Chapter 11 - Drawing on bellies...

     Silently she stared down at her round belly—looked up at me, and then down at her belly again. Her eyebrows lifted into little triangles and she started chewing on her lower lip. She was understandably puzzled.

     “Yes, that’s right. Even though your uterus is twice as large as this, your baby is only this big,” I explained, demonstrating the size of a twelve-week fetus with my thumb and forefinger. Thinking that she might have twins because of the discrepancy between her size and her history, I had ordered a sonogram. The results confirmed the presence of a single, healthy, three-month old baby. The oversized uterus was just an unexplained weirdness—not a problem.

     She continued to gnaw on her lip—perplexed. She looked at me again like I had lost my mind. “Let me show you something,” I said. I picked up a marking pen and drew a little upside down baby just over her pubic bone. I gave it features like curly hair, and tennis shoes and long eyelashes. Then I traced the outline of the uterus with a placenta at the top and the umbilical cord spiraling down and attaching to the belly button that I had drawn on the baby. “There, it’s something like that.” I said.

     Slowly and methodically she took her finger and began to carefully stroke this cartoon baby. Her face had a look of childlike wonder. She started to laugh. “What are you doing in such a big house, all by yourself? You’re such a bitty thing. What do you do in there all day?”

     I sat silently on my stool for a long time, watching her—listening to her converse with her unborn child. Finally she looked down at me, tears glistening in her eyes. “There’s a baby in my belly. I can see that there’s a baby in there,” she whispered.

     She had a three-year-old daughter who had developmental difficulties, and a year ago she had given birth to a little boy in Texas who was premature and who had birth defects. He lived only three days. They had suggested to her in the hospital that she might be to blame, that she had not taken good enough care of her babies when she was pregnant. Now that she was expecting another baby, she was convinced that she was incapable of growing a healthy child in a body that had obviously failed her twice.

     The next time I saw her she told me that “even though this might sound silly”, she started methodically setting a place for the baby at the table, and putting food on the plate, which she ate in addition to her own. “I’m feeding my baby every meal now.” I say, “Are you ready? Here comes your breakfast,” she giggled.

     Each visit she would have me draw the baby on her belly—each month bigger and bigger—and then take a picture of it with her camera. Once she brought in a baby blanket to show me how she covers the baby at night before “they” go to bed. “I feel so different this pregnancy, like I’m already a mama. It seems like we already know each other,” she beamed. “Do you think this is possible—to know someone before you even meet them? “Yes, I do,” I reassured her. “No one could do a better job than you are doing, caring for your baby.”

     A few months later, when she gave birth to an eight-pound healthy baby boy, I was not surprised to see this mother and child come together, like two old souls. She had taught me how something so simple as drawing cartoon babies on bellies, can connect a mother to a visual reality of another human being living inside of her, and could play a crucial role in mother and child bonding before birth.

     Not surprisingly, this soon became a routine part of my pre-natal care…