In a 2003 TV documentary, Michael Jackson walks through a stuffy art gallery in a Las Vegas mall and points out everything he wants to the owner.
“Yoo-hoo,” he says, gesturing to a decorative urn. “I like this. Can we order this?” The shop has been cleared of all the riffraff trying to get his photo so he can get down to business and spend half a billion dollars.
Beyond loneliness and overdosing, fame has its perks. Whatever a celebrity wants they get, whether that be to change one’s race or to buy a Fabergé egg once owned by a tsar steps from a Tommy Bahama.
Killing time before a prenatal yoga class when I was 33 weeks pregnant, I browsed a home decor shop and spotted a wicker dog bed. Exhausted, I longed for the influence to kick everyone out and summon the sales girl scrolling her phone. “Yoo-hoo? This dog bed? I want to take a nap in it.”
I didn’t plan it this way, but a friend’s wedding seven months prior was the ideal send-off from a life pre-children. One final party before I morphed into a Pregnant Lady, before my days filled with applesauce pouches and Tide pods. It didn’t matter that I got Covid. The chance to Turn Down for What with old friends would stay with me longer than a bad cough.
And yes, when I discovered I was pregnant and had a life-threatening disease at the same time I was concerned, but my OB reassured me. “It’s probably fine,” she said over Zoom.
Hall, my husband, didn’t get Covid so we spent the first weeks of my pregnancy last May in separate rooms.
“I’m so excited to have a baby,” I said.
“What?”
“I SAID I’M SO EXCITED TO HAVE A BABY.”
Later we would properly revel in the news by hugging each other at random times throughout the day and shit-talking how other people raise their children. “We’re not gonna put our 2-day-old in a basket with a bunch of baguettes and be like, “Fresh out of the oven!” are we?” I asked.
“God, no,” Hall said. “Can we please not let them go barefoot to continental breakfasts?”
“Just not in those roller skate shoes.” (Children shouldn’t have that much swagger.)
But for the contagious period it was either yelling across the house or sitting on the couch in masks holding freshly washed hands and talking about how tired I was. “What’s wrong?” Hall would ask when he’d notice I was especially quiet and moving about like a roly-poly.
“I’m just tired,” I said, meaning it for the first time in my life. It wasn’t masking resentment or a translation for I’m mad at you and I want you to figure out why. I was just tired. Really, really tired.
I figured the extreme fatigue would dissipate once I got over Covid.
“I’M EXHAUSTED,” I called to Hall one day from the bedroom. It was beautiful outside, an ad for spring in the Southern Appalachians. Ferns were unfurling, the azaleas were blooming and when I coughed a Carolina Chickadee serenaded me. I could see new life everywhere, at least from the window, and closed my eyes. “MAYBE IT’S JUST ALLERGIES.”
“MOLLY, YOU HAVE COVID.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“WHAT?”
“I SAID ‘YEAH.’”
Unlike humans who use wine to reproduce, oak trees use the wind. The male flower releases pollen while the female flower waits for an air current to bring it her way. “It happens when you least expect it,” her friends say. Eventually she’ll produce a tiny acorn, who will grow to become a tree or maybe even president. This was why our car was coated in yellow and why I couldn't stop snoughing, or sneeze-coughing.
Beneath the trees, the first wildflowers were stretching out shoots like little green arms. Trilliums and Geraniums, names I may have considered for my daughter were I not under the influence of my mother. “Don’t choose anything weird,” she’d said. But wouldn’t she love Dwarf Crested Iris anyway?
Above, millions of birds were using the night sky to navigate north to their breeding grounds, some traveling upwards of 15,000 miles. I, meanwhile, clocked about 50 feet from trips to the bathroom.
I had a front row bed to this beautiful cycle except I couldn’t stay awake to witness it. And after two weeks, when my sore throat was gone and I was no longer coughing mucus the color of the buds outside, I was still tired. It wasn’t allergies. It wasn’t Covid. It was pregnancy.
My favorite quote is, “Oh, you must be exhausted.” In the beginning of my first trimester when I wore fatigue like a uniform it was all I wanted to hear. The problem was that no one knew I was pregnant. How was I allowed to take a nap unless some lady at BuyBuyBaby gave me permission?
I went through those first weeks begging to spill my secret so some stranger would say, “Oh you must be exhausted. Go lie down!”
My mom had a similar adage when we were growing up but you never wanted to hear it.
It’s dinnertime on a Tuesday and my 4-year-old sister Caroline is having a meltdown. She throws herself on the ground while my mom wrangles her and says, “Oh, you’re exhausted.” Caroline screams that she’s not.
“Oh yes, you’re exhausted,” my mom says again, and again, Caroline screams that she’s not. Twenty minutes later she’s asleep.
I suppose it’s a good thing I couldn’t tell anyone. Had I been asked how I was feeling I wouldn’t have had the energy to lie. “I feel like I’m dying,” I’d have said. “But I can’t wait to meet the little nugget!”
If only we were forced to sleep as adults. The second you yawn the nap police take away your phone and lock you in a dark room with a bed. This is what I needed when I had 30 minutes between work calls in May. Even though I needed the sleep (they say pregnancy is as metabolically taxing as running a marathon or finding a recipe on a blog), choosing to nap on a spring day felt dirty.
By June I wouldn’t have a choice – under the influence of the rising hormones my body reached a point each day where it just had to lie. I hadn’t been a big napper previously as I always woke up feeling disgusting and mean, but at least I’d felt rested. When pausing the day to sleep during pregnancy, I woke up as tired as I went in and buffered away the hours until nighttime.
When you’re expecting you have to limit coffee because the caffeine decreases blood flow to the uterus or makes your baby come out holding a briefcase, I can’t remember which, so I couldn’t drink it the way I had before – two cups in the morning to wake up and one in the afternoon as a narcotic. Instead I had coffee just once per day, like a Mormon on spring break.
As animals die off in greater numbers I imagine scientists will invent clever ways to augment reproduction. Perhaps they’ll use caffeine as a tool, dumping Monster Energy into bodies of water to get them to stop moping around and get back in the saddle. But for now the birds and the bees don’t need stimulants to sing at 5 AM. Eastern Phoebes and Tufted Titmice woke me up every morning last summer, and every morning I’d shut the window and burrow into my pregnancy pillow, Big Flopsy. Big Flopsy was massive and gray, like something pulled out of a swamp, and it had a tag that looked like an eye. “I love you,” I’d say, stroking its head and holding it up to Hall. Romance had taken a new and ugly form.
As a practicing millennial, tired or not, on Saturdays I went to the farmers market. It runs all year but I go in summer when there’s safety in numbers. In winter you risk making eye contact with the vendors, feeling bad you’re not buying anything, feeling bad for them because you’re not buying anything, and feeling bad for the world because of human suffering. I couldn’t stomach any of the produce proving that the world was waking up, so went for the guy selling croissants out of a van.
On other days I’d lie in bed and wonder, What if I didn’t get up? I recalled a similar feeling on Sunday mornings in 6th grade knowing I was scheduled to altar serve. What if I just…didn’t go? I always went – the guilt would have been too strong to lie to my parents – but I made sure to hold the cross in a way that said I don’t want to be here.
There were some benefits to pregnancy. Other than the fact that I was growing a best friend, I also had an excuse for everything, which included going to bed when Seinfeld was still on. On the Fourth of July as we sat on our blankets waiting for the sun to set and “Born in the U.S.A.” came on, I didn’t let it hypnotize me into American pride but instead used it as a pump-up song to stay awake longer than the popsicle-stained toddlers around me.
When August came I had a respite from the extreme fatigue and a number of other symptoms, which is typical of the second trimester. “The second trimester is AMAZING,” friends had said. “You feel SO GOOD.” I’d expected to feel like I was tripping on acid or maybe 24 again but really I just felt normal, which was welcome after three months of puking and falling asleep on the toilet. The change was so drastic that I felt like I’d come out of a coma. “What year is it?” I asked Hall. “Is Reagan still president?”
Even though I was 10 pounds heavier, I felt like myself again. I went for walks and swam, and spent summer evenings reading, finally learning what a cervix was (the bouncer for the uterus). We went on a babymoon, which is a debutante ball for your bump at a beach. We spent ours in the Outer Banks, and when I wasn’t napping in the parking lot of a Verizon Wireless as Hall sorted out our lost service inside, I read a book in the sand, getting kicked from the inside. Thankfully the Queen died on our trip and our hotel had BBC so we didn’t have to worry about nightlife.
In late September I noted the influx of birds in the sky. They had their new babies in tow and were flying to places like Mexico, where there was ample food in valleys and rainforests, and thanks to American tourists, champions of conservation, in the dumpsters outside of Señor Frog’s. I sat on my deck in a sweater and continued incubating my own chick, feeling sad for the day she’d leave the nest and wondering if I could convince her that I really did want to get another degree and it just so happened to be from the same university.
Leaf peepers arrived soon after, in hiking boots for driving slowly on mountain roads and crowding out locals in breweries. I drank apple cider like water and rounded out like a pumpkin ready to be manhandled by a child. On Halloween, I entered our dog in a costume contest and prepared for the politics of parenthood when he didn’t win. “Those assholes,” I said on the drive home. “He was the cutest one there.”
By 30 weeks I heard it all the time, mostly from other moms. “You must be exhausted!”
And once again, I was. I’d smile, the corners of my mouth butting up against my cheeks like a squirrel’s packing nuts for winter. “But not as tired as I’ll be in a couple months!” I said, in an effort to preempt their inevitable response of, If you think you’re tired now, just wait!
“Hope you have enough diapers!” one mom would say, before lowering her voice. “You’ll go through five hundred in a week.”
“Are you so excited to have a baby?” asks another. “It’s the best thing in the world!”
“Yeah! It’s gonna be grea–”
“Your life is over. Everything you’ve known is gone.”
Moms love to scare you when you’re pregnant. It's their verbal hazing that initiates you into the sisterhood of motherhood.
A number of symptoms had returned for the third trimester and I welcomed new ones, like heartburn and being a bitch. Plants and animals were dead or gone, the fall trees decommissioned and the mountains brown and lame. After months of leaving the doors and windows open, Hall and I migrated inside and warmed ourselves by the light of the TV.
On Christmas, two days before I was scheduled to give birth, we made dinner and sat across from each other at the dining room table. Hall had roasted a chicken, and though I still found meat problematic, I ate it to prepare for the coming bloodshed. By then we’d exchanged gifts and FaceTimed our families. We’d painted and furnished the nursery. We’d gotten our chimney inspected and had a vague argument about the value of trade schools. “I’m so tired,” Hall said, before pausing. “But not as tired as you are.” It was the last time it’d be just the two of us, man and husk.
It was still dark the morning we arrived at the hospital. The building was quiet, not yet running on Dunkin’, and the only activity was from nurses leaving the night shift. When I checked in I whispered. “Hi, I’m here to have a baby?”
They started the IV right away. Drugs to coax the baby out of her slumber. And later that night when she still hadn’t budged, drugs to help me fall asleep. Attempts to buttress me with hospital pillows were futile – I would have had better luck with rolls of paper towels — and knowing I wouldn’t sleep for the rest of my life, I wanted one final night. When the Ambien finally kicked in I turned to Hall. “I’m dreaming! I’m dreaming!” I said, seconds before passing out in the middle of my third popsicle.
On December 28th, I watched the sun rise over the mountains with a cold cup of Jello. By 10 o’clock, the baby was (very forcefully) turning towards the light, knowing her hibernation had ended and signaling that mine had too. I’d spent the better part of 39 weeks lying dormant in my West Elm den, conserving energy for this specific moment.
“It’s time,” the doctor said, tying her surgical cap while a new team of nurses arrived. The blues of their scrubs spread over me like the sky, and my green-gowned bump rose to meet it like a lush, breathing mountain. The fetal heart rate monitor had been beeping the whole time but now kept beat for the metallic sounds of surgical instruments, tinkling like a stream. My husband whispered reassurance, his breath warm and heady, and 30 hospital pillows were pulled from under me in a lumpy flood of polyester. My water had broken, the rain had come, and the birdsong of women chatting hung in the air.
“Chick-fil-A?” said a nurse, stretching on a glove.
“We had that on Monday,” said another, as I lay feet away – heaving, humid, and tired, still, as dirt.
For them it was two hours from lunch on a Wednesday, the depths of winter. For me it was spring.
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Lovely!