After I told my parents that I was pregnant with Balthazar,
my father sent me an email in which he said that I was very brave but that
since he was an optimist he would expect a good outcome.
The email left me irritated
in a vague, all over way, like a mild flu. Since my father and I communicate
infrequently, parsing his communiqués requires close reading approaching
biblical exegesis. I got to work.
First of all, I mistrusted
that word, 'brave'. I mistrusted it absolutely. It seemed to praise but it was
meant as criticism. My father was suggesting that what I was doing was so
dangerous that it required foolhardiness. I didn't have to ask why he claimed
to think I was brave but really thought otherwise. It was because I was forty
years old and pregnant.
I didn't feel brave at all. I had no interest in feeling
brave. In the southeast quadrant of Portland, OR, where I live, no one told me
I was brave. Late motherhood is more the norm here than the exception. In fact,
most of the mothers I hang with at the elementary school are a few years older
than I am. Many had children while in their forties.
The attitude of my forty year-old midwife, who was trying to
get pregnant at the time, was mindful but not fear-mongering. Being forty was
like coming into the pregnancy twenty pounds overweight or having a family
history of diabetes. It didn't signify anything by itself, and until and unless
something came up, it was just a fact.
Second, my father calling himself an optimist is like Mitt
Romney calling himself pro-woman. It is absurd on its face. If the major
premise of his statement was false and the minor premise was also false, what
did that do to the conclusion? If I were a lawyer, like my father, or had
taught logic and rhetoric at Columbia I would have known, but I suspected it
was nothing good. He was telling me that he believed that something terrible
was going to happen.
*
As ridiculous as it seems to me when I examine my
mortgage-paying, school-volunteering, flats-wearing life, I am far and away the
risk taker in my family.
I moved to New York when I was twenty-four to go to graduate
school in creative writing. There is so much wrong with that sentence from the
perspective of a cautious person that I don't even know where to begin. New
York in 1995 wasn't the crack den it had been in the '80's, and to the housing
administrator's annoyance I insisted on living on the west side of Broadway,
away from Morningside Park, but even she struggled to pretend that it was safe.
I went into significant debt to go to graduate school, which
even then was understood by the sane and sober to be a gamble. I went into
debt to get an MFA. No bookmaker at Belmont
Park would take those odds.
On the other hand, I have gone to great lengths not to live
without health insurance. I do not own a motorcycle, or a gun. I don't smoke,
gamble or drink and drive. I will not let my son play football. I believe in
vaccinations and carseats. I wash my hands after handling raw eggs or chicken.
From my perspective, having Balthazar was a calculated risk.
It was not quixotic. It was not reporting live from Tahrir Square or jumping
out of an aircraft from space. It wasn't even riding a bike without a helmet.
Still, I tried to be reasonable about my expectations. 'The chances are good that
I will miscarry,' I told myself when I found out I was pregnant. 'Forty percent
of pregnancies end in miscarriage.' But then we saw the heartbeat at nine
weeks, and the chance of miscarriage went down to something like four percent.
The odds of Down's syndrome increase dramatically after
thirty-five, and again after forty. So I tried to steel myself against that.
But then the nuchal fold ultrasound combined with the triple screen indicated
that the risk of Down's syndrome was 1 in 5,660, which was the risk of a twenty
year-old mother. The risk of miscarrying after an amniocentesis was 1 in 200,
and so, to my great relief and on the advice of the perinatologist, we didn't
have one.
After that I worried about preterm labor. I even went to
labor and delivery at twenty-seven weeks, thinking I might be leaking fluid. It
turned out to be a false alarm. And then I was in the home stretch, with only
stillbirth to worry about.
Because the risk of stillbirth increases with age, I was
told early on that I would be induced at 39 weeks. The prenatal yoga teacher,
who seemed to disapprove of everything about me from my choice of Baby Bjorn
over another carrier (because it was what I already had) to the fact that I was
not planning a home birth, shook her head and said it was a shame that the
medical establishment had these rules. I said I didn't mind, and I really,
really didn't. I never bought into the idea that I should become heavily
invested in my own experience of the birth. I was old enough and had seen and
heard enough not to be cavalier about the risks. I didn't really care if the
birth wasn't perfect or peaceful or whatever the fuck all the hippies thought
it should be. I just wanted everyone to live.
*
My father always thinks something terrible is going to
happen; that's the way his brain is wired. Many, many other times he has been
wrong. This time, he was right. I had a baby the day after I turned forty-one,
and he died. The odds were in my favor, but they were less in my favor than
they would have been if I were thirty-one.
Then again, I am the oldest woman in my perinatal loss book
group. If age were to blame, you would expect the room to be filled with
geriatric mothers. Most are in their early thirties. One, I believe, is
twenty-seven. What, exactly, did she do
wrong?
I just filled out an online survey that is being
administered by the StarLegacy Foundation, to try to pinpoint risk factors for
late stillbirth, defined as a pregnancy loss after 33 weeks. As I filled it
out, I saw all of the bases they were trying to cover. No, I didn't smoke, or
live in a house with a smoker. No, I didn't use drugs, or have even one drink.
I was physically active before the pregnancy. I was physically active during
the pregnancy. I had no medical problems before the pregnancy. I had no medical
problems during the pregnancy. I could tell that I had nothing to offer them,
nothing that would help them to develop their screening tools, except my age.
But age isn't a reason. I
had assumed that a large part of the risk of having a child later is that many
health problems, including diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease,
have begun to show up in many women by age 40. I thought that by being
extremely healthy I could get around that. I also thought that if a woman's
body couldn't handle the pregnancy, it would become clear at some point: her
placenta would conk out or her amniotic fluid would get low, her blood pressure
would rise or her cervix would collapse. I didn't think I'd find myself sitting
in the perinatologist's office to hear him say, "It shouldn't have
happened."
Years ago my brother told me
that he wanted his wife to be done having all of their kids by the time she was
thirty-two. Because he is a pediatric geneticist, and looks at statistics and calculates
risk all day long, it was hard not to take him seriously. Because I had my
first child at thirty-four and then conceived another six years later, it was
hard not to feel judged.
After Balthazar died he surprised me by telling me that he
wished I'd just get pregnant again. That he felt strongly that what happened
was a one-off. A genetic disaster of some kind that wouldn't be repeated. I was
amazed and touched. At that point the "I told you so's" hung in the
air like tear gas, but he made me feel like someone who has had something very
bad and unforeseen happen to them, not someone who was doomed from the start,
not someone who had it coming.
This year three forty-one year-old women of my acquaintance
have had babies. Uma Thurman had a baby. What risk did I take that hasn't been
successfully taken by many, many others?
Maybe age had something to
do with it. Maybe it didn't. It's just the only thing that anyone can find to
blame me for.
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