Tag: mother

Should You Call A Pregnant Woman Fat?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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I snorted when a book I was reading admonished against telling a pregnant woman she was “fat.” Yes, of course. That’s probably a bad call. Instead, however, it recommended that rather than the word “fat,” you kindly refer to the additional weight gain as “Maternal Storage Tissue.”

Because yes, that’s what every woman wants to hear.

“Damn, your maternal storage tissue is looking finnnneee.”

No thank you.

My body is getting bigger, and I think it’s beautiful.

Women gain 25 to 35 pounds (according to American standards, and for many woman, it can vary even more) for each pregnancy. The weight is divided up into different places: our blood volume nearly doubles, we carry more fluid (both inside our uterus as amniotic fluid as well as throughout our bodies), we create an entirely new organ from scratch (the placenta), and we build a human being (who weighs roughly 7-8 pounds, again with variation depending on your kid).

Also, our breasts swell up quite a bit – they can double in size in the first part of pregnancy, and then double again once you deliver your baby and if you begin breastfeeding. I keep buying new undergarments online because I keep outgrowing them! (One downside is that no, retargeted advertising, I do not need to see pictures of underwear all over the place while I’m working during the day.)

In addition to this fluid and human gain, we also gain fat storage deposits. Beautiful, gorgeous, lovely lady lumps.

I weigh myself each week (top of the morning, after my morning pee), to get a reading on how my body is changing from a mass standpoint. What surprises me, however, is how everything is shifting and changing beyond just my belly and boobs (my “front bumps,” as I like to joke).

I pulled on an old pair of jeans to see how they would fare if I left the top unbuttoned — there’s a fancy pregnancy trick where you can loop the top button together with a hairband or rubber band to make your pants fit longer) — but surprisingly, it wasn’t my belly that caused them to feel tight. I got them up about mid-thigh, and my jeans said NOPE, not going to happen.

Apparently my thighs are building out some maternal storage tissue and my tush is also starting to gain a bit of weight.

Here we go, mama.

Another area that surprises me is the bottom of my bra line — where the bottom of a sports bra hits, or where the bra clasps together. I thought that my rib cage would stay fairly consistent in size, even if my belly and breasts swelled outwards. Apparently, however, as a baby grows inside of you, your stomach gets pushed upwards and your rib cage can expand outwards to accommodate the extra space. Bras that have a single-fasten strap or a fixed elastic band no longer fit, because I’m bigger around… everywhere.

When I’ve watched friends go through pregnancies in the past, I watch them in the year before the birth and in the year after. Everyone seems to swell beautifully throughout the year, rising in size and shape, putting it on in different places, each body accommodating the changes in their own ways.

These teachers also show me the rhythm of the slow decrescendo post-birth; bodies taking three, six, nine months to gradually come back to a form of strength and shape that is similar, but not necessarily exactly the same, as before. The plump middle is a gorgeous time of ripening, exactly as it’s meant to be.

What I was surprised to discover, is that the maternal storage tissue is not just for the pregnancy: it is our way to provide food for the baby after it’s born.

It’s not just the pregnancy part of childbirth that needs you to add weight to your body. It’s the need to provide food and fuel for a rapidly growing human that causes our bodies to pack on pounds like we’re about to hibernate for a year. We are the primary food and fuel resource for a brand-new infant, and we need to be prepared accordingly.

Why is a baby born at nine months? By most accounts, humans are born “too early,” to survive outside of the womb. Conventional wisdom (and science) holds that if babies stuck around inside for longer, they would get too big, and we wouldn’t be able to get them out through the narrow hips and size of the birth canal.

Yet more recent scientific theories speculate that the 9-month gestation period for human babies is cut short at nine months not because of the size of the head and the brain, but because of the metabolic needs of the fetus and the mother.

This theory suggests that hip width might not be the limiting factor. We might be giving birth to babies at this early stage because if the fetus stayed in the mother any longer, the mother would no longer be able to provide food/energy at a fast enough rate. That is, the metabolic function of the mom’s body reaches a peak point where she can no longer digest and provide enough nutrients for both her body and the fetus.

(Anecdotally, I know that I am already constantly hungry, and eat all the time. I wake up and eat in the middle of the night, I eat constantly throughout the day, and I still feel a sense of hunger even when I would normally be very full.)

Beyond the anecdote, however, this made me realize that much of the job of the mom in the first 3 months of an infant’s life (and really, the first 6 to 9 months, or whenever they start eating solid foods on their own) is to provide an unlimited source of fuel and energy for their offspring.

Unlimited source of fuel for a baby that’s going to grow rapidly.

Hence the packing on of pounds earlier on in pregnancy, before the baby gets bigger.

Maternal storage tissue.

It all makes sense.

(I got your back, kid.)

Record It While It’s Happening: Rachel Cusk on Emotions, Mamahood, and Becoming a Parent

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Even though dragging myself out of bed and dealing with morning sickness does not make it fun to keep up with my writing habit, I also know that these feelings are fleeting. They won’t last forever, and I want to capture them while they’re here, so I can remember what it’s like.

I have no idea how many kids we’ll end up having. Alex and I have ideas for what we think we want, but then there’s what happens in reality. Knowing that the future is always uncertain makes me recognize that despite our best plans — there’s a possibility this may be the only time I’m ever pregnant. For whatever reason, I may only have this one time. I use this realization to remember to cherish right now, however many extra hormones it includes.

It seems like time is moving so slowly, like I’m muddling through a vague fog of fatigue and barfing, and yet everything is moving so quickly. I’ll be a hormonal messy pregnant mama-to-be for about four more months, and then… I’ll be a mama. And I will have crossed the threshold from independent lady to parent and the rest of my life will be different. Time moves forward.

As Rachel Cusk writes in A Life’s Work, a documentation of the gravity of pregnancy and becoming a mother, these thoughts and feelings around pregnancy only last for a brief moment, and then they disappear.

“My desire to express myself on the subject of motherhood was from the beginning strong, [but]… a few months after the birth of my daughter Albertine, it vanished entirely,” she explained, and while she had the urge to write this book, she lost it after she gave birth for the first time. And so, “I wrote this book during the pregnancy and early months of my second daughter, Jessye, before it could get away again.”

She writes in a manner I find refreshing and real. I tend to prefer books that are honest about depression, loneliness, philosophy, and struggle — a book that says pregnancy and motherhood are miracles and the best thing on the planet would be chucked out the window as fast as I could waddle over to the window to throw it.

In her cataloging of the process, she talks about the dark side of pregnancy and how having children affects your identity, your ability to work, and your relationships with people around you. As a novelist, she confesses that this type of open disclosure is often too much for her: “I have merely written down what I thought of the experience of having a child in a way that I hope other people can identify with. As a novelist, I admit that I find this candid type of writing slightly alarming.”

The book is not a tribute to the glory days of motherhood, but a frank assessment of what might be to come.

“I am certain my own reaction, three years ago, to the book I have now written would have been to wonder why the author had bothered to have children in the first place if she thought it was so awful,” she confides, and I find myself feeling a wash of relief to hear that someone else has catalogued and documented the array of complexity around how it feels to enter into parenthood.

For parenting and motherhood is not always easy. And the burden is largely on women, despite how much our society is changing, we will still hold the biological accountability for bearing and bringing to life new human beings.

“Women must and do live with the prospect of childbirth: some dread it, some long for it, and some manage it so successfully as to give other people the impression that they never even think about it. My own strategy was to deny it, and so I arrived at the fact of motherhood shocked and unprepared, ignorant of what the consequences of this arrival would be, and with the unfounded but distinct impression that my journey there had been at once so random and so determined by forces greater than myself that I could hardly be said to have had any choice in the matter at all.”

Across the experience, as my life shifts, I am reminded from Cusk to write, write, write.

Don’t stop writing. Document what I’m feeling and thinking, and explore inside of the feelings that shift and grow across my time becoming a parent. Watch as this landscape of emotions shifts and moves month over month, minute over minute. Capture the range of expressions and they come and go. Explore what it means to be this person, in this moment, right now.

To write about what is happening is to validate your own thoughts and emotions. I attempt not to layer judgment on top of it all, but rather, to examine what arises. What fears do I have about what’s to come? What societal rules and norms do I feel guilty about breaking? What decisions am I making and how are we embracing (and deciding) who we want to become next? What is it like to be this person, in this time, in this body, right now?