I Was Told I’d Be Glowing
The World is in Labor and It’s Time to Push
This is about America. Rather, it is about knowing what you want — getting it! — then losing your shit because it doesn’t feel anything like you thought it would, and tunneling into your couch for four months watching The Bachelor. If that’s not American, I don’t know what is.
(Except — maybe — the tiny, resilient, dead-of-night instinct to make sense of it all; to believe that the revolution you’d hoped for wasn’t the one you expected, but might be the one you needed. That is American, too.)
I’ll explain.
On March 31 2020, eighteen days after COVID-19 was named a public emergency, I found out I am pregnant. I had just peeled the pink, sateen duvet off of the bed I share with my boyfriend; it was a paisley monstrosity that my mother had loaned us, and I never liked it, but still stared at it for thirty days while the world combusted outside our window. On the last day of March— after returning home with a vat of hand sanitizer, packet of new sponges for my grandma, and home pregnancy test — I finally freed our bed from its silky prison, and marched straight into the bathroom to pee on a stick. Earlier, when I mentioned that my period was late but probably delayed as a result of the apocalypse, my boyfriend’s eyes had rocketed into his forehead. “Can you imagine if you were pregnant? That would be nuts.” Fast forward a few hours: the stick blinked back at us with double pink lines, and the only thing I could think about was the fact that we had conceived our first child on the ugliest duvet I’d ever seen in my life. In the middle of a pandemic.
We woke up the next morning, April Fool’s Day, and cried.
Note: there are occasions in life when panic is a warranted response. One is the outbreak of a deadly virus. Another is awakening to the systemic racism that you’ve steeped in since birth. Another yet is realizing that the two are happening simultaneously; while at the same time, being faced with bringing another, brand new human into a world that prepared you to post about babies on Instagram, but nothing to normalize the icy dread spidering through your veins. As I hugged the bathroom floor during those first days, I recalled every movie in which a woman realizes her Life’s Greatest Potential upon discovering she’s pregnant, and never has a bad day again. She is usually the same person who announces it while dining at a French restaurant, pulling a red napkin off of her husband’s plate to reveal a positive pregnancy test beneath. They both begin to laugh-cry, oblivious to the fact that this woman has essentially urinated onto the table, and probably revisit all of their wedding photos that night in bed. She will throw up exactly once in a subsequent scene. Approximately four minutes later, she is featured with her hair tied up in a silk scarf, painting a nursery while her watermelon belly swells beneath a Ralph Lauren polo. She has already gone jogging. On one swift brushstroke, her water will break with gusto onto the hardwood floor; in the next image, she has a delightfully pink infant cradled in her arms, who is likely portrayed by a 5-month-old child actor who no longer looks like a swamp creature and already has his SAG card.
This scene, the only one I’d been reliably exposed to, conveys two resounding messages; one, that delight is the only response to conceiving a baby. Two, that women are supposed to carry a baby while carrying on with life as normal; to wear mascara, exercise, and get shit done. No one ever told me that confusion, shock, and ambivalence are perfectly normal — nay, healthy — responses to pregnancy, as to a pandemic. It is as futile to expect all pregnant women to be overjoyed as it is to expect all quarantined adults to develop an expert recipe for banana bread, thriving yoga practice, and robust sex life as a result of being trapped at home. So even though I felt excitement beneath the confusion, like a fleck of gold visible in a creek bed, I also judged the turmoil fuming inside my body. I was afraid to admit that I felt less than certain; mortified to have gotten what I had wanted, had quietly prayed for, and still wasn’t ready for. For weeks, I tunneled into comparison to with others; sunken in the cryptic advice that strangers — most of them male — felt entitled to share. “You women are so anxious,” an uncle slurred one night, plonking down the beer he had also instructed me not to drink. The manifest destiny of mansplainers everywhere rested on his boozy shoulders.
“You should just enjoy this experience. It’s the best time of your life. Enjoy it.”
And in that moment, something clicked. I was overcome with the urge to ask if he was enjoying it; “it” being his very own pregnancy, or the conception, gestation, and painful birth that humanity seems to be experiencing during the dumpster fire of 2020. I suddenly got it. Beneath his idiotic comment rested a crucial idea that maybe, just maybe, the challenge-yet-hope-yet-denial-yet-glory that I’d been juggling during pregnancy was a mirror of the global conundrum. Here we were, faced with the opportunity to re-evaluate everything leading up to this point — inequity, healthcare, productivity, our parents’ testy relationship — and we were balking at the task. The world was burning, and still wanted to go to brunch. I was growing a strawberry-sized human inside my uterus, and still wanted to organize the garage. In between meetings. Our resistance was catching up to us.
Luckily, the same spirit who chose this godforsaken year to make his entrance had little tolerance for my ego, nor for my lifelong habit of Caring What Other People Think. Cue “Pukefest 2020”: just as my head wrapped around the reality of birth, my stomach began turning itself inside out with the subtlety of a chainsaw, all day every day. And I was shocked. The same part of me who assumed I’d feel elation at pregnancy also assumed I would adore the bodily changes that came with it. I was certain I would feel like a celebrity, round and magical, with a mane of hormonally-juiced hair. I was told I’d be glowing; but instead, felt as if I were hungover on a boat, after being hit on the head with a blunt object. Twenty-four hours a day. The smell of my own skin, the taste of my own mouth, the inkling that someone within a fourteen-block radius might be cooking bacon — all were fodder for the kind of demonic vomiting that I’d only seen before in movies. And not the ones about babies.
I became the kind of sick that people don’t want to talk about.
Anyone who has ever cleared a room with the word “tampon” can understand that incessant puking — coupled with a torn esophagus and lack of basic hygiene — fell outside the microscopic window of tolerance that is socially allotted for women’s health issues. When it comes to “morning” sickness, we are trained to believe it should be gone by the second trimester. Well-meaning friends bring sourdough bread and packets of ginger candies for a few weeks, but by the time that fourth month arrives, you better be ready for them to shift to baby shoes and judging you about breastfeeding plans. Well into month six, I was still flinging open the car door to vomit into parking lots, making watery eye contact with horrified passersby who seemed to need to hear “I’m pregnant” in order to survive the ordeal of seeing me. On more than one occasion, I experienced the distinct glare of where’s your bump, then, bitch as a deli customer realized she should probably move her Tesla out of the splatter zone. When my boyfriend would return to the car with sixteen cases of sparkling water and a packet of pretzels, I could only look up at him in a tired combination of love, appreciation, and total resentment at his ability to operate a motor vehicle. “What did I do,” he would sometimes ask, peering around the doorjamb as I yelled in helpless, illogical rage.
“Nothing,” I’d answer. “I’m just mad at you for existing so easily.”
It took me five months of near-constant vomiting to consider that — perhaps — my body was having a reasonable response to the events transpiring outside. The murder of George Floyd dominated the news, bringing the reality of racist America inescapably forward, and I threw up. College students partied on yachts in Florida, none of them wearing masks, and I threw up. My home state of California burned to a crisp as the air quality index crept beyond the 400 point all over the west coast, and I threw up. I called friends, senators, and grandparents; asking for forgiveness, for justice, and for tools to move forward. “I’m just tired,” a friend told me, reflecting on her experience as a Black woman in America. “I’m so tired, and mad. Others can just exist so easily. I… can’t.”
And I threw up.
Meanwhile, life continued.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg began her last months on Earth, the bougainvillea plant began blooming outside my front window, and I grew a pancreas, liver, heart, brain, and teeny set of lungs inside my belly. All while surviving on toast. On one of my better days, I met a friend for a walk at the beach; who, like the wise man he is, greeted me with a cold juice and ample distance. I remember the way the salt air sank into my skin, both stinging and nourishing my largest and most visible organ. “I didn’t expect to feel so exposed,” I told him, outrage and gratitude continuing their infinite cha-cha inside my psyche. “It’s like whatever layer I had left has been stripped away. I feel the suffering of others like a virus. Pregnancy — this change — has turned me inside out. And I worry I won’t ever go back.”
“Well,” he paused, looking out at the sea. As I mentioned, this is a wise man. He often looks to large bodies of water for clues.
“I don’t think you will. I mean, none of us will. This year has taken away the illusion that everything is ok, and it’s painful. But it’s left us with something else — the truth.
“It’s like your pregnancy. America is also gestating something new — something that can, one day, be better — but in the meantime, our current body is rejecting it. Just like yours is registering your baby as a foreign entity. We are all being tasked to let something grow that was always part of our potential… but in order to let it, we have to let go of the old part.”
“We have to shut up and let the future in.”
We walked for hours that day, seeking patches of shade. I ate saltine crackers from my pocket and tried to find comfortable positions to sit in; eventually, I gave up. Comfort is nice, but it’s not part of my life right now. Or anyone’s.
Today, my baby is almost ready to come out of my body and into the world. With each passing moment, I feel like I know him more… and also not at all. Having children is the ultimate mystery; you know there’s a chance they will have your eyes, or his hair texture, but the personality is invariably up for grabs. Ask any parent who has spent thirteen hours reading the Captain Underpants series out loud to a group of spiky-headed extroverts. Confusion is normal.
As for mine: over time, the uncertainty that I began this revolution with has made way for something like peace. Creeping from its supernatural, Lochness depth, has come the knowing that I asked for — and needed this — all along; this exact baby, this exact time, this exact challenge. My initial lack of recognition was an integral part of losing myself in order to show up for something better; which I hope, deep in my core, that everyone will. That there will come a time when we look into the eyes of this thing we have made, all of us, and know we have welcomed it.
Maybe we needed the puking phase to get here.
Meanwhile, the labor — not to mention parenting, the real work — still lies ahead.
At one point during Pukefest, while waiting in line to spent $9 on Whole Foods pita chips, I rand into a family friend. He absorbed my dilapidated wave with timid eyes before looking down at my belly; we made chitchat about my parents, the weather, the infernos, the Emmys. He asked how I’m handling pregnancy. Preparing for his inevitable barrage of advice on how to treat hemorrhoids, I considered changing the subject; had he seen the news today? If so, how is he feeling? Who is he becoming, given all that is breaking?
Breathe breathe breathe, push, push, push.
He glanced up then, seeing that it was almost my turn to cross the threshold, and paused. “It’s good to see you. You look…”
“I know, I know.” I smiled back at him. “Radiant.
“And with any luck, we’ll get through it together.”
