In Praise of the “Whoopsie” Baby

Unplanned pregnancy and surrender

As I move forward with writing and simultaneously move toward a maternity leave that feels very up-in-the-air in terms of what is in store for me career-wise (with nursing), I am realizing that I feel more and more compelled to try and make writing into something more than just a hobby. This is a vulnerable thing to put down for others to read.

As such, I am humbly asking for my readers to consider a paid subscription. I have plans for more value for paid subscribers coming up. If you cannot commit to a paid subscription but desire to leave a monetary token of appreciation, I set up a “buy me a coffee”. I will link to both options below.

As always, I appreciate all of you no matter your ability or desire to compensate me! Your engaging with and sharing of my work, and also the silent reading of it as well, is all so valuable and precious to me. Thank you all.

---

I have never had a planned pregnancy.

I have had pregnancies that came to me when I was not feeling open to life and ones that have came to me when I was—but none of them have been planned. This, at times, was a result of irresponsibility and youth and likely some flavor of intoxication. At other times, it was more a result of getting lax about charting my cycle and not feeling very passionate about prevention while also not being opposed to pregnancy.

I was listening to

Meghan Murphy

and Marylou Singleton’s (of

Enchanted Family Medicine

) weekly “Where Are All the Women” broadcast on YouTube recently (see below, also worth listening to as MaryLou’s walk through how IVF works was very illuminating) and Meghan stated something to the effect of “maybe accidental pregnancy is kind of the way to do it” and I realized that I actually agree. Sometimes when the choice of “when” is subtracted from a decision, the decision becomes a little more easeful for us. I have no doubts that some women absolutely know when the right time is, but also, the question of “when” when it comes to pregnancy is a question I have hardly ever heard answered concisely.

I recently had a conversation with a coworker of mine who is about 5 years younger than me about this exact topic. I basically told her that banking on future fertility isn’t wise, that the best thing for her body would be to not wait, and that the time will never feel ideal or perfect so stop waiting for her list of requirements to be perfectly checked off. I feel like the advice of “the time will never feel perfect” is common, but the advice of “consider your future fertility and how to protect your body from the consequences of increased medical involvement” is missing from that advice. There is a sense of urgency there that I think is important. It’s not something I said to her to scare her, but to protect her. The urgency that goes along with my message is just putting words to the urgency women often feel in our bodies as we grow older.

---

I was a very shy student in my schooling experience and I resented nothing more than I resented having to present projects or papers in front of the other students. I feel like my teachers sensed this and often picked me to go first or second. If I was left to my own devices, I would have volunteered last. As a mega-introvert and serial procrastinator, going last was my perpetual aim in school. And so they often foiled my plans and forced me to the front of the room long before I had told myself I would be in that place.

And then I would present, and it would be fine, and I would do well and then came the best part….I got to sit back down. I got to bask in my glory and relief and actually enjoy learning about what Stephanie from up the street learned about dolphins or what Corey the weird kid thinks about the death penalty.

This, in a rudimentary and silly way, is sort of what having my first child before all of my friends had children felt like. Prior to having her, I wasn’t sure what my future held and I had no solid plans. It was my pregnancy with her that forced me to make solid plans and consider my future. I didn’t dread pregnancy the way I dreaded public speaking, but I was unsure about it and certainly didn’t feel ready. I was 20 years old and my boyfriend went to prison shortly after I got pregnant. I was freshly sober from hard drugs. I worked for a veterinarian who laid me off right after I announced my pregnancy at work. I was taking a few classes at the community college but at the time wasn’t taking it very seriously. I lived with my parents. It was not ideal.

It was not ideal but for every not ideal thing I just listed—the fact of the pregnancy and later, the fact of my daughter—meant I found a solution or transformed it into something good. In that ever-evolving process, I learned a lot and gained a lot.

The direction in which the force of life pushes us is for good, this much I know. I write this as my entire belly shifts before my eyes, burgeoning with life just under the surface. There is a lot of speculating I could do on how my life would have gone if I had not been met with hers, but there is no true way to know. What I do understand is that for every apprehension I held when I found myself pregnant, there was a calm I found later once she had arrived. Just like I got to sit back and enjoy the show of my classmates presenting after me as a child, I got to sit back and enjoy witnessing my friends have babies after me while I held that calm.

Bertha Wegmann - Motherhood, 1846-1926.

I don’t recommend or pedestal single motherhood, but once upon a time, I was a single mother and that was better than what I was before—a lost girl. For myself at that time in my life, allowing life to flourish meant allowing myself to sever ties with a person who harmed me. Also for myself at that time, becoming a mother is what set me in the direction of the place I am fully enveloped in today, a place where I am a functioning member of a community, where I am a mother to more life that I made, where I am the tender of a home, where I have a career, and yes, where I am no longer a single mother.

I could easily have instead have been a cautionary tale. But I’m here, and I’m about to have another baby, and I wake up in the morning to little freckled faces needing milk and oatmeal and then I drive the biggest little freckled face to her little rural Catholic school.

In thinking about that phase of my life, I ask myself the question: what does it take to make a child into an adult? What events or experiences or accomplishments force change upon individuals so great that the course of their life is diverted? There are a great many answers to these questions but none of them are as simple or universal or as biological as becoming a parent.

The map to human maturation is a built-in feature of the human physical body, and I would argue all the more so within the female body. There is no other fairly universal and reasonably accessible way to gain the gritty determination matched with humility and grace that the adult woman must possess to be a successful human adult on this Earth than through childbirth and mothering. Childbirth has been considered a rite of passage across time and place for a reason, of course. And yes, because it is biological, it can be accidental.

Graduating college, beginning a career, international travel, buying a home, getting married—these tend to become, at least in Western society, the other “markers of maturation”. But parenthood is different in the fact that it can happen when you don’t particularly want it to and aren’t intentionally trying to, because of its physiological nature. You don’t graduate on accident. Barring extreme intoxication or some sort of fugue state, you don’t get married by accident. Seeking shelter surely is physiological but becoming a homeowner isn’t a biological process.

In the process of your own life expanding and multiplying into another, there is an unavoidable and acute understanding of one of the most obvious yet simultaneously most forgotten and ignored fundamental human realities— that your life doesn’t merely exist just for yourself.

The CDC website states that “the percentage of US pregnancies that were unintended declined from 43.3% in 2010 to 41.6% in 2019. Rates of unintended pregnancies declined by 15%, from 42.1 per 1,000 females aged 15–44 in 2010 to 35.7 in 2019.” They define unintended pregnancy as a pregnancy that was “unwanted” or simply just “mistimed”.

Another statistic I found interesting from their site was that from 2010 to 2019, rates of pregnancy in younger women decreased dramatically while the rates of pregnancy in older women increased (with women in my own age bracket, the 30-34 bracket, staying relatively stable) as shown in the quote below:

By age, estimated pregnancy rates declined by at least 50% for 2010-2019 for young people under age 20 (under age 15: 1.0 per 1,000 to 0.4, a decline of 60%; aged 15-19: 60.8 per 1,000 to 29.4, a decline of 52%). Pregnancy rates also declined 29% for women aged 20-24 (from 139.3 to 98.8) and 14% for women aged 25-29 (from 154.3 to 132.6). For women aged 30-34, pregnancy rates were essentially the same in 2019 (139.7) as in 2010 (139.1). For women aged 35 and over, pregnancy rates were higher in 2019 than in 2010. For women aged 35-39, pregnancy rates increased by 11% from 69.1 to 77.0. For women aged 40 and over, pregnancy rates increased 15%, from 21.5 to 24.7. In 2010, women aged 25-29 (154.3) had the highest estimated pregnancy rates followed by women aged 20-24 (139.3), but in 2019, the group with the highest estimated pregnancy rates was women aged 30-34 (139.7), followed by women aged 25-29.

Clearly, older women are not suddenly evolving to become pregnant more easily and younger women are not suddenly evolving to avoid pregnancy more easily. These numbers very much reflect the pharmaceutical, surgical and procedural medical meddling with the natural course of life making. Some people may see these numbers and applaud, I am not one of those people.

This doesn’t mean I’m a proponent of teen pregnancy, nor does it mean I do not think older women should be having babies. It means I am recognizing a general pattern in which younger women are prioritizing things beyond family, which is facilitated by technology, and then waiting until later to give birth for the first time and utilizing technology to do so.

In this pattern of technologically influenced life making, accidental pregnancy is clearly becoming more rare. I want to be clear—I want women to have the bodily knowledge they need in order to space pregnancies the way they desire to and I understand what it is like to become pregnant when it feels mistimed or completely scary or uncomfortable. The issue lies in the fact that women, in all of our discontents, have simply been too eager to accept temporary (and sometimes permanent) sterility in exchange for economic mobility as a condition of our liberation.

tend.her.heart

A post shared by @tend.her.heart

When I realized I was pregnant with my most recent child at 7 months postpartum, I sobbed. I sat on the edge of the bathtub with my head in my hands, reeling. I did not feel ready, I was still nursing my son at least 10 times a day, and I felt foolish for not having realized I was pregnant sooner. With my other children I knew I was pregnant before I could even get a positive test. With this baby, I was already about 7 or 8 weeks before my revulsion at the smell of cooking chicken clued me in. How could I have missed it?

A surprise pregnancy was not something I was a stranger to. Yet, this felt different. I had always been able to experience immediate gratitude and joy, even in fairly dire circumstances (as outlined above). This time I just simply felt closed off. The idea of an “openness to life” appeals to me and….this wasn’t that, at least not in the precise moment when my suspicions were confirmed by two pink lines as I sat on the bathroom floor crying. I felt quiet inside, unable to locate the joy and the gratitude I knew so well. I felt grief knowing that my breastfeeding experience with my already-born baby could potentially be impacted.

I think back to this time and I think I was just feeling incredibly self-protective. I wasn’t sure if I had the mineral reserves to sustain two lives. I don’t think this was without reason, I still think there is a lot of wisdom in my worries. I also think that they were somewhat a result of my consumption of a lot of fear mongering, overly idealistic rhetoric that is out there on this topic. Now, I’m of the belief that if your body can become pregnant without intervention, then the reserves are there. It becomes a matter of maintaining those reserves at that point, through nutrition. The feeling I experienced ultimately was just a reminder of the need to take extra care.

As time moved on, acceptance moved in, which gave way to gratitude. After that, after her birth, all there was was her. Just like the two times before. You have a baby and then you just cannot comprehend how there was a life without them before. Babies have a way of existing that is so all-encompassing. This, matched with brain and hormonal changes in us as mothers, really does create a new reality, the only reality. Your arms are full, your heart is full, and life marches on through you into them.

Here’s where I feel compelled to place the caveat. Women prioritizing things beyond childbearing and family is something I don’t personally relate to. I prefer childrearing and home-tending over my shifts at the hospital. I actually sincerely prefer cooking in my own kitchen over the idea of jet-setting and eating all over the world. I am very home-oriented. I also understand not every woman is like me. I know some women are more career oriented, or have a passion for whatever art or religious vocation or non-profit work that they are invested in that surpasses their current interest in family.

I also do think that many women really are similar to me in their interests and desires. And many of those women are trapped in situations in which the prioritization of family-making feels very difficult or impossible. Maybe they have no children and feel they cannot have any until X, Y, and Z are taken care of. Maybe they have children and desire to have more but feel like the time isn’t right. Maybe their family will judge them for having more than the societally approved 2.

These concerns surrounding pregnancy are fair and valid, and they can have real implications. They also can be very socially informed and not based on actual personal desire. What society deems a “good pregnancy” may not be what happens to us, and I think most of the time, it all ends up okay. The standards for what a “good pregnancy” is seem to get less attainable every year, and likely non-ironically, they inevitably eventually put women in situations that then require that aforementioned technological meddling. The age of physiological manipulation pairs perfectly with the age of the financially successful, perfectly prepared, perfectly curated, planned pregnancy. Of course a wanted baby coming into an intact and happy and stable family at the time of their choosing is a wonderful thing, but if all of these things do not line up absolutely perfectly with a Nuna car seat and a $1600 dollar Snoo on top, it will also be just fine.

Perfection isn’t required of us in mothering, and we cannot always expect perfection in when mothering comes to call. Faith in many ways has been replaced with the false God of physiological control, the sort of control that is empowered by birth control pills, social media posts encouraging women to sterilize themselves based on who the president is, and nonchalant attitudes about abortion.

There is something to be said for the allowing of life, even when one doesn’t feel completely open to it. Often, our feelings shift, our hearts open, and the realization that this is all an immense gift does actually fall upon our shoulders if only we give ourselves some time. Accidental pregnancy doesn’t have to be a crisis or a sentence to a life of misery—it can be an invitation to a life of more. The chaos that we sometimes perceive our bodies to be the location of is really just a result of our misunderstanding of the order of natural world. I find comfort in this idea, at least, and maybe you will too.

Looking at my last baby born—my third whoopsie baby, now three years old— picking daffodils for me, I can see no mistake nor misfortune. I see only a little flame-haired fairy that I get to hug and play with and share my life with for now, before she grows up. And that time is relatively short in the span of our lives, and that time is the most precious, full of the most sparkling, shiny, special moments of “I don’t deserve this” while simultaneously receiving them, hoping desperately I am doing so with at least some measure of grace. These moments become a living fortune of memories.

There are no real accidents.

Existing in a human body is the enduring practice of surrender. Living in female body, perhaps especially so. Whether fertile or not, it is an experience which reminds us that we are not always in control. Perhaps there is liberty found in surrender. There certainly is joy.

---

A little disclaimer…

I want to recognize that to speak on accidental pregnancy will inevitably turn into an abortion discussion and for this reason I will link to a previous essay in which I share about my own experiences and opinions on the matter—

Abortion discussion is not my aim here, however. Neither is it my aim here to get into infertility, as I know there will be some who perceive my above statement of “I’ve never had a planned pregnancy” as some sort of weird flex and conclude that I’m trying to shame the infertile who have never experienced an unplanned pregnancy. I’ve spent enough time on the internet to know that this is the sort of thing ridiculous people conclude when I make such statements. Again though, to discuss infertility is not my aim here but it is something I have touched on in much of my writing, as seen in the essay below—

Thank you for reading! Have you experienced unplanned pregnancy as well?

---