MIA Part One: Overthinking Motherhood

First published July 7, 2008

I've been gone a long, long time. Two weeks. Which, in this still-new-to-me world of blogging is, like, an eternity. Good thing I haven't launched yet so likely the only people who've noticed my silence are the kind friends who will stick with me no matter what and were maybe even kind of relieved to have a break from my ramblings, even though they'd never tell me so to my face.

There are several reasons for my being MIA. And each of them is so full of thoughts on motherhood and self—like a big, juicy, overripe elephant plum, mostly sweet, but likely to make your eyes water and your mouth pucker if you get too close to the pit—that they all deserve their own post. Which leaves me writing singularly today about something that's a little scary to highlight with its own post, stranded alone and naked without the comforting cover of other, less fraught topics to lessen its impact and present it in its true, almost-manageable light.

But it's what's on my mind right now, and a big chunk of the writing paralysis. So.

Reason Number One for why I've been MIA: a miscarriage.*

[* Which turned out to be a misdiagnosis.  Thankfully, I rejected the resident's demand that I have an immediate DNC and am now looking at my 4-and-a-half-year-old daughter.]

Not my first, by any stretch. Which makes it less shocking, less earth-shaking, but no less frustrating and sorrowful. No less likely to send me in an unwary moment spinning into a festival of self-recrimination, chest-beating, and paranoia about the big, cosmic conspiracy that has led me to suffer four miscarriages in my short life of wanting to reproduce. Just the sort of I'm-Plainly-Not-Meant-To-Be-A-Mother wallowing that I felt deserved a little YogaMamaMe airing.

After all, I'm pretty sure it doesn't take anything as dramatic as a miscarriage to make any one of us question whether we really were meant for motherhood.

Why I'm Quitting the Oops-Pregnant-Again Clinic

It is nothing short of amazing to me how difficult it can be just to find a health care provider who both gets that it isn't always easy to get pregnant and doesn't think it's his job to do the job for you.

I've found, during my journey through the ob-gyn offices of Los Angeles and Asheville, that there are basically two responses to a woman who's over 35 and has the audacity to hope for a diagnosis of why she's having trouble carrying a pregnancy. And by "diagnosis" I don't mean, "You may look younger than you are, but I have your chart and I know how old you really are, so I'm putting you on fertility drugs." This was the response of a specialist I saw in Los Angeles—specifically, some of the last words he said to me before I ditched him for the wonderful, thoughtful, willing-to-listen doctor at UCLA who immediately diagnosed, yes, a problem that wasn't age-related, treated it, and headed off to a new job at NIH just before I returned to his office for the first ultrasounds showing Jake's heartbeat.

Other than this wonderful man—and, I'll warrant, I hope, a fair number of other doctors who have managed the fine art of listening, really listening—doctors and their staffs seem to fall into two categories. There are the ones who seem unaccustomed to pregnancy being something that doesn't come easily. And there are the ones who are all too happy to take charge of your uterus for you, as if you can loan it out like a library book until they are ready to return it, genetically tested embryo tucked neatly inside.

The second bunch have done such wonderful things for so many of my friends that I hesitate to criticize them. Except to say, "Nope. Not for me." Part of the yoga thing for me is not forcing my body to do things it is not prepared to do, whether it's full kapotasana or carrying a pregnancy.

As for the first group—that wearied mass of professionals who have treated so very many fertile women that the whole mystery of life is more like a not very interesting beach read to them by now—welcome to life as a patient at a women's clinic in the hills of Western North Carolina.

Obviously I don't have a problem with going to a clinic, or I wouldn't have signed on in the first place. By all accounts, the doctors are quite good, and—the selling point for me—it includes a midwifery group. Since one of the midwives has a son in Jake's class and is an absolutely lovely person, it seemed a good fit. So what if the majority of the patients are on Medicaid? I'm just as able to wait in a stripped-down waiting room rather than the cushy surroundings of a PPO-only private practice as they are.

No, the problem has nothing to do with the income-level of the other patients. It's the fact that I can pretty well guess they're not there for fertility issues. And that, as a consequence, the staff is woefully unprepared for someone who is.

It's not that everyone at the clinic hasn't been perfectly nice. (With the notable exception of the receptionist at the satellite office who treats everyone like they are even less bright than she is, gives out no information, and refuses to check to see why, say, Mike and I are stuck waiting for an hour and a half past our appointment time with an increasingly sick little boy who will later turn out to have pneumonia.) It's just that no one can be nice enough to make up for spending 45 minutes in a waiting area packed with sixteen-year-olds sporting ripe bellies and the outlines of cigarette packs in their purses while you are shamefully, darkly waiting for a nonviable pregnancy to sort itself out.

There's more to it than that, of course, or I wouldn't have walked out the doors after this morning's futile quant test with a rush of relief at knowing I will never, ever walk through those doors again. Suffice to say that underfunded clinics are not exactly the optimal place for developing a close, informative relationship with your caregiver.

Which leaves me with just one such relationship—the one between me and my revved-up-to-chatter mind. The very mind just waiting to spew misinformation of the sort we love to chew on when we're feeling sorry for ourselves. In particular, that most familiar to so many mothers spiel about the reasons we are not supposed to be a mother, despite the ample evidence to the contrary.

Karma Conspiracy

Just to be clear, much as I might pretend not to, I know this miscarriage isn't some kind of message that I'm not a good enough mother to deserve more children. And I understand that I do not have some sort of deep, complicated web of psychological issues that are sabotaging my efforts to get pregnant.

Still, I think, as I cling to Jake, my beautiful proof that I am a good mother and, if anything, must have done something really amazing to deserve him, what about karma?

Karma is such a piece of our pop culture that pretty much everyone is familiar with the basic idea. Do good things for others and for the world and you generate positive energy that comes back to sweeten your own life. Do bad, cruel, thoughtless things, and you are only, so to speak, making your own bed.

The problem with this simplistic take is that it suggests we deserve the bad things that happen to us. Which, for a fixer like myself, sends me into a flurry of figuring out what I did wrong and how I can change it, as if I can do penance for the fact that, well, stuff happens. And sometimes it happens to me.

So how do I sit with this? What am I supposed to make of the fact that something very bad has happened to me?

In the abstract, not much. It's true, it's life, life is suffering, the best we can do is flow with it. I was listening, recently, to a lecture on Buddhism by Alan Watts, a well known (for those who follow such things) scholar on eastern religions. He used the analogy of cutting into a piece of wood to explain how not to struggle to change the things you can't change. In Buddhism, he explained, one goes with the grain in life instead of struggling to cut against it. "Ah," I thought. "That's it. So simple, Go with the grain."

Which means, I guess, acceptance. Not following my mind where it coaxes me, not letting it try to tease out the reasons this keeps happening, the I'm-not-good-enough's, the I've-had-such-a-tough-life's, the questioning whether I questioned too much whether I want to get pregnant again. If it's been so hard to find myself again after having Jake, my mind would bark, did I really want this pregnancy? Wasn't I risking another year and a half of self-doubts, of restlessness, of wondering where I went? And didn't just asking these questions doom me to lose it?

No. I say this emphatically for anyone who is reading those sentences nodding her head in agreement. "I doomed myself to never have another pregnancy," we think, "because I questioned whether I could do it all again, the sleeplessness, the spit up upon clothes, the lack of time for myself." Because we all know from having done it before that we thought every single indignity was one hundred percent worth it when we received just one gurgle-y smile from our incomparably priceless baby.

So, unquestionably, I'm sad, in pain. I did want this baby with a fierceness borne of pure animal instinct. But just as unquestionably it's not my fault I don't get to have it.

Here's what karma really is: the flow of energy through our lives. Not a series of tit-for-tat moments. Not a tally sheet wherein we get one positive return for every good thing we do. Not a program of retribution in which that rude receptionist who kept me and Mike waiting with a pneumonia-ridden child has something very, very bad happen to her, like getting a chicken bone stuck in her throat at dinner that night. (In this scenario she doesn't die, because I don't like to wish violence on people, even the ones who deserve it, but she does end up with a lingering case of laryngitis that forces her to take a week of sick leave so the women who come after me will have a respite from her condescension and mean-spiritedness.)

While there are few things more painful than a miscarriage, the big picture of my life contains so much less pain than the lives of so very, very many others. I have a beautiful, delightful, healthy boy, a fiercely loving partner, a beautiful home. I have clothing and food and my own health and so many things that so many people will never have.

I'd be crazy not to be grateful. And even crazier if I didn't believe that I must have generated some mighty good karma during my life to be so blessed.

It's All About the Sitting

I've written a lot recently about meditating, about how taking 15 minutes to sit and be still every morning has been so beneficial for me. But I'm going to offer it again, both because it's what makes the most sense when your mind is pulling you in the direction of blaming yourself for the things that happen to you and because it's really easy to try it once or twice and then forget about it. Consider this your reminder.

What's been particularly helpful for me has been not letting go of the things around me. For years, I thought meditation started with pratyahara, or withdrawal of the senses. So I'd shut my eyes, go inside, and enter the theater of my own chattering mind, gleeful at no longer having to compete with the things around me. But, I have finally realized, pratyahara is what comes after you learn to quiet your mind; it's the gift at the end, not the tool at the beginning.

Now, I sit with a conscious focus on all that is around me—the smell of the air in my cedar-lined meditation room, the sound of dogs barking their morning greetings, the feel of the thick wool blanket knit by my sister-in-law that I place on the cold floor for comfort. And every time my mind starts to pull me into a conversation, I send my consciousness outward again, aware of how I am sitting, just sitting, in this present moment, in this present place, where nothing has changed and everything is okay.