Last week, I wrote a bit about how overwhelmed I’ve been feeling at the prospect of trying to do my own research and evaluate the mountains of information about each of the Democratic Presidential hopefuls.  That swirling miasma of bickering, debating, and fact-checking is the backdrop for a major change happening in my personal life, demanding endless evaluation of information and advice for the next 9 months and beyond: pregnancy.

When I first learned I was pregnant a few weeks ago, I was almost immediately overtaken by panic over how much I don’t know: I don’t know anything about making a birth plan, I don’t know anything about what I should or should not eat, or how much to exercise, or how to prepare my apartment, or what supplies we really need, or… this list goes on and on.  I made my husband make a shared google document to list the topics that we need to research, so that we’d be able to divide and conquer; I knew that there was no way I could evaluate all the info myself, but maybe if we divided it in two we could start making some progress.  (Very shortly after that, the morning sickness set in and I’ve been spending most of my free time sleeping or fighting the urge to vomit, so I actually haven’t made any progress at all.  But the list is there when I can get back to it.)

I keep thinking back to a course that I took during my Master’s degree, which was entitled “Environmental Risk Communication” and focused on the challenge of explaining risk to a lay audience.  That semester, the professor chose to focus on Children’s Health Risks, so each student in the class researched various issues such as lead poisoning, rising rates of asthma in urban areas, air pollution, childhood cancers, and so on.  My peers and I dubbed the class the “nervous mothers’ class,” because we realized early on that by the end of the semester, we would have read so many facts and statistics about the threats to children’s health that we might never want to become parents… or if we did, we’d be nervous about everything our child ever breathed, drank, ate, touched, heard, watched, or was exposed to in any way.

A year or so later, I found myself in my first professional job, writing a curriculum unit for high school Physics students about Nuclear Energy.  Aside from the basic chemical reactions and laws of physics involved, the main idea that my colleagues and I wanted the unit to teach was that for a controversial topic like nuclear energy, students needed to learn how to read the information presented by both sides and evaluate the facts for themselves–key critical thinking skills for teenagers in the information age.

That was 12 years ago.  We certainly had the internet and google already, but we didn’t have smart phones in our pockets yet.  A good friend of mine had a baby that year, and I remember a piece of advice that her mom shared with her: “Don’t buy or read any of those pregnancy books about what to expect– they’ll only make you worry more.  Trust your body and your doctor and your instincts– you’ll be fine.”  I wrote to that friend last week and asked if she had actually been able to stick to that advice through the whole pregnancy; I’ve been so hungry for information that I can’t imagine not letting myself read anything.  She said yes, she had mostly stuck to that advice, but she conceded that it would have been harder if she were pregnant today, with her smart phone giving her access to the internet 24/7.

For now, I’m trying to pace myself.  If I have a specific question, I look it up.  I bought two books: one for the expectant dad and one that focuses on mediation and journaling throughout the pregnancy.  As the months go by, I’ll have to get more serious about researching hospitals and procedures and things like that, but for now, I’m just going to sit back and acknowledge how overwhelming this whole thing really is.