10.
One impetuous afternoon in my early pregnancy, after we told our close friends and family but before we told the internet, I find myself alone in the kitchen standing sideways in front of the camera on my laptop. I am supposed to be working but instead decide it is time to post a cryptic photo of my torso to Instagram. The photo doesn’t include my face, just my stomach pooching out a little. I caption the photo Does this shirt make me look pregnant, y/n? and feel a rush of adrenaline as I hit Post. The comments range from Ummm to What????
I have reached the agreed-upon threshold—twelve weeks—but posting it on Facebook feels too fraught, like I am conducting a press conference on behalf of my fetus and I might get the tone wrong.
After the first hesitation, the first failed grasp for a new language or, better, a new way of being, I start to understand why people use borrowed phrases: “excited to announce”—like a business acquisition. I want to say it quickly, to get the information out there and over with so that everyone can leave some screaming emoji comments and I can move on to talking about it constantly. I want to have already said it.
11.
Prenatal yoga is a lot like regular yoga except the teacher talks about Kegels and has us walk around grabbing our pubic bones just to get us thinking about them. The new utility of our private parts.
At the beginning of class we sit in a circle in the large, bright room, perched on yoga blocks and blankets, everyone barefoot and shifting lazily. We all go around and say how far along we are and share one thing that’s bothering us that week: hip pain, heartburn, can’t sleep, sore tits, exhaustion, nausea, deep regret.
Whoever is the most pregnant wins. At eleven weeks, twelve weeks, thirteen, I am apologetic, a chubby impostor, merely bloated. Each body is a revelation. I wish I could put the women nearing forty weeks behind glass and ogle them properly. As it is, I spend most of my mental energy trying to sneak glances at their popped-out belly buttons between warrior poses. They all seem to have the same faraway look, one that makes me feel a sort of naive adoration. Looking at them is like looking into the future.
12.
The sonograms are sacred things. My obstetrician runs one each time I visit her and I always hold my breath, brace myself for bad news. I want her to do the ultrasound, of course, to flip the switch that turns on the machine and ask me to yank my leggings down around my hips.
I’ve never quite loved my doctor, my ob-gyn, but I’ve been going to her for years and the idea of finding a new one is overwhelming. When I complain about her, Dustin gently reminds me we could switch, that it’s worth the trouble, but I get defensive and change the subject. There’s so much about this that’s unfamiliar. I don’t want one more new thing.
My palms sweat while Dr. R. tries to find the baby’s heartbeat, and the hygienic paper crinkles when I grip it, steeling myself for tragedy. I can’t see how anyone could go looking for a heartbeat without the sinking feeling it won’t be there, but the doctor just clucks her tongue when she can’t find it right away and says the baby is being stubborn. I’m so filled with dread I don’t even laugh politely, feeling the resignation of an anxious person buckling in for a transatlantic flight.
Then the relief when we touch down. Implausibly, improbably, defying all hunches, the baby is there, darting like a guppy in his black-and-white home.
13.
He was only ever real for the afternoons and evenings after an ultrasound. I’d push open the doors to the sight of yellow cabs and buses rushing by along Central Park, then pace around the sidewalk texting my vital signs and images of the printed-out sonogram photos.
Friends text back: So, what am I seeing here?
On one such jubilant afternoon, the fetus and I passed by the Museum of Natural History and I decided we should go in. I stood under the giant whale and cried, full of awe, thinking, You are going to come here one day. We are going to come here together.
14.
I rush around the apartment grabbing my stuff so I can make it to yoga class on time, but I stop short of the door and stand a few feet in front of Dustin, who is sitting at the table eating toast. He beckons me over to him but I stay where I am and tug at my shirt.
“Do I look pregnant today?” I turn sideways for the full effect.
“Meaghan,” he says, trying not to laugh at me, “you look pregnant every day. You are pregnant.”
15.
Were other women changed immediately? Did they become mothers the minute they peed on a stick and went screaming down the hallway? Or was it like the time I was in first grade and came home from school crying to my mother because all the kids knew how to read but me?
“Nobody knows how to read yet,” my mom assured me. “That’s why you’re in school. To learn!”
“No, Mom!” I told her. I was insistent. “They do. I can tell because during silent reading time everyone looks at the pages of their books and moves their lips.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, what do you do?”
“I look at the pages of my book and move my lips!”
16.
When my mom visits for Thanksgiving, I am sixteen weeks pregnant and just starting to show. Halfway into an afternoon of shopping with her and Dustin, I’m convinced I feel something wet in my underwear. I keep this information to myself at first and shuffle down the block, twisting this way and that to get to the bottom of it. I consider trying on some clothes just so I can be alone in a dressing room, stick a hand down my underwear, and assess the damage. Dustin and my mom stop to get a coffee and I tell them I want to use the bathroom. This is it, I think, the moment of truth. There is a long line and when they wander over with their drinks to see what’s taking so long, I look up at them and start crying. “I think I feel blood,” I confess. Everyone turns white. When I come back from the bathroom, I’m somber. I shake my head a quick no; it was nothing.
This scene plays out around once a week.
The next time it happens, my mom has had enough. “Baby, you have to stop reading everything you can find! You know too much! You’re going to drive yourself crazy,” she says. “This was not how it was in our day, and you know what, I think it was better that way.”
I don’t tell her about the stillbirth memoir I just bought at the bookstore a week earlier. Or that I have the New York City tenancy laws about lead paint committed to memory.
17.
I spent most of my life being just a little bit fat and always figured that pregnancy would be a nice reprieve. I imagined I would fall in love with my body and feel ready to pose for pictures in Facebook updates. I had this image in my mind of how I’d look pregnant, mostly based on the type of woman who posed on lifestyle blogs and looked “like a beanpole that swallowed a bowling ball.”
My whole life, I’ve had upper arms I’ve wanted to hide in a cardigan, but for some reason in this image of myself as a pregnant woman, my arms and legs are long and thin, set off by a perfectly round midsection. Like maybe as my belly grew, the rest of me would look smaller? In my fantasies I am hugging my large stomach and wearing some sort of flowing, floral vintage dress. I am emanating effortless joy.
When have I ever willingly posed for, to use dating-app parlance, a full-body shot? When have I ever said, Here is my body, please look at it while I stand here smiling, and take a picture so we can remember it always.
I should be able to wear tight dresses, things that under normal circumstances would reveal too much of my gut. Now, I remind myself, my gut is a source of pride. Now my gut is a miracle. I know I am supposed to enjoy that, and on certain days, in certain outfits, I do manage to float along in cotton jersey with an undeniable sense of well-being. Other times, in other outfits, I’m chiefly concerned that people will assume I’m just fat.
Some days, when I catch sight of myself, an automatic, self-hating part of my brain still recoils, still thinks, Bad. My body is jutting where it should not jut. There’s no hiding it.
18.
The first time
a man offers me his seat on the subway, my face gets hot. He stands up in a crowded car and gestures, grandly, toward his still-warm space. I smile; I’d like to sit but find myself demurring reflexively, feeling put on the spot and wanting the whole interaction to end. I wave my hand at him, shaking my head. No. It’s fine. He insists. I say no. I feel a train car’s worth of eyes on me, the pregnant lady, blushing and breaking into a sweat.
19.
When the radiology tech says, “Okay! It’s a boy,” Dustin, sitting off in the dark, holding my outstretched hand, goes, “Huh,” without affect.
All we had really imagined was a girl. We both had sisters only. Even the family dogs I had growing up were girls. What was a boy?
20.
The day we find out the baby is a boy is the day I first feel him, or feel something. It’s not a kick; more like a vibration—a phone buzzing, briefly, inside of me. It’s wild to feel a brand-new sensation in a place where nothing has stirred before. It feels like being tapped on the shoulder from the inside. I exist, I exist, I exist.
21.
For Christmas we drive the ten hours to Michigan from New York, splitting the cost of a rental car with Dustin’s sister and dad. I am hungry the whole time but feel sheepish about it. I don’t know how to speak up: Feed me, I’m having your grandchild.
What kind of mother can’t do this for herself? I cry quietly in the backseat, feeling inadequate and desperately needing to piss.
When we get there, I’m presented with my own Christmas stocking, embroidered by my not-yet-mother-in-law, who also brings out Dustin’s baby book. In it we find a carbon copy of her birth story, which was written on a typewriter in 1982. She gave birth to him without an epidural, at a birth center under dim lights. They put him directly in a warm bath. I feel cowed. I tell her about all the yoga I’ve been doing.
My own mother had me via C-section after I got stuck in her birth canal for hours. It was Friday the thirteenth and the on-call anesthesiologist had been locked in a tennis court as a prank. She had my younger sister two years later without drugs, she tells me, but when I talk on the phone to my dad, whom she’s been divorced from for a decade, he snickers and tells me she got the epidural.
22.
The day after we get to Michigan, I e-mail my friend Anna, who wants to know how I’m holding up. I tell her not so good. Allergies, hunger, rage. After reading my missive out loud to her mother, Anna transcribes her mom’s advice for me:
She should tell people what she needs and they should do it for her. If she needs something and she’s pregnant she should get it. That’s what I think. She has a kind of authority as a pregnant person that she should learn to use because the minute the baby arrives, she will a) fall in love, like she’d never been in love before, but b) she will have a new and impetuous boss.
I know she’s right. The authority of the pregnant person. I can see that it’s there in the way people treat me, in their endless questions and concern. But I don’t feel it in myself at all. “How are you feeling?” everyone asks me, and every time I’m taken aback. I feel dumbstruck. Unwieldy. Overwhelmed.
23.
In the privacy of our rental car the next morning, I tell Dustin I’m worried. I haven’t felt the baby move, not since that one time back in New York before we left. I keep waiting and waiting, but nothing. When he waves my fear away like he always does, I lose it.
“I haven’t felt him at all! I can’t feel anything!” I yell at him while he’s driving. “The baby is dead!” I scream the scream of a woman who is not being taken seriously, who is not being fed enough, coddled enough, who is not being ultrasounded every hour so that she can be reassured that the possible is not probable, is not inevitable. A vein in my forehead feels like it’s going to pop and my throat aches with urgency as I watch Dustin’s face change from what looks like rage to pity—his lunatic fiancée, all of her hormones.
“It’s fine, baby, I know he’s fine. I know it,” Dustin says, finally crying. “We just have to get through this week. We have the next appointment when we get home.” This means nothing to me, but just seeing that I’ve shaken him is something. What I really want him to acknowledge, to feel with me, is that we are standing at the precipice of death now all the time. That it’s undeniable, part of the deal sooner or later, inextricable from life. We created a death. And how could he not take that seriously?
He holds my hand and then my stomach, and we keep driving down the bleak Michigan highway. The trees are covered in icicles, which look menacing to me, dangling in the wind.
24.
Back home in New York just after the new year, we go to our anatomy-scan ultrasound. Our son is pronounced perfect, twenty-one weeks old, definitely a boy. They ration out this information to us in offhanded remarks: “See, this is his skull from above.” Is it? All my fear seems foolish now. I replace it with hope. Helpless, dumbfounded, uncertain hope.
25.
I am too shy to talk to the baby out loud. I feel goofy when I creep over to his dresser to fold and refold his baby clothes. Dustin makes fun of me. I roll my eyes but wish he would leave and let me do this in private.
26.
As soon as we found out we were having a boy, I knew we were screwed, name-wise. Naming a girl would have been hard enough, but girls’ names are lovely, myriad. I spent my whole life dreaming them up. A boy? I hadn’t given it any thought.
Dustin and I sit in restaurants writing names on paper tablecloths. We take turns hating and then preferring names, reminding each other that given our genes, this baby will inevitably grow up to be chubby and bespectacled. We have to be careful.
When we do settle on an idea, we see and hear it everywhere, in baby catalogs and in the mouths of women at Baby Gap shopping for their nephews. It sounds so unspecial, no longer ours, so we cross it off the list, not wanting to be—God forbid—clichéd in this, our most significant display of personal taste.
I picture our baby’s name floating somewhere just beyond my consciousness, like when you forget a word and know that as soon as you stop trying to remember, it will come to you. Except in this case, it doesn’t. I find I’m left with the same old words I had before, the same short list of names worn thin by the lives of other men.
“We’ll figure it out,” I tell Dustin. “We work best under pressure.” I hope it’s true.
27.
Sometimes I forget it entirely, that I’m pregnant. I sit for hours at a coffee shop writing, and my condition slips my mind. These are good days, days when I feel like I’m liberated, just a brain floating in a vat.
But the spell is broken when I stand up to go to the bathroom and try to squeeze past the necks of young Brooklyn coffee-shop men, my new stomach grazing the tips of their ears. “Sorry, sorry!” Everyone turns and sees my conspicuous body. I am a stranger who is pregnant. In this way I make more sense to them than I do to myself.
28.
By the time I am twenty-eight weeks pregnant, my baby is the size of an eggplant and I’ve learned that heartburn is the perfect name for heartburn—it feels like burping fire.
At prenatal yoga I have leveled up into truly pregnant. Hugely pregnant. Downward dog is no longer a possibility for me. I do all of the hands-and-knees stuff with my elbows on blocks. It feels right to be this incapacitated.
The best days—rare—are the days when my bigness feels like grandeur as I drag myself down the street.
29.
I worry I am not “savoring my pregnancy.” There is always something I feel like I should be doing, some excitement I should be stoking—not just in myself but in everybody else too. It’s my role, I suspect, to be a sort of spiritual leader, the matriarch in our church of anticipation.
I should be journaling, blogging, documenting my moods and cravings, and updating my registry. There should be Polaroids our son finds in a shoe box thirty years from now and feels sentimental about. I want this baby to think his mom was radiant, effortlessly so, hugging her massive, miraculous
body in floral prints. I want him to post them to the 2045 version of Instagram. I want his friends to leave comments about my fashion sense.
30.
No one believes us when we say we have no idea what to name the baby.
“Oh, so you’re keeping it a secret?” they say. “What are you deciding between?” Others seem to think we’re being difficult on purpose.
“Well,” I venture on a night out with friends, “we call him Gus, kind of as a joke, but it’s starting to feel like it’s actually his name.” Sharing this feels embarrassing and too vulnerable, like talking about a novel before you start writing it.
“Gus?” I look up to see Halle visibly recoiling. “You can’t name him that!” she says, then catches herself. “Well, you can do whatever you want. I’m sure we’d come around to it. But I’ll be honest. I hate it.”
“Hey, what about William? That’s cute, right?”
“Bill, though?” I picture a little baby in wire-framed glasses and a blue oxford shirt.
We like Cal but it sounds weak and also somehow like a bully. David is okay but Dave sounds like he puts too much gel in his hair. I dated a Charlie and he wore his cell phone on his belt. Toby sounds like his collar is always wrinkled and folded over on itself. Show me a boy’s name and I’ll show you a man who has ruined it.
And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready Page 4