Bumpy Road
Pregnancy changes everything.
by Rebecca Barry
March 1, 2007
One day, the baby stops kicking you. For 14 hours you feel nothing — no nausea, no fluttering, no slow, rolling motion in the pit of your abdomen. You are lost and unmoored, the way you felt when you put your parents on the train to the airport after they visited you in France, and their sweet, familiar faces got smaller and smaller until they were gone. But then there is movement again. A blip, a ripple. Unbelievably relieved, you tell your mother-in-law, who is visiting. "That's the thing about birth," she says. "You're that much closer to death."
Then she tells you a story about the time she saw the husband of a woman who had cut a pregnant woman's stomach open and took her baby.
Instinctively, you put your hands on your belly to cover Bucephalus's little ears, which now work, according to babycenter.com.
"That's a terrible story," you say. "That's the worst thing I've ever heard."
"I know!" says your mother-in-law happily. "She met her at Wal-Mart."
You worry that you aren't connecting to the baby. You worry that you aren't connecting to anyone else because you keep saying what you think. "I hate being pregnant," you say to a group of people you barely know (and then the whole way home you apologize to the baby: "It's not you I hate, You get that sharp surge of joy and sadness you always get when you see something beautiful.Bucephalus, it's the pregnancy"). When one of your colleagues says the main character in a story is pathetic because she's promiscuous, you put your head in your hands and say, "Your argument is hurting my brain." No, you tell your students, who want to know if they can e-mail you another draft of their essay, if they can make an appointment outside of your office hours, if they can make up the four classes they missed because they work in a nightclub and don't get out of bed before three in the afternoon. "That's bullshit," you say, when one of them cites a study about women abusing men more than men abuse women. You haul your pregnant self out of your chair and say, "Show me that shit-for-brains study." (Miraculously, your evaluations that quarter are the best they've ever been.) "Yes," you say when people offer you a bite of whatever they're eating. Then you take three times more than they offered you. "Go bother the dog," you say when a friend asks you how you can be pro-choice when you're growing a baby yourself, when you can't even kill a lobster and looking at a tank of them waiting to die makes you impossibly, inconsolably sad.
Then one day you're sitting alone on your porch with your baby inside you and you look up at the birch tree in your front yard. It is autumn, and the leaves are so bright yellow against the white bark, against the blue sky, that you get that sharp surge of joy and sadness you always get when you see something beautiful, especially in the fall when the natural world tells us that death — like birth, like hope, like love — is an inevitable, glorious, soaring thing. "That," you say to your baby, "is what beauty feels like. You'll see when you get out.
"You'll love it here," you say, and your heart fills the way it once did when you saw your husband across the room and you knew he was the man you would marry.
©2007 Rebecca Barry and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Rebecca Barry's nonfiction has appeared in The Washington Post, Glamour,
The New York Times, and Best American Travel Writing. Her fiction
has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, and Best New American
Voices. Her first book, Later, at the Bar, was published in May. She lives in Trumansburg, NY. |
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