When has your fixed identity crumbled?
on pregnancy, etc.
Dear reader,
It has been since October since my last letter. October when we learned my hCG was rising, my womb making space for a baby. November when the vertigo began, then the nausea - all day and unrelenting; and with it the depression - dark and empty and swallowing. November when I got back on an SNRI. December when we had to forgo Christmas with family to stay close to our own bed and vomit bin. January when the smell of our house became nearly too much to bear. Late February when finally I could walk, practice yoga, cook, clean, enjoy a coffee. March now, when the sun flirts like Spring is near, playing hard to get. Last frost in Colorado isn’t until May and I am antsy to see plants grow. Still, the house stinks.
In a Valentine’s weekend yoga class, the teacher asked us to reflect one thing we loved about ourselves. It was then I realized how strong I clung to my pre-pregnancy identity; how fragile I felt when my ego-fortress was bombed; how suddenly I couldn’t think of what to love. Before pregnancy, I felt I could be a good partner and friend. I felt connected to my writing and yoga practices, my creativity, and my humor. Since pregnancy, my everything shifted to Unwell. I had to forgo helping and instead ask for help. I had to accept creative aridity. And I had to pause almost all activities that before gave my life structure, meaning, and purpose. I’ve felt unbearably weak and vulnerable, though this journey has arguably required all my strength and adaptability.
Pema Chodron’s wrote in Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change: “When things fall apart in your life, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. But actually it’s your fixed identity that’s crumbling. And as Chögyam Trungpa used to tell us, that’s cause for celebration.”
Goodbye again, old fixed self.
What happens when I allow my identity to melt, morph, unbecome and become again? To accept it as a changing thing. Or a nothing thing. At first, shattering. Then, freeing. To Be Nothing.
Stephanie Duncan Smith would describe the pregnancy/parenthood transformation as expansion. But this perspective came after a long time resistance to the negative stigma of motherhood. “I believed,” she wrote, “the mythology that the movement from woman to mother was the movement of a downgrade, a lessening of self. And I did not want to be reduced to the trappings of banality that felt so inherent to motherhood… I wanted to ascend, to be left alone to my personal ambition and autonomy.”
She was afraid that parenthood “would not be an expansion but an override of self.”
I feared this, too, for a long while. Even with my first pregnancy, before its ending in miscarriage, I mourned the thought of replacing my guest room/office with a nursery.
Something has changed since; a deep longing for expansion beyond the self, even in its discomfort.
I’m not sure how my creative practices will look once the baby is here. Before pregnancy, that terrified me. Now, the difficulty of this pregnancy has already demanded I let go of clinging to my self-importance and creative productivity. I can do so little now. I have been making only for making’s sake - a garland for a diaper party, a strawberry cake, a mobile of felt hummingbirds. Unconsciously, a baby girl.
With each identity layer crumbled, stretch marks bloom. The skin on my stomach itches as it grows. There is something new and profoundly important in place of all that’s lost. This is the first time I’ve written in five months. It has not been a time for words, just for hands to belly and to heart.
Sending expansive love your way, reader,
A