Things Strangers Do to Pregnant Women

23 Weeks, 4 Days
Mega-Mango
I have become a magnet for unwanted hands. I'm not sure where it is written in the societal norms protocol, that women who are pregnant should be touched by random strangers. It's as if we have forfeited our right to personal external space when we choose to share our internal space with a growing fetus. I have thought of some creative solutions to combat the unwanted touching. They include:

• Touching them back. Nothing says "awkward" like having your own belly rubbed by a pregnant woman, after you've rubbed hers without asking.
• Acting as if their touch is like acid. "OH! It burns! It BURNS! Why would you do that?" Commence the "what a world" speech of the Wicked Witch of the West from the 1939 classic, The Wizard of Oz.
• Slapping their hands. This is obviously the more aggressive response. It's important to say, "No!" in a firm voice, much in the way you might say to a puppy that has just micturated on your rug.
• Act like it turns you on. Only the bravest of souls can pull this one off. Maybe purr a little. Say, "Ooooh, don't stop. I like it."
• Go on a rant. Like, at least 25 minutes long. It must include several references to the dystopian world we must live in, where women's bodies are not their own as CLEARLY evidenced by a stranger's willingness to just spontaneously caress the abdomen of a woman completely without solicitation. Make sure it's loud. And public. Maybe stand on an actual soap box, if you can find one that isn't made of cardboard.

Of course, there are always the things that people say. Very inappropriate things. It's hard because, on the one hand, nobody wants to insult someone by asking if they are pregnant and risking the possibility that they aren't. However, it's a very different insult when people act surprised that you are pregnant. When you are so. Obviously. Showing. Sometimes, however, people are gutsy and ask away. Other people just play games.

• "Oh, I didn't know you were pregnant." This is a total cop-out. They were just afraid to ask if you were and waited until they could "overhear" you telling someone else your due-date.
• "So, ARE you pregnant?" No, I just let myself go. Of course I am! I can't fault people for asking, but sometimes the tone or the way in which they ask just reeks of incredulity. I think maybe they are hoping I would say that I was just overweight and confirm their initial thoughts. Oh, you mean you're pregnant, not just fat? I see. Well, guess I owe Jim-Bob some money.
• "Gosh, how many are IN there?" The implication here is that I am huge. Well, 3rd kid and a belly that has been there before. What do you want? Elasticity isn't permanent. How many times can you stretch a rubber band before it's just like, "Yeah, we're not going to go back to that 'new rubber band' smallness."
• "Oh, you're only 23 weeks?" Yet another implication of hugeness. To be fair, my midwife says I'm doing a bang-up job in controlling my weight gain. Also, to be fair, this one is riding deep. He likes to hang out around my spine. So I'm not that big. Really and truly. Nevertheless, the latter part of the previous point still applies: 3rd kid, well-rehearsed belly.
• "Gross, you have stretch marks already?" Well, these are old ones, from my second pregnancy. I miraculously made it through the first without any, but the beast that came next made his mark. It's still a little early for new stretch marks. And you know what? Stop looking at my belly. You're creeping me out.
• "When is your due date again?" This is a more covert way of asking why are you STILL pregnant. Most people have a tendency to forget how long a human gestation lasts. They think it should be over about the month after they find out you are pregnant. Of course, there are people who ask another way....
• "You STILL haven't had that baby yet?" Well, no, he's not ripe enough to come out yet. We kind of have to wait until his lungs develop and stuff. Calm down. It's not like you're carrying. Please don't act like my pregnancy is an inconvenience to your life.
• "But you had the perfect family before!" This is a huge insult, basically casting judgment on what type of family is "perfect" and why mine now won't be because we're adding another kid to the mix. If I were concerned about zero-point population replacement, we would have stopped with the two that would replace us. But, we didn't. So.... obviously that was not heavily weighed in our decision to grow our family.
• "I can't believe you would go through that again." Sometimes this comes from women who have had horrible birth experiences. Birth trauma, perhaps. I understand they can't wrap their minds around it just now. But sometimes, it comes from non-moms (women who haven't given birth, or men who aren't dads and/or who just can't deal with childbirth). So, your hang-ups about this miraculous wonder of pregnancy and birth haven't actually gone through my mind in a decade or so. At one point I was terrified of pregnancy and birth. But oh, the miracle! Oh, the mystery! Oh, the amazing grief and joy and pain and heroic triumph of bringing a new life into the world! There is absolutely no experience like it, and your lack of perspective on it doesn't really make you the authority on how all people feel about it.
• "Now you're going to be outnumbered." Yes, we've considered that. In fact, this one is probably the only thing that actually registers in my brain. My children are so, so smart. One day, they will learn to work together (rather than fight like cats and dogs). When they do, we are in trouble. There will be three of them. Assuming the third is as smart as his siblings, we could potentially have the beginnings of world domination in our offspring. We're just banking on the fact that we are older and wiser and can maybe catch on to their shenanigans before they do anything crazy or irreversible.

Bottom line, people do some crazy stuff around pregnant women. They let their guard down, let their thought filter go on standby, forget that we just don't reach out and touch strangers, and more. Not to mention all the unsolicited advice you get!! That will be saved for another blog. When you're pregnant, there's a lot more to this ride than just the stuff your body is going through. There's all the stuff that people around you are doing that makes it all the more.... interesting.

Crisis Averted....Maybe

My firstborn is not much of the adventurous type. And yet.... last week she took a swan dive off the second-floor balcony of a Dutch-style garage at her grandparents house. She landed ON their driveway.


We aren't exactly sure how it happened. My mother had just brought the kids home from a day of errands and adventures. It was about 4:45, and my dad had just gotten home from work. He was "tasked" to watch the kids as they played outdoors. My son is a sweaty little dude and it was hot, so my dad decided to get them some water. My eldest had just started walking up the exterior stairs when my father told her to "Get down from there" before he headed inside. While inside, he grabbed their water and some stale bread to feed the turtles in the pond beside their house.


He was gone for maybe one minute.


In the span of sixty seconds, my child climbed the stairs, leaned against the railing, broke said railing, and went flying between the top rail and the balcony platform, FOURTEEN FEET to the concrete driveway below.


My father didn't see the fall. He saw my daughter getting herself up off the ground, crying, bloody mouth and nose. My son protested that he saw her fall and was a bit freaked out about the blood. He was given a popsicle and escorted indoors and was henceforth oblivious to all that followed. My daughter carried herself indoors of her own volition. She had wet her pants at some point during this fall or immediately after, and she changed her clothes. All was thought to be well because my dad thought she fell while running on the ground. But she told him, "No, I was up there," and pointed to their garage. Then, he saw the broken railing. Then, she wanted to go to sleep - a sure sign of a concussion. So, after some consultation with nurse-friends and us (the parents), they called 9-1-1.


Paramedics arrived and began doing some cognitive awareness testing. They asked her name, age, birthday, and the like. My daughter turned to my mother and said, "Nana, will you answer their questions so I don't have to?" She was still sassy! She protested when they made her get on the backboard with a neck brace. My dad convinced her it was a princess crown you could wear on your neck. How that logic worked, I'll never know. I guess you have to be six years old to get it.


My mom rode in the ambulance with her. They had to keep her awake because she kept trying to fall asleep. She had a full body CT scan, during which they found no internal bleeding, no brain swelling, no hemorrhage, an no inflammation. They did, however, find a basal skull fracture running from about the top curve of her skull to about the middle of her forehead. The two bones were not misaligned, and there seemed to be no concern that she would be leaking cerebrospinal fluid or have any swelling or bleeding there. You can't even see a bump or scratch there. It's on the inside.


What you could see by day two, were the tell-tale raccoon eyes of a child with a head injury. Both eyes grew black. One swelled shut. She had a couple of scrapes on her cheek and nose. She had a hematoma on her knee, where it obviously had made a big part of the impact. She was kept overnight in the hospital. My mother stayed with her, bless her!


The hard part for me was not rushing to her, not being there for her. My baby girl! There was nothing I could do but be a mom, which would have been more than enough I'm sure. But, I knew she was in good hands and that my being present would take moving heaven and earth. Being military (and since this occurred after business hours), I would have had a nightmare on my hands trying to secure emergency leave and drive the 5 hours (after a full day's work) to my parents' hometown. I would have missed my first day of clinical training at my practicum site. I would have done all of these things in a second, if I had felt I needed to. But I didn't need to.


The second hardest part was controlling my reaction to seeing her in person for the first time after it had happened. My child is not self-conscious in the least. But I didn't want to scare her or make her worried if I reacted poorly to her injuries.


Now, five days after the accident, she is back to her sassy, bossy self. One black eye is cleared up. The other will clear in a few days. The scrape on her nose is gone, and the one on her cheek will hopefully clear up in a couple of weeks. Her knee isn't swollen, and the bruising is almost gone. No other broken bones, no spinal injury, no permanent (we think) repercussions of her concussion.


She starts first grade tomorrow. We will take her out after a half-day, to have a follow-up appointment. I think the hardest part of all will be telling an active six-year-old that she can't run and jump on the playground at recess, that her feet must be on the ground at all times, that she cannot go back to Taekwondo for three months, and that she can't wrestle with her brother. I mean, we do tell her that last thing, but it hasn't worked yet. How does one keep a bird on the ground?


The thing we have learned is that it only takes a minute for something bad to happen. The consequences of one brief action could be long-term - and that is the lesson I hope our daughter learns from all of this. That, and, when Papa tells you to get down, GET DOWN!

Healing Ain't Easy

There are no shortage of people in the world who aim to be helpful when others are grieving. Sometimes, people's way of being helpful is to give you space. Sometimes, they want to give you copious amounts of baked goods. Others want to dispense with advice. While well-intended, the advice-givers tend to be the ones that, despite their best efforts to be helpful, just aren't.

Advice and "tidbits" that either I or my husband have been given since our loss:

• "You'll get over it soon." Let's break that sentence down. On the surface, it seems pretty benign. But let's put the lens of grief on and take a second look. The phrase, "you'll get over it" is a brush-off, disregarding how painful and difficult it is (or maybe even impossible it is) for a person, in that moment of grief, to be able to see the other side of the mountain. And "soon" is relative, friends.
• "You can always have another one." This isn't like a car I really liked and just need to get a new one. This isn't even a favored pet that just died. This was a child. My child. And along with the hopes and dreams that go along with a pregnancy, all of those things died with him or her.
• "Did you know if it was a boy or girl?" I don't hate this entirely. Asking questions are better than assuming one knows everything ever and tries to share this amazing knowledge. But I am not at a place where I can consider the possibilities of a son or daughter that I will never know. The development stopped well before any sex organs would have been visible. So, in addition to not knowing the sex of my child, I have the pleasurable agony of adding to that thought that I will never know.
• "Have you thought about adopting?" Yes, we have. In fact, we'd considered doing that instead of/in addition to/before/after/whatever having a third biological child. We made a choice to expand our family biologically one more time (or whatever, maybe two more times). It doesn't mean we can't adopt. It doesn't mean we don't want to. But now isn't the time for me to prepare the mountain of documentation for an adoption. I'm just trying to get my taxes done for now, thanks.
• "Oh, I had a few of those [miscarriages], and I'm okay." First, okay, that really sucks for the individual who said this. Second, having anything bad happen to you once, twice, or seventeen times and surviving doesn't mean that everyone can, should, or will be able to just "be okay" with what happened, just like that.

One thing I am worried about is the gradual disappearance of compassion when I share my story. I'm struggling right now. Struggling to keep my temper in check with my kids, struggling to get all my work done, struggling to meet some milestones, just struggling. And I wonder how long the clock of compassion will tick inside the heads of those around me before they think, "Okay, she should have grieved long enough." How long before the expectations that I am "over it" start to change the way I interact with people who have these expectations? Or the way they interact with me?

How long is the timeline for grieving?

Grief is not finite. I'm learning that there are some days when I wake up and it feels like some kind of surreal dream, where I'm not even really sure if anything happened to me at all. Sometimes, I wake up and feel like the wound is wide open and raw, the pain so real and awful that I want to just scream into my pillow. Sometimes, I do. There will be days like each of these. There will be days when I feel "normal" again. There will be days when I don't think about the baby I wanted to hold. But not right now.

Right now, I block people's Facebook posts who have just announced their pregnancy. And the due date is too close to mine. In my head, I still have a due date. I imagine that when August comes, I will grieve some more. And by then, people will have decided that my deadlines are more important than whatever else is going on. By then, most people will probably think I should be "over it."