ePregnancy: In describing your early pregnancy with Jack, you echoed what so many of us have felt or done amidst our first pregnancy…read all the books, started in with bits of guilt (e.g. obligatory journaling), contemplate all the birth stories, etc.
Could you share a bit about when that “predictability” of pregnancy ended for you?
Ann: Well, I’m a serious worrier, I’ve always been a fretter, so from the moment I learned I was pregnant with Jack, I worried constantly. What if he’s born with birth defects or dies at birth, has emotional problems as a child, no friends as an adult? All sorts of crazy fears went through my mind, but I never once thought, “what if the baby is born three months early, in a foreign country?” Which is what ended up happening.
So the lesson to be learned (I’m still trying to learn it) is that there’s no point in worrying as a parent because all the frightening scenarios that we dream up are very unlikely to happen. And, conversely, the things that will most likely happen are beyond even the most imaginative and cautionary minds.
My first pregnancy dutifully followed the timeline spelled out in “What To Expect When You’re Expecting,” until the day in 1990 when my husband and I strolled along Oxford Street in London and I experienced Premature Rupture of Membranes (PROM). I was not yet in my third trimester, we were completely broke (he was a struggling comic at the time and we had been flown over for a London gig). We had only packed for a two-night stay but it ended up being almost six months before we were able to return to the United States with our baby Jack
One moment I was a wide-eyed, blissfully pregnant tourist, the next -- an hysterical neophyte in the world of obstetrics, neonatology and the British National Health care system.
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