by Stephanie Wescott
The title of this piece is adapted from Ashe Davenport’s book, ‘Sad mum lady’, published by Allen and Unwin.
There’s half a tomato in the cutlery drawer. After a frustrating few minutes spent scanning the fridge, wondering if my brain is doing that thing where it fails to see the precise object it needs to locate, I give up, then find it there, in the drawer. I did it, but I don’t remember, of course, and file this event under ‘inexplicably malfunctioning brain’, one of the indignities of pregnancy I’ve learnt to live with over the past 6 months.
In the first few months of my pregnancy I felt like I lived underwater. Everything felt muted and slower, like it does when you’re trying to move your body as fast as you can against the power of a current. The fatigue made me an unrecognisable being, a constellation of glitches. I would read a simple work email, struggle to comprehend it, and need to nap to recover from the exertion. My creativity didn’t just feel blocked, it was entirely absent, and the thought of sitting down the write (my main job as a PhD student), felt beyond any capacity I would ever have again. Everything I ate made me vomit, and everything I smelled, except petrol, made me vomit. Pregnancy was a visceral, physical endurance, one that hijacked my body, which I expected. But it was losing the functionality of my brain that I mourned more.
I remember being in a conversation with friends and watching them fire banter quickly between each other, my brain understanding (sometimes delayed), but unable to formulate a contribution. I felt muted. Another time, my partner and I were playing a game with friends that required us to write ironic photo captions in timed conditions. Each time, I sat, blankly, waiting for the typically-reliable part of my brain that would usually offer up something acceptable. But nothing. When the game ended, it awarded me the prize for ‘contestant who spent the most time typing.’ I forget words, nouns, having to ask the pharmacist for ‘bacteria pills’ when I can’t remember that they’re actually called probiotics. I lock myself out of my house several times a week. I rely more than ever on my partner to keep our household functioning, filled with food and with bills paid, tasks that are typically overwhelming even to my non-with-child self.
I experienced the terror of knowing that my brain was not functioning as normal while getting ready to face a PhD milestone: a twenty minute presentation on my project, followed by questions from an academic panel. I worried my brain would not comprehend the academics’ questions, that I would be silent for long stretches of time, waiting for an answer that I wasn’t capable of producing. I feared that the panel, not knowing about my condition, might interpret my slowness as intellectual inferiority or incapability. Beside my computer as I presented, a plate of savoys coated in Vegemite, and a glass of orange juice. The only things I was able to consume that week.
In the early days I struggled to read, too. I felt too sick to dedicate my concentration to a single sentence. It was too consuming, and I needed distraction. I wondered if this was it; if I’d never be able to read, or write, or offer a quick quip in a conversation again. These core parts of my personality, all relying on my central organ, my brain, had become diminished. The tool that I rely upon to complete my academic work, but also to complete basic tasks like replying to emails and answering text messages, had been hijacked by hormones and new neurons that were preparing me to care only for the offspring I am soon to give birth to. I understand this process biologically, but I’m a thinking, feeling woman in 2021, and I grieve that the body I live in is so focussed on a single task that it is simultaneously abandoning the most central parts of my identity. It is a devastating thing to experience.
Culturally, pregnancy is framed as a miraculous event, even a calling, the realisation of a woman’s true purpose. We are socially primed for it and are supposed to relish it, abandoning all other pursuits in order to dedicate ourselves completely to a new identity. Glowing, smiling pleasantly while strangers place their hands on our bodies, spending nine months dreaming of nothing else. For me, it has made me wretchedly ill, at times miserable, a stranger, and consumingly anxious. The other problem for women who, like me, want as little attention drawn to their pregnancy as possible, is that it becomes the focus of every conversation. I want to say: I’m still writing! I’m writing my first book chapter! I have three academic papers on the go!… when the only things asked of me are how I’m feeling, and how’s the baby, and then the conversation runs dry. If people were interested in what I’m doing with my brain, they’d ask, I reason. Instead, it’s my reproductive functioning that has taken the stage.
Right now, I am having the most fulfilling months of my life in the final stages of my PhD, writing up my study, reading papers and books, and thinking about how this dream, this achievement, will come to an end. As I do this, I also happen to be pregnant. Which, I maintain, is one of the least interesting things about me.
I wonder, too, where other pregnant women turn to deposit their most taboo thoughts? The ones where you wonder why you’re not giddy and smug like other women in the pregnancy yoga class, or why you’re not smiling contently while you rub your belly and order a decaf latte. For me, it’s my therapist, who I was able to ask, ‘What happens if I don’t know how to love my child?’ Her response, disappointingly, was that my son doesn’t deserve to feel my fear, which is true, but I wasn’t seeking empty reassurances, like, of course you will, or, it’s instinctual! I wanted someone to assure me it was normal, and fine, focussing on my experience as an individual person, rather than that of my unborn child.
The What to Expect email that I regrettably signed up for in early pregnancy alerted me yesterday that I’ll probably gain one pound this week! But not to worry, it’s normal, and to keep exercising and eating healthily, and maybe consider wearing flat shoes instead of heels. Fuck off, I reply aloud. I’m mad that this email assumes I care more about an expanding body than an unrecognisable brain, that thinks it is comforting me by writing that some men even love their partners’ rounder bodies! What a fucking insult, and an abject failure to acknowledge the truth of the experience of being pregnant. The physicality, the panic, the anxiousness, and the feeling of losing parts of yourself to a body that was built to prioritise your baby over any other thing. In pregnancy, I’ve realised, our identities become slowly eroded as our body expands, and the emphasis of our existence becomes how we can serve others: our partners, our parents, strangers, rather than ourselves. We are a slate upon which others may project their most idealised versions of the pregnant woman, without bothering to ask permission.
Regrettably, I’ve spent a lot of time during this pregnancy Googling things. My GP reminds me of the dangers of this every time I call to discuss a study I’ve found that is cause for concern. ‘The internet is knowledge without wisdom,’ he repeats, which is why I know to call him to be the mediator between my brain and the common experience of pregnancy. One afternoon, reflecting on the overwhelming state of anxiety I have lived in since discovering I was pregnant, I decide to read up on the effect of maternal anxiety on the developing fetus’ brain. The results are alarming, with studies reporting that stress and anxiety can interrupt normal brain development, causing long-term impacts on functionality. In a rare attempt to moderate my thoughts, I remember the sonographer’s dedicated scan of my son’s developing brain, each of its parts forming perfectly whole and in proportion. I remember, too, the perfectly-formed limbs, face, and the nose that a friend told me looked like mine. ‘By stress, do you think the authors mean like, natural disasters? Or like, every day stress?’ I ask two friends who have become accustomed to my panicked messages following Internet scanning. My GP gently inquires if I think it’s time to increase the dose of my medication when I call him to discuss the possibility that I could have acquired a rare infection that can penetrate the placenta after planting tomatoes in my garden. ‘She’s fucken crazy,’ I imagine him writing in his notes after I hang up.
The only thing I can do to pacify my over-functioning brain is to submerge it in books. I’ve read ten this month. I am inhaling them. The next one waiting patiently at my bedside, lest I spend a few panicked hours wondering what I’ll devour next. When I read, I feel I am reclaiming the part of my brain that is most familiar and loved, the part that is entirely mine. It is a private world where my thoughts bend and meander, parts of myself that are for private consumption only, instead of my body, which is public property. When reading, my brain is satiated, consumed and fulfilled. It forgets that I live in a culture that places what my brain can do second to what my uterus can.
I won’t be the woman doing a photoshoot wearing lace and a flower crown while frolicking in a field of pumpkins. I’m the woman wearing the oversized linen shirt that I bought in two different colours after seeing on the label that it was called dad shirt. Perfect, I thought, knowing it will preserve the ambiguity of my growing body for a little while longer, and I can avoid awkward confrontations like the one I experienced the other day when a woman serving me at a cafe asked, ‘How long do you have?’ and having no idea what she meant, I replied, ‘What do you mean?’ because I don’t identify publicly as a Pregnant Woman. And maybe, too, because I want to identify as a dad, not a mum. Dads’ entire lives aren’t hijacked by reproduction. They aren’t expect to transmogrify into a bizarrely smug, entirely new being. They play hours-long games of golf while mothers go to the supermarket for precious ‘me time’.
I’m the anxious woman, reading studies about the dangers of gardening, the one unable to giggle and smile and coo, wearing the dad shirt, begging you to ask me about my work, about my writing, about what I’m reading, and what I’m feeling in my brain, instead of my body.
Lifeline: 13 11 14 / PANDA: 1300 726 306
