I Almost Didn't Tell You I Was Pregnant

You don't see the part where I'm on the floor with a syringe. You don't see the part where I miss the window. You don't see the part where I have to ask a Navy SEAL to please just hold me because I cannot do it by myself. You only see the part where I post a video about how to build a business. So this is for all the mothers who had to go through difficulty, all those still trying, and all those who it never worked out for. I see you.

So here’s the story.

I’m 14 weeks pregnant. My husband and I are having a baby, and we’re thrilled.

I want to say that out loud because I’ve spent years unable to.

If you’ve spent years not being able to say something, anything, you know what comes next in the body before it happens. The tightening of the chest. The reach for the phone you shouldn’t be reaching for. The moment you almost tell the cashier at the grocery store, of all people, because she doesn’t know you, and you don’t have to perform for her.

It’s not just about me though. It’s about us.

My husband is a former Navy SEAL and the most capable man I know. He follows through on what he says, he doesn’t forget anything, and he fixes the things that break in our house and most of the things that break in our company.

He fixes things for a living.

He fixes things on principle.

For years, I’ve had to tell him, over and over, that there was nothing he could fix.

The thing was inside my body, and the doctors didn’t know yet whether it would work.

There was no door he could break down, no plane he could call, no plan he could write that would solve a hormonal cycle that didn’t care about who he was.

He had to sit on the edge of the bed and watch.

It was damn hard on him too.

One night, I had to look at him and say, “Chris, I am not handling this well...”

If you’re like me, you already know what that sentence cost.

I don’t say things like that to people. I’ve built an entire adult life on not saying things like that.

But I said it.

I said it with tears in my eyes because there was no other option.

Crying was cheap.

Asking felt expensive.

I don’t know if there is a harder sentence in English than, "I can’t do this by myself."

If you’ve said it, you know. If you haven’t said it yet, you will. And it will cost you whatever it costs you to be the kind of person who never says it.

He sat there and listened to me say it.

In the meantime, my body stopped being mine.

I was, as I term it “fluffy.” I was bruised. The injection sites on my stomach made a small, scarred constellation that nobody else got to see except for Chris, the doctor, and me.

I had stopped caring what I looked like in any of the ways a woman is supposed to care, because my body was a project, and the project had a deadline.

The deadline was: become a mother before whatever piece of grief that lives in your blood comes for this baby too.

After staying silent for so long, I’m ready to talk about it.

My mother had several miscarriages.

I won’t put numbers on her grief because they’re hers. But I will tell you that I grew up knowing the word miscarriage the way other children grow up knowing the word garage.

It was a household word.

Now, I’ve even had one of my own.

And before my baby, before my brother, and after me… there was Kristin.

Kristin was my sister.

She made it all the way.

My mother carried her to term, she was born, and she was alive. She came out, but she never left the hospital.

She didn’t stay with us. She lived a month. Maybe two.

Her heart had reversed valves.

I remember my father telling me about driving home from the hospital that cloudy day without his baby girl. He and my mother were alone in the car when the song, “My Love’s Leaving,” by Stevie Winwood came on.

“Can I cope with today?

My love is leavin' me

Still I'm hoping she'll stay

My love is leavin' me”

That song hangs heavy in our family, and my father has told me that story exactly twice.

I don’t need it told a third time.

I do, however, think about that drive more than I think about many things.

Every year on Kristin's birthday I think about the tiny grave and the baby whose heart was too small, and I do the math of how old she would be now if she had stayed.

That is, weirdly, what I have been carrying all the years I’ve been trying to have a baby.

If you’ve carried something like it, a sibling, a child, a pregnancy that ended on a bathroom floor, a name in a small graveyard with a date too close to itself, then you already know that what I’m describing isn’t in the past.

It’s in the room.

It’s sitting on the bed during the test.

It’s in the car on the way to the appointment.

It’s the question every shot in the stomach is asking.

Will this one stay? Please.

That was the question my mother asked however many times.

It was the question my father had to put down on a highway with Stevie Winwood on the radio.

It’s the question I’m still asking, at 16 weeks, in the privacy of my own car, on the way to my own appointments, when the song comes on.

So I guess while I am THRILLED… I’m putting this part on the page because nobody else does.

The world watches a woman like me and decides when she’s pregnant, she just gets lucky, and when she doesn’t she’s just too busy.

Then the comments come.

They always do.

People who don’t know you, typing into a phone that, “none of this matters unless you are a mother, and you should spend more time being a mom than doing this, and you never prioritized family." F*ck you.

Want to know what I was doing the exact moment a stranger was typing that comment to me?

I was on a kitchen floor in a different time zone, doing math with a syringe.

So…

You’ve been trying.

I’d been trying too.

I’d been trying my hardest for years.

If you’re reading this, and you’ve ever been told you should be doing more of the thing you were already, secretly, breaking yourself trying to do, please hear me when I tell you:

You’re not lazy.

You’re not too late.

You’re not failing.

You’re doing math with a syringe.

Most people will never know that feeling.

For me, the answer was prayer.

I prayed.

I hadn’t, until these past three years, ever had one thing I needed badly enough to beg something larger than me for.

And I begged.

I begged in cars, in bathrooms, and at airports.

I begged in clinics with the paper sheet crinkling under me, and I begged while another woman in another room was getting the news I so desperately wanted.

I pleaded when I had nothing left to give.

I think God gave us this baby. I don’t know what else to call it. The other words I’ve tried just don’t fit.

And yet, I am also very afraid.

I’m 16 weeks in, and I’ve been around enough grief in this life to know that 16 weeks is not the finish line.

Kristin's heart was too small at term.

I’ve lost a pregnancy too.

My mother carried her grief.

And so do I.

I’m not going to pretend I’m not still scared, because pretending is the part of this story I’m tired of, and the part that almost made me not tell you any of it.

If you’re reading this and you’re scared too, you’re allowed.

You’re allowed to be happy and afraid in the same hour, you’re allowed to want this baby and not yet believe in this baby, and you’re allowed to thank God and refresh the doctor's portal in the same minute.

So. We’re having a baby.

I am terrified.

I am grateful.

And if you’re reading this in the parking lot at the clinic,

I see you.

If you’re reading this with the leftover medication in the drawer,

I see you.

If you’re like me, someone who hasn’t been able to ask her husband for what she needs, I’ve been you for years, and I’m telling you now, he will sit on the edge of the bed and listen.

They do not break the way you’re afraid they will break.

You can ask. You’re allowed.

If you have a Kristin, I’m sorry. I think about her so very often, and I never met her. I’ll think about yours.

If the comments in your life are louder than the truth in your body please stop listening to them.

The body knows.

Other people don’t.

I’m going to go take care of this baby, and I’m so damn excited to meet him or her.

If the baby stays, you’ll be the first to meet them.

If the baby doesn’t stay, I’ll tell you that too.

This is the contract I’m making with you, because the silence is what nearly broke me.

And I will not do it that way anymore.

— Codie Sanchez

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