Wednesday, November 12, 2008

One of the reasons why

If I had written before this worked, about my personal reasons for wanting so badly to be pregnant (other than the obvious reason that Gail and I wanted another child), my reasons would have had a lot to do with pregnancy being a way to reconnect with my body, and as a way to have evidence that my body worked, after years of neglect and mistreatment. I've implied before, that I've not been treated kindly at the hands of western medical care. In particular, by agreeing to care that I did, for nearly a decade, for a condition it turned out I didn't even have, I exposed my body to extremely dangerous drugs that damaged my overall health and may have also damaged my reproductive health. I worked extremely hard for many years to extract myself from that system of "care" in a way that protected my body from further harm. Once I was free, I was so angry at myself for having been sucked in, for being so naive and accepting, for just believing what I was told without understanding the deep risks to which I was exposing my body. Honestly, I have yet to completely forgive myself, and still have healing to do. But some piece of that healing, and some piece of why I did not want to go on fertility meds unless absolutely necessary, was wanting to have some sort of evidence that my body was healed, even if my heart wasn't. I hoped that maybe pregnancy and birth would be a way to reconnect with my body, a way to redevelop a trust that I had long ago betrayed.

Somehow this seems so over-dramatic and perhaps ill-advised when it is written out, especially since so much can go so wrong during pregnancy and birth, that it's probably best to avoid putting too much pressure on the proceedings. But lesbians have to work so hard to get knocked up anyway, there's no way many of us head into this with reasonable expectations.

But here I am now, feeling crappy in the first trimester. I'm so thrilled that we have an actual baby in here, the kind with a heartbeat, but I'm still finding the experience itself challenging, and I'm trying to see if even now, I can find a way to use even the crappy parts as a way to reconnect. So far, I'm trying to listen to my body, to sleep because it says it needs to, to feed it. I'm trying not to be angry that I feel this way, and remember that so far it seems I'm doing a pretty good job growing our kid. Maybe for now, that's enough. I'm getting the feeling that as far as paths of reconciliation go, I may have picked a rocky one. Maybe I should have just stuck with the yoga.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i just found your blog and wanted to say hi and wish you luck with your pregnancy. we have very similar stories. My wife and I have an amazing (almost) 3 year old daughter that i gave birth to and my wife is now almost 7 months pregnant with our 2nd daughter. looking forward to getting to know you guys through your blog and keeping up with your journey...