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This Is Us
Not Like Those Other Pregnant Women
An expecting mother’s notes on identity, transition, and surrender
A few months back, my husband and I were in San Antonio visiting his family for Christmas. At the time, I was about four months pregnant and hadn’t started showing yet. In fact, not much about my life reflected that I was pregnant: I was still going to the gym six days a week; I kept a fast-paced client schedule; my appetite had yet to eclipse my willpower, and so I hadn’t gained any weight. With my first trimester nausea behind me, life was still running like a pretty tight ship.
To be honest, I was a little smug about the minimal impact my pregnancy had made so far. I’d heard so many horror stories of women’s lives coming to a screeching halt the second they became a sacred vessel and was proud that I hadn’t needed to adjust as much. (To be clear, I was attributing this feat solely to my strength of character rather than to hormonal luck or good pregnancy juju.) Clearly, I was not like other pregnant women.
Don’t get me wrong: My husband and I were psyched (well, one part psyched, two parts terrified, which I maintain is a healthy ratio for first-time parents). We’re both mental health professionals, so we knew we’d make a good team and could trust each other to keep chipping away at our own emotional development as we raised our boy.
To be clear, we were the kind of psyched that made us binge-listen to Ram Dass lectures on parenting. We were not the kind of psyched that inspires couples to, say, plan a nursery, assemble a baby registry, or ready the house for a newborn in any practical way. We were far more enchanted with philosophizing on who our son would be and how we would keep our marriage healthy than with making actual preparations to bring an infant into our home. We didn’t see a problem with this; in fact, we congratulated ourselves for doing our emotional homework early. Like I said, I was not like other pregnant women. Those other women, the ones diving headfirst into motherhood with sheer joy and no trepidation, were — I had to assume — operating in some degree of denial. Little did I know how much we had in common.
So when my darling Texan mother-in-law innocently asked, “What’s the theme of…
