Lately I’ve been going to bed early and waking up nine or ten hours later, still exhausted. The smells of coffee and bacon and blueberry muffins turn my stomach. I’m pregnant again, in other words.
If I had my way, I’d never have to say so explicitly. Instead, I’d take the nineteenth-century approach: wear looser and looser clothes until middle-aged women began looking at me knowingly and then retire to my manor house, appearing six months later with a rosy-cheeked bundle and a mysterious air of superiority.
It’s funny how reluctant I feel about announcing a pregnancy, given how cheerful I am about discussing sex and parenting and so many other aspects of my lived experience.
Part of it is superstition: I don’t want to share the news until I know it will be good news. American convention at the moment calls for postponing an announcement until the end of the first trimester, when the chance of miscarriage decreases. But as any parent knows, the risk doesn’t end there. We’ve all heard stories about the midpregnancy ultrasound that reveals a serious problem, the baby who stops moving a week before its due date, the birth that ends in tragedy. And having an impossibly fragile infant, or a reckless toddler, hardly inspires more confidence. No, count no mother happy until she be dead—and her children survive.
And this, I suppose, gets to the heart of the matter: The most common response to a pregnancy announcement—cheerful clapping, cooing over the prospect of sweet first smiles and tiny booties—feels all wrong, ill-suited to the reality of my experience.
I sometimes say, a bit glibly, that being pregnant is like going through puberty again—the growing pains, the hormonal shifts, the suddenly unfamiliar, betraying body—except that everyone expects you to be cheerful all the time. But a more honest statement would be that being pregnant feels like touching death.
I’ve been thinking about death a lot in these queasy, exhausted, anxious last few months. Partly about loss of the baby, partly about my own. And not my own literal death, exactly—I’m lucky enough to live in a time and place where death in childbirth is quite unlikely—but metaphorical death, or symbolic death.
I don’t know how to account for this except in terms of ancient archetypes: the maiden being transformed into the mother, a process that requires a permanent transformation of the self. The peak of this process is giving birth, but it begins in early pregnancy as a persistent mental fog, an unshakeable fatigue, an instinctive withdrawal from once-beloved foods. So much is taken from me during pregnancy. My desires for food and for sex, my emotional equilibrium, my capacity to bend at the waist, to draw a deep breath—all these disappear. Some women, I’ve heard, feel wonderful during pregnancy—energized, centered, purposeful. I said to my husband the other day, half-jokingly but half in earnest, that I felt I was under a malevolent curse. I feel that I am being destroyed, perhaps remade, so that another may live.
This is what I mean when I say, I’m pregnant—which is why it feels so peculiar, so discordant, to hear cheerful, casual messages of congratulations. If I said I was embarking on a yearlong quest traversing the boundaries of life and death, a mythic journey that would push me to the limits of my capacities and transform my understanding of human nature, nobody would say Congratulations. Good luck, maybe. How can I help, perhaps.
So. Wish me luck?