Once

What Women Know (And Are Telling the World All About)

The National Advocates for Pregnant Women held their great conference in Atlanta this week. Listen to the smart people who attended, writing about central issues of women's bodies, risk, doctoring, political tensions, midwifery, reproductive rights, and social justice at large, especially Bitch PhD, who writes about pregnancy not as a choice but as a fact of life and the realities of our bodies' lives, and Angry Black Bitch, who asks necessary questions about how American society typifies "legitimate producers" of children vs. those who are considered with "no business" having children (but, strangely enough, held that much more accountable) and, here, about just what constitutes a "good birth"--discussions and debates raised by the content of the conference.

All of these conversations echo for me in Mel's post over at the excellent Stirrup Queens blog that asks "But what about inside of our body--is a system that is almost entirely outside our control truly our responsibility? If my body is mine, am I by default part of this blame or celebration?"

Just what, as women, as beings fertile, infertile, or somewhere in between, is our relation and responsibility to our bodies--and our bodies to us?

Every day of this pregnancy I'm more aware not of the ease and any kind of "rightness" of womanhood--even at the moment when I'm supposedly most physically and socially expressive of being a woman--but how very much it connects me to larger social justice issues of femininity and feminism, of the shaky place of womanhood out in the world. By no means easy. How very much time we waste, as women, fighting with each other over what's natural or right or true, how we beat up on ourselves and each other, and for what?

Showing, Not Yet Telling

My mouth tastes of metal, but not the kind of general tinge that pregnancy brings to your tongue. This is blood, from my gums, which are swollen and bleed at slight provocation. My teeth might be a match for the skin of the apple I have after dinner, but when I slide the skin down and bite, the inside of my mouth cannot push back, but gives in. There, against the pale yellow flesh of the apple, comes the red of my own blood.

It’s meant everything to me not to have spotting after the sixth week into carrying this child, so much so that the blood from my mouth, or the occasional nosebleed, all the ways the body’s membranes are just more sensitive now, seems an altogether separate physical response. It does not portend loss but tells me instead of keeping, of the way my body is filling up, of how my belly has grown to a hard roundness while the rest of me goes softer.

I’ve been softening, susceptible, for months now. All my strength slackening, the way I could not think of myself too much in my body, because it was too much a risk, for fear that it betray me once again. My head’s been in a muddle. The first trimester drowned me in sleep, pulled the bones straight down into exhaustion. During the day, I rigged up my chair a foot away from my office mates’ to curl up and sleep for the 30 precious minutes I had between office hours and classes. I had to work so hard just to think that in pushing through the fatigue, it took all I had to stand up in a classroom and speak, much less to work into the night to grade (and to judge), that I had nothing left of the hardness teaching needs—that command of the classroom, the being in charge, in control. I had none of it. All the hardness has had to go into making the body take the shape I’m in now. The shape, and fact, of a pregnant woman.

When I left work at the end of the fall semester in early December, I was still covering myself up. It wasn’t hard to do. I teach writing, after all, and we follow the official humanities dress code—often rumpled and not quite put together. We might start off the semester pressed and fitted, but by the nearing of exams, we are as weary as our students, and we fall into wrinkled, comfortable clothes that leave the shape of the body undefined and, itself, loose.

But when I come back to the university hallways on Tuesday of next week, unless I walk around in my heavy winter jacket all day like a homeless person, when I stand there, in my job, there will be no denying the frame I find myself cast within and the way my very shape has changed.

This body announces itself, carries its news out to the world despite what I might be willing to admit to otherwise. Over the past few weeks it's been mostly strangers who've received it, watching me out of the corner of an eye as they walk by on the sidewalk and reading the story my shape tells. And my husband, who each day takes me in as I dress in the morning and change out of my clothes at night, and announces to me that I'm pregnant, he, seemingly as astounded as I am.

My colleagues will know. My new students will see me and greet me as full-fledged pregnant, knowing me no other way.

For a few more days I am secret. In a few more days, told on by no one else but my self.