Show’s Over: Living in the Shadow of Prepartum Depression
It began as soon as I began to “show”: the assumption, from near strangers, that it was fine to grope my belly. So what if it wasn’t sexual? It was non-consensual. An arm already moving in, as the rhetorical question, “Can I?” is fake-asked, does not count. To my mind, “Can I touch your belly?” is always an inappropriate question. If I want your hand on me, I’ll let you know.
(Don’t hold your breath.)
The larger I get (I’m now seven months pregnant), the more I seem to shrink from sight. My stomach feels like a giant cinema screen, featuring whatever others choose to project onto it. In a tennis class, playing beside the coach (who has made the last three unforced errors), he warns the other team to stop scoring points against us: he has an unhinged pregnant woman beside him; he remembers what his ex-wife was like. He benches me without asking if I need a rest. “Don’t hit hard against her,” says another coach. “Nobody wants to be the guy who hits the pregnant woman.”
I have had a garbage pail pregnancy. Nausea every waking minute, refusing to relent in the second and now third trimester. I eat less than I did pre-pregnancy. My cheekbones have sharpened like #2 pencils.
“You look great!” other women say. “You’re so tiny!”
I try to explain that the drugs doctors typically give chemotherapy patients have done nothing to soothe the sickness. That when I vomit, it’s so violent I lose bladder control, and my throat is sore from the acid for the rest of the night. But most of the time, I don’t throw up, and that’s even worse: the nausea like a relentless stalker, my dinner plates looking like they did in my anorexic, late-teen years: a couple pieces of celery, a few crackers.
When I see family members, they beam, and insist that I’m glowing. But I am living in the shadow of a nine-month eclipse, in which I vanish, like the sun, from sight.
I try to find words for it, Google articles online: is my kind of pregnancy hyperemesis? “Technically, you’re not hyperemetic, because you haven’t lost weight,” says my doctor. Even though I lost ten pounds in the first trimester. Even though I’ve only gained twelve pounds, and most pregnant people, by this stage, should have gained about 25. Even though the only time I’ve felt this bad was the months following my sister’s death, when I was fifteen, when my eating disorder began.
Prepartum depression, I whisper to myself. And force a smile when the phones come out, when others demand photos.
“Let’s see that bump!”
“Turn sideways, hold your belly!”
“Come on, smile!”
I was on the fence about having a baby before I got pregnant, at 41. Ironically, one of the gifts of this unbearable pregnancy is the new certainty that most pressures in life are utterly illusory. I now feel I would have been perfectly fine without a baby. And, equally, that the things I felt so guilty about before—an extra glass of wine on a weeknight, a jeans size up after the holidays, a meandering career—are exquisite states of being. After seven months of starvation rations, I finally get it: pleasure is the point.
So, no, I will not be breastfeeding. I have suffered a lifetime’s worth of restrictions: first, at my own hand, in my teens and early twenties; and, in the last months, due to my disordered digestion. I will not be solely responsible for my daughter’s feeding, I will not pump, I will not bow to the widely accepted wisdom that “breast is best.” I want my body back.
Typically, “getting your body back” after pregnancy means shedding all the pounds you put on. But I have a strange new ambition. I want to feed and pamper my body like never before: to find the generous weight I have perhaps always denied myself, ever since I was told, around nine years old, to “suck my stomach in” for pictures.
Telling pregnant women to hold their bump when they pose for a photo is the same message as telling young girls to suck in their bellies: your body is not yours; this is how you are beautiful. With my daughter’s birth at the end of August, I hope I come back to life, too, in a way that ignores popular opinion. I want to nurture and love and protect her even as I offer that to myself in a radical new way.
Some women love pregnancy. I have hated almost every moment of mine. Friends look disturbed when I say this, but are cancer patients supposed to love their disease? I adore Singapore, where I grew up, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy the thirty-hour-plus trip to get there.
Why is it so upsetting to hear a woman disavow discomfort? Are listeners afraid that I will not be willing to make the requisite sacrifices for my child? And what if I am not? Who is to say that maternal martyrdom ever worked? The Madonna’s sad eyes, cast up to heaven, or lowered demurely at Jesus. What if we saw her gaze burning, staring at the Renaissance painter, as lusty and licentious as Venus, rising from her shell?
About the Author
Brittani Sonnenberg is the author of the novel Home Leave, which was selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The O’Henry Prize Stories Series and elsewhere. Her comics and creative nonfiction have been featured or are forthcoming in Electric Lit, Texas Monthly, Lit Hub, Travel and Leisure, and The Second Serve. She is based in Austin, Texas.
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