Anne TootillTo Be or Not To Be a Mother - Part Two
November 30th 2006 20:03
I’m on solid foods and working hard to keep them down for twenty minutes before I inevitably throw them up again. And I always do that it seems.
For a day or so I had a roommate. She was pregnant with her third boy and needed a cervical stitch to keep her cervix from opening prematurely. She was happy and full of life, had plenty of visitors and talked on and on about her wild little boys and the trouble she loved to watch them get into. I was jealous. She was eating cookies that her visitors brought. And she looked great. And she sounded great and except for this tiny little blip in her pregnancy she appeared to be having a grand old time. As a pregnant person and as a mother.
I, on the other hand, was sick as a dog and missing my fourteen month old. Would he forget me? Would he still love me? Was he O.K. without his mommy? I felt very guilty.
As one point my Obstetrician came by and told me about another patient he had who was also pregnant with her second child and was also sick with Hyperemesis Gravidum (nonstop vomiting) , although she hadn’t been sick with her first pregnancy like I had. Anyway, according to him while she was hospitalized, hooked up to an I.V. for re-hydration like me, she’d decided to have an abortion since she had her other child to care for. He didn’t actually suggest that I have one too but he did say that no one would think worse of me based upon what I’d gone through with my first pregnancy and now this.
Later that night I told my husband what the doctor said and asked what he thought I should do. He told me what he always did, it was up to me. That he would support whatever I decided. I know, I suppose I should be happy that he didn’t try to force me to do what he wanted, but sometimes when the decision were real hard, like this one. When there was so much at stake. Knowing that I was a person with low self-esteem who always worried about what everyone else thought and who put everyone else’s wants and needs above her own…sometimes I just wanted him to tell me what to do, what I had to do because no one should keep suffering like was. To tell me it was O.K. to pick myself for once, that I’d been a really good girl with Josh and that no body deserved to be sick like this again. Sometimes you just want an opinion, even if you don’t take it.
I knew I was having my girl but I felt so sick. During the past two years plus I’d spent nearly a year of it too sick to pick my head up off the pillow or confined to bed. And here I was still. But you don’t throw away a baby, right? Especially when you’d once been told that you’d never, ever get pregnant.
Can’t think anymore. Finished holding down my lunch. Twenty minutes and then I threw up. Feel sick. Don’t want to throw up anymore. Time to sleep because lack of consciousness (sleep) was my other relief from consciousness.
For a day or so I had a roommate. She was pregnant with her third boy and needed a cervical stitch to keep her cervix from opening prematurely. She was happy and full of life, had plenty of visitors and talked on and on about her wild little boys and the trouble she loved to watch them get into. I was jealous. She was eating cookies that her visitors brought. And she looked great. And she sounded great and except for this tiny little blip in her pregnancy she appeared to be having a grand old time. As a pregnant person and as a mother.
I, on the other hand, was sick as a dog and missing my fourteen month old. Would he forget me? Would he still love me? Was he O.K. without his mommy? I felt very guilty.
As one point my Obstetrician came by and told me about another patient he had who was also pregnant with her second child and was also sick with Hyperemesis Gravidum (nonstop vomiting) , although she hadn’t been sick with her first pregnancy like I had. Anyway, according to him while she was hospitalized, hooked up to an I.V. for re-hydration like me, she’d decided to have an abortion since she had her other child to care for. He didn’t actually suggest that I have one too but he did say that no one would think worse of me based upon what I’d gone through with my first pregnancy and now this.
Later that night I told my husband what the doctor said and asked what he thought I should do. He told me what he always did, it was up to me. That he would support whatever I decided. I know, I suppose I should be happy that he didn’t try to force me to do what he wanted, but sometimes when the decision were real hard, like this one. When there was so much at stake. Knowing that I was a person with low self-esteem who always worried about what everyone else thought and who put everyone else’s wants and needs above her own…sometimes I just wanted him to tell me what to do, what I had to do because no one should keep suffering like was. To tell me it was O.K. to pick myself for once, that I’d been a really good girl with Josh and that no body deserved to be sick like this again. Sometimes you just want an opinion, even if you don’t take it.
I knew I was having my girl but I felt so sick. During the past two years plus I’d spent nearly a year of it too sick to pick my head up off the pillow or confined to bed. And here I was still. But you don’t throw away a baby, right? Especially when you’d once been told that you’d never, ever get pregnant.
Can’t think anymore. Finished holding down my lunch. Twenty minutes and then I threw up. Feel sick. Don’t want to throw up anymore. Time to sleep because lack of consciousness (sleep) was my other relief from consciousness.
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