Open Journal Montreal

I started my journey in the wrong place.

Forget about romance. Or, at least, don’t over-concentrate it: it needs to be diluted in a fair part of
realism. I mean, you find out that your life is forever changed when you pee on a little paper stick. You become shaky, and catch the first bus to your boyfriend’s place, holding on the banister to compensate for your useless feet. And, after all, you would be a careless mother to fall and provoke such a shock on your uterus at this stage. And what about the stress it is now enduring? And the bottle of wine you drank last week? Oh lord, oh lord, already a bad mother. You open your agenda: sign up for yoga lessons. Check with pharmacist for drugs you have been using. Oh lord, oh lord, you probably have a deformed baby by this time. Close agenda to breath deeply. Open it again: oh yeah, first of all, talk to boyfriend.

Boyfriend wonderfully happy. Grows three inches taller when I tell him the news. Open agenda together. Write down all the first names we like, the things we need to buy, we decide for reusable diapers and against private school and baptism. The week’s objectives: write testaments, start buying organic food, find bigger apartment, well first of all move together, sign up for daycare. Surely we now know everything and I can settle to the task of being a happy smiling pregnant woman: bring the glass of fruit juice and the cultural section of the newspaper!

Ah. Ah. Ah. After the initial shock come a hundred more. That thin red line on that cheap pregnancy test tells nothing of what is coming, and if it did, it would be wrong anyway: the enterprise of making humans is by nature bound to be exceptional, diverse; as exceptional and diverse as is each one of those beings that it creates. Hence the feeling of confusion and urgency that may install in the pregnant subject and which no statistics, no medical text, no self-help book, no older sister’s story erase or ease: the impression that one’s pregnancy is not quite like that and not quite like this reminds of the human and unique nature of each story.

In telling my own journey through the beginning of a pregnancy that is only starting to subtly shape my belly but has already changed my world, I am a voice that wants to be heard, a voice among millions, that claims the right to be unique and exceptional in telling the story of my own experience in keeping the world going.

As keeping my world going has been another story, narration becomes a way of making sense of my own journey, for myself, for my entourage, at times puzzled and, perhaps, for those who talk about and to pregnant women. Today I want to talk back, to be an expert in talking about my experience, to incorporate emotions into the medicalized pregnant body, and to resist making the sort of truth claims that silent subjectivity.

This piece revolves around three themes, emotionally rather than chronologically organized. They loosely unfold: I first speak of the multidimensional shock, then of the image of the happy mom, and finally of the medicalization of pregnancy, questioning whether to test or not to test. It is written as a journey, taking into account time and space, the local, the discourses and structures that inform, misinform, guide and lose pregnant women and their partners. I am guided by the points of tension between too much information and too little, between control and lack of support, between joy and fear, discourses and silences.

So I was saying: I started my journey in the wrong place.
I did as I was used. Found something unusual. Went to the doctor. Well, looked for one that could take me soon, no July will not do, and so got seated for a couple of hours at the clinique sans rendez-vous.

Congratulations! You are pregnant.

I know, isn’t it great? Thank you!

This would have to do, as this clinic focused, like most youth clinics, on sexually transmitted infections and
abortions.

I started my journey in the wrong place. And so I was lost, confused as to what was the very site of my journey. I did not understand why I found nothing of the map I had glanced at before in the new codes I now encountered. Surely the women in the stories had not peed on a paper stick nine months before the ‘happiest day of their life’. Surely the babies on the Sears’ photographs had not been so harsh on their mother’s body… If they had, our collective narrative would account for it, wouldn’t it?

Dealing with the shock of the news proved to be a long-term process, or rather commitment. It came in waves and, along with my Olympic team of hormones, had me alternate between states of tears and fears and hopes and terror and ecstasy. I remember crying so desperately one evening because not only my habits and my world and my budget and my social status would change, but also my body and my sexuality and my femininity and my vulnerability— and my boyfriend did understand and took me like a child to the full scale mirror where he put cushions under my shirt and told me to look, how beautiful I was, and how beautiful I would be with a large and round belly, and how incredibly beautiful this act of production, of reproduction, of creation, of procreation, was.

I remember feeling so sick I swore I could take no more, feeling so sick and tired I said I would remember those first three months as the worse of my life so far, and remember feeling so guilty to associate such a happy event with its evil manifestations. I am still feeling so sick and tired that everyday I get a bit angrier at those who told me it would get better after three months, that the nausea would disappear, that I would get a burst of energy. It has been three months now, and none of this has come. I still have morning sickness that extend until well after I go to bed, and I still come home in tears after the marathon of buses and metro leave me dead tired after a seminar.

I remember running into a friend who looked right and straight and only at my imaginary belly and asked “how is it going?”, and so I said: “It is going fine, thank you, and I am doing fine too”. I felt that this thing which remained largely imaginary in me was constituted into a subject in this exchange. I had a double identity, and my other and I were both fooling each other. I was the site of a spectacle, I was an actor while I thought I was writing the script. I was a ventriloque, and I was talking for, nourishing, petting my puppet. I could kill it, I was the owner. I was the masochist landlord who finds her place upside down without never having received the money of the rent. My baby, my thing inside me, was a ventriloque, and was telling me, worse, was making me tell myself: no more of that good wine, no more of that stress, no more kayaking snowboarding rollerblading this year. “Is there something inside telling you to buy a Volvo?”, asks a Volvo advertisement featuring the ultrasounds of a foetus. (reproduced in Stabile, 188) My baby, my thing inside me, was telling me, was making me tell myself: now it’s all about the little me me me inside me. The food, the vitamins, the care, the gifts, the tests, the rest. People said: take good care of yourself. What self? I was fine, just a little borrowed. I was worried inside, only my inside was no longer my private self but had become my public self.

I remember shifting identities: suddenly I was not only a woman and an adult, which are difficult positions to occupy in the first place, but I was also becoming a mother; suddenly, I was no longer single and heart broken but a partner in a couple, and this couple was becoming a family. We were lovers and now we were turning into genitors, protectors, educators. In any account, I was now old; they could call me madame on the phone. My boyfriend found my first white hair. He thought it was cute. I thought it was fate.

I remember visiting my sister-in-law and my boyfriend proudly lifted my shirt to show my belly, and I refused that this part of my body become public, that my skin become a window for mystics to see through it. In the street I like to touch the lower part of my belly, feeling like a pregnant woman, performing the pregnant woman, feeling satisfied when people look at the pregnant me.

Before I was able to understand what it meant to have this thing growing inside me, I understood that there were things that were better left unarticulated. An extraordinary net of support grew around me: I got extensions for papers, offers for help. Yet, just as you say ‘good’ when you are asked how you are doing, I felt there was only one good answer for questions surrounding my pregnancy. The shock was affecting my present and my future but was also making me visit my past; it was emotional, physical, relational. And yet, I felt a zone of discomfort when I tried to address those issues. As if I was misunderstanding the plot of my own story. As if I was cheating the spectator.

Between the words and the silences there were, hidden, many discourses. It was confusing, did I know the codes? Was it a false consciousness that made me feel like there was something essential in what I was doing, in what others were perceiving I was doing? Was there something inhuman in what I was going through? Something ‘barbaric’, as Firestone writes, in “the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species”? (Firestone, quoted in Stabile, 185)

Overwhelmed by information on what vitamins I had to take and why breastfeeding was all a right-minded woman would provide to her newborn, I found little, almost nothing, in the books that I read on the symptoms that were the only tangible things I knew of my pregnancy at this stage. They were briefly listed and discussed but were classified as normal, and so that was all. So I went on saying I was doing good, although a little tired and sick, thank you, and I kept feeling guilty because I was not all smiling and peaceful. I wanted to say I am awfully tired and sick; it is horrible to vomit back half of what you eat, my back and my muscles ache so much I can hardly sit for more than half an hour and I don’t know why. I am sick, sick, sick. And I feel sick to be sick. How about you? But it doesn’t make great cocktail lines. Perhaps that this shift between experience and discourse came from the common assumption that, as Anne Balsamo puts it, “the state of being pregnant is so ‘wondrous’- or, variously, thrilling, fulfilling, and soulfully satisfying- for a woman that she would endure any discomfort, humiliation, or hardship to experience this ‘blessed event’” (Balsamo, 80).

Yet how does one reconcile a ‘blessed event’ with a sense that one’s body and moral are weak and stretched to their outmost limit? How does one acknowledge the fact that being tired and sick is normal, part of a process, and yet deserves attention, deserves to open discussions that contain the word ‘courage’ more than ‘vitamins’? In what other setting do we expect people to serenely accept that they feel sick, weakened, altered? In what other contexts do we think only the end is worth talking about? I tentatively think of some answers: the competitive athlete or performer, the transsexual undergoing surgery… But I am no hero and no martyr and I am not longing to be one. I am just becoming a mother and I wish this experience could be told using my own words. Yet how can one avoid silences without fulfilling them with empty words, without being a whiner, without being a bad mother, without reacting negatively? How can a more encompassing space be created, one with definitions and borders
that go over the binary?

—

I sometimes feel that those nine months belong to no one. In a way they are not mine: as Iris Marion Young puts it, “Pregnancy does not belong to the woman herself. It is a state of the developing fetus, for which the woman is a container; or it is an objective, observable process coming under scientific scrutiny; or it becomes objectified by the woman herself as a ‘condition’ in which she must ‘take care of herself’.” (Young, 160) When she looked for works in the library card catalog, Young found no card listing a work that, as Kristeva puts it, is “concerned with the subject, the mother as the site of her proceedings’”. (Kristeva, quote in Young, 160) I find my pregnancy becoming more public than me, my belly an object of gaze and touch, my health a subject of concern where decisions are often articulated for me, I say ‘our’ and ‘we’ when I talk about decisions that affect my body, my health, my baby, but I mean to include my boyfriend in this ‘we’. I find what my doctor and what the books consider a ‘normal’ pregnancy and a ‘normal’ delivery is not
the same as the image that I have of it.

Yet to whom do those nine months belong if not to me? Each of us has the experience of at least one pregnancy but, for a lot of us, this experience is not part of our ‘real’ experience since, without direct memory of it, we are left to the stories and memories of those who have lived or witnessed it to include us in this story. So pregnancy does not really belong to the baby either. Pregnancy, I sometimes feel, belongs in parts to those who monitor it, who write about it, who talk about it. Why would that be surprising in a culture where it is okay to smoke and drink and live a stressful life until you are pregnant or breastfeeding. Mothers are sanctified and expected to act and live ‘sanely’ or risk being demonized as ‘bad mothers’. “Protection of the fetus, Balsamo argues, is often offered as a commonsensical and, hence, ideological rationale for intervention into a woman’s pregnancy, either through the actual application of invasive technologies or through the exercise of technologies of social monitoring and surveillance”. (Balsamo, 89)

There seems to be two lines of thought when envisaging the way one wants her pregnancy and delivery to happen: I can imagine feeling comfortable enough in any of these positions, in different times and contexts. Technology has made possible the monitoring of the different stages of our lives, starting when we are embryos. When we have a headache we take an aspirin, when we have the flu we take a tablet or some syrup: we are trained to see symptoms as a nuisance. Technology now makes it possible to know about the foetus and the mother, and sometimes to act in consequence. It saves lives, it diminishes pain.

I stand with those who think that reproductive technologies have become too intrusive, and that our dependence to them and their unnecessary use cause other symptoms or problems. I do not call for their abandon and I do not think that suffering is romantic. When I read my ‘Guide pratique de la femme enceinte’, week after week, I am told about ‘my obligation this month: the second mandatory medical visit’, about the exercises I should be doing, the food I should avoid or eat, the tests I must now take.

In this book, and in the other books, and when I visit my doctor, and when I talk with people around me, I realize that… ‘To test or not to test’ is… not even the question. Not for my doctor, not for the authors of the books and magazines I read, anyway. Tests are taken for granted. I don’t mean to suggest that they are forced upon you: parents are often the first ones to enquire about the first ultrasound that will allow, normally around the twentieth week, to know whether they are to expect a girl or a boy, or two. This is also the day when they will look at a screen which they are unlikely to be able to read, and thus will look at the doctor expecting a confident smile and a ‘your baby is perfectly normal so far’. But it is not always like that. And research shows that more tests do not mean more or better interventions, neither do they translate into a healthier baby or mother. More tests just mean that you know, perhaps, which can be nice sometimes, although perhaps the tests or their reading were wrong, of course, and then, I don’t know. If I do have an ultrasound at the fifth month and find out that I have a deformed baby, what do I do? Well, probably more tests. And then I make the difficult, heart-breaking decision to abort or not, to judge what type of life is okay and what type of life is not okay to grow inside me and be allowed out. If I already know that abortion is not an option, then what do I want to verify with this test? Doesn’t it become a form of rhetoric? If I am to have a baby with a mental or physical ‘anomaly’, then I know I will be better able to love him/her and accept him/her after the birth, without living with the uncertainty that would accompany any ‘abnormal’ diagnosis.

In a paper titled “Why Monitor?”, Edmond A. Murphy, from the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, puts the record straight: “The main activity of medicine is monitoring in one form or another: what defines the scope of the present Symposium is that it deals with the effects of vigilance at the very start of life”. (Murphy, in Hook et all (eds.), 7) A few lines down, he adds that “There are always observations to be made. […] There is little information as to how efficient monitoring is. We may know harmful factors which have been discovered, but have no idea how many may have been missed”. (Murphy, in Hook et all (eds.), 7)

Perhaps after all that these tests are not all about representation but about control:

When a mother undergoes ultrasound scanning of the fetus, this seems a great opportunity to meet her child socially and in this way, one hopes, to view him [sic] as a companion rather than as a parasite… Doctors and technicians scanning mothers have a great opportunity to enable mothers to form an early affectionate bond to their child by demonstrating the child to the mother. This should help mothers to behave concernedly toward the fetus. (Dewsbury, 1980, 481, quoted in Stabile, 195)

I am still struggling about whether to have this ultrasound done or not, taking into account the fact that it is also a relatively new technology which may have long-term effects that have not been detected yet, and I find myself quite alone and lonely in this process, as people just take it for granted or don’t always think through the implications of those technologies. In the end, “the use of instruments, Iris Marion Young writes, provides a means of objectifying the pregnancy and birth that alienates a woman because it negates or devalues her own experience of those processes”. (Young, 170)

—

I remember my life before I knew I was pregnant. Those were the old times when I could go snowboarding and not feel like a murdered if I fell, the old times when I could walk away from home without my boyfriend running after me to make sure that I had not forgotten my soda crackers, the old times when I talked about a variety of things like politics and arts, and when ‘I’ referred to only one person. I read recently in the Globe and Mail that a recent research shows that the brain activity of new parents is strikingly similar to what is seen in patients who have been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (McIlroy, F5). I had a great weekend and I bet a bottle of wine that before I can drink again they will prove that this starts well before birth.

References

Balsamo, Anne Marie. “Public Pregnancies and Cultural Narratives of Surveillance”, in Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, 80-115

Delahaye, Marie-Claude. Guide pratique de la femme enceinte, France : Marabout, 2001

Hook, Ernest B., Dwight T. Janerich and Ian H. Porter (eds.). Monitoring, Birth Defects and Environment; The Problem of Surveillance, New York and London: Academic Press, 1971

McIlroy, Anne. “The Moms must be Crazy”, The Globe and Mail, Saturday March 27, 2004, F5

Stabile, Carol. “Shooting the Mother; Fetal Photography and the Politics of Disappearance”, in The Visible Woman; Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science, Treichler, Paula A., Lisa Cartwright and Constance Penley (eds.), New York and London: New York University Press, 1998, 171-197

Young, Iris Marion. “Pregnant embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation”, in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 160-74

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[ originally posted on Monday, April 26th, 2004 at 11:29 am and is filed under Everything. ]