The Pregnancy Sandwich
By Melissa Poulin
@melissa_r_poulin
The sandwich my husband made me sits on a handmade ceramic plate, one of a dwindling set of six from a wedding gift nearly ten years ago. He made the sandwich with plain wheat bread spread with just the right amount of mayonnaise—specifically, and this is important, the kind from Trader Joe's in the big jar with the yellow label and the blue lid.
It’s October 2020, and I’m in the middle of my third trimester, in the middle of a global pandemic. The presence of that coveted jar in our fridge, and the tang of its contents in my sandwich, adds a heightened layer of preciousness. Or maybe it’s more loaded than that. Maybe that mayonnaise jar represents something I can control, during a time when nothing much fits into that category.
Daily, I remind myself of the data I’ve read about pregnancy and this virus—no significant elevated risk of getting it, no evidence of mother-to-child transmission, only a slight increase in preterm birth. But I'm terrified the baby will die, or that I will die and leave my children behind. Then there's the fear I can't even speak, that my children or husband will die.
Also? With no childcare and constant nausea, I’m pretty desperate for more than just a little time to myself. From what I can gather, this is a common pandemic-pregnancy emotion, this mix of wanting my children close and needing them to go away. It’s a very specific combination, not unlike the sandwich of my dreams that I’m about to eat.
There's a little Dijon mustard, a few crisp leaves of lettuce, and several thin slices of Tillamook cheddar cheese. My husband included two slices of roasted turkey lunchmeat, sliced avocado, and a few twists of freshly cracked pepper. He cut it diagonally, arranged it on the plate with a pickle spear—a brand very carefully selected for its singular virtue of not containing garlic or onion—and set it on my nightstand with a cloth napkin and a glass of water. And then he closed our bedroom door, locked it, and took our two young children outside to swing on the swing set.
I sit in our bed in the stunning quiet and I devour the sandwich, by myself. Our two-and-a-half-year-old is not climbing on my non-existent lap. Our five-year-old is not asking me, for the thirty-second time, if she can have tap shoes so she can dance on our hardwood floors. (For the record, the answer is Dear God, no). Our unborn baby girl digs her feet into my ribs, and I am eating a sandwich, alone.
Few things taste as good when I am very pregnant than the thing I love, made by the man I love, in just the right way, at just the right time. It's a seasoning unlike anything else. The sandwich itself? Delicious, fresh, homey, and uncomplicated. But by all standards, unexceptional. And yet there is nothing I have craved in quite this way throughout each of my pregnancies.
It could be tempting to chalk this up to only a matter of hormones and caloric deficiency. Babies suck the nutrients from the bones, blood, and sinew of their mothers as they grow. Meanwhile, digestion goes haywire, slowed down by sleepy progesterone and hampered by the physical weight and bulk of the baby as it compresses organs like the stomach. For me, this combination usually means I am staggeringly nauseous one minute, only to be suddenly and desperately hungry the next.
So is the mysterious allure of the pregnancy sandwich merely the result of a special, concentrated hunger?
Once, on the tenth night of a group backpacking trip, I ate a serving of no-bake Jello cheesecake. Sitting in the dark on top of a granite dome, under a star-spattered sky, I felt almost woozy with hunger, my legs aching with the miles we'd covered, and my heart full with new friendship and ability. I could feel the grit of dust and gravel in my teeth as I ate a gooey slice of a cheesecake I could barely see. And yet, it is hands-down the most delicious dessert I have ever eaten.
Or, to bring it closer to the subject at hand, I could compare the zest of the pregnancy sandwich to the many tiny boxes of Ocean Spray Cran-Apple juice I consumed with gusto after giving birth for the first time. No beverage had ever before tasted as perfect as that juice, or ever has since.
Hunger under duress, then? We're getting closer. But another facet of sandwiches is their complexity. The layers. It's possible pregnancy sandwich is a general metaphor, in the genre of reality sandwich, soup sandwich, or shit sandwich. There is the buffering effect of two slices of bread, a palatable outer layer housing something otherwise chaotic, gross, or difficult. I'd say the actual experience of pregnancy checks those boxes.
We are expecting our third child, but it's technically my fifth pregnancy. Two babies we expected didn't live beyond the first trimester, nausea and all, so even though we're well beyond that window of danger now, I don't take it for granted that this baby kicking me so forcefully is guaranteed a shot at life outside my womb.
By now, in this third trimester a third time through, my husband is a pro at recognizing sandwich emergencies. He knows the look of pinched hunger and pleading in my eyes, after eight hours of tending our children solo. He knows I am running on string cheese and graham crackers, hastily crammed in my mouth while hauling our littlest to the potty, just a second too late. And if for whatever reason he doesn't catch the look in my eye after he turns off the truck ignition and opens our door, all I have to say is, “This is a sandwich emergency,” and he springs into action.
The Original Sandwich Emergency happened when I was pregnant with our son. Neither my husband nor I can remember the exact circumstances that triggered it. Maybe it had been an especially trying day with our then two-year-old daughter. Maybe it was weeks of frustrated conversation, trying to figure out how to ask for what I needed. I was probably hungry and tired. The record only shows that in the middle of an otherwise serious discussion about shared responsibilities and support, I suddenly threw my hands up, exasperated.
“Listen, I just need you to make me sandwiches, okay?”
To which my husband replied, startled, “Okay, for how long?”
“From here on out!” I yelled.
We were both stunned into silence by the simultaneous accuracy and ridiculousness of the phrase. We burst out laughing.
From that moment on, all that either of us has to do, even in the tensest of moments, is to add on the phrase, from here on out, and it instantly bends the corners of our mouths up.
This, too, is a secret ingredient in the appeal of the aforementioned actual sandwich—humor. In our case, it's a kind of gallows humor that goes beyond the funniness of sandwich, itself an inherently funny word. Say sandwich, and you can see one, right? Maybe you think of a Dagwood-style hoagie or a sad little PB&J in a baggie. Either way it's an instant reference to something simultaneously boring and vitally important. A sandwich is so common and everyday you barely think about it, and also deeply personal and slightly embarrassing. Like underwear.
We need funny these days. These days we watch a lot of The Office and Jim Gaffigan and John Mulaney after the kids are in bed. I need to laugh so I don't cry, because the truth is I am terrified. Outside the safe cocoon of our home, COVID-19 continues to take lives unpredictably—young as well as old, healthy and unwell. Each night, I settle against my husband and an overwhelming number of pillows on the couch, and I thank God for getting us through another day. Under the laughter, there’s the rhythm of my husband’s breath, the kicking of our baby’s feet, and the steady beating of our hearts. Fear and love live side by side there, and both are expanded by this experience of carrying another child.
Right now, in the blissful quiet of our bedroom, I take another bite of my sandwich. I think I know why it tastes so good. It’s this solitude, yes, but it’s everything around it, too. My husband is alive, and he made it, and my kids are alive and playing outside, and I am alive and writing this, and it's just the best damn sandwich in the world.
Guest essay written by Melissa Reeser Poulin. Melissa’s poems and essays have appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Entropy, Hip Mama, Relief Journal, Ruminate Magazine, The Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, and Water~Stone Review, among other publications. She is the author of a chapbook of poems, Rupture, Light (2019), and co-editor of the anthology Winged: New Writing on Bees (2014). She lives in Oregon with her husband and three children.
Photo by Lottie Caiella.