Body Building, part one: Basic fitness

Welcome to Body Building, a series on strength, selfhood, pregnancy, and the uncertain future.

This story will be spread out in occasional installments over the next couple of months as part of our usual content mix while She’s A Beast is on a self-created, pre-programmed but nonetheless handcrafted “maternity leave.”

tw: miscarriage, fertility

I admit I felt smug when I got that first positive pregnancy test. I just knew it would be easy: I’m old, sure, but I’m in good health. My stress has never been lower. I eat, I exercise, I’ve never smoked, I don’t drink that much. I was going to walk into this. I was so sure I’d walk in that I worried it would all happen too fast, before I felt ready. I was so sure it would happen easily that I was even ready to test the limits of it all. I was running a lifting program to test my one-rep squat max. I was about to travel to a work event halfway across the country to give a presentation, a type of task I find so stressful that I’m shocked it does not cause all my hair to fall out.

And then, a few weeks after, I started seeing smudges of blood. I found a doctor, who tried to be encouraging: The embryo was undersized with no heartbeat, but lots of babies grow out of sync with the charts. The next day, blood just fell out of me all at once into the pad I was wearing, like a dumping bucket at a water park.

This was disappointing to my sense of invincibility, for sure. But when I told anyone, I felt the looks of pity and sympathy were entirely too much. In a backwards way, I found myself trying to reassure the few people who knew, and resolved not to tell anyone else about this process. I didn’t feel sad at all. Instead, the immediate rollercoaster of instant pregnancy, followed by instant miscarriage, mirrored my feelings in an unsettling way.

I had always left room in my life for kids, abstractly, always doing the math at the end of relationships about how many years I had left to get situated with another potential partner. I hated more than anything to be selected out of a possible life choice by circumstance.

But otherwise, the prospect of a family always felt long from now and far away, in part because my own life had been unstable for so long. I never had a vision for my life beyond getting to safely to college. I was focused first on surviving the day, thanks to my family history (spotty, mentally and emotionally and financially). Second, in the name of that survival, I was focused on scraping together a career in my choice of notoriously unstable and crumbling industry (media). And then, lastly, I was focused on trying to wrest relationship success from the hands of “disorganized attachment.”

None of these aspects of my life encouraged anything resembling long-term planning. It was a tall order of things to sort out, all of which staunchly resisted any process of sorting out, before I felt I could even imagine thinking about a family, or had cause to envision one of my selves as “eventual parent.” As someone who watched her parents scramble, I was committed to never bringing another child into that type of situation just because “the clock was ticking,” “maybe shaking things up is what we need,” or whatever.

As the years piled up, the less likely it felt that I’d surmount all that I’d put in the way—with good intentions, I’d like to think—of having kids. But also, the less likely it felt that I should even try to plan on having kids, because biological factors beyond my control loomed larger and larger.

And then I landed with a bump, suddenly, in a situation where things did feel together. I found myself with an actually kind of stable career, thanks to striking out on my own. I had a stable partner who was beyond excited about the idea of having kids, with whom doing mundane daily life stuff like going to Target is fun, and loving and caring for things—plants, pets, each other—is one of our most delightful shared activities. I’d made huge advances in my own mental health. I’d finally found some peace—peace that already felt a bit tedious. All of this felt insanely lucky. By the age of 35, I grasped the ups of child-free life, but imagining it extending forever into the future felt vaguely unsatisfying. Now that everything had suddenly aligned, it felt like it was not too late. But if it wasn’t too late, it needed to not be too late right now. I was ready in practice, but the circumstances had, against all odds, raced ahead of my emotional readiness.

Not only that, but in the last several years, family life had started to sound incredibly daunting, to the point that it didn’t matter if kids were right, for me; they never seemed less right in general. I’d become scared crooked by the way everything family-related seemed to be continually on fire. The lack of infrastructure for childcare and family support was constantly in the news. Seemingly every day, a new mom wrote about the unique, identity-unraveling disgrace of being drenched in spit-up and poop as she unsuccessfully tried to wrangle a hateful toddler into bed with her thousandth gentle-parenting script of the night as the toddler screamed and screamed for just another five minutes of screen time. The mom, haunted by near-constant intrusive fantasies of her simple and indulgent life before children, gazed out the corner of her eye across a kitchen buried in crumbs and dirty dishes, where, an ocean of LEGO bricks away, her partner scrolled his phone on the couch. And that was after the traumatic birth, where she was induced against her will and a dozen medical professionals swirled around her and not a one listened to a single thing she said for 48 straight hours, until it was time to get an emergency C-section. I’d see people with even relatively placid children at playgrounds or in stores and wonder what they suffered; I’d see people with screaming, crying, tantrum-ing children who refused to cede control of their iPads and know.

I completely understood why the dam had broken on the idea that parenting or giving birth was all sunshine and rainbows. People were suffering and weren’t getting the support they needed. Part of me had hoped to wait as long as possible in hopes that some of the bad stuff would have time to change, that the establishments would pivot from focusing on relatively inane bullshit (calling pregnancies over 35 “geriatric”; forcing pregnant women to give up coffee and medium-rare steak and sushi; debating whether pregnant women were allowed to pick up more than 20 pounds) to progressing on issues that mattered (the lack of support for childcare; the overall terrible gender dynamics of domestic labor; the apparent total mystery of post-partum depression). But now I felt like I’d waited as long as I could, and things were not only not ideal, but getting less ideal, culturally and politically.

I approached my therapist with some questions. I try not to turn therapy into stand-up comedy hour, but sometimes it’s hard to resist.