A Brown Mother

What’s a baby bumb without a bathroom selfie?

Since I was a little girl I knew I wanted to be a mother. I knew I wanted a house, a husband, and kids. I had many dreams, many of which changed throughout my life, but my desire to have a family was the one aspiration that stayed constant.

Today as I write this, Wednesday November 5, 2014, I am officially 23 weeks pregnant with my first child. I had always thought I would log every moment of pregnancy, but it is only now that I finally feel comfortable enough and confident enough to put things into words.

Here’s why…

 

February of 2013 I miscarried my first pregnancy at 4 weeks. I hadn’t known I was pregnant, but I did think I might be so after a night of severe cramping and heavy bleeding, I visited a public clinic to have myself “checked out”.  While I was hoping to hear news of a pregnancy, the “nurse midwife” attending to me was so rude, so insensitive and so nasty that I honestly left feeling belittled and as if I had somehow done something wrong. She very matter-of-factly told me that no, I wasn’t pregnant, and she said it as if with her results she had won some competition that I hadn’t known we were in.

She assumed I had poor health, which baffled me because I had began my journey to vegetarianism a few months before, yet, here she was telling me that her numbers and figures from my urine samples, and the presence of blood and tissue, suggested otherwise.  She assumed my husband was my “friend”, whatever that means, and seriously spoke to me with such an attitude you would think we had beef prior to this appointment.  I didn’t know this woman, and as far as I knew, she didn’t know me.  She was at least 3 times older than me so there was no way we could have mutual friends or even mutual enemies.  To this day the only thing I can reason is that I was treated the way I was treated because I was young, black, female and in a public health clinic, which to her meant I was poor…which apparently means you don’t have feelings and that every ailment that befalls you has done so because of your indifference, ignorance, and negligence of your health.

Whatever the case, in the midst of all of this undue hostility, I’m sitting across from my new enemy, slash health care provider, with a broken heart and completely confused about everything.  I’m not pregnant, which is a disappointment to me, but I’m also not having my cycle which is…what is this?

Emotionally bruised and a bit traumatized, I go home and google my symptoms.  From my own very short research I discover I’ve just had a miscarriage.  This hurts even more. What I can’t seem to figure out though, is how could this 60 something woman who has been in women’s health all these years not know or even entertain this?  How could she be so insensitive?  How could she be so…mean?  Why did everything BUT this cross her mind?

My devastation from learning of my loss, coupled with my anger at replaying the appointment in my head, tied in with my recent personal interest in natural alternatives to women’s health, and the knowledge I was gaining of the abuses black women have suffered at the hands of “modern” healthcare began my distrust for modernized medicine.  I made up my mind then that I wouldn’t trust anything man-made.  I think part of me somehow blamed this woman for my loss.  I didn’t realize it then, but looking back on it, I think that’s where I put the focus of my hurt and my anger.  Since, up to that point in my life, I was what some would call a control freak when it came to my emotions (I was convinced I could control them by willing them away as opposed to working through them), I resolved to defeat this woman and all the white coats she stood for.  I resolved to overcome this hurt and outsmart her, by doing anything related to my personal health as a woman, on my own.

 

So that’s part one of the “why I’m just now starting a pregnancy blog at 23 weeks” saga…

 There’s one more part before I actually get to this pregnancy, but for now I’ll leave it at this.  I guess if I had to sum this part up, it’d probably be labled as “Chapter 1” in a lesson that God understood I needed in my life, and as sad as it seemed then, the “aha” I got in the end was well worth the pain.  Isn’t God a master teacher in that way?

Well my interests in women’s health still remain, and I’ve even trained as a birth doula since then so if any women have any similar situations they’d like to share I am always here for that. 

Until next post, Peace.