I Have A Skeleton In My Stomach

On the physical weirdness of pregnancy

Books, websites, and forums about pregnancy tend to fall into one of three categories: soft-focus, two-cute-by-half material that talks down to pregnant women like being pregnant has actually turned us into babies ourselves, graphic worst case scenarios that read like emotionally voyeuristic trauma porn, and crunchy humorless earth mother world that presents itself as welcoming and progressive but is secretly dogmatic and judgemental.

If that's how women want to experience their own pregnancies-- in a whipped-cream world of ruffles and lullabies, by spending 9 months in a state of mortal panic, roaming barefoot through an organic garden selecting vegetables to add to your placenta omelet when the time comes-- far be it from me to demand those worlds go away. Whatever gets you through it!

But none of those things feel true to my experience.

Being pregnant is extremely common. None of us would exist without it. However, I can say with confidence that pregnancy is the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me (I type this as I sit at an odd angle, leaning back and away from my right side because if I lean too far forward in this desk chair, the fist of a tiny, waxy, nude person I've never met will punch me in the cervix.) And I have done weird things. I have dropped acid at a technology convention in Las Vegas for work. Danny De Vito once shared with me, unprompted, how many bombs the US military had dropped in Afghanistan. I used to have a pet bantam chicken named Peabody who would fall asleep in my hand. I've partied with a pre-Trump Steve Bannon-- more than once. I lost an after-school job because a tornado blew it away. When I was 17, I was the Wisconsin State President of an organization that, at the time, was called the "Future Homemakers of America." Pregnancy is weirder than all of that.

The pregnancy itself wasn't a total surprise, but it was a bit of a shock. I knew it was possible for me to become pregnant, mostly because I had a functional reproductive system, I stopped using birth control, and my husband and I had decided we'd "see if it works" to conceive. We were casual about it, like it was something that might not be for us, like rock climbing or transcendental meditation. I tried to temper my expectations as much as possible. I'd had enough friends deal with the random cruelty of infertility and pregnancy loss that I knew heartbreak was also a possible outcome to all this. I knew a lot of conventional wisdom around women's reproductive capacity is sexist garbage, but I also knew I was over 35, and that sometimes pregnancy just isn't in the cards for people after a certain age, and that I may have internalized some of that sexist garbage.

I was so pessimistically relaxed about the whole thing and so prepared for so many different ways it could go wrong that I don't think I actually expected it to work. Pregnancy is a physical wonder that didn't quite make sense to me as something that is possible, like synchronized swimming or beef wellington. But I was peeing into a little disposable cup every morning and dipping a little white strip into the cup anyway; on the off chance my body decided to cooperate, I didn't want to do something unintentionally harmful to the embryo, like eat an entire sativa edible gummy and watch Lost Highway.

The night before I saw a second line on the test strip, I had a dream that I found a positive pregnancy test in my bathroom, which on one hand was kind of a cool and will be a neat story to tell my child one day, but on the other was a bit of a spoiler. The pregnancy was, at the time, a cluster of undifferentiated cells that had just attached itself to the inside of my uterus after floating lackadaisically around my body, unknowable and unseeable, for several days, replicating, genetically unique from anyone else who has ever existed, like an alien spaceship looking to dock. Each cell contained in the bundle was exactly like all of the others, so if one of the cells died, the others could replace it with a copy. Whether its genetic material was sufficient to successfully produce a viable pregnancy was still unknowable.

I had taken human growth and reproduction in middle school but didn't remember this incredible fact, and as soon as I learned this I could not shut the fuck up about it. And because my husband was the only person who knew about it, he was my only audience (Sorry, Josh).

This continued throughout the early weeks of the pregnancy, when I was alternating between morbidly refreshing something called the "Miscarriage Calculator" every morning, just to prepare myself mentally in case something went wrong and to rehearse reminding myself that when something does "go wrong" it's almost never the mother's fault, and reading websites that tried to use cutesy language to gloss over just how bizarre embryonic development looks during the early stages. ("Your baby is growing teeny weeny buds that will one day be arms and legs!"= my baby looks like the aliens from the X Files movie, except the size of the top portion of an adult pinkie finger, which is somehow scarier than if it were huge.)

When I had my first appointment at my doctor to confirm the pregnancy, I saw a small flicker of a bunch of cells that would one day be part of a little human heart, DNA willing. I thought about how every human heart is an electrified pump made of meat. I learned that if I didn't eat a healthy enough diet during the pregnancy, the blurry little lump I could see on the ultrasound would grow bones by stealing calcium from my teeth. I told my husband (who had to wait in the car due to COVID) this horrifying fact within minutes of emerging from the doctor's office.

I was sold. I needed to learn every possible bizarre thing that we know about what happens to a human body that grows another human body inside it. I needed to know what my future baby, tiny little corporeal roommate from hell was doing for itself, doing to me.

Every week, I update my husband on what our fetus is doing by reading from one of those websites that talks to pregnant women like we're idiots. I skip over the flowery language, though, to get to the good stuff: which medical facts are the weirdest. I watched his eyes widen as I explained that, in utero, developing babies are covered with a layer of downy fur, and delighted in explaining that the placenta will eventually be the size and shape of an LP made of veiny steak.

I can't stop. I'm a demented version of a Bible Belt billboard that features a stock photo of a several-months-old baby alongside a fact about fetal development. "Choose life," the billboards say, as though the four-month old infant looks exactly like an 8-week-old lima bean-sized zygote. "Isn't this fucking weird?" I say, pointing out where I am pretty sure the baby's tiny developing butt is causing an area of my stomach to bulge out disturbingly.

For awhile, I was really into the placenta. "It's a disposable organ. I am growing a whole organ right now and when I'm done with it, my body just throws it away."

"My uterus is the size of a soccer ball," I'll say out of nowhere. "It was the size of a lime before."

"There are two human eyeballs in my pelvic cavity. The baby can see light and dark with the eyeballs." To demonstrate this, I pulled my shirt up and took a flashlight and shined it on my-then-26-weeks-pregnant belly. Sure enough, alien invader caused a bulge poke out next to my belly button. See? Told you it had eyes!

Last week, one of the apps explained that the baby had grown fingernails. Assuming this baby's on track in terms of nail development and considering that the baby is part of my body at the moment, I currently have twenty fingernails and twenty toenails.

On one hand: what a crazy miracle. On the other: hahaha what the fuck!

We decided early on that we weren't going to find out the sex of the baby before the birth, both because we liked the idea of a delivery room surprise and because I don't like the idea of getting a onesie as a gift declaring my child to be "Daddy's Little Princess" or "Mommy's Little Heartbreaker" before we've even met the kid. Overly gendered newborn clothes always seemed more like they were about treating the baby like an extension of the parents' self-expression rather than the kid's personhood anyway. Babies don't seem to care what they wear as long as they're comfortable and dry. (That being said: my baby will be wearing a Top the Tater branded onesie, so strangers know that this is a chip dip house.)

Not knowing the baby's sex has doubled my opportunities to learn and share facts about said baby.

"Did you know, that if this baby is a girl, by this point in the pregnancy, her body contains every egg cell it will ever contain? Half of the DNA of every possible child she could conceive herself is currently inside my body."

"If the baby is male, around this week, he's probably trying to grab his junk. Not for any gratification or anything, just because at this point the baby is looking for stuff to grab."

My husband has come around to my talking about our future child like I am growing them as part of a science experiment I'm conducting on myself, but not everybody is as keen about my approach. So far, sharing the fact that anywhere from 2-4 lbs of weight gained during pregnancy is in extra blood has gotten a mixed reception. I have to be careful not to say things to couples with tiny infants in public that cross the line from "friendly stranger" to "weird city aunt."

But overall, distancing myself from the mild (in my case) daily discomfort of these months by focusing on the truly absurd feat my body is in the process of pulling off is easier than lying awake at 3 am and worrying or feeling guilty about the fact that I will miss some things about my life that I can't go back to now. It's weird. It's supposed to be weird.

In this newsletter, I hope to convey the weirdness, wonder, and frustration with different aspects of pregnancy and parenthood, but also of what it means to be a parent and maintain a sense of self separate from one's role as caretaker.

This newsletter isn't just for mothers or other people with kids. I hope it's entertaining for as many people as possible. If it's upsetting to you, I'd encourage you to read one of the one billion other newsletters currently being distributed online, or take a walk in nature.

I'm not here to dispense advice beyond "beat yourself up less" and "don't let people make you feel worse when you already feel like shit" and "more people should consider leaving pregnant people and parents the fuck alone."

I'll occasionally share something that I did that was fun or enjoyable or a disaster, but please don't take it as implicit judgement of people who make different choices (unless those choices are unequivocally socially harmful; in which case, fair game). Everybody's experience with choosing to be a parent or not be a parent is personal, every parent and every child is a unique individual, every pregnancy is its own wonderland of weird, and besides, there are enough people out there shouting contradictory things about motherhood into the ether. I don't need to join the chorus. In fact, I wish there were less advice out there. If we could harness the energy that goes into offering pregnant women unsolicited advice, we could cut global emissions in half by next year.

Original Illustration by Tara Jacoby/ Instagram