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Maternity Doctors up North Every mother-to-be in Oulu has a chance to get a closer look at her baby on the monitor during an ultrasound examination. So did I in the beginning of the second trimester of my pregnancy. My husband, although having looked forward to the first glimpses on his offspring, stayed at home, poor soul, nursing a bad case of influenza with high fever. I on the other hand was spared from sickness for the whole of my pregnancy so far (knock on wood!), although all around me people were coughing and sneezing their way though fall and winter.
Off I went to the maternity centre building next to Oulu University Hospital to have my stomach smeared with cold gel and get a peak into the unknown. In the waiting room, I had a good time comparing my stomach to those of the other women sitting around me. Never mind the icy silence that greeted me when I opened the door or the fact that nobody even reacted to my timid “Good morning”. Having been in Finland long enough, I know better than to take stuff like this personally.
Blotches and Funnels
The doctor, a young, pleasant woman, made up for everything. Pointing at shadows and blotches of light on the monitor, she did her best to explain to me what I was supposed to see. We had agreed with my husband in advance not to encourage our relatives´ strong wish to start providing for our baby in either powder blue or pink colors and had thus chosen to remain in ignorance about little peanut’s sex. I was relieved when the doctor told me that she would have had a hard time persuading the baby to move had I wanted to find out its sex, since it appeared to be of the shy sort, legs drawn up high to the stomach.
Everything fine, I was told and was handed a photo printout that resembled an upside-down funnel with some shadows inside. All the more surprising that everybody I showed that piece of paper seemed to find it terribly cute, a fact that gave me a slight pang of guilt – was I a bad mother-to-be for not being able to summon feelings for these blotches on the paper?
University, Meet Pregnancy
How to deal with letting my employer know about my situation? Being a project worker employed by the University of Oulu, I had serious doubts whether any university institute would fund a project submitted by a pregnant woman. My recent project was running out by the end of March, and I tried to withhold the news until very shortly before the end of the project. My close colleagues found out earlier, of course, and to my delight everybody seemed to be very happy and supportive. Work got more and more tiring at the same pace as I started wishing to be able to concentrate fully on the imminent changes in my life. Slowly but surely, the prospect of being unemployed for a couple of months before going on maternity leave started feeling less scary. No new project plan formed in my head, and I started to look forward to the idle days. Finland has a great system of maternity allowance, where the amount of allowance paid by the National Insurance Company is calculated on the base of the last taxation year’s income. Thus, I would not have to get by with only the meager minimum maternity allowance an unemployed woman gets – they would pay an allowance according to my last salary.
Visiting the doctor
If everything goes well, Finnish mothers-to-be visit a doctor three times during their pregnancy: in early, mid- and late pregnancy. My first visit was laced with astonishment over the technicality with which some doctors view the wonders of life. Sure, for the middle-aged female doctor the movements of a developing baby in her mother’s womb are no grand news, but to me her resolutely uttered words “The pregnancy is under way. The fetus appears to be intact” sounded like a wish of condolence. Also, I did not really enjoy her hands pushing and pulling in a way that did not really seem necessary to me. But, who am I to know? I resigned to a silently whispered apology to the baby who couldn’t have enjoyed the rough treatment either. “Can you feel your baby’s movements yet? It’s so wonderful when you start feeling them”, was a statement I heard very often in early pregnancy from other mothers. Excitedly, I couldn’t wait for that to happen. Then, one night in week 18 of my pregnancy, I awoke to the feeling that there must be an earthquake, because I am not moving but something is making me move nonetheless. After the first shock I settled down and tried to listen in to the strange feeling. It felt like an avalanche inside me, never knowing from which side it will attack me next time. Wonderful? Nope. Evoking soft maternal feelings? Can’t say that either. I felt more scared than elated and needless to say, guilt and bad conscience set in soon enough. Just to reassure other moms-to-be: early and late pregnancy is a bath of hot and cold, conflicting feelings and coping with new situations. Have mercy on your feelings, since they’re all natural. And no worries: they’ll all change in time anyway. You have nine months to accommodate yourself to what’s happening to you. After the first days of shock over another being mulling about inside me, the feeling slowly and gradually changed into curiosity and then, finally, affection. Read next week: Pregnant up North, Part IV: Working with a growing bump – the last working days. Part I http://www.65degreesnorth.com/content/view/714/91/ Part II http://www.65degreesnorth.com/content/view/723/91/
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