pregnancy

Wishing everyone a year of true freedom, however you define it!

My own little “Exodus” story of going through divorce and infertility and coming out the other side inspired my dear friend the talented filmmaker Ilana Trachtman (of Praying with Lior fame) to make a little movie as part of the Projecting Freedom Project, sponsored by the Skirball Foundation. For this project, different filmmakers were commissioned to do a cinematic interpretation of a specific aspect of the Hagaddah. Here are Ilana’s, below (starring Marco, Anya, and Teo!)

Rachatza:

Nirtza:

It’s my pleasure to introduce a guest blogger today: Natalie Wilson.

Natalie Wilson is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is founder of the blogs Professor, What If…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is currently working on Seduced by Twilight, a book examining the Twilight cultural phenomenon from a feminist perspective.

The Mommy Myth That Will Not Die: Bella Swan and Global Motherhood

Living inside our media-saturated US bubble, one might view motherhood as a competitive sport (ala Kate and her eight), as a fashion statement (think Katie Holmes and her impeccably dressed little Suri), as a way to prove one’s enduring hotness (such as Heidi Klum’s post-partum walk down the runway), or even as a testament that one cares about the world (in Madonna or Angelina Jolie adoption-style).

If these media representations of motherhood are to be trusted, what Susan Douglas named “the mommy myth,” where women are supposed to be perfect, gorgeous, dedicated super-moms, still dominates the cultural imagination.

Twilight, via the character of Bella Swan, breathes immortal life into this myth. In Breaking Dawn, the fourth book of the series, Bella transforms from reluctant wife into exultant expectant mom all in the blink of one headboard-busting sexual encounter.

The celebration of maternal martyrdom and mothering as the be-all and end-all of female existence that the final book of Stephenie Meyer’s saga enacts is hard to stomach, even for me–a mother of two that loves being a mom.

The problem is that Bella is a modern June Cleaver–too perfect, too submissive, and too ready to defer to her Mr. Cleaver (embodied by uber-dad, Edward Cullen). Once she is a vampire mommy, college plans are set aside, vampire adventures delayed, and instead, she becomes that monster we all love to hate: perfect mom.

Bella could not be more privileged; she is white, heterosexual, has endless wealth, super-powers, and a bevy of around the clock vampire and werewolf babysitters at her beck and call. She will never have to worry about stretching her budget, not being able to afford healthcare for her daughter, not having access to clean water.

While Bella and her similarly perfect vampire mother-in-law Esmee convey that motherhood is nothing but a joy and women who don’t desire babies are cuckoo, the text silences non-white, non-first-world mothers. Why does Native American mother Sue Clearwater have no voice in the story? Why are South-American women represented as fierce, untrustworthy animals? And why is Leah, the one lone female werewolf, called a “genetic dead end” due to her infertility? (This strand of the narrative would have been an opportunity to explore the historical sterilization of indigenous women. No such luck, though. Instead, we only learn she is a complaining bitch, an annoyance to the male alpha wolves who hate having to deal with a female in their testosterone fueled midsts.)

Globally, for many women, getting pregnant is one of the most dangerous things you can do. It makes you more susceptible to procuring diseases, to enduring poverty, to dying. Around the world, one female dies from pregnancy or labor every minute. That’s 1,440 females a day. Most of these women are not located in the first world nor can they choose, like Bella, to become vampires.

Twilight, loved by many mothers around the world, fails to give voice to the realities of global motherhood. To do so may be asking too much of this lightweight vampire tale; but could not the billions in profit the series is generating be used in some way to curtail maternal mortality rates? Seeing as the series suggests all women’s lives are made better by motherhood, perhaps it should put its money where its mouth is, giving more women more access to prenatal care and reproductive justice.

Now, that’s a dream I could sink my teeth into.

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I am pleased to introduce Susan David Bernstein, “Beyond Pink & Blue’s” first guest columnist! Susan teaches literature and gender studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has published widely on contemporary feminist theory and the Victorian novel. She is currently working on a study of women writers and activists in the Reading Room of the British Museum, as well as a memoir titled Unlikely Loves.

Here’s Susan:

I discovered new realms of gender profiling before my child was born in August of 1992. Although the sex chromosomes of this eventual baby were recorded in my OB/GYN file, I was adamant that I did not want to know. “Don’t tell me!” I’d shield my eyes, when a nurse or doctor opened my file at an appointment. At that time, it was increasingly common for people to have this knowledge, and from what I witnessed, prenatal gendering took off with a vengeance. I’d hear comments like, “I know this little guy is going to be a quarterback! What a kicker already!” Baby showers became gendered affairs, and the first outfits for the ride home from the hospital were tooled to match that chromosomal information. I was happy instead to receive an array of baby clothes, some blue, some fuschia, one with a rodeo pattern, another with vegetables in reds, greens, and oranges.

So even back then, it was unusual to answer the “what kind of baby are you having?” question with, “I don’t know.” I had an elaborate birth plan which even included a provision about birthing room announcements: I asked my doctor not to say, “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” but simply, as he did, “Congratulations, you have a healthy baby!” My partner and I even joked about how we’d try not to know those gender-defining genital features of our baby (we’d have someone else do the diapering and bathing for the first month), so that our ingrained notions about gender would be kept at bay. And, we thought, so would those of the world we lived in. Not possible, I discovered, from day one.

I did of course learn I had a daughter within in minutes of her birth, and she was quickly swaddled in a pink blanket. A nurse held out a basket of caps for newborns, all knitted by a women’s league, and I chose a white one with lavender and blue stripes. But later that day my partner and I requested a different blanket, yellow perhaps, or green or white. We learned that the maternity unit only had blue and pink blankets.

This was Madison, Wisconsin, a university town with a history of progressive values; Tammy Baldwin is our congressional representative—the first open lesbian to be elected to the House. Today, in 2009, my daughter is taking a terrific women’s studies class in her high school (the same one Baldwin graduated from); all four public high schools in Madison offer such courses. But in 1992, there were only pink and blue blankets at the hospital. So I asked for a blue one. A nurse entered my room the next morning, glanced at the bassinet, and then asked me cheerily, “And how is your little boy today?” I responded, “I do not have a boy.” The woman peered in the basket, looked a bit alarmed, and hurried out of the room.

Within a few years, the hospital expanded its newborn wardrobe to include prints and other colors. Still, there remain many ways in which the straitjackets of gender identity flourish from before birth through high school. My daughter spent all four years of high school competing on the cross country team where the girls run 4K meets to the boys’ 5K races. And now she’s one of two girls on her high school team of forty wrestlers. She’s also in the gender minority in her advanced chemistry and physics classes. As a family, we’re still learning to navigate the updated variations of pink and blue that we first encountered in 1992.

Impossible Motherhood is a new memoir by Irene Vilar, editor of The Americas series at Texas Tech University Press and a writer who uses the history of her life and the lives of her mother and maternal grandmother to highlight critical relationships between colonialism, sexism, reproductive rights, and motherhood. But this will not be the headline that captures the interest of the public. Vilar’s fifteen abortions in fifteen years, on the other hand, seems to be causing quite a stir of attention.

In many ways, this is a memoir about misery. Throughout the book, Vilar critiques the idea that her success on paper — early graduation from high school and a move from Puerto Rico to the U.S. at the age of fifteen, marriage to a Syracuse University professor, book publishing – has not kept her from suffering with severe issues of depression, abuse, self-mutilation, and addiction. Her marriage to a highly regarded, intellectual writer several decades her senior, who defines “independence” by keeping her forever at an emotional distance from him and insisting that the couple cannot have children together, triggers a downward spiral which culminated in twelve abortions in an eleven year relationship, followed by three others with another partner after the dissolution of her marriage. However, with intense therapy and a happy second marriage, Vilar overcomes her painful ambivalence toward biological motherhood and gives birth to two daughters.

The seemingly happy ending of Vilar’s tale of thwarted motherhood will still raise ethical and moral red flags in readers, causing us to squirm uncomfortably as we embark on the author’s lifelong journey of recovery.  Vilar does not go for pat answers or self-satisfied conclusions about her decision to repeatedly abort unwanted pregnancies rather than utilize birth control (which was available during her time in the U.S.).  Instead, this a complex, emotional account of one woman’s emergence from cycles of oppression into an acceptance of her unique identity and experiences.

Vilar’s unhappy childhood – a distant philandering father and a mother who committed suicide when Vilar was only eight years old – contributes to her feelings of abandonment and a need to please authority figures, if only to ensure her survival. Vilar is not claiming to be a representative for pro-choice or pro-life arguments, though she does offer this disclaimer in the prologue:

“This testimony… does not grapple with the political issues revolving around abortion, nor does it have anything to do with illegal, unsafe abortion, a historical and important concern for generations of women.  Instead, my story is an exploration of family trauma, self-inflicted wounds, compulsive patterns, and the moral clarity and moral confusion guiding my choice.  This story won’t fit neatly into the bumper sticker slogan ‘my body, my choice.’  In order to protect reproductive freedom, many of us pro-choice women usually choose to not talk publicly about experiences such as mine because we might compromise our right to choose.  In opening up the conversation on abortion to the existential experience that it can represent to many, for the sake of greater honesty and a richer language of choice, we run risks.”

Reproductive justice movements, particularly in the U.S. and its territories, often have a tumultuous history with communities of color.  But many readers will likely approach the book with little, if any, background knowledge of reproductive justice movements in Puerto Rico. So how did colonialist policies and a U.S.-driven abortion counseling, abortion services, and abortion outreach contribute to these decisions?  In an interview with The L.A. Times, Robin Abcarian observes that:

“Puerto Rico, at the time, was a living laboratory for American-sponsored birth control research. In 1956, the first birth control pills — 20 times stronger than they are today — were tested on mostly poor Puerto Rican women, who suffered dramatic side effects. Starting in the 1930s, the American government’s fear of overpopulation and poverty on the island led to a program of coerced sterilization. After Vilar’s mother gave birth to one of her brothers, she writes, doctors threatened to withhold care unless she consented to a tubal ligation.  These feelings of powerlessness — born of a colonial past, acted out on a grand scale or an intimate one — are the ties that bind the women of Vilar’s family.“

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How did the pro-choice movement fail to help a survivor of abuse like Vilar?  Is there a theoretical and activist disconnect between three major intersections — martial strife/violence, psychological trauma, and reproductive justice?  Pro-choice communities would do well to examine books like these and form outreach for women who have experienced multiple abortions.  Vilar understands the stigma which confronts women who have had multiple abortions and does not shame these women, but tries to provide a lens of her own experiences with repeat abortions as a way to personalize this sensitive issue.  In a 2006 Salon.com Broadsheet post, Page Rockwell notes that:

Liberal message-makers would probably have an easier time if repeat abortions were rare, but the truth is, they’re not: According to a report (PDF) released last week by the Guttmacher Institute, which we found thanks to a flare from the Kaiser Foundation, about half of the women who terminated pregnancies in 2002 had previously had at least one abortion. (The report notes that because many women do not accurately report their abortion experiences, these findings are “exploratory.”) Rates of repeat abortion have been on the rise since Roe v. Wade, and ignoring that fact isn’t doing women who need multiple procedures any favors.

In the anthology Making Face, Making Soul, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote that, “[W]omen of color strip off the mascaras [masks] others have imposed on us, see through the disguises we hide behind and drop our personas so that we may become subjects in our own discourses.  We rip out the stitches, expose the multi-layered ‘inner faces,’ attempting to confront and oust the internalized oppression embedded in them, and remake anew both inner and outer faces…. We begin to acquire the agency of making our own caras [faces].”  This is one of those books that rips out the metaphoric stitches and exposes Vilar’s process of multilation and healing, addiction and recovery, for readers to examine.  This is not an easy or light book; it will trigger and it will probe and it will leave readers feeling as if they’ve been punched in the stomach, repeatedly.  But it also has the power to transform and expose previously hidden oppressions.

The outer face of Vilar is a brave one and so is the inner face.  Impossible Motherhood is a book for any pro-choice believer who wants a deeper understanding of the complex issues surrounding reproductive rights in the U.S. and its territories in the twentieth century.  This is also a book for people who believe in the power of personal redemption.  It will leave readers aching, hopeful, and perhaps a little more empathetic to Vilar’s life.

One of the things I like most about blogging is that your subject can change as you do. This summer I’ve been blogging pregnancy, and now, with just a few weeks more to go, and to keep up with the changes going on here at GWP, I’m changing the theme to (drum roll) Mama w/Pen. From here on in, keep an eye out for monthly contributions from me on the topic of emergent motherhood, feminist and otherwise, on the first Monday of each month.

And speaking of becoming a mama, I just put an “away” message on my email, in preparation for The Big Event. In the meantime, you’ve not heard much from me this past month because I’ve been either in the hospital or on bedrest, spending much of my time lying on my side (best for babies’ circulation for some reason)—all of which makes it rather difficult to type on anything but an iPhone.

What started as a very cutting edge pregnancy—all those high-tech fertility interventions!—has ended up an anachronism. I now understand, in a very personal way, why pregnancy was once called “confinement,” or “lying in.” Hospitalized for early contractions at 30 weeks, I’ve spent the past 3.5 flat on my side, holed up with Marco, Tula (pictured here), my parents for a little while, and the occasional intrepid visitor from Manhattan and beyond. While Tula thinks bedrest is the cat’s meow, for me, it hasn’t been easy. Never in my life have I felt so limited by my body. I’m a a 21st century woman on a 19th century cure.

There are days when I think, “I can’t believe women, everyday, everywhere, go through this kind of thing, have gone through this, from the beginning of time.” Intelligent design? I think not. There are days when I’m in awe of my sisters who bear pregnancy gracefully, stoically, and without complication. Granted, some pregnancies are easier than others. For me, all attempts at grace and stoicism went out the window with those early contractions, which seem to only intensify as the weeks go by. My knees buckle from the weight of me. I have dark, dark circles under my eyes.

But I’m trying not to complain. Or rather, at least not in public, not out loud. I still can’t believe the technology worked. I’m still in awe that at ages 40 and 48, we’re lucky enough to become first time parents, and that we’re having not just one but two.

So rather than kvetch, which I confess is indeed my inclination right now, I’m trying instead to embrace the absurdity of it all while I bide my time and courageously hope not to give birth for a few weeks more—even though I’m more than ready to be done. Though it’s become increasingly hard to breath, there have been moments of buckling laughter. Like the night Marco wheeled me in a wheelchair with no leg support to the church down the block where Kol Nidre services were being held. Like the other day, when Marco walked me over to stand in front of the full-length mirror. “See? You’re still hot,” he said. “In a funhouse mirror kind of way.”

Funhouse aside, I feel like a character from a Margaret Atwood novel—an incubator and not much else. “Having children is sacrifice,” says Shari, one of the kind nurses I see regularly when I go to the hospital for my twice weekly monitoring appointments to check on the status of my contractions and the babies’ heart rates. “It starts right here, right now.” But what about the incubator? I want to ask, incredulous that becoming a mother has to involve such prolonged discomfort and pain. Instead, I hold my tongue, think of my roommate during my stay at the hospital, who gave birth to twin boys at 26 weeks, and feel immensely grateful to be here, with babies still inside me, at week 34.

If I could think of a topic that travels around the conversations of most women I know, the choice to have a child, and when, often lives pretty near the top of the list.  Following it comes a litany of concerns: how to juggle career, partnerhood, personal and professional ambitions, and more.  Elizabeth Gregory, Director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Houston, as well as Full Professor of English, tackles the topic of timing in Ready: Why Women are Embracing the New Later Motherhood with results that bring relief — both in the sense that there is good news to uncover amid all the swirling anxiety, and relief as the strong, clear reasons why many women choose to delay motherhood stand out against a grey fog of cultural pressure that warns against it.

Over two and a half years, Gregory interviews 113 women of diverse backgrounds (gay and straight as well as single and coupled) and focuses on the choices of women who become first-time mothers at age 35 or older.  Recognizing that “later” motherhood is nothing new, Gregory articulates how the difference is that women are now choosing to have first children, rather than last, at what is labeled “advanced maternal age.”  The choices that spur this change swim the  currents of women’s lives: the advent of birth control, and correspondingly, advances with fertility treatment; access to education and the desire for a career; refusal to marry just to gain a spouse, with instead the desire to wait for a peer relationship; commitment to financial security that eschews dependence on a partner.  The best news is how often the women interviewed express deep contentment with their paths.

Gregory’s statistics are compelling: “One of every 12 babies born to first-time mothers in 2006 was born to a woman 35 or older. In 1970, the figure was one in 100.”  Her research reflects the financial as well as emotional rewards of this choice.  She points out that “among full-time workers between 40 and 45 with professional degrees, those who had their first child at 25 made an average of $46,000, while those who waited until 35 made $79,000. A woman’s average long-term salary increases by 3 percent for each year she delays children.” Her exploration of the politics surrounding labor (during birth and other maternal work) and childcare issues continues on her blog “Domestic Product” and in several thought pieces available online.

Ready rounds a spectrum of reasons why women choose to delay, with many citing better emotional preparedness at later ages, as well as not wanting to rush new relationships, or women’s own enjoyment of their 20s and 30s, alongside the desire to be more financially powerful and advanced in their careers, hence better able to leverage work/family balance.  Women who come later to motherhood are more likely to have higher levels of education, more stable partnerships, and be in “peer marriages,” with active partners who commit equally to childcare. Most cheering is the overall positive sense of choice.

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PEACE.
It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.

In spite of myself (or maybe because of myself, as Marco might say) I’ve somehow made it to the cusp: the third trimester. The home stretch. Music to my ears. I can’t imagine how it’s possible that my body itself will stretch further to make room for these growing babes—2.10 lbs each as this trimester begins, as good as singletons at this stage, huzzah! But I have confidence my body will still expand, even if it continues to choke me out along the way.

Just as I believe my body will continue do its bizarre miraculous thing in spite of what I think or say or do (pu pu pu), I’m slowly starting to have confidence that my intractable mind will stretch to incorporate motherhood, too. I still need some convincing on this front, but things are looking up.

As usual, it’s friends, parents, and spouse who are helping me believe. The other weekend, Daphne, her mother-in-law, my mom, and Marco helped shovel out boxes from the storage room—I mean, babies’ room—to clear space for two new beings. Once I could see the floor in there, I immediately started fantasizing about a rug. A sickeningly sweet baby-style area rug with clouds and moons and stars. “Of all things the babies will need, you’re fixated on a rug?” asks my wonderfully practical friend Rebecca from California. Indeed, I am. It’s the first bit of gear I’ve been able to get excited about, now that I believe these babies are going to be real. This weekend, I picked one out. I ordered it. No small victory here.

The rug makes it real. The fact that at 7.5 months with twins I look ready to pop makes it real. During trimesters 1 and 2, I grew reluctantly accustomed to a sense of the surreal, the unreal, the insane. It’s not a comfortable state of being; I’ve resisted it every step of the way. The reality—two babies growing limbs and organs and fingernails inside me—has been too much to fathom, leaving me barfing with vertigo, body and soul. Working at a start-up this whole time has been a terrific distraction, and while frenetic, in many ways its timing couldn’t have been better. It’s given my mind something all-encompassing to do.

But now it’s time to start putting my feet on the ground, feel the rug beneath me, find a way to steady my head long enough to find a pediatrician and buy a crib.

The rug. The crib. The changing table. The trappings of two babyhoods that have not yet arrived are symbolic, and yet they are more. They are signs of my belief, material affirmations of the unbelievable coming true. Today, Daphne gave me two pairs of booties (pictured above). The babies have hiccups. I believe they are going to make it to reality. And I believe their mother just might too.

(Gratitude to Sarah Saffian for sending me the epigraph to this post.)

For Grandma Marge (may her memory be for a blessing)

Ok, it’s time for me to admit it: I’m getting scared. In less than 10 weeks (knock wood, pu pu pu – sorry can’t help it), my body will somehow, with whatever degree of medical intervention, bear forth two new beings whose well-being will henceforth depend, in very large part, on me. I confess to my husband, my closest friends, and my mother than I’m getting nervous. They offer comfort, try to allay my fears:

“Of course you’re scared. It’s scary.” –Daphne (mother of two)

“You’re focused on the first few weeks. I was too. But three months in, everything changes, and you don’t even remember that blur.” – Rebecca (mother of two)

“Too late now!” – Mom (mother of me)

Gee thanks, Mom.

Again, I must qualify. I feel blessed beyond belief at the bounty of having conceived not just one but two babies, twenty-first century techno style. I marvel at the way things have gone so far. In spite of bouts of stress (a layoff, a move, the start of a new company), these babies have grown the requisite parts. They’ve passed all their tests, independent of the fact that their maternal host has sometimes felt like a chicken without a head. They are of me, but they are not me—a lifelong lesson I’m sure, something they are already teaching me, something I am not yet wholly convinced of but want and need to believe.

My father, a psychiatrist, gets wind that I’m having a minor, belated freak out. He calls from the road 700 miles away to remind me I’m not alone. “It takes a village, Deb, and a village you will have.”

And he’s right. When the babies arrive, my mother will come for a month, and my father will join her when he can. Rebecca will come for a week or so, all the way from California. The twins I grew up with, Molly and Busy, will each come from Chicago for a few days. Courtney will be across the park. Daphne will be nearby, as will myriad others. And then, of course, there’s Marco, my sweet attentive artistic Marco (author of the “2” on my belly in the above photo), who can’t wait to hang our twins’ art on the walls and take them to see Star Wars and play them Superman’s theme. We just don’t know yet, given his new position, the extent to which he will be able to be at home, in the beginning, with me.

But come what may, I will not be alone. It’s my new mantra, and I’m trying to buy it. It’s just that my experience of pregnancy, this experience of being so embodied, has been oddly isolating. I’m a social person who stops pregnant women on the street and cries “solidarity!”, and yet there have been many times when I’ve felt alone, as in existentially, in my discomfort and angst. Locked in, with no escape. I’ve tried hard not to crawl too far into that dark hole—I have a small history of depression—and I’ve been successful at keeping healthy and busy. But every so often, that feeling of aloneless (is it just a fear?) creeps in.

A village you will have.

And I will.  The last village elder, however, is gone, and I’ve been missing her a lot of late.  My Grandma Marge passed away a year ago today. Grandma was a certified nurse—head of the department in her day—and used to bring great comfort whenever I was sick. Pregnancy is not illness, and yet its symptoms have been physically challenging, reminiscent of times I’ve felt ill. Grandma Marge made it our wedding last year, but she died before the technology worked its magic. How she would kvelled and basked in our news, enabled by money that I, her only grandchild, inherited from her. And how I would have loved to have shared the blessing of these babies with her.

If I can write it, maybe I can will it: these are our babies. They are not mine alone. I will be their mommy. But they will have a daddy, and grandparents, and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, and if I believed, departed great-grandparents watching over them from somewhere. (On top of it all, I recently joined the notorious Park Slope Parents listserv. Never again will I worry about anything child-related alone!)

I am not alone, I am not alone, and yet…I am. It’s my body that’s primarily responsible, and that seems both a miraculous blessing and a bit of a curse. In spite of my feminism, I’ve internalized wholesale the cultural mandate that the buck stops with Mom. Because let’s face it, in reality, so often it does. How desperately, already, I find myself wanting to rewrite that script. But is it feminism, or existentialism, that I’m grappling with here? I’d love your thoughts.

It was recently pointed out to me by my dear observant friend Daphne that when talking about this pregnancy with her, I haven’t once said anything about the fact that there will soon be two new little beings around here (knock on wood) and that I will be their mother. I think the reason for my reticence lies snug inside those two parentheses: knock wood.

I am not, in general, a superstitious person. My grandmother, an orthodox Jew who would have been 100 last week had she lived just two more years, believed in the evil eye. Before getting pregnant, I neither knocked on wood nor spat three times (the Jewish equivalent) when mentioning a hope or a dream. And yet I’ve been a bundle of superstitious tentativeness when it comes to talking about the life forms I’m gestating as real people who will one day exist outside.

Why?

My mother, a therapist, says it’s obvious: “Self-protection, honey,” says she. And it’s true. I’m of advanced maternal age and I’m carrying twins, which automatically throws me into categorical high alert. But I’ve been carrying this unfathomably wondrous primordial soup in my uterus now for almost 27 weeks, and all has unfolded, so far, according to plan. When, I wonder, will I allow myself to hope, to dream, out loud?

I have never, ever wanted something this much. Well, that’s not completely true. I wanted a husband, and then, when the first one didn’t work out so well, I wanted another. I wanted a book contract, and later a second and a third. I achieved those things. I’ve been blessed (if you believe in that sort of thing), and I’ve worked hard to realize my desires. But with pregnancy, it feels different. We did everything in the book—and then some—to get to this point, but from here on in, it’s pretty much out of our hands.

The universe is encouraging, helping gently to push me along. Last week Daphne sent me an envelope in the mail with a note scrawled on the outside: “the first of many hand-me-downs from me!” Inside were two little sets of newborn-sized socks. The gear amasses. My mother-in-law sent baby shoes. A friend from childhood, herself a twin, gave me two matching onesies with images of the Dr. Seuss creatures, “Thing 1” and “Thing 2.” My aunt corralled a gently used double stroller from her physical therapist. My cousin has offered me her breast pump. Soon it will be time to get the babies’ room, currently full of boxes from our recent move, in shape for its forthcoming residents. I’ve been calling it “the second bedroom.” I can barely even say “babies’ room.”

Don’t get me wrong—I’m moved beyond language at the thought that there will be babies. When I see newborns on the street, I choke up. Just thinking about those teeny socks makes me cry. It’s just that somewhere between the concept “babies” and the reality “my babies,” or rather, “our babies,” my thoughts get lost in translation. Lost in gestation, maybe.  (Have any of you, I bet, I hope, felt this way?!)

For now, it’s easier to think of these inexplicable creatures that rumble in my belly as my own private primordial entourage. They’re in there doing their thing, and I’m out here doing mine. I wonder if I should be talking to them more. I try to get my husband to put his mouth near my belly and sing. But we both have trouble, it seems, relating to them as people who can connect to us as “Mom” and “Dad.” It will be different, I know, when we’re all out here living on the same side.

For now, they’ll remain a mystery. They’re abstract to me, but I can’t wait for them to become concrete. Yesterday my friend Kathy suggested I write them a letter. And maybe I will. This is how it might start:

Dear Baby Things (1&2),
Keep cooking. I’m here for you, waiting. You may be my entourage, but I’m your number one fan.
Love,
Your Mama-to-be

These three researchy news items just in, courtesy CCF:

The Television Got Me Pregnant, by Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon, Nov. 4, 2008 — A new study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. They found that, among sexually active teenagers, those who spend the most time watching racy programming like “Sex and the City” are twice as likely to become, or get a partner, pregnant. Researchers interviewed 718 sexually active teens aged 12 to 17 once a year for three years and, based on an analysis of 23 TV shows, estimated the amount of sexual content (including kissing, petting and sex) that they had been exposed to. About 12 percent of those who viewed the least amount of sexual programming became involved in a pregnancy, compared to 25 percent of those who consumed the most. A total of 58 girls got pregnant and 33 boys got a partner pregnant during the study.

Pregnancy Discrimination Complaints Jump, Especially for Women of Color, by Theresa Walsh Giarrusso, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Nov. 6, 2008 — Workplace discrimination against pregnant women is on the rise in a stunning way according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The National Partnership for Women and Families found that in 2007 working women filed 65 percent more complaints of pregnancy discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission than they had fifteen years earlier. The report also finds this new wave of discrimination affects women of color at a much higher rate than white women.

The Economics of Single Motherhood, by Kat Bergeron, Biloxi, Miss., Sun Herald, Nov. 6, 2008 — No other state has a higher rate of children born to single mothers than Mississippi, at 53.7 percent. That compares with the lowest state, Utah, at about 18 percent. Last year 46,456 Mississippi children were born, 24,939 to single mothers, and the numbers are rising. About 15 percent of those births are to teens aged 15 to 19. That is a slight drop from a decade ago but the trend is again upward, as are the rest of the unwed-mother statistics. Pete Walley, an economic analyst who studies and reports trends to state leaders, says that if Mississippi doesn’t change the numbers, it will permanently become No. 50 in income, health, education, economy, even in per capita traffic deaths.