Two of Us Live Here Now: The Second Trimester by Lyndsay Wheble
As pregnancies wait for neither time nor tide, here we are already at the end of my second trimester, a whole trimester on from part one of my writing series: three months on and three months to go. Given that I am due in December, both I and the shops have begun our jolly-yet-overwrought countdowns to Christmas. And, alas, given the amount of stuff that babies need, it's going to be expensive.
But, just to paint you an immovable mental image, put me in a Santa suit now and I’d fit right in: swollen belly, red in the face, overheating whilst I promise things I cannot possibly know to fidgeting, unfamiliar children. At the moment, letting people sit on my lap sounds like a great alternative to standing, if only to prevent my ankles swelling up and over my brass-buckled boots.
I hear the extra progesterone has many pregnant women on the way to beards.
As per most seasonal work, I will only be this festive figure for a few months more. How to tell you what the last three months have wrought? It would be easier to describe Mad Men in a sentence — and I love Mad Men. The usual peaks and troughs of pregnancy have also likely been exacerbated in my case by moving to a new area and finding myself completely incapacitated by the, admittedly, fleeting, summer heat.
But let’s give it a go, shall we?
Physically, I've become a mountain range. With each day that my bump grows bigger — my tethered ligaments sore with the outward pushing and stretching — I can't help but imagine a band of Lilliputian explorers attempting to conquer the steep incline during the night, laden with canteens, wooden-poled tents and flags, puffing that they can't make it any higher, boys; but then the next day the stretching continues, and they do. We do. Being only five foot one, I lack the height for the graceful, lengthened growth of taller women, so for a while now the only way has been out, à la beach ball. A large hard-boiled egg strapped to my front, the epicentre of all heat and blood, my bump now twitches and shifts with the rolling curiosities of its now-hefty inhabitant, who follows and shies from light, sound and its own internal fancies.
Billowing and gesticulating within its own dark-water dreams.
Elsewhere, my be-veined breasts, having calmed down now from their earlier, nervous crisis, have started gifting petal-like stains unto the inside of my bras: a gentle introduction to colostrum. My cat-scratch stretch-marks, friends of mine from the earliest days, have deepened around my thighs but remain conspicuously absent from my mid-section, perhaps out of respect for the main arena of activity.
And, my goodness, is there activity.
The first movements, at eighteen weeks, felt like someone was gently pinching, nudging or plucking a guitar string against the inside of my skin. Then came the feelings of bony pointedness, as if a featherless bird had become trapped and was pushing with wing points and sharp beak at the inside of its cage. This small bird would transform into a fish at night, drifting down as I lay on my side to where my belly met the mattress, where it flipped and undulated meditatively in gentle, generous space. Now it is another person, unmistakably, who sleeps and wakes at regular intervals, who fidgets through post-meal sugar highs, flaps elbows and knees and rolls over heavily in its shrinking bed space, momentarily turning my bump into a rippling sphere, like those images of the earth showing the moon's tidal pull on the oceans. I can feel negative pressure as baby lollops from one side to the other, and its body shape and weight when it lolls back like a lazy teenager against my hammocked skin, its outside wall. Pressing on it too hard feels dangerous though, akin to the sickening internal alarm bells rung by pressing on your inner wrist, or larynx.
And it can now feel (me) (you) (us).
When you have been the vehicle, the incubator in every sense, maybe it's hard to get out, or be moved out, of your child's way.
A nudging-and-pushing trip to the midwife provokes the baby into a resentful frenzy, but the cat’s purring against my belly will crescendo until the cat can’t purr any louder and the baby is comatose with joy. The primitive directness of this communication takes my breath away. Hopefully, it means that I will give birth to a cat-calmed little baby, whose furry welcome party will not rescind his benevolence after ten minutes of screeching and smells.
As ever though, we’ll see.
This notion of my skin being the separating wall, the wire fence through which my baby is trying to communicate, is a bizarre one. When my husband tickles my belly and the baby responds, it reduces me to the mediator, to the cells in between; being the temporary membrane that is keeping them from each other can feel almost proprietary, or selfish, though no-one would want the alternative. Is this to be my role, I wonder: filtering my child's experiences into a form both intelligible and safe for its stage of development, whilst feeling guilty that, in the beginning at least, the parental experience cannot be evenly shared? Is it wrong to experience twinges of jealousy at the fact that the recipient of first attention is now someone else (it is my belly that’s being tickled, after all)? Or, rather sadly, as my child seeks to experience the world, will they start to resent having to go through me? I won’t always be the skin in-between, but maybe I will want to be. When you have been the vehicle, the incubator in every sense, maybe it's hard to get out, or be moved out, of your child's way. Without injury, at least, without trauma. Maybe that’s why many people have fraught maternal relationships.
A Moses’ basket in the reeds could then be the ideal start in life (jk).
Or, perhaps labour and its trials are a metaphor for everything: perhaps you have to constantly 'give birth' to your children in order for you both to be free.
For all this postulating though, I have, of course, no idea what it’s like to actually raise a child.
I rushed into my local bookstore recently in a panic: I know nothing about babies! I wanted to cry out to the sales assistant, to the women shopping with their prams. It’s neglectful of the world to presume that I can do this! As I grabbed the relevant book off the shelf, I felt the same potent mix of trepidation, embarrassment and relief as when I bought my first pregnancy book, many moons ago, which was, I suppose, the first tangible acknowledgement of my pregnancy. Save for the tests, of course. I haven’t gotten round to reading it yet; likely because I’m kind of hoping that The Knowledge will be formally imparted unto me during my initiation into The Motherhood, and I’m presuming that this will happen soon.
Somehow, baby-wrangling feels too intuitive, and too rooted in personal qualities like patience and forbearance, to just study or learn. Though maybe one learns these systems to be able to act intuitively within them. I might find, once I start reading, that I already know the rough routes to take, but just not how to unlock the gates on the way, or how to best pack for the journey.
Perhaps process-led learning really comes into its own when you’re covered in [lacuna] at four in the morning.
Perhaps I should really just read the book.
This issue of preparedness has been a major theme, though, over the last few months: not just as a mother, but as an individual. Pregnancy is like being a teenager again in that every decision I make is presented to me as a prism that will have lasting ramifications for the rest of mine, and the baby’s, life. So much so, in fact, that I think one could live out an entire pregnancy always thinking one, two, three years into the future; funnelled into small, cramped mental spaces by the idea of potential outcomes, by the advice that comes from all angles with large side-helpings of agenda, self-righteousness and nostalgia, and by the mysterious and unwieldy fear that comes with a world of new responsibility and a complete life change.
Are you obedient enough to think independently, all sources seem to ask.
Will you be the ‘right’ kind of mother, or the wrong kind?
Everyone is allowed to slip up every now and again, except you, now, with this.
I’m also fascinated by the fact that becoming a mother, in the general view, seems to require the strong subsumption of the past, and of the self.
For instance, the sonographer at my twelve-week scan glared quite openly at my abiding belly bar and proclaimed, rather disdainfully, that that shouldn’t be there, and was clearly not just talking in terms of the ultrasound (which, at that stage, took place well below it). What I think he was trying to say was shed the evidence of that aspect of yourself; not knowing, of course, that the paradoxical reason that I’d been allowed to get it in the first place was as reward for my excellent exam results at sixteen. Just think of the message that it would send to a child; but what message would that be? One of youth, sexuality, fashion or folly? Tell me, what route to parenthood, nay, adulthood, did not traverse across most, if not all, of these? Believe me, there are definitely lessons to learn from it (if only how stretched and horrible that bit of skin is becoming). Out the piercing came, of course, as it was always going to, just before my sixteen-week Doppler, by then a jovial and accepted synecdoche for all life’s changes. In contrast, his disdain becomes an unnecessary footnote in the long and epic story of presuming pregnant women have do not have their own reasons, autonomy or ideas.
Similarly, I went to an Open Day for a post-graduate course that would start in autumn next year and was openly praised by a number of people for even being there.
As if I would instantly shed all my interests.
As if having a baby wasn’t interest, or sufficient, enough.
One prominent female academic laughed after answering one of my questions that I probably had ‘other priorities at hand’. I was stunned into blushing silence by this unexpected dismissal. My guess would be that she presumed less the inevitable subsumption of self, and more a stepping out of the room altogether, a traitor and failure to the cause.
Maybe, in her eyes at least, I’m already utterly lost; utterly finished in all the ways that matter.
And this is before the main event has even occurred.
I don’t think, in my relatively humble opinion, that society can even begin to decide whether motherhood is a quagmire that one should just selflessly and appreciatively sink into to, to the exclusion of all that came before, or if it’s more honourable and impressive to speed superficially across its magnetic morass, eyes barely dropping beneath the level of the next far-off achievement, the next self-actualising goal. As if the suppurating mud will never come off if you choose to wade in it, or worse: if you come to realise that it means as much, or more, to you than the idea of reaching that aforementioned achievement, that next self-actualising goal. Woe betide the woman who finds fulfilment here, creaks the sign above its many varied entrances. How she will be patronised!
And yes, I’m previously guilty of thinking this about others.
Enjoy it, but don’t forget yourself is the strongest message that I’m receiving at the moment.
Treasure it, but don’t become one of those women who can only talk about their children.
Know how lucky you are; just please don’t talk about the unpleasantness.
Frankly, these pressures just make me want to dig my heels further into the earth.
If I want to write over the next year or so, I’ll write. And if I want to think about nothing but my baby, I’ll do that too.
The final thing worth noting in this essay is, paradoxically, how difficult it has been to write. I couldn’t not write the first one, which all but poured out of me in a torrent of incredulity, surprise and wonder. This time, not so much.
I have several self-concocted theories:
1. That evolution itself would rather that I retreated now into a safe, private mental space in preparation for giving birth, like a fox or badger deepening their den or sett, rather than remaining out here in public, vulnerable and chatting away (and potentially tempting fate, even).
2. That I’m feeling too many emotions at once to be able to sift through and pull out the strands, narrative and structure necessary to record them. Fear, excitement, pride, love, apathy and the embarrassment of making such a public statement of such an intimate wish can all wash over me in a matter of hours, meaning that I am umbrella-less under a weather system that it is beyond my capabilities to describe (if only because it will seem satirical and excessive).
3. That because this is really happening to me, now, in real life, I have no observer distance with which to describe it. Perhaps my creative brain is utterly occupied with the envisaging of two new lives (one of which will be mine), leaving it no time or resource for this, quite literal, gazing at my navel. Also, I am shifting from being the subject of my own sentence to becoming the object, the time and the place of someone else’s; without the ‘I,' what personal essays can there be? My personal reassertion might be essential to my return to my previous writerly state: currently I am a chameleon, a nebulous cloud, shifting with the day. Transfiguring into the hereafter when all I’ve known, to date, is the past.
And, more than this, my gaze is not on the present: like Janus, the two-faced God, I have one eye cast backwards, trying to love and appreciate what is happening, whilst the other rests firmly ahead, on what is to come, and what I must do. I have little emotional use for this discrete time period, where I cannot remain, I cannot stay. The depths of pregnancy are like service stations between cities: though the travel sickness and cheap cutlery are all familiar from stories, and my own, researched imaginings, I only need to start to describe the nowhere, moving vista for it to fly away, hopelessly unexamined.
Nothing much now progresses past anecdote.
But, I suppose, this frustrating quicksand is a state and a place in itself.
This meta reply to an unasked question is my attempt to somehow describe another aspect of this pregnancy, which, frankly, I did not predict, and from which I cannot extricate myself.
It is also a vague apology of sorts.
One day, when this moment is past and my mind is my own again, I hope to have earned the language necessary to describe this odd and fleeting mid-point between the past and the burgeoning; between the mundanity of stretch marks and the outrageous generosity of the dazzling, inconceivable stars.
Lyndsay Wheble is a writer of fiction and memoir whose work is published or forthcoming in magazines such as Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Crack the Spine,Sein und Werden, Danse Macabre, The Lowestoft Chronicle, Inkapture, The Bicycle Review, Side B Magazine and Who We Are Now, amongst others. Her work has also appeared on the shortlist for the Yeovil Literary Prize 2015 and the Granta-sponsored Festival of Garden Literature 2013 long-list. She is currently working on her first novel. Follow her on Twitter @lyndsay_wheble.
Photo Credit #2: Jessica Doyle
Photo Credit #3: Alisha Vernon
