The best thing about being pregnant is that you grow this endless love for your own body, this motherly care for your own swollen breasts, fingers, and feet, for your compressed stomach and lungs, for your pimple free skin that is stretched to impossible limits and itching. It seems like this new person growing inside you is trying to get out through your belly button that is now unrecognisable but so clean, without a trace of dead skin or weeks old garments fuzz. And all this love is guilt free, not shadowed by any suspicion of selfishness. This must be how my father feels after years of hard work to get us through school and to build for us a never completed home. If the house would ever be finished how could he justify to himself that he is distant, and angry for unknown reasons, and never satisfied.
When you are pregnant you get to move around like you are permanently surrounded by stage lightning, impossible not to notice, with everyone trying to guess the gestational age, or the sex of the baby, or whether this is your first child, or how much weight you gained. Suddenly your are not a threat for other women or a competition, but worthy of their sisterly love and care. Some question their childless lives, while others shower you with irrelevant advice from their own experience. Suddenly you are protected from the unrequested interest of men of all ages much better than by a wedding ring or lack of makeup and high heels. They either remember their own journey next to a woman that becomes a mother or they shrug away the pain that they will also be chained.
You receive all their offerings of food, free car rides, beach umbrellas, kind smiles, and concerned questions, and all the services of a social state that is chipping away a bit of their income every day. You find yourself surrounded not by self-centered individuals but by a community that carefully waters the growing seed of their own immortality.
Who you are is less important than whom you become.
Who you are is less important than whom you become.
