Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

“We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic.” ~Cullen Hightower

I was on the floor doing mandatory stretches for birthing class when I paused mid cat/cow to eavesdrop on the girl whose strident voice was asking the doula (a pregnancy support coach) about a severe pressure in her lower abdomen. Glancing up, I met my husband’s eyes and we smiled with conspiratorial slyness. Every Thursday night for the past three weeks we have had to listen to this girl worry about everything from stretch marks to constipation, and although I also struggle with fear surrounding my first child’s impending birth, at that moment I felt superior to her until she started complaining about a clicking in her pelvis whenever she walked.

“Oh, that’s great,” the doula replied. “That means your pelvis’s loosening in preparation for labor.”

Still on all fours in the sage-colored Zen room, I swiveled my pelvis from side to side then hissed up at my husband, “My pelvis won’t click. You think it’s fused?”

Randy just rolled his eyes and reached down to offer me his hand. “You’re fine,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

The next afternoon, rather than taking the elevator, I ambitiously ran up three flights of stairs to the natural birth section of the women’s health clinic and was ushered back to meet with one of the four midwives. After taking my weight, she had me sit on the examination table and took my blood pressure, then paused and took my blood pressure again. The midwife pressed the heart rate monitor to my stomach and a steady thumping filled the room. She shifted the monitor to the other side and more thumping filled the room, only faster this time. A line formed between her eyebrows, but she still tried to smile.

“Got squirrels in there?” she said.

“No, maybe twins.”

“You have had an ultrasound, right?” she joked.

The midwife listened to the heart rate for a few more minutes and said she was having a hard time distinguishing between my heart rate and my daughter’s.

I said, “I did take the stairs.”

The midwife just nodded and explained that I might be compressing a vein by lying on my back, which could be slowing the baby’s heart rate. She asked me to follow her into another room. Squirting some warm goop on my stomach, the midwife had me sit on a recliner and attached the fetal heart monitor to my stomach and wrapped a contraction band above it.

She powered on some kind of machine that immediately started spitting out a record of the baby’s fluctuating heart rate, then left the room to research the herbal concoction a mother of fifteen had given to me. I watched the red numbers on the black screen fluctuate from 110 to 150 and began to panic. I didn’t know much about the medical profession, but I did know that Addie’s heart rate had always stayed in between 140 and 160; it had never dipped that low before. My own heart rate increased as I stared down at the contraction band and wondered why the midwife had wrapped it around my stomach. I glanced around the empty room while wishing for the midwife’s return, then looked back at the contraction monitor. I didn’t know what the spike on the paper meant, but I didn’t think it was good. I started talking to my daughter, trying to calm both her and myself down.

It did not help.

They’re gonna put me on bed rest. What if I’m in labor at thirty-three weeks? What if they have to do a C-section?

My stomach rippled as Addie swam laps through the amniotic fluid, and I wondered if she was moving so much because she was in distress.

I was giving the worry wart from birthing class a run for her doula when the midwife reentered the room and picked up the paper scrolling from the machine. Her blue-green eyes grew wide. “Did you sit up?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Did you move at all?”

Again, I shook my head.

The midwife pointed to the lower spike on the paper. “Looks like you had a contraction.”

“But I didn’t feel anything,” I said.

“Sometimes you won’t.”

The midwife stared at the machine, and we watched another contraction spike being etched out on the paper. She knelt before me and gently kneaded her fingertips into my stomach.

“You’re not tight,” she said.

Right then Addie shifted beneath the contraction band and the midwife smiled naturally for the first time since my visit began. “She was pushing it up,” the midwife explained. “That’s why the shape of the contraction’s all wrong.”

“What about her heart rate?” I asked. “It’s never been so up and down before.”

“But look here,” the midwife said, pointing at the lowest point of the numbers. “Her heart rate has a good base line; it doesn’t degress at all.”

Just to be on the safe side, the midwife kept me hooked up to the monitor for a few more minutes and checked my blood pressure again. Everything looked fine, but as I descended the three flights of stairs on shaky legs, I realized how blessed my pregnancy has been and that I would never, ever again judge the girl from my birthing class for her strident voice or for her worry.

Experienced mothers to us expectant ones: What were your biggest pregnancy fears and how did you conquer them?