Moving through Prenatal Anxiety in Uncertain Times

This is about the most personal I’ve ever been with you, my fellow BodyWiseMama.  But, as we say, the times they are a-changing.

I’ve never once taken a viable, healthy pregnancy for granted.  My husband and I navigated a 4+ year road of family planning paved with infertility, disappointments, disagreements and frustrations.  On one hand, I believe that this is a moot point now: I am positively pregnant and we’ve come through a lot of the challenging times feeling stronger as partners.  Blessed be.  But, on the other hand, I find myself facing prenatal anxiety in the here and now that brings that past into the present.  And, in my experience, this anxiety manifests in deep and subtle ways that no one would ever notice on the surface.

For example, every time I pee (which is very often during pregnancy!), I take a deep breath and pray that nothing but urine comes out.  I check the toilet and the toilet paper for spotting or bleeding.  Every time.  It’s a work in progress to untangle myself from this obsessive-compulsive response to the fear of miscarriage.  These types of behaviors provide an instant yet false sense of control and power over the fear as well as instant gratification that all is well right now, so they are especially tricky to undo.  My awareness of the entanglement is there, and that is a solid baby step (pun intended?). 

Then there is the almost daily and often unpredictable onset of baby bump growing pains that trigger hypervigilance.  And, sometimes, it’s the lack of aches and pains that can bring it on.  Then I wonder, is this pregnancy real?  During my last check-up, the midwife reassured me that, at this point of gestation, any physical discomfort or pain (or lack thereof for that matter) I feel are on me and not the baby.  I guess this pregnancy is a sort of basic training for motherhood!  Her point was this: our little one is very protected, safe and secure deep inside many layers of phenomenally resilient tissue.  The baby’s womb room is tethered by my round ligaments, armored by my abdominal muscles and held by my pelvis.  As our growing baby, well, grows, my body naturally follows.  Then, all those musculoskeletal structures evolve and shift – automatically adapting – causing me to feel all that physical expansion.  I get it, intellectually.  As my husband and I jokingly say in Valley Girl voice when an uncomfortable growing pain pops up: I’m like reeeaaallly pregnant! 

Psychologically and emotionally, though, those pangs of pain sometimes ping my amygdala to open and flood my body with anxiety and vigilance because of old stories and old wounds.  They include my mom’s battle with breast cancer that started when I was 4 and unconsciously absorbing her (and probably my dad’s) greatest fears at that time of not being here for her children.  These stories don’t always go back that far, though.  While TTC, my husband and I chose a path that involved an obscene number of diagnostics.  Our bodies were microscopically evaluated for possible root causes of infertility.  I happen to have autoimmune conditions that I’ve been functioning optimally with through lifestyle (i.e. diet and exercise).  Lab work will sometimes detect an abnormal range in my blood counts.  This happened a couple of times on our journey to conceiving, with medical professionals “flagging” me for follow-ups with other doctors.  At one point, I ended up with a hematologist to evaluate my test results and, when I arrived, I was handed a pamphlet on coping with a cancer diagnosis.  Seriously!?  But, anyway, the hematologist (who is a 40+ year practicing physician with a very reputable history of treating blood disorders and cancer) reassured me that I’ll continue to function as a perfectly healthy mama even with my funky blood counts.  He told me that my “abnormal results” weren’t that “interesting” to him.  Believe me, I wasn’t offended.  But, the bottom line is this: I’ve had some scares on the journey to pregnancy that something has gone terribly wrong.