On Being Pregnant
(Written in June 2019 when I was pregnant with my first daughter, Aimi)
I’m trying to think of what to say to the person in front of me. I feel sweaty and shy, insecure about my acne-spattered skin and uncomfortable in my bulging and increasingly wobbling body. Suddenly I feel like I have nothing at all to say. Who am I? Why can’t I be me? Who even is me? I want the floor to swallow me up. I want to hide under my duvet eating crisps. I want my mum.
And no, I am not 13. I am 37 - and pregnant.
But short of having an undercut and locking myself in my bedroom blasting out Radiohead and angrily burning incense sticks, the feelings between the transition to adulthood and the transition to motherhood are remarkably similar. Existential, emotional, hormonal, physical angst. Soaring, aspirational highs and wailing, irrational lows. Hair in unwanted places, sore boobs and a willingness to spend all my disposable income on Clean & Clear. It’s puberty 2.0.
The term ‘transition’ in both instances to me seems like quite a polite way of saying multi-faceted identity crisis. With adolescence, you’re no longer quite a child (even though you secretly want to be) and yet you’re definitely not an adult (even though you pretend and protest with all your might that you are). And in terms of the transition to motherhood, it’s a similar kind of limbo where you’re no longer really who you were (who was that again anyway?) but you’re also not yet the mother you will become. You find yourself trapped between these two slightly shady ideas of yourself – an unrealistic remembering of some independent-and-loving-life-boss-babe and an unrealistic projection of some totally-nailing-it-semi-intimidating-super-mum. Alexandra Sacks talks about the transition to motherhood in terms of this important transition which she calls ‘matresence’, explaining that ‘when a baby is being born, so is a mother – both unsteady in their own way’. It’s a push-pull identity shift that happens, and that is, as it turns out, entirely normal.
Nevertheless, this identity shift has precipitated an urgent (read: panicky) need to really try and pin down who I am and what I want to do with my life. Ever the impatient, high-expectation type, rather than relaxing and enjoying nine months where I can take my foot off the gas and relish earlier nights and bigger pieces of carrot cake, instead I’ve decided that I’d better do everything RIGHT NOW. This has included (in no particular order) that I will write a book, train to become a coach, learn Dutch and Japanese, become a Pilates teacher and, the other day over a cup of morning tea, I even caught myself genuinely thinking ‘maybe I should become a DOCTOR’. Luckily even I have the sense to recognise that as an option this is probably quite unrealistic. For now, becoming a mum will I’m sure be more than enough.
The loneliness has also felt surprising to me, since I’ve finally found a guy that I love and want to be with and have a small and wonderful little being growing inside of me. You would think it would be the time I felt most safe and most surrounded by love. But I think it’s a more inconvenient kind of loneliness that is related to some deep, human need for belonging, and having traditionally used busy-ness and social-butterflying as a way to avoid it, I now find there is nowhere to run and the ache for community and belonging has become all the greater. And though it would be nice to think that you can just do the same kind of stuff (just without the alcohol and in comfier shoes) in reality you really can’t. I’ve found that I don’t really want to do yoga, don’t really want to go to the pub, don’t really want to go to house parties or festivals or museums or meet people 1-on-1 for coffee, but I also really-really want to be doing all those things, all the time. As opposed to finding that I only have the energy to watch How I Met Your Mother reruns in my boyfriend’s tracksuit bottoms.
And just a quick shout out to the hormones in the house. They are real. Really real. From acne to anger, hairiness to hysteria, insomnia to inconsolability and everything in between. I have experienced a range of surprising outbursts that come on quickly (and thankfully pass at the same speed). Luckily, I have a wonderful boyfriend who has the patience to hold my hand through the bad ones, the strength to talk me through the anxious ones and the common-sense to help me see the funny side when the crazy ones kick in. Like when we ordered takeout rotisserie chicken (on my adamant demand), only for me to burst into tears when it arrived because – I sobbed – the chicken ‘looks too dead’.
Slowly, but luckily, it seems more people are starting to be open about the grey areas of both pregnancy and becoming a new mum, without the black and white tendency to think you have either pre or post-natal depression and be really struggling, or are a kind of glowing earth mamma just born to pop children out. Because – like life – a lot of the experience is muddled, not ever entirely one thing or the other, but an inconvenient blurring of both. And when I start to speak to friends about it – both mums and non-mums – there is a realisation that we all exist somewhere in this middle ground all the time and that pregnancy is just one manifestation of that. Because in order to feel truly happy and at ease we also need to be able to feel sadness and discomfort and conversely, these feelings are bedfellows and often occur simultaneously.
This isn’t meant to be a poor-me pregnancy rant, and I fully appreciate that every woman is different in her experience – as well as fully appreciating how lucky I am to be in the position of expecting a child, something I had given up hope of ever achieving. And with all the ups and downs of the past months I also feel a growing sense of excitement, gratitude, curiosity and love (as well as a slowly-developing and long-overdue no-bullshit filter). I can’t wait to meet this wise, divine little being who already knows exactly what she is doing. And for all of this, the at-times awkward transition suddenly seems worth it.
I’m well aware that as transitions go pregnancy is nothing compared to what it will feel like when I’m holding my baby in my arms and realise I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing. But I’ll learn. Because we’re built for transition—as we are built for love.
Disclaimer: I don’t profess to be any sort of expert on the range of (convoluted and complicated) human emotions that I periodically choose to write about! These are merely personal reflections based on personal experiences.
If you got this far, you might also like:
Poems: ‘Lonely’ / ‘Message from earthside’
Ponderings: On being pregnant 2.0 / On the spaces between
