Pregnancy is Hard. Why Is This So Hard to Acknowledge?

I always thought I'd be one of those women who loved being pregnant. The idea of a life growing inside of me felt positively magical. After three years spent trying for a baby, my positive pregnancy test seemed like a miracle.

I love my baby. I can't wait to be a mother. But I loathe pregnancy. Private conversations with mothers from all walks of life have revealed to me that I am not alone.

Every mother I have ever known has warned me about the challenges of pregnancy. I thought I was special and different. I thought other women struggled because of their bad attitudes, unhealthy bodies, unsupportive spouses, or shitty doctors. I thought hating pregnancy was a choice. I thought I was too enlightened, too healthy, too good for all of that.

In short, I engaged in the sort of victim-blaming for which I have derided others my entire life. I chose not to believe women, to see them as crazy or inept or dishonest for one simple reason: it made things easier for me.

I've learned my lesson.

I am continually surprised by how much we expect of pregnant women, all while deriding them as hormonal maniacs who are incapable of reason.



What the Non-Pregnant Need to Understand About Pregnancy
A brief exercise for my readers who have never been pregnant: If you woke up tomorrow vomiting, aching all over, and feeling so tired you could hardly move, you'd probably stay home from work, right?

What would you do if a colleague called in pregnant to work? Judge her? Shake your head? Tell yourself that she chose pregnancy and therefore has to live with it? The same symptoms somehow become less serious when a pregnant woman suffers them. In a healthy society, the well-being of two humans should matter more than that of one. In our society, two people--the pregnant woman and her unborn child--are supposed to just suck it up. When symptoms change meaning solely based on who has them, the only logical explanation involves discrimination and bias.

Every woman's pregnancy is different. Some find that their symptoms get better after the first trimester. For most, pregnancy is difficult at best. Our society collectively refuses to acknowledge the very real challenges of pregnancy, so if you've never been pregnant or are one of those incredibly lucky women who has no pregnancy symptoms, here are just some of the delights that await most pregnant women:

• Morning sickness, which really should be called all-day sickness. Seventy-five percent of pregnant women experience nausea and vomiting. 
• Organ crowding. Your organs have to move around to make way for your baby. By the end of pregnancy, women's lungs and intestines are essentially crushed. 
• Constipation. Yes, you really can go a month without pooping. 
• Contractions. Television has convinced us all that contractions begin dramatically, but for most women, contractions are an intermittent experience during the last few weeks of pregnancy. Round ligament pain, which feels like a minor contraction, can occur throughout pregnancy. 
• Muscle pain. Go strap a 20-50 pound bowling ball to your stomach. Walk around with it for nine or so months. Bet you don't feel much like going to work. 
• Heartburn. Pregnancy relaxes your muscles, including those in your esophagus. The result is chronic heartburn. Light a stick on fire and stick it down your throat to approximate the sensation. 
• Pregnancy discrimination. Pregnancy discrimination is so common, and so socially acceptable, that some employers openly admit that they won't hire women of childbearing age. Pregnant women are routinely denied promotions, fired, and denied jobs for which they are otherwise qualified. Somehow doing everything when you're sick and carrying around a person makes you less qualified to work. 
• Abuse. Eight percent of women report experiencing domestic violence during pregnancy, and the actual figure might be higher. Murder is the leading cause of death among pregnant women. 
• Ceaseless demands. So you're feeling nauseous and your muscles hurt and your boss just fired you, eh? Go put together the crib, fight with the hospital over your birth plan, and remodel your home. Pregnancy almost always involves a lot of work, and most of that work falls to women--not the partners who impregnated them. 
• Terrible treatment and judgment from random strangers. I've built this entire blog around the bizarre and mean-spirited things people say to me: that I'm fat or ugly because I'm pregnant, that everything I feel is the fault of my hormones, etc. Pregnant women are also routinely assaulted by people who think it's their right to grab pregnant bellies. 

Why is it so Painful to Admit That Pregnancy is Hard?
Pregnancy may lie at the core of gender discrimination. Women of childbearing age are routinely denied jobs because they might one day get pregnant. Men have claimed that women are irrational creatures dominated by hormones--as if men don't have hormones, too--for centuries. So it's tough to admit that pregnancy is hard, especially if you're dedicated to gender equality, because doing so feels like an admission of weakness.

I think feminists need to view pregnancy through a different lens. I planted 200+ plants in my yard, continued working at a demanding job, never slacked on any of my household responsibilities, kept up with my friends, mastered new skills, and developed an enviable squat all while struggling with severe fatigue, near-constant nausea, intense muscle aches, and 30 pounds of weight gain.

Tell me how that makes me weaker than men. Because I don't see it. Women continue to prove their strength in the face of incredible physical discomfort, intense social judgment, and ongoing discrimination. We want them to believe that admitting to the challenges associated with these issues is somehow an admission of weakness.

Um.

No.

If men could get pregnant, they'd be endlessly shrieking about all the stuff they accomplished while suffering through the agony of growing a child. Pregnancy would widely be considered the most difficult thing a man can do. We'd erect monuments to the incredible courage of the male species.

We tell women they're shrill, hormonal, and weak.

The Shame of Struggling
There's another issue at play here, too: shame. It's an emotion women already specialize in. From cradle to grave, women are shamed for being too loud, not loud enough, too independent, not independent enough, too sexy, not sexy enough...this list goes on and on. And if a woman gets raped? She probably just misread the poor guy's signals. Or maybe she was dressed like a slut.

Shame. It's what tells us that we are bad, that nothing can erase our badness, and that our badness is so terrible we should not even admit to it in public.

It's something all women are primed to feel. In a society where women are repeatedly told that their primary duty is to become mothers, the shame of inadequacy as a mother can sting especially sharply.

Shame instructs us that if we struggle, it must be our fault. It's also what prepares women to struggle with motherhood in silence.

For most of human history, women have gotten help from experienced parents: mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, and yes, fathers and grandfathers. Now they go home with a new baby and no clue. Dad may return to work the next day, leaving mom alone to fend for herself. If she can't get it right, she'll be convinced the problem is with her mothering, not with the way our completely dysfunctional society expects her to mother. Maybe that's why rates of postpartum depression have skyrocketed.

The Social Construction of the Challenges of Pregnancy
Nausea and muscle aches might be unavoidable. Many other challenges of pregnancy do not have to be. The problem is that we expect far too much of pregnant women while simultaneously refusing to acknowledge these unreasonable expectations.

We deride them for missing work, refuse to give them paid maternity leave, offer little to no support for the challenges of daily life, demand nothing of their partners, and continue to treat pregnancy as a personal choice--not as the thing that allows our species to survive.

Pregnancy might not ever be easy, but it is society that is to blame for the isolation, exhaustion, and emotional overwhelm most pregnant women feel.

We should all be held accountable for this. If you don't care about pregnant women, you don't care about women. Or children. Or families. Or society and its continued survival.