faith, the mystery, and needing to know (pt. 2)

first trimester chronicles: clementines, Barb, and prenatal testing.

CW: This post mentions miscarriage and termination of pregnancy.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

—Rumi

The most unmooring part about being pregnant is that, eventually, we have to plop ourselves down in the middle of the mystery and just be with it for awhile. Pregnancy is a sort of in-between place. Buddhists refer to the transitional gaps of uncertainty in our lives as bardos—and because the bardo of pregnancy is quite uncomfortable, we do our best to wipe out its’ mystique altogether. We want to feel safe and responsible (understandably), we’re impatient, curious humans, and Finding Out is seductive. I imagine that we used to be better at accepting the ambiguity of the experience, before the large selection of prenatal testing options were made available (including pre-conception carrier screenings & new polygenic preimplantation embryo screenings, in which you can cherry-pick and discard according to intelligence, schizophrenia risk, breast cancer risk, etc), the ability to not only discover the sex of your baby almost immediately but, if you do IVF, to choose the sex of your baby, and the option of having an early look at your baby in the womb via creepy 4D keepsake ultrasounds; these days it’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking we can plan and test away the mystery. Its’ perceived absence promises us that perfection and guaranteed safety are attainable, so long as we do our due diligence and gather all the information that we possibly can. This mindset all but consumed me in the very early days of my first trimester. Knowledge is power, after all— and “being informed,” writes Dr. Sarah Buckley, “is equated with being responsible.”

I like predictability as much as the next guy. I empathize hard with the all-too-human thirst for answers, comfort and information— but I think this ‘must-know’ frame of mind is, at best, flat and unreliable, and at worst, hubristic and harmful. Buckley goes on to write, “we diminish our own authority in birthing and in mothering—we disempower ourselves—when we put more faith in information from the outside (tests, scans, others’ opinions) than our internal knowing of our bodies and of our babies.” It is impossible to completely eradicate the mystery from pregnancy and birth. This is equally beautiful and terrible, and after experiencing it myself, I can’t help but wonder: is knowing always better than not knowing?