Suburban Turmoil
If I thought raising stepdaughters would earn me an honorary entree into the secret club of motherhood, I was dead wrong. When I’d run into the “real” moms at school plays and sports matches, they were polite but distant, forming their own tight circles that were bound by shared experiences and inside jokes. I stood on the outside, awkwardly smiling and alone.
Until I got pregnant.
“When are you due?” Annette Hinkle asked, setting her chair beside mine on the soccer field. I looked over at her in surprise. Annette had never said more than hello.
“In April,” I replied.
“Well, I hope you’re not having too bad of a time with morning sickness,” she said, leaning in conspiratorially. “I threw up at least once a day for the entire nine months I was pregnant with MacKenzie.”
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“Are you serious?” I asked nervously.
“Ohhhh yes,” she said. “At the end there, I was lying on the delivery table and I sat up and puked and pooped at the same time. And then I looked over at my husband and screamed, “No more kids!”
I put one hand protectively on my belly. They certainly hadn’t shown anything like that on A Baby Story.
By that time, Maggie Peterson, Barbara Loudermilk and Grace Burton had joined us. Everyone exclaimed over my new baby bump and within minutes the anecdotes were flying. There were tales of emergency c-sections and ripped abdominal walls, bleeding hemorrhoids and broken tailbones.
“When I finally pushed Jonah out, no kidding, I ripped up one side and down the other,” Barbara recounted too vividly. At that point, I knew I had made it into the inner circle of motherhood. I’d never felt more accepted. Or more repulsed.
What was it about my bulging belly that made these women tell me their most disgusting secrets? For answers, I turned to Uma Subbiah, a clinical psychologist here in Nashville, who had a very simple explanation for my newfound popularity: I was, according to her, providing the moms with an excuse for a little group therapy.
“Pregnancy can be traumatic,” Subbiah explains. “Women end up bouncing things off each other to see what’s normal and what’s not.”
Funny, I had always imagined that group therapy involved folding chairs, a church fellowship hall and lots of tissue, not recitations on what color discharges women have when they’re incubating a human. But Subbiah says it can happen anywhere, even on a Bellevue soccer field.
“It’s great,” Subbiah says. “Sometimes you’re holding onto a lot of stress, and being able to let that off your chest and talk about it and laugh or cry about it can be really therapeutic.”
Therapeutic, at least, for moms who have been through the pregnancy experience. For me, it was freaking scary. After hearing a few too many tales of 72-hour labors, botched epidurals and ripped perinea, I no longer saw myself as one of the moms in those Baptist Hospital commercials, bathed in a heavenly light and serenely holding a sleeping infant in my arms. Instead, I figured I’d be lying battered, bruised and barely conscious in a corner while my family oohed and ahhed over my newborn on the other side of the room.
In the end, having a baby wasn’t quite that bad, but it definitely stands out as the most humiliating moment of my life. From the early contractions that had me moaning and writhing in pain all afternoon in front of my extended family to the moment after I gave birth, when some idiot let everyone into the delivery room while I lay spread eagled and gasping on the table, it certainly was no Kodak moment.
Yet afterward, I, too, felt an irresistible urge to share my trauma with everyone I met.
“They say labor is painful. Well, that’s nothing compared to going to the bathroom for the first time after you’ve given birth,” I said knowingly to a woman who’d just told me she was expecting her first child. Her eyes widened. I laughed evilly and continued.
“And breastfeeding? After a few days of it, I literally felt like tiny needles were going through my nipples every time I nursed,” I continued. “I actually cried every night before bed, just thinking of dealing with that at midnight and 4 a.m.” Her face turned pale.
“But don’t worry,” I said airily. “You’ll be fine…after a few weeks of unbelievable pain.” Later, I mimicked the newbie’s facial expression for my mommy friends. Once we’d had a good laugh, the pregnancy stories continued.
“I could think of nothing but sex while I was pregnant, but for the last two months, my husband was afraid to even touch me,” Stacey reminisced. “I was miserable.”
“That’s nothing,” Annie scoffed beside her. “When I was pregnant, my husband had to insert my suppositories for me!”
“Well, I heard about a man who saved his wife’s placenta and used it to make cocktails when they got home from the hospital,” My friend Jean said.
Abruptly, the laughter stopped.