I'm happy to be pregnant, but I don't want to talk about it.

This week, I got together with several women from church for a tea party for our preschooler girls. I was asked many times about my pregnancy and how I'm feeling. Which was very thoughtful. But I'm sure I came off as so rude in return. I'm uncomfortable talking about my pregnancy and I imagine the other women thought I was being terse and cold. I just can't small talk about pregnancy anymore. But for most moms, that's probably a hard concept to grasp. After all, I am currently pregnant and everything seems to be going well. What's the harm in talking about it?

For other women chatting about where they're going to give birth might be a casual conversation, but it requires me to assume that I will indeed be giving birth to a child at the end of this pregnancy and I can't go there quite yet. At times, it's a stretch to even think of myself as still pregnant come next week, never mind six months from now. It's also those kinds of conversations that haunt me after a loss. The conversations about whether we're going to find out the sex come flooding back when we reach 20 weeks and imagine us going in for our anatomy scan, urgently telling the ultrasound tech, "We don't want to know! Please don't give it away!" And when we're facing down the due date that will never be, I can't help but remember the conversations about the birth center or midwife we've chosen, the carefully crafted plans we made to bring our baby into this world in a gentle and natural way.

As a mom who has experienced many more losses than live births, I find it easier to take everything one day at a time, to live in the present and not plan ahead more than is absolutely necessary. Acting as if only the present exists makes it possible for me to find a bit of excitement and joy in my pregnancy. I think this is because I need to treat the pregnancy as an end of its own. When pregnancy is treated as only the means to a end (a living child), then the vast majority of my pregnancies lose all purpose. And if I need anything right now, I need this pregnancy to mean something, to have value today even if it might end tomorrow.