Thomas Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College"

Yet ah, why should they know their fate


Since sorrow never comes too late


And happiness too quickly flies.

Thought would destroy their paradise.


Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise

By the time you deliver your first child you are sure you know EVERYTHING. At least I was. I had read everything, watched everything, asked everything, gone to my hospital birthing classes, and joined a support group for parents of multiples. But of course, until that fateful day when my son and daughter were born, I knew nothing. And this is my theory: ignorance is bliss.

For everything I thought I knew there were at least one hundred things I had yet to learn. The steep learning curve began with our visits to the fertility doctor and will only end when I stop being a mom. In other words, never. Looking back (and looking forward) I am certain that the only thing that got me through all of it was my ignorance and naivete. I survived because of what I didn’t know, not because of what I did. If I actually had known what was to come each time it was coming, I would have turned tail and run. My story is one of all the things I am glad I didn’t know about. If you are just now considering getting pregnant, this may not be the story for you. My story is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach.

Most people know about how babies are made, and many even know something about fertility medicine. But I didn’t really know anything about how bizarre and otherworldly the whole thing was until I was well into the process. If you have not experienced it, you are going to have to take my word for it. It is invasive; I am sure I gasped the first time the doctor casually slipped a condom on the inter-uterine ultrasound wand. It is incredibly personal; I was asked all manner of questions including where on my body I have unusually heavy hair growth. He um-hummed when I detailed my happy trail that I unfailingly plucked in order to look good in a bikini. It is depressingly mathematic; we were shown the charts and the graphs mapping our respective fertility. No one could have prepared me for any of this. I just went along, nodded my head, answered questions and put my feet in the stirrups whenever I was told to.

Caught up in the excitement over the prospect of having a child, I did whatever was asked of me. Roll up my sleeve and have blood drawn for the thirtieth time? Sure. Take birth control pills to regulate my cycle? No problem. Go talk to a counselor about using donor sperm? Of course. Shell out many thousands of dollars for the privilege of being poked and prodded inside and out? We just asked what credit cards they accepted. Could we earn frequent flyer miles?
The surreal turned instantly to the all-too-real the day I opened the very expensive box of pharmaceuticals and dozens of hypodermic syringes that had arrived on my doorstep. I am really glad I didn’t know about the box of needles—I am sure the doctor mentioned this part but somehow it didn’t really hit home until I had to inject myself with drugs every day for weeks. With needles. This is what I mean about ignorance being bliss. By that point I had already agreed.  The credit card had been run. The ink was dry. Maybe if I had objected a few weeks earlier in the doctor’s office I could have avoided the big box of needles, but not when it was already in my house.

On the night before my egg extraction my husband had to administer the shot that would release my eggs. When he got a look at the 2-inch needle that he had to use he almost passed out. “I don’t think I can do it,” he said. Seeing as how it was midnight and it had to go into my back-side (not really the kind of favor you can wake your neighbors up to ask) I told him he didn’t have a choice. Then, after the embryos implanted and I was actually pregnant, he had to give me shots of progesterone every night for two months—same long needle, same queasy husband. If he had read the fine print at the fertility doctor’s office we would probably be childless spending our summers in Europe and enjoying the financial benefits of two salaries and the health benefits of good sleep. But once you are on the fertility train, you can’t just jump off. Not when you have invested one third of your annual salary. Not when this might be your best chance to have a baby. Or two.

 

I am certainly glad that I did not know what it would feel like to be nauseous for the better part of four months. No matter how many times you read about morning sickness and nausea, you really have no idea what it means until you are living it. Think about it. You might get the flu once every four or five years. Maybe you get a rare bout of food poisoning, or have a night of alcoholic overindulgence. But nausea is usually fleeting–you throw up a few times, it is awful, but you move on and feel normal again. I felt that nausea all day, every day for months. MONTHS. For at least eight weeks even thinking the word chicken sent me running for the bathroom. It’s the prospect of three or four months of constant nausea that is the deal breaker for me when I think of conceiving another child. Again, my ignorance was a blessing. By the time I felt that wretched I knew I was having twins. Probably I even felt that wretched because I was having twins. My determination to deliver healthy full-term babies kept me from the crushing depression of feeling miserable almost every minute of every day.

My labor and delivery was twenty hours of things I am glad I didn’t know about—despite the hundreds of hours I had spent watching “A Baby Story.” Who knew that an epidural can actually come out? Apparently when one of the nurses was jiggling the two different fetal heart monitors around she jiggled the darn thing out. I was anaesthetizing the bed for a good ten minutes, thinking aloud, “I didn’t know you could feel the contractions with an epidural,”  before my mom, bless her heart, discovered the problem and called for a nurse.

I also didn’t know that pitocin could make one sick. In between waves of vomiting into a little pink bedpan I had to push out my second baby. I have a distinct memory of the nurse holding the bedpan saying to the doctor, “She’s only dry-heaving. She can push again.” And even though I had read Anne Lammot describing how she feared leaving a little poo on the delivery table I was in no way prepared to lose control of my bowels right after the nurses had gotten me all cleaned up and back to my room. The nurse certainly wasn’t prepared for this either.

I am also glad that I really didn’t know what sleep deprivation was until we brought the babies home. Oh sure, people try to explain it but it has to be your world before it makes sense. If anyone really wanted you to understand what sleep derivation meant before you brought home the baby (or babies in our case) they would come to your house shake you awake every two to three hours, make you get out of bed and do something semi-coordinated for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then let you get back in bed. Then they would do that two or three more times during the night. For months. Sometimes years. Then you would know.

If either of us had known what a different sleep world we were entering I probably wouldn’t be writing this—I would probably be in Paris on spring break, or maybe taking a leisurely afternoon nap, or working on my dissertation. But once you have kids and love them, you have to endure all of the awful parts too. And you certainly don’t want to know that you are signing on for a rare form of torture. There were weeks that my kids together would have broken the will of hardened Al Qaeda members detained at Guantanamo. Waterboarding has nothing on eight-month-old twins with blisters in their mouth from hand-foot-and-mouth virus screaming all night in a 1,000 sq. foot house. I didn't even know there was such a virus.

If I had know how miserable my daughter’s reflux would make her first year of life, that anything other than being carried around in an upright and locked position would lead to endless screaming and spitting up, if I had known that a child could cry and drool for three days straight when he was getting his first tooth, if I had known about how I would feel like a dairy cow hooked up to the breast pump five times a day for four months, if I had known about mastitis, if I had know I would get the stomach flu four times in two years, if I had known what a twin pregnancy would do to my belly button, my previously cute and perfect belly button, if I had known any of this and all of this, I might have chickened out. The knowledge certainly makes me panic a little bit if my period is late. I was so ignorant six years ago. So blissfully naïve.

What I also didn’t know when I became a parent is that for all the really crappy parts, there are hundreds of wonderful things that you have no idea about until you have your own kids. When you are childless you endure painful social events with couples with babies or young kids who want to tell you all the AMAZING things their kids are doing. Pooping! Babbling! Rolling over! You want to slit your wrists. But then you have children of your own. And you know. My husband and I got to know all the horrendous parts of pregnancy and parenthood doubly. We got through it on a wing and a prayer—with an innocence and ignorance that allowed us to survive. But we also got to enjoy the amazing parts of parenthood doubly as well. Two kids learning to walk, and talk, and loving us no matter what.

And every time I start to have an anxiety attack when I think of all the scary parts of parenting still to come, of my children as middle schoolers (the horror), I remind myself that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.”

Cindy Morgan is a mother of six-year-old twins and freelance writer living in Laguna Niguel. She used to be a high school history teacher, and one day she may have the time to finish her dissertation and get her PhD in history. In the meantime she writes for Parenting Orange County Magazine and often wonders, “Well, how did I get here?”