It is very, very, very, very hard to tell people. I’ve been fretting about it for months, because, duh, I’ve been pregnant for months. And, let’s be real, I’ve been dreading it for years. My only recurring dream throughout my adolescence was about being pregnant. I would have progressive dream pregnancies over the course of several nights, and, interestingly, I was never alarmed or worried about the physical experience of being pregnant. It felt as natural as anything else. Instead, I was terrified about telling people. And then about having them know. Granted, I was always whatever age I was (15, 16, 17) and definitely single and spontaneously pregnant in these dreams (for whatever reason, the how of the situation was never apparent. I guess my subconscious was much more interested in the state of pregnancy rather than what it takes to get there?). But I think we can say, conservatively, that I’ve been dreading telling people I’m pregnant for nigh on a decade now. This is starting to sound pathological.
It’s a lot like telling people when we got engaged (which I didn’t spend nearly enough time worrying about as an adolescent). Leading up to becoming engaged, I was terrified of not being able to muster up socially acceptable levels of excitement in the wake of the big moment. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the moment actually made me physically happier than maybe I ever had been—it was actually a visceral rush of joy. And I needed every bit of it for the excruciating phone calls and texts and conversations that I knew I needed to conduct afterward. Even though I felt every bit of the euphoria, it was still pinprickingly painful to share that joy. And not because I didn’t want to share. I was glad to make a lot of people happy and excited to be excited with me. So what was it? What is it?
This time around, I wasn’t even concerned about my own emotional response. I knew I would be happy being pregnant, and I knew it was a good time to start trying. I did think briefly that I might be weirded out about a little swimming alien in my stomach, but it turns out I’m enchanted by what feels like a tiny whale undulating in a tiny sea, and what’s even better, it helps assuage my fear that the fetus has spontaneously died and I am unknowingly a walking mausoleum. But I was absolutely, positively, desperately dreading letting anyone else know.
But I did it anyway. Just under the deadline in a lot of cases; much earlier, after much goading, and just on the cusp of offending people in others. And it has gone really well, at work, with family, at church. People get really happy about the prospect of a baby (maybe because it’s not theirs and they won’t have to feed/clothe/change it around the clock? Kidding). And I even got a frisson of excitement each time I spoke my happy little truth. But that didn’t make it any easier.
So what’s wrong with me? Why can’t I take joy in sharing the happy events of my life? Maybe a clue lies in our other major life milestone, because I despise telling people we bought a house. And if you look at the way we’ve accumulated adult accomplishments like a precocious child with so many Awana badges (to use a metaphor ripped straight out of my own experiences), it starts to look kind of obnoxious. For our time and place, anyway. I understand there was a time when checking off college, marriage, grad school, house, and baby by 26 wasn’t unusual (or least three or four of those things?). But here and now, we’re not only privileged enough to have gone to college and grad school and snagged a mortgage, we’re also fortunate enough to have found our soulmatey ring by spring counterparts on the first day of school freshman year, and, cherry on the sundae, to have gotten pregnant the first time we put our minds to it. It might just be that I’m deeply embarrassed to have gotten everything I ever wanted (or dared to hope for, really).
I don’t even know what to do with my own happiness. I was a deeply lonely and unhappy little girl from the ages of 11 to 19. I had hopes, but not very high ones. I was increasingly convinced that the only people who had ever seemed to understand me had died 50-200 years ago, and I was doomed to a rich inner life and a large collection of books. And when the first year of college was a disappointment, connecting-on-a-deeper-level-with-other-humans wise (I might have met the guy the first day of school, but that doesn’t mean things clicked immediately. Sometimes love at first sight is like at first sight and then later wonder what you were thinking and even later realize your subconscious knew what it was talking about all along), I was a little adrift. And then suddenly things started coming together, and they kept coming together, and here I am.
And I wonder if admitting to myself, and to the world by extension, that I am secretly wildly happy doesn’t feel a little like setting myself up for having that happiness taken from me. When you start thinking about how rare and unusual and precious your beautifully orchestrated life is, it can begin to paralyze you with fear and maybe make you never want to leave the house again. Because what if something happens to one of the rare and unusual and precious gifts you’ve been given? And that’s no way to live. So I compartmentalize my happiness in a little corner box and peek under the lid every once in a while to flood my brain with the golden glow, and then I shut the lid again so I can let my husband out of my sight, and leave my little house during the day even though what if it burns down and no one is there to stop it, and eat pumpkin pasta for dinner even though what if it has too much vitamin A for a pregnant woman.
And in this particular act of telling I am currently so concerned about, there is also a modicum of not wanting to be the center of attention, and not wanting to relinquish my Cartesian, autonomous male persona of physical imperviousness in exchange for soft, vulnerable, dependent, secondary, breeding femininity, with all the social undertones and implications of “giving up your career” at 26 to be just a homemaker etc. But we’ll deal with that as it comes. For now, it’s enough to have little abdominal taps and some very negative genetic testing results and pumpkin pasta for dinner with a special someone.
