Pregnancy - Amommymity begins

I began to really understand how motherhood was going to define me in unexpected (and often unwelcome) ways when I was pregnant. Let me start by saying pregnancy is a miraculous thing. If you stop to think about it and aren't blinded by how normal it seems since we see it so often, you realize it's amazing. A life actually begins, and then grows, inside of a mother. That is mind blowing. I am in awe that I was able to be a part of that miraculous process. However, I was never one of those women that loved being pregnant. I felt uncomfortable with it from the start of morning sickness until the end of labor. The only part I really loved was feeling the baby kick. It was a visceral reminder that a person was growing inside of me, and I couldn't help but feel joy and awe at that.

Photo by Evan Hunter

As I began to show in my first pregnancy, I realized that pregnancy is not an individual experience. Pregnant women are somehow communal property - many people feel comfortable touching them and commenting on their appearance and choices. My social interactions often became downright weird and uncomfortable. 

The first thing I noticed was that some people ignore any sense of personal space with pregnant women, and the social norm of not touching people without their consent goes away. Lots of people would greet me by rubbing and touching my belly when I was pregnant, like at the gym for example. NO ONE normally touches someone else at the gym! Yet, during both of my pregnancies at two different gyms, I was groped quite often by other gym goers. I'm actually not personally uncomfortable with being touched - as I often warn people, I'm a hugger - but it was just strange to notice that people felt no sense of the normal personal space boundaries any longer.

Second, people felt comfortable telling me what I should and should not consume. Not just people who I'm in relationship with, but total strangers. When Jeff and I went on vacation to Aruba in 2010, I was in my second trimester and starting to really show. Every morning, we went to Dunkin' Donuts to get a coffee. I ordered a small coffee, half caffeinated, half decaffeinated. I knew all the research on caffeine consumption during pregnancy, and had even abstained from caffeine during my first trimester. Once I was past my first trimester, I only had half a cup of caffeinated coffee each morning. This is well under the recommended daily limit. Yet, after I placed my order, the woman behind the counter was like, "Are you sure? That's not good for the baby." A few days later, we were out to dinner, and I ordered a steak medium-rare. The waitress responded, "You shouldn't eat rare meat when you're pregnant." Listen, ladies. I want my coffee a wee bit caffeinated and my steak medium-rare. It's not like I'm doing recreational drugs or consuming anything that is harming my baby based on research and my doctor's recommendations. And you don't even know me - I'm just amommymous to you. 

Lastly, people begin to comment on your weight and size when you are pregnant. I felt like my body was suddenly the topic of public discussion. Daily comments like, "Wow, you've really popped!" or "You're really getting big!" came from all kinds of people - family, friends, acquaintances and students. As a woman who has always been body image conscious (a topic for another blog post), this was particularly uncomfortable for me. Like it's normally extremely rude to tell a woman that she's looking large, but somehow people think it will not offend pregnant women to hear this. As people began to openly comment on my size, I found myself often making sarcastic, self-deprecating remarks about it in response to such comments and in social situations where I felt particularly conscious of my growing girth. For example, when I was in my third trimester of Anna's pregnancy, I was co-teaching a seminar on professional development for graduate students. The class was long - four hours a day, twice a week - and it met in a space that was too small for the size of the seminar. It was physically tough to teach that kind of class in my final weeks of pregnancy. I often had to ask people to move their chairs to get around the room while teaching, and would occasionally say things like, "I'm sorry, I'm kind of huge - could you scoot your chair in?" Well, our teaching evaluations for the class were outstanding. However, one student comment really haunted me. It said the following: "I thought that both of you did a wonderful job with the seminar. In fact, I think nobody should go on the job market without this. You were so organized and well-prepared. My only suggestion and I mean this in the most gentle way possible: It seemed that/or came across that Laura was a little self-conscious about her pregnancy when there was no reason to be. Sometimes she would make self-deprecating remarks about it which really didn't seem necessary when she was doing great." 

When I read that, I was angry. At first, I was angry (maybe unfairly?) at the student. Like had this person ever been pregnant, and experienced what I had? Had his or her body ever unwillingly become a daily topic of public commentary? Making the occasional self-deprecating remark was my coping mechanism, and now I was being criticized for it?

But the more I thought about it, I was angry at myself. I realized I had really let the collapsing of social norms and personal space get to me. I had let others in society define who I was based on my status as a pregnant woman and future mom. I had started to agree with remarks like, "You're really getting big!" by sarcastically apologizing for my size. And to an entire classroom full of people, too! 

One of the students in my seminar was specializing in disability studies, and her dissertation explored under what conditions people with disabilities choose to self-identify as disabled. She told me that being pregnant is actually a temporary window into what life is like for those with a disability that is visually obvious to society - people commenting on your body/condition, strangers asking personal/health questions, staring, etc. I found that observation really insightful. I would add that pregnancy is also a good crash course in preparing women for the societal judgments about moms and the choices that they make as parents. Really, pregnancy is just the start of amommymity.