the annals of pregnancy, part one

It's worth noting up front that most of my pregnancy-related thoughts have nothing to do with COVID, except for the fact that it is very awesome not to have to wear work appropriate pants while pregnant. Every woman should be able to wear sweatpants and leggings without judgment every day of her pregnancy.

So far, what I've been most surprised by is people who have asked me if I got pregnant by accident. (Not a large number, but more than one.) If they thought about it for a minute, wouldn't they realize how unlikely it is that a 35-year-old woman who has been married for 5 years would get accidentally pregnant? I suppose it's possible, but really pretty unlikely, right? I can't figure out if people are asking because they think it's crazy to have a baby now, in the middle of a global health crisis, or if it has something to do with me having a baby? Probably some combination of both. I don't take it personally. 

Strangely, while the pregnancy wasn't an accident, it does kind of feel that way. I was (and still am) surprised to be pregnant—since my teens I've had a condition that my doctors always insisted would make it difficult for me to have children. So when someone asks me if the baby was an accident, I almost want to say yes—it does feel that way! I was so sure it would take many months or years to get pregnant, if it happened at all, that other than going off birth control I didn't really pay much attention—there were no prenatal vitamins, no ovulation tests, not even the slightest attempt to stop drinking. (And I do hope the baby likes bourbon because there were more than a few pandemic cocktails early on there.)

Being told at 17 that I was possibly infertile was, for me, less traumatizing than you might suppose. At that age having a baby seemed like the worst possible thing that could ever happen to me. And as I got older and that changed, I had already accepted that childlessness was one possible life outcome, much like it was possible I would never get married. I knew people who were single or childless and neither of these outcomes seemed to me like a true impediment to happiness or a full life. 

But here I am, unquestionably pregnant. I'm both glad I took the warnings of my doctors seriously— infertility issues are fairly common, after all, and more people should probably be prepared for them—and I'm also very relieved that I didn't take their warnings too seriously, otherwise I might very well have ended up accidentally pregnant long before I was ready. (I did sometimes wonder why I needed to also worry about birth control when everyone insisted I was unlikely to conceive without extensive medical intervention.) 

Yesterday was the baby's first sonogram, and it was amazing to see his little face, his tiny hands and feet, even the blood flowing in and out of his heart. I am truly amazed at what medicine can show us about a baby still in the womb, and I remain simultaneously confounded by how much of medicine appears to be guesswork. I have a lot of respect for medical science—hooray for vaccines and antibiotics and immunotherapy and all that jazz!—but doctors rarely acknowledge that while diagnostics may work very well in the aggregate, individual cases do not seem to be quite so easy to predict. I'm sure my particular case will remain a mystery forever—if only because the doctors ended up being wrong.