Pregnant, Pill-Free and Panicked - NYTimes.com Because I've lived so long with anxiety, there were lots of things I figured I'd never, ever do - having children was one of them. In fact, in my 20s, before I'd managed to stumble on the combination of drugs and exercise that allows me to be as sane as I can expect to be, I was so sure I'd never give birth that I got a tattoo of a giant koi fish extending from one end of my abdomen to the other. Seven years later I found myself hugely pregnant - the koi fish had expanded to a koi whale, stretched out into a giant, fleshy billboard advertising the grand impulsivity of my youth. On darker days, it was a villainous rebuke. Its growing eye stared back at me in the mirror. To be clear, I did choose to become pregnant, and when I did I found myself in a very ironic situation: my decision to have a child was the result of a sense of stability I enjoyed due to taking an array of anti-anxiety medications that I would be strongly advised by most doctors to stop taking now that I was pregnant. It was also my medicated, logical brain that reasoned that the possible side effects of the drugs on the baby would be even greater than the anxious thoughts and behaviors that would flood back in when I stopped taking the pills. I can do it! I told myself. So I stopped taking the pills. And this is what happened. My pregnancy was one long, nonfunctional funk, in which I oscillated between the couch and the bed and seldom removed my favorite pair of stained elastic-waist pajama pants. If I had to make a pie chart of my activity during pregnancy, the two largest sections would be "crying" and "apathetically watching "Law & Order" reruns." I worried that upon birth my child would not recognize my voice or that of my husband but only the gestational background noise she'd heard the most - the sound of a gavel slamming onto wood. Pregnancy without drugs made it impossible not to constantly entertain the giant, looming questions of mortality all throughout the day. Few things can make one focus on death more than the life-giving process. At practically the very moment I found I was host to a living being, I realized that that living being could stop living. I remembered, that I, too was a living being who could stop living. Whenever I allowed myself the slightest glimpse at the new potential zenith of loss made possible by this gift of a child, I became paralyzed. The specter of doubt in my head was a convincing one - it took on the form of a wizened voice that brought to mind an elderly philosophy professor in a sweater vest sitting in a rocking chair and thoughtfully puffing away at a pipe. "Just look at you; look at your life!" the voice said. How exactly would someone like you MacGyver a human baby from the ether of sarcasm, Eggo waffles, and dog hair that is your existence? It's true, I thought. It's enough of a triumph for me to remember to turn off the coffee maker each morning that I'm literally proud when I do it. Did I think I'd actually somehow managed to conjure up - and nurture - another person? This, of course, spawned worries for me that the pregnancy wasn't proceeding correctly. For example, the "nesting" energy I'd been told about did not kick in and make me want to clean things. A dust ball behind our bedroom door slowly grew to the size of a small cantaloupe. Instead of removing it I manufactured an odd link between the growing dust ball and my growing fetus: I did not pick it up or throw it away for fear that tossing the dust ball would cause me to miscarry. When it grew so large that our dog began to regard it with suspicion - sitting several feet away, trembling, emitting a low growl - I finally compromised by vacuuming it up but not emptying the vacuum into the trash: it was still safe, I assured myself. Encapsulated and going nowhere. I could toss it after I gave birth. On the bright side, pregnancy actually decreased my anxiety in certain areas - mainly relative to physical appearance. Leaving the house without changing into actual clothing, for instance, would've made unpregnant me feel self-conscious, but pregnant me never gave it a second thought. It made going through the McDonald's drive-thru while wearing a bathrobe at 3:46 p.m. on a weekday feel seven percent less embarrassing than it had before. Ditto for pumping gas in oversized tropical bird patterned pajama pants. When someone at a stoplight recently used their phone to take a picture of me drinking from the mouth of a 2-liter bottle in my car, I was blissfully unaffected. In fact, I had to actively rein in my apathy at others" judgment of my sloth. Amazingly, my baby was born without a hitch. And I've begun to resume the taking of my beloved anti-anxiety drugs. But now that I am a mother, I am at the threshold of a whole new set of anxieties I haven't even allowed myself to contemplate. I'm about to enter a club where increased anxiety is the norm even for people with regular brains - so where will that leave me? When I do allow myself to think about what's beyond the cliff, it's the worry that I won't be able to handle the worry: that no amount of medication, cathartic yoga, or omega-3-enriched, low-preservative-diet food could ever possibly be enough to handle it. I worry about the games and tricks my brain will play on me in its misguided attempt to try to help me cope with the hurricane of what-ifs. But if there's one thing I've practiced to date in my life, it's anxiety. If anything has prepared me even slightly for what's about to come, maybe it's that: maybe my life-long nemesis was just a gateway to motherhood all along. Alissa Nutting is author of the short story collection "Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls" and an assistant professor of creative writing at John Carroll University.