Making Room

Even though it makes me sound kind of cranky, I’ll be totally honest: I used to wonder why some expectant parents put so much time into decorating their babies’ rooms. Spending weeks preparing a nursery seemed sweet and all, but also sort of frivolous. Why go to the trouble of endlessly pondering paint colors and “themes”? Does a newborn notice, much less care, if her room is rose or coral, or if you’ve stenciled stars or seagulls over the crib? Why not just get a few workable basics and then spend the rest of the pregnancy reading some good novels and getting actual work done?

I’m still sympathetic to this perspective, but I’ve also been drinking liberally of the expectant parents’ Kool-Aid. Decorating for a new baby is basically unnecessary, but it’s a great way to bond with your fellow decorator and build your shared anticipation for the new family member. And anything that builds anticipation (anticipation being one of the life's supreme joys) has to be a good thing. Besides, arranging cute toys on shelves is way more fun than scrubbing bathroom grout at 4am or cleaning behind the stove with a Q-tip, or whatever it is that Very Pregnant Women possessed by mystical Nesting hormones supposedly do. (I wouldn’t really know, since my cleaning sprees lately have consisted of doing the dishes for approximately 4.2 minutes and then flopping dramatically on the couch to recover.)

Point is, Justin and I had a great time decorating the wee bedroom/walk-in closet that our baby will occupy. We thought a lot about how to combine items we already own with a few new objects to make a cheery space that still manages to be restful and serene. We wanted something that she can grow into, but that we can also enjoy. We’re not quite there yet—we still want to hang a large, colorful geological map over her crib and replace the rocking chair cushions with a neutral shade—but we’re liking where things are at the moment.

The crib has three nifty features: it’s a mini-crib, which means it's small and can fit through doorways; it rocks (literally); and it comes with attachable wheels. It'll be great as we gradually transition the baby from our bedside into her own room. (Our room is just through the door.)

The rug, from Anthropologie, was our one splurge. I knew I wanted some bright splashes of color to offset the cool grays and whites, and the rug helps accomplish that. It's actually brighter than the pics suggest.

My favorite corner of the room is this Eames “hang-it-all” rack (a cherished Christmas gift last year from Justin) combined with a framed print we bought at a comics and graphic arts festival in Brooklyn several months back. The instant I saw those plump, Matisse-like baby-ladies, I knew this picture had to go in our kid’s room.

Early on, I also knew I wanted the baby's room to have a cuckoo clock. I picked up a mousy brown one on ebay and slathered it liberally with magenta paint. Turns out, the color matches the rug perfectly.

This little gent is my first and only venture into stuffed-animal making. To protect my ego, let’s describe him as “rustic.” Despite lumpen, ambiguous appearances, he was supposed to be a rabbit (witness the tail below). But he might just be a cat. Or a gourd.

The felt pockets over the changing table (below) were a stroke of genius from Justin. They’re actually intended for hanging indoor plants, but they’ll work great as holders for diapers and toys. The thought of hanging heavy shelves over the changing table scared me, but these containers are soft and hard-working. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the blue shade is really vivid, and the felt fabric is sturdy and soft.

Voila! Now if only the human baby would arrive so I can stop test-driving the crib, swaddle blankets, and changing table with a sock monkey.

Such a good read

Promises I Can Keep is easily one of the best books--fiction and nonfiction included--I’ve read this year. When I first saw it cited on a blog, my interest was piqued by the subtitle: "Why Poor Women put Motherhood before Marriage."

I instantly had to know the answer. Why do they?

Why indeed when study after study shows that having a baby when young and single impairs a woman's career prospects and earning potential. And yet many poor, unmarried women decide to have babies while in their teens or early twenties. Why do something so obviously self-defeating? To answer this question, the authors conduct in-depth interviews with single mothers from eight poor Philadelphia neighborhoods. Their research offers some very convincing answers and, in the process, they help restore the humanity of the women involved-- humanity that gets obscured when the "unwed mother” becomes a political flash point. The book quotes heavily from the interviews, so we really get to hear the women's voices and see them as individuals. And because the authors are so explicit about their research methods, the book is also a great window into how sociological research is conducted.

While I don’t want to give away all of their conclusions, I found it fascinating to read that for many of the mothers, having a baby meant having an opportunity for meaning and self-worth where other forms of meaning (professional, educational) were all but absent. Contrary to stereotype, nearly all of the mothers surveyed say they enthusiastically anticipate marrying someday. In fact, they see marriage as a sacred institution and they disdain divorce, but, for them, a wedding is the culmination of years of hard work --a picket-fenced dream that comes only after one has saved money and established a career and yes, become a parent. After all, good men are in short supply, and few can be depended on for happiness or security. Raising a child, though, gives a young woman a chance to form emotional bonds and do something that really matters.

28 Weeks

Two things:

1) It's been one of the snowiest winters on record in NYC. Perfect for staying inside and consuming chocolate and episodes of Downton Abbey.

2) When I emailed this photo of myself from my iphone, autocorrect changed the word "preggers" to "prejudge."
Pfft.

Thinking about Denial

So I was lying on my back today, watching my belly take on weird, sculptural shapes as my unborn baby decided that she preferred my right side—no, my left side, before she finally settled somewhere in the middle under my belly button. Like most pregnant women, I really like these unmistakable physical signs. The wooshing heartbeat, the fluttering and more ferocious kicks, the smooth proof of the ultrasound screen, the shifting topography of my belly as she flops around—all help me know that I didn’t just imagine her. Maybe it’s because I like my truths nice and literal, or that I have an unlimited imagination and might otherwise wonder if I’d made the whole thing up, but I do like the basic reassurance of these cumulative symptoms.

Weirdly, as I’ve been consumed with tracking the physical evidence of pregnancy, I’m also finding myself really drawn to accounts of women who are pregnant without knowing it. I keep thinking of stories I’ve heard of women going to the hospital complaining of strange abdominal pains only to find out, surprise, it’s labor time. This is the stuff TV writers fall all over themselves for. Think of Peggy’s little surprise in the second season of Mad Men. Her only proof (and grasped only retrospectively, at that) seemed to be her mysterious fatness, a symptom that seemed almost preposterous in both its theatrical execution and its uniqueness. Really, Pegs? Nothing else going on in your body to clue you in? And if there were other clues, why didn’t the writers let us in on them?

Then there are those true, sad stories of real women shocked by the discovery--often under the florescent lights of the ER--that they’re mothers. And what in the world does it mean to be a mother in the biological sense only-- before the awareness kicks in?

I find it astonishing that someone could go month after month and not perceive the wild factory of person-making happening just below her skin. But I also can guess how it’s possible. These symptoms, so factual and convincing to me, seem so not just because they are real, but because I’m paying attention. If I weren’t paying attention—if I decided to explain them away out of fear, distress, or ignorance—I could probably make them all but disappear. Denial is a powerful thing. It’s not the case that my symptoms mystically Summon me to Motherhood. They don’t command my attention and thereby make me a better, more conscious person than I already am. My attention is already there, and these bodily clues are just meeting me half way.

I also know that in a very basic way class plays a role in my feelings about pregnancy. The luxury of paying attention, of exulting in physical symptoms rather than fearing or repressing them, is related to my security about bringing this kid into the world. Because I’m not terrified about how I’m going to feed her and because she’s arriving as a very wanted little person, I can cherish the weird changes she’s putting me through and all the traces of her existence I have already. I can meditate on her for hours, and in so doing, make her more real than she otherwise would be.

“Pregnancy denier” is the oddly political-sounding term that medical researchers use for women and girls who remain unaware of being pregnant throughout the period of gestation. Deniers are different from concealers—those women who know they are pregnant but hide the fact from others. Sometimes this lack of awareness has basic physical roots. A young girl who has just entered puberty might misinterpret pregnancy for something else. A woman who experiences irregular or non-existent periods could understandably go nine months not knowing she’s pregnant, especially if she has other medical conditions that make her body seem opaque to her or her. In one study of pregnancy denial, an obese 32-year-old woman showed up at the ER complaining of urinary problems. A sonogram revealed a live term fetus. She had an emergency c-section and delivered a live 9-lb male baby. The study described the infant, with troubling vagueness, as being “in poor condition” and closed with the recommendation that physicians screen for pregnancy all adolescent girls and women who present in ERs with abdominal complaints.

Unsurprisingly, pregnancy denial can also be associated with psychological disorders. According to some research I looked at, many women who deny pregnancy suffer from dissociative psychopathology (though having this disorder doesn’t necessarily mean a woman will deny her pregnancy). Other illnesses that can lead to denial are schizophrenia and Cotard’s syndrome, a frightening neurological condition in which patients doubt their very existence. But researchers who have tried to pinpoint a single pregnancy denier profile have come up empty. One study that set out to seek a “type” concluded that the group of women involved was “heterogeneous, and a clear-cut typology of a 'pregnancy denier' could not be established.”

A sad and rather obvious fact is that women who don’t know (or accept) that they're pregnant tend not to receive prenatal care. One study of two hundred women who didn’t seek care found that the main reasons were, in order of frequency, substance use, denial of pregnancy, financial reasons, and concealed pregnancy. It's also no surprise to learn that women who don’t know they are pregnant deliver babies that are smaller and less healthy than average.

Interesting, women who showed up at hospitals just in time to deliver or shortly afterward tended to take responsibility for their infants once they were born. This is very good news, but I doubt that “taking responsibility” and bonding always go hand-in-hand.

All this leaves me with the feeling that I’m lucky to be in a place of awareness and readiness. It’s sad to think that for whatever reason (financial, medical, psychological) all pregnant women don’t have this luxury.

There's a lot more to say on this topic, of course, but there are other things I also want to research. I’m really interested, for one, in how very young teenage girls process the experience of being pregnant. Guess I need to start watching more reality TV?