Chrysalis

Over on the other side of the room, a blue-clad mini-person is gurgling peacefully (for once), safe in the knowledge that I absolutely adore him, and I wonder what kind of person I've become. A mother, yes, but not the kind of mother I thought I'd be.

I spent the first twenty years of life firmly convinced that I never wanted to have children. My mother, for all her fun, child-messy artistic-ness, is one of the most psychologically frightening individuals I have ever met. Especially for a child. I always feared that having children, with the demands they place on people (like me and her) with little patience, would drive me to her end of violent rages and an unceasing fury beating against the world that had never given her everything she wanted.

But now? My son spent a month in intensive care after being born 7 weeks early, and I craved him every moment of it. I crawled into a corner of my bedroom and cried that I didn't deserve him--after all, I'd spent my pregnancy worrying only about myself, about what kind of time I would have for myself after he was born (such a huge issue for an introvert), and whether I would ever have time to work, and whether I would resent him when I didn't. I do resent it, sometimes. But most of the time I don't care. I know I'll get back to my work, which isn't, after all, time-dependent. I sit on my essays for years sometimes before they're ready for publication.

Even when the fat little hobbit drives me to frenzied madness with his crying, I can take a deep breath outside, clutch my hair, come back in, and nurse him until he calms down. I'm not my mother! What a releif! But someone I don't know has emerged from a background, and I'm still prodding around her limits. She appreciates people a little more, since she was so dependent on the kindness of friends during a brutal couple of months. She panics sometimes at the prospect of never having a day to herself again. She hasn't yet thrown the baby out the window, which, as a friend of mine said, automatically makes you a good parent. She snaps at people when she's short on sleep (that's not new). And she's walking a narrow, rickety fence, balancing the hormonal reaction that makes her say she'd do anything for her little boy, give up anything for him; and the repeated statement before her pregnancy that she thought she could only make a good mother if she made her own self (work, fulfillment, human-ness) a priority even over her children. My mother didn't, for all her complete self-absorbtion. She didn't try to make anything for herself, and that fueled her anger. To give this little human a good life, I have to give myself one, too.

Hands off my belly!

It's happened -- the thing I always dreaded most and was forewarned about. My belly has been rubbed without my permission.

It was a friend, a tiny-boned, lithe little Frenchwoman I used to take yoga from. I've tried to detach from her recently because I discovered that she's one of these new-agey health people who started giving far too personal advice about my husband's physical health (there's nothing wrong with him) and my mental and emotional life. She tried to drag me to a meditation class run by a woman who does past life regression. I can't stand that kind of thing. And this weekend, while we hung out at the organic farm (the little hide-out for the few liberals in my area), she rubbed my belly while lecturing me about a book I absolutely have to read on Parageneology. Work that one out.

There is another woman in my regular yoga class who I know would love to feel up my little sproglet, but is too polite to ask. I'm grateful to her.

One thing that made me so ambivalent at the beginning of my pregnancy was the knowledge that the single most private thing in my life, what was going on in my body, was something that the whole world would soon be able to see and comment on. For an introvert, a very private person, it was a horrific prospect.

I'm trying to steel myself to it. To anyone who doesn't know I'm pregnant, I can still hide it if I want (almost six months and I've only gained three pounds?). I live in a place where people tend to thickness, if not chubbiness. And I've started not to mind if strangers do notice and comment, as long as they refrain from telling me how I'm feeling and what I should be doing.

What strikes me as funny is how being pregnant, especially visibly so, has further solidified my position on abortion. (Side note: this position is something I'm going to write about soon, as it's going through some evolutions through experiencing a wanted pregnancy.) My body, my sproglet, me. Hands off me.

Alcohol and the Fetus/Embryo/Baby/Parasite Debate

For 16 weeks now I've been reading all the articles, books, and Web sites people give me that relate to healthy pregnancy practices. Every single aspect of my life has been addressed: what's best to eat, how often (and how) to exercise, what position to sleep in, what my caffeine intake should be limited to, how to pick things up off the floor when I get huge, how late I can fly, how much weight I should gain, and, of course, the effects of both alcohol and stress on the little parasite that's taking up all my bladder space.

I list these last two together because I cannot separate them, if other people can. I don't need to reiterate the snippy debate between European and US standards for alcohol consumption, during pregnancy or at any other time. I grew up in America, with a certain expectation of what was 'okay' to drink; my parents were very sensible people in that respect -- and they were poor, so buying wine or good beer simply wasn't part of our lives. However, I moved to Europe and married a European in my early 20s, so quickly acquired the pleasing habit of having wine with dinner every night. I refuse to justify this habit to anyone who thinks it's awful. Go read French Women Don't Get Fat for yourself. I can't take seriously the criticism of any society whose idea of a great weekend is to mow a chemically green lawn.

Added to this is my own scientific training and analytical turn of mind. I don't simply nod my head and do whatever my doctor tells me. No, I do the research for myself. And the research, I have to say, has done nothing but get me completely wound up and stressed out about the entire issue.

When I first took the "you've got a blue line" test, I did a bunch of research online and decided to go with the UK government guidelines rather than France, tempting as it was (in the last month, by the way, France has altered its recommendations; it used to advise women to have a glass of wine per day, but now is more aligned with the UK). The advice is "no more than 1-2 units of alcohol once or twice a week." That's all right until you find that 125 ml of 12% wine constitutes 1.5 units of alcohol. It's not a lot. And it's not even that I wanted more -- my mother was absolutely right when she said I wouldn't even feel like having alcohol most days (she didn't abstain, either). But I hated the feeling of being constrained.

Then well-meaning people began sending me research, which, instead of reiterating or listing the Web sites here, I'll condense (imagine people screaming this progressively louder across a room): WE DON'T KNOW! WE DON'T KNOW SO WE'LL TELL YOU NOT TO HAVE ANY AND SCARE YOU TO DEATH TO MAKE SURE YOU DON'T!

Well, bugger that. How is it that chemical companies and mining conglomerates and people like Monsanto have permission to litter our water, air, and bodies with toxic, probably cancer-causing pollutants simply by saying nobody can disallow their actions because WE DON'T KNOW what the impact is, yet I'm ostracized for my two drinks a week because alcohol, which has been around about as long as civilization, might possibly have a miniscule effect on a baby that will probably be just fine?

And here we hit the stress wall, which frankly applies to all the other damned pregnancy advice. With all the articles people send me of the possible effects of alcohol, I do worry. And that stress, it has been shown, probably has a much more detrimental impact on my child than have a glass of wine every day could ever have if I'd hadn't known better (so to speak).

Forget the alcohol for a second. Imagine you're a thirtyish woman who eats well, exercises relatively regularly, isn't all that fit but is pretty darn healthy, keeps her mind active, gets outdoors a lot, but, of course, spends a lot of her time trying to limit her calorie intake and get really in shape cause it'd be nice to be super-fit, and should probably cut back on drinking due to the calories, and who also wants to learn French and Arabic and hike through Tibet and further her mathematical studies and learn to play the piano really well. Then she gets pregnant. Suddenly, all this stuff she's been trying to do in a mild sort of way becomes, in the doctors' eyes, absolutely essential. The message is, in short, "You must immediately become the perfect person you've had an image of for the last 10 years." Stressful? You betcha.

The other day I was at a seriously boring dinner party, where I made a sarcastic comment about not being able to drink. A man said, meaning well, "Well, just think of it this way. At least you're not forcing your baby to consume alcohol." At which point I was ready to scream at him. It's the baby that's keeping me from doing a whole hell of a lot of things I love doing, from wine with dinner to doing handstands in yoga to sleeping through the night without needing to pee.

Right now I'm clinging to a lifeline in the form of What's Going on in There?, a book about baby brain development written by a neurobiologist. Here's the research: moderate drinking probably does have a mild effect on the fetus's brain. Modest drinking, however, having been subjected to thousands of studies both sides of the pond, is still inconclusive, although tends to lean toward the preassumptions of the culture (yes in the US, no in Europe).

The catch? "Moderate drinking" is defined as three drinks per day, every day. "Modest drinking," one drink every day. The effect of high stress? Very conclusive detrimental effects on emotional and mental development. With my desire for only two unmeasured drinks a week, I know which risk I'd like to take.

The Nausea, the Fatigue

Finally, this morning, for the first time in six weeks, I woke up without feeling desperately tired or feeling ill. It felt so good--I'd almost forgotten what it was like to feel normal.

I've been looking at a lot of pregnancy and baby sites, looking for guidance, advice, and stories. Instead, I've found a cheeriness that seems . . . well, to put it bluntly, creepy.

People go on and on about how wonderful it is to be pregnant, and to bear a child, skimming quickly over the uncomfortable bits and pointing out that it's all worth it.

Is it? Personally, I feel invaded. Hubby has started calling it "the parasite," in an affectionate way, of course. I feel tired all the time, nauseated frequently. I can't drink wine, which I love, anymore.

I'm not saying it's not worth it to have children. I still want children. But is it really worth it to bear them yourself? Nine months of intense discomfort and the theft of your bodily functions, to go through a ridiculous amount of pain to push out something that you could love just as easily if it were grown from a glass tube.

Men don't carry babies, but they love them, too. Why should it be a requirement that women go through nine months of purgatory--if not hell--just to feel like they have the right to love them? People love babies they adopt.

Evolution has cheated women. Humans are the only species that not only takes this long to produce offspring, but produces babies that aren't fully developed when they're born (foals walk shortly after being born, for example). All that work and they're not even done? Something somewhere along the way has gone seriously wrong. I vote for a misogynist conspiracy.

There's a new life in my way

There are a lot of things nobody told me about pregnancy. Top of the list is the utter exhaustion these first three months. I'm tired all the time, with nothing to show for it. All I want to do is sleep, sleep and drink tea and read books. Nobody told me, either, about the hurricane-like feeling that my life has been stolen.

I feel plugged. The works are gummed up. Not just the parts that are meant to excrete, but the rest of me, too. My mind--it's dammed. Or damned. Everything has stopped, as if stuck in a held breath that will never exhale. Emotions float around so lazy that it is too much trouble to be sad, scared, or angry. I have been stoppered.

It's a child that's done this. Or it might not be a child yet, depending on how you look at things, especially whether you want it or not. I've had this feeling before, when I was a stupid teenager, and it was most definitely not a child then. It is one this time because I wanted it. Or thought I did. That's the problem, that I wanted this and am now horrified because I feel like I'm caught in a web or stuck in resin or, as I said, stoppered. I have been stopped. Everything that I am, or want to be, has stopped to make room for something more important: new life. That's how it feels, anyway. It's terrifying to be afraid--or is it jealous?--of something that doesn't really exist yet, and when it does will be totally dependent on me.

I should stop calling it 'it.' It has a name. She has a name. Nobody's told me she's a 'she,' but I know anyway.

Nobody told me that it would feel like this, that the happiness and expectation would be replaced by a limb-gripping fear that my life has just come to a screeching halt. And I haven't even done anything with it yet.