In the first prenatal appointment, at six or eight or ten weeks’ gestation, there is not much to be done. The embryonic heartbeat cannot yet be heard. Some doctors routinely perform ultrasounds, though there is little diagnostic justification for them. The embryo will continue developing until it is large enough to be perceived and analyzed, or else it will not, for reasons that will generally remain unknown.
Information is exchanged, a family history taken. The mother receives pamphlets about what to do and how to behave. She is told to exercise, but not too strenuously, and to relax, but not become indolent, and to avoid alcohol and lunch meat and excessively hot baths. She receives a chart like this one.
They say to “try to gain” 2-5 pounds total in the first three months of pregnancy, and not more than a pound a week thereafter. They give guidelines of how many extra calories to consume during each trimester, and examples of moderate, ladylike snacks that meet these guidelines. “That's the equivalent of, say, two glasses of skim milk and a bowl of oatmeal,” chides What To Expect When You’re Expecting, “not the all-you-can-eat sundae bar you were envisioning.” Heidi Murkoff, needless to say, does not know what I was envisioning.
The prenatal appointments during my first pregnancy constituted the first time I had ever weighed myself regularly, and I was bewildered and alienated by how little the numbers on the scale had to do with my behavior. I gained weight rapidly, uneasily, in fits and starts—two pounds this month, six the next—whether I ate mostly vegetables or mostly oatmeal or mostly ice cream sundaes, whether I “tried to gain” one pound or five pounds or none. While breastfeeding (hungrier than ever) I shrank again, less rapidly but just as uneasily, feeling my vitality drain directly into my son’s gurgling, thrashing, chuckling body.
The body knows what it needs, I told myself. But I wanted to know too, not to submit myself to an opaque and ancient mystery. That turned out not to matter.
They say gaining too much weight will make it harder to lose “it” again after giving birth. As if the weight one gains during pregnancy is ballast, stored in discrete ingots around the waist, the thighs; as if it is not the integrated system that sustains your thoughts, your movements, your very identity. As if it is something other than your self, all you have incorporated into your being.
They speak of cravings, which sound cute and whimsical, and of “good nutritional choices.” None of this is hunger. What is hunger? Hunger is ambition. Hunger is depletion. Hunger is lust and hunger is exhaustion. Hunger is a driving force.
They don’t say, tend to your hunger or you will vomit and tremble and rage. They don’t say, your husband will gaze at you with fond bemusement as you out-eat him for the first time in your lives together. They don’t say, you won’t leave a restaurant with leftovers anymore. They don’t say, your hunger will be transporting, violent, demanding all your attention.
Try to gain no more than one pound a week, they say. Gaining too much weight can make your labor more difficult. As if labor could ever be anything but difficult. As if life could be created without struggle. As if there would be anything reasonable or linear about this process.
Pregnancy is an end to stability, to homeostasis. One body swells, shifts, ruptures violently into two. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost Rebecca Solnit writes of
“the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform at least once in its life cycle. In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who ‘knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.’… We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Not of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.”
They don’t say, you will feel as nothing that goes through you is for you. All that you take in will flow to your blood, your milk, to the ravenous and perfectly selfish creature you bear. They don’t say, your child will never stop being hungry for you. You will spend endless hours doing nothing but caring for him, keeping your phone and your book and your glass of water out of sight so he does not destroy them, and he will still hurl himself sobbing at the shower door as you lather up your hair. They don’t say, this is how you begin learning to live with that.