Mother to Mom

"It's going to be okay."

My mom looked at me from across the kitchen table. In the dull yellow glow of the pendant light, she looked tired. The pregnancy test, beaming a YES+ up at her, looked ominous. I'm sure I must have looked scared.

To tell the truth, I wasn't supposed to be in this situation. I was told in May of that year that it would be very difficult for me to get pregnant, and until that moment I was sure that I didn't want to be a mother.

My mother and I have a rough relationship. It is colored by trauma, hers and mine, and they feel irreconcileable since she is the source of so much of mine.

As I stare at her, a little weary and lost, a disctint memory pops into my head: I am a chubby eight-year-old, my face tight with the concentration that comes when you are trying your best not to cry. My mom kneels in front of me and wrestles a too-small bathing suit up my body. Her cheeks are flushed, and she is sweaty and angry. As she wrestles with the spandex, it becomes more and more clear that the swimsuit does not fit my rolls of fat. She exhales in disgust and rips the swimsuit off of me and hisses at me to get dressed. From that day on, I hate swimming.

What I didn't know about that day was that her and my father were fighting. My dad was never a great husband, and though it's not an excuse, she had nowhere else to channel her stress. It fell on me as the oldest and the daughter to be burdened with her rage and sadness and everything else that comes with struggling to keep a broken home intact.

My stomach lurched anyways, and I felt a massive wave of dread wash over me. Was I going to be like my mother? I would never... Would I? It made me ill. So did the hormones raging through my body. I was scared, and my boyfriend had said only one thing when I told him: get rid of it.

I stared at the only person who believed I could do it and nodded, and from that moment on, our relationship changed.

When I was eleven weeks pregnant and doubled over with cramps and spotting, it was my mom who drove me to the ER and held my hand as a stone-faced ultrasound technician scanned my belly, looking for continued signs of life. I was scared and worried, but my mother still held my hand the whole time and reassured me. When the doctor came in and told us that everything seemed fine and that I should check back with my obstetrician, she was happy for and with me.

When, four weeks later, I found out that I was having a girl, I lost my footing a bit. I was hoping for a boy, something dissimilar from myself and my mother. But I was having a baby girl, and my mom was right there with me when we found out. After my boyfriend decided that he simply didn't want a child, she told me we could do it alone and that we didn't need him.

I would go on to be diagnosed with gestational hypertension as well as gestational diabetes. I would have to learn how to prick my finger, test my blood sugars, keep a food diary, and deal with my anxiety and depression wihtout the help of the medicines I worried would hurt my growing baby. I learned that I had a lifelong, congenital heart defect, which didn't bother me much until I had the extra blood from the pregnancy being pumped through my heart and I began to get palpitations as my heart struggled. My mom was there as another ultrasound tech, this one a little kinder and gentler with the wand, scanned my heart to check its function.

As my belly and my support system were growing, my doubts in myself were as well. I had a difficult pregnancy, and I was still a full-time college student as well. The further I got into my pregnancy, the sicker I got and the more difficult things became.

Finally, my doctor called it. It was nine pm on a Friday when I got the call to come in to be induced. At thirty-seven weeks along, I waddled into the labor and delivery ward, my protein and glucose levels spiking and my blood pressure was rising to dangerous levels. My doctor walked in and explained what would happen.

Cervadil was inserted first, as I was nowhere near going into labor on my own. It was uncomfortable, but it wasn't the worst thing I've been through. That was yet to come.

For the next 53 hours, my mom sat by my side, encouraging, supporting, and helping me through the process of laboring when my body wasn't ready to do so. I was lucky, in a way, that my doctor let me labor. I was terrified of a c-section, which my anxiety had me convinced would kill me. She sat by me, she fed me, she wiped my face, and she wasn't even bothered when, while in transition from laboring to pushing, I hissed at her like a cat because she touched my IV site (that one got a funny look from my nurse).

So, after growing together around my growing daughter, I can't imagine what she felt when she saw my daughter shoot out of me-- along with a torrent of blood and no cries. My brain was too flooded with oxytocin for me to think about anything except for the fact that I had a baby. I didn't know that I was hemorrhaging or that my daughter's blood sugar was crashing.

My mom explained what she saw to me that day. She saw me, laying back on the bed in a daze as several nurses and doctors flooded around me and I bled what looked like buckets. On the other side of the room, she saw the team working on my daughter, who wasn't crying and wasn't alert. "She's just not as angry as we'd like." The doctor would say as he vigorously rubbed at her back to get her to scream, cry, make any noise. Instead, she blinked at the bright lights of this new world and made no sound.

On my side of the room, my doctor was elbow deep inside of me, pulling out clots the size of dinner plates as my uterus had given up and I was still bleeding out. I vaguely remember asking to see my placenta. It was pretty, in a weird way, but the action of lifting myself to my elbows to see made me dizzy. A nurse on my right, Cassie, gave me a shot in my thigh and told me it was going to help stop the bleeding.

In the end, we were both fine. My daughter's blood sugar normalized after a week in the NICU and my bleeding stopped. I had a rough postpartum period as well, as I developed double pneumonia from being in the hospital on fluids for so long. In the middle of the summer, pneumonia is the devil.

My relationship with my mom changed when I knew I would become a mother. It took a lot of work, a lot of therapy, and it's still not perfect. I am too much like my father and she may never let that go. She is the source of too much of my trauma and I am still working on letting that go. It doesn't matter. She was there when I truly needed her, with all the love and support I could ever ask for. She was there for late-night cravings and terrifying doctor's appointments. She was there for middle-of-the-night breastfeeding lessons and to soothe my daughter when I couldn't see straight from lack of sleep. She helped shape me into the mom I need to be for my daughter, and I could never thank her enough for that.