How To Annoy Your Fetus

Pregnancy guides have some helpful tips

Already so pissed / Wilfredor, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A second pregnancy is a little like a repeat viewing of the movie Midsommar. On one hand, you know what’s coming, so any jump scares are less effective.

On the other, you spent too much time on the Ari Aster subreddit after you watched it the first time and now you have a deeper awareness of all the subliminal scary shit that’s happening in the background on an ongoing basis, and also you know when that scene with the old man who jumps off a cliff and breaks his legs is next and you can’t pay attention to what’s even happening in the runup to the gore because you’re wincing so hard in anticipation. Metaphorically speaking. 

I retained about 60% of what I read about pregnancy the last time I did this. But that still leaves a lot of important information that was lost to my brain’s great grey matter reduction. So, for my own edification when I hit weekly milestones, I check in on Babylist or What to Expect or whatever comes up when I google “21 weeks pregnant” to get a sense of when my fetus has gone from the size of a Tamagotchi to the size of a papaya. 

Side note/ second baby observation: I wish I would have known back then that a lot of pregnancy information I took in the first time turned out to be not-applicable to my specific case, since every body is different and every pregnancy is different. There’s such a thing as reading so much about pregnancy and childbirth that you freak yourself out. Last time, I was over-prepared and anxious for things that never happened to me, in part because so much pregnancy literature makes it seem like you’re definitely for sure going to get morning sickness, swollen ankles, nosebleeds, fatigue, muscle cramps, hot flashes, vomiting, food aversions, facial skin discoloration, stretch marks, stomach skin discoloration, random bouts of rage, heartburn, cellulite, spider veins, breakouts, a permanently flat ass, mood swings, weeks of Braxton Hicks contractions, depression, rage, swamp vagina, round ligament pain, giant boobs with saucer-sized nipples, uncontrollable little squirts of pee every time you sneeze or laugh, excessive flatulence, insomnia, varicose veins, and constipation. You’d have to be incredibly unlucky to experience all of these symptoms. Most people get a few of them, or at worst a handful of them. [The only people who get none of them are the sort of people who appear on those “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant!” shows and my theory is that the reason they didn’t know they were pregnant is that they have always felt a little bit like shit, and thus the specific ways that pregnancy makes a person feel like shit did not register to them. Just another day, or week, or nine months of feeling like shit– the usual.]

I had forgotten how often these websites offer tips for how to connect with your future baby, and looking at them a second time, a lot of them sound really annoying, from the fetus’ perspective. 

Imagine being a fetus. It must be so relaxing. Just you, near-total darkness, a pool of water that is exactly the same temperature as the inside of your body, a perpetual state of dreamlike semi-consciousness. All you have to do is float there, practice opening and closing your hands, drink and expel the amniotic fluid/your own pee as a way to practice breathing, kick the soft walls of your enclosure every once in awhile. 

But these websites think it’s a cool idea for me to fuck around with the baby. At around 18-19 weeks, the websites started telling me that the baby can hear my voice, and that it might be cool and fine to play some soothing music on headphones touching my belly, or to have my partner get down close to the action and say some stuff, so the baby can get used to his voice, too. I did this when I was pregnant with Juniper. I put my big airport headphones on my big old belly and cranked some Rachmaninov, thinking that maybe it would help make the baby smart. I thought the baby might like it. 

But, putting myself in the shoes of the fetus– would I like it? No. As a fully formed and fully sentient human, there are few things more irritating than somebody showing up during a moment of peace– like say, if I were on a hike or on the beach or floating in a sensory deprivation chamber– and blasting some music or soundscape of their choosing. It’s probably annoying enough that this child is spending its first moments of primordial consciousness listening to me yap on and on about how the new season of True Detective sucks. (We’re still watching, though, driven by the sunken costs fallacy and the fact that it’s so bad that it lends itself well to MST3K-style roasting.) 

Here’s us watching another treacly montage that doesn’t do anything to advance the plot, hoping the next scene will be one of those scenes where somebody approaches the main characters with a folder that solves the case. /MST3K/Gizmoplex

Another recent website entry on a week-by-week pregnancy website advised me that this future baby’s eyes were now developed enough to detect light, and that therefore it might be a cute idea to shine a flashlight directly into my stomach. The light might cause the baby to respond! Ok, cool, but that also sounds very rude. I, too, would respond to having a flashlight shone directly into my face while I was trying to sleep. That’s straight up bullying. 

The internet abounds with ways to annoy one’s fetus into moving. Eat something cold. Drink a sugary beverage. Jump up and down. These measures can help mothers who are concerned by a drop in fetal activity, which is something that shouldn’t be ignored during the last stages of pregnancy because it could indicate a problem. But it’s a shame, from the fetus’s perspective, that the first and best way for a pregnant person to rule out something wrong with their baby is to irritate the shit out of them.

When I went for my most recent ultrasound, the tech would sometimes shake my stomach like a stubborn Jello mold when the baby wasn’t in an amenable position to be photographed. No wonder when they’re born, babies are so endlessly cranky. Ever since they’ve had a shadow of awareness, we’ve been bothering them. It’s like if I went to the doctor and the first thing the doctor did was knock me around a little to wake me up.

The other day my two-year-old went into a full meltdown because I would not feed her “peanuts” for breakfast. We don’t regularly buy peanuts. We have never once given her straight peanuts. I tried to figure out if she was trying to say a different word and it was coming out wrong, but she was clear and insistent. And then it took an hour to calm her down.

I have to wonder if some of this is payback from the jiggling, the jostling, the cold beverages, and the flashlight interruptions from her first and most peaceful nap. Maybe if I largely leave this one alone she’ll be a little easier on us. (Probably not, but worth a shot!)