On Being Pregnant during COVID

I woke up way too early this morning. This happens to me a lot at this time of year, when the sun is just coming up and the birds are chirping. Our bedroom window was open and I could see the sky changing colors. And I just laid there and thought. I thought about all the other times in my life when I couldn't sleep, and how most of those times occured in the year after Sylvie was born. I remembered how my body stopped wanting to eat and sleep, and how deeply wrong that felt. I thought about how my bodies needs for food and sleep make me feel human, connected. And I remembered how disconnected I felt at that time. 
And then, the clearest, loudest thought of all. That was the worst time, the worst thing, I have ever been through. 
I carry a lot of privilege in this world, but I have also been dealt a fair share of trauma. Most notably a truly fucked up family experience, an extremely violent relationship in my late teens and a handful of reproductive tragedies. But my experience in my pregnancy with Sylvie and in the months that followed her birth eclipsed all of that. The way that it felt to be disconnected from my very own self will haunt me forever. 

I just got off of a call with my therapist where we spent a lot of time talking about grief. My constant, never ending grief about the ways that this pandemic is affecting my pregnancy. And then I realized, maybe for the first time, that the grief I'm feeling now is not just about this pregnancy. It's about the pregnancy before and the postpartum that looked nothing like what I wanted or expected. It's about the pregnancies I never got to carry to term, and the ones I chose to end, and the circumstances in my life that made those decisions necessary, and the ways that other people treated me as a result of those decisions, and all the obstetric violence that came with every single one of those experiences and all the ways that we treat birthing bodies like shit in this time and place. And I wonder, really, truly wonder, how deep, how far down our collective well of reproductive grief actually goes. 
We live in a culture that completely fails to honor and acknowledge the sacredness of reproductive health. We've twisted the narrative around childbearing until it looks nothing like the truth. We've drowned and suffocated and murdered the soul of what it actually means to build and birth a human life. 

Towards the end of my struggle with postpartum depression, I went to see a healer. After a few sessions together she sent me home with a question: what service is your soul being called to in this lifetime? It was in the answer to that question that I finally found healing, that I finally found purpose and meaning to my suffering. 

Since then, I have poured myself into birth work as if my life depended on it. In some ways, it still feels like it does. And at every turn, I've felt grief. Grief for the ways my experience could have been if I had known how to get the support I so desperately needed. Grief for the wisdom I did not have access to. Grief for every birthing person who has found themselves in the middle of a process that they were completely unprepared for, different in every way from what they were taught to expect. I have vowed over and over again to tell the truth about my experience and I have vowed over and over again to do it differently if I ever got the chance.
Now is the moment when I get to do both. 

My truth right now is that even after a year of working with clients and telling them over and over again that birth and pregnancy and the entire reproductive process are entirely out of our control; after urging them, over and over to surrender and let go, I still had expectations about how this would look for me. I still have a 10 page document that is part birth plan, part maniacal Virgo spreadsheet on every detail that I thought I could control and even after I hit publish on this rant I will probably still continue to edit and obsess over it. 

My truth right now is that I can't bring myself to actually feel all that scared about coronavirus because I'm way more scared of the postpartum anxiety that I have spent most of my energy trying to prevent for literally years of my life now.
My truth right now, is that the thought of still being in this mess and not having childcare for my toddler when my baby is born fills me with such a deep rage that I couldn't even type this sentence without dissolving into hot, angry tears. And a part of me feels that this is selfish and entitled but it doesn't stop me from feeling it so so deeply.
My truth right now is that I thought it would make me a better doula if I could "fix" my own experience and have a perfect, supported pregnancy and postpartum, and I can't and I feel like I'm failing. 
My truth right now is that I want so so badly to control this, even just a little bit. But I don't get to. And now it's me who has to listen to my own advice and just fucking surrender and it's really really hard.
My truth right now is that the only thing I can do is tell my truth, acknowledge my grief, and maybe, hopefully, a little bit of our collective, human grief. May it be a healing for us all.