Know My Pain

April 22, 2020: A letter to my therapist

I want to preface that I've reread this a few times now to myself, and I know that some of the sentences seems harsh or are harder to read. Just because it is a simple process for it to be read does not mean it was a simple process to write, or that the emotions and feelings behind it are anything other than complex and heartbreaking and beautiful.

When people ask me if this pregnancy was planned, I hysterically laugh it off. How do you explain that the day before you ovulate and the day after you ovulate, you hate the idea of another pregnancy? That 6 months into your first child's life you sent out a mass text that said, "I know you don't mean any harm, but stop asking when we'll have another child. The answer is never". How do you explain that you're a middle child who spent a lot of time feeling misunderstood and unloved, and you've promised yourself to not ever do that to your own child. How do you explain how going through 16 months of postpartum anxiety changed you so much as a person that the idea of ever being pregnant again makes you physically ill? How do you explain that, and then say that you knew what you were doing when you purposely had sex while ovulating?

Maybe part of myself thought that God would protect me from having another child. Maybe I was just playing Russian roulette with my ovaries.

I do think, and did then too, that my daughter would love a sibling. I did think that my husband has always wanted two children. I did think that maybe those two things would make being pregnant worth the sacrifice.

And then the pregnancy test was positive and none of those things mattered anymore because what. the. fuck. had I just done to myself.

I have wanted my own child since I was a child myself. But even with my first pregnancy, I hated it. I was at my husband's office one day, 7 months into being pregnant with Blake, when his boss asked me how it was going.

"Do you watch alien movies? Where this thing grows inside of the woman, feeding off of her, until it rips its way out? That's how I feel."

I am not good at being pregnant.

I know that you should wait until you're further into pregnancy, but I needed other people to keep me accountable. I needed something to keep me from terminating. So I told a few people. And it felt like a betrayal to myself, that I would out myself like that when before, I still had a chance to change my fate.

I've been very strongly pro-choice since having Blake. I have raged for the women who feel like they don't have a choice. For teenagers. For rape victims. For women in abusive relationships. For women who weren't ready. For women who would have to sacrifice their own mental health for the sake of another. But I didn't know how to feel about myself. Did I still have a choice? Or had i already made that choice?

I went back to not sleeping through the night. I would watch the baby monitor and beat myself up about the horrible choices that I kept making in life. What if I died in childbirth and left Blake without a mom? What if I could never love this child like I love Blake? How could I live with myself if this child grew up with the emotional baggage of knowing that their mom wasn't putting in 100%. It had been almost three years since I had given birth to Blake, and I was only just finally starting to find my way back to myself. How could I have given that up?

What if I terminated and it destroyed my relationship with my husband?

I couldn't look at other babies.

Never, in my whole life, have I uttered the phrase "Oh no, I don't want to hold your newborn" until I became pregnant the second time. Newborns are AWESOME. I have always wanted to hold them. But I couldn't move past what the newborn days with Blake were like. And the knowledge that I was going to have to do it again.