Primigravida

We Don’t Know Anything

by Rachel Canar

My late-in-life pregnancy is not just weird for other people. It is pretty weird for me.

I did not grow up my whole life knowing that I would have children. In fact, I wasn’t even sure that I would get married. I was not like Carrie Bradshaw, who somehow woke up on her 39th birthday and remembered she forgot to have children. I spent many hours in my early 30s in serious reflection and came to the realization that given my body’s fertility window, and the fact that I wasn’t even in love with anyone at the time – let alone that I didn’t have a boyfriend –  I was probably not going to give birth to my own children.

I had always been infatuated with the idea of adoption, and I settled into the knowledge that when I was ready for a family, I would adopt. After all, our world has too many children and not enough parents.

So when I shocked myself, my family and my friends and got married at the age of 40, I wasn’t feeling in a special rush to try and have kids. If it happened it happened, but I had some concerns that a baby right away could ruin our new marriage. My man had promised me before we got married that he didn’t want kids anyway. He lied.

Or changed his mind. Once we got married, he became completely baby crazy. We stopped using contraception, and I got pregnant just after our honeymoon. Unfortunately, 10 weeks later, I miscarried. It was a painful experience, but not one that left us feeling defeated. We had proved that we could get pregnant and it was bound to happen again.

But then it didn’t. We started trying harder. We took my temperature and used a device with which I could inspect my spit every morning to monitor my fertility. Yet the months went by with nothing and our doctor recommended fertility treatments.

For me, fertility treatments were the promise of a nightmare. I had always had problems with hormone imbalances that radically affected my mood. I suffer from extreme cramps during my period, and had consistently been proscribed birth control pills to alleviate the pain. Unfortunately, every time I took pills, it sent me into a tailspin of suicidal depression.

So when I started the treatments, we knew what to expect. I went mad. I was sick, and sad, and felt like I was going crazy, all to no avail. We actually had one of the weirdest possible outcomes of IVF. After monitoring me for the entire month and watching my follicles grow to bursting, presumably with many eggs, the doctor was stunned to a jaw-dropping silence that he found no eggs at all when they went in to surgically retrieve them. This type of syndrome is exceedingly rare and happens in only 2 percent of women, most of them over 40.

The catatonic depression that this launched was so bad I don’t even want to write about it. I hated myself, my body, the world, and most of all, my husband, who got me to this place of despair darker than Mordor.

Before you start hating him too, our relationship actually came out the other side of this tunnel with a complete Hope for the Flowers transformation. We were stronger, more trusting, and more about each other. I finally really felt ready for us to have a family and my husband was ready to look into adoption, but we still didn’t know how it would happen. We definitely weren’t doing any more fertility treatments.

All through this entire process, I had been working in a stressful job. Holding a senior position at a major Israeli civil rights organization, I was responsible for raising the 2 million dollars a year that kept the program running and the paychecks coming for the more than 20 employees. Moreover, my marriage had precipitated a move that resulted in my commuting in hellish traffic for three to four hours a day. I was working about 50 hours a week, and counting the commuting time, more than 60. Even the time when I wasn’t technically working, was spent worrying or otherwise thinking about work. In an effort to reduce the pressure, I had started working from home twice a week, but my stress levels remained unbelievably high. My salary was pretty good, and I was guaranteed at least three months of maternity leave with full pay. My co-workers were my family and they were completely supportive of my wanting to have kids.

In October of 2010, I came to know – and this is an entire story in itself – that I would never have a family while I held this job. While I loved my work and it made my life meaningful, it did not allow me the space emotionally or physically to create anything new. Ironically, I had always thought that only with professional success could I feel secure enough start a family.

I informed my boss in December of 2010 that I would be leaving my job in July of 2011.

My last day at work was July 28th, 2011. The date of my last period was August 15, 2011. In other words, I got pregnant my first cycle after I quit my job.

To clarify, this pregnancy was not planned. There were no treatments, no counting, and honestly, we are married so you can assume we weren’t having sex that often.

When I went in to my doctor in the end of September and he confirmed the pregnancy with an ultrasound, he looked like he was going to cry.

I won’t lie. It feels pretty weird to be pregnant at 42. I know it is common, even popular – I just never truly thought that this would be my life. But as my husband points out, I never thought I would be married either. Things change. Get used to it.

In our last ultrasound and battery of tests at 18 weeks, when we had finally cleared the hurdles of so many of the worst fears, our doctor confided to us that he tells our story to everyone: doctors, patients, and friends. He said, “We think we know so much, but your pregnancy has shown me that we don’t know anything.”

And we are all wiser for it.

Rachel Canar is working on a baby and a book. 

 

 

“You’re really starting late!”

When you’re pregnant for the second time in a year and-a-half, people say the darndest things…and feel free to ask the most intrusive questions. They want to know how far apart the kids will be (18 months), whether you planned it (well, we definitely wanted to have a second child and didn’t use birth control), and whether you had fertility treatments (no.) All of these questions, but the latter in particular, seem to intrigue the masses when you’re in the “elderly primigravida” demographic, which includes anyone who becomes a first-time mother over the age of 35.

From the start, the reactions to my second pregnancy have been amusing. “Knew you’d be having them close together!” a friend who started motherhood a decade earlier than I wrote on my facebook page. “Irish twins!” others pronounced, introducing me to a term I wasn’t familiar with, and which a friend from Ireland didn’t think was so amusing, making me wonder if it wasn’t a bit of a slur. One local woman who started having kids in her late 30s and also had two very close together relayed that she was asked by someone, with a bit of a disparaging tone, “What are you, religious?” To which she replied, “No, just old.” (I hope the questioner walked away feeling ashamed of herself.)

Sometimes the reactions amuse me (“Wow, you guys are gettin’ busy!”) and other times they frighten me (“Well, it’s going to be miserable for a while.”)  One of my closest friends has had three beautiful kids after the age of 38, and she’s a great support. (“You know, once you’re dealing with a kid in diapers, you may as well just be in that stage and have one or two more.”) And dozens of people have offered stories about how close they were with a sibling because of being so close in age.

In the past week or so, however, I found myself taken aback by the somewhat blatant reactions of several women of an older generation.  One neighbor noticed my growing belly and reported that her daughter, who had a child at the same time I had Eli, was pregnant again, just like me. “Well,” the neighbor sighed, “she’s making up for lost time.” I asked, and learned that her daughter was only 33. I quickly offered that I was 41. “Oh,” she gasped. “You’re really starting late!”

A day or two later, I saw a fellow journalist and friend, aged 28, whose mother happened to be visiting. The mother wondered aloud why this successful young woman didn’t give up her high-flying, foreign correspondent’s lifestyle and teach college journalism courses as I do…so much more conducive to settling down and producing grandchildren. In other words, she all but said, why don’t you be more like Ilene? When I interrupted to clarify that I was past 40, the mother’s jaw dropped. She was sure I was ten years younger.

Now, I find this as flattering as the next girl. But I think the real double-take is due to the fact that the last generation’s mindset has still not adjusted to a woman’s fertility not being washed up by the time she hits 30.

Even people I respect have said things that floored me. A specialist in women’s health approached me to say that if I didn’t want this to happen next time, she could tell me how to prevent it. (As if I lacked information about birth control! Had that been the case, I wouldn’t have remained pregnancy-free until the age of 39.) And then there was one of my enlightened, never-touch-a-cup-of-coffee, yogi friends, who gently informed me that “from a Chinese medicine perspective, you really should wait a year to give the body time to heal before getting pregnant again.”

For some reason, that comment is probably the only one that has truly given me pause. I’m not the type to live according to what’s good for my chi or to drink copious amounts of green tea, but I wondered if she had a point. Had my body fully recovered? Was I truly ready? I can’t judge anything by ancient Chinese standards – funny that today’s China hardly allows a woman to have more than one child anyway – but I can say that I felt energetic and healthy enough, thankfully, to contemplate another baby. Another confession: We’re blessed with a baby who’s been sleeping through the night, except if he’s ill, since he was six months old. I say this because sleep deprivation is perhaps the most debilitating aspect of new parenthood, and had it continued for us the way it does for some parents, I’m not so sure we’d have been ready to jump in again. Also, while the conventional wisdom says you should wait at least a year to 18 months before trying to conceive again after a C-section, my own doctor said his research showed that this “wait” is unnecessary in most cases, including mine, and gave me the green light. (For more see here.)

I could get into my fears about how energetic I’ll feel in ten years, when my children will still need a “young” mother. But when I start worrying about things far off in the future, which I tend to do just before bedtime, my husband always says, “Come back. Stay here.” So here I am, 28 weeks pregnant, and thinking about “family planning.” It is a wonderful term invented in the last century as a tool of social health policy. Real families, however, are built with some mysterious mix of planning, love and happenstance.