Fear and not-fear

I am 16 weeks pregnant today. That makes me so happy. I am so far along! This feels so very pregnant! I struggle with feeling like an imposter in a lot of areas of my life, but especially pregnancy. I remember saying to the midwife right after we heard pregnancy #1 didn't have a heartbeat something like, I feel so stupid, like I don't belong here. Like I came in acting like a pregnant woman but really, I'm not like all the others. The midwife was like oh no of course not. I wish she'd stayed and talked to me for much much longer, and had been there for my follow up appointment. I wish I'd heard more, you really were pregnant. This happens. It's particularly cruel. You couldn't have known. With this current pregnancy #3, I am finally feeling like 16 weeks is "legitimately" pregnant, it doesn't sound like I'm going around foolishly believing that I'm pregnant and telling people too early (I would NEVER judge anyone else as harshly as I judge myself). I've even felt like an imposter in the pregnancy loss community. I've had two miscarriages, but not 3. And I feel ashamed that I sought a support group when my losses were so early, even though no one there has ever belittled my losses. And why would I be ashamed of being spared the intensified suffering of an even later loss? A few weeks ago the pregnancy loss group held a tulip planting ceremony. I feel ashamed (sense a pattern?) that I didn't go. I didn't go for lots of reasons--scheduling conflicts, the way I don't really think of my losses as having severed a connection with a particular child, but rather a moment of cruel suffering and dashed hopes that I endured; the fact that ceremonies like this drive home for me the ways recurrent miscarriage feels different for me than the experience of later term loss; the feeling of hopefulness about this pregnancy that I've had lately since I've never experienced this trimester before, and so my thoughts have been on other things than my miscarriage grief, and I didn't want to turn them back. I feel guilty for feeling hopeful. I feel guilty for not feeling afraid. Am I just avoiding my fear? Is it growing somewhere undetected, ready to turn somehow malignant? Or do I really just not feel much? If I don't, am I like the ignorant, insensitive people not living on Planet My Baby Died that we used to talk about in the pregnancy loss group, and direct our anger toward?

Or maybe I don't feel much fear because unlike women who've experienced later losses, I am hitting milestones like 16 weeks for the first time; growing a bump for the first time; making concrete parenting plans for the first time, and maybe good fortune doesn't mean I'm ignorant or insensitive. I was raised on a steady diet of guilt and shame. It makes sense that my default setting would be to feel that again the moment I feel hopeful and good. 

My therapist said that I have to really feel that I deserved the kind of love that I want to give my child, because every child deserves that, in order to be able to really fully give it to my child. I see this kind of double standard everywhere around me and it makes me mad: people who excuse and tolerate the pain of things their parents did to them, not really mourning it or giving themselves the compassion of healing from it, when they themselves would never in a million years treat another person that way. I'm talking about emotional, physical, and sexual abuse here, not small slights. Like there's one standard for what's an acceptable way to treat me, and then there's another for everybody else. Yet actually believing that about myself--that I deserved what every child deserves, what my child deserves--seems nearly impossible. And trying is very painful. But I see why I have to do it. I think about telling my child every year on its birthday--"and then they put you on my chest and I talked to you so you'd hear my voice to comfort you, because I knew you'd been through something hard," and hugging her or him and saying I love you so so much. And the instant I think of that incredibly longed-for dream, which itself makes me tear up with emotion, I feel an enormous pang of pain, knowing my mother never did anything of the kind. Knowing that she could barely remember the difference between the day of my birth and that of her other children; that the first memory she has of my life is one of resentment at my horrible father; that she said I was born at a "crabby time," that just a few years ago she dropped some birthday gesture off on my porch and didn't even bother to knock to say hello, even though all the lights were on and we were clearly home. I can barely comprehend the pain of truly facing that when all is said and done I just wasn't that special to my mom, that despite all the words she could say now in response to that statement, her actions have always spoken louder. I will never, ever, ever know how my child will feel when I tell it its birth story with love, when I cuddle my child and say I love you so much, I have loved you long before you were ever born, and I have quilts I sewed for you in 2013 to prove it. And trust me that hurts like a bitch. That fucking hurts. And that's why people like me tell ourselves that "it's different" for us versus our children in millions of subtle ways; that we keep going back and trying to please people who betrayed us and silenced us and put us down, when we would never in a million years want our children to spend that energy on someone who hurt them, we'd rather they grieve for the loss of what that person won't be to them and focus on giving ourselves the love we need, and assembling only people around us who will do the same.

So that's what I've been focusing on, now that the panic from my own miscarriage traumas has subsided. I want to love my baby and heal my damn self. I recently discovered postpartum doulas. I literally made a list of wishes for what I'd ideally like help with after the birth, and then I learned that there are actually women who do all of these things for a fee, and give you all that emotional validation to boot. I felt elated. One of the sites even said, "your mother, without all the strings attached." Doulas mother the mother. That made me cry. I told an acquaintance that I know I'll be sad postpartum because my mother won't be involved, and she was like, isn't she in town? And I lament how rare it is to find a person who doesn't automatically assume a mother is a good thing. Even years ago when I was still playing the denial game, I wouldn't have wanted her "help," I don't feel comfortable around her. And yeah, she could wash dishes and do laundry, but I'd have to beg for it, and I'd have to face how I know she favors my brothers' kids (because daughters are assumed to always take care of themselves), and how she would be near me without being attentive or affectionate or interested in getting to know me as a person, and it would have caused emotional turmoil. Post-denial, it's impossible. How could she carry me in her body and then not lift a finger to protect me from my horribly abusive father? The more pregnant I get the sadder I am about my relationship with her and horrified that she could have treated me in a way I would never treat my child. 

See how I keep just assuming that this will be one day a child? I feel guilty about that, too. I know that there really is a very high likelihood that it will be, safely. I also know it's not for certain, but I have the luxury of not having experienced the opposite, and the lack of that particular trauma makes it easier to say that. Just like my child will hopefully go through life with the luxury of believing that s/he doesn't have to feel ashamed without a reason; that caregivers are generally trustworthy; that mothers are usually good to have around.

I get annoyed at how condescending much of the pregnancy info is, so cutesy and lame, like I'm an idiot. I'm not an idiot. This pregnancy brings up big, complex emotions. It does for many women, for many particular reasons. All that processing gets ignored in favor of "your baby is an avocado!"

One last thing. Cleaning out the closet that will hopefully be the baby's closet, I found a bag, thrown in haphazardly. Inside I found a stuffed Paddington Bear, I'd bought suddenly but after much anguish, on a trip to London, just after miscarriage #1, and right after I'd gotten my period after our first cycle of trying again. I thought about the pain of the miscarriages for the first time in a long time. That was such a brutally horrible time in my life. Really, getting my period that first time after trying with the OPK post-MC was almost worse than the miscarriage itself. I learned that I wasn't "owed" anything, that no rainbow was going to be shining its healing light anytime soon. I remember vividly sitting in the bath in London, and suddenly breaking out into sobs. Wails. "I want my baby! I want my baby!" I was supposed to be shopping for baby clothes on our trip. I was supposed to be nearly showing. Instead I ran out into the streets and wandered at night, wishing I could throw myself in front of a bus. I couldn't have a loving mother, and I couldn't be one, either. I was cut out from one of the most basic human relationships, in any form. I made it back that night to a worried MFP. I remember that. But I had completely blocked out that I had bought the Paddington until I found it again in a moment of forced hope for this new pregnancy. I don't feel too much fear these days anymore that the baby is/will be dead, but that doesn't mean it's easy to actively hope--to get myself to do things "as if" the baby is coming, like really clean out a closet, or, like I did today, force myself to buy a book I was holding that I really want to read to my child. I looked at his little red galoshes and toggle coat and I was astounded that even in that moment of despair, that time I remember as being one of utter hopelessness and misery when it comes to thoughts of being a mother, I took that leap of faith. That I winced and ran back after first dismissing the idea, and bought it anyway. Because I wanted this pregnancy, the one I'm having right now, the healthy one, the one that just hit sixteen weeks, the one that I told work about to schedule my leave, the one that led to the loaned pregnancy pillow I'm sleeping with and the clothes that no longer fit and the new bras and the now pretty much undeniable little bump, I wanted it so much that I was willing to commit an act of defiance of that despair. I cried, really hard, when I found that bear. For myself, having to go through that horrible time, but mostly, because I could hardly believe that bear was now, soon, if I keep doing some cleaning and reorganizing, going to decorate that deeply longed-for baby's room. This is really happening. At last.