I can feel you in my Belly

Notes on becoming a Vampire

Happy Spooky Season!

To celebrate I am going to write about the spookiest thing that’s ever happened to me - being pregnant.

I always intended to write about my experience, it was all I thought about for 9 months, after all. But now I’m sitting down to do it, it feels awfully vulnerable. I was about to scrap the whole idea, but then I remembered that when I was pregnant I trawled the internet searching for other people’s experiences so I would feel less alone. So bare with me as I share my soul before it is taken away (this analogy will make sense in a minute).

THE FIRST TRIMESTER

The philosopher L.A. Paul likened the decision to become a parent to that of becoming a vampire:

Because a person would be fundamentally transformed by becoming a vampire, they cannot possibly know in advance what being a vampire is like. Other vampires might offer information, but their advice is likely shaped by their own irreversible choice. In this situation, a fully informed comparison of preferences and values is impossible.

Prior to being pregnant with Max, my vampire parent friend Mikey told us that becoming a parent was like opening up your front door and yelling out to the first person you see: “Hey you, do you want to come inside so I can take care of you for the rest of my life?”

If becoming a parent is like becoming a vampire, pregnancy is this sequence in Twilight:

Except at the end I didn’t emerge as a smoking hot vampire, but a bag of potatoes.

So riding the wave of this analogy, let’s go back to the moment I got bit.

I found out I was pregnant while we were living in New York in the fall and the first thing I did was take a picture of my boobs to ‘remember them.’ This was mostly for laughs but has since proven absolutely necessary now they’ve been torn to shreds by a newborn.

We’d been trying on and off for a while to get pregnant and had unfortunately experienced some bumps in the road, which I wrote about here:

So we were thrilled at the news, and, naturally, terrified.

This time around, we decided to wait to tell people until the second trimester so I ambled through the first few weeks like a girl with a secret crush.

It was cute, I was having a cute time! And then the nausea set in and the vibe quickly shifted to:

I felt sick from the moment I woke up until 8pm, when the nausea inexplicably went away until midnight. I called this my Cinderella Syndrome and during these hours Raviv and I would run out onto the streets of New York - living as we once had, a few long weeks ago.

Pumpkin.

Having been pregnant once before, I was thought I was prepared for the nausea - but this time it was much worse and I quickly became unable to do anything that made me feel like me.

If I did manage to do something soothing one day, it would be the source of my morning sickness the next. If I spent Monday drawing donkeys (my number one past time):

By Tuesday, the donkeys made me gag.

There was nothing for it but to Bella Swan the heck out of those first 13 weeks and spend any non working moment I could lying in bed, haunted by the surrounding tchotchke’s, that morphed and giggled and ran towards me as I threw up in a nearby bucket. I was 100% this medieval bitch:

Everyone always asks you what your cravings are in pregnancy. I’ll tell you - hot dogs. But what I found more fascinating were my aversions. Top of the list: Autumn.

No, Nora Ephron, no I do not.

Things that made me gag in the first trimester included: Pumpkins, Chai Lattes, gorgeous orange trees, Halloween and the opening sequence to the Gilmore Girls. This images was like staring into the seventh circle of hell.

As December rolled around, Christmas fell prey to ‘the sickness.’ Christmas lights, Christmas trees, Christmas decorations, Christmas carols, Home Alone, Mince Pies - all of it. This image - fuggedaboutit:

All in all, the first trimester was a pretty lonely experience - despite being British I do not have a stiff upper lip, so pretending I wasn’t constantly seasick was hard for me. I defaulted to staying in with my only friend - cold forehead rag - and eating chicken soup made by my only husband Raviv.

This naturally resulted in some pretty emo poetry:

I ended up telling my family at Thanksgiving after I passed out on the loo and broke my glasses. I immediately felt the relief of a community of loved ones understanding why I might need to eat first, eat often and pass out on the sofa always.

THE SECOND TRIMESTER

I spent a lot of my pregnancy hammering on about how there weren’t enough pregnancy horror films. There’s the eerie feeling of the first trimester of course, but more importantly by week 16 you start to feel flutters in your belly, the flutters of your baby moving within you, and this, I kid you not, is called:

The Quickening.

Give me a better horror movie title!

Coming from the root word quick, an archaic synonym for “living.” (Think “the quick and the dead.”)

Horror movie terminology aside, I actually felt pretty good in the second trimester, bar one thing - everyone suddenly felt entirely within their right to comment on my appearance at all hours of the day and night.

On my morning walk

On a work call

Strangers asked if I was having twins. When I said no, one person responded ‘are you sure?’ She walked away and a single chunky tear ran down my face.

Despite my best(ish) efforts, I ended up gaining 60 lbs during pregnancy (the recommended weight gain is 25 to 30 lbs).

I quietly mourned my old body and questioned why I couldn’t muster up the energy to take a zumba class (even though I never could before I was pregnant).

I would look at photographs of myself from the days before and think; I was so hot, I wish someone had told me. And then I thought -

I went to a prenatal yoga class near the end of the second trimester and a woman in her 35th week said she had never felt more powerful. She was growing an organ and an entire human life inside her and all people can think to do is comment on her body - that was their problem, not hers, she said. My Queen.

THE THIRD TRIMESTER

I can’t remember much from this trimester despite it being the closest to me. I asked Raviv what he remembered me saying, and he said:

“Fuck this!”

Fuck this indeed!

My fondest memories are from bed.

I watched pregnancy movies and peanut galleried about which bits were accurate and which were not. My top picks:

#3

Father of the Bride Part II.

Shockingly inaccurate but you gotta give them points for that babies room:

#2

Rosemary’s Baby

No explanation needed.

#1

Junior
Arnie has an iconic moment in this movie where he pushes a man over and says:

And I read about medieval pregnancy rituals and pregnancy amulets:

Referred to as eaglestones at the time they were commonly tied with string to a woman’s left arm to protect against miscarriages and, later, to her thigh, during the delivery, to make it easier, safer, and quicker.

Nicholas Culpeper, the 17th-century botanist, astrologer, physician defined eaglestones as:

“Aetites, or the stone with child, because being hollow in the middle, it contains another little stone within it.”

A pregnant stone.

They were not only supposed to protect against miscarriages and pain during labour, but also from baby-snatching demons like Gello, a female demon from Greek Mythology who was thought to threaten the reproductive system. The name is also preserved in the word ghoul. (!!)

They later became known as a class of beings known as gelloudes which is surprisingly close in wording to what eaglestones are now known as: geodes.

I said that waiting to go into labour was like someone saying:

“Sometime in the next few weeks (I’m not going to tell you when!) someone’s going to come round your house and break yer legs.”

Much like becoming a vampire, I had no way of conceptualizing what labour would be like, and as someone on the other side of it i’ll just quote ol’ Stephanie Meyer and say:

The transition from human to vampire is said to be very painful, in fact it’s so bad that "The pain of transformation is the sharpest memory they have of their human life."

For additional reading I recommend this essay by Haley Nahman.

And after 24 hours of trying to get him out the business end, our nearly ten pound baby boy ended up coming out through the sun roof.

A friend and fellow vampire mum showed up on my doorstep a few days later and scooped me up in a hug and we both just cried. I said ‘why didn’t you tell me?’ and she said there was no way of putting all this into words until you’d been through it. “Welcome to the other side” she said.

And then she said can I meet you new baby and I said yes of course, and Raviv came to the door and said:

If you got all the way down here thank you for reading, it means the world to me. See you next time, when we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming of dog drawings.