That Mythical Second Pregnancy

I suppose opinions might vary on this, but on my list of things I DIDN'T want to experience while taking care of an infant, contracting a nasty stomach bug was right at the top. Thankfully O is fine - we think I might have gotten food poisoning, actually, and since he rarely eats takeout he probably wasn't exposed - but the past few days were not pretty. We've spent all this time and energy worrying about how to keep O safe from the influenza epidemic that's affecting the entire country, but it never occurred to me that I might suddenly become nauseous, feverish, and spend two days unable to get off the couch. Harry helped out as much as he could, but at one point I was alone and I needed to get O from our living room downstairs up to his nursery, change him, and put him to bed for the night. I swear to you that accomplishing that task while trying not to vomit was equally as difficult as actually giving birth to him back in October. So why am I already obsessed with planning for baby #2? I mean, I spent weeks upon weeks of my pregnancy feeling debilitated with nausea. I also lay on the couch for entire weekends and routinely slept 9-10 hours on weeknights, and still felt exhausted. I complained about being pregnant to anyone who would listen. Yet even a tiny reminder of that nausea and exhaustion wasn't enough to dissuade me from daydreaming about when I can start my next IVF cycle.

It's not just that I'm excited about the possibility of having another baby - it's more than that. I'm also incredibly nostalgic for my pregnancy, believe it or not, and that feeling started almost as soon as they placed my tiny little boy on my chest in the delivery room. Right after we got home from the hospital, only one day after my official due date, we brought O to the pediatrician to check his bilirubin levels. Their office is located on the same floor as a very busy Ob-Gyn practice, and on our way in we encountered no fewer than three pregnant women. One looked like she was ready to deliver, her belly just as huge and as distended as mine, now deflated, had been mere days before. Did I give her a sympathetic glance and a cheery "Good luck!" like some sort of recent Pregnancy Academy graduate? Nope. Instead I got really sad, because all I could think was, I wish I were still pregnant. And it didn't stop there. Right up until I had passed what would have been my 42nd week, every day I would think, You know, I could still be pregnant. Right now. A lifetime has passed since O was born, but it didn't have to work out that way. We could still be the way we were, living in a state of nervous excitement, sleeping long hours, fielding phone calls from expectant relatives, feeling our little boy wriggle and kick from inside my belly. And when the sadness peaked, I would console myself by thinking, I can do this again. I can get pregnant again - probably. I can try, anyway. I bet it will work. And then I get to go through this incredibly special thing, this absolute miracle, at least one more time.

At this point, I'm going say what longtime readers have been thinking: are you CRAZY? You hated being pregnant! Don't you remember the constant stress, the worry, the wear and tear on your body, the daily obsession with whether the baby was going to survive, not to mention the psychological damage from a traumatic IVF cycle? You were miserable for your entire first and second trimesters - as in, really miserable, clinically miserable, miserable enough that you didn't dare bring it up with your doctors because you knew they would be horrified and start talking about drugs and therapy and all sorts of unpleasant things. That kind of miserable. All you wanted was the baby to be out and safe so you could have a chance at feeling like yourself again; you wanted him to be happy and healthy and now he is and why isn't that enough?

I've spent the past three months going over and over these questions, and what follows is my best guess at why I've had this unbelievably surprising reaction:

- Hormones, plain and simple. Postpartum changes are generally acknowledged to be terrible and make you think crazy things. (By the way, did anyone else catch the fertility drug references on 30 Rock recently and maybe laugh a little too knowingly?) But... it's been three months. And I still think all the time about getting pregnant again.

- We really do want to have another baby. Harry and I both grew up with siblings, and the picture in our heads of our eventual family has always had more than one child in it. I'm often hesitant to bring this up in conversation because I know that people can hear "we want to have another baby" as "my existing baby just isn't enough to satisfy me," and that's not it at all. I would frame it more that we love O so much, we can't wait to love his sibling(s), and we're excited for him to love those siblings as well.

- I just want to get this over with. Who knows how much longer I have with my ovaries intact? Could be months, could be decades. (In other words: my biological clock is ticking!) There's that, but there's also the outgrowth of my initial hesitation to have a baby. We've now had a baby, he's here, he's wonderful, and he is also most definitely a ton of work. I'm back to looking at my other life goals with a bit of a longer lens and thinking, you know, in ten years maybe I could do this... in fifteen, maybe that... but if I extend my childbearing years, those goals just get farther and farther away. If we're committed to another child, then let's just get the show on the road already.

- Pregnancy is really special. Yeah, I'll go ahead and say it. I miss the attention more than I would have ever predicted. But I also miss walking around with an amazing secret inside of me. It was a time outside of normal cares and concerns; everything else in my life took a backseat while I concentrated on my #1 job: create a tiny human. Now that things are back to "normal," I am surprisingly wistful about the ability I had over the last year to determine what was important and what wasn't. In other words, I'm back to sweating the small stuff.

- I feel like I screwed it up last time. Oh, it's not like I did something really awful while I was pregnant that I now regret. I didn't ingest banned substances or spend nine months skydiving and eating sushi and generally ignoring all of my obstetrician's advice. But I did spend a large amount of my pregnancy weeping, fretting, and generally feeling sorry for myself and my baby. I know I can't control for all of those things (or for actual medical complications), but I also can't imagine how different it would be to go through a pregnancy that felt... joyous. Or at least not so upsetting.

So we'll see. For now, just to follow up on a recent post, I did decide to take a progestin-only pill while we wait to see what my ovaries do next - for the moment, they're stable with endometriomas between 1-2 cm on each side. I feel generally okay although I think I'm a bit "flat" compared to my usual pre-surgery, pre-IVF, pre-pregnancy self... then again, I have no idea how I would feel with just the hormonal changes that come along with breastfeeding, so it's hard to blame anything on the pill. Nothing remotely interesting will happen in my reproductive life until at least April, which is O's six month birthday and the absolute earliest anyone would entertain a discussion with me about another IVF cycle (and even I recognize that jumping right back into things this soon isn't great for my body overall.) So we wait. Who knows, by April I might feel differently, and in the meantime, I have the most wonderfulest little baby in the world to snuggle and love.