The Internet Still Thinks I’m Pregnant

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From The New York Times, I’m Anna Martin, and this is “Modern Love.” A few months ago, I got an email alert from my credit card company. It told me that I had spent $400 at MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas, which was impossible because I was here at the office in New York City, working on an episode of this show. So I called my dad, freaking out. And he was like, OK, someone stole your identity. Where is your credit card information online? And I was like, I mean, it’s everywhere.

And it got me thinking about just how much of myself, my personal information is floating around on the internet. Amy Pittman wrote an essay about how disconcerting it is to realize just how much of yourself you’ve shared online. It’s called, “The Internet Still Thinks I’m Pregnant,” and it’s read by Sam Desz.

I found out I was pregnant the normal way. I peed on a stick. My husband and I had been trying to conceive for a long time and during a difficult year. So I held off looking at the stick for as long as I could to give it plenty of time to think about its answer. While I was showering, a beautiful magenta plus sign materialized.

Like many 20-somethings, I have an app for just about every important thing in my life. I have a health tracker that I ignore, a budget tracker that I ignore, an app to pay my bills that I try to ignore, and a period tracker that I’m obsessed with. Every week, I religiously tracked my mood on the period tracker, along with my core temperature, the viscosity of various fluids, how often we were having sex.

The app had more intimate knowledge of my reproductive behavior than my husband or any doctor. On the day of my positive pregnancy test, I logged into my period tracker to share the good news. When I did, it suggested a pregnancy app. I downloaded it immediately. I could see how big my baby’s hands were. Look ahead to see what new and weird things my body would do in the coming weeks.

All it asked of me was some basic personal information — email, address, age, and date of my last period. I typed in all that info without a second thought. According to my app, my baby was the size of a lavender bud — tiny, perfect, and mine.

I miscarried a month later. It happened around 2:00 AM on December 27, two days after our Christmas Day announcement to our families that we were expecting. I had the perfect miscarriage. I’m not just saying that. The doctor used those exact words while she had her hand between my legs. She winced with empathy and confirmed that it was unlikely that they could have saved the pregnancy.

Then she asked me if my husband knew where I was. I didn’t blame her for her concern. My hair was unwashed, and I was swimming in my husband’s dirty sweats. I had already made a 3:00 AM Walmart run for feminine products and spent hours rotating between my room, the couch, and the bathroom, trying to ease my labor pains, while I waited for the clinic to open at 10:00 AM.

Yes, I was fine, I told the doctor again. After the doctor left, the nurse asked me if I was OK. I assured her I was fine, which was true. The most seemingly real thing about my pregnancy, oddly enough, had been the lavender bud avatar on my pregnancy app that had grown to the size of a chocolate chip before dying.

When I got home from the clinic, I opened the app and terminated my virtual pregnancy. The app immediately responded with a consoling email and cleared my data. It was then when the chocolate chip avatar disappeared that I finally let go and cried. I spent the next few weeks assuring people I was fine. One in three first pregnancies end in miscarriage, I would say, or, I never really felt pregnant.

But as the months passed, I felt less and less fine about the miscarriage. I found myself crying at unexpected moments or responding too defensively when someone asked if my husband and I were going to try to have children.

Meanwhile, all those milestones I had been anticipating came and went. First ultrasound, fingernail development, gender reveal.

As each non-milestone ticked by, I lay awake at night imagining the little chocolate chip growing to the size of a walnut, and then a peach, as the sadness descended upon me.

I hadn’t realized that when I entered my information into the pregnancy app, the company would then share it with companies targeting new mothers. Although I logged my miscarriage into the app and stopped using it, that change in status apparently wasn’t passed along. Seven months after my miscarriage, mere weeks before my due date, I came home from work to find a package on my welcome mat. It was a box of baby formula, bearing the note, “We may all do it differently, but the joy of parenthood is something we all share.”

I took the box inside and read the congratulatory card that gently urged soon-to-be mothers toward formula feeding, and I snapped a picture and texted it to my best friend. Well, the internet still thinks I’m pregnant, I wrote. Maybe the mailman now, too. Then I laughed because what else could I do? It seemed ludicrous that the only remaining evidence of my pregnancy was an erroneously sent product I’d never intended to use from people I had never told at a company I’d never heard of.

The internet had no idea that our baby had died.

Part of me liked the idea that a data hungry entity like the internet, which is so intimately involved in every trivial aspect of our lives, had completely missed the most important news of all. I also liked that our baby remained a piece of living data to someone.

As far as the internet is concerned, my pregnancy proceeded normally, and I gave birth and became a mother last month. Two years from now, it will probably assume I’m dealing with potty training and send me samples of training pants. And in five years, it might come calling for offers of school supplies for my kindergarten student. My little chocolate chip, long since deleted, is indeed out there somewhere, drifting around in cyberspace, endlessly trolling the internet.

After the break, I talk to Amy about what it was like to get pregnant again.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hello, Amy.

Hi, Anna. How are you?

I’m great. So how many kids do you have now?

I have my two stepsons and my son, Simon. But they’re all mine. We have them all full-time.

Wow, three boys. What’s Simon like?

He’s so smart. He just turned 4. He told me the other day — we were looking at videos about animals. And one popped up. He goes, oh, that’s a giant isopod. And I was like, how do you know that? He was like, I learned it.

Wait, I don’t even know what that is. What is that?

It’s like a roly poly that lives in the water.

[LAUGHS]: Oh, my God, Simon. He’s a future biologist? Insect studier?

He wants to work with sharks, he says. He wants to be a shark scientist.

And I’m sure he will. And you got pregnant with Simon after your miscarriage, right?

Exactly, yeah.

Tell me more about that.

We started trying a few months after — did not get pregnant for two years, two years almost to the day. So my first due date was August 5, and my son’s due date was August 1.

Wow. The day that Simon was born, were you also thinking about your miscarriage? Was that somewhere in your consciousness that day?

I mean, it’s always a little present. We had a beautiful baby boy, but he doesn’t replace the baby that’s lost. He’s just an additional baby. So I’m a stepmom to two awesome boys. And I’m a mom to two babies. One I got to hold, and one I never got to.

Hmm. Did you know anyone else who’d been through what you’d been through?

I did. My mom miscarried her first baby a few years before I was born. I knew that miscarriage was a likelihood because we grew up with it. My brothers and I used to imagine if it was a girl or a boy, and I think we settled on the name David at one point. But that child was always kind of like a part of our family narrative. She would just tell us, we tried to have a baby before, and the baby died before it was born. And then we got to have you.

As you got older, did your mom continue to talk about her miscarriage?

No, it was something that was pretty exclusive to childhood. I don’t think we talked about it in depth until I miscarried. And then as the years went on, really, it was, how did you grieve? How did you move on? When did you decide to start trying for a baby again? And, you know, I asked her fairly recently if she was still sad about it. And she said yes.

And I think what I was looking for was, is there an end to the grief? And I don’t think there is. And I think it’s OK. I think that you mourn it as you need to. And it doesn’t change with time. The grief gets less — or less potent maybe. But there’s always kind of a wondering. There’s always a longing.

A longing for what?

So the way that I think about it is, my first pregnancy, that child would be six this year. It’s almost like the grief ages with you because with every passing year, there’s a milestone that’s missed. There’s a birthday you don’t get to celebrate. And so you grieve something very abstract. I think there might be people who would say that it’s not a real loss because it’s such an abstract thought. But because the grief is so potent, you have to honor the grief.

I went to my parents’ house in March, and I had made them an embroidery hoop that said, I’m this big, with a little chocolate chip embroidered in the middle. And I found it while I was at their house. And it was the first time I had seen it for six years. And I was very sad very unexpectedly. So I wrote in my journal that day, I’m sad today. I feel like all the healed places in my heart have been shaken.

And then the next day, I was laughing because my four-year-old knows what a giant isopod is.

You just, you never know what’s going to change your day. Our lives are so dynamic. So when I’m sad, I’m sad. And sometimes I think about this alternate reality where my first baby is a data point, trolling the internet. And it makes me laugh because that would be my baby. My baby would be the baby that’s out there, causing just enough mischief to make her mom laugh.

[LAUGHING]: Amy, thank you so much for letting us in. I so appreciated your time.

Oh, of course.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

On the next “Modern Love,” a man with a chronic illness proposes a plan to his sister — a very long bike trip.

How Ari Diaconis pushed through for the people he loved, next week on “Modern Love.”

“Modern Love” is produced by Julia Botero, Christina Djossa, Elyssa Dudley, and Hans Buetow. It’s edited by Sarah Sarasohn. This episode was mixed by Dan Powell, who also created the “Modern Love” theme music.

Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Nell Gallogly, and a special thanks to Anna Diamond at Audm. The “Modern Love” column is edited by Daniel Jones. Miya Lee is the editor of “Modern Love” projects. I’m Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.