Body’s in Trouble

When pregnancy feels like it's swallowing you whole

If in your excitement and curiousity about your newly pregnant body, you download an app to tell you what’s happening inside you every week, the app will describe your baby’s size in terms of fruit. You’ll have apple seeds and raisins and oranges and bananas and inexplicably, a head of romaine lettuce growing in your uterus. The shapes often make no sense and sometimes you’ll be a pomegranate and then an avocado and you’ll think, wait a minute I’m sure a pomegranate is bigger than an avocado? And you think about who is measuring this fruit and who is holding it up next to a fetus and if they’re maybe in California where I guess avocados can get pretty big, who knows? Sometimes you’ll skip ahead just to see what’s coming and you’ll get to cantaloupe and quickly close the app because that’s obviously too big to fit inside you. 

They use fruit to talk about the baby but when they talk about you (if they ever talk about you), they talk about the beautiful, natural state of womanhood you’re now occupying. Wow, you’re glowing they’ll say just before a sponsored link for maternity leggings that look suspiciously like regular leggings but cost a lot more. But you don’t feel like you’re glowing. For weeks now you’ve been getting out bed (you can’t really call it waking up because you don’t really think you’re technically asleep) with the howls of nausea tearing at you like a hungry wolf. Your daily ritual revolves around the rush to the toilet, not to vomit but to pee, you don’t vomit in the toilet anymore anyway, ever since your first pregnancy. It feels too undignified and is reserved for puking, for something you earned through alcohol, not conception. You are an adult woman carrying life, you throw up in the sink. 

Sometimes in the chaos of the physical revolt your body is in, you vomit in the sink while you’re sitting on the toilet. You don’t glow when this is happening but you do sweat, you often cry, you always sigh. You feel transformed by the act of vomiting. You sometimes think this, this act of purging, is the most important thing happening to you, that’s ever happened to you. Your body is not your own. Even though you know it’s gross, it’s gross to you so why wouldn’t it be gross to anyone else, you rush into the other room to tell your husband what you’ve just thrown up. “Whole chunks of orange”, you scream! “Yes all the pomegranate seeds, completely undigested.” You add each regurgitated food to a growing list of things you can’t eat anymore because once you’ve seen it come up you can’t stomach it going down. You have to keep reminding him about the dumplings you can’t eat anymore. But you love dumplings he tries and you have to acknowledge sadly that yes, you did used to love dumplings. Your body is not your own. 

Then one day, a day that you were sure would never come, the morning ritual is less violent, less profound. Now you only rush to pee. You still wake up before the sun, before the sleeping toddler and the sleeping husband because you have to eat, in a feral way you have to quell the feeling that could threaten your new peace. But at least the sink is just a sink again. For washing your face and looking into the mirror above, waiting for your reflection to glow. The app tells you you made it, you’re in the honeymoon period, the hallowed second trimester where the fertile garden you’ve been sowing with puke blossoms into abundance. Some women will talk about their bodies now in terms of nature and life and femininity and you agree it’s natural and full of life. But you hear the words in Werner Herzog’s accent and you think about how your body’s not your own, you think about the teeming, wriggling, carnality of nature, of its ability to overwhelm its surroundings, to swallow everything around it. You don’t tell anyone this though. You do buy stretchy pants that are like regular pants but come from a different, more expensive section of the store with swollen-bellied mannequins. 

You don’t want people to think you don’t want it, you’ve never wanted anything more. But you want the destination, not the journey. For some people pregnancy connects them to themselves, roots them in their bodies. You feel like every day you slip away from yours. Like you’re always lurking just below your own feet, your new, bigger feet. In a mirror you recognize your face, but not as your own. As someone who looks familiar, but not enough to say hello. 

The app says the baby is a Belgian endive this week. That it’s growing a waxy layer and gulping amniotic fluid. You don’t know how to feel about that and you feel sick thinking about a waxy endive. You close the app. You think about deleting it but worry if you do that you’ll lose your tether to what’s really happening, you’ll forget that you aren’t just molting into something new, something permanently changed. You need the fruit to remind you that this is temporary. You decide to add endives to the list of food you can’t eat.