Modern Feminism Didn’t Prepare Me for This

Dispatch From The First Trimester

The Pregnant Virgin from Németújvár” (c. 1410)

I’m 12 weeks pregnant with my second child.

At 41, this is miraculous to me. I wanted this, but a year ago, looking at the stats, I’d come to accept the likelihood that I’d missed my chance. I don’t have the money or modern morality for IVF. I didn’t even try a special diet or acupuncture. I was going to, but my husband said, “Call me old-fashioned, but I truly think a baby is meant to come from love. We just need to love each other.”

“You really think that works?” I asked, thinking about fertility windows and whatnot.

“Yes,” he responded. “I do."

And it turns out that he was right.

A month after our hike along The Camino de Santiago, I took a test and discovered I was pregnant. We were over the moon. My five-year-old would have a sibling, and we would get to live in the magical world of babies and small ones for longer than we’d expected.

“What’s it like to have a baby?” I asked my father during my first pregnancy.

“It’s like looking into the eyes of God,” he replied.

He’s an atheist, and he’s right.

A few months ago, I wrote a piece called Feminism Lied To Me About Motherhood, and as I’ve just moved out of the first trimester, I have some more to say on the topic.

I spent the last six weeks barely able to move from harrowing exhaustion. I’m talking…you fall asleep, get eight hours, and then ache for more. Getting through life - the laundry, the meal making, the few easy-going working hours I do from home, was mission impossible. I lay on the couch, wondering how on earth I would get the energy within the next two hours to walk ten minutes through the oppressive summer heat to pick up my son from summer school. How would I make dinner? The dirty clothes piled up, and I was so bone tired one day that I ONLY cleaned the clothes my son would need for school the next day. That is how impossibly tired I was.

And now let’s talk about the anxiety. Hormones were rushing through my body. I woke one morning.

“And how is the most beautiful woman in the world?” my husband asked as he got ready for work.

“I’m terrified of life,” I responded, meaning it.

As I’d experienced this before, I could remind myself that it ends, in a few weeks, I would be able to move, I would be able to see the baby being made. But this horrific trimester reminded me…yet again…of just how much feminism has lied to me. I could not do anything. I was incredibly vulnerable. I went onto Reddit and saw a comment from a pregnant woman, “This first trimester is awful. I don’t think I can do this, and I’m considering an abortion. Help.”

I was not surprised by the comment. If you were single, if you didn’t have the education to understand this, if you had no one to help you, if you had been sold the lie of “We’re Superwomen,” and knew instinctively that you aren’t a superwoman, an abortion at this stage sounds like the right idea. Some part of you wants to turn the madness off. It feels so foreign to a modern woman. I wish I could explain to men just how sickening this stage is. I WANT this baby, but even I was deeply down. I said to my husband, “Usually if I’m feeling down, I simply change my thoughts or do some sports, and then my chemistry changes. It’s simple. But this is a tidal wave of hormones that my brain is up against. It doesn’t stand a chance.”

Over the last six weeks, I’ve lain on my side scrolling, dehydrated even though I’d down gallons of water. I’ve seen, I believe, everything the internet has to offer.

It’s deeply depressing.

“Read,” Some would say. But I couldn’t. The exhaustion was so deep that all my brain could bring in were short, stupid videos.

This pregnancy and the last, I noticed myself watching terrible reality shows peppered with those horrific true crime-type stories. I never, ever watch this stuff, ever! But in both pregnancies, I’ve been drawn to them, and I’m wondering why. Is it as though I’m trying to see the worst of the worst of this world that I’m bringing this being into? I have no idea and would love to know if any other women have had similar experiences.

But back to the exhaustion…you need help. I genuinely don’t know how women are working high-end positions during this time. I cannot get my brain around it. The idea that we can just quickly make a baby and pop it out and go back to work at the same speed as men is just insane to me.

I’m in the middle of an epic transformation. One that is stripping me of my energy to give it to someone else. This is a full-blown but beautiful sacrifice, not just a slight inconvenience for a bit. I’m wondering who I will be at the end of this process. I genuinely have no idea.

And here’s another thing. Why am I having a baby so late? 36 with my first and 41 with my second. First time around, I didn’t want one. Feminism had really done a number on me, making baby-making sound like some kind of modern slavery that men had invented just to oppress women. I wish I were joking. But another reason was…I had not become a wildly successful independent woman. I’d never become a boss bitch. I’m certainly not superwoman. I had a modest job teaching English while I did my writing. If I had a baby or two, I would have to be dependent on a man, and there is NOTHING that goes against feminist doctrine as much as needing help from men. I was terrified of this.

If I could not raise one or two children on my own salary, then I had no business having them. This was my cement-strong mentality. But then again, I did not want to have a baby that I couldn’t be with. It all felt like an impossible situation.

But at 40….as I found my faith…I let go of any fear or expectations. God will find a way was my new internal monologue. This was such a soothing and restoring phrase that kept coming to me. You don’t have to know everything, but yes, you have a baby now…or you don’t have a baby. You choose.

So I jumped. The cement-strong mentality was smashed with a sweet and soft vulnerability. And here I am, very dependent on a man. Here I am making a whole person while the world screams by hustling, I dare to stop, to slow up, and to be taken down by Life.

I’m also finding myself with another clear NO response to the growing world of surrogacy. You cannot put a price on this sacred transformation, on this suffering. You cannot pay for this. As we move through this capitalist competition, is it not a fair and just game in which wealthy women and gay couples can commission life while poor men and women think, “I don’t have the money to get pregnant. I can’t be so sick for so long. I won’t have children.” How is this fair? And how is it okay that resource-poor women use their bodies in this way…as a service for the rich?

As I had experienced all of this before, I knew that around week 12-14, I would get some of my energy back. I would be able to clean the house and stop traumatizing myself with videos and stories that tell the worst of this world.

And when we got to week 12, we went to the doctor with my five-year-old son and had the first proper ultrasound to see how this baby was coming along. We all watched in awe as this tiny thing bounced around, halfway between worlds.

With a great sense of relief that everything was going okay for the moment and we could officially tell ourselves we were pregnant, we went out to dinner to celebrate. My son was now obsessed with me. He wanted to sit near me so he could be near his sibling. He took all the baby bottles and pacifiers that the doctor gave us and placed them in his room - he wanted to take care of them until the baby arrived. He was beside himself with happiness.

“So,” he said at dinner, “We are going to have a boy, a father, a baby…and a precious mother.”

The happiness and sweetness that came from my son were something I’d never seen in him. A few weeks before, heavy with exhaustion, putting on the television too much and speaking in winces, I said to him, “I know I’m not being a good mummy now, I’m just a bit sick…but in a couple of weeks I will have a surprise for you.”

“Is it a toy?”

“No, it’s something much better than a toy. You will see how some things in life are so much better than things.”

Before he went to bed that night after the ultrasound, he said, “Mum, it was a fantastic surprise. You’re the best mum in the world.”

And just yesterday, as I was waddling around (already) feeling layers of fat appear in unwanted places, he turned to me and said, “You’re a pretty home for my brother.”

In our very individualistic world, we aren’t taught to understand how making someone else happy might be the best thing that has ever happened to us. It’s all me, me, me, me, me. But seeing my son so happy was like winning everything all at once.

I’m sharing this news here because it’s the epic thing happening in my life. Everything else will be touched by this experience. I’ll be sitting here thinking up ways to avoid conventional work for at least the very first year of this baby’s life. And then I’ll be dreaming up ways to make that time even longer.

My dream has always been to be a successful writer. Stories are my everything. When I was six, I dressed up as John Hurt from The Storyteller…that’s how much I’ve been obsessed with this not-so-lucrative art form.

Most little girls dream of being princesses…not unattractive sixty-year-old men. That’s how much I’ve loved stories. I’ve wanted it so badly that it almost broke everything inside me and every part of my life. I’ve seen many of my contemporaries make it, even when they didn’t deserve it, even when they are selling stories that will only sour our society slightly more. It’s been hard to watch. Difficult to feel.

But the reason I’m putting off that dream for a moment to make my family is because I said to myself one day, “Abi, imagine that you got your career dream…imagine you wrote a book so beautiful that it became a bestseller and you could write all day every day, guilt-free….would that be better than a baby?”

And the answer is…no. Nothing beats a baby.

So that other dream, that won’t be able to hold my hand while I’m dying, and won’t be able to show me the eyes of God…is on hold for a moment.

It’s a nervous time, 12 weeks pregnant, I won’t be fully celebrating until that baby is in my arms. I’m old enough to know too well not to count a chicken before it’s hatched.

But feminism lied to me about motherhood….about babies, about dependency, about being in service to others in my family.

Many women will need support from men, and many will be vulnerable and dependent. And this is okay, and this is beautiful, and this is how it has always been.

And I will say this again, for the ladies at the back, in a world of declining birth rates brought about by an overzealous ideology, in a world where AI is eating up all of our jobs…nothing…nothing beats a baby.

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