Based on today’s ultrasound, we could have a winner here. What a journey this has been—from my initial elation at discovering I was pregnant to a misdiagnosed miscarriage to today’s doctor’s visit. There on the ultrasound screen was a seemingly healthy 9 1/2-week-old fetus frantically waving its little webbed nubby hands at me.
People keep telling me how heroic I am, as though I’ve somehow trumped a potential miscarriage with a healthy baby through the sheer force of hope. But I can tell you that there was no hope involved. It was the opposite of hope. I entered every day of pregnancy with fresh pessimism and dark predictions.
The way I see it, there is no upside to optimism. I think it is better to be shocked and surprised by good news than to be stunned by a horrible discovery, better to anticipate grief than to have your idealistic heart ripped apart by a pregnancy that ends prematurely.
I know it’s not rational, but I’ve begun to believe that I keep my pregnancies healthy by worrying. If I lie awake at 4 in the morning imagining that the life within me has stilled permanently, then my baby might be OK. It’s only the scenarios that I don’t imagine that might actually hurt the fetus. If I review every possible bad outcome, I will protect us all from it.
This theory seems to have been proven true by the existence of my second daughter—the tall, good-natured 8-month-old who tugs my maternity pants down each time she tries to climb my legs. Every time I caught her snoozing in utero, I’d guzzle cold lemonade to get her kicking. At every prenatal visit, I would grill my doctor about my odds of losing the baby (all the way through week 41).
Then she was born perfect. So, in my mind, all that worrying saved that pregnancy from certain doom.
The corollary is that I owe a fresh batch of anxiety to this new child. Could my abject pessimism be what brought the pregnancy back from the brink two weeks ago? Again, by the logic of the grief-stricken, it certainly seems so. A positive attitude would have been asking for trouble.
Next page: The fears to come
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