Some of you may know that it was originally my plan to return to the United States at the end of the academic year 2018. By that point, I would have been in China for five years, when I originally planned to stay for three. I was going to return to school to pursue a PhD, or more accurately, to attend a bridge program that would give me the background in psychology to be competitive for a PhD program in counseling psychology.
The University of Pittsburgh has one such interesting program. It is called the Hotel Metal Bridge Program. In order to increase the diversity of graduate students they accept, they offer lucky applicants free tuition and a stipend to study in certain fields such as biology and psychology in a one-year transition program. The hope is that these students will then apply for University of Pittsburgh’s graduate programs.
The only problem with this program is that it is not really designed for people who live, say, on the other side of the world. For instance, having heard about the program in October of 2017, I sent an email to ask about it. In fact, I sent more than one. I tried calling, as did my best friend Brittany. I got no response to my email nor phone calls until the end of January 2018 when I received two identical messages saying that applications were open. The specific questions I raised in my emails were not addressed. At that point, I had already known that applications were open from checking the website fairly regularly myself.
Now it is important to note that I had been asked to make a decision about renewing my contract at the university in November of 2017.
Even though I had heard nothing from the University of Pittsburgh at that point, I was determined and hopeful, and I did in fact turn down the offer to renew my contract, hanging all my hopes on this program. Once applications opened at the end of January, I applied. My application was finished by mid-February. Considering I wanted Ben to go with me to the United States, we were working on the immigrant visa application at the same time. It was a very stressful time period, especially when my job was put back on the table at the beginning of May because one more person than predicted turned down a job in my department.
By the end of May, I still had not heard anything from the University of Pittsburgh. The first week of June, I decided to keep my job. I was way over the University of Pittsburgh, from whom I heard nothing until the second week of June. If money is what it takes to have people respond to your emails and give you the least consideration, then it was best for me to skip the free ride they were offering.
At the beginning of August, when I found out I was pregnant for the first time, I was relieved I was not in Pittsburgh. Both Ben and I were in the best financial position of our lives with him now working at the university too. It seemed everything had worked out for the best.
Then I found out I had a blighted ovum.
All meaning crept out of life. I stopped believing everything happens for a reason.
The second time I found out I was pregnant the meaning didn’t come back.
As I mentioned in the last post, it was hard to focus on the fact that I was pregnant at all with work and my physical health being more than I could handle. I remember the many nights spent pacing my apartment, crying because I was simultaneously starving and nauseous, trying to figure out what balance of what foods would convince my stomach to calm down enough to allow me the blissful solitude of sleep before my bladder woke me up again. I would stalk around my apartment repeating “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. It’s too much.”
When you have a cold, and you can’t sleep enough, eat enough, or stay sufficiently hydrated, it’s hard to heed people’s advice to “enjoy your pregnancy.”
I was also very afraid to enjoy it. I knew from first-hand experience that becoming pregnant and becoming a parent were not always correlated. I had seen our little bean on an ultrasound, but I knew of people who had seen their little one on a monitor and heard their heartbeat, only to go back a few weeks later to find the heart had stopped beating.
Unlike the first pregnancy when I made sure to do my kegels every night, and Ben and I would go for 45-minute or one-hour evening strolls, I did no exercise. I did not worry about my diet—or what existed of it. It was partially a lack of physical strength to do any exercise and partially the fear. Why do so much for a pregnancy that may end in a few weeks?
I did not talk to the baby. I had talked to the baby in the first pregnancy, only to feel betrayed when there was none.
I had taken weekly photographs of my mid-section for the first pregnancy, but I was not very inclined to do so for the second. I mean, I already had photos from the first 8 weeks of pregnancy one. Weren’t these photos all about the same? Would it be morbid to just add to the photos from the first pregnancy? It would certainly be easier. Even so, I took photos about every three weeks this time, mostly at Ben’s prompting.
This pregnancy was consistently haunted by the first. Every week that passed of the second pregnancy, I thought of how far along I would be now if the first pregnancy had not ended. Especially in that first trimester, as the weeks seemed to drag on in suffering, I wished that I was already pass this stage. I thought about how I’d probably not be teaching in the spring at all if pregnancy one had not ended.
To distract myself, I went back to the trajectory of my career. Did I want to become a psychiatrist through an MD track or a counseling psychologist through a PhD program? When were we going to go back to the States? Did I want to go back first while Ben kept working here? I came up with a lot of elaborate plans.
I plan the most when I know I have the least amount of control over what will happen.
When I finally arrived at my 12-week appointment, I was very much afraid of what would happen. First, I was not allowed to eat or drink anything after 10pm the night before. For someone with a stomach as fickle as mine was at the time, going a night without being able to eat or drink struck fear into my heart. There was also the fact that I normally have motion sickness, and I needed to travel two hours to the hospital first in a taxi, then on a high-speed train, and then on the metro. And no, just taking a car directly to the hospital from Kunshan would not have been better. It would still have been two hours in a moving vehicle. At least I can make quick bathroom breaks on the high-speed train and metro. Then, of course, there was the morning sickness. I still remembered my last trip home from the hospital, which involved my stomach turning upside down four times in two hours.
On this day, though, I made it to the hospital without even one cleanse. I did utilize every don’t-throw-up strategy in my arsenal (like not looking down, which meant no reading my Kindle or checking my phone on the trip), but it was still a miracle.
Of course, the most amazing part of that visit was the baby. He or she had grown so much at that point. The sonographer walked me through all the little body parts, and I smiled in a way I had not smiled in weeks. Ben was able to video record the whole thing, including the sound of the baby’s heartbeat. I was so over the moon, all the previous weeks’ suffering was momentarily forgotten, though only momentarily.
I try very hard to carry the joy of a new life forming within me where I go, but this pregnancy has not been easy to enjoy. I did not know how hard it could be, and I was afraid to ask for too much help. Last semester’s pregnancy and miscarriage and the previous semester’s surgery and menopause had asked a lot of my colleagues, especially my boss, Don. At what point did my efforts to become a mother become too much of a burden on everyone else? Again the question niggled at the back of my mind, and what if this pregnancy came to an end?
I know it probably does not make sense, but I felt somehow that I owed the people who knew what was going on a happy ending. After all the ways my own pain and suffering had burdened them, I felt I needed a baby to be born this time. I also felt I could not complain too much with this pregnancy because I wanted two children. If I asked for too much help and support this time, maybe people would not be happy for me if I was fortunate to become pregnant again.
So, I chose mostly to suffer in silence. Of the times I went to Don and said I was struggling, there were probably 10 more times that I chose to say nothing at all. I released my tears and pain into the tile floors of our apartment in the middle of the night where no one was there to see or hear them.
Had I known the pregnancy would be this hard, I would still have done it. But I still feel sucker-punched by how hard it is, even beyond the first trimester.
No one tells you that your bladder becomes a problem almost immediately. No one mentions that your breasts start growing right away—which, trust me, is more painful than sexy. No one mentions the incredibly vivid nightmares you may have keeping you up at night. All the things that you think start happening in the late second trimester or third, start in the very first. I even started showing at 6 weeks. People say that is just bloating, and perhaps it was, but the bloat never went away. My stomach just kept getting progressively bigger. Fortunately, my little pouch could be easily covered in layers of clothing during the winter and the excess attributed to the extra pounds many people put on in the colder months. However, I did have one “insightful” (i.e. nosy) student ask me early on if I was pregnant. I just laughed in response.
Laughter was in short supply in that first trimester. In fact, when I was past the morning sickness, many people commented how great I looked. I thought it was the “glow.” However, it was just that I looked less like I might throw up at any minute. That is, I looked like a reasonably healthy person instead of the Ghost of Christmas Past, or the Grinch (one colleague had told me “I looked a little green” while I was making an attempt to eat my dinner one night).
That time was full of fear. Fear that kept the joy away. Fear that kept me suffering in silence. Fear I wish I had managed to better conquer. However, I know I did my best. For fighting fear takes mental and physical strength I simply did not have.
**The featured image is of my mid-section at nine weeks. The baby is the size of an olive.
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