Journey into the Disconnected Mind of a Pregnant Woman

Lately I have been either too exhausted or too paralyzed by thoughts of babies and motherhood tumbling around in my head in no rational or coherent order to do much of anything. When I don’t do anything, when I’m not accomplishing anything, when I don’t have a project to work on, I get depressed. And when I’m depressed and exhausted, it’s damn near impossible to pull myself out of my funk. So I’ve been reduced to a queasy, tired, hormonal lump of expanding flesh in sweatpants watching episode after episode of Babylon 5, or sometimes HGTV. It isn’t pretty. Some might say that baking a baby is my “project” these days, but that’s a load of crap. I want something that exercises my brain, something that’s tangible now, something that hasn’t been done by billions of women for eons.

In my darkest moments, I wonder if this is to be my life. If I can’t find the energy or the intellectual coherence to do anything now, how am I going to be able to do anything once I actually, you know, have a baby? I hear they’re pretty demanding, and you don’t even get any say in what model you get. You just pays your money and takes your chances, which seems like kind of a lousy way to go about the whole thing, if you ask me. Once upon a time I had hobbies, goals, ambition. I was a grad student at a pretty prestigious private university. I blogged somewhat regularly and occasionally wrote something worth reading. I read books that didn’t have the words, “Lamaze,” “birth partner,” or “pregnancy,” in the titles. I was quickly proving myself at work and moving up the corporate ladder (yet without embracing corporate life or becoming a soulless human being). Husband and I shared great travels and had plans for more: maybe Egypt or India would be next. I was socially conscious, fiscally conservative, and environmentally friendly. I had plans to become a basement jazz and blues saxophonist, get myself published, and hone my skills as a photographer.

And now … well now I’m going to have a baby. And that’s nice and all, and I’m sure it’ll be fulfilling and joyful sometimes, but I can’t help but whine what about meeeee?

I want to call my mom almost every day (down from wanting to ring her every hour), but I don’t because I know I have nothing new to say to her (attributed to the aforementioned lack of doing anything). But it’s like if I’m talking to her and she’s doling out advice then she’s still The Mom and I don’t have to be. But if I’m still counting on my mom to kiss my scrapes and tell me that she loves me, how can I be Mom to someone else? This kid is going all-in betting that I and my husband will be adequate parents, and sometimes I want to tell him to save a few chips in case he loses this hand. It might not be a bad idea to have a backup plan. I may, like Big Nutbrown Hare, come to love you all the way to the moon and back, but love doesn’t do the heavy lifting. And don’t you forget that when you’re a little older and you start to fall in love: you can love someone to death, but there’s a lot of work involved, too, and you both have to be willing to do the heavy lifting.

Oh, God, someone is going to break my baby’s heart someday, and then I am going to have to kill that person.

Sometimes I wonder if my marriage is strong enough to handle the responsibilities, selflessness, boredom, struggles, and fears that go into raising children. It is as if I am, at this moment, growing one of the biggest tests my marriage will ever have to endure. Who does that voluntarily? Who says, “You know, honey, I don’t think we’re challenging each other enough. I think we should see if we really meant those vows we said. Let’s see what this marriage is really made of. Let’s earn our happiness.” You can’t tell me that happiness is better if it’s earned because that’s garbage and I won’t believe you.

A couple of weeks ago my husband was at work and got a call from Howard Community Hospital. He works for Johns Hopkins University, and does a lot of business with hospitals, so this wasn’t an unusual call. But as soon as the person on the other end of the line told him he was calling from Howard Community Hospital, my dear husband’s heart stopped as he thought, “Oh, God, something happened to Josie and the baby.” (It doesn’t matter that there are least a dozen hospitals closer to my office than HCH; there is no room for rationality in the minds of expectant parents.) He told this story to his boss who laughed and said, “Welcome to the rest of your life. You will forevermore live in fear of phone calls.”

I am going to imagine this kid’s death, aren’t I? Like it’s not bad enough that I devise horrifying deaths for my husband, parents, and myself, now I have to do it to a baby. What kind of sick bastard do you think I am?

Oh, Jesus, we need to have a will, don’t we? And we have to decide who should raise our child if we die, don’t we? There is obviously no one qualified for that position. How do you make that decision? Something tells me that you do not call people in for interviews, but I think that’s pretty shoddy. We are talking about the job of raising our child, yet we’re supposed to make that decision on the basis of what we think we know about someone, of how we think they’ll be as parents, without asking them any direct questions? Then there’s the problem of what if we actually agree on someone, and feel fairly okay with it, and then they say no, they don’t want to raise our child in the event of our deaths? Awk-ward.

Sometimes I wonder what if I give birth to a serial killer? Those people have moms, you know.

On the other hand, what if I give birth to a Mozart and she lives a tortured life because her brain is not of this world, and she can never be understood by anyone, not even her mother?

Yesterday I bought my child’s first book. It’s called Guess How Much I Love You? and it tells the story of Little Nutbrown Hare trying to show Big Nutbrown Hare how much he/she loves him/her, and Big Nutbrown Hare thwarting all attempts by showing that really Big Nutbrown Hare loves Little Nutbrown Hare even more. It’s not a book I had when I was little, but I chose it over one of my own childhood favorites Are You My Mother? because I already have a copy of that, and I’m still practical even if I am a little irrational and weepy these days. I love this book. I love the story. I love the names of the characters. I love the illustrations. I love that my extensive library now includes a book made out of cardboard.

Well, I suppose it isn’t a part of my library, but I will be the keeper of it for quite some time. And now my library will be the family’s library. I will loan books to my kids, and make recommendations to them, and we will talk about books, and they will see things in books that I never have. This fills me with a happiness I have never known.