In the discussion section of the What To Expect app, there’s a post titled “Just Curious.” In it, a woman asks the group of expecting moms how to prepare for delivery. “Lol I know this is the last thing to think about but I know I look like a troll without makeup. Do you guys put on makeup? Get a blowout? Get lash extensions/lift?”
In almost three months of being pregnant, I hadn’t at all considered what I’d look like when knee-deep in labor. Would my hair be cooperating? If I had on mascara, would it run? Should I get a naturally hairless body part waxed, like my palms, just in case? I made a note to ask my OB if it was safe to get breast implants while pregnant. I was already pushing double D’s, but if it’d make the day more special for my husband or 268 followers if I were say, a K, I’d consider it.
The alternative would be to accept that I too might look like a troll and just deliver my baby under a bridge where I belonged.
I don’t spend much time in the discussion area of the What To Expect app as the threads provide little in the way of insight or advice. Instead, they’re for complaining about mother-in-laws or outsourcing name choices (“Do you guys like Steeler for a boy? My husband loves football!”) or for photos of baby announcements – a little boy dressed in suspenders and a newsboy cap holds a newspaper that reads, “Extra! Extra! Carson is going to be a big brother!”
What the app did offer in those early months, however, was a place to openly be pregnant, even if I didn’t contribute and mostly sat there judging. Because of the chance of miscarrying, women aren’t encouraged to share their pregnancy news until the end of the first trimester, which is wild considering how life and body altering those first months are.
“So, what’s new?” friends would ask.
“Oh, same old, same old,” I’d say. Was I supposed to tell the truth?
“Oh, you know, just puked water.”
“Cried today from a brown avocado.”
I found a sense of community in the app. When someone would write “Does anyone else wake up nauseous at 3 am and have to eat a banana in the dark?” I felt seen.
But when I read posts about how to look hot during labor, or asking how to lose the baby weight two weeks postpartum, I’d close the app and stare out the window. Hand on my belly I thought, I hope she’ll be a fool, a beautiful little fool…and long for an icy cocktail.
On one particular afternoon this past July, I opened the app in desperation, searching for tips on curing a debilitating headache. I’d already hit my caffeine intake for the day, so my go-to-relief option of a Coke was off limits. So was ibuprofen which, like vodka, is frowned upon during pregnancy. And the recommendations of rest and an ice pack from Google, my unofficial primary care provider, had only gotten me so far. Sure, I could put an ice pack on my head, but was there any way to get it inside my skull?
My thumb scrolled while my head pounded, so hard it felt like I was being driven further and further into the couch. It was the kind of headache where the slightest of movements caused agony, where walking led to an audible throbbing, so when I got up to use the bathroom, I had to slide my feet along the ground as if cross-country skiing.
Headaches are a common symptom in pregnancy. They’re caused by the usual culprits: lack of sleep, fatigue, stress, or low blood sugar, but in pregnant women also stem from hormonal fluctuations and an increase in blood production. So, if you take a normal person’s probability of getting a headache and then factor in a flood of estrogen and a two liter Pepsi’s worth of blood, chances are pretty high that a pregnant woman will spend time rubbing her head like she will her belly (an unforgivable word – more on this later).
My first introduction to headaches was when my mom, probably with one of her own after another day raising five children, would threaten them. I would be weeping uncontrollably at some childhood injustice or inability to solve a math problem about Sally and her apples, and my mom would say, not looking up from the stove, “If you don’t stop crying, you’re gonna get a headache.” Which always made me cry harder. Because she was right. There I’d be, performing every tear just so, unsure as to why I was wasting my art for such an indifferent audience, and usually having forgotten why I’d started crying in the first place, and my head would start to thump. She’s. Always. Right, it went.
The first headache I can remember that wasn’t conjured by my own theatrics was in first grade. It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon, ripe conditions for illness of any kind, and I was with my Girl Scout troop on a tour of the wastewater treatment plant. I can’t think of any place less interesting for a first grader, especially in the early 90’s. Who cared about water when there was Juicy Juice, and why care about its management when it was as seemingly dependable and eternal as childhood itself? Even now, when water scarcity is real, and soon we’ll be waking at dawn to harvest dew from a Peanuts-sized tree (the only one left in our colony after mass deforestation) to nourish our two jaundiced children (two children too many in the resource-stricken hellscape that is planet Earth), I’d rather do almost anything else.
I felt worse and worse as we toured the white halls in our brown vests. The final stop was an airless room, and I remember the pain crescendoing as I tipped my head over a bin of soil and worms. What this had to do with anything, I had no idea (maybe the workers ate them?) and only after doing research do I know that the tour guide was showing how worms burrow into the soil to create channels for rainwater. “Underground beavers,” people call them.
I left the building that day knowing where my clean drinking water came from but unable to appreciate it for the image stuck in my head of worms writhing around, like a brain come undone.
A couple years later, I came home from school with an assignment to read my mom a story but she had a headache so bad that I had to read it and she had to sign off afterwards, in the dark.
My teacher called me to her desk a few days later and held up the worksheet.
“Is this your mom’s signature?” I looked at it. It was a crooked line with two loops in it.
“Yes,” I said, hating myself.
“Is this what her handwriting normally looks like?” she said in the same way a cop would ask, “Do you normally run red lights?”
“No.”
“Then why does it look like this?” She was so confident that she’d caught me, a forger.
I bowed my head, ashamed. “Because she signed in the dark. Because I read in the dark.”
There was a pause and she softened. What kind of environment was this child going home to that she didn’t have electricity?
“Why did she sign it in the dark, Molly?”
“She had a headache.” I looked up, pleading with her to understand something I was still learning – that when an adult has a terrible headache they must lie as if dead in a black room. That the noise of a child learning to read is painful so when they slide their limp hand from beneath the covers to help with homework, they’re allowed to completely choke – to scrawl a crooked line with two loops in it.
“Ah,” she said. “Don’t let it happen again.” I walked back to my desk like Charlie Brown.
At 11 weeks pregnant, I lay in agony in the dark combing through the app’s comments. I’d been having headaches daily but today’s was the worst, seeing as I was ready to entrust my health to someone named MamaBearGrr. “The only thing that cured my headache was drinking water until it went away,” she’d written.
I knew from early research that I was supposed to be getting between 64-96 ounces of water a day, but to avoid going to the bathroom any more than I already was (on the hour like a suburban train), I was only putting back about three glasses a day.
I used to hydrate like a professional. When I worked in an office, I drank water like it was my job. Really. I barely did my job and I mostly drank water. I learned that the more you drink, the more often you get to leave your desk to take long bathroom breaks. You pee for three minutes, wash your hands for another three, and then spend the rest of the time staring at the mirror, praying for 5 pm with your reflection of Ann Taylor.
But heeding the advice of my newfound community, I got up from the couch and chugged over the sink, recalling what my college roommate had said at parties. “You have to open the back of your throat.” She repeated it the next morning when I nursed at the teat of a large Nalgene.
After an hour guzzling water my headache was gone. I felt clear, human. I hadn’t needed drugs or caffeine. Google wouldn’t need to invoice me for its medical advice. And I’d survived without outsourcing help from friends or family. I had just needed water. The simplest element, the essence of life, the product of my wastewater treatment plant.
MamaBearGrr had been integral to my recovery, and amidst thirty trips to the bathroom, I spent the rest of the evening telepathically thanking her. Was she too planning on curling her eyelashes for labor or getting a manicure to complement the red and blue stripes of the hospital receiving blanket? I decided I didn’t care. I felt too good to judge, and upon noticing in the mirror what proper hydration had done for my skin, I was quite pleased. I looked brighter, fresher. Almost as if I were glowing, almost as if I weren’t a troll.