1. You will find out a lot about your body
When I was a few weeks pregnant, I had to go for an early scan, during which the sonographer mentioned that I had a tilted uterus. It proved to be a characteristic experience of pregnancy: discovering bewildering things about the body I thought I knew, divulged in such a mundane way that I never asked what any of it meant. I still don’t know what a tilted uterus is, and my son is now two years old.
I never knew that my hair would stop falling out due to increased oestrogen levels. That entire months would pass without a single strand from my head disappearing down the plughole. That two months before the baby was born my breasts would leak milk as I slept. That in each scan the foetus would become less easy to see in my womb, as though he was becoming more of a stranger the further I got in my pregnancy. That I would feel my organs rearranging themselves around my ballooning uterus. That I would be able to see as well as feel a contraction. (It looks like a slight pointing of the dome of your belly, from classical to gothic.) I never knew that a pregnancy is traditionally counted from the first day of your last period (ie before you were pregnant), meaning that the nine months of a human foetus’s gestation is a bit made up. The average pregnancy is closer to 10 months. Basically, it’s bloody confusing – especially when you’re pregnant, that everyone suddenly starts measuring time in weeks, and you have the concentration span of a gnat.
With each discovery, the earthquake came first and then the aftershock. Some were semantic more than seismic, such as discovering that for nine months your vagina turns into a “birth canal”. Which is a bit like calling your head a “mountain top” for a year. For me, the image (pregnancy and birth, like sex and death, are bodily states flooded with imagery) conjured up the little boy tunnelling through the big, juicy fruit in Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach. “The floor was soggy under his knees, the walls were wet and sticky, and peach juice was dripping from the ceiling.” See what I mean?
2. You will become a walking metaphor
Pregnancy is itself a metaphorical state: literally ripe with meaning. By the late-14th century, “to be pregnant” also meant “to be convincing or weighty”. Think of the pregnant pause. The pregnant moment. The pregnant argument. It is an experience that has always been, well, pregnant with euphemism, at least partly because it has always been shrouded in shame and used to judge, silence, diagnose and incarcerate women. “I’m a riddle in nine syllables,” observed Sylvia Plath in the first line of her 1959 poem Metaphors, written while she was pregnant with her first child. “An elephant, a ponderous house, / A melon strolling on two tendrils.” There is an absurdity to being a metaphor, but there is a loneliness, too, because no one sees you for who you really are.
In practice, this meant becoming more invisible the more visible I grew. Strangers reached out and touched my “bump”, as it’s called in the disembodied language of pregnancy. (Nobody, incidentally, told me how much I would grow to hate the word “bump”.) People stared at my middle instead of my face. I became a metaphor for other people’s stories, a most unexpected privilege, whether it was the colleague who emailed about a miscarriage or the GP who told me about her divorce. Most memorably, on a train from Edinburgh to London when I was seven months pregnant, a terminally ill man sat next to me, looked at my belly, and started talking. Pregnancy made me a container for my own secret and everyone else’s. Life became more intimate, inside and out.
3. You will feel healthier, happier and more in love with the world than you ever thought possible … Then you will go mad
I thought the image of the radiant (usually white, often ponytailed, always slim) woman with one hand resting on her fecund belly and a beatific smile on her face was as constructed as a pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair. Airbrushed, sanitised, deified. But when I was around six months pregnant, I really did feel all big and big-hearted. I would find myself arranging roses from Lidl and smiling like Nigella Lawson does when she mashes an avocado. All I wanted to do was watch films starring Hayley Mills and drink fizzy grapefruit juice. I felt very mild and compliant, which is convenient for society because this is also around the time when everyone tells you to start consuming wildly and stop doing anything that might harm the baby. Though no one can agree on what “anything” actually entails. Anyway, then I got bigger and lost it. Big style.
4. Hosting life will make you think about death as much as birth
No one told me that quickening – when the baby’s first movements are felt, a marker used historically to determine a foetus’s right to life – would make me think so much about death. We tend not to talk about how much time we spend pondering death – your own, that of the foetus, your partner, parents, the planet, and so on – during pregnancy. It’s not exactly the stuff of NCT classes. And yet … waiting for the baby to move when I was five months pregnant was not just waiting for a sign of life. It was waiting for evidence – the exhausting kind that required proving over and over again – that he would not die. Before I became pregnant, birth and death seemed separated by the continent of a life. Pregnancy brought them together for nine heightened months, uneasily, terrifyingly and thrillingly, and never more so than during labour. As Leo Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, during one of the most vivid and detailed childbirth scenes in literature, the joy and grief of witnessing birth and death “were like holes in this ordinary life, through which something higher showed”.
5. As you grow a baby, you might feel as if you are turning into one
Not only did my body go all soft, plushy and downy, I could only bear to watch kids’ films and reread books from my childhood. I really did feel in a delicate condition, as the euphemism goes. I made the mistake of going to the cinema to watch a Quentin Tarantino film and spent the entire time with my hands wrapped around my belly, the pregnant woman’s equivalent of covering her ears. The news would reduce me to tears; I ate bland, unadventurous foods; and the world seemed bigger, louder, more hazardous. Towards the end of my pregnancy, I felt like an old person. I sat on a lot of benches, was always looking for the nearest toilet, and couldn’t keep up with or sustain much interest in what was going on around me. Pregnancy felt like a microcosm of life, from start to finish in nine swift (and sometimes interminable) months.
6. If you have a membrane sweep, the midwife might feel the baby’s head
If you’re overdue, your midwife will offer you a membrane sweep, a routine procedure in which she (or he) inserts a finger into your vagina and sweeps around your cervix to release prostaglandins that may kickstart labour. I was convinced I would refuse a sweep on the grounds that I would be so chilled about the baby coming out whenever he was ready. Suffice to say that by the time I was 14 days past my due date, I’d had three of them. During the first, my midwife casually told me she could feel the baby’s head. WHILE HE WAS STILL INSIDE ME. “What’s he like?” I asked, stupefied. It had never occurred to me that a person so resolutely inside my body – and who would not come out for another five days – could be touched from the outside. “His head feels lovely and smooth,” she replied. Even at this final stage of pregnancy, my mind was blown.
7. No matter how your labour goes, you will see yourself in a way you never have before. And, no, you won’t forget
I opted for a home birth and ended up having a C-section. Birth is wild and unpredictable, a bit like life – and death. I became someone completely unrecognisable to myself: brave, reckless, outrageous, outraged, magnanimous, a comedian, a lion, a little girl, and more of a risk-taker than I’ve ever been before or since. Afterwards, the labouring warrior (someone in between James Bond and Anne of Green Gables) promptly disappeared, replaced by another person I never knew was in me. A mother. People told me I would forget. That now the baby was here, big, beautiful and healthy, that was all that mattered. Neither was true. All of it mattered, then and now. Every “birth story” (as your labour soon becomes when the visitors arrive and the questions begin) is different. A hole in ordinary life. Or “the black force”, as Plath called it in her journal, describing the birth of her second child at home. All that can be said is this: be kind to yourself – you did great.
8. You will bleed for up to six weeks after the birth
I found this out a few weeks before I gave birth. Seriously. Which is why I’m telling you now. Don’t thank me, just treat yourself to some good-quality maternity pads. Tax-free!
9. You will realise that everything you ever thought, read, watched, heard or were told about pregnancy and birth was basically a lie
Scarlett O’Hara sending for ‘“boiled water, a ball of twine, clean towels, and scissors” before delivering Melanie’s baby in Gone With the Wind. Miranda producing a newborn with a couple of red-faced pushes in Sex and the City. Rachel’s hair and comic timing remaining intact in Friends. Katherine Heigl swearing at the doctor at great levels while fully dilated in Knocked Up. The classes that prepare you for birth. The people who tell you, when you’re complaining about how tired you are, to “just wait until the baby gets here”. The blogs, apps, Instagram accounts, bump-watchers and month-by-month (and increasingly day-by-day) guides that tell you when the baby will be the size of a marrow and what to pack in your hospital bag but not when you will be obsessed with death or unspeakably lonely. None of it tells the truth about pregnancy because it’s as complex, messy and indescribable as all the biggest, hardest, most fraught and fruitful experiences tend to be. As Toni Morrison writes: “Birth, life, and death – each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.”
Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy by Chitra Ramaswamy is published on 7 April by Saraband
