easy to see pregnancy as a hardship, an inconvenience, a means to an end (and I feel all those things on any given day, believe me), but what if it is also an opportunity? What special things is pregnancy offering to me, things that might be more difficult to learn or access in other seasons? What is unfolding in me right before my eyes?

The body becomes a little clock.

When else in life do we count time in weeks? Pregnancy feels like a completely new relationship to time. You have nine months, forty weeks, three trimesters, give or take. Even the idea of “trimesters” is so bound to pregnancy. If you ask someone who is pregnant where they are in their pregnancy, it is more likely than not that they know down to the week or even the day. Even if time slips away a little bit, the milestones along the way serve to jog your memory. Office visits every few weeks, then every week at the end. The 20-week anatomy scan. Gestational diabetes screening. Not to mention the ever growing belly, shifting symptoms, and baby kicks to remind you that time is passing and something inside of you is growing stronger and stronger.

There is something really special about the new dimensions of time that pregnancy offers, layered on top of the ones we already know. Pregnancy layered over the seasons, pregnancy layered over special dates and anniversaries, layered over weather and work and all our usual rhythms. It gives us a new narrative arc, with a big bang at the end! I have found being inside of the pregnancy “story” to be comforting to me. Finally, I can give a shape to what is happening in my life, and I know what role I have to play. Time feels like an active participant in the unfolding narrative rather than a force I have to bend or wrestle against. Pregnancy has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But this is normal, this is grounding. We humans depend on clocks we can live inside. The world is one, of course, with day and night, summer and winter, these forces that gently usher us through the endlessness. But pregnancy is a new one, surprising with its own rhythm. The body becomes a little clock, and it’s a pretty special one.

Transformation is inevitable.

It’s one thing to say, “I want to change my life.” It’s another thing to feel that life-change quite literally growing bigger and bigger inside of you. You can’t not change. You can try really hard, I guess, but even physically there’s no fighting the shift. The body transforms, but the soul does too — sometimes in ways that are hard to detect in real time but become very obvious later on. I have felt this transformation twice already, and I feel curious about it once again. Who will I be on the other side of this? What is developing quietly inside of me even now? I can’t tell yet, but I feel the tide pulling already. It sounds like let things go. It sounds like see what comes.

I think personal transformation is the single biggest opportunity of pregnancy, beyond growing and meeting your baby. I also think its the one most easily resisted or set aside as unimportant or even inconvenient. The book about pregnancy I recommend most often (and have turned to so much myself, especially this time around), is Britta Bushnell’s Transformed by Birth. In it, she describes birth as a rite of passage and humans as meaning-making beings. We pass through experiences that bring big change in our lives, and then we unfurl the branching meanings of that change. This is in us to do, offered freely among the changes and chances of our lives. It has meant so much to me to allow the change the birth has offered me, welcome it, and see what meaning slowly comes. In birth, I truly have been transformed, and I will be again — and that has honestly been incredible to experience.

The stakes are so high.

They honestly couldn’t be higher. The moment you hold a positive pregnancy in your hand, you feel those stakes, sense the “what-if’s” rushing in. Something Louise Erdrich wrote in The Blue Jay’s Dance (another of my all time favorite books about birth) has always stuck with me: “Most of all, I worry over what I hold. I want perfection. Each day I pray another perfect cell to form. A million of them.” We want perfection — and the thought of anything less is terrifying. Where else in life do we demand perfection so adamantly? Almost nowhere. We are so used to compromising, finding our way toward “good enough,” making lemonade out of lemons. But not with our babies! The miracle of perfect babies being intricately grown in the dark of the uterus so very often is the one that truly keeps me believing that the world is still headed somewhere good. The fact that this works shocks me. I look at my two sons and they have everything they need, they are perfect. They grew inside of me that way, and I had no way to meaningfully influence that perfection beyond blindly trusting that they would we well. Frankly, that’s wild. The stakes are so high.

The grief that unfolds when babies die or when they are not healthy, when they don’t have everything they need to thrive, is so, so heavy. The chaos of life touches us here too. I send all my love and honor to those parents who hold and miss and move through that story. They feel the stakes most acutely. When we take the test, stand at the beginning of pregnancy, we all have no idea what will happen. We know we have so little control. And we know what we hope. We hope for perfect. In fact, we demand it. Then, all we can do is watch and wait and will each perfect cell, all million of them, to please, please form. All of this, quiet in the background of everything else we are responsible for in life, forming in the dark. It feels impossible. It happens every day. Of course I worry over this baby who is growing inside of me now. They are my child. I demand their perfection and I fear anything less. My love for them already covers any and every eventuality. I feel these stakes every day.

How do I cope with intensity?

This is something I talk about with my doula clients all the time. Pregnancy is a strange mix of ordinary and intense. It leads to birth, which is a mix of very extraordinary and very intense, then back to postpartum, ordinary and intense again. It’s all intense though. The first trimester of pregnancy tends to push most of us straight into intensity, giving us nausea and exhaustion and mood-shifts that startle us with their force. All of a sudden, you have to figure out how to reconcile these intense things with the rest of life. What still needs to happen, what can I set aside, how can I get through these big feelings? What helps, what makes it worse, how do I survive until this too passes? Who can help me, and how do I ask them to? This problem-solving coping mindset, the understanding that we can’t escape the discomfort but need to learn to coexist with it somehow instead, is an incredibly valuable skill. It’s a skill we need to cultivate for birth, for postpartum, for parenting, and for so much else that life throws at us too. Everyone copes with intensity differently, and finding what works for you, your own path through challenge, is one of the great lessons of pregnancy. Someone else’s magic bullet may not be yours. Only you can find your own way through.

An opportunity to learn.

It is very normal for first time parents not to know much or even anything about pregnancy, birth, or babies. Our culture is really good a siloing birth into its own realm that is easy not to interact with without a clear reason. This was not always the case — pregnancy, birth, and babies used to be much more integrated into community lifecycles, touching almost everyone’s lived experience. Now we hear folks loving to shout on the internet about being angry that there’s a baby seated near them on a airplane. (Sigh.) But then, all of a sudden, you’re pregnant! Time to figure it out! It’s so interesting to see people navigate this. It takes all kinds. Some people go deep into research mode (I was this kind of person), some people seek teachers, some people really want only the bare minimum information, some people would prefer to remain mostly ignorant, relying on doctors to just take care of everything. It all belongs! But learning something about birth before experiencing it is in everyone’s best interest, and I think we are all better for knowing more about where we come from and how birth is approached by our healthcare system, midwives, and other practitioners today.

Because I was one of the deep research kind of people, I have to say that it was so exciting to unlock a whole new world of learning when I was pregnant for the first time, and my interest has only expanded from there. For every new thing I learn about birth, I find new rabbit trails to follow into history and philosophy. You can go so deep with birth, and the thinkers, researchers, and teachers who are offering their genius to this field are pretty amazing. Birth will never go away, as long as there are people. Artificial intelligence cannot replace the fact that humans grow in humans and humans need humans’ help during birth. Capitalism’s commodification has stormed the birth world as it has everything else, of course, but so much of it still feels so grounded in reality and true altruism. There is something beautiful and true here, is what I am saying. I grieve the siloing of this information, because I feel that birth has so much to offer to pretty much everyone, parent or not. It is so deeply human, it is where we all come from! Everyone was born! How cool to get to learn all about it as we walk through it ourselves!

A new point of connection.

Being pregnant instantly connects you with so many people in a new way — people you’ve known forever and people you are yet to meet. I’ll never forget the way it felt to talk with my mom about her pregnancies and births once I was pregnant and experiencing it for myself. I suddenly felt so curious about the pregnancies and births of all the moms I’ve ever known, random strangers, anyone anywhere. Parenting extends this point of connection. Anytime I see someone out in the world who is pregnant or who has a little one tagging along, I instantly can connect with at least something about their life and experience. There is always something to chat about on the playground, gentle friendly questions to ask, a way in. The warmth of that connection with other moms has surprised me, and has felt easier than I expected. Of course it isn’t effortless or a given thing that just because someone else has moved through pregnancy suddenly you have everything in common, but still, it has surprised me how big these points of connection can be.

The way becoming parents and moving through pregnancy and birth together has deepened my existing friendships has been one of the best things of all. Just as pregnancy and birth have been transformative in my life, they’ve been transformative in my friends’ lives too, in so many beautiful ways. I have learned so much from my friends who are parents, and the conversations we have together feel so rich with new layers of experience and meaning to connect all sorts of things. Pregnancy and birth are things we experience in the isolation of our own bodies and lives, but we are not alone in them. We have so much to share with each other.

Building tolerance for uncertainty.

Much like the very high stakes of pregnancy, there is so little way to know what is going on for so much of the time. Likewise, there is no way to know what will happen until it happens. This is how all of life is, but pregnancy blows this feeling up to huge proportions. It’s so wild early in pregnancy to have an ultrasound or even to have your provider put the doppler on your belly so you can hear the baby’s heartbeat — affirming that there really is a baby in there, and they are doing ok! We go through so many of our days just not sure, hoping and praying. Again, I am so grateful for the movement and kicks we get in the second half, little reassurances. That is when the uncertainty about birth starts to build, so at least we can begin to relax a little about our baby, knowing that each kick is like a little “I’m ok!”

I spend so much time talking about birth’s uncertainty with my doula clients. We make birth plans that aren’t plans so much as they are preferences, or, really, dreams. No, there is no certainty. We slowly grow in our tolerance of this uncertainty, but it never really becomes comfortable. This is one of the hardest things about being pregnant. Many wise teachers say that preparing for birth means preparing for “the unexpected,” understanding that you can think about what you want all day long but sometimes what you get is something very different. I have lived this, and I have seen it firsthand in other people’s pregnancies and births, to varying degrees. Sometimes the unexpected is heartbreak. Sometimes the unexpected is joy. Sometimes it’s both mixed together in really surprising ways. But, at least we know that no one spends their pregnancy in full bulletproof certainty. We all are united in our not knowing. It’s what we do with this uncertainty, how we let it perforate us, that makes a difference in the end.

Living with limitations.

To invoke Rilke (as I am wont to do): when you are pregnant, “you must change your life.” Sometimes at the very earliest stages of pregnancy, before many symptoms have hit, we engage in some wishful thinking — things won’t really have to change for me, will they? Sorry friend, they will. I’ve done this twice already, and still I was so startled by how life-altering pregnancy has been this time. It’s a familiar feeling, one I guess I had shoved toward the back of my mind. Much like coping with intensity, I am having to learn to live with and around new limitations. 8:30 pm bedtime? Ok, I need to get everything done in fewer hours then I guess. Crazy food aversions? Ok, I need to figure out what the heck I can eat and then locate and eat it before the aversion shifts. All-day nausea? I need to keep the unisom and b6 stocked, carry my little emotional support barf bag around, cancel plans, and chew multi-packs of mint gum. And that was all just in the first trimester. None of these things on their own take up too much space in my life, but all together they’ve amounted to new patterns, choices, and rhythms in my days. The limitations throughout pregnancy shift and change, which requires even more changes to how life flows. Even going to so many midwife appointments is not a simple feat!

Then, there’s the huge looming black hole in the future of “life with our new baby.” I don’t dare plan anything past September right now, knowing that our entire life will be reshuffled like a pack of cards when this baby crash lands into our life. That is a wild limitation to live with, exciting but severe. I’ve declined needed work contracts, I’ve cancelled plans, I’ve cleared my calendar for most of the second half of the year. A baby is a glittering limitation, aren’t they? And what a gift that is.

We can do hard things.

Yesterday, I was sitting with my five year old at the doctor’s office where he was terrified about getting his very sore throat swabbed for Strep A. (Spoiler alert, it was positive.) He couldn’t stop crying, but I saw him visibly begin to pull it together when I quietly reminded him, “Hey, I know you to be a really brave kid. This is hard but you can do hard things, I know you can.” He worked a little while longer to calm himself down, then he finally did the swab and it really sucked but he was proud of himself. This “we can do hard things” phrase feels a little trite by now, but it still comes to mind all the time. Life is full of hard things. It is hard and getting harder for pretty much all of us right now. I really wish it could get easier, even just a little bit. I wish we all didn’t have to do so many hard things all the freaking time. But, we do. We just really do.

Pregnancy and birth are no different — in fact, they just raise the hard all the higher on top of everything else. But something that moving through pregnancy and birth myself, and especially walking through it with others, has continuously taught me, is that we are so strong and brave. Not once have I ever seen someone lay down give up instead of pull the strength from somewhere and keep going. Of course there are moments of defeat, times when we reach the ends of ourselves, true experiences of not knowing how to go on — but there is almost always life beyond those places too. Pregnancy and birth sometimes push us past all our boundaries, beyond hard even into “impossible.” At births, I see every woman in transition crash into this wall, and then I see them break through it, somehow. As a doula, I just sat with a woman in the midst of the kinds of impossible I hope to never live and that she hoped to never live too. I still don’t know how she did all those extremely hard things. But she did. She’s on the other side of it now slowly recovering, which also will continue to be very, very hard. I am amazed by her.

I was really scared when I saw the positive pregnancy test this time around, I won’t lie about that. I felt my stomach drop, because I have done this twice before and I know how it is and will be. A big part of me didn’t want to do it. But a bigger part of me did, because I know I can, and I know that so much good will come of it. In all my doubt, I just kept telling myself, “I can do this.” Over and over again. I’m starting to believe it. We don’t want to do hard things, but we can do hard things. And if pregnancy and birth can teach us anything, it is that. We can. We can do this. I can do this! I can! It’s hard, and it sucks, and it’s beautiful, and I’m so, so, proud of us.

Want to read some of my favorite pregnancy / birth books? Here are the ones I recommend to all of my doula clients!

Not much scares me more than artificial intelligence right now, and this essay was written 100% by me (beyond spell check). I do use em-dashes a lot, but I always have. Sigh. I hate to even have to be clear about that, but it’s the water we’re swimming in now I guess and I’m proud to be a person who writes. You can pry my mind from my cold dead hands! I won’t say this every time I publish an essay, but I had the thought that because this essay is more “list-y” than most, it might sound more like ai? Idk, it’s a weird world out there right now.

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