Clawing my way to week 40

My life during pregnancy is characterized by a swing between two extremes, nausea and fear. At first, nausea defines my life. Then fear does. In between, I get three or four weeks of freedom , after nausea has ceased to control me and before fear begins to. This is a blessed, too-short respite from what is otherwise not a really fun experience.

I’ve been living in this pleasant middle zone, what you might call my pregnancy temporary ceasefire, for close on four weeks now. And it has been nothing short of fantastic. All I have to do is operate normally to feel superb. This is because for a very long five and a half months, feeling normal has been absolutely denied me. So, every day that I wake up, go through the day and go to sleep absent the permanent desire to vomit violently, I am astonished and delighted. Not puking is all it takes for me to feel great these days.

But this little breather is coming to an end. The fear is starting to set in. I’m resisting it, but it’s starting. Yesterday, for the first time this pregnancy, I started to get a little nervous that the baby hadn’t moved. I made myself lie down and wait, telling myself that babies do not kick in utero on command. I reminded myself that sleeping, not kicking, is the primary activity of a baby in the womb. This basically worked, but I know that as pregnancy progresses and the baby kicks less frequently, these persuasive arguments will wither in the face of fear.

This is uncomfortable on two levels. First, and quite obviously, it’s just not fun to feel afraid all the time. Fear does not generally control me in my non-pregnant life, so it’s a relatively foreign, unwelcome feeling. By week 30 or so, it’s exhausting and debilitating.

Second, it feels like I should be able to vanquish my fear if I just try hard enough. But I can’t. I don’t enjoy the idea that I should be the pawn of irrational, unfounded fear. If someone asked me to describe myself,say, five years ago, the word “fearful” would not leap to mind. In fact, I used to be quite proud of the fact that fear’s opposites more aptly described me - “daredevil” and “risk taker” were labels I was more likely to apply to myself, if only in the privacy of my own mind. Fear doesn’t jive with my image (accurate or not) of myself, so when I’m pregnant, I’m forced to reconcile who I want to be with who I really am.

I’ve developed a theory about the very real differences between theoretical fear and fear born of experience. Theoretical fear is based on the idea that something could go wrong, rather than the experience of it. Parents are highly subject to theoretical fear. Teenagers are practically immune to it.

Every parent will tell you that one of the downsides of parenthood is how fearful you become, how much you begin to worry. Mostly, these parents are referring to theoretical fear. It makes sense that theoretical fear should abound during parenthood because when you become a parent, you suddenly love your child more than you’ve ever loved anything and cannot fathom - but intuitively fear - the terribleness of something happening to him or her. You worry a lot about the potential of something going wrong.

But theoretical fear is not the same as fear born of actual experience. At first, I couldn’t see the link between loss and fear. But my friend Vicky once told me that more than grief, the long-term imprint left by loss on a person’s spirit is that they become more fearful. I think that’s true. In my experience, the acuteness of grief waxes and wanes over time. It comes and goes at odd times, according to its own mysterious internal clock. But the fear left by the intimate, personal knowledge that things can and do go wrong - sometimes tragically so - never fades. Those who have experienced loss are subject to this type of fear.

Perhaps the difference between theoretical fear and fear born of actual experience is just a question of strong offense and weak defense combining in a particularly damaging way. Fear born of experience tends to be more aggressive and more persistent. That’s the offensive bit. But, cruelly, the person most subject to this type of fear also has a depleted set of tools in their arsenal with which to defend themselves. That’s the defensive bit.

Typical tools to combat fear include:

• Using Statistics - When faced with the fear that something might go wrong, people turn to statistics and probabilities for comfort. Countless people have offered me comfort in this form. “Mary, the probability that something will go wrong is very small.” This may be true, but the ultimate cruelty with experience-based fear is that statistics cease to work when you are the statistic. In our case, this has been doubly so, since the string of events that occurred in 2006, taken individually but especially in concert, are so monumentally improbable as to be hardly credible. And yet they did happen. By the end of that year, I was darkly joking with my mother that, given how many highly unlikely things had actually come to pass, we should buy a lottery ticket as chances were good we’d win. (We didn’t.) And that was before Sasha was born two years later with an exceptionally rare heart defect, adding to the pile of improbabilities. So, statistics work in reverse for me now. When a doctor leads with the sentence, “But Mary, statistically speaking, it’s highly unlikely that…”, that is exactly when I begin to prick up my ears. I know it sounds odd, but experience has taught me that I should listen when someone talks about the rarer, more improbable stuff.
  
• Transferring responsibility - Another way to deal with fear is to understand and accept that some things are not in your control so consequently you shouldn't worry about them. This sounds neat and is basically a great objective but it’s impractical in that at least for me, I’ve never come close to achieving it. The corollary to this approach is to suggest that someone (or something) else is in control and has a Grand Plan. The most common form this approach takes is the age-old adage, “Everything happens for a reason.” Generally, this tactic is used post-tragedy rather than pre-emptively, where people try to comfort those experiencing loss by suggesting that fate (or whoever) ordained it to be this way and that they have a plan, so presumably there must be something good that will come out of it. Apart from the fact that I find this idea, however well-meaning, to be hard to swallow, as if we somehow deserved what happened, it only works for those who are religious or believe in a sentient being who cares about their welfare. I’m not and I don’t. (Though I often wish I were and I did, see blog entry from October 4, 2010.)
  
• Talking about the fear - This is the one tool that I find works for me, at least some of the time, as long as I’m selective about who I talk to. In my experience, there are fear augmenters and fear depressors. You don’t want to share fears with an augmenter. They will build on your worries, indulging in scary, hypothetical scenarios that make matters worse. On top of that, you might infect them with your own feelings, triggering a sort of contagion that’s hard to bring back under control. Fear depressors on the other hand will keep your fear in check and remain unaffected by it (or at least pretend to be). Demian is my most common fear depressor. When I’m succumbing in pregnancy, he marshals all his most persuasive arguments for why I should not be afraid, and walks me through each of them while (mostly) listening respectfully to my side instead of discounting my fear out of hand.

This doesn’t always work. When it fails, I try to find other coping mechanisms. By the end of Sasha’s pregnancy, Demian and I had made I don’t know how many “emergency” trips to the hospital to ensure everything was still okay. My doctor also lent me a Doppler scanner to listen to the baby’s heartbeat whenever fear began to overtake me.

A week ago I would have told you that I didn’t think I’d need those coping mechanisms this time around. Now, I’m beginning to wonder. I’m starting Week 26. Time will soon tell.