Body Building, part seven: Teotihuacan vs. the little achievement tyrants

Welcome to Body Building, a series on strength, selfhood, pregnancy, and the uncertain future.

This story will be spread out in occasional installments over the next couple of months as part of our usual content mix while She’s A Beast is on a self-created, pre-programmed but nonetheless handcrafted “maternity leave.” Read the previous installments here.

As I got deeper into my third trimester, I finally started to feel the physical encumbrance of pregnancy. I hadn’t even bought or worn that many maternity clothes, since I had enough soft elastic-waist shorts and pants and large t-shirts from the pandemic that still fit. But now I was straining even my baggiest of garments. One day I opened Instagram on a minor messaging errand and found myself scrolling the feed, one post after another showing people joyfully executing athletic feats with ease. I glowered, thinking of how I no longer went for a walk, but a waddle; how I worked up a sweat taking a shower; how I got out of breath walking up a small hill. I didn’t have long now, but was ready for things to start going back in the direction of being able to move freely.

I had kept up my working weights with lifting, continuing to Valsalva-brace the whole time with no negative effects on my pelvic floor—no peeing, no pain, no organ prolapse. Now that I was nearing the end of my pregnancy and I knew that I never lost much strength from a couple months off, I lowered the weights a bit around week 32 and did sets of 12 instead of 5. My stomach was big enough that I had to switch to wide-stance and sumo lifts. I’d long felt able to continue picking things up and carrying them around, even as people snatched them out of my hands.

But in the home stretch, I was humbled. I learned that the extremely central location of “where the two sides of your pelvis meet at the front,” the symphysis pubis, is a fulcrum made only of connective tissue. This is a plus for all of the expanding that one’s pelvis has to do to make way for baby delivery, but a minus for many other things. Lifting, as a form of exercise, was actually more comfortable than even walking—if I became tempted to hustle through a crosswalk, it would become a day of pelvic soreness tomorrow.

Of course, I remained in denial and continued to do things like throw or kick a ball for our dog, windmilling the limbs of my body around, and then would experience such shooting pelvic pains that it hurt to roll over in bed. To lighten the pelvis-wrenching, I made my greatest concession of all: I stopped doing full-depth squats, and instead quarter-squatted to a box positioned behind me.

One of the best parts of being pregnant thus far had been finding out how much I still felt like myself (aside from the exhaustion and doldrums for a few weeks of the first trimester). I had expected to be constantly thinking about being pregnant, constantly reminded by the physical encumbrance of it. But I ended up forgetting it was happening most of the time, not unlike you might forget you have a giant bruise somewhere on your body, or that you are wearing an especially ridiculous balloon hat.

I expressed this feeling to one friend, and her reaction was something like secondhand embarrassment: “Well, we’ll work on fixing that right away!” But then I expressed it to a second friend, and she said it was the most reassuring thing she’d ever heard someone say about being pregnant.