Many of my friends are pregnant right now, in various stages of glowing or glowering.  Although I feel a twinge of warmth when I see a tiny baby on the street, asleep in a sling or gazing around with wondrous eyes, it’s immediately squelched by the thought of another gestation. 

I remember hot August days in late pregnancy.  I was enormous, exhausted and very grumpy.   Complete strangers would approach me in the Co-op and put their hands on my belly, violating what felt to me as my personal boundaries.  People love talking to pregnant women, telling them if they’re carrying a girl or a boy, commenting on how big they’re getting, and worst of all, asking “When are you going to pop?”

While some women are polite and receive this attention with the grace of a haloed Madonna, I growled like a she-wolf.  I wasn’t a balloon or a kernel of popcorn.  Surely anyone who knew even the most basic facts of labor understood that a woman does not pop during childbirth. 

No one would dare approach a non-pregnant person in the grocery store, stroke her stomach, and remark on her size.  Yet I too (when not pregnant) have felt the magnetic pull to an expecting woman’s belly, the intuitive desire to touch that roundness.  I know it speaks to our human longing for connection-we want to lay our palms on the visible miracle of creation. 

But when people touched me, I felt as if I had lost the privacy of my selfhood.  At the bitter end, when I was overdue with my first baby, I stopped going out in public at all.  No more trips to the Co-op, I snuck out at odd hours to the Farmstand down the road, where I could anonymously leave money in the box and fill a bag with fresh veggies and bread.

Normally a gregarious person, I retreated inward.  Perhaps this was my instinctive way of preparing for impending motherhood, or perhaps it was a response to my father’s sudden death only weeks before, which veiled me in shock and grief. 

Either way, I was not myself while pregnant.  I’ve known a few rare women who glow for nine months straight, who feel like powerful fertility goddesses when expecting.  Once at a yoga class I met a buff attorney who said, “You’re so lucky!  I loved being pregnant.  I wish I could be a surrogate for someone.”

I wish I’d had even an ounce of that woman’s enthusiasm, because my pregnancies were challenging for everyone.  A lifelong athlete, I lost my balance-literally and figuratively- with a baby growing at my center.  Core strength yields athletic power and stability, and I felt mine displaced by another being.  Yes, I was enraptured by the sound of my unborn child’s heartbeat echoing from the Doppler like a steady drumbeat or a distant train engine.  Yes, the fluttery swoops and kicks on my inner walls were miraculous.  But I would have appreciated them for a month or two, rather than almost ten.

There’s a cult of pregnancy in pop culture these days, an obsession that has generated a billion-dollar industry.  Products like body pillows, belly butter, and chic prenatal couture bombard women long before they start outfitting their newborns’ nurseries.  From Knocked Up to Baby Mama, from Britney Spears to Bristol Palin, society is fascinated with pregnant women- provided they are gorgeous, cheerful, and get their figures back immediately. 

Every young starlet seems to view pregnancy as a strategic career move.  But I wonder, did Britney actually enjoy being pregnant?   What about Nicole Richie, Christina Aguilera, or Ashlee Simpson?  I take as a given Angelina Jolie, her radiant beauty blooming in gestation, breasts spilling over her strapless yellow gown at the Cannes Film Festival.  She must have known then she’d never looked better-a healthy contrast to her stick-thin arms in signature black outfits.

But maybe, despite her glow, Angelina didn’t feel at ease during pregnancy, the same way I didn’t.  Maybe she went to Namibia to nest and birth her child because in many African cultures, people give a pregnant woman space.  There’s a common taboo around talking about or touching a pregnant belly, for fear the attention could bestow bad luck on the life inside.

This hands-off approach would have suited me well during the 82 weeks I was pregnant in the USA.  Now when I feel the illogical longing for another child (a flicker, not a flame)- when I want to smell a newborn’s downy head or nestle her into the crook of my arm, I remind myself of the dog days when I was “great with child,” as one curious stranger once described me.

So I stretch my own body to the sky and give thanks.  I’m not expecting anything but the return of more sleep to my life.  I feel blessed that my energy is flowing outward now, into my creativity, into the family I already have.

*This Spilt Milk column was originally published in The Brattleboro Reformer, June 13, 2009.

Tags:   Angelina Jolie · Pregnancy1 Comment