In The Fourth Trimester, we ask parents: What meal nourished you after welcoming your baby? This month it’s a polka-dot grilled cheese from editor and cookbook author Kristen Miglore.
My first pregnancy happened swiftly. “Textbook,” as my doula said after my daughter’s bat-out-of-hell delivery on a clear March morning in 2019. It was so seamless and we were so lucky, I thought we should only try for a second child when we were really ready. We don’t want two under two—can you imagine?
The week our daughter turned one, she took her first tipsy steps and we went into lockdown. We stopped planning for the future, took walks with masks on, watched our toddler learn to run and jump and tell jokes. When I finally felt safe enough in fall 2021, I quickly got pregnant again. Good thing we waited! I thought. And, almost as quickly, it was over.
I knew that miscarriages were heartbreakingly common—one in four pregnancies, by some estimates. But I had no idea what I was supposed to do.
As my body transitioned from pregnant to recently pregnant—both categories the CDC considered high-risk for Covid, I noted—I made oatmeal with my daughter and sat in meetings. I led a Zoom class of kind home cooks stirring eggplant pasta, as if everything was as it seemed.
Later that winter, it happened again. In spring, a third time. Each pregnancy was a little longer, more hopeful, the recovery more grueling. I baked banana bread with my daughter. I screamed in the car. I drove to beaches and laid on the cool sand.
In time, I started telling more people. Almost everyone had a story of loss—if not their own, someone they cared about.
If I couldn’t stay pregnant, I could at least try to find out why. Fertility doctors explained that my uterus had grown contorted with adenomyosis, a cousin of endometriosis, making it difficult for embryos to land and stay. IVF medications might be able to temper the inflammation, and I had the privilege of being employed in New York, a rare state that mandates insurers for larger companies pay for up to three rounds of treatment.
The first embryo we transferred briefly, faintly took hold, then faded away. Desperate for agency, I controlled what little I could. A naturopath told me to quit dairy and gluten and eat at least 30 different plants a week. I counted purple radishes, yellow dragonfruits, all manner of sprouts and leaves. I gnawed gluten-free bread from the freezer, toasted with vegan butter. I made waffles with my daughter and didn’t eat them. I don’t know if any of these choices mattered or none of them did, but they gave me a place to rest my spinning mind.
We watched our second embryo move across the screen like a shooting star. With each scan, my doctors encouraged me that the baby was eclipsing every growth forecast, that he’d miraculously found a good place to latch on. I went swimming with my daughter, and she asked if I might have a baby in my belly.
I started making cinnamon toast for midnight snacks, then failed my gestational diabetes screening. A nutritionist taught me to prick my finger after every meal, to make sure that the sugar in my blood, which was now coursing through my baby’s body, wouldn’t reach dangerous levels. I retreated to 30 plants a week.
As my due date neared, a superstorm was coming. We wanted to be sure our daughter was safely at her grandparents’ by the time the baby came, so we gave in to the pressure to schedule an induction. He wasn’t budging, until suddenly he did. In the bubble of love and pain and bone-deep relief, we never heard the storm outside.
