Friends, I had a lot of hubris about pregnancy.
As with many things around which I have unearned pride, I wasn’t boastful. In fact, I might have said too much and too loudly, “I have no idea what pregnancy is like. I couldn’t know less about a thing in the universe!” And then secretly, I had opinions — strong opinions. Here are some things I believed:
Pregnancy was easy to achieve. All you needed to do was know when you were ovulating, then have sex, and then boom, you’d be pregnant.
Once pregnant, my body would tell me what to do, no matter what. My body would tell me what to eat, how to exercise, and when and how I should sleep. All I really had to do was listen to my body.
Pregnancy was magical. It was a MIRACLE. Anyone who got pregnant had participated in something bordering on religious. Whenever I would think about this, I was sure I’d be okay with whatever discomfort I might feel.
But overall, I didn’t think I would experience much discomfort. My body has always been unruly, so I felt I’d be tougher than other pregnant people who had never battled their metabolism or found running to be horrible and painful but kept running anyway. I believed I had a high threshold for discomfort.
And nevertheless, I’d never complain if I got pregnant, because I would be just so incredibly grateful to be pregnant.
On a personal level, I believed that since I do not, as a general rule, ever throw up, I would not get sick or nauseous.
And if I did get sick or nauseous, that would be kind of great, because it would mean I would not gain “too much” weight.
There were other things, too. I bought into the goddess narrative. I figured that pregnancy would be spiritual and beautiful and sparkly. I read books and spoke to birth workers, and thought that I was ready to “do pregnancy” in a way that was both sufficiently honoring of the vast mysteries of life and simultaneously chill.
I was not right about anything. It may have been less humiliating if I had found out that I had been right about even one thing, but truly: I was not right about anything. Here are some facts that have been true about my individualized pregnancy experience. (One thing they say about pregnancy is that it is different for every body. I believe this is probably true.)
It wasn’t easy to get pregnant.
I meticulously tracked my cycle (I took my temperature every morning and everything, which is a thing), and while it was regular and predictable and danced stereotypically alongside the moon, no amount of sex in my “fertile” window resulted in the double-pink line. The first month we “tried,” I was sure I was pregnant, and bought the six-day early test. I sat in the bathroom at work with my heart pounding, knowing that I was going to pee on this stick and my entire life was going to change. I tried to figure out how I would tell Luke. How I would tell my sister. Whether I would be able to teach my class that day.
This was an emotionally confusing experience because I, like basically every girl who has grown up in a city where rudimentary sex ed is taught, had taken many pregnancy tests before. The thing you learn in high school — and this isn’ necessarily a bad thing — is that if you have a uterus and you even LOOK at a sperm, you are going to get INSTANTLY pregnant. I took my first pregnancy test long before I ever had penetrative sex, because my period was four months late and I had a boyfriend. I logicked that what if he had masturbated, and then held my hand, and then I’d wiped my butt at some point later that day, and the sperm (which I truly believed to be magnetic to eggs) had swum up inside me and impregnated me?
And after I did start having penetrative sex, I took a pregnancy test every time my period was even a day late. Never mind that I was on the pill AND always used condoms. I was sure that the sperm would find the egg somehow, and that would be that. I must have taken at least 100 tests by the time I took my first “trying” one, and it was the first time I hoped the result would be something else. It felt weird. Like I was cheating on an earlier version of myself.
When that test was negative, I sat and stared at it for an additional 20 minutes, squinting at the single line in the plastic window, wondering if I could just be missing the second line somehow. I took another one two days later. I was Just. So. SURE.
But I wasn’t pregnant that month, or the month after, or for eight more months after that. And of course, as is often the story, it happened after I’d decided we should stop “trying.” I was sick of feeling heartbroken and like a failure every single month. (Especially since getting one’s period is already kind of the worst; adding a personal existential failing to the mix is bad mental healthcare.) The month after I stopped tracking my cycle and measuring my temperature and hoping for morning sickness was the month I got pregnant.
My body knows a lot of things, I am sure, but it is all bound up in my brain and my feelings and my traumas, and that makes shit CONFUSING.
The first thing my body told me when I got pregnant was that I didn’t want to run on the treadmill.
That could have just as easily been my brain, or my general existential dislike of exercise. But it happened three days in a row, and usually, when I show up to the treadmill for three straight days, one of those days will treat me right. Then I can go on my secret fitness Instagram account and write some crap about “showing up” and “perseverance” or whatever. And then I can have a smoothie and feel virtuous for a day, before five days of inevitable sloth set in. This has been my life for the past 20 years, so the change was noticeable and sudden. I kept feeling like my heart was beating out of my chest whenever I tried to do something even remotely difficult, and so I took a pregnancy test. (I had a ton, since I had been taking them religiously for most of the past year. What was the harm?)
When I saw the second line, I felt happy, sad, scared, and confused. These are all emotions, but you feel them in your body. I wanted an egg sandwich and a nap. But I couldn’t decide: were these desires coming from my stew of emotions, or from my pregnancy? I tried to journal about it, to no avail. Everything was too bound up in everything else. It was like when you’re moving and you try to pack all your necklaces together in one container, and then you go to take them out, and they’ve become a single knot, and you have to throw them away and get all new necklaces. Except I couldn’t throw away my emotions or my physical needs or my gut intuition or my overthinking. All of it was stuck in my body. It came with the house.
As the months wore on, I had no idea what to eat, how much to move around, how long to let myself cry, or how often to nap. My body was good at telling me that I had to eat something every two hours, but it would laugh in my face when I tried to figure out what to eat. All food sounded horrible, all the time, but I had to eat it anyway, all the time, or things would be worse.
I read books about what my body was supposed to want, and found them surprisingly helpful. It turned out that I wanted all these things I was sure I would not want: I wanted someone to tell me what to do. I wanted food brought to me and forced upon me. I wanted to not have to be the only person with agency in charge of my body. This made me feel like a politically regressive piece of shit. I wished that Luke would see me eating licorice and say something like, “Whoa, let’s get you a ball of protein and iron and other assorted nutrients, because you need that. Just lie there and I’ll bring you this amazing ball. I have a bunch of them in the back of the closet. And then I will sit here and watch you eat the ball, and praise you for your growing breasts.” Instead he said, “I trust you to know what your body needs.” I would curse him under my breath for being such a good feminist or whatever.
Although there were some (godsent) specifics, however, the books mostly told me that I should listen to my body. Great, I thought. A whole new thing to hate my body for. I hated it for its relative inability to communicate to me with any clarity during this, apparently the most intuitive and miraculous time of my womanly life.
Some days I would cry for the entire day and not know if it was because I was pregnant or because I just cry really fucking easily and I was letting myself do that. (I know, I know: it was probably both. I get it. But do you get how confusing that is? And all of a sudden your choices impact not only you but this OTHER, invisible, nutrient-sucking person. Causation seems to matter vastly more.)
I felt lonely more than anything else. Lonely Sophie likes to eat a lot of sugar. Pregnant Sophie likes to throw up a lot of sugar. Both Sophies are likely addicted to sugar, and sugar is bad for you. But Sophie’s body (or is it her mind?) still says, “SUGAR, PLEASE!” The body is a confusing thing to listen to, is my point. If I were evaluating the human body as a professor, I’d say something like, “The college required me to take this course. The professor technically did what was needed, but lacked clear expectations and was therefore more frustrating than seemed necessary, given the course objectives.”
It turns out, I have a low threshold for discomfort!
Before I got pregnant, I Googled whether anyone enjoyed being pregnant, because I believed I was going to be in that camp. Some women (but let me be clear: VERY FEW) did enjoy it, they claimed. Their husbands were googly-eyed and doting during the time of their pregnancies, and their hair got epically shiny. I thought: Shiny hair and doting husband! Sign me up! I also assumed I’d be a sort of warrior queen, revering the evolution of my body as it grew and changed to meet the needs of this new creature.
Friends, my hair looks like shit every single day, and Luke is an incredible partner, but there is no one in the world who could dote on someone as whiny and melancholy and perpetually grumpy as I have been since I got pregnant. (Plus he is too much of a feminist to be too doting. See above.)
My feet are huge, my heart is pumping too fast, I cry all the damn time, often about nothing. In the first trimester, I threw up multiple times a day, sometimes on purpose just to feel something different than the underlying low-level nausea that permeated my every waking moment. I’m mean. My BRAIN doesn’t work as well; I’m not writing as quickly or comprehensively and I forget basic things like whether or not I bought toothpaste already. My lower back hurts, duh. My nose is constantly clogged, or sometimes it’s bleeding. I feel ugly, and not in a pregnant way. I have an overactive libido without any actual desire to have sex with anyone. I hate all of this and it makes me ill-tempered.
This entire post may be nothing more than one, rambling, turd-like complaint.
It seems like all I do is complain! I furthermore often complain about other people complaining, which makes me not only annoying, but also a hypocrite.
It’s official! I’m a person who vomits.
Before 2021, I used to proudly proclaim that, like Ted Mosby, I had been vomit-free since ’93. That was especially amazing because in 1993, I was seven years old.
A few caveats on that: I used to pretend to vomit a lot. I would get sick to my stomach and then have poop or have diarrhea or fart or (usually) an epic combination of these three things. But I didn’t want people to know that I pooped. How could I be hot and also poop? I couldn’t. But I would be uncomfortable, and I wanted people to understand that I couldn’t talk on the phone due to my physical abdominal pain, so I’d say I was puking. I thought vomiting was hotter than pooping. There is no logic to this that I can discern.
Also, when a boy broke up with me in 2013, I drank a whole bunch of vodka cranberries at a party and I did throw up a beautiful little stream of pure vodka cranberry out the open door of my roommate's Subaru on the way home. In my mind, because this vomit was chunkless, it didn’t officially count. (Shhhh.)
Then in 2021, I threw up because my appendix burst. I was like, “Oh my god. This is… new.” Once it was officially confirmed by a doctor that my ejecta was due to an actual medical emergency, I felt like this was a warranted exception to the “I never throw up” rule.
And then I got pregnant. For five weeks, I felt nauseous without throwing up. Then I threw up every single day for, like, 70 days in a row. And now I am a card-carrying person who vomits, and pregnancy is why.
I gained 35 pounds in three months, and as far as I can tell I didn’t really eat anything.
I want to talk about pregnancy and weight gain at some length. This is the subject around which I am able to articulate the most indignation. Strap in.
One of the things that made me decide I was ready to get pregnant was that I’d worked to have a new relationship with my body. Formerly a person who weighed in every day and counted every calorie, I had gotten really into intuitive eating (this book fundamentally changed my life) and paying attention to what my body said it needed and why. I also read “The Body Is Not An Apology” with my friend Jessica in our two-person book club and loved and appreciated it. Also “Pleasure Activism.” Basically, I was done hating my body and anyone else’s body, and I decided I no longer wanted to know what I weighed. This felt like a big adult evolution, and it made me feel ready to share my body — my amazing, incredible, powerful body — with another person.
Also, after reading “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia,” it became clear to me that fatphobia was as much a manifestation of racism as it was anything else. The final chapter in that book illuminated studies that showed that BMI is not actually based on anything other than the generalized guesswork of a known white supremacist. Furthermore, people who are “overweight" according to the BMI actually tend to live longer and have better health than people who are of “average” weight. Furthermore, essay after essay showed anecdotally as well as statistically that physicians are so bought into mythology around the correlation between weight and health that they do not provide adequate medical care to people who are obese. So it would be wrong to conclude, based on the data we have, that obesity is the cause of all the health problems some physicians claim that it is. When you are not receiving health care that is equivalent to someone with a different type of body, there is no statistical constant, and you can’t draw conclusions.
When I first got pregnant, I talked on the phone with my general care provider. I shared with her that a fear that I had about pregnancy was that people — and I meant healthcare professionals — would pay too much attention to my weight, and I had just reached a really great place, emotionally, with my own body image. I didn’t want to talk about my weight during pregnancy. I had trouble believing my weight would have all that much to do with my health, or the health of my baby. My doctor literally could not understand what I was trying to say. She thought I was trying to say I was worried I would gain too much weight. She kept reassuring me that there were diet and exercise plans I could stick to to keep my weight down during pregnancy. I don’t fault her for this; I think “too much weight gain” is a pretty common concern for pregnant people.
I started reading pregnancy books and articles, and downloading pregnancy apps. More than once, I read, “You may think that it’s time to start eating for two, but you’re wrong,” or something like that. A family member told me to be careful about what I ate, because it was so easy to get fat during pregnancy, and so hard to take the weight off after you gave birth. (That’s what happened to her, she said, and she’d wished someone had told her.)
In the book “Expecting Better” by Emily Oster (which was recommended to me by every friend who also has a favorite podcast and has ridden an electric bike), weight gain and pregnancy is discussed at some length. Oster is an economist, and uses hard facts and meticulously cultivated data to draw conclusions about how to navigate pregnancy. (This is the book that concludes that a glass of wine a day is fine during pregnancy, and six cups of coffee is OK too.) Generally, I appreciated this approach, because it allowed me to make statements to my friends that were grounded in hard science. Oster is transparent about how the data she uses was gathered, too — so she is able to give more merit to studies that had more participants from diverse backgrounds, rather than small-scale niche ones.
However, Oster writes some about BMI and the risks of obesity, without considering or mentioning the proven non-science of the BMI. That causes her to draw conclusions that neglect important context around weight. This huge oversight made me frustrated. (There were other things that frustrated me about this book — particularly that there were several points throughout it that it seemed to be written for a certain kind of white woman, without acknowledging the assumed audience. Not all pregnant people are white, financially secure, or women. This book sometimes neglects that.)
The book concludes that weight gain during pregnancy doesn’t actually matter that much in regards to the overall health of your baby. If you gain more weight, you are slightly more likely to have a bigger baby; if you gain less, you are slightly more likely to have a smaller baby. Both bigger and smaller than average babies have additional health risks, but there are far more health risks for smaller babies. Overall, though, weight gain has very little impact on the health of your baby, and it isn’t something one should be spending time obsessing over. The main concern about weight gain during pregnancy is that it’s hard to lose it after you give birth. I know that matters a lot to some pregnant people, and there might be great reasons for that, but I was working really hard to let it not matter too much to me.
At the beginning of my second trimester, I had a flare-up of a backache that I’d had before I got pregnant. A trip to the chiropractor had fixed it in the past, so I decided to go again. When I told my chiropractor I was pregnant, he launched into a spiel about pregnancy: what it was like to be pregnant, what I was probably feeling, what I was going to feel, and what I should be concerned about. At no point did he ask if this was something I was interested in hearing from him. (It wasn’t. I’d already read several books, most written by mothers or birth workers or both. I didn’t need my cis male chiropractor to explain pregnancy to me.) At some point in this irritating spiel, he said, “Now, I’ll bet you think you’re supposed to be eating for two. A lot of women think that. It’s a total myth. You really need to be watching your calories.”
In an act of pure courage that amazed even me, I interrupted him. “Actually, I don’t want to talk about that. I have a boundary around talking about weight.”
He looked stunned and said, “This is really important. We do need to talk about it.”
“I have a history of disordered eating,” I said, and then repeated, “so I have a boundary around talking about this subject.”
“Well, I work with dancers for a living, so I know about disordered eating,” he said. “But this is a very important issue. Are you discussing it with your OB? Because if so, then we don’t have to talk about it right now. But you do need to be talking about this with someone. Gestational diabetes is a serious issue, and it can really harm your baby.”
Reader, I wish I could tell you I told him off. Because, as my (also pregnant) friend reminded me later, if he’s saying this to me, he’s probably saying it to other pregnant people. Telling people that they need to be watching their calories during pregnancy can be quite harmful. When even the basic data lady concludes that it is more dangerous to gain too little weight than it is to gain “too much” during pregnancy, we should take heed! What my chiropractor did and said was not OK. He had also clearly never heard the word “boundary” before. (He did fix my back, though. Ugh.)
I didn’t tell him off, but I left his office fuming. How was it this hard to explain to people that my weight was not up for discussion?
At my first few doctor’s appointments, I asked them not to share my weight with me. I told the doctor that if my weight gain became a major health concern, that was when she could bring it up. Until then, I didn’t want to be concerned with it. This request was met with confusion. My doctor acquiesced in the moment but didn’t make a note in my chart or anything like that. So when my lab results came back, there was my weight at the top of the chart, printed next to the important information I wanted to read to know about the health of my fetus. I couldn’t miss it.
I cried because despite all my best efforts to maintain body positivity and mental health throughout my pregnancy, I’d failed. My mental health was deemed not as important as the number associated with my weight, by basically everyone I tried to talk to about it. And once I knew the number, my brain knew how to care about the number. When you spend 34 years caring about that number, it’s very easy to fall back into the same old pattern. The day after I found out my weight, I noticed myself inadvertently counting calories. I signed up for a workout class I had no interest in. I lost what remaining trust I had in my own intuition, and gave in to the idea that this was something I should be caring about — a lot.
When I talked to my mentor Jill about the encounter with the chiropractor, she said, “It’s so funny, because you literally are eating for two. That is what you are doing! The phrase isn’t, ‘You’re eating for two people who are adults and each need the same amount of calories.' The phrase is, ‘You’re eating for two.’ And that is true. Your baby is getting all her nutrients from you.” That should have been obvious, but I had read and heard that “eating for two is a myth” so many times that I’d forgotten what was actually true: that what you eat matters for the life you’re growing.
For the record, I gained all that weight during the first trimester. I am guessing I gained it because if I didn’t eat something every two hours, I felt like I was going to die. The foods I felt able to eat were: smoothies (fruit, spinach, protein isolate, coconut water), soy yogurt, dry cereal, ginger lollipops, cold pineapple, and one protein bar a day (because you are supposed to get a lot of protein). Normally a big eater of salads and other non-processed things, I guess my body was like, “I don’t know how to break this kind of food down quickly, but I know you need it, so I’m just not going to metabolize it for a while, lol.” I'd imagined that pregnancy would mean nonstop pizza and ice cream cravings, because that’s what I’d seen in movies. Instead, I hated every single food that came into my orbit, and ate food anyway. And then got lectured to by a chiropractor that I didn’t care about my unborn baby because I didn’t want to talk about calories.
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I tell you all this because it is the story of my one body. In early pregnancy, I found myself craving as many stories about pregnant bodies and births as I could get.
My one body is different from all the other bodies that have ever been pregnant. That is a very cool thing, and it is not lost on me. And now that I can feel (baby name spoiler alert) Tanager swirling around inside of me, pregnancy feels more cool and interesting.
But more than that, humbling. And I believe that all people who are pregnant or trying to get pregnant should be totally worshipped and fed grapes and fanned with fancy fans.
I’ll bet I feel the same way about all moms very soon.