On Being With Child (Speculative)

via Molly Young's "Privacy"

In a restaurant in 2001, I followed my pregnant aunt into the bathroom.

“This is going to be really gross, Fendi. I’m sorry,” she said. “You may want to step out.”

I, a chubby nine-year-old and family loyalist, dismissed her warning and waddled into the stall anyway. Then I heard it: a waterfall surging into a stagnant pond.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“You should go on without me,” she said between rounds.

Back at the table, I delivered the news solemnly before scooching into the booth and lapping hot pasta into my mouth.

My aunt is part of the unlucky 2% of women, Kate Middleton and Amy Schumer among them, who suffer from hyperemesis gravidarum (HG). Routine morning sickness is child’s play compared to HG, a condition marked by extreme and unrelenting nausea and vomiting. My aunt was hospitalized at her lowest weight: 92 pounds. (She’s 5'1", but still.)

I hadn’t revisited this memory until recently. Like death, most of us do not dwell on pregnancy until we see it coming for ourselves. One close friend texted me that she got her period for the first time in 646 days, according to her tracking app. Now that she’s fertile again, she may try for a second. (She believes Only Children are lonely. Look, yes, we were—but it builds character! And makes us fantastic third-wheels.)

Another friend is due in a month. At her baby shower, I sat between two mothers discussing breech births and hair loss while picking at my Chinese chicken salad. A woman with zero gestational experience has little (nothing) to contribute to a conversation about child-rearing. I don’t mean that degradingly; it’s just a fact. I asked the equivalent of “So, how do you know the bride?” then examined the pastel blue cookie shaped like a pacifier next to my name card.

I feel it now. Pregnancy is close, which is why Molly Young’s latest zine, Privacy, didn’t collect dust on my bedside table. I read it in three days.

Privacy—72 pages, published by “Titular Press,” which I assume to be a joke because its logo is a tit—chronicles Young’s first pregnancy, from 16 weeks in to 8 weeks postpartum. Reading it feels like hovering over a writer’s private journal because that’s exactly what it is. The zine began as a Google Doc Young created to air out her racing mind. Later, the pages were edited, printed, bound, and shipped to buyers wrapped in seductive red ribbon.

“The hypothesis is that if I can type unlimitedly and privately about the state of being fertilized, I might undergo the process as a participant-observer rather than as a grousing invalid, beast of burden, lunatic, victim, hero, or any of the other roles ascribed to the pregnant. As a method of being, “participant-observer” seems more conducive to sanity than the others.”

Young describes insomnia, nosebleeds, back pain, discoloration, expulsion, “demonic possession,” and poor memory recall. She meanders through each week with the resignation of a novice captain navigating unexplored, hostile waters—in control but only to a point. Her measured accounts of radical self-discovery remind me that while women have endured pregnancy for hundreds of thousands of years, each woman’s first encounter makes her a pioneer in the most physiological and spiritual interpretation of the role.

I appreciate that, seemingly, anything goes. One could wake up fluent in an endangered language or able to scale walls like a gecko in a Tahitian hut, and those around wouldn’t call the doctor but marvel at what the female form is up to. I wonder if expecting mothers feel almighty, like they’re single-handedly performing a miracle, or more like vessels built to complete a biological sentence. Whether that sentence lasts nine months, eighteen years, or a lifetime is up for debate. Two weeks after giving birth to her daughter, Young hemorrhaged, underwent surgery, and had most of her blood replaced with new blood—or rather, “gently-used,” she notes.

I finished the zine and wondered what pregnancy will bring for me. My grandmother could only stomach tomatoes and the smell of tobacco. (I love the image of her lying on a chaise in the ’60s, inhaling deeply as my grandfather chain-smoked beside her.) My mother says I was easy, which does not surprise me one bit. I’m not a betting woman, but if I were, I’d double down on me being a mess.

The other week, Mo and I went to our favorite hot pot restaurant: thirty-five dollars all-you-can-eat—a steal in a city where menu items usually rob you. We ordered from a screen in our booth, then gorged in silence, breaking between mouthfuls only to speak and strategize the next bite. At a minimum, we each put away a pound of red meat, plus piles of leafy greens, tofu skin, and vermicelli.

The term food baby exists because the sensation and appearance of fullness resembles, if only stupidly, carrying a baby. That night, I woke up hot and anxious. My belly gurgled like a coin spinning down a drain. I wasn’t ill, but I was acutely aware of the mass inside me, processing. I placed a hand on my abdomen to greet the occupant. I had become the participant-observer Young describes in Privacy.

Could my body handle what I’d done to it? I nudged Mo to tell him I’d eaten too much, but he rolled over. I was alone in this, apparently, which made me more upset. I relocated to the bathroom, just in case. There’s nothing wrong, I told myself. I imagine all pregnant women, at one point or another, have sat on or near a toilet thinking the same: This is just how it is.

Eventually it passed, and I fell asleep. My episode lasted an hour—short of nine months—but it invited retrospection. If a surplus of thinly sliced beef can throw me off balance, I’m in for a long and harrowing ride should I ever conceive a human baby. I thought of my aunt, my friends, Molly Young, and the billions of women who’ve carried life before me. What a disaster pregnancy is.