Pregnant in a Pandemic

I first saw that phrase on a friend's hashtag on Facebook. I thought "how cute" but then being 21 weeks along, I knew that it was anything but.

This is my first pregnancy. At 35 years old....which in uterine years, is somewhere between Sandra Bullock and Meryl Streep age. 

We used to call first-time mums my age as "Elderly Primigravid" calling to mind images of women with gray hair in buns, hobbling along and supporting themselves on a cane while trying to maintain balance. I had not anticipated this.

At 16 years old, I had drafted an autobiography which included a crystal ball prediction of where I would be at 21..30...35 years. This milestone was a 30 year old milestone. But life doesn't read 16 year old crystal ball predictions.

Having gotten married only a few months before, getting pregnant almost immediately after was an achievement. Despite straddling the "Elderly Primigravid" age, I was pleasantly surprised and set about unearthing all my old parenting books and parenting notes gleaned from studying it theoretically - through books then eventually through other people's (my friends, my patients') kids. There was a dizzying and ungodly amount. I am a hoarder of books (both physically and digitally) and whenever I had felt tired or needed an ego boost after a week of seeing patients in our outpatient clinic and being a channel and a (temporary) answer to their families' pains, I was ready to release all that tension somewhere. 

And I did. By buying books that sent me on an imaginary fantasy of holding all the answers and dreaming up all the ways I could build a better future for my patients then - simply by being in posession of said books.

I must emphasize though that I am a better hoarder than I was a reader. I bit off more than I could chew. And now the challenge to have all those accumulated pages  (significant and insignificant) be translated to practical, pragmatic, "what I MOST need to know NOW" knowledge was upon me. The second line in that pregnancy test screamed so.

I had counseled parents about vaccines, colds, speech delays, time-outs and teen woes for almost 8 years now and I STILL FELT LOST. That is how ironic it seemed to me then. True to my "this can wait" nature, I set these seeds of WTF aside and decided to concentrate on restarting my private practice.

Then Fate dealt another funny hand. 

By the end of March, I had decided to stop holding physical clinics as the Coronavirus Pandemic (soon a chapter in future generations textbooks) spurned a region-wide lockdown. I watched in awe and suspended denial as the rest of the world follow suit. 

Now that I had clamped down on my initial worries of pregnancy, health risks of my job now occupied my mind. I took almost two months trying to adjust to being homebound again, concentrating on eating 3 meals a day and subscribing to a very simple but informative expectant mommy website (https://www.babycenter.com/) that compared my growing baby's size to several vegetables as the weeks progressed. That and the "Mayo Clinic Guide to Pregnancy" felt sufficient enough.

But as the impact of this pandemic hit - personally and profesionally - I came to realize that preparing just for the pregnancy wasn't going to cut it. Our finances (my husband and I both) had taken a hit. He had been running a small restaurant and it had closed. Most of my patients (non-urgent as they were) decided to wait the pandemic out before risking their child's health to bring them to clinic. I had decided too, that being "Elderly Primigravid" and the opposite of a neat freak put Beanie (my baby's temporary name) at high risk and decided to go all online.

So from expecting to slowly settle into married life and beginning private practice, a curveball.
But I count my blessings.

The most abundant of which now, is TIME.
And this is where the desire to write again, hit me.

For my own sake - as a tool to sift through all these changes that threaten to tip the balance of my "mental hold" on calm...as a way to organize the books and notes that have languished, unread and calling to be resurrected...

For my future Beanie's sake - so I may use this time to learn the mindset of who I want to be as a Mama, to settle old "debts" so I wouldn't have to carry them over to my parenting...

For you (whoever you may be) - that if you recognize yourself in some part of my (too personal) rant, that I offer a little bit of solace and comfort (laughs, hopefully) during these uncertain times... 

Thank you for your time and...Welcome!

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