“I woke up with a start at 4:00 one morning and realized I was very very pregnant.”
One of the trends I’ve noticed about writing about pregnancy more recently is some attempt to remove the sort of automated cultural responses to what pregnancy, birth, and motherhood are. What I mean by this is that more recently books about motherhood (especially memoirs and not say, baby or parenting books) have tried to be more honest about some of the different feelings people have regarding these experiences. There’s too often pressure to always put a happy face on all aspects of it. I think there’s a lot of reason for this. For one: people are terrified about actual pro-choice views sometimes and have been for my whole life. In general, abortions are seen as wrong but sometimes necessary, always sad, kind of evil or very evil, and meant to be avoided. This often means that people have to be against them, not talk about them, or frame them through several layers of abstraction. With pregnancy, all women are required to want to be pregnant and love pregnancy and be in a constant state of joy and bliss about it. Birth might be hard, but wonderful! And of course motherhood is both a noble sacrifice and again, a state of pure bliss. These forces are conservative, but they’re not always “Conservative” as there’s plenty of cultural forces using “Mother Earth” and “New Age” and various kinds of primitivism to force the same results, for different reasons. Often the message is, there’s a million ways to do this, but you’re probably doing it wrong.
I mention this because Anne Lamott’s book about her pregnancy, the birth of her son, and his first year on Earth is clearly an attempt to partially call bullshit on all those forces, or more so to assert her right to be the author of her own experience. And her experience is probably not particularly extraordinary. She was kind of dating someone or at least sleeping with someone. She was 34 or 35 at the time. She gets pregnant; he freaks out and bails (while castigating her repeatedly for weeks about her deciding to keep the baby). And so with the help of friends, she has the baby and begins raising him. The results are a series of funny, sad, angering, and gratifying diary entries. One that made me laugh out loud is when she talks about her friend always threatening her dogs with a stick with nails in it, but in a sing-song voice so they don’t she’s really mad whenever they act up — and she does the same here. The sheer feeling of overwhelmingness she sometimes has and her outlet in writing (and help) is refreshing and scary but also honest and cathartic.
