The Backstory to the Baby, Part 1

As I started to think about my path to pregnancy, I realized that the story actually starts quite some time ago. Almost in high school. So you'll have to bear with me as I set up the story. Be cause the road to Baby Z really has two parts: dealing with my own hangups and dealing with some medical things that were beyond my control.

You see, I've always been a very career oriented girl. I had both my parents telling me as I grew up that I could be anything I wanted to be and that I shouldn't let other people put limits on me or tell me what I should or shouldn't like doing. Growing up in the 70's and 80's there were all sorts of exciting scientific things going on. My dad bought our first computer when I was 12 and I loved the thing, even though at school, the only people into computers were the truly geeky guys. But my first love was always biology. And when I got to my junior year in high school I discovered immunology and I was pretty sure I had found my calling. I was going to become a research scientist and save the world with my discoveries. Hey, I was 17 and I still believed I was invinceable. And I was a geek who wasn't very comfortable socially, so I needed to believe that there was something important out there for me to do.

So college was all about achieving that goal. I did undergraduate research, researched good grad schools, focused on science as much as I could. It was all about getting to the place where I could start to solve big problems in science. In the end, I was pretty proud of myself. I got to speak at undergraduate research conferences, I won a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and was actively recruited by more than one prestigous graduate program. From a career standpoint, life was good.

During college I also met a guy that I thought was on the same wavelength as I was. Like me, he came from the midwest (he grew up in Chicago) and he was looking at a serious scientific career as an MD/PhD. We started dating sophomore year and by senior year we were picking our graduate programs together. Which is how I ended up at the University of Chicago. It was the one good university that we both got into together.

Time went on and after some intial bobbles, we ended up living together and engaged. That would have been all well and good, but it was about this time that I started to discover that he and I didn't have goals as similar as I once thought we had had. We both were driven by our careers, but it became clear that my career was really secondary to his. Whether it was comments about not wanting to get "just a PhD" or suggestions that I didn't spend enough of my time keeping a clean house, I began to suspect that in the case of the fiance, driven might be re-interpreted as controlling.

After we got engaged, he started planning out the future. He loved kids and definitely wanted to start a family. His own family relationships had been chilly, and he was always trying to prove to his parents that he was good enough for their approval. Which he never got. So he channeled all that insecurity into trying to control the rest of his environment agressively. He decided that we were going to have our first child when we were 27 and our second when we were 30. He didn't really discuss this with me in a way that was negotiable. It was just the thing that needed to be done. He didn't factor into the equation that I would be doing my postdoc in a competitive field that required as much of a time commitment as a residency and didn't cut women any slack for having babies. He didn't factor into the equation that he would probably be doing a residency and would be on call and would leave me with most of the child care responsibility. He just decided that this was what we needed to do. It didn't put me in a very good headspace. Especially when he followed it up with the fact that it was going to be very important for me to keep my weight in check during and after pregnancy. It was beginning to become clear that I wasn't much of a person to him... I was a child-bearing vessel and an arm trophy.

A smart, driven, self-confident woman would have handed his ring back and walked out the door at this point. I like to think that I am smart and driven, but at the time, between the fiance and the learning experience that is graduate school, my self-confidence was at an all time low, and I was convinced that if I couldn't make things work out with this guy, I might spend my life alone. A pretty stupid thing to think as a 24-25 year old woman, but my social skills had never been strong, and I was pretty painfully aware of that. So instead of just telling him he was a jerk and to find someone else to be his glorified arm trophy, I stayed around and started becoming very resentful about the idea of having children and got very religious about making sure that I took my birth control pills when I was supposed to.

One of the things I thank my lucky stars for every day is that we got engaged and then set a wedding date for a year and a half later. It created plenty of thinking time for both of us. Especially when I went to a conference in New Mexico in the spring of 1995. I came back with a new resolve to make things work. He came to the conclusion that things could never work. I was devastated. The real kicker? The reason he told me that he was doing it was that he didn't think I would be a good mother to our children.*

That split, while immediately painful, turned out to be the best possible thing that could have happened to me. People who saw me the next day as I told them what had happened said I seemed happier than they had seen me in ages. And in truth, I was scared of the whole being alone thing, but it felt like the great weight of a bad relationship had been lifted, and I was now free to focus on the things that were important to me again: my career, my hobbies and finding someone who would really value me -- although I didn't necessarily approach them in that order. The whole "having a family" thing went completely out the window.

And then, in the spring of 1996, I met John.

* I know all of this stuff makes the Ex sound like a real self-centered heartless bastard. In truth, he was just a regular guy with personal issues that he couldn't really get past, and he got focused on one very particular solution to those problems. At the same time, I wanted to rescue him from his demons, because I'd always had a warm, loving family environment, and I thought I could help him have that, and could change the stuff I didn't like. As a result, I enabled a lot of bad behavior on his part. After we split up, it was clear to me that we were better friends than partners, and that trying to change someone to get what you want isn't really a healthy relationship strategy. People are what they are. I don't really regret him, or coming to Chicago. But I do regret not having the strength to stand up for myself when I should have.