I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant

“Are you pregnant?” The nurse at the urgent care bursts through the door and asks. “No,” I say, but there’s something about the look on her face, “… am I?” “I think so, I’ll be back,” she says. The physician’s assistant already in the room asking questions continues on. I thought I had a UTI, that’s why I’m here. I have a feeling of pressure on my bladder that just won’t go away. It doesn’t feel quite the same as the last UTI I had but it’s similar enough that it’s the only thing I can think the problem is. The PA wraps up her questions, says it will be a bit of a wait before the doctor can see me since he has other patients ahead of me, and leaves the room. I send a text to my best friend: “So I went to urgent care cause I think I have a uti and they said I might be pregnant and then just left me waiting in the room… I’m freaking out. I’ll let you know what they say when they come back 😳” Twenty minutes go by as my mind races with questions. I’m on birth control, how could I be pregnant? Could they have made a mistake? Are they going to come in and tell me it was a mistake? Who is the father? How far along am I?

The PA comes and checks in. “How are you doing?” “Honestly, I’m kind of panicking,” I reply, trying to keep myself from crying. I feel like I’m going to throw up but I don’t tell her that. “Would you like some water?” “Yeah, that would be great, thanks.” She brings the water and leaves again. 

Another ten minutes goes by. I finally hear a knock on the door and the doctor comes in. “Mahalia? I’m Jordan, it’s nice to meet you.” His demeanor is calm, there’s a compassion in his tone that tells me he knows he’s about to give me news I was not at all prepared for. I imagine him going over my chart with the PA before entering the room, “yeah, she’s pregnant but she has no idea and she’s freaking out,” she says to him. 

The doctor goes over the results of the urine test. All clear, no signs of infection. “There is, however, a high level of hCG. That means you are positive for pregnancy. I take it you were not aware you were pregnant?” So it’s confirmed. I’m pregnant. Waves of excitement, fear, and shock wash over me. “Based on the date of your last menstrual period, you’re 22 weeks along. That’s about five months.” No. No way. How did I not know? I mean, sure, I’ve been nauseous for months now. But I’ve been adjusting to new medication and I thought it was a side effect. And yes, I’ve been extremely fatigued, but I have fibromyalgia and when it flares that’s one of the symptoms. I’ve had a flare up of sciatica pain but I’ve had back problems for years. I haven’t had a period in months but I’m on birth control so that’s supposed to happen. My breasts have grown a ton and are always sore but again, I’m on birth control, isn’t that just a side effect? But in the last couple weeks I’ve been feeling gassy and my stomach has looked somewhat bloated… is that really just a baby growing and moving around in my belly? And the pressure on my bladder, that must be from the baby as well. Lined up one after the other the symptoms make sense. It seems ridiculous that I could have not figured it out. But there was a reason for each symptom individually. I had started to suspect a couple days before but I thought it was just the usual panic/excitement I’d felt a hundred times just before getting my period and all the disappointment and relief that came with it. 

The doctor calmly walks through what next steps might be with me, whether that involves getting an abortion or keeping the baby. I tell him I am unsure and he remains neutral, recommending that I get in contact with my OBGYN to start prenatal care or planned parenthood if I want to terminate the pregnancy. I know I’m going to keep the baby. I want this baby. I want to be a mom. But the timing is all wrong. I can’t afford to take care of another human, I’m barely getting by as it is. And the father, sperm donor really, by this time I’ve figured out who it must be, is not a good person - I don’t want him involved in my life. How can I raise a baby all on my own? 

The appointment wraps up and I leave the office. Feeling shocked and numb, I get in the car and call my best friend, “hey, did you get my text?” “No, give me a minute… oh my god!” “Yeah, I’m fucking pregnant. Fucking five months pregnant. What the fuck is going on?” She asks me what I’m going to do and I say I don’t know but I think I’m going to keep it. I tell her I really want this baby but I feel guilty because I’m not set up to be able to take care of it right now. She reassures me and offers what support she can. We’re both shocked and trying to process.  

I get home and call my OBGYN to make an appointment for prenatal care, trying to do something concrete to make things feel real. I call my sister. The conversation helps me process a bit more, brings me that little bit closer to being grounded. But I’m really in shock at this point. Physically shaking, feeling like I’m freezing cold. I text the one friend I have who lives near me, “I just found out I’m five months pregnant, I’m freaking out.” He invites me over to his place and I jump at the chance to not be alone. I bring ice cream because it feels necessary. I’m pregnant and emotional, of course we need ice cream. When I get there he hugs me and my nervous system finally calms down and I stop shaking. We hang out and talk for a while, watch a movie, eat dinner, and he lets me spend the night. I barely sleep. When I wake up in the morning I still can hardly believe it. It just doesn’t seem real. But it is. I’m pregnant. 

Suicide Prevention Month

 September is suicide prevention month. Every year it comes around, and every year I have a new story to tell. This year my story is darker than any before - I want to say, "but also more hopeful," but I don't know just yet if I believe that.

In June of this year I was admitted to a mental hospital. I was planning to kill myself and reached out to my doctor as one last chance at life. She didn't let me go home. I could either drive myself to the hospital or be taken by ambulance. Suddenly my life was spinning completely out of control and I grasped at what small bits of control I had left. I chose to drive myself. 

I think that was the worst day of my life. 

Everything went by in a blur once I arrived at the hospital. It was a whirlwind of paperwork and talking with nurses and social workers. My belongings were taken and locked up. Everything I had with me and everything I was wearing was checked, my naked body was examined, my shoelaces and the string of my hoodie were taken away. I frantically texted family and friends to assure them of my safety before having my phone taken away. I cried through the whole process. I knew my life was going to end, it was the only way for the pain and emptiness to end. But I was absolutely terrified of dying and these people said they could keep me safe, and maybe even help. 

My  room was sterile and unfriendly. Everything slanted, built into the ground. Nowhere to hide under or behind, nothing to hang off of. The whole room could be seen from the hallway and the bathroom had just a curtain that didn't even reach the floor so some part of me could be seen at all times. The sheets and blankets were thin and breathable to reduce chances of suffocation. Nurses checked in every 20 minutes for safety.  I wanted to laugh - this couldn't be real - I felt like I was looking at my life from the outside, watching a character in a TV show get swept up in things outside their control and land somewhere they were comically out of place.

Everything hit me suddenly, my consciousness jerking back into my body, the shock of it all sending me into a fit of sobs. 

Another blur of meeting other patients, going to meals, outside time, and attempts at sleep went by all while I shifted back and forth between crying uncontrollably and going completely numb. At some point I saw a psychiatrist, a doctor, a nutritionist... 

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, acute depression, borderline personality disorder, PTSD, and acute anxiety.

At first I felt like I was just being covered in labels, like my self was being erased. Eventually I would come to accept the diagnoses 

-----

I started this post in September 2023 but was still a bit too raw to finish it. I was still just learning to cope with the diagnoses I had recently been given. I was still recovering from the chronic fatigue that came from being utterly emotionally and physically drained. The toll of my experience in the hospital was significant physically, emotionally, and financially. But I was catapulted into healing in a way I had not thought possible before. 

Living with the mental illnesses I have was scary when undiagnosed. The feeling of instability, of having emotions that I just couldn't get under control no matter how hard I tried, was terrible. I didn't like getting diagnosed, it felt like my identity was being reduced to a bunch of letters. But getting the help I needed, the right medications and therapeutic treatments, has been completely life changing. The experience of stability and the ability to control my responses to intense feelings is something I am wonderfully grateful for. 

Getting help is... helpful. I am so grateful that I got the help I needed. I don't want to discourage anyone from getting the help they need. But my actual experience in the mental hospital was terrible. I wish there was another way I could have been helped out of the "acute distress" (as the hospital people called it) I was in. The staff was overworked and under equipped to help the variety of patients they oversaw. There were two daily mandatory group therapy sessions and several times the tech who helped monitor our vitals and had no mental healthcare training was called in to help cover. I was physically safe and getting the medical treatment I needed but emotionally and mentally I was not well cared for. When I hear people joke about "going on a grippy sock vacation," it makes me furious. The mental hospital, in my experience, is a stressful place that did not even give me socks. I was stuck wearing the jeans and sweatshirt I checked in with for three days until the clothes a friend dropped off got cleared by security. 

My mental health journey has been a messy one. Getting help for my mental health has been difficult, painful, and expensive. I think when we talk about things like suicide prevention it is important to talk about how much better it gets. But also, perhaps for the sake of the people who are supporting our journeys, it is important to talk about just how difficult the process of getting help is. 

Telling My Story to Myself

 I feel like I have a lot to say about  personal experiences. The question is whether it should remain between myself and my journal or if I should package things more suitably for public consumption and share them with the world. Is there anyone that needs to hear what I have to say? Or is that a self-centered view that comes from living in the society I do, where social media gives each person a platform and a false sense of personal fame. I wonder if I will look back in a few years on my current reflections with the same embarrassment I feel now looking back five or more years.

There is the matter of growing up in a fundamentalist Christian community. I could say so much about being homeschooled, using Sonlight curriculum, having church and Christian homeschool groups as my only socialization. I could talk about the years my parents were on staff with YWAM and I lived on a missionary base. Attending Bible college at a Pentecostal charismatic school. Marriage just after graduation when I was far too young and inexperienced with life to be getting into that type of relationship. A post-graduation search for purpose and meaning as the more education I received, the more my faith fell apart. I could tell people about my personal journey into healing from purity culture and discovering my own sexual identity and the ways it contributed to the end of my marriage. 

If I talked about all that, it would be colored through the lens of my mental health experience. That is to say that my own perspective on my life influences how I process my experience and my perspective has been shaped by depression and other ongoing mental health disorders. I could talk about the good along with the bad. There certainly has been plenty of good in my life, it has simply been tainted by a struggle with mental illness and unaccepted neurodivergence. The struggle culminated in a breakdown. All the moments of my life one after the other built up to a climax that nearly brought the story to an end. Certainly a dramatic way of framing the fact that I ended up in the mental hospital during an acute depressive episode that triggered intense suicidal ideation. 

I think I’ve been looking at it wrong though, my breakdown. Seeing my life as a story with the regular dramatic arc puts my breakdown at the climax. There was a moment where death seemed the only possibility, where I thought the story would end with a funeral. And then I made a choice: to drive to the hospital instead of driving home. A climax, a choice, a week of anguish, a release into life as a (barely) stable member of society. But that would frame the last few months of my life as the resolution to the story. It works if I’m writing a memoir of my young adulthood. But as a framework for understanding my life, it holds me back in ways I hadn’t quite realized. I’ve been getting through the last few months as if the story has ended. The mentality feels similar to how I think of characters at the end of cheesy romance novels. The plot points have all resolved and the characters continue on as vaguely happy creatures that float through time without anything really happening. I feel like I have to start a new story and it has me frozen with fear. Part of me is apprehensive that I might end up at another breakdown. Rather than living and choosing to have experiences that bring me fulfillment and happiness, I feel like I have to choose what my new story will be and then mold my world and experiences around that. 

As I reframe my way of understanding my own life, I find that I am able to experience more fulfillment. The “story mindset,” as I call it, served me well for a time. As a young adult attempting to create an identity and live with purpose, seeing myself within a story gave meaning to things in my life. At this point, I find that creating a new story is less important to me than being myself. For instance my career is not exactly fulfilling or exciting. I’d like to be doing something more meaningful. But at the moment I am okay with waiting to make a big change because I have to make a lot of small choices every day about who I am and who I want to be. I am trying not to worry about what plot points I am creating in my story, whether I am delaying an important moment or perhaps creating a twist that ends in another climax like my choice to hospitalize myself. Hopefully this reframing is helpful for me. Looking at choices and asking “will this bring personal fulfillment right now,” and “will this bring personal fulfillment in the future” instead of asking how it fits in the story is a lot less pressure for now. (A side note about framing my life in terms of personal fulfillment. I realize that on the surface it can sound entirely selfish. But personal fulfillment, to me, is about living one’s values. If I did not value the happiness and wellbeing of others, then seeking my own fulfillment would likely be selfish. But that is not the case here.)

Perhaps I will eventually find motivation to expand on the different points of my personal experience. But I am hesitant to say anything that might hurt the people in my life and sharing my story from my current perspective which is of the pain and difficult things I have experienced will likely do that. For now I have tried to remain vague enough about things beyond my inner experience to avoid offense. Maybe this is a reflection that will add value to others as well as myself. For now I will leave it here where people can find it but likely won’t.

Getting There: Faith vs. "Trusting the Process"

 I used to say, "I know where I'm going to end up, I'm just trying to figure out how to get there." 

Oh, the arrogance. 

I won't lie, it was a pretty effective strategy all the way through college--bumbling ahead at full-speed, hoping I would eventually end up where I intended to go, not really taking the time or effort to line up all my ducks. I graduated, I got married, I moved to Portland--all accomplishments I intended beforehand to achieve. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost myself a bit along the way. 

Lately, I keep hearing myself saying, "I don't know where I'm going to end up, so I'm a bit afraid of the getting there part."

Why am I so afraid? I won't digress into a discussion of the weaknesses of the modern Evangelical American Church (which I will refer to as the EAC, not to be confused with the East Australian Current) here. One thing I will say, though, is that faith as a spiritual practice is often lacking and I think that's a big part of my own problem. Dependence on formulas, business models, and systematized theology leave people without a "need" for faith--if you just do x, you're guaranteed y. (No, I do not have all the citations to back up these claims, it just isn't my main point right now. It is a relevant discussion in the American church at the moment, though and I'm sure Google will yield plenty of information on the subject.) 

With a definition from Hebrews 11:1 (one of the go-to passages for such a definition), faith is "to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see" (GNT). I may no longer have a solid idea of "where I'm going to end up," or what I want to do with the rest of my life, or even what the practice of following Jesus is going to look like every step of the way. I do know what I am hoping for, though. Holding to this hope through the practice of faith is what allows me to move less fearfully into the space between where I was and where I will end up--less poetically: through faith, I am less afraid of being present with myself in the journey I am on.

This makes me think of the television show "The Bachelor" (and "The Bachelorette," of course). In that show, many women compete to "fall in love" with one man (or many men with one woman). Of course, it is full of drama and hurt feelings. One thing contestants and leads on the show often say, especially when things get tough (which is basically all the time) is "I trust this process." Now, while the 25 (and 17) seasons of this show have often ended in an engagement, those relationships do not frequently last long after the show ends. To me, this is a very straightforward example of how a system that works on paper (yes, yes, I understand that the real formula is meant to produce dramatic television, not true love, but we're just pretending that hypothetically the process would, in fact, facilitate "true love" when worked out on paper) does not translate well to real, dynamic human relationships. Similarly, the formula for a "true love" relationship with Jesus in the EAC--read the Bible and pray daily, go to church weekly, volunteer and tithe monthly--looks good on paper but doesn't always work out as a lasting, loving relationship when applied to real humans.

Personally, I've decided to stop "trusting the process." Admitting this out loud is frightening for me. I'm afraid of being misunderstood, of people assuming I'm "losing my faith." I worry that I'm moving in the wrong direction, that I need to just try harder. But I've tried as hard as I possibly could and "the process" isn't working. It makes "good TV" or in this case, "good church," to be sure, and there are likely plenty of people for whom "the process" (I'm talking EAC, not Bachelor, here) works. It isn't working for me, though, and I think I'm done trying to convince myself that just one more week of heartache and frustration is going to bring me the fulfilment and loving relationship I'm longing for.

Kaskes Wedding: July 7th, 2018

Getting Ready!

Lacing up the Dress

Getting my Hair Done

Blessing the Bride

The Bridal Garments

 

Dad's First Look

Groom's First Look

Almost Forgot the Boutonniere!

Family Pictures

Cy and His Parents, Bob and Leanne

The Kaskes Family

Making Some Adjustments!

Cy's Side of the Family 

Me and my Mom

Me and my Parents, Paul and Tammy

The "Bertelsen" Family

My Side of the Family

Me and my Sisters

Sister Love!

Me and my Brother

The Original Four

We Just Keep Adding More!

The Wedding Party

The Best Man: Jacob

The Maid of Honor: Rachel

"Hello, World. I'm Rachel and I'm Amazing."

Jacob and Cy

Rachel and Me

The Ceremony

The Revolving Doors Played a Beautiful Live Set

Chazz and Oma Kaskes

Grandpa and Grandma Bell

Grandpa and Nana Miller

Simeon and Grandma Bertelsen

Bob and Leanne

Simon and Tammy

Here Comes the Bride!

"With This Ring, I Thee Wed"

"With This Ring, I Thee Wed"

"You May Now Kiss Your Beloved!"

"Presenting: Mr. and Mrs. Cy and Mahalia Kaskes!"

Post-Ceremony Pictures

Do We Look Married Yet?

What About Now?

 Sibling Toasts

Chazz

Cayla

Nakenya

Simeon

Gabrielle

 Cake!

   Reception

Thank You!

Thank you so much to everyone who made this day possible!

Lauren Gray: Our fantastic photographer who captured our wedding so beautifully (@laurenanngray)
Linna Martz: Our amazing coordinator who made the day virtually stress-free

Andy & Carissa Hawksworth: Our officiants and mentors who told our story so beautifully- we literally wouldn't be married without you!!

Kortni Sims: Our fabulously talented caterer (http://www.culturehoney.com/author/kortni-culture-honey/)

Noelle Walker: Our incredible florist who filled the day with color!

The Revolving Doors: The brilliantly talented band who put our day to music! (revolvingdoorhinge@gmail.com)

And all the many other friends and familywho blessed us with their time, talents, and resources!

Here's a link to the video of our ceremony on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matthew.conners.7/videos/1986991897979543/