Don't Forget This
Submissive & Breedable #2
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“When I was in my first trimester, I remember telling myself ‘don’t forget this.’ But now all I can remember is having that thought.”
I’m eight weeks pregnant and I’ve just gotten done ranting to my therapist about how much this fucking sucks. She tells me what she remembers from her first trimester — scattershot images of lingering in her car when she arrived at destinations, unable to get out, a baguette always at her side.
This sounds familiar, except I’m jealous of the driving part. I can’t do anything right now. Anything. Thanks to my freelance lifestyle, I’m spending my days basically on bed rest, bingeing TV when I feel like shit, and trying to work lying down when I get the occasional wave of energy.
Knowing I’m going to forget this is both a blessing and a curse, and it’s happening already — the past disintegrating week by week. It’s like being conscious through a drunk blackout, knowing the majority of your days will be wiped away.
My therapist asked me if I would have wanted to know how bad the first trimester is, if I could have been warned.
“No,” I say right away, “people tried to warn me and I just couldn’t believe it would get that bad for me. I think it was internalized misogyny if I get down to it. Like I thought I could be the exception.”
Note to self. Don’t forget this.
Don’t forget the feeling that the entire world is a wobbly version of what it used to be, feeling dangerous or simply nausea-inducing at every turn. You have to blur your eyes to go into your own kitchen so you don’t dry heave into the sink. You cover your face in the passenger seat of the car because everyone on the road is insane.
Don’t forget what it’s like to finally find a safety food, then turn on it two days later. The weird grief in that, because feeding your fetus is your entire life now. Discarded fast-food chicken sandwich wrappers proof that your fantasy Healthy Pregnant Self is currently out of reach.
Don’t forget sitting in a group of people on your own separate island, knowing you have to cross the water to get to them, but the only thoughts you have, your only life raft, are about this crazy process occurring inside of you right now.
Don’t forget your head in your husband’s lap on New Year’s Eve as you vomit pure stomach acid into a metal bowl. How He sent you Miranda July’s ‘The Metal Bowl’ in the earliest days of your Dom/sub relationship to read and savor in a quiet morning before work. And now you’re undone in front of Him in a whole new way, spatchcocked, throbbing, open heart surgery, insides spilling out into a new year. You sob that you can’t do this and He puts your hair into a ponytail and tells you you’re strong. He used to gather your hair like this to put a blindfold on you. Now neither of you can see ahead, but you’re holding each other regardless.
Don’t forget what it’s like to watch an old self die while a new one is born.
Don’t forget the sound of the baby’s heartbeat rushing through the quiet exam room, so strong, flickering brightly all the time, even when it’s not being observed.
Don’t forget that feeling bad is the precursor to healthy life.
Whenever the body consumes me, I’m left with only one image: the Giant Pacific Octopus in the documentary I saw the other night who retreated to a crevice in the coral to lay her hundred-thousand eggs. This is the last thing she’ll ever do. Slowly, as the eggs grow, she grays. She dies as they set off into the wide ocean, having only instinct to guide them. Motherless.
The mother instinct overrides the survival instinct. Somehow I have to kindle both. By eating pretzels and drinking Gatorade and looking out my bedroom window. The mundanity of this is the most shocking part. I think I’m being trained for what’s to come.
In the midst of these graying days, a text comes from my pregnant friend that sets me free:
“Please try to release the guilt as much as possible. My ‘morning sickness’ made me think about how much sexism truly still exists and that women are mostly and systemically pretending this shit isn’t happening to us so that we don’t lose ground in the man’s world of being professionals and not being relegated full time to the home.
“There’s nothing you can change about where you’re at right now besides continuing to try to make yourself comfortable and accepting that hormones are so for real and growing neural tubes and tiny organs is all consuming.”
So I retreat into my crevice to both die and live at the same time.
