The myth of the cute pregnancy

On adjusting to the unexpectedly grotesque, grappling with ugliness, and reckoning with the reality of forced unwanted pregnancy

Dear readers, it is finally the end of a long, dark winter. In the literal sense, Northern California has been experiencing since December an unceasing apocalyptic series of rain storms, “atmospheric rivers” for which our soil and infrastructure are unprepared. On a personal level, this season of deluges has coincided with the first 22 weeks of a pregnancy that has felt as oppressive and stormy and interminable as the winter weather outside.

It feels necessary to clarify that this is a wanted pregnancy. A healthy pregnancy. And yet I finally find myself comfortable admitting that I have hated every minute of it. I have hated the constant bodily discomfort, the drastic changes in my brain chemistry, and the accompanying loss of my familiar exercise and writing routines. At its worst moments, I have felt like I have ceased to exist in any form recognizable to myself. I have been reduced to a lump in pajamas infested by a fickle parasite who demands to be fed constantly, but who will only eat off a kid’s menu. But I’m slowly resurfacing. In the last few days, nausea hasn’t persisted beyond the first moments of waking. The sun is out and I’ve worn a dress twice in the last week. Today I am wearing pants with a button, albeit maternity pants with a stretchy waistband and a button that clasps below my burgeoning bump. Slowly I am remembering what it is like to exist outside of survival mode, to have thoughts and feelings unrelated to where I can get a sandwich in the next 15 minutes or where we will store an infant bathtub in our tiny house.

With this newfound emotional space, I’m finally beginning to process the anger and resentment that have been simmering in unverbalized form for the last 20 weeks. Why was I so unprepared for this? Why had no one ever told me how difficult pregnancy could be? Why was I left feeling robbed of my last months without a kid, months I had mistakenly believed would be my own? Was the lack of transparency in the wider cultural discourse just part of a worldwide conspiracy to ensure women keep having babies? Anecdotally, I can see that my pregnancy has been more unpleasant than most, but why, when I imagined pregnancy at its worst, could I envision nothing worse than sending my husband out at 10 pm to pick up salt and vinegar potato chips or throwing up into a wastepaper basket at work once or twice?

Instead of preparing for pregnancy, I prepared, as much as one can, for the emotional rollercoaster of trying to get pregnant. This was the hardship I would endure as a 34-year-old woman, the culture had told me. I fretted that it had been foolish of me not to freeze my eggs when I was younger. I sought to soften the potential blow of disappointment by filling the first months of “trying” with things to look forward to, things that would be more fun not pregnant. We planned winter trips to New York and New Orleans. I focused on a dear friend’s wedding in Italy at the end of the summer as a silver lining. If I got pregnant (and it definitely felt like an if, not a when), I assumed my relief and joy would render any discomfort in pregnancy surmountable.

I had braced myself too for the physical and emotional exhaustion of having a newborn. I had no illusions about the hormonal realities and the overwhelm we would feel. But in preparing myself for a baby or for the disappointment of not getting pregnant, I can see now that I was woefully unprepared for the reality of being pregnant. I was not prepared at all for the physical immediacy of it, how one minute you pee on a stick 15 minutes before friends come over for dinner and see a second line for the first time in your life and are suddenly leaving the bathroom and declining a drink. I was not prepared to be unable to exercise within a matter of days, because I was too crampy to get out of bed in the morning. When I booked an overnight work trip to LA, I had no idea I would spend approximately three hours of that 24 hour trip searching for breakfast burritos in Santa Monica.

There were startlingly few moments that were consistent with my notions of pregnancy. I was prepared to make my husband stop at McDonald’s on the 5 on a drive to LA for my first crispy chicken sandwich in 20 plus years. I was not prepared to cancel our trip to spend Christmas with my family in Connecticut because I was too weak to travel, and unable to eat anything except buttered noodles, popsicles, and broth. I was prepared to feel bitter about the paltry parental leave afforded to parents in this country; I was not prepared to require a month of medical leave from work in the first trimester.

I had not expected getting pregnant to feel like slamming on the brakes on the freeway when you belatedly notice the line of red taillights illuminated in front of you. I had not been prepared for a sudden and dramatic alteration of my relationship with a healthy body and the part of my brain capable of thinking about things other than survival. The ten months of pregnancy were supposed to be MINE, to do with as I pleased. Even as my body changed, I expected my mind to stay my own, for at least those ten months. These would be months to work and read and write and travel, to wake up early on Saturdays refreshed from not drinking.

Instead, with the nausea came vomiting, exhaustion, and a constant stream of self-pity. I lost the ability to think about things. It was like every time I threw up, I voided my brain as well as my stomach. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t focus on more than 30 minutes of TV before falling asleep. Some of this is hormonal, I have since learned. The body does go into a sort of survival mode during pregnancy. Newly flooded with estrogen and progesterone, the mind and body reorganize their priorities. In my case, I have found myself preoccupied by modern survival concerns, such as whether to Doordash pizza or pick it up, or how to get our landlord to deal with the mold problem in the bedroom. Passing anxiety over ChatGPT and climate and whatever the fuck the Tennessee Legislature is doing get quickly filed away in an offsite storage facility. I’m not sure I could summarize the gist of a single book that I’ve read in the last few months.

Perhaps because my pregnancy did not follow a long struggle with fertility, I was surprised by how divorced the physical and emotional experience of pregnancy felt, at least in the first twenty weeks, from the desired outcome—the baby at the end of the journey. Indeed, the words “pregnancy is a scam” started running through my head as early as six weeks into pregnancy, when the unceasing nausea began. At that point, I had barely even begun to process the fact that I was pregnant—the connection between four increasingly unambiguous pregnancy tests and pushing out a baby in nine months seemed fragile, abstract. I had no proof of the pregnancy besides a missed period and those tests, and so the sudden onslaught of nausea seemed to be the result of a new poison coursing through my bloodstream. When I awoke for the third time in the night to heave up whatever bile had accumulated in my stomach in the last two hours, it felt as if this new poison was intent on killing me. The friends we were telling congratulated us. “You must be so excited!” Was I? I couldn’t remember choosing this.

Of course I did choose this. And fueling the anger that seems to be the dominant emotion of my pregnancy is the thought of the legislators forcing women to endure this hell, forcing them to show up at work every day when they are nauseous and exhausted and aching, and forcing them to bear a baby that they are not prepared to bring into the world. It feels bizarre to be choosing to get pregnant at this moment, at a time when I am too scared to visit a friend in Austin in case anything were to go wrong.

But it doesn’t seem right to call pregnancy a scam, though that is the word my desperate psyche keeps coming up with. A scam is a fraud, a dishonest scheme that takes from people and gives them nothing in return. At the end of this, I will hopefully get a healthy baby—the literal fruit of my labor. But unable to comprehend what I will be given by motherhood, it is easy to fear that I will give more than I will get in this new role. After all, isn’t that the point? The giving of yourself as its own source of fulfillment?

And yet, I keep returning to the word scam because I feel duped in a way. I feel duped in the same way I feel duped about being able to buy a house when I reached a certain age and level of economic stability. Duped because it is all much harder than I was led to believe. Duped because the predominant portrayal of pregnancy is the portrayal of pregnancy as a special time, a sacred time. Duped because #GirlBoss culture led me to believe that I could do anything, pregnant or not, without needing any kind of special accommodation.¹ (See, e.g., Rihanna performing at the Superbowl.)

Of course we have the trope of the pregnant woman with cravings, and the trope of the tired pregnant woman demanding a foot massage from her husband, and the trope of the pregnant woman who tries to hide the fact that she has just thrown up in the bathroom during an important presentation at work. But these portrayals of pregnancy are all spun as somehow cute, or otherwise humorously monstrous—the pregnant woman’s husband finding himself her servant, the roles suddenly—and temporarily—reversed.² “Enjoy it,” she’s told. Enjoy being doted on and spoiled—the subtext being that it won’t last. Enjoy it, as if not being able to lift your head from the pillow in the morning without throwing up the stomach acid rollicking around your empty stomach is enjoyable, as if having your husband gently place a bowl of oatmeal on the nightstand in that moment is being spoiled, and not being kept alive.

There has been nothing cute about my pregnancy. At 22 weeks I still throw up almost every morning. My vomiting is not discrete. A couple of months ago, I threw out a muscle in my abdomen from coughing on my way to throw up. My nose streams as I throw up and half the time I pee myself from the exertion of needing to empty my already nearly-empty stomach.

Maybe nothing could have prepared me for what constant nausea would feel like. But maybe I could have been better prepared for how quickly pregnancy sets in, and how little time you have to adjust to the idea before it is always there with you. You get nine months to prepare for a baby, but about five days to prepare for onslaught of pregnancy. In low moments, my anger has fixated on the unfairness of the fact that my husband gets an additional nine months before his life changes, whereas mine changed immediately.³ (I.e., he still exercises every day.)

I am pregnant in a country where forced pregnancy is now a reality. We know that having a baby is not nothing, but neither is being pregnant. Pregnancy is disruptive. It is dangerous. It is costly. The option of giving up your baby for adoption does not undo the physical and emotional trauma of being pregnant for ten months, experiencing your body and your mind change, all so you can push a baby the size of a small pumpkin out of a hole where you were once terrified to put a tampon.

And if that sounds gnarly and makes you shudder, GOOD. Pregnancy is gnarly. It is also beautiful, because growing a human that was, at least in my case, literally made with love, is beautiful. But somehow the fact that pregnancy can be gnarly and difficult and despised is just …. missing from the cultural dialogue around pregnancy and motherhood—at least the dialogue that any non-pregnant woman not on hyperemesis gravidarum message boards has access to. Slapping a “Mamacado” sweatshirt on this body is not going to make my pregnancy cute (even if it tying it around my waist would help hide the fact that I just peed in my leggings).

1. Maybe there is a selection bias kind of issue, where as a non-pregnant woman, the only pregnant women you see out in the world are the ones that are doing well, like the seven month pregnant woman I just saw running in a crop top on my way to this coffeeshop to finish this newsletter and eat my second breakfast. You don’t see the women who are home on the couch Doordashing breakfast burritos while wearing their husbands’ boxers.

2. This is the general vibe of Sharon Horgan’s character’s very cute pregnancy in the first season of Catastrophe, which I made the mistake of watching during my first trimester.

3. In moments of clarity, I know that the suggestion that my husband’s life hasn’t changed is itself unfair, as he has had to adjust to my incapacity and take care of me and both of our lives have become much less fun.