People begin asking about the birth and I happily say I am planning a home birth. Many, most, smirk, even my friends who haven’t had children. My one aunt says, That’s what you choose for now. Someone else talks about having a healthy baby being the most important thing, as though having an opinion about what kind of birth I want is an offence to proper priorities, the implication being I’m already a selfish mom. A friend says I’ll be in so much pain I won’t know anything.
I feel rage building up in me. I have done a ton of research already, am surrounding myself with a birth team, and I am having a completely normal, healthy pregnancy. Why should I not have the type of birth I want? Of course, things change, and there are circumstances that would dictate that we take another course. I am not going to go against my doctor’s advice to do what I want, but I also know what I want. This seems to be part of the problem – a woman saying she wants a particular thing for her body and her baby is an affront. My cousin laughs at me.
I decide to stop telling people my plans. They are my own, and I don’t want doubt to be sown into me by people’s unsolicited opinions. But I become aware of something else: I am afraid. And I also cannot fully picture myself having this baby in the way I want. That part of me bracing for disaster is bracing for the inevitable emergency C-section, or the induction followed by a cascade of interventions finally ending in a C-section. I feel the pull of passivity, the pull of the smirkers who give me a look that says, poor idiot, you’ll learn, and I feel this all in myself too. I feel this. I agree, deep down. The tidal wave of doctors and the supposed scariness of this process almost forces my hand, forces me to hand over my power, my own sensibilities, my own sense of my body and this baby, to the experts, to those who know. When I say I want something different, a bevy of women – me included – gangs up: what makes you so special, huh?
This fear has been coupled in the past few days with the most extraordinary new sensation: I love my body. I love its curves and heft. I love my big boobs and bumpy areolas. I even like my stippled, cellulite-ridden thighs. I slather myself in oils and creams and stare at how I gleam and shine in the mirror. She, she, she is in me and making me large and round. Something is loosed in me, and I can finally let my body romp and run free, let it expand, let my belly right the way out.
I still catch myself holding it in, as I habitually did before pregnancy, as I’ve done since I was an early teen, held in my stomach and kept my breath high and in my chest. God, how I wished I could breathe, could just let myself be. But a tyrant inside me kept me tummy tucked and always unhappy with my body. I always frowned in the mirror. Bad body, bad self, for eating, drinking, bulging.
Now I am bigger than I’ve ever been in my life by far and I feel absolutely gorgeous. I can’t stop pulling up my tops to see my belly and breasts, pulling down my pants to look at my big thighs and new bum. I’m pale from winter, and hairy, but still, I feel if I were thrown overboard I’d float serenely, buoyed up by this body. It is a convex host, moist and luscious, heavy and here and alive.
I buy extra-large underpants and large bras. I try to buy a large pair of shorts but find they are already too small so I will take them back and get an extra, extra large. I don’t care. I don’t care a bit. And I would have. For years I’ve creaked around in too small underpants because I couldn’t stand the idea that I am a size large and not small or medium – the acceptable sizes.
My gran was called Tickey after the 1c coin because of how small she was. Somehow smallness became a virtue. Forget it. I hope this feeling lasts, not only into the more difficult third trimester but beyond. I feel I have found, finally, my body, and it is joyous. It is this feeling, and some hypnobirthing affirmations, that I hope will encircle and soften the fear I have inside me, so we can all come to the threshold of birth and step through.
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