This Month’s Mom-to-Mom series comes from Stephanie Ronco. Thank you, Stephanie, for your bravery and your commitment to your health and that of your family!

At first I was running from responsibility. If anything were to go wrong with my baby during pregnancy, I thought it was going to be my fault. There was no other option. It’s not like my husband could mess it up. I was the one with the person growing inside me. And everywhere I looked, there were more ways for everything to go terribly wrong. The Advil I took for my shoulder injury when I was just one or two weeks along could increase my risk of miscarriage. Lying in the sun on a beach for hours could have raised my internal temperature and caused problems for my baby. Eating sliced fruit from a streetcart could have given me food poisoning that could have hurt my baby. I was only 5 weeks pregnant and I had already put my baby at risk multiple times through my ignorance.

The more I read, the more I worried. Modifiers fell by the wayside. Who could see the word “small” or “some” or “slight” when the word “RISK” was right there, screaming out of the page that I had already done something very very wrong?

No one likes to scare pregnant women, so I didn’t know about all the risks that I needed to avoid. Everyone likes to scare pregnant women, so horror stories filled my mind and crowded any hope of logical reasoning right out. And no one would talk to me in the early days. I could not find an OB/GYN who would agree to meet with me or advise me in any way until I was 8-10 weeks along, which seemed very far away for my 5 weeks pregnant self. I had already messed up, perhaps seriously, by taking Advil when I didn’t know I was pregnant. And then there was the beach day, and then there was the possibly compromised fruit. What other landmines were out there waiting for me? What to Expect When You’re Expecting had already outlined a bunch of ways that I had failed and my pregnancy had barely started.

The only thing I thought I could do to keep my baby safe was to exhaustively research every possible risk and then exert iron control to avoid each one. Of course, this research wasn’t full, balanced research. I know now that I was just looking for risks and, once I found one, the odds didn’t matter. I needed to avoid that risk at all costs. I started taking the temperature of any food I cooked, to make sure that any dangerous bacteria was utterly destroyed and there was no way I could get food poisoning. I washed fresh fruits and vegetables in vinegar, then cold water, then sometimes soap and water, and then I peeled them. I was not taking any chance that something I ingested would endanger my baby. Of course, I was also exhausted and nauseated, so I would often start the time-consuming process of preparing food, get too tired, and just go hungry instead. I threw out dinners because one part of the chicken registered under the safe cooking temperature… after it had been sitting on the cooling rack for 10 minutes. I couldn’t remember if I had checked that section when it first came out of the oven, and the risk/reward ratio was just too out of balance for me to eat it. The vegetables that cooked underneath the chicken were of course no good either. Everything had to go in the trash.

Everyone is nervous during pregnancy, I reminded myself. As long as I control all the food, all the hand soap (I threw out all our soap for paraben-free options), all my makeup (formaldehyde and other bizarre ingredients seemed too dangerous to put on my pregnant body), all my clothing, all of anything that has contact with me, and through me to the baby, as long as I make absolutely sure that I don’t do anything that could risk the baby, I could keep my nervousness to high-strung racehorse levels and that was just fine, right?

I didn’t think any of this was problematic. I thought of it as the bare minimum of work I needed to do to protect my baby. My husband hadn’t done as much research as I had, so I didn’t listen to him when he said that my behavior was extreme. And I just hid it from everyone else. If we dined at a friend’s house, I pled pregnancy nausea and didn’t have to eat until I got back home to the food that I could control. If I decided not to wear stage makeup in a play, it was because I was grossed out by all the chemicals in stage makeup. Who needs makeup in an intimate theater setting anyway?

When I finally did go see an OB/GYN, my anxieties were only reinforced. They were surprised at some of the things I had uncovered — who knew that the same fish that were high in mercury were often used in pregnancy vitamins? Yes, I was probably wise to find a different brand and not put the baby at risk. If my hand soap had parabens, it was definitely better to switch to a kind of soap that didn’t have parabens. I didn’t mention my bizarre food behavior because I already knew what to do to keep my baby safe, so why would I run it by them?

It’s not like “are you obsessively taking the temperature of any and all food you might choose to consume?” comes up at the 12-week checkup.

My doctors asked if I was eating healthy and I said yes and that was the end of it. I was young, I was fit, what possible problem could there be?

I carried on in this hyper-vigilant state until well into my second trimester, when my husband finally begged me to get help. For his sake, and for the sake of our baby, who was being exposed to my constant high levels of anxiety. That one-two punch finally penetrated the fog of terror that had engulfed me, and I agreed to see a therapist. Unfortunately, she was not a good fit. But I had gone, I had tried, and now I could go back to freaking out about whatever imagined mistake I had made that day that could have maybe possibly put the baby at risk.

After a few more weeks, my husband once again asked me to get help. So I tried a different therapist, and that’s how I ended up at the Postpartum Wellness Center. Kate seemed to take one look at me and get to the very bottom of what was going on. Suddenly I had tools to help me feel better, and a diagnosis that made what was happening make sense. I wasn’t doing the bare minimum to keep my baby safe. I was experiencing obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety.

It was like turning on a light in a room that I had been trying to navigate in the dark. Knowing what was happening helped me profoundly and I came out of that appointment feeling like I could actually breathe for the first time since I read about Advil in What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

That was all years ago and I’m still doing the work. My symptoms haven’t fully gone away, but they’re manageable now. And that makes all the difference. I am so grateful that I found the help I needed, and I wouldn’t have done it without the push from my husband. So if you’re reading this and any of it resonates, I would like to give you that same nudge. Seek help, seek understanding, And if the first few roads you take don’t get you where you want to be, keep searching. It’s worth it to find the help you need.

- Stephanie Ronco, Mom of Matthew, age 3