Crackers and Sprite; It'll Be All Right

It's just a little morning sickness, sweetie

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This is not a pregnancy announcement. But it is a story.

When I was pregnant with my third child, I had weekly IV appointments at labor & delivery in the hospital. This is the kind of cushy privilege that makes some of you roll your eyes, and it was also a necessity since I’d lost 13 pounds and most of my sanity. A kind nurse would hook me up, give me ice chips, and let me sit and read library books on my phone for two hours. Then they’d measure my pee before letting me leave. Sometimes I threw up in the parking lot, but I could usually make it home after being pumped with sugar water. I always took our tiny 2009 Toyota Camry, and the smell of that car still makes me a bit nauseous.

This was my third round of hyperemesis gravidarum, a pregnancy condition that literally means Lots of Barf. You can distill the mountains of well-meaning advice—the ginger tablets and the Diet Coke and the teensy tiny meals, but all it really comes down to is this: you cannot stop throwing up. Hyperemesis was the first, but far from the last, time that I prayed “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?” and meant it with every bone in my body.

I’ve spoken on stages and donated dollars and advocated for policy but these three pregnancies are the most pro-life things I’ve ever done.

I have a thousand stories; they’re stacked like a deck of cards in my back pocket. The nurse who insisted she couldn’t give me anything stronger than Diclegis even though this was my third baby and I was able to recite studies about Zofran back to her; the nurse who rolled her eyes at me when I said I’d been in the waiting room for three hours and was about to pass out; the ER doctor who asked me if I had a “little morning sickness” without even looking up from his clipboard; the arguments with insurance companies and CVS and the hospital and insurance companies again.

And a thousand more: the friends who showed up with Panera for my kids; my mom cleaning expired gunk out of my refrigerator; my best friend who left her crush-now-husband’s super bowl party to come sit with my toddler while my husband drove me to the ER; my friend who sat with me in that ER for three hours, my OB who followed up with that nurse to ensure she didn’t try and pull the same game on someone else, the labor and delivery nurse who held barf bag after barf bag as cool as a cucumber and snuck me Sprite; the old woman at church who hand-knit me a prayer shawl that I still have.

Here’s what I don’t know: why some of us waltz through pregnancy as if it’s a dreamboat spa-resort and glow like magical little gremlins. Why it’s so taboo to say the truth, that sometimes pregnancy is back-breakingly hard and that doesn’t mean I love my kids any iota less. Why I have to advocate and advocate and advocate to get medicine that has been proven to have no link to fetal defects and then pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket for that medicine unless the kind receptionist sneaks me the office’s samples (another story). Why I’m supposed to follow up any breath of complaint about pregnancy with a thousand disclaimers about how happy I am to be a mother and how hyperemesis isn’t on the same pain scale as infertility (which, OBVIOUSLY, but why must I lessen my pain to make sure yours is seen? Why can’t we both just be like, shit, womanhood is hard?).

Here’s what I do know: at least 60,000 women walk into the hospital every year with pregnancy-related dehydration. (That’s not including the women who are just suffering at home, clinging to the toilet, afraid to be hit with a $1,700 ER bill with a side of potassium pills.) The risk of small-for-gestational-age babies is worse for HG sufferers than it is for meth addicts. And up to one in seven women with HG resorts to an abortion.

May is Hyperemesis Awareness month (all of the awareness).

The Hyperemesis Education & Research Foundation says this: “in the 20th century, it was erroneously decided that HG was caused by psychological conflicts instead. Limited research and outdated theories have fostered this belief for over a century, resulting in unnecessary suffering and financial loss for too many women and their families, not to mention the adverse impact on the health of both mother and baby.”

In the 16^th and 17^th centuries, scientists believed the uterus floated around the body, causing women to be overly emotional and untrustworthy. Hystera: the Greek word for uterus. Hysteria: what is assumed of women in pain.

In the 1960s and 70s, thalidomide was used to treat women with excessive vomiting in pregnancy, leading to thousands of dangerous birth defects and tragedies. It’s made the medical community understandably jumpy. Nobody wants to take medicine that could hurt their baby—nobody. But losing weight, passing out, and becoming dehydrated isn’t good for baby either. So where does that leave us? Up Reglan river without a Zofran paddle, popping a pill and insisting to the friend who stopped by to drop off cookies that it’s safe! You did the research! You swear! You’re not a terrible mother! (This, by the way, is one of my favorite essays on the internet.)

The HER Foundation works to study things like genes involved in HG and the impact of nutritional/dietary changes. But grant funding is a rarity; HG studies are usually privately funded through donations. HG, like most woman-exclusive diseases, is underfunded and under researched. According to a study by the Journal of Women’s Health, “in nearly three-quarters of the cases where a disease afflicts primarily one gender, the funding pattern favors males, in that either the disease affects more women and is underfunded (with respect to burden), or the disease affects more men and is overfunded.”

If you want to help a friend, sister, neighbor: you are such a kind soul. If you ask them what they need, they either don’t know or are going to quickly say “oh, nothing! I’m fine!! I’m so lucky to be pregnant!!!” So here is what you could do:

• Drop off a meal for their husband/kids. They are so, so sick of Chick-fil-A, and even if her husband is an amazing cook, he’s exhausted from all of the child-rearing and could use a night off.

• Take their kids for an afternoon to do something besides watch TV.

• When she says “my kids are watching so much TV” remind her that we all watched literal hours of Legends of the Hidden Temple when we were kids and we are literally fine.

• Let her complain about being pregnant without reminding her how lucky she is. This is so weird and frustrating, but in Catholic-land we so often want to celebrate motherhood (good intention!) that we act as if it has no difficult parts (bad idea!) and shame women for being vulnerable and needing to voice hard feelings (disastrous result!)

• Pray. Actual, on your knees prayers. Not just a casual “I’m praying for you!” but genuine time out of your busy schedule to do so.

• Offer to come sit and hang out and fold laundry together. I still wanted to see people and have a reason to sit up straight, and it made the days go by so much quicker.

• Refrain from the advice. You hate seeing your person like this and it’s so hard on your heart; I completely understand that. But I promise you—she knows. She knows about ginger and essential oils and phenergan and protein and all the things. You telling her just means she needs to put valuable energy towards smiling and nodding and “oh, yeah, I’ll try that” and in her head she is thinking I love you, but shut the hell up.

I wish there was a solution I could offer with a sweep of the arm. Maybe we should study HG more (we should). Maybe we should make healthcare more affordable so more pregnant women can get those precious weekly IVs (we should). Maybe we should give women more time off work to go to the doctor (we should). Maybe a lot of this has to do with money (it does).

There are real, serious, large structural issues facing mothers in America. If we allow pregnancy to be this ridiculously difficult and expensive, we’re not encouraging the culture of life we so often claim to want. A DoorDash gift card is not going to make a serious dent in the thousands of dollars HG moms have to pay, and praying is not an excuse for ignoring the problematic policies surrounding birth and motherhood in America.

But also, this: maybe we should be more of a team. Maybe we shouldn’t leave hyperemesis moms floating along their sea of bile, and we should bring back the village. I sometimes find that complaining about things like lack of funding excuses us from the day-to-day work; after all, if I made an Instagram post (or wrote this letter) about women’s diseases being underfunded, I basically solved the problem, right? But the tangible grace of neighbor loving neighbor isn’t something that can be digitized or skipped over. We need one another. As Saint Teresa of Calcutta said, we belong to one another.

All you pregnant mamas, I see you. You are doing a great job. You’ve got this, because He’s got this, and He’s got you.

St. Gianna Molla, pray for us!

On My Nightstand 

• The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown: This is a beloved re-read for me. The first time I read this novel about three sisters coming home to care for their cancer-stricken mother, I was an introverted, cynical she-beast at FOCUS training. I have very vivid memories of hiding in this random room at Ave Maria and reading with a giant Diet Coke. It’s an easy, breezy read with beautiful prose.

• How to Spot a Catholic Writer: Love, love, loved this piece on what makes writing “Catholic”. As a mainstream fiction author, I’m always intrigued by how other Catholic writers weave their Catholicism into their storytelling, and one of the main characters in my next book is a priest, so it’s been extra top-of-mind lately. “Catholic Mass is a spectacle of sound, smell, and story; whether delivered in Latin or the vernacular, Mass is a performance. Don DeLillo has described it as theatrical, a sensibility shared by Toni Morrison. For many writers, it is the elegance and elevation of language during Mass that is their entry point toward the stylized writing of literature. Catholicism’s inherent strangeness—and I mean that in the best possible sense of the word—renders it Other.”

• Thousands of Afghan Women in Peril as Taliban Voids Their Divorces: Please don’t stop praying for the women in Afghanistan. I can not imagine this horror.

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In case you missed these Letters:

• No, Being Asked to Include Women Isn’t Tokenizing - for subscribers

• The Narcissism of Small Differences - for subscribers

• The Women Left Out of the Women’s Movement - for everyone

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“In transforming culture so that it supports life, women occupy a place, in thought and action, which is unique and decisive. It depends on them to promote a new feminism which rejects the temptation of imitating models of “male domination,” in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society and overcome all discrimination, violence, and exploitation.” - Saint John Paul the Great

The New Feminism Pilgrimage to Poland will take place October 15-25, 2023. Seats are filling, but we’d love to have you join us. Learn more here. Registration closes in June.

We’ll be traveling to Saint John Paul the Great’s childhood home and museum (on! his!! feast day!!!) as well as seeing the tomb of St. Faustina, the Divine Mercy image, the image of Our Lady of Częstochowa, Auschwitz concentration camp where Edith Stein + Maximilian Kolbe were martyred, and more. You and 30 new friends will also have the opportunity to visit the underground salt chapels, the Tatra mountains, and more. 🇵🇱 Poland is a country that’s near + dear to my heart, and I can’t wait to show it off.

The first Catholic Feminist Pilgrimage in 2021 changed my life. I hope + pray that if the Lord is calling you to join us in Poland, you will give it a “hell, yes” and come along.

Questions? Holler at me by replying to this email. See you in Warsaw!

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