Blue Notes #28: Life Transition Survival Guide
Or, my pregnancy survival tool kit
My book comes out next week!
*You can preorder it in any format HERE!
*If you preordered, you can get a needle-felting tutorial I made HERE!
*You can see what needle-felting is HERE!
*You can sign up to attend a book release event in NYC or DC HERE!
*You can sign up to attend a virtual book release event HERE!
*And you can read an excerpt from my book HERE!!
Mari’s Life Transition Survival Guide
A thing that has surprised me most about pregnancy:
I wasn’t interested in talking to other pregnant women.
I mean, if they were right there, then yes sure of course, but I didn’t seek out my fellow with-childs.
I’m such a community-oriented person; this caught me by surprise. In my early weeks of pregnancy, I started looking into prenatal yoga classes and the events going on at my maternity clinic—though I was too sheepish to attend in the early months lest I show up looking like a 7th grader in a crowd of high school seniors.
Yet once I felt like I looked legit enough to join those spaces, without wanting to stuff a pillow under my shirt just in case there were any class skeptics, I didn’t actually want to be in them.
I’ve been curious about this resistance, and it only recently dawned on me—actually as I was writing this piece about why I write:
I already know how I’m feeling about pregnancy.
I do a lot of processing through journaling, going on thinking-walks, and weepy conversations that generally follow my classic pattern: “I am [metaphor]. Actually, I am [extended metaphor].”
And once I’m processed, then I’m all set.
My symptoms are only terribly fascinating to me, I don’t find this to be a particularly magical nor brutal time of life, and I’ve realized that my decision to forego labor, breastfeeding, and prep beyond the first week of Mari Jr’s life eliminates me from most of the wonderings of the third trimester. I’m just not sure what exactly we’re supposed to be talking about!
Rather, the richest, most robust, fascinating conversation I’ve had about pregnancy was with a friend who hasn’t been, nor plans to be pregnant.
BUT, she has been disabled, and that’s a shared background that I’ll never run out of questions and wonderings about.
It dawned on me that I’ve been experiencing pregnancy through one singular lens: that of having been quite critically disabled for a different set of 9 months in my life.
If the body does keep the score, then my own earthly vessel is holding the 2017 scorecard right up to this year’s with constant comparison. In many ways, I’m reliving the darkest shadow of my life, but a flip-side of it, now in the light.
An easy comparison between visible disability and pregnancy is that the body goes from private to public. The introduction of a (in my case) wheelchair or cane has a parallel effect to the introduction of a conspicuous tummy-bump.
The body quickly becomes more of a thing than a human as it presents challenges, provokes comments and questions, and even becomes political.
“I would like to go out for a day and not have my body say something,” I told my friend, and we discussed how body size, race, serious sickness, and probably lots of other factors we’re unaware of have the same effect.
Sometimes I feel like a walking (or waddling) statement.
When I went to a tough weightlifting class at my gym, the instructor called out, pointing to me, “Look at this girl MOVE!” I took the same class a couple days later and took many more breaks to slump over the equipment. “Good for you, you need to rest!” her voice rose over the music.
I don’t mind these call-outs—I tragically love the attention!—but they’re a small example of how a protruding belly instantly creates a public figure of its carrier.
I had a similar experience while using a cane, though instead of warm smiles or dismissive scoffs, my body received pitiful looks or obvious avoidance. In both cases, I’ve often felt less like a person and more like a symbol—a mirror of society’s hopes, failings, or flat-out indifference to the different.
I catch myself worrying how my new body shape might upset people, and trigger sudden feelings of loss, or envy, or who knows how many other emotions. I genuinely fret over accidentally making a social or political statement with this new shape.
After all, I’m simply treated better in public, which is more than I can say for many others in my position, or my past disabled self. And I’m angry for that past disabled self, who had many of these same limitations and symptoms but was treated more often like an object of fear rather than someone to be protected.
I get self-conscious around the unfairness that this fluke of fertility has created this bubble of protection, and at the same time I see the many shortcomings of a hyper-individualistic society that looks at pregnancy (and many other types of bodily states) as a personal choice that doesn’t deserve communal support (thinking here about a video I saw of a dad speaking about the insane prices of childcare, to a flood of comments telling him that he should have known that kids are expensive before deciding to have one).
[Side note: I fully recognize that singleness and childfree-ness are also treated as such individual choices that there is a glaring lack of communal support for either as well (where are the meal trains for single people in the midst of a move, or registries for childfree folks who choose to devote their lives differently?).]
I’m much less interested in the experience of pregnancy than I am the experience of any life transition—particularly the more ‘public’ ones.
When anybody goes through a big change in life—especially one announced by such markers as a scar, a wedding ring, an upgrade or downgrade in material positions, spontaneous tears, or a distinct body shape—they often automatically become an instant lightning rod for the beliefs and feelings of others.
How that plays out is what I’m really interested in (although if you get me going on late-pregnancy acid reflux, you’ll never hear the end of it).
I was going to write a “Pregnancy Survival Guide” with all the tricks and tools that have scooted me along on this journey with some easefulness, but I’d be sick of myself by the time I hit ‘publish.’
Rather, I’d like to present my insights and attempts-at-advice for different types of life transitions. I’m focusing here on physical changes, but everything we do in life is within and through a body.
Here’s the Mari Kit for change and transition that bring up many more questions than answers: