The Emotionally Unsafe Zone

Tuesday musings about a Twosday I'll never forget, two years later.

TW: pregnancy loss, childbirth, run-on sentences

Two years ago, I submitted these words to my publisher, unknowingly creating the premise for chapter 9 of my book One in a Millennial, "The Parent Trap:"

"As I sit here and write my two cents, it is 2/22/22. Due to this date's multitude of twos on this Tuesday, it's been cleverly dubbed "Twosday." I laughed to myself when I heard this morning that a "Twosday" like this won't happen again until 2422-- 400 years from now.

I felt relieved. Maybe by then, I'll have sorted out my thoughts about becoming a mother.

My blues toward these twos on this date is due to [what would have been] my due date for a pregnancy I lost over the summer. I'm lying in the same bed I cried in when I couldn't get pregnant, then cried in when I was scared to be pregnant, then cried again in when I no longer was pregnant. This day is perhaps even more confusing for me because I've been open about not being totally sure when or if I want to have kids. I've come to realize I'm grieving two things; the pregnancy itself, which was an excruciating process that made me emotionally reconcile my own maternal desire in ways I failed to intellectualize before experiencing it. But the other is more abstract and represents a type of subtle grief many of us experience when encountering personal roadblocks for things we oversimplify with our expectations. I've found myself really grieving the magic I felt I was promised by what I can only refer to as the Love-Marriage-Baby-Carriage Pipeline (LMBCP). It's incredibly disorienting to grow up thinking these things are universally desired and guaranteed and assuming they should have to happen in that order and, beyond that, that it will be smooth sailing once you get there. When this illusion was shattered for me, I felt robbed of the pipeline's singsong-y simplicity; something I desperately needed to serve as my fear's cliché companion, reassuring me this process really would be as straightforward and magical as I'd always imagined. In the midst of trying to figure out if kids were something I wanted, I found myself most devastated by the realization that kids were something I always thought I'd have."

This Thursday marks the date the online calculators told me a baby was supposed to be due when I finally got pregnant in the summer of 2021. My recollection of this time reminds me of a sibling carelessly taping over a VHS recording of my favorite show in the 90s. I try to access the excitement and joy that was there before finding out it was unviable, but my memory seems to favor playback of the painful moments, carelessly taping over the brief joy that preceded it. The joy I so desperately needed to harness to be able to move forward or feel hopeful at the time. Or at the very least, feel ok.

In case you're new here, it was an ectopic pregnancy, aka a pregnancy in which the fetus develops outside the uterus, and in my case, a fallopian tube. Unfortunately, ectopic pregnancies have become more prevalent in the cultural conversation since 2022's seismic overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the implications this ruling will continue to have on women in life-threatening situations cannot be overstated. Today, I was reflecting on how I'd have an almost two-year-old if things turned out differently. Whew, it still stings. In One in a Millennial, I reflect on how the role of time has shape-shifted with each phase of trying to become a parent. When I was deciding if I wanted kids, I wanted more of it; when I was trying to have a kid, I wanted to freeze it, and when I experienced loss, I begged for it to pass by more quickly.

I wrote:

"For me, motherhood has always been a sore subject. But recently, I’ve learned pregnancy loss is more like an open wound. Experiencing that changed a lot for me. It’s an open wound with the most vulnerable scab, forced to constantly replenish its surface-level protection as it’s picked at daily, not by you, but inadvertently by other people’s joy. This makes it difficult to be honest about your pain; you feel like a monster making other people’s pregnancy announcements, baby showers, gender reveals, and sonograms about you. The thing is, on most days, it’s fine; it will scab. But the optics of healing can incorrectly signal to those around you that the worst is behind you, as it usually would be with the passage of time. However, now I know time is perhaps the least helpful variable, only serving to remind you of the milestones you would’ve hit, the trimesters you would’ve completed, and the date your life would have otherwise changed."

Now that two years have passed, much of this still rings true. While the baby showers got easier and the pregnancy announcements stopped feeling like a gut punch, the passage of time still makes me count the would-have-beens, and more importantly, my blessings. After a long period of trying, then loss, then two rounds of egg retrievals for IVF, I realized how hard it is even to get pregnant, stay pregnant, make it through all the ultrasounds, blood draws, and milestones, and then make it through childbirth. The past two years taught me that it's a literal miracle any one of us arrived on this earth.

I’ll never forget the overwhelming feeling I felt when I first held my son, Teddy, born in August 2023. I’ve heard people describe it as joy, elation, a love they’ve never known, etc. For me, and for many people who experience pregnancy loss and/or complications, the overarching reaction is one of tremendous relief. Relief for my body, my blood pressure, my nerves about labor, relief from the last few years of uncertainty, not knowing if holding a healthy baby was ever in the cards. You can see it in my face. I finally felt in the clear yet? good.

I also have to LOL that literally the day before my induction, I demanded my husband upgrade his iPhone to have a better camera for taking footage of the baby’s arrival. Seeing the photos after, I actually would have been down for some lower quality or at least light pixelation to dull this sharper image of what 36+ hours of labor do to you.

I think my pregnancy was so rough, I wondered if God would throw me a bone or a blowout and give me the breeziness of Kate Middleton outside the Lindo wing, but alas, I embodied the purple-stained popsicle-mouth and matted day 4 hair that’s signature to Kate Kennedy. To be clear, I could rage at anyone else insinuating a woman should prioritize being put together post-childbirth!!! F the patriarchy, keychain on the ground. The whole deal. But IDK, I’m also a vain human who wants super cute pics! We can be both.

Perhaps one of the things that surprised me about becoming a mom is that it hasn't made me move on; it makes me think about my first pregnancy even more. I'm endlessly mesmerized by my son; every day I stare at his big blue eyes and think about how a world without him in it is simply one I'm not interested in. I stare at his chubby little flat feet that are a perfect rectangle and are near-obsolete, gaze into his big blue eyes, and admire how his head seems directly attached to his shoulders. Every new skill isn't a milestone as much as it feels like a monument, and I'm the 4th grader taking disposable camera photos of the least notable details on the field trip. But I want to remember it all. As I stare at him daily, I often wonder who he'll become, what his little voice will sound like, what his personality will be, and I'm overcome with such profound gratitude that I get to be the one to watch what happens live.

Before I had a baby, I didn't really know what this process looked like, how I'd react, or if I'd enjoy being a mom. I was so sad about my previous loss, mostly because we had tried for a while and when it finally happened, even though it was brief, I got really attached. I had very vivid dreams, before and after. Including one from before I found out it implanted in the wrong spot, where I dreamt I got off a train and looked behind me, and my dog Tugboat was still on the train. I couldn't get to him in time and he rode away from me, going to the wrong location. To this day, I wonder if that's the moment it happened and if that dream was my body trying to tell me that the baby got off at the wrong stop. The process was so, so real to me. The thing about miscarriages and/or pregnancy loss is that the people around you often think the most helpful thing they could do is not trigger you, not bring it up. And in doing that, the experience slowly becomes more and more invisible to everyone else, while you're still out here Sixth Sensing, seeing and thinking about something no one else can.

I've had some weird conversations with people who (I assume) were trying to make me feel better, who will imply that its unviability should give me peace, given there's nothing I could do and it would never have made it anyway. Pardon my language, but it's a special kind of mindfuck to be told the fetus may be viable, but is in an unviable location, requiring you to consent to a procedure for the termination of a pregnancy that is so desperately wanted. If you don’t, your tube will rupture and it may kill you. It was (and still is) hard that I had to be the one to make that choice, even though I technically had no choice, and I'm forever wondering who that baby would've been, had they gotten off at the right stop. What should've been, could've been, would've been you, if you will.

I don't discuss what this felt like to suggest my situation was harder or more heartbreaking than another; rather, like everyone's experience with loss, it deserves to stand on its own, void of outsiders speculating on the validity of your emotional response. Gauging if a person's pain is proportionate to its unpreventable nature, how long they knew, or how far along they were is a soulless endeavor. So is telling them it could be worse. Pain is pain and for me, having any perspective on the situation couldn't be forced, it had to be gained. While I try not to compare or minimize my experience, I do now think about what this looks like for people who have been trying for years, who have experienced multiple losses, and who carry and connect longer than I did. But rather than channel my energy to arguments for 'it could have been worse,' I try to use this perspective to expand my own empathy, and approach women in this phase of life with only one thing being true: we are all, in our own way, going through it.

Looking back, even though there wasn't anything I could've done differently to affect the outcome, there was one thing that I think I did right. At least, it was right for me. Both times I've been pregnant, I never really subscribed to the idea of the "safe zone," aka waiting for 12 weeks to share the news of your pregnancy with family and friends. For one, some of us never really feel like we're in the safe zone until the baby is born healthy; prior complications forever change your wiring, and you go from the naivete of buying cute clothes and baby shoes early to a superstitious state of waiting for the other shoe to drop. There's a lot that can happen in those ten months, and while initial viability is most certainly a huge relief, it was hardly the end of my anxiety. Secondly, I think we need to ask ourselves who our silence serves.

Here are my two cents regarding when to tell people you're pregnant: please keep in mind that sharing your pregnancy with people in your life before 12 weeks is not a medical requirement; in most cases, it’s an emotional decision, and it is entirely your choice. Unfortunately, while deeply personal, miscarriages are medically quite common (an estimated 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, according to ACOG), so you likely know more people who have had this experience than you think. When I experienced pregnancy loss, the only comfort I could find was from other women who had experienced the same, and I cannot imagine navigating that kind of pain in isolation or compounding it with shame and self-blame, as if I'm an outlier and a not a victim of common, unpreventable complications. So tell people or don’t, hell, revise who you tell the second time based on the results of the first; not everyone deserves your news. If you value privacy, don't tell anyone at all. The point is not to get too caught up in the "rules" we always heard about, and to figure out how to make yourself the most comfortable while having support throughout the process, regardless of outcome.

In the book, I talk about how my sister-in-law Emily sent me a baby gift after I told her I was pregnant in 2021. The gift was a pristine artifact from the Disney store in the 90s: Hallie’s undercelebrated stuffed animal bunny, Cuppy. We've always bonded over our love for Nancy Meyers' immaculate vibes. But it arrived at my apartment after I found out the pregnancy was unviable, and she told me not to open it because she was afraid it would upset me. But I ran to the mailroom and sobbed with gratitude when I first saw Cuppy in that box. Accepting this gift validated that this baby is still part of my existence, of my story, despite never having its own time on earth, and deserves to be honored all the same. It meant a lot to me, and I say that to remind people that sometimes the best way to support someone is not to ignore their pain by not asking about it, or to feel bad if you celebrated their news before learning of a disappointing outcome. I’ve learned it means the world to me to be allowed to have my pain exist alongside others’ joy, concern, or heartbreak. That baby getting its very own gift was the farthest thing from triggering. In fact, the opposite. Now, it's all I have to prove the experience was real.

Another thing to consider is there are very real consequences for suffering in silence, and I'm a living example of a person who could've died had I not told somebody before twelve weeks. It's pretty crazy to think I've been in two life-threatening circumstances related to pregnancy throughout this process, and without talking to the women in my life, the outcome could have been very tragic.  During my first pregnancy, I knew something was off, but we hadn't told anybody besides my immediate family (and Courtney, I can’t so much as go to a CVS without telling her all about it). Even though I was hesitant because I didn’t know what was going on, we ended up telling my husband’s family because we were on a trip when I started heavily bleeding. After getting in touch with my PCP, they told me to wait and we'd do a blood draw when they opened a few days later on Monday and another on Wednesday to see if HCG levels dropped. Most OBs won't see you until 8 weeks, so that’s why I contacted my PCP. But after telling Greg's sister, she insisted I go to the ER and advocate for answers rather than wait. I think about this conversation all the time; she's been so generous in sharing her experiences in this category with me, even before I meaningfully understood it and could support her the way she supported me.

We were in Michigan, and I was trying not to tell his family yet because I didn't want to get their hopes up for what I thought might take a turn. But at a point, it’s not just about the surprise or video or manufacturing of the moment you'd always dreamed of, it's about life. The difference between me keeping it to myself or telling Greg's family that I was pregnant (but thought something was wrong) really could have been a matter of life or death. With ectopic pregnancies, you have to catch them early, because as they grow, the tube will eventually rupture, which can cause major internal bleeding. This is why ectopic pregnancies are the most common cause of maternal mortality in the first trimester and a condition I feel strongly women should know about. I don’t know what would’ve happened to me if I followed my doctor’s advice to wait over 5 days and two blood draws before pursuing an ultrasound to determine if it was ectopic. Time was of the essence, and I didn’t even know it.

I was writing a piece for a future newsletter about my experience with the timing of my second (and first viable) pregnancy colliding with major deadlines for my career's biggest break (the book), and I maintain that I would never have survived if I hadn't been able to talk about it with family and friends in the first trimester. As we know, we plan and God LOLs, so I got pregnant by surprise two weeks before the book was due after two years of trying, requiring me to edit and finalize the biggest project of my career amid overwhelming exhaustion, nausea, and anxiety. I was around 8ish weeks when I had to turn in the final version of the book, and I had never felt worse in my life, but I had never needed more clarity, energy, and focus to thoroughly rewrite, review, and improve over 100,000 words about my life. But what can you do? We don't have control over when these things happen to us, so I persevered. Not because I'm some exceptional human, but because I had to. The only thing more striking than the experience itself was realizing that this is normal for women trying to have children, and I had been completely unaware of what this must have been like for the women in my life to navigate while keeping their pregnancies a secret. I needed and deserved a lot of grace during that time, and harboring the secret wouldn’t have protected me from added disappointment if it didn’t work out. It would’ve only made my life harder.

How crazy is it that we are expected to suffer in silence for the first three months while also being expected to keep up with the physical and cognitive demands of our careers, relationships, and households, denying ourselves some much-needed grace from those around us? I often ask myself why the "safe zone" is the gospel because unless you're a jinx truther, it mostly seems designed to minimize the number of people you'll have to share disappointing news in the event of a loss. Sure, it's tough for them to hear, but why aren't we prioritizing how brutal it is to experience? In the event of a miscarriage, another facet of the Parent Trap is making yourself feel trapped in a secret about finding out you'll be a parent in an effort to save others from disappointment, only to add to your own despair and feel like you have to navigate your loss without support. On the one hand, I understand not wanting to get people excited and then be responsible for its redaction while you navigate your own grief. But I wouldn't take back the excitement of telling Greg on Father’s Day and then telling my family right away; you can see in their faces they were absolutely shocked I was actually going to have a kid. I would never want to take that moment from them either. It was all we had left to remember the pregnancy before it was gone.

Screenshot from when we told my parents + Kelly the news on Father’s Day 2022.

Telling people early and then having to share disappointing news after the first pregnancy didn't encourage me to stay silent the second time; it actually encouraged me to involve more people. I knew the process of getting pregnant might bring me more disappointment, but even if it didn’t work out, I refused to rob myself of that moment of excitement in favor of the prevention of a nominal addition to an already astronomical level of heartbreak.

I suppose my point is to encourage you not to follow arbitrary rules, but to consider who would bring you comfort and to align yourself with the support system you need, whether that means telling people or not. I'm a person who needs a lot of support, but some people's situations may make the involvement of others endlessly more complicated. And I know how this becomes tedious and heartbreaking the more losses one experiences. This is why this choice should be person-to-person and not a widely accepted rule. All I want is for us to do what's best for ourselves, while also considering how these rules contribute to the invisibility of women's experiences.

So many aspects of womanhood are marked by invisibility; I’m tired of my body and humanity being ignored on the floor of Congress; I’m tired of having our pain dismissed and our needs under-researched in medical settings. I'm tired of being told we should stay silent during some of the hardest days of pregnancy, only to feel silenced when those around us never speak of our loss to spare us from pain. And worse, I'm horrified that we're now in a situation where I cannot decide if it's more dangerous for us to stay silent or more dangerous for us to be sharing, following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Society has historically approached pregnancy loss to be a private experience we endure quietly, but we've seen examples in recent years of those who oppose abortion access seeking to criminalize miscarriage. Prosecutors have terrorized women whose pregnancies ended, specifically, poor women and BIPOC women, and these implications will cause more women to suffer in silence and/or not seek necessary medical attention in the event of an incomplete miscarriage that needs surgical or medical intervention. This is a topic I plan to write more about throughout the election year; I’m barely scratching the surface here, and I don’t have the answers, other than making sure we support public officials who advocate for women's bodily autonomy and who would never stoop to the cruelty and inhumanity of co-opting a woman's devastation and trauma for the sake of political theater.

Twice now, I've been in situations that were described to me as so rare that there's a ~1% chance of them happening (ectopic, then postpartum preeclampsia with severe features presenting as a pulmonary edema). Strangely, given my access to thousands of women online in my age range, I hear stories of both of these things happening to my listeners often and they kind of don’t seem that rare. And isn’t it even more rare to have two rare things happen to you back-to-back? Regardless, it was rare, and I was very much there. I guess if anything, I am so grateful that this platform has enabled me to use my experiences to evangelize these complications and their warning signs. I don't talk about them to scare people, but to make sure we all continue to be our own advocates, as women's pain (especially in the context of pregnancy) is very easily dismissed as normal since pregnancy can be an all-around uncomfortable experience. While I don't mean you should always sound the alarm and prepare for the worst when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth, I think we should be vigilant in advocating for ourselves and trusting our gut, and learning from other women’s experiences is a key part in recognizing what is and isn’t normal. Read more about the signs and symptoms of ectopic pregnancies here and postpartum preeclampsia here.

Although I've had the privilege of not feeling a great deal of dismissal in general medical settings throughout the years, once I got pregnant, I felt it all the time. It was eye-opening for me, I couldn't believe how crazy I felt, vocalizing concerns and symptoms, but being told it was normal. Feeling like my intuition carried zero weight, questioning my sanity because there was no way for me to prove something was or wasn't normal for me, having never experienced this before. Having the appointments be literally 30 seconds long when you're in the longest, most grueling parts of pregnancy. I found so many parts of the process to be needlessly punishing and painful, down to the very end, when you’re sent off to the recovery room after a 36+ hour labor and severe tearing with some Motrin and a prayer. A day later, I told my doctor I was in excruciating pain and needed something stronger. She looked at me skeptically, then asked me to get up from bed. I slowly scooted myself to the edge of the bed, wincing while lifting myself into a standing position. She said, “You seem to be moving around just fine.” Ummm. YOU JUST TOLD ME TO MOVE AROUND?!?! So I did! It was incredibly painful. Must an exhausted, traumatized woman also be tasked with performing her agony to get you to believe her?

I'm far from the most affected by this phenomenon. Depending on your experience, whether it's with racial bias or weight bias and related stigmas affecting the quality of care and beyond, many women experience a dangerous level of medical dismissal when articulating their symptoms and pain. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the mortality rate for pregnancy-related causes for Black women is three times that for white women and two times for American Indians and Alaska Natives. This is bone-chilling data. It hardly feels like a solution to suggest we put more burden on the patient to advocate for themselves in the presence of being ignored rather than focus on the bigger problem of biases resulting in this sort of dismissal, but I do think it's important to listen to your gut in these situations and to be relentless in your self-advocacy.

And I say this as a person who keeps failing to do so! I’ll share more about my postpartum preeclampsia and pulmonary edema experience later, but I literally waited until I could not breathe to take myself to the ER after being discharged, and had zero idea how dangerous of a situation I was in. If not for the Beths telling me on Instagram it looked like I was developing preeclampsia, I’m not sure it would’ve been on my radar. I definitely wouldn’t have been as diligent about taking my blood pressure. Toward the end, swelling and heavy breathing are normal, until they’re not. But it’s very hard to discern when you’re miserable if it’s because the end of pregnancy is kind of miserable, or if it a medical emergency. It all culminated after the final day of recording my audiobook, so if you listened to it and it sounded like I was dying toward the end, fun fact! I kind of was; I didn’t know my lungs were entirely filled with fluid and my BP was stroke levels of high. I'm alarmed by how, in both emergency situations with my pregnancies, I pushed myself as far as humanly possible due to my default setting that I'm sure many of you can relate to: I must be overreacting.

I got slightly off-topic, but the point is that the “safe zone” sometimes does more to protect those around you who hear about your loss rather than look after the person who is experiencing it. Beyond that, given the invisibility of many women’s issues, sharing and supporting one another is crucial in order to normalize our experiences and advocate for our medical care, especially in spaces where women’s needs are often underresearched and our pain is too easily dismissed. Maybe, just maybe, if we talk more about these topics, we’ll better understand how much variability exists within people’s experiences related to pregnancy and childbirth, and how nuance and scientific accuracy are paramount in drafting public policy. The more awareness there is, the more we can allow for our empathy to expand and our humility to kick in, and hopefully accept that we cannot possibly know what is best for everyone. Most importantly, we should not be making their choices for them.

I was so grateful for my sister-in-law’s insight on that tragic summer day in 2021, and I feel strongly about using my platform to be a good sister to you all like she was to me. I want to remind you that if your body is telling you that something's not right, even if you aren't sure what's wrong, while I know insurance coverage is a privilege in and of itself, if you can, go to your doctor, to urgent care, the ER, to L&D triage, wherever. Don’t wait. Get the scan, get the tests, and hopefully, at the very least, get the peace of mind. If you’re met with bad news, early intervention may save your life. And FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, if you register for one thing, let it be a blood pressure cuff. Check it often, establish a baseline, and pay close attention toward the end.

Even though I have had a fraught relationship with twos from the date I was due, seeing these two play together today alleviated my Twosday blues. I once thought Cuppy was all I had from that first experience, but when I really think about it, I have it all. I'm alive, thanks to the women who looked out for me; our shared experiences provided me with the “safest zone” of all.

Lastly, please forgive me, as it’s been a long time since I’ve written an essay, and I’m posting this without overthinking it. Otherwise, I fear I won’t publish it. I’m trying to make this a forum where I can be casual, make mistakes, and not write too formally if that’s cool with you. I have a lot to say about motherhood, but I am not quite sure where to put it. So if you’re into it, I’ll keep going! I apologize if anything came across as insensitive; I know this topic is highly personal and sometimes I fear I’m too desensitized at this point. Feel free to leave a comment below, would love to hear from you. And see some of you in Chicago on Thursday for the last stop of my book tour; what a gift it is to talk about Spice Girls and Limited Too and make some new memories on 2.22 :)