pregnancy was terrible. Not because it’s so painful – it isn’t, only uncomfortable. But because it wipes you out, it erases you. You aren’t you anymore, you have to forget you. If you see a green lawn in a park and you’re hot and you’d love to sit on the grass and roll over in its cool dampness, you can’t; you have to toddle over to the nearest bench and let yourself down gently on it. Everything is an effort – getting a can down from a high shelf is a major project. You can’t let yourself fall, unbalanced as you are, because you’re responsible for another life besides your own. You have been turned, by some tinypinprick in a condom, into a walking, talking vehicle, and when this has happened against your will, it is appalling.
Pregnancy is a long waiting in which you learn what it means completely to lose control over your life. There are no coffee breaks, no days off in which you regain your normal shape and self, and can return refreshed to your labors. You can’t wish away even for an hour the thing that is swelling you up, stretching your stomach until the skin feels as if it will burst, kicking you from the inside until you are black and blue. You can’t even hit back without hurting yourself. The condition and you are identical: you are no longer a person, but a pregnancy. You’re like a soldier in a trench who is hot and constricted and hates the food, but has to sit there for nine months. He gets to the point where he yearns for the battle, even though he may be killed or maimed in it. You look forward even to the pain of labor because it will end the waiting.
It is this sense of not being a self that makes the eyes of pregnant women so often look vacant. They can’t let themselves think about it because it is intolerable and there is nothing they can do about it. Even if they let themselves think about afterwards, it is depressing. After all, pregnancy is only the beginning. Once it is over, you have really had it: the baby will be there and it will be yours and it will demand of you for the rest of your life. The rest of your life: your whole life stretches out in front of you in that great belly of yours propped on cushions. From there it looks like an eternal sequence of bottles and diapers and cries and feedings. You have no self but a waiting, no future but pain, and no hope but the tedium of humble tasks. Pregnancy is the greatest training, disciplining device in the human experience. Compared to it, army discipline that attempts to humble the individual, get him into the impersonal line that can function like a machine, is soft. The soldier gets time off to get back to his identity; he can, if he is willing to take the risk, retort to his superior, or even bolt. At night, as he lies on his bunk, he can play poker, write letters, remember, look forward to the day he’ll get out.
All of this is what Mira did not think about, or at least tried not to think about. It was in these months that she developed her pursed lips and the set frown on her brow. She saw the situation as the end of her personal life. Her life, from pregnancy on, was owned by another creature.
What is wrong with this woman?? you ask. It is Nature, there is no recourse, she must submit and make the best of what she cannotchange. But the mind is not easily subdued. Resentment and rebellion grow in it – resentment and rebellion against Nature itself. Some wills are crushed, but those that are not contain within them, for the rest of their days, seeds of hate. All of the women I know feel a little like outlaws.
18
At the end of her pregnancy, Mira could sleep only for brief snatches. Her body was so big and painful that any position hurt after a while. She would get up gently, so as not to wake Norm, put on the cotton wrapper which was the only thing that fit her now, and tiptoe into the kitchen. She would make tea and sit drinking it at the kitchen table, staring blankly at the walls which someone had papered in
Pregnancy is a long waiting in which you learn what it means completely to lose control over your life. There are no coffee breaks, no days off in which you regain your normal shape and self, and can return refreshed to your labors. You can’t wish away even for an hour the thing that is swelling you up, stretching your stomach until the skin feels as if it will burst, kicking you from the inside until you are black and blue. You can’t even hit back without hurting yourself. The condition and you are identical: you are no longer a person, but a pregnancy. You’re like a soldier in a trench who is hot and constricted and hates the food, but has to sit there for nine months. He gets to the point where he yearns for the battle, even though he may be killed or maimed in it. You look forward even to the pain of labor because it will end the waiting.
It is this sense of not being a self that makes the eyes of pregnant women so often look vacant. They can’t let themselves think about it because it is intolerable and there is nothing they can do about it. Even if they let themselves think about afterwards, it is depressing. After all, pregnancy is only the beginning. Once it is over, you have really had it: the baby will be there and it will be yours and it will demand of you for the rest of your life. The rest of your life: your whole life stretches out in front of you in that great belly of yours propped on cushions. From there it looks like an eternal sequence of bottles and diapers and cries and feedings. You have no self but a waiting, no future but pain, and no hope but the tedium of humble tasks. Pregnancy is the greatest training, disciplining device in the human experience. Compared to it, army discipline that attempts to humble the individual, get him into the impersonal line that can function like a machine, is soft. The soldier gets time off to get back to his identity; he can, if he is willing to take the risk, retort to his superior, or even bolt. At night, as he lies on his bunk, he can play poker, write letters, remember, look forward to the day he’ll get out.
All of this is what Mira did not think about, or at least tried not to think about. It was in these months that she developed her pursed lips and the set frown on her brow. She saw the situation as the end of her personal life. Her life, from pregnancy on, was owned by another creature.
What is wrong with this woman?? you ask. It is Nature, there is no recourse, she must submit and make the best of what she cannotchange. But the mind is not easily subdued. Resentment and rebellion grow in it – resentment and rebellion against Nature itself. Some wills are crushed, but those that are not contain within them, for the rest of their days, seeds of hate. All of the women I know feel a little like outlaws.
18
At the end of her pregnancy, Mira could sleep only for brief snatches. Her body was so big and painful that any position hurt after a while. She would get up gently, so as not to wake Norm, put on the cotton wrapper which was the only thing that fit her now, and tiptoe into the kitchen. She would make tea and sit drinking it at the kitchen table, staring blankly at the walls which someone had papered in
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