Missoula News

Column: Savagemama

A Tiny Secret: Another Baby on the Way

By Jennifer Savage, 12-28-07

You may have guessed from my silence and the fact that I wrote most recently about eating a hamburger in the middle of the night that I might be carrying around a tiny secret.

Someone recently confronted me, “Only 16-year-old boys and pregnant women have cravings like that.” Arms crossed in front of her she waited for my confession. “Well, I’m not a 16-year-old boy,” I said.

Yes, it’s true. My little secret is growing bigger everyday forcing me into fashion-tragic pants with elastic waists and keeping me from eating almost everything. You guessed it. This Savagemama is pregnant. Knocked up. I’m in the family way, I’ve got a bun in the oven. 

And no one seems to be more continuously surprised by this than me.

I’ve seen women in this situation. Their pregnant belly poking out underneath their shirts, a baby toddling behind them. When I see these women in the reception area of the clinic where I work, waiting on a well-child visit or a prenatal appointment, I think, “Don’t they know how that happens?”

Well I do know how it happens and it wasn’t exactly an accident, though I’m still amazed that either Seth or I would be so willing to have another baby so quickly after having Eliza. She won’t even be two when this little bugger comes into the world. What were we thinking?

Our rationale went a little something like this:

We want more than one child and we’ve already made the big fat life shift to have a kid so why not have another so they’ll be close in age. Basically, we’re in neck deep why not go all the way. So we did.

And a few weeks later over bacon and eggs with my mother in law I felt queasy. Bacon is a part of my DNA. If I got to choose my last meal on earth it would involve bacon. It never disappoints me and it never leaves me feeling like I need to puke. That’s when I knew something was up. I put my mother in law on a plane and drove downtown to run errands. As I was finding my checkbook to go to the bank I thought I’d just check my calendar to see when my next period was supposed to come. I realized it was five days late. My stomach hit the floor.

It took the better part of two years for me to get pregnant with Eliza so when Seth and I started talking about having another baby I thought we we’re talking a year (at least) down the road. I was scrawny, skinny. I thought I needed to gain a little weight, eat better, get myself in shape, take these really expensive vitamins from my naturopath before I could get pregnant again. Wrong.

Turns out I didn’t have quite as much control over the process as I had once thought. It’s this illusion of control that I keep running into lately. And there it was again when I came home and peed on a stick that turned blue in all the right places. I hadn’t actually planned this and, still, it happened anyway. (I can hear my therapist chuckling.)

So here we are, 14 weeks in. The show-stopping nausea seems to be waning (thank God) and it’s just starting to hit me that pretty soon I will have two “to haul around” as my grandmother recently said.

I vacillate between wanting to succumb completely to this motherhood gig and having an anxiety attack when I think of how much work two kids will be. But in the moments when I don’t want to puke and I can take a deep breath, I think about some of the words that help calm me down. Words like “dawg,” “ball,” “nose” and “mama.” Eliza chatters around the house these days practicing her growing vocabulary and I get lost in this little person she’s becoming.

We’re having another baby and no matter how I try to plan, think through and orchestrate, I have no idea how it’s going to work, how we are going to do it. So I guess we just will. And maybe instead of spending the next seven months fretting about it, I should spend them having some conversations with Eliza. Ones that start with important questions like “Where’s your nose?”

Check in regularly with Jennifer Savage at www.newwest.net/savagemama

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