On being "a little pregnant"

I know there's an infertility blog called "A Little Pregnant" and it's apt. A few weeks ago an acquaintance (who has a child) made a comment in conversation that used the term in the usual way: "[Such and such] is one of those things you can't be just a little bit. Like you can't be a little pregnant!" Oh, how lucky you are to believe that's true. I have been "a little pregnant" in many different ways. For pregnancy #1, I would have told you I was pregnant all the way up to that 9.5-week silent sonogram. Then I spent a week in this horrible limbo of knowing my hoped-for baby was dead, but waiting for the (excruciatingly painful, by the way) actual miscarriage. So I was pregnant but not. Then, with pregnancy #2, I'd had some spotting, but no period, so when I took the pregnancy test and it was positive, I was like, Yay...I guess? I'm pregnant? And then the oh-so-light spotting trickled for a while as Dr. Keep Trying's nurses just kept telling me not to worry. So I'd think to myself I was pregnant but with a question mark. I'm pregnant? Six weeks or so? I guess? I'm due in July? Supposedly? Then, a week after what I thought was an early miscarriage--bleeding and cramping--I was told to take a pregnancy test at home to make sure my levels were down. By the way: what an assholic thing to do to a woman with a miscarriage! Make her take a pregnancy test at home! So I did, and whaddya know, the longed-for positive, except not longed-for at all. I threw it across the room. I was kinda pregnant. Technically pregnant, but not actually going to have a baby. So then began the months of weekly blood draws: the levels went up; I had to have an emergency D&C; I waited a month after that to finally have indiscernible levels of HCG, the pregnancy hormone, in my bloodstream. I figured I was technically pregnant for half of 2014. My poor, weight-gaining body.

Which brings me to today. In yoga, the instructor said to push on our abdominal psoas muscles "unless you're pregnant." Well...I doubt one day post-positive-test means I'm pregnant, but yeah, technically I am. Being out of town, I don't get some kind of reassuring doctor response, blood test results in hand, saying, "everything is going okay." How cool that would have been to have gotten to go in the *day* of the positive test for that. Maybe I'll find out on Monday this is all over. Will I regret having let myself be happy for five days? I don't know; I don't care. I'm happy now. Still no spotting. I'm not taking my temps or taking another home test. I'm putting this one in Dr. Special's office's hands. I told MFP, it would be easier if the news I was waiting on wasn't inside my own body. Like we were waiting to get a call on Monday letting us know everything is okay; and maybe at some point we'd get a call saying it wasn't. But the news is right here. Only it works a similar way. I really just don't know. I know that I'm pregnant, but I don't know if I'm going to have a baby. I won't say I'll know that until it is in my arms, squirming and screaming. My child's life begins as a mystery to me. I suppose in many ways it will always be a mystery to me, if it lives. No matter how close we are, how bound up with one another. I am not all-knowing, I am not in control. This little life has got its own trajectory. Help or hinder, that's all I can do.

I will tell you though, that I would love to have a baby. The plus sign yesterday allowed me to indulge in a few seconds of hope. MFP as a dad. I think about diaper tables for some reason. Maybe next summer, a baby pool...that's it. I won't go so far as to think about the calendar. Right now I'm on the hopeful side of "a little pregnant," not the trying-to-get-unpregnant side, and I'm grateful for that.

In a larger way, I think this is a big part of what's wrong with the way people talk about reproductive justice, the idea that you can't be "a little pregnant." That's fundamentally wrong, just not scientific. Just ask Dr. Special. There are all kinds of ways to be "a little pregnant." Human life starts out all bound up with other life, we don't start out as separate. We actually don't become separate people for a long, long time. I am my baby, my baby is me, right now. It's also a little MFP. It's a life-threatening medical condition. I think if we respected the realities of this whole, incredibly complicated process more, legislators and others wouldn't constantly be attacking women for navigating it. I've said it before, being "a little pregnant" for so much of last year, and now again, has only confirmed and emboldened my commitment to reproductive rights. This stage is bewildering and scary; it is utterly unjust to put roadblocks up that force a woman to go through it when she doesn't want to. I respect parenthood too much for that. I respect parenthood enough to plan it, to choose it deliberately. In good time: B'Sha'ah Tovah.