Pregnant and Pumped Phase 1: From No Way to Yayy yayy!

What changed?

The Covid lockdown was one of the worst experiences for people all around the world – with livelihoods, loneliness and life, itself, in the balance for an extended period of time. So I want to be careful when I say the lockdown had some of the most positive effects on my personal life.

To those who have known me awhile, know that I have been against having children (for myself, not others) pretty much ever since I could remember. In a sentence, if I don’t like a movie I don’t recommend it to others. I struggled through severe depression, and the inevitable emotional instability for a good number of years of my life, and of course, didn’t want to bring another soul into it. At the same time, I understood that the impact of having a sad mother or the genes of one, cannot possibly good for the child either.

Come Covid, things changed. To be clear, Covid did not make me happy. Happenstance, I got married to my long time boyfriend right before the pandemic hit. And outside of the lockdown, both of us had fairly busy lives. I’m a morning person and usually stayed occupied all day at work, dancing or writing classes and slept early. My husband is a night owl and had his own exciting life at work – meaning that we mostly just spent dinners and maybe an hour of TV together during the weekdays. But the lockdown changed this ‘seems-to-be-working’ setup of our lives and we spent 24/7 together over months – making/having meals together, exchanging quick kisses and laughs during the day and all in all, inadvertantly, getting to see more of the person, we had fallen in love with when we had started dating. Before, we shared a house, but during the pandemic we built a home.

You forget this as you grow up and fly out of your nest, that the outside world is hard on you. A home, on the other hand, is warm, and comforting. The effect on me was mindblowing. No amount of therapy had done for me what a few months in our ‘new’ home did – even losing my voice for a couple months couldn’t dampen my spirits. And I caught myself multiple times as I cozied on my couch, drifting into thoughts of how I would raise a child, or what my child would look like, etc. This was new for me.

Now I’m not one to ignore my natural instincts, just because I have vocally assumed a counter position in the past. But I also wasn’t going to jump right in. There are always so many things to consider, my career, my husband’s career, the pandemic, etc. I was lucky that neither sets of parents were pushy about this, so I got some time to just mull over the idea. At the same time, two of my mentors did give me some advice on the topic that stuck with me – I didn’t bring it up with them, they just happened to talk about it when I was confused. Seredipity.

My first mentor, my physics teacher, since I was 13, is very much like a second father to me. He always knew how to look at things from all perspectives and encouraged me to do the same in this regard. He said, “If you never want to have kids, that’s fine. But if you’re thinking about having them then it is worth keeping in mind that, just like your career, your kids deserve your best years.” They are not asking to be brought in this world, but if you decide to bring them in, make sure they get the best of you – peak health and performance.

Don’t just give your peak years to your career, and your travels and your fun, and leave the ‘leftovers’ of yourself to your child – they don’t deserve that.

I won’t go into the details of how many ways that statement stands true but, I do believe, that a mother’s age matters in giving birth to healthy babies and being able to raise well-adjusted, happy adults. To each their own, but this stuck with me.

My second mentor, a senior PM at work, and a mother had a reassurance for me when I voiced my belief that starting a family, for a woman, meant being unable to climb that next step, or nail a promotion for at least a year or more. She said, “A single year or even two of promotions are going to look like irrelevant specks when you look back at them at 45-50.

You won’t look back and be regretful, if you’re a director one year later OR proud that you were a year early. In fact, you might even realize you never wanted to be a director in the first place.”

None of these meant to convey that starting a family is easy – but just that if it has to be done then there is a time to do it. And in my head, I had turned a corner.

Is it time to meet with the Doctor?

My husband had been pro-kids for the longest time. In fact, we had a few arguments about this when deciding to get married. Even so, I thought it best to approach this topic with him slowly. We spent months chatting about his general thoughts on, for instance, how to discipline a child, if he had preference for number of kids, basic value structure, etc. Never chatted longer than 10-15 min at a time but enough to convince us both that we have a ‘similar-ish’ parenting style. And to be fair, I was okay with being different from him, in most regards – a child needs to see different approaches to life (that work) to make good choices.

So we were set! We had made a decision to try!

We visited a gyn before starting and here’s a piece of advice, DON’T. More specifically, if you are in normal health (BMI, non-diabetic, no major heath concerns) – don’t spend time waiting for a doctor’s appointment, which takes forever in the US, and spend the unneccesary $300 on a family/gyn appointment. Just, you know, go with your natural instincts. Because here’s what the doctor is going to say:

1. Don’t drink/smoke/weed/drugs even when you’re trying, cause you never know when you have conceived. Obviously this is for the woman, the man is fine to do whatever, from a medical perspective (dick!)
2. Start taking prenatal vitamins, one a day, even when you’re trying – literally doctor won’t event prescribe you one. They will just ask you take any of the brands over the counter with a single requirement. The tablets must have a min 400 mcg of folic acid. This is to prevent neural tube defects in the baby (Personal recommendation, also look for a prenatal that has methylcobalamine over cyanocobalamine)
3. Keep exercizing regularly. This is good for mental, emotional and physical health. But don’t start anything new and taxing. Meaning if you do yoga, keep doing that, but don’t suddenly start preparing for a marathon. This is primarily because most women don’t find out they are pregnant until their 6-7 weeks, and you don’t want to be stressing your system in unpredicatble ways in the first few weeks
4. Planners can suck it. I told my Gyn that I wanted a Dec-Feb baby, so I need to concieve between Apr-Jun timeline and she laughed in my face – like nobody cares about your schedule, especially not your eggs. You can start trying and it could take up to 6 months for anything to actually happen. She asked me to come to her with compaints only after we have tried at least 4 months and then we could discuss some medical alternatives.

Disclaimer: All of this is for people with normal health conditions, if you have genetic or hereditary issues or major health concerns, please ignore my advice. The goal isn’t to save money with your/baby’s health in the balance

Journey to double lines!

We decided to keep it all under wraps for awhile. You know, we didn’t want to externally commit to something, in case, it didn’t work out or we changed minds mid-stream. Also it is just awkward to announce something like this.

Alright, this is the point where I ask readers to reconsider reading ahead. If you’re family or friends who will not be able to look at me the same way after reading about some educational yet intimate (and mildly funny) bedroom activities, I’d advice to skip this section.

Still reading? Great, now I’m going to try to use as many metaphors here as possible to reduce the embarassment, but keeping all jokes aside – this was the most fun we’ve both had in the bedroom for awhile. It was like introducing a whole new mission, a new boss to beat in a game we’d mastered. And we had some interesting questions we needed answers for – the internet obviously had multiple, contradictory opinions.

Let me start with the success story first, keeping well in mind, that I’m going to list our decisions as causal, where they could’ve been correlational. That’s for you to decide. We were able to convceive in 2 months – that means 2 menstrual cycles. Here’s some decisions that potentially led to this success

1. Don’t make it about the end goal – If the sole reason you’re playing the game is to win, you’re going to be frustrated when you don’t, immediately. And unfortunately, frustration, stress is detrimental to the ammunition you’re using to win the game, thus creating a spiral you don’t want to get stuck in. Instead, make it about the game. It is one of the best 2(-ish) player games ever invented – so make the best of it.
2. Go back to dating – Music, candles, costumes and, most importantly, no dishwashing talks. Take the time to be excited, try new things and know that this is going to be a limited time adventure, before you have a new person in your midst, putting a pause to a lot of your 2-person activities. Flirting, winking, teasing, sexting is all back on the table – Make it about you both and if you feel the other person is not as invested as you, maybe due to work, or dirty laundry or other distractions – maybe a honeymoon pt 2 is on the charts (we went back to India to our parents’ houses, and boy let me tell you, our parents are not going to be happy if they read this). A complete break from your daily routine, to put you both in the mindset for this fun phase.
3. Cleanliness is next to Godliness: This may be one of those ew bulletpoints, but still solid advice. You’re probably going to be building a sandwich without gloves, for the first time. And you want to make sure that you’re reducing other random risks that come with ungloved sandwich making, by simply washing your hands, taking showers, changing sheets and staying hygenic. Not only is this going to protect you both, but also send a signal that you care about the other person and want them to have a food-poison-less experience with you.
4. Wait for the tank to fill – This is merely a suggestion, no scientific evidence here. Both from a cellular standpoint as well as a human nature standpoint, we thought it best to avoid emptying the tank daily, especially by yourself. Let the pressure and quantity build so when you decide to open the valve together you have the right force and impact, so to speak.
5. Track yourself – Damn important to have a calendar. Make sure you know when the woman is in her fertile week so you both have a sense about when to open the valve. I have been using the app ‘Clue’ to track my menstrual cycles. The app makes reliable suggestions about your fertile days if you have gathered enough data on there.

This phase also made life more interesting for us, as we made time to go to bed together, spent more time giggling and laughing about trying to adult and it was like we had a secret against the world.

So about 5 days after I’d missed my period, I woke up with great excitement at 4 am, couldn’t possibly sleep any more – to witness the single most life-changing moment of my life. Two red lines!