Tag Archives: pregnancy

Tankini

Posted on by under Gender & Place

I’m flat on my back, soaking up the luxuriousness that is Day One of vacation. My beach towel is freshly laundered and fluffy, my skin free of sunburn, and my bag packed with iced tea, still-crunchy Cheez-Its, and some deliciously unpretentious books.

Version 2For awhile it feels good to just lie here, relearning how to do nothing, but soon I begin to contemplate rolling onto my stomach to crack open a book. To roll over or not to roll over? That is the sort of question you face on a true vacation.

It’s not like shifting from back to tummy is such an ordeal, but it does involve a certain amount of resolve and strategic sand resituating. The butt-shaped hollow I created with a horizontal booty-shake when I first stretched out on my towel will need to be filled in with some sand, while new, boob-shaped divots—much harder to get positioned just right—will be called for. But that iced tea does sound good…

I decide to go for it. One, two, three…I engage and shift muscle and bones, my loose belly coming along for the ride, lagging just a split second behind the rest of me, as it does. Settling myself face down, with a wiggle of my hips to reposition the sand, I say a silent prayer of thanks for whomever invented the tankini.

Since having babies, the tankini has been my swimsuit of choice. The concept is simple, yet genius: the ease of a two-piece in wet-swimsuit-bathroom-scenarios, with the coverage of a one-piece for stretch-mark-riddled tummies.

It’s been nearly two decades since my body underwent the enormous transformation that resulted in the birth of my first daughter, and I’m just beginning to accept that no amount of cocoa butter or yoga or time will erase the marks pregnancy left behind. Time, in fact, seems to be hurting, not helping.

I suspect I’m not alone in this predicament. What else could have inspired and sustained the existence of the sensible tankini? At least the one I’m wearing is somewhat hip—chocolate brown with a sexy halter style top and retro ruching at the hips. Most importantly, I feel comfortable in it, even while rolling from back to tummy, where I now lie, popping Cheez-Its into my mouth.

I look over at my teenage daughters with their bikini-clad, impossibly toned skin, and wonder, “Did I really look like that 30 years ago?” I’ve earned my age, of course—I don’t expect to look 16 again, and I certainly don’t want to be 16. But there is a small tug in me—part vain, part nostalgic—that wishes I was wearing a bikini rather than its modest cousin.

My enlightened daughters tell me what many of you are thinking: I can and should wear whatever I want. It’s a topic that even gets my youngest daughter a bit worked up, and my firstborn goes so far as to proclaim, “You would look so cute in a bikini!”

I love how liberated and affirming my girls are—much more so than I was at their age. I grew up in the 80s, an era of many thin models and very few voices questioning the cultural expectations being set in the pages of teen magazines. Body shaming was both everywhere and nowhere—everywhere in the air we breathed, but also nowhere because “body shaming” wasn’t a phrase anyone used. As a teen, I didn’t hear voices of opposition, calling it what it was.

Now, in my middle age, I’m as troubled by my faint desire to wear a bikini as I am by my hesitation to boldly wear whatever I damn well please. What does it all mean? I suppose it means at least two things: my desire to wear a bikini isn’t all that strong, and being a woman at the beach is a complex thing.

My daughters give me hope, though, for a new generation of women. I marvel at their comfort level, both with their bodies and in standing up for issues. As I watch them get up off their towels to go test the temperature of the lake, I muse, “Where did these amazing girls come from?”

Oh, right: from my puckered belly. It all comes full circle.

That there’s a link between my pregnancies and my stretched-out tummy is no secret, but for years I had somehow isolated the two realities in my mind. That all changed the day I casually complained about my saggy skin to a friend, who suggested plastic surgery.

My anger was immediate, and with it came a burst of clarity: The physical record of my childbearing was not a “flaw” to glibly erase!

Ironically, it was the realization that I could take surgical measures that led me to accept my belly as it is, not as culture dictates it should be. I began to see the excess skin below my belly button, and the rays of scars emanating around it, as a history—a Curriculum Vitae of my body’s experiences and job descriptions: the once-home of my babies, the still-home of my aging self.

That doesn’t mean I’m rushing out to buy a bikini. I’m just feeling a fondness for what is tucked comfortably beneath this trusty spandex: the stretchy first-home to two remarkable young women, whose bodies are on their own journeys. Toned skin and flat stomachs are just the beginning.

I look over at my daughters, reading books on their own towels, and decide to turn myself over once again, taking with me my pouchy, ribboned skin: this record of miracles.

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Kristin bio YAH

She Will Grow on Laughter

Posted on by under Laughter and Place

When my mother was pregnant with my older sister, she was a visiting nurse. She drove around Aurora, Illinois in her blue Plymouth Horizon, stopping at the Dairy Queen drive through on the way home from work. She’d slurp banana milk shakes while listening to the instrumental theme from St. Elmo’s Fire.

While pregnant with me, she chased around my toddling sister. She exercised weekly at a local Christian workout class called “Believercise.” That is, until mom lunged too far, causing significant bleeding; the doctor ordered at least a week of bedrest. She had to pee in a bucket, another reason she’s the best mom of all time. In her third trimester, she survived summer days by scarfing down dripping slices of watermelon, a fruit I still consider to be one of my favorites.

There’s something sacred and terrifying about the way babies go wherever their mothers go. They eat the same foods, hear the same noises, and even pump the same blood. They can benefit or be harmed from the womb they inhabit, which is why pregnant women aren’t supposed to eat Subway or drink cocktails. Now that I’m pregnant, I worry my tiny has been anchored to a sinking ship.

You see, I’m not the best at being pregnant.  

For half my pregnancy, my body rejected prenatal vitamins. I either vomited them up in fits of sweats and shivers, or they seared my esophagus with heartburn, fighting their way down the digestive tract. Everyone offered solutions, chewables, more organic options, and even a liquid green sludge that needed chased down with orange juice, but all produced the same result.

My first trimester, I survived on a diet of brown sugar Pop Tarts and Barq’s root beer. When I tried to joke with others about my nutrition free diet, they looked at me like a candidate for a morning talk show featuring teen moms who aren’t fit to be mothers. Giving nervous laughs, their countenance seemed to ask, “should you be joking about this?”IMG_1291

People ask if I’m excited, and I choke out the right kinds of answers. When I was younger, I pictured myself wearing pregnancy like a veil of honor, rosy cheeks and a delightful little bump showing under a flowy peasant blouse, but it turns out, I’m not the glowing kind of pregnant.

Some days I’m a nauseous, sweaty animal, sprouting a new layer of acne on my back; on these days, it’s hard to put how I feel into a pleasant statement. Instead, I lead with my signature defensive humor and make offhand comments about the anti-depressants that I continue to take while pregnant. “I would drink an occasional glass of wine, but I figure the baby already gets the Zoloft,” I say with a wink and a nudge.

This punchline hangs in the air for a few moments of painful silence before I try to reel it back in, “but you know, the doctors are monitoring the baby, and I got a special ultrasound, and…” This is when the nice person who asked me about how I’m feeling smiles through anxious eyes and clenched teeth, nodding their head to try and keep things polite.

But among all the things that I know I’m already doing wrong as a mother, I’ve come to enjoy bringing the baby to the places I go. I may not do great with leafy green veggies, but my baby will grow on laughter.

My baby’s momma is a comedian. I perform in Chicago as a comedic improviser, staging twenty five minute pieces with seven to nine teammates. My three teams perform at several different theatres around the city, which averages out to two or three shows a week.IMG_2428

I take her with me to the bar for a drink with my teammates after a tough show with low audience attendance, trading in my gin and tonics for Shirley Temples and diet Roy Rogers. She gets the consoling pats on the back my castmates offer me, and I imagine they reverberate through my body and hit her like a wave of Vitamin D.

I take her on the stage to the sound of a quickening slow clap, which she must think is for her. Receiving biweekly applause has to be good for brain development. She goes with me into rehearsal rooms where we shriek, snort, and guffaw at each other’s moves. She’s the unseen tenth player on stage, kicking to be noticed during my scene work. I often hold my belly when I laugh, as if to make sure we’re both awake to the blessing of these joy filled spaces.

She is with me when we’re the only women on stage. As my body changes to hold her growing form, we shapeshift into diverse characters with their own points of view and treasure troves of specifics. On one night, I played a petite daughter stowed away in her father’s suitcase. I crouched low, tightening my body into a ball to simulate the cramped quarters and the baby tucked in to the warm curve of my body.

When I worry about the way my depression must seep into the womb, tears dripping through the umbilical cord and sorrow carried through my bloodstream, I revel in a night where I’m out late at a cabaret table, watching my heroes and friends on stage. Many of us are deeply sad people, but for a night, we are artists and poets who have discovered the hilarious underbelly to the tragedy.

So I’m glad  that as my baby grows to the size of various vegetables, that she is growing up with laughter, that her adopted aunts and uncles are some of the funniest people in Chicago.

When I fail in so many ways that I lose count, I know the baby must know well the vibrations of her mama’s laughter, punctuated with my drawn out snorts and the fog horn blats I let out when laughter catches me unexpectedly.

I cherish this special time when I take the stage with a tiny teammate. As my friends and I wait in the wings to make our entrance, we participate in the ritual of assuring one another, we’ve got each other’s backs. I place my palms over my growing belly and say to my girl, “We’ve got this WIlla.” Together we laugh and make others laugh, and for a moment in time, we have everything we need.

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Meredith-bio-YAH-1024x327

 

Swabbing at Memories

Posted on by under Guest, Scent & Place

For years, I shot up nightly. Didn’t matter where I was, I had a small vial, a hypodermic needle and an alcohol swab. I had to have my “fix” at the same time every day, so if I was at a friend’s for dinner I’d take my stash into the bathroom and do what I needed to do.

Sure, I could be off by a short time, but I was compulsive about maintaining the consistent schedule. If that meant that I had to quietly excuse myself from a picnic in order to go to the car and dose up, I’d do it. I even fashioned my own sharps container out of a small Tupperware container until I got home and could dispose of the needle. On my dresser sat the official version– the one I got each month from the pharmacy. With one or the other, I could safely dispose of the tools necessary to administer meds for infertility.

“Super ovulation” drugs are meant to crank up the volume on the normal cycle of things. Where a woman’s ovaries might typically release one or two eggs of a size sufficient to be found by certain swimmers, the drugs took me from your basic medium size scramblers to a dozen or more extra jumbo free-range beauties. Basically they helped provide a larger, more enticing target for the swimmers. The drugs also helped create a cozy den in which those two crazy kids could get to know each other.

Every day for half of the month, I’d administer the injections. Open the alcohol swab, inhale that fresh, sharp scent and reach for the needle. For balance, other days featured numerous extractions, as I had blood drawn every few days to see how things were progressing. The smell of those alcohol swabs before the blood draw was somehow sweeter because it meant I was closer to an answer.

And then I would wait.

The reminder alarm would continue to go off each evening, and I swear I could almost smell it. I became one of Pavlov’s dogs. Only I didn’t salivate, I hallucinated the smell of rubbing alcohol. Most months, I was betrayed with a crimson enemy confirming that the target wasn’t cute enough, the swimmers weren’t charming enough and the party den wasn’t alluring enough.

But I needed to wait until three days after the betrayer had left, in order to begin the cycle anew.

Those days of waiting were roller coaster rides of a different kind. The highs were stacked up ridiculously tall, strengthened by brand new hope for the coming month. It was like the fresh feeling of a brand new backpack on the first day of school. Hope and possibilities abounded. This one’s going to be great. This one’s going to work.

My stash – the drugs and the supplies – became my tools. Tools I prayed God would use to help my husband and me be fruitful and multiply. I prayed over all of it. From the prescription, to the box delivered by UPS, to the tiny glass vials of what looked like very expensive water.

My routine became part medical intervention, part sacred ritual. Though the details would change each day, a typical evening went like this:

Wash hands – Father you know the desires of my heart; let them be fulfilled through this process – Gather supplies – Lord, thank you for this medicine and the doctors who use it on my behalf – Swab injection site – Please, please, please, please, please (and yes, I believe that is a holy prayer) – Injection – God, I am in your hands; I trust in your wisdom that you have a plan for me.

I remained in God’s hands, continuing to trust in his plan for me as I stayed on the roller coaster for five years. As I approached the top of each month’s ride, the combination of excitement and dread built up anew until I reached the top and had to wait in that in-between space that seemed to take forever. Most months I was sent crashing downhill at breakneck speed, spun around until I was dizzy and confused, and ushered to an exit where I came to a stop, exhausted and shaking.

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A few times, the roller coaster rides indeed ended with the desire of my heart: I became pregnant. The fear of the never-ending-ride gave way to grateful, giddy joy when I was able to step off the platform of constant cycles. My heart pounded loudest of all when I heard the heartbeat of my own baby, and my heart broke hardest of all weeks later when the heartbeat stopped.

It took several months – physically and emotionally – to get back on the roller coaster. But I eventually climbed back on and resumed my nightly rituals, perhaps with a tad more urgency. Wash hands – Father you know what I want;  Where’s the needle? – Thanks for giving me another shot!  (Sometimes humor is what got me through.) Swab, swab, swab – Please let this work; Injection – I’ve done all I can do, it’s in God’s hands. Round and round I went until the doctors gently suggested that the ride was likely to always end at the same empty destination.

That was six years ago, and I still sometimes struggle when I see a pregnant woman (which, by the way, to wannabe-momma me, seems to happen almost daily). But God has been faithful. I used to have to pray away envy – Lord let me happy for her, (i.e., not secretly “hate” her) – and now I can truly pray for her well-being – Father keep her safe and healthy that she might raise a child who serves you.

I still have a long way to go. But whenever I happen to catch a whiff of rubbing alcohol, I smile. Sometimes it’s bittersweet and those roller-coaster days seem like a dream. But I like to think that God is answering my prayers in some small way by reminding me that he is not done with me. He continues to help me heal. The fact that he might use the smell of an alcohol swab to encourage me to keep trusting and seeking him? I take delight in that.

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AldermanPatricia Alderman’s passions include serving and doing life with those in her church community, maintaining the home she shares with her floppy-eared beagle, and getting her hands dirty in the garden. She also solves many of the world’s problems while relaxing with a skein of yarn and a crochet hook. She can be found online at patriciaalderman.com and @patricialderman on Twitter.

“Cotton Ball Clouds” photo by Swerz on Creative Commons

December 20th, 2013

Posted on by under Guest, Memory & Place

Our destination was Toronto, straight north, about four hours, all highway driving. We were traveling to celebrate the union of two beautiful friends who would be wedded on the winter equinox. After the wedding, we would spend the night in Niagara so that I could see the falls for the first time.

But we never made it. We didn’t even get close. Barely out of Allegheny County, a tractor trailer truck merged into our Subaru Impreza. The police report would estimate that upon impact our car traveled 90 yards, almost the full length of a football field.

When we landed, I looked myself over. Somehow I was fine–not a single scratch I turned to the driver’s side where my wife sat.  She was not fine. The roof had compacted in upon impact, cutting her head. Blood, mixed with glass bits from the windshield, covered her face. She was conscious.

She was worrying about me.

Straddling the road’s shoulder and a grassy embankment, our car faced outward and I watched, terrified, as headlights from passing vehicles whizzed by. The ignition key remained in place but we were going nowhere. The front of our car had crumpled up liked a used soda pop can. The back and side windows were completely blown out. Far away from city lights it was dark and damp. The flashers hummed in the background: Tick, tick, Tick, tick.

I fumbled for my cellphone in the breast pocket of my coat, but before I could reach it, a Good Samaritan arrived, “Are you okay?”png;base645aaca8097519cafb

“Please,” I begged. “Please, call 911. Now.”

Taking off my downy brown winter coat, I used its sleeve to apply pressure to my wife’s head and draped the rest over her body. She was shivering from the shock and the chill of the night air. I didn’t notice the cold or the rain seeping through my thin gray cotton shirt.

I tried to remain calm, but my tears falling silently onto her face gave me away. Fighting the growing panic, I forced myself to focus. I reassured my wife, “It’s going to be okay honey. The paramedics will be here soon. Stay with me. Don’t leave me.”

Where was that ambulance? Why weren’t they here yet? What if they can’t find us? Taking a deep breath in and silently beseeching God to make an ambulance appear, I continued to hold pressure.

Finally, flashing red and blue lights approached us. My breath froze as I let out a deep sigh of relief, and  the paramedics  hurried to our car. Shouldering me aside they worked to remove my wife. I stepped aside.

On the side of Route 79-N in the wet grass and mud, my black and white converse sneakers squelched as I walked over to the stoic Butler County police officer.  I thought it odd that he didn’t offer me a blanket, jacket, or to sit in his car, while he rained down questions:

“Were you wearing seatbelts? How many people were in the car? Names? Ages? Is that your sister? What happened? Did the driver stop? What color was the truck? Did you see the license plate? Where did the truck hit you? How many times did you roll? How fast were you going? Did the driver see you?

Laying on a stretcher my wife was loaded into the back of the ambulance. I sat in the front. Fearful of being hit again, I turned my eyes away from the dark slick road and watched while the paramedics worked on my wife: cutting away her shirt, listening to her heart and lungs as she laid shivering and immobilized. An IV was inserted into a petite arm vein, a bag of fluids hanging overhead. No longer able to keep my fear at bay, my tears erupted and I sobbed for the rest of the drive. We returned to our city.

When we arrived, the paramedic went to wheel my wife in, “What about you? Do you need to be checked out?” he asked. “No,” I replied, but my wife cut me off, “Yes! She needs to be seen. She’s six weeks pregnant.”

Pregnant. Earlier that day, we were at a different hospital completing my six-week ultrasound. The printout of our baby was in my wife’s workbag. We were waiting to share the news with our families until Christmas, only five days away. We were elated. I had bought coffee mugs that read, “World’s Greatest Grandparents,” as a creative way to break our wonderful news.

Twelve hours after we arrived at the hospital, I told my mom the news in the hospital cafeteria among the sterile white walls, plastic trays, tasteless cardboard eggs, and a pint-sized carton of chocolate milk while we waited for my wife to get out of surgery. Despite my dirty blood-stained shirt, my mother engulfed me in a warm hug and we both smiled for the first time since her arrival.

My mother-in-law found out several days later. Combing through our things that had been salvaged from the accident, “What’s this?” she innocently asked holding up the ultrasound picture.

That ultrasound picture was our savior, a reminder of better things to come. A symbol of growth, love, and resiliency. During the weeks of recovery we would sit together and gaze at that black and white watermarked ultrasound picture, our hands resting lightly on my stomach.

In addition to the head laceration, my wife had broken her neck. The margin of difference between having full mobility and being paralyzed was less than a quarter of an inch. A quarter of an inch, in late December, just out of Allegheny County, that lay between a devastating loss and an abundant family of three. A quarter inch that changed the direction of my life and gave me new appreciation for every mile.

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png;base64d2e992f25f3ecfe1“December 20, 2013” was written by Kristen Stepanczuk. Kristen lives in Pittsburgh, PA where she is a licensed professional counselor and coach, and an aspiring writer, storyteller, and speaker. She loves to help and connect with others, and has made it her life’s mission to help women live healthy, happy, and balanced lives. Kristen counsels and coaches both locally and nationally. Additional information can be found on her website www.PittsburghHealthCoach.com.