Nadia Singh decides she doesn’t want children, believing it will detract from her scientific career, but then her husband issues an ultimatum.
Nadia Singh is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University and an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Oregon. She earned her BA in Biology from Harvard University, her PhD in Biological Sciences at Stanford University, and did a postdoc at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the genetics of evolution, and she relies primarily on fruit flies as a model system. Outside of work, she enjoys running (ok, jogging), cooking (ok, eating), drinking IPAs (no caveat here, it’s a true story), and playing board games with her two daughters (but not Monopoly because that game is awful and she doesn’t want to raise a pair of mercenary capitalists).
This story originally aired on Sept. 1, 2017.
Story Transcript
So when I was in grad school, the dean of the school of earth sciences was this woman called Pam Matson, and she told the story about how her six-year-old daughter came home from school one day and said, “How come you don’t make brownies like all the other moms?” For me, it was a really powerful and poignant example of the struggle we all face trying to balance our personal and professional lives.
I decided that I was never going to be that mom. I actually decided I was never going to have children because I didn’t want to compromise my professional career.
A few years into my marriage when I was a postdoc, my husband and I got into a massive argument. He accused me of being too ambitious, of working too hard. He wanted kids. We were at a crossroads. It was divorce or children. I loved my husband and I loved our marriage, so I agreed to have kids.
I went off birth control and a few months later I was pregnant. My cycle had been so bizarre because I'd been on birth control for so long that I didn’t know I was pregnant. It didn’t even occur to me that I might be pregnant. I had some irregular bleeding and so I went to a clinic just to get checked out, just to make sure that I was okay.
The doctor checked me out and he left the room, ran some tests and he came back and he said, “Congratulations! You're pregnant.” I burst out crying. The doctor told me that was not the normal reaction, and I told him he was an asshole.
Matt, my husband, was in Cambodia at that time doing field work and I knew he would be thrilled. I just didn’t want to tell him over the phone and so I decided to wait until he came home to tell him in person.
About a week or so later, I was at work, it was a Friday, and I started to bleed more heavily. Matt was still in the field. I had walked to work that day so I didn’t have my car and so I went to my friend Brian’s office, who was a dad already, and I told him what was happening. He drove me to the emergency room.
They took me back and a man came in and did an ultrasound. Then he left and he pulled the curtain closed and he had this very hushed conversation in the hallway with a woman. Then the woman came back and she did an ultrasound and then she left. A third person came back and told me that I had miscarried. She said I should follow up with my doctor on Monday and that she was sorry, and she asked me if I would like some apple juice.
Brian drove me home and I took a scaldingly hot bath and I drank the better part of a bottle of white wine. Matt called me the next day from Cambodia and I told him that I had miscarried. He hadn’t even known I was pregnant.
I followed-up with my doctor on Monday and she didn’t think I had miscarried at all. She thought I was still pregnant. Sorry, what? Like it didn’t even compute, right? She thought it was too early to see anything on the ultrasound and so what she wanted to do was draw blood every couple of days and track my hormone levels. If the levels were increasing at the correct rate, I hadn’t miscarried at all.
It turns out, she was right. I was still pregnant. I was shocked and I was relieved. And then I was shocked that I was relieved.
I started going to the obstetrician every two weeks for a checkup and an ultrasound. Matt would come with me to all the appointments. At six weeks we heard the heartbeat. Deafening. At eight weeks, we saw the heartbeat on the monitor. It looks like a light flickering really, really fast, and that for me is the moment my pregnancy became real. I had a heart, like a beating heart that wasn’t my own inside of me.
At ten weeks I went in for a now-routine ultrasound. It was so boring at this point Matt didn’t even come with me. It was a Friday, right? Of course, a Friday. And the ultrasound technician, she couldn’t keep a poker face. There was something wrong, but she couldn’t tell me what it was. I called the doctor and left a message saying I wanted to know the results.
The doctor called back that evening. Matt and I were having dinner at Chili’s for some reason. Sorry, it’s true. I wanted the doctor to tell me the results, but he said he couldn’t. He had to tell me in person. I could see him on Monday at his office. You know, protocol.
I don't know what I said but he caved. “The embryo is not viable,” he said. “You've miscarried.” I ordered a beer and I haven't been back to Chili’s since.
When you miscarry, one of two things happens. One, your body realizes that the pregnancy is no longer viable and it will rid itself of the pregnancy and unneeded tissue. Another case is your body never figures out that the pregnancy isn’t viable and it will continue to invest in the pregnancy, so the embryo isn’t growing but everything else still is. In that case you have to have surgery to remove the embryonic and placental tissue.
Matt and I waited for a couple of weeks hoping my body would wise up, but it never did. So surgery it was.
The procedure is called a D and E. It’s for dilation and evacuation. They dilate your cervix and they evacuate your uterus. To warm me up for the surgery, they had me take a drug called Pitocin, which induces labor. What that really means is that before you even go in for a surgery you've expelled all of the tissue and all the doctors really have to do is go in and clean you up.
This drug is not taken orally. For maximum effectiveness, it’s delivered straight to the source, and then you wait. Before you know it, you've gone from zero to full-on labor in about sixty seconds. It’s excruciating and it’s horrifying. I spent the night before my surgery in our bathroom moaning and weeping and expelling about twelve weeks’ worth of pregnancy.
Being a scientist, I saved some of the tissue and took it with me to the surgery. I wanted them to karyotype it. I knew that there was a genetic explanation for my miscarriage. Some chromosomal abnormality made the fetus not viable. I wanted to know which one. I wanted an explanation for the miscarriage.
They looked at me like I was crazy. “We don’t do that here, ma’am.”
“Why not? You would learn so much about the genetic basis of miscarriage if you just did this with every spontaneous abortion that comes in here.” Like more crazy looks.
I asked if there was a private company that I could send it to, to run that kind of diagnostic. “I don't think so, ma’am. It’s not your typical request.”
I had my D and E on December 31, 2008. It was New Year’s Eve. Matt and I rang in the New Year watching movies in bed. Matt bought a Mylar balloon and wrote, “Fuck you, 2008!” in purple Sharpie on it, and then… then I got pissed.
For as long as I can remember, I have not responded well to being told what to do. if you tell me what to do, I will do the opposite just to spite you. I used to not wear my seat belt because the law told me I had to and I don’t need the law telling me what to do with this body. So do you think I'd just sit back and let the universe tell me I couldn’t have kids? That I would listen to my body when it told me no? Hell, no. I was going to have kids, dammit! And I wasn’t going to let the universe or my body or anyone or anything get in my way.
I got pregnant with a vengeance, and I vowed to be the best goddamn pregnant person and the best goddamn mother in the history of the world. I exercised, I took my prenatal vitamins, I even wore my seat belt. The problem was that I sucked at being a patient. I had so many questions about the science, about the statistics, for my doctors and they never had any answers. And they didn’t like me because of it.
When you’re pregnant they screen you for gestational diabetes. The first screen is very error-prone, and if you fail the first test they make you do a second, more accurate test. I failed the first test because, of course.
So I asked my doctor, “Well, what’s the error rate on this first test?”
“Oh, it’s high. That’s why we have a second test.”
“Yeah, I got that actually. Like but what is high? I wanna know how high is high. What does high mean to you? Is it five percent? Is it ten percent? Is it thirty percent? How high is the false positive rate?” I wanted to know.
She had no idea. If anyone wants to know, it’s actually fifteen percent. I looked it up.
Early in my second trimester, we went to the anatomy scan. That’s where you can start to see the skeletal development of the fetus. The 4D ultrasound technology is totally mindboggling. The things you can see are incredible.
I remember the articulation of the spine coming up on the monitor and Matt and I both just gasped audibly. We saw the four chambers of the heart starting to develop. We took a picture and sent it to my brother, who’s a cardiologist. You can see all kinds of things with this imaging. You can see, for instance, that this thing you've affectionately been referring to as “Sprout” actually looks more like Skeletor.
You can also see the sex of the fetus, and the ultrasound technician asked us if we wanted to know if we were having a boy or a girl. We said no, we didn’t want to know. The truth of the matter is that I come from a long line of difficult relationships between mothers and daughters and I didn’t want to have a girl. I didn’t want to perpetuate this cycle of dysfunction. And I knew that if they told me I was having a girl at that moment I would spend the rest of my pregnancy being anxious about meeting my soon-to-be daughter.
But if they told me when she was born, I would just be so excited that she was there I wouldn’t care that she was a girl. And that’s exactly what happened. When Isabella was born, I was so happy that she was healthy, and that she was out of me, that I didn’t care that she was a girl.
I wish I could tell you what it was like to see her for the first time or to touch her for the first time, but the truth is I don’t actually remember. I have flashes of memories. I remember meeting Matt’s misty eyes with my own and exchanging this silent look of, “We did it!”
I remember swelling with pride when I got to introduce my daughter to my father, who had showed up at the hospital when I was in labor.
I remember the nurses placing Izzy on my chest and thinking how tiny she was. And I remember holding her, this tiny, sleeping, swaddled bundle and knowing, really knowing, that everything was going to be fine. I was not going to fuck this up.
I have two daughters now. Nikki is three and Izzy is six. And is divorced from science as my three pregnancies felt, my life now is inextricably linked with science.
I’m a professor of biology. The students and faculty and staff at my home institution see me as a scientist, they see me as a researcher, as a teacher, as an editor, as a leader, as a member of the scientific community. But they also see me as a person. They see me as a mother. They’ve seen my kids at seminars, in my class, in the hallways, in my office. I like to think that it’s a good thing for some of our students and staff and faculty to see a successful person who is defined by more than just their career.
For Mother’s Day last year, the school made a video of our kids answering questions about us, and they asked Nikki, my three-year-old, what my job is. She said, “Her job is to keep me safe.”
If you ask Izzy the same question, she’ll say that I study flies. They're both right. They see me as the scientist who goes to work every morning and the mother who snuggles them at night.
As for me, I still have aspirations of being dean someday. I still strive to make breakthroughs in science, to innovate, to educate, to integrate research with training and teaching. I still try to think creatively about how to foster crosstalk between scientists and the public. And I try to be a role model for my daughters, to teach them to work hard and play hard, to be kind and to be grateful, to respect themselves and to respect others, and to laugh and to love. And I teach them how to make brownies. We make a lot of brownies in my house.
Thank you.