Pregnancy & Fertility

As I find myself in the very last weeks of my third pregnancy, I am getting to this weird stage of excitement/fear/laziness/motivation. I feel tired yet I have million things on my mind. I feel full of energy to order, replace, and redecorate every single thing in our apartment, yet after an hour of restless cleaning up, I usually give...

When will you have a second child?You don’t want to wait too long.You’re turning 35 this year? Is that advanced maternal age?You had a baby already…. so easily…why is it hard now? Appointments…specialists…take this medicine….let’s draw some labs….endoscopies….there isinflammation…we have concerns….stillbirth risk…..frequent miscarriage is a possibility….fetal delays maybe a potential…wait…wait…we still need to wait. In 3 months let’s reevaluate.Mmm let’s...

40 weeks and 3 days. My eyes opened up to my dark room at 2:30am after a decent cramp and I thought, “Ooh, that was a good one.” I had Braxton Hicks for months. I fell back to sleep. More came and went, some deserving of a check of the clock, but in my sleep haze, I estimated a half...

The shots are the easy part. It’s not just shots anyway. It’s multiple transvaginal ultrasounds. Welts from the shots that get bigger and more numerous with each passing day. The hormone fueled roller coaster  that has you feeling elated, ragey and depressed somehow simultaneously. Don’t forget the mindfuck of the hope that maybe this will work.   It’s crumbling a bit more...

Pregnancy with Fern taught me to look inward. To seek healing in places that Forrest’s birth brought to light. I sought out literature, social media accounts, films, podcasts, people of interest in the birthing world, enrolled in classes, and discovered places of inspiration I had not explored prior. I visualized and meditated and most of all let go, because birth...

It was around 5am when I felt the rhythmic achings of contractions. I smiled to myself. I knew what these were because I had been here before. Tingles ran through me, to think of my baby girl announcing that she was on her way. I said a quiet “Thank you, baby.” She had given me a full night’s rest for...

I left this world to birth our son. My water broke at noon the day before he was born. I didn’t know if he’d come that day or several days later, and I wasn’t feeling any movement or contractions, so my husband, Joe, and I ate lunch at the park in the rain while my waters poured out of me...

The year I was pregnant with Basia was one of the defining years of my life. The pregnancy was challenging, nothing like my first pregnancy with Leonardo. I had horrible morning (see: all day long) sickness that lasted through the entire pregnancy, horrible insomnia, and painful varicose veins from the pelvic floor down. Everyone said I was going to have...

No one warned me about the boxes. I wasn’t going to have kids. I was never interested. How could I be, watching myself and my brothers sap the life force from my mother, who worked full-time and homeschooled me and was always aggravated by something we’d done (or not done)? It looked like a thankless, miserable job. Nah, I’m good....

Stella's pregnancy was a combination of my first two. I was really sick the first trimester then felt pretty good the second and really good the last trimester. It just kept getting better. I had just finished my first module at the Artemis School, ending with the full moon on the Summer Solstice and was on a total high from...