Nom de Plume

It’s been a rough week.

Tuesday night, I had really bad cramping, but still not a lot of blood. Wednesday night, I officially miscarried. I had no idea it would be so bad. You read online that a miscarriage usually consists of “cramping worse than your period.” What they don’t say is that you have full-on contractions and that they are probably the worst pain you’ve ever had in your life. So between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., I had contractions that increased in severity and duration, with respites that decreased until they were about a minute apart and I passed the gestational sac and god know what else. I thought it was over, but my cramping all yesterday and all through the night have been almost as bad.

The dreams haven’t helped. Perhaps it’s all the murder mysteries that I’ve been reading, but when I finally fell asleep at 5 in the morning yesterday, I dreamed that I killed someone in the Mafia and was being tortured as a payback. I woke up at the point they were about to gouge my eyes out. This morning, I woke in a cold sweat after having dreamed that my wallet was stolen, and my bank accounts drained and I owed several million dollars. Economic crisis anyone?

I didn’t expect this to be so hard. I thought, when it was first certain that a miscarriage was imminent, that it would happen and I would be sad for a couple of days and that it would be over. Intellectually, one knows that this is for the best–an nonviable fetus, the body’s way of making sure that the kid is healthy, blah blah. I wasn’t prepared that the loss of what is essentially a clump of cells at this point would make me feel so grief-stricken. There runs through all our lives a thread of wanting something, of yearning for something more than we have, of being something more than we are. And in some strange, fundamental way, I think that losing a fetus represents a loss of hope.

My doctor had said that I should think about having some sort of ceremony for closure, whether it’s burying the tissue or writing a letter, or doing something that would be meaningful to me. I didn’t scoff, precisely, but I didn’t think I needed it either. I was wrong. Gross as it sounds, I wish I had saved the tissue to bury, but frankly, at 2, 3, and 4 in the morning, bleary with pain and fatigue, it was the last thing on my mind. So I write this now, not as a bid for sympathy, or a woe-is-me post, but as a public declaration of sorrow. We don’t talk about these things except in clinical terms, even though so many of us go through it. It’s a loss of what might have been, and to you, Steve’s and my what-might-have-been, I say goodbye.

is what happens when you’re not knocked up anymore.

Yes, dear reader, I have miscarried. Or rather, I’m still in the process of miscarrying. It seems to be an incredibly drawn out. process for me. I’ve been spotting on and off since Saturday–not much, but enough. My hcg levels are down from 8500 to 100 and something, and my progesterone from 8.2 to 5 based on blood drawn yesterday. This morning, I woke up and just knew–I’ve lost that bloated, pregnant feeling. Actually, I pretty much knew yesterday, but didn’t really want to admit it.

It’s hard. On the one hand, there’s really nothing you can do about it–and if the fetus isn’t viable, it’s not viable. On the other, I was getting excited. It was finally starting to seem real. And perhaps this sounds silly, but what upsets me more than anything right now (in my admittedly still hormonal stage) is that I have the incredible fatigue of the past month and a half ahead of me. Well, that and the fact that in a strange way I feel lonely–not in the sense of lacking support or people around me, but that there was this other life in me and now it’s gone. It’s just me, and after the past two months, just me feels weird.

Still, we’ll go for it again. One out of three pregnancies ends this way according to my doctor–who, by the way, is a complete love and went well out of her way this morning to make sure that I was doing okay emotionally and to reassure me that there’s no reason to think that another pregnancy won’t be completely normal.

So there we are.

Does this woman have any clue what she’s talking about?

But this is AWESOME.

None of this has seemed quite real to Steve because I didn’t have the doctor’s word that I’m pregnant–but I went in last Thursday, and it’s now official. I am about 8 weeks, not 10; the online calculators count from the date of your last period rather than the date of conception. The only worrying thing is that my progesterone levels are low. Progesterone is the hormone that makes you “stay” pregnant, and normal levels for the first trimester range widely from 9 to 45, with many saying that 10 is the minimum level you should have at this stage. I’m at 7.8. We all know that I worry, and as low progesterone levels can result in miscarriage (or signal an ectopic pregnancy), I’m fretting. Google searches don’t help either. I am to pick up a prescription for progesterone pills today from the pharmacy.

Dear Friends:

We may have thought we wanted a woman on a national political ticket, but the joke has really been on us, hasn’t it? Are you as sick in your stomach as I am at the thought of Sarah Palin as Vice President of the United States?

Since Palin gave her speech accepting the Republican nomination for the Vice Presidency, Barack Obama’s campaign has raised over $10 million dollars. Some of you may already be supporting the Obama campaign financially; others of you may still be a little honked off over the primaries. None of you, however, can be happy with Palin’s selection, especially on her positions on women’s issues. So, if you feel you can’t support the Obama campaign financially, may I suggest the following fiendishly brilliant alternative?

Make a donation to Planned Parenthood. In Sarah Palin’s name. And here’s the good part: when you make a donation to PP in her name, they’ll send her a card telling her that the donation has been made in her honor. Here’s the link to the Planned Parenthood website:

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/

You’ll need to fill in the address to let PP know where to send the “in Sarah Palin’s honor” card. I suggest you use the address for the McCain campaign headquarters, which is:

McCain for President
1235 S. Clark Street
1st Floor
Arlington, VA 22202

Feel free to send this along to all your women friends and urge them to do the same.

Relaxing social strictures and therapy are doing wonders for us as a society–but I sometimes wonder if they’re ruining the contemporary novel. I mean, what is there to fight about these days? What provides the tension? Nothing. Instead, the focus turns inward; the protagonist fights against himself (or discovers something, or whatever). And if it’s not really well done, then all the reader (well, this reader anyway) can think is, “God, this person needs a shrink.”

Which is what was running through my head as I read the soap opera-like Free Food for Millionaires, the story of Korean-American Casey (along with her friends), who graduates from Princeton, fights with her family, goes 24k in debt on mainly clothes, takes a secretarial job because she only applied to one investment banking house, goes back to school, takes out massive student loans to go back to business school, gets an internship, works her ass off, and then ends the novel giving up on business school because she “just can’t.” I guess it was supposed to be that hopeful note at the end of the novel speaking of personal redemption through self-discovery. But I found it tragic because it just all seemed so stupid.

And this is the thing. I am down with the tragic heroine. Madame Bovary? I’d have an aperitif with her any day. Lily Bart? She is my PEEP, man. But while Madame B and Lily B do stupid things, we still understand, our hearts rip apart as we read, hoping that this time–finally–things will turn out better. With Casey? I just want to shake her. So is it 1. the writing (I confess, this was a riveting read with Casey and all her friends)?; 2. the fact that I never really LIKE Casey; or 3. that we have completely different expectations from the modern novel? I suspect there’s a little of 2 in there, but perhaps a whole lot of 3. And maybe it’s why I’ve really been into mysteries lately. (Just worked my way through all of Donna Leon and Martha Grimes.)

Particularly one who is ready to use her pregnant teenage daughter as a puck? As a feminist, Sarah Palin’s nomination is an insult.

Oh my gosh, it’s fast. Much faster than IE7. Don’t know about IE8, haven’t downloaded it yet.

Where has this stuff been? I’m not a milk drinker, but oh my god, I can’t get enough of it.

“So,” my mother said with a goofy grin on her face when she learned I was pregnant, “are you and Steve finally going to get married?”

“Probably not,” I said, blithely dashing her hopes to the ground. “There’s really no point.”

She was silent for a moment and then started trotting out various arguments about why we should, most notably that it’s a social contract that people recognize and it’s a good thing to make one’s relationship in the eyes of the world.

I’m not convinced. I mean, growing up as I did with divorced parents and friends with divorced parents, the institution doesn’t really mean all that much. What’s the divorce rate these days? I think that the fact that S and I have been together for seven years means more than a piece of paper.
The fact that we decided to procreatesays a heck of lot more than a trip to City Hall. And when push comes to shove, I don’t think the world gives a darn whether we’re married or not either.

But of course, we’ve talked about it. Should we? Shouldn’t we? Steve says he doesn’t care one way or the other. “Whatever you think best,” he says.

As far as I can tell, there’s not much reason to do it. I have my own health insurance policy. If Steve’s name is on the birth certificate, he’s legally recognized as the father. It doesn’t make one whit of difference tax-wise. There is inheritence and medical next-of-kin stuff, but that can be sorted out easily with wills and powers of attorney. Really, it seems like most of the benefits that marriage confers are the legal protections conferred when one ceases to be married. Which just makes it all seem like a farce.

The other night when I was walking the dog, I listened to a podcast about how the rates of children being born out of wedlock (and if you wonder why I object to marriage, just look at that word) are growing and it’s a problem. Do a google search and you’ll find the same thing. But these are all women with little education, few skills, and virtually no means of economic independence. What about people like us–middle-class equal earners who have just decided not to get shackled? There’s virtually no information about couples like us out there–or at least information I can find. Anyone? Know anything? Just to satisfy my curiosity ….