The week that Tom Hanks was diagnosed with coronavirus, the NBA canceled their entire season, and patronage at the usually-busy restaurant where I work was becoming spotty and unpredictable was also the same week I thought for sure my body was broken.
It was the second week of March and I had gotten some test results back from the Infertility Center at Kaiser. They found I had fibroids all over my uterus. If you’re unfamiliar with this term, a fibroid is a non-cancerous tumor that can range anywhere from the size of a pea to the size of a watermelon. My largest was about an inch in diameter. After enduring a painful procedure where they put iodine inside my cervix and fallopian tubes, the doctors took a series of x-rays and found it was Fibroid City all over the outside of my uterus, as well as in the lining, which can make it especially difficult for a fertilized egg to attach itself and become an embryo. Perhaps this was why my husband and I had been trying to conceive for the last three years without any luck?
We couldn’t know for sure, but this wasn’t good news. To determine our next course of action, the doctors wanted to run one more test and asked me to call them on the first day of my next period to schedule it. The problem? My period was really late.
I kept waiting for it so that I could call them. Even as the coronavirus seemed to be closing in on our country, I chose to remain hopeful that these tests, this search for knowledge on my never-ending fertility journey, was one small thing I could still control. But with each passing day, my hope of ever having a baby began to get mixed up with the daunting news footage coming out of New York City and the bombshell announcement that someone in Long Beach had tested positive for COVID19. There was no way of tracing where or how they had contracted it.
By the end of that second week in March, I was crying on the couch at my therapist/spiritual director’s office and she was walking me through a few ways to curb my anxiety. She suggested I write out everything I was longing for and everything I was concerned about on strips of paper and imagine myself handing them over to God, one-by-one. A prayer ritual whereby each strip of paper was placed inside a shoebox. When I started to get anxious again, I could remember them there, in the box, being held by God.
I liked how tactile this sounded, so I spent an entire evening writing out prayers and placing them in a box. The next morning, I woke up feeling calmer and more clear-headed. I realized that since I still hadn’t gotten my period, I should probably take a pregnancy test. Just to rule it out.
The test came out positive. I was stunned.
I ran to the nearest drug store to buy another test -- a more expensive, “fancier” pregnancy test. It was positive, too! I could hardly believe it. It was both a miracle and a mystery, as I couldn’t point to a single thing I had done differently. Over the past three years, we had tried multiple tactics, from tracking my ovulation in an app, to seeing an acupuncturist, detoxifying our household, taking herbal supplements, and of course everyone’s favorite forms of casual advice: “Stop trying!” “Go on vacation!” and “Make sure you’re not too stressed out!” Yet, I was doing none of those things when we conceived.
Paul and I celebrated that night by curling up on the couch and streaming the classic comedy Nine Months, starring Hugh Grant and Julianne Moore. We were joy-filled. Humbled. The very next day, I lost my job.
The mayor ordered all restaurants in LA County to shut their doors, and I was officially an unemployed, quarantining pregnant lady. Basking in the news of this glorious miracle, while simultaneously wondering what pregnancy would look like in the midst of a pandemic.
It’s been a whirlwind, but here I am in my second trimester. I have a healthy baby whose heartbeat was so fast it reminded me of butterfly wings when I watched it flitting on the ultrasound monitor. My husband wasn’t able to witness it, though. He hasn’t been allowed to accompany me on any of my prenatal appointments because of COVID19 restrictions, and that’s just one of the aspects that have made this whole experience bittersweet.
Will I get to have a baby shower? No one knows. Will I get to make friends with other expecting mothers the way I always hoped to – like, at an in-person birth-prep class or a prenatal yoga session? No one can say. Would I have chosen to finally get pregnant at this time in our world? Not in a million years.
My friend is a doula and she suggested I read a book called Transformed by Birth by Britta Bushnell. The first few chapters focus on dismantling any preconceived ideas women may have about controlling their birth experience. Bushnell writes, “What we need most are not methods for better control but rather more resilience and adaptability for when events surprise, challenge, or disappoint us.” I know she is describing labor and delivery, but I keep finding connections with our current pandemic.
My pregnancy journey and it are so intertwined they seem indistinguishable sometimes. Each day that I’ve been in quarantine has felt “surprising,” “challenging,” or “disappointing” in its own way. Forget childbirth. I just want to survive the summer without going out of my mind since LA County’s Safer-At-Home orders seem to have no concrete end in sight. Being the extrovert that I am, I want to war against these restrictions every bit as much as I want to war against the impending pain and discomfort I will encounter in childbirth. But none of it is within my control.
Bushnell calls giving birth a rite of passage. She explains:
“Rites of passage are meaningful transformational experiences that alter a person’s knowing of who they are. They usually have an element of struggle or some level of discomfort or involve facing an ordeal. A rite of passage takes an initiate out of their familiar identity of daily life and thrusts them into something new, often stressful, and possibly threatening. Through these unfamiliar challenges, existential questions about the meaning of life, higher purpose, and the nature of God are made central.”
Once again, the similarities between what she is describing and our current situation are writ large. Which begs the question: Could this time of social distancing be its own rite of passage? And if it is, which existential questions is it asking me to wrestle with?
I don’t know about you, but I am still working my way through those answers. Sometimes with gritted teeth. Sometimes like a child wanting to throw a temper tantrum. But on the days when I am more clear-headed, when I can soften, when I can open to what is, I realize things. Like how it may have never occurred to me to take a pregnancy test if I hadn’t spent the night prior on my knees in surrender. Instead, I would have woken up that morning and continued agonizing about the future, remaining blind to the reality that what I was hoping for had already taken place.
